PART II

I

The European war affected Elsie Williams as much, or as little, as it affected many other young women. She had been married a little over a year in August 1914.

She was vaguely alarmed, vaguely thrilled, moved to a great display of emotional enthusiasm at the sight of a khaki uniform and at the sound of a military band.

Later on, she sang and hummed “Keep the Home Fires Burning,” “Tipperary,” and “We _Don’t_ Want to Lose You, but we Think you _Ought_ to Go,” and was voluble and indignant about the difficulties presented by sugar rations and meat coupons. She resented the air raids over London, and devoured the newspaper accounts of the damage done by them; she listened to, and eagerly retailed, anecdotes such as that of the Angels of Mons, or that of the Belgian child whose hands had been cut off by German soldiers; and after a period in which she declared that “everybody” would be ruined, she found herself in possession of more money than ever before.

Never before had so many clients presented themselves to Messrs. Williams and Cleaver, and never before had there been so much money about. Elsie bought herself a fur coat and a great many other things, and went very often to the cinema, and sometimes to the theatre. She very soon found, however, that Williams, when he could not take her out himself, disliked her going with anybody else.

He was willing enough that she should take Irene with her, or her sister Geraldine, but if she went out with any man, Williams became coldly, caustically angry, and sooner or later always found an opportunity for quarrelling with him.

Elsie was bored and angry, contemptuous of his jealousy, but far too much afraid of him to rebel openly.

She was more and more conscious of having made a mistake in her marriage, but her regrets were resentful rather than profound, and her facile nature found consolation in her own social advancement, her comfortable suburban home, and her tyrannical dominion over a capped and aproned maid.

She very seldom went to Hillbourne Terrace, and had quarrelled with her mother when Mrs. Palmer had suggested that it was time she had a baby.

Elsie did not want to have a baby at all. She feared pain and discomfort almost as much as she did the temporary eclipse of her good looks, and the thought of a child that should be Horace Williams’s as well as hers filled her with disgust.

She only spoke of this openly to Irene, and Irene undertook the purchase of certain drugs which she declared would render impossible the calamity dreaded by her friend. Elsie thankfully accepted the offer, and trusted implicitly to the efficacy of the bottles and packages that Irene bought.

Sometimes Horace declared that he wanted a son, and as time went on his taunts became less veiled, but Elsie cared little for them so long as she remained immune from the trial of motherhood.

She spent her days idly, doing very little housework, sometimes making or mending her own clothes, and often poring for a whole afternoon over a novel from the circulating library, or an illustrated paper, whilst she ate innumerable sweets out of little paper bags. She never remembered anything about the books that she read thus, and sometimes read the same one a second time without perceiving that she was doing so until she had nearly finished it.

After a time, Elsie became rather envious of the money that Irene was making as a munitions worker, and the “good time” that Geraldine enjoyed in the Government office where she had found a job. Elsie seriously told her husband that she felt she must go and do some “war work.”

“You are not in the same position as an unmarried girl, Elsie. You have other duties. These war jobs are for young women who have nothing else to do.”

“I don’t see that I’ve got so much to do.”

“If you had children, you would understand that a woman’s sphere is in her own home.”

“But I haven’t got children,” said Elsie, half under her breath.

“It’s early days to talk like that,” Williams retorted, and his glance at her was malevolent. “One of these days you’ll have a baby, I hope, like every other healthy married woman, and neither you nor I nor anybody else can say how soon that day may come.”

“Well, I suppose till it does come--_if_ it ever does-you’ve no objection to me doing my bit in regard to this war?”

“I don’t know. What is it you propose to do?”

“Oh, get a job of some kind. Ireen says they’re asking for shorthand-typists all over the place, and willing to pay for them, too. I could get into one of these Government shows easily, or I could go in the V.A.D.s or something, and take a job in a hospital.”

“No,” said Williams decidedly. “No. Out of the question.”

Elsie, who at home had, as a matter of course, surreptitiously disobeyed every order or prohibition of her mother’s that ran counter to her own wishes, knew already that she would not disobey her husband.

She was afraid of him.

On the rare occasions when she saw any of her own family, Elsie always made a great display of her own grandeur and independence. She was really proud of her little suburban villa, her white-and-gold china, fumed oak “suite” of drawing-room furniture, “ruby” glasses and plated cake basket. She was also proud of being Mrs. Williams, and of wearing a wedding-ring.

Geraldine came to see her once or twice, and then declared herself too busy at the office to take the long tram journey, and as Elsie hardly ever went to Hillbourne Terrace, they seldom met. But Irene Tidmarsh came often to see Elsie.

She came in the daytime, when Williams was at the office, and very often she and Elsie went to the cinema together in the afternoon. Irene seemed able to get free time whenever she liked, and she explained this to Elsie by telling her that the superintendent at the works was a great friend of hers.

Elsie perfectly understood what this meant, and realised presently that Irene was never available on Saturdays and Sundays.

The war went on, and Mr. Williams made more and more money, and was fairly generous to Elsie, although he never gave her an independent income, but only occasional presents of cash, and instructions that all her bills should be sent in to him.

He did not rescind his command that she should not attempt any war work, although, as the months lengthened into years, it seemed fairly certain that there was to be no family to give Elsie occupation at home.

At twenty-five, Elsie Williams, from sheer boredom, had lost a great deal of the vitality that had characterised Elsie Palmer, and with it a certain amount of her remarkable animal magnetism. She was still attractive to men, but her own susceptibilities had become strangely blunted and no casual promiscuity would now have power to stir her.

She was aware that life had become uninteresting to her, and accepted the fact with dull, bewildered, entirely unanalytical resentment.

“I s’pose I’m growing middle-aged,” she said to Irene, giggling without conviction.

One day, more than a year after the Armistice in November 1918, Irene Tidmarsh came to Elsie full of excitement.

She had heard of a wonderful crystal-gazer, and wanted to visit her with Elsie.

Elsie was quite as much excited as Irene. “I’d better take off my wedding-ring,” she said importantly. “They say they’ll get hold of any clue, don’t they?”

“This woman isn’t like that,” Irene declared. “She’s what they call a psychic, really she is. This girl that told me about her, she said it quite frightened her, the things the woman knew. All sorts of things about her past, too.”

“I’m not sure I’d like that,” said Elsie, giggling. “I know quite enough about my past without wanting help. But I must say I’d like to know what she’s got to say about the future. You know, I mean what’s going to happen to me.”

“Oh, well, you’re married, my dear. There’s not much else she can tell you, except whether you’ll have boys or girls.”

“Thank you!” Elsie exclaimed, tossing her head. “None of that truck for me, thank you. Losing one’s figure and all!”

“You’re right. Anyway, let’s come on, shall we?”

“Come on. I say, Ireen, she’ll see us both together, won’t she?”

“I hope so. I wouldn’t go in to her alone for anything. Swear you won’t ever repeat anything she says about me, though.”

“I swear. And you won’t either?”

“No.”

The crystal-gazer lived in a street off King’s Road, Chelsea, a long way down.

A little hunch-backed girl opened the door and asked them to go into the waiting-room. This was a small, curtained recess off the tiny hall, and contained two chairs and a rickety table covered with thin, cheap-looking publications. There were several copies of a psychic paper and various pamphlets that purported to deal with the occult.

“I’m a bit nervous, aren’t you?” whispered Elsie. She fiddled with her wedding-ring, and finally took it off and put it in her purse. When the hunch-backed child appeared at the curtains, both girls screamed slightly.

“Madame Clara is ready for you,” announced the little girl, in a harsh, monotonous voice.

She led them up to the first floor, into a room that was carefully darkened with blue curtains drawn across the windows. They could just discern a black figure, stout and very upright, sitting on a large chair in the middle of the room. A round stand set on a single slender leg was beside her.

Elsie clutched at Irene’s hand in a nervous spasm.

The black figure bowed from the waist without rising. “Do you wish me to see you both together, ladies?” Her voice was harsh and rather raucous in tone.

“Yes, please,” said Irene boldly.

“You quite understand that the charge will be the same as for two separate interviews?”

“Yes.”

The little girl advanced with a small beaded bag. “The fee is payable in advance, if you please.”

Elsie fumbled in her purse, and pulled out two ten-shilling notes.

“Half a guinea each, if you please, ladies.”

“Irene, have you got two sixpences?” Elsie whispered, agitated.

Irene, by far the more collected of the two, produced a shilling, and the little girl with the bag went away.

“Will you two ladies be seated? One on either side of the table, please--not next to one another.”

Elsie made a despairing clutch at Irene’s hand again, but her friend shook her head, and firmly took her place on the other side of Madame Clara.

Elsie sank into the remaining chair, and felt that she was trembling violently. Her nervousness was partly pleasurable excitement, and partly involuntary reaction to the atmosphere diffused by the dim, shaded room and the autocratic solemnity of Madame Clara.

A sweet, rather sickly smell was discernible.

The silence affected Elsie so that she wanted to scream.

Her eyes were by this time accustomed to the semi-darkness, and she could see that Madame Clara was leaning forward, her loose sleeves falling away from her fat, bare arms, her elbows resting on the little table, and her hands over her eyes.

Suddenly the woman drew herself upright, and turned towards Irene.

“You, first. You have a stronger personality than your friend. It was you who brought her here. Do you wish me to look into the crystal for you?”

“Yes, I do,” gasped Irene.

Elsie wondered from where the crystal would appear, and then she noticed the faint outline of a globe in front of the seer, on the little stand.

A thrill of superstitious awe ran through her.

“Make your mind a blank as far as possible, please ... do not think of the past, the present, or the future ... relax ... relax ... relax....”

Madame Clara’s voice deepened, and she began to speak very slowly and distinctly, leaning back in her chair, the crystal ball before her eyes.

“Time is an arbitrary division made by man--the crystal will not always show what is past and what is to come. For instance, I see illness here--bodily suffering--but I do not know if it has visited you or is still to come. It may even be the suffering of one near to you....”

She paused for an instant, and Elsie just caught Irene’s smothered exclamation of “Father!”

“Hush, please,” said the seeress. “The shadow of sickness deepens--it deepens into the blackness of death. A man--an old man--he is dying. You will get money from him. Beware of those who seek to flatter you. You are impressionable, but clear-sighted; impulsive, yet self-controlled; reserved, but intensely passionate. I see marriage for you in the future, but with a man somewhat older than yourself. I see conflict....” She stopped again.

“Perhaps the conflict is already over. You have certainly known love--passion----”

Elsie, from mingled nervousness and embarrassment, suddenly giggled.

The clairvoyante raised an authoritative hand. “It is impossible for me to go on if there are resistances,” she said angrily, in the voice that she had used at first, ugly and rather hoarse.

“Shut up, Elsie!” came sharply from Irene.

Elsie ran her finger-nails into her palms in an endeavour to check the nervous, spasmodic laughter that threatened to overcome her.

“The current is broken,” said Madame Clara in an indignant voice.

There was a silence.

At last Elsie heard Irene say timidly:

“Won’t you go on, madame?”

“I’m exhausted,” said the medium in a fatigued voice. “You will have to return to me another day--alone. All that I can say to you now, I have said. Beware of opals, and of a red-haired man. Your lucky stone is the turquoise--you should wear light blue, claret colour, and all shades of yellow, and avoid pinks, reds and purple.”

She stopped.

Elsie, though awestruck, was also vaguely disappointed. It did not seem to her that she had learnt a great deal about Irene, and the warnings about colours and precious stones might have come out of any twopenny booklet off a railway bookstall, such as “What Month Were You Born In?” or “Character and Fortune Told by Handwriting.”

Then she remembered that she herself had made Madame Clara angry by laughing, and that the woman had said the current was broken.

“Probably she’s furious,” Elsie thought, “and she won’t tell me as much as she told Ireen. And she’s got our money, too. What a swindle!”

“What about my friend?” said Irene Tidmarsh. Her voice sounded rather sulky.

“Your friend is a sceptic,” said the clairvoyante coldly.

“No, really----” Elsie began.

The woman turned towards her so abruptly that she was startled.

She could discern an enormous pair of heavy-looking dark eyes gazing into hers.

“Make your mind a blank--relax,” said Madame Clara, her tone once more a commanding one.

Elsie moved uneasily in her chair and fixed her eyes on the crystal. She could only see it faintly, a glassy spot of uncertain outline.

The seeress bent forward, leaning over the transparent globe. After a moment or two she began to speak, with the same voice and intonation that she had made use of in speaking about Irene.

“The crystal reflects all things, but Time is an arbitrary division made by man--we do not always see what is past, and what is future.... In your case, there is very little past--how young you are!--and what there is, is all on one plane, the physical. You are magnetic, extraordinarily magnetic. You have known men--you are married, if not by man’s law, then by nature’s law--you will know other men. But you are not awake--your mind is asleep. Nothing is awake but your senses....”

Elsie’s mouth was dry. She longed to stop the woman but a horrible fascination kept her silent, tensely listening.

“Now you are bored--satiated. You have repeated the same experience again and again, young as you are, until it means nothing to you. You have no outside interests--and you are ceaselessly craving for a new emotion.”

Abruptly the sibyl dropped on to a dark note.

“It will come. I see love here--love that you have never known yet. There will be jealousy, intrigue--letters will pass--beware of the written word----_Ah!_”

The exclamation was so sudden and so piercing that Elsie uttered a stifled scream. But this time she was not rebuked.

Madame Clara, all at once, was calling out shrilly in a hard voice, an indescribable blend of horror and excitement in her tone:

“Oh, God--what is it? Look--look, there in the crystal--what have you done? There’s blood, and worse than blood! Oh, my God, what’s this? It’s all over England--_you_--they’re talking about _you_----”

Irene Tidmarsh screamed wildly, and Elsie realised that she had sprung to her feet. She herself was utterly unable to move, wave after wave of sick terror surging through her as the high, unrecognisable voice of the clairvoyante screeched and ranted, and then broke horribly.

“It’s blood! My God, get out of here! I won’t see any more--you’re all over blood!...”

A strange, strangled cry, that Elsie did not recognise as having come from her own lips, broke across the obscurity, the room surged round her, she tried to clutch at the table, and felt herself falling heavily.

Elsie Williams had fainted.

She came back to a dazed memory of physical nausea, bewilderment, and resentment, as she felt herself being unskilfully pulled into a sitting position.

“Let go,” she muttered, “let me go....”

“She’s coming round! For Heaven’s sake, Elsie ... here, try and get hold of her....”

She felt herself pulled and propelled to her feet, and even dragged a few steps by inadequate supporters.

Then she sank down again, invaded by a renewal of deadly sickness, but she was conscious that they had somehow got her outside the dark, scented room, and that the door had been slammed behind her.

Very slowly her perceptions cleared, and she realised that Irene was gripping her on one side, and the little hunch-backed girl holding a futile hand beneath her elbow on the other.

With an effort, Elsie raised her head.

“Look here, old girl, are you better?” said Irene, low and urgently. “I want to get out of here as quickly as possible. D’you think you can get downstairs?”

Elsie, without clearly knowing why, was conscious that she, too, wanted to get away.

She pulled herself to her feet, shuddering, and staggered down the stairs, leaning heavily on Irene.

“What happened?”

“Oh, you just turned queer. Don’t think about it. Look here, we’d better have a taxi, hadn’t we?”

“Yes. I couldn’t walk a step, that’s certain. Why, my knees are shaking under me.”

“Go and get a taxi,” Irene commanded the hunch-backed child, who went obediently away.

Elsie sat down on the lowest stair and wiped her wet, cold face with her handkerchief.

“What made me go off like that, Ireen? That woman said something beastly, didn’t she?”

“Oh she’s mad, that’s what she is. She suddenly started ranting, and you got frightened, I suppose--and no wonder. Never mind, you’ll soon be home now.”

It struck Elsie that Irene was looking at her in a strangely anxious way, and that she was talking almost at random, as though to obliterate the impression of what had passed at the _séance_.

Elsie herself could not remember clearly, but there was a lurking horror at the back of her mind.

“What did she say?” she persisted feebly.

“Here’s the taxi!” cried Irene, in intense relief. “Here, get in, Elsie. Thank you,” she added to the child. “Don’t wait, I’ll tell the man where to go.”

She gave the driver Elsie’s address after the little girl had entered the house again, and then climbed in beside her friend, drawing a long breath.

“Thank the Lord! We got away pretty quickly, didn’t we? Well, it’s the last time I’ll meddle with anything of that kind, I swear. I say, Elsie, had we better stop at a chemist’s and get you something?”

“Yes--no. I don’t care. Ireen, I want to know what that woman said. It was something awful about _me_, wasn’t it?”

“She had a--kind of fit, I think. I don’t believe she knew what she was saying--she just screamed out a pack of nonsense. And you gave a yell, and went down like a log. I can tell you, you’ve pretty nearly scared the life out of me, young Elsie.”

Irene was indeed oddly white-faced and jerky. Her manner was as unnatural as was her sudden volubility.

Elsie, still feeling weak and giddy, leant her head back and closed her eyes. She felt quite unable to make the effort of remembering what had happened at the clairvoyante’s house, and was moreover instinctively aware that the recollection, when it did come, would bring dismay and terror.

She and Irene Tidmarsh did not exchange a word until the taxi stopped.

“Here we are. You’d better pay him, Elsie. I’ll take the Tube from the corner, and get home in half an hour.”

“Aren’t you coming in with me?” said Elsie, surprised.

“I don’t think I will. I’d rather get straight home.”

“Oh, do!” urged Elsie, half crying. She felt very much shaken. “I’m all alone; Horace won’t be back till seven, and this has upset me properly. Besides, I know I shall remember what it was that awful woman said in a minute, and I’m frightened. You _must_ come in, Ireen.”

“I can’t,” repeated Irene, inexorably. “I ... really, I’d rather not, Elsie.”

The door opened, and Irene turned rapidly and walked away down the street.

Elsie tottered into the house.

“I’m ill,” she said abruptly to the servant. “I fainted while I was out, and I feel like nothing on earth now. I shall go to bed.”

“Yes, ’m. Shall I go for a doctor, ’m?” said the girl zealously.

“No,” said Elsie sharply. “I don’t want a doctor. Telephone to Mr. Williams at the office, Emma, and ask him to come home early. Say I’m ill.”

“Yes, ’m.”

Elsie dragged herself upstairs and took off some of her clothes. She was shivering violently, and presently pulled her blue cotton kimono round her and slipped into bed. She lay there with closed eyes, shuddering from time to time, until Emma brought up a cup of strong tea. Elsie drank it avidly, lay down again and felt revived. Presently she dozed.

The opening of the door roused her. It was nearly dark, but she knew that it must be her husband, who never knocked before entering their joint bedroom.

“What’s all this, Elsie?”

“I felt rotten,” she said wearily. “Turn on the light, Horace.”

He did so, and advanced towards the bed. His face wore an expression of concern, and he walked on tiptoe.

“I fainted while I was out with Ireen,” Elsie explained, “and I was simply ages coming to. We came back in a cab, and I must say Ireen’s awfully selfish. She wouldn’t come in with me, though she must have seen I wasn’t fit to be left--just turned and walked off. I’m done with her, after this.”

“Where had you been?” enquired Williams quickly.

“Oh, just out.”

“Where to?”

“I suppose you’ll call me a fool, if I say it was to see one of those clairvoyante women, someone Ireen had heard of. It was all Ireen’s doing--she persuaded me to go.”

“Very silly of you both,” said the little solicitor coldly. “Did this person upset you?”

“Yes. She had a sort of fit, I think, and called out a whole lot of nonsense, only I can’t remember what it was.” Elsie moved uneasily.

“Where does she live?”

“Why?”

“She ought to be prosecuted for obtaining money under false pretences. I suppose you gave her money?”

“Oh yes.”

“You’d better give me her name and address and I’ll see that she is properly dealt with.”

“I’d rather not.”

Horace Williams shrugged his shoulders. “Well, you’d better get up and come down to supper, hadn’t you? There’s no reason for lying in bed if you’re not ill.”

“All right,” Elsie agreed sullenly.

Her husband never shouted at her or threatened her, but she was afraid of him, and of a certain sinister dryness that characterised his manner when he was displeased.

The dryness was there now.

Elsie spent the evening downstairs. Her husband read the newspaper, and she turned over the pages of a fashion magazine listlessly. Her thoughts, unwillingly enough, returned again and again to the scene in the clairvoyante’s room, but still she could not remember the actual words screamed out by Madame Clara before she had lost consciousness. But she remembered quite well other words, that had preceded them.

“You are magnetic ... extraordinarily magnetic.... You are not awake--your mind is asleep.... Now, you are bored, satiated. You are ceaselessly craving for a new emotion....”

Elsie reflected how true this was.

She glanced distastefully at her elderly husband.

The bald patch glistened on the top of his head, and he was breathing heavily as he read his newspaper.

He had always been rather distasteful to her physically, and although the continuous, degradingly inevitable proximity of married life in a small suburban villa had hardened her into indifference, Elsie was still averse from the more intimate aspects of marriage with him.

She wished that she could fall in love, remembering that Madame Clara had said: “I see love here--love that you have never known yet.”

“That’s bunkum,” thought Elsie. “I’ve been in love heaps of times--I was in love with that doctor fellow, Woolley. It doesn’t last, that’s all.”

She hardly ever met any men nowadays, as she resentfully reminded herself.

The husbands of her married friends were at work all day, and if she occasionally met them at their wives’ card-parties, they did not interest her very greatly. Most of the wives distrusted the husbands and gave them no opportunity for flirtation with other women. And Horace Williams himself was a jealous man, always suspicious, and never allowed his young wife to go anywhere with any man but himself.

Elsie had been for a long while in inward revolt against the dullness of her life. She remembered with longing the old days of her girlhood, when every walk had been the prelude to adventure, and the casual kisses of unknown, or scarcely known, men had roused her to rapture.

Nowadays, she knew very well that she would be less easily satisfied. The apathy that had been creeping over her ever since her marriage had to a certain extent lessened the force of the animal magnetism by which she had been able to lure the senses of almost every man she met, and for the first time she was beginning to have doubts of her own attractiveness.

Elsie gave a sigh that was almost a groan.

Williams neither stirred nor raised his eyes.

“I think I’ll retire to my little downy,” Elsie murmured, drearily facetious.

“It’s only a quarter past nine.”

“Oh, well, we lead such a deliriously exciting life that I’d better get some rest, hadn’t I?” she said ironically. “Just to make up for all the late nights we have.”

At last her husband put down the paper and looked coldly at her through his pince-nez. “What is it you want, Elsie? I work hard all day at the office, and you have plenty of time and money for amusing yourself in the daytime--and a strange use you seem to make of them, judging by to-day’s performance. What more do you want?”

“I don’t know. We might go to the pictures sometimes, or to a play. I hate not having anything to do.”

“That’s the complaint of every woman who hasn’t got children.”

“I can’t help it,” said Elsie angrily.

He said nothing, but continued to fix his eyes upon her, with his most disagreeable expression.

“Good-night, Horace.”

“I shall come up to bed before you’re asleep,” he said meaningly.

She went out of the room.

The thought crossed her mind, as it had often done before, that she had made a frightful mistake in marrying Horace Williams.

“I was only eighteen,” she thought, “I ought to have waited. Perhaps he’ll die.”

As she undressed, Elsie idly imagined a drama of which she herself would, of course, be the heroine.

Horace would be at the office, as usual, and a telephone message would come through to say that he was ill--very ill indeed--he was dead. Everyone would admire the young widow in her black, with her string of pearl beads.... Horace would leave her quite a lot of money. Elsie knew that he was rich, although he had never told her his income. She would stay on in the villa, but people would come and see her--she would go out and enjoy herself--enjoy life, once more....

Elsie sighed again as she got into bed.

Bored and exhausted, she fell asleep almost at once, to dream vividly.

In her dream, she stood outside a closed door, knowing that something unspeakably horrid lay beyond it. Terror paralysed her. At last she pushed at the door, but it would not yield more than an inch or two. Something was behind it. She looked down and saw a dark stain spreading round her feet, oozing from beneath the resistant door.

Screaming and sweating, Elsie woke up, and as she did so the remembrance came back to her in full of everything that the clairvoyante had said that morning.

II

“Hallo, Elsie!”

“Hallo, Geraldine!”

“You’re quite a stranger, aren’t you? I think it’s about a year since we had the honour of seeing your majesty last.”

“Well, now I have come, aren’t you going to take the trouble to invite me to come in?” asked Elsie good-humouredly.

“There’s a visitor of mine in the drawing-room.”

“Who is it? Aunt Ada?”

“No, not Aunt Ada, Miss Smarty. It’s a friend of mine, I tell you, who I knew at the office during the war.”

“Well, you can introduce me to her, I suppose,” said Elsie carelessly.

She noticed that Geraldine’s hair was not, as it generally was, in curling-pins, and that she was wearing a new dress, of an unbecoming shade of emerald green. Geraldine always went wrong over her clothes, Elsie reflected complacently. She herself wore a new black picture hat, and it was partly from the desire to show herself in it that she had come to her old home.

“Where’s mother?”

“Out.”

“What a mercy!”

Elsie walked into the familiar drawing-room, feeling glad that she no longer lived at Hillbourne Terrace, under her mother’s dominion, and forced to share a bedroom with the fretful Geraldine.

A young man of two- or three-and-twenty was sitting in the drawing-room, and rose to his feet as Elsie and Geraldine came in.

“This is my sister, Mrs. Horace Williams. Elsie, this is my friend, Mr. Morrison,” said Geraldine with pride.

Elsie was immediately conscious of a quickened interest. The young man was of a type that appealed strongly to her; dark and tall, with very brown eyes, and a wistful, ingenuous smile that was the more noticeable because he was clean-shaven.

When they shook hands, she was conscious of the slight, unmistakable thrill of mutual magnetism.

“I thought I was going to find a young lady in here, when Geraldine told me she had a friend!” Elsie exclaimed, laughing.

“Sorry I’m a disappointment,” Mr. Morrison replied, also laughing.

“Oh, I didn’t say that. Only my sister doesn’t have gentlemen friends as a rule,” Elsie declared innocently.

Geraldine’s sallow face flushed. “You don’t know much about it, do you, considering that we never see you nowadays. I’m not one for talking much about my own affairs, either, so far as I’m aware. It’s a misfortune, really, to be as reserved as I am. I often wish I wasn’t!”

It was unprecedented, in Elsie’s experience, to hear Geraldine setting forth a claim, however obliquely, to be considered interesting. Elsie looked at her in astonishment.

“She must be gone on this fellow,” she thought, and without the slightest compunction she immediately put forth all her own powers to attract Morrison’s notice and admiration to herself.

The task proved to be as easy as it was congenial. In a very little while, Elsie and young Morrison were talking and joking together, and it was only an occasional, spasmodic, and quite evidently conscientious effort from Morrison that from time to time caused Geraldine to be included in the conversation.

Morrison told Elsie that he travelled for a big firm of silk merchants in the City, and was very little in London.

“How did you and Geraldine meet, then? I thought you were in the same office as her during the war,” said Elsie sharply.

“Just for six months I was, and then I got this job in the place of a man who’d joined up. I was under age for joining up myself, worse luck,” said the youth.

Then he must be younger than she was herself, Elsie reflected, surprised. She felt oddly touched by the thought.

She looked at Morrison, and found that he was looking at her with admiration evident in his dark eyes.

Elsie allowed her eyes to dwell for a second on his before she broke the momentary silence. “What about tea, Geraldine?”

“All right,” said her sister sulkily. “Where’s the hurry?”

It was already half-past four, but Elsie guessed that Geraldine did not want to go and fetch the tea and leave her alone with Morrison.

“No hurry, I suppose,” she cried gaily, “but I’m a bit tired, that’s all, and I thought I’d like a nice cup of tea. It’s a good long way to come, and the Tube was pretty full.”

“Where did you come from?” Morrison asked eagerly.

She named the suburb. “You must come and look us up one day, Mr. Morrison. My husband is a solicitor, and he’s always at home on Saturdays and Sundays. The rest of the week I’m by myself and ever so lonely,” sighed Elsie.

“I’d love to come. I should--er--like to meet Mr. Williams,” said Morrison solemnly.

“Here’s Mother!” Geraldine announced sharply, as a door banged downstairs.

Mrs. Palmer came in, breathing heavily, her hands full of parcels.

“Elsie! Dear me, this _is_ a surprise. Good afternoon, Mr. Morrison, how are you? Quite well, thank you, but for Anno Domini, that’s all that’s the matter with me.” She dropped into a chair.

“Where’s tea?”

“I’ll get it up,” said Geraldine.

“Go and give her a hand,” Mrs. Palmer calmly directed young Morrison. “My gurl is out. They’re all the same, nowadays--always out, never in.”

“_I_ never have any trouble with servants,” Elsie murmured.

She was annoyed that her mother should thus dismiss Morrison, and that he should meekly prepare to obey her.

He opened the door for Geraldine and went out behind her, and Elsie heard her sister talking animatedly as they went downstairs.

“What’s come over Geraldine?” she coldly enquired.

“Why should anything have come over her, as you call it? Geraldine’s a gurl like you are, I’d have you remember, and a very much better one than you’ve ever been, to her widowed mother. You mind your own business, Elsie.”

“That’s a nice way to speak to me, when I haven’t been at home for I don’t know how long.”

“And whose fault has that been?” enquired Mrs. Palmer. “Not but what I’m always pleased to see you, Elsie, as I’ve told you time and time again, and Mr. Williams too--Horace, I should say--if he cares to come. But don’t you go interfering with Geraldine’s friends.”

“Is this fellow a friend of hers?”

“Of course he is. They’ve been going together for some time now.”

“I suppose she’s not engaged?”

“No, she’s not engaged,” Mrs. Palmer reluctantly conceded. “But I’m free to confess that I hope she will be. This Leslie Morrison is a nice fellow, as steady as can be.”

Elsie reflected that Leslie was a lovely name.

“Now, Elsie,” said her mother warningly, “I know what you are, and I give you fair notice that I won’t have any of your goings-on. You’ll remember that you’re a married woman, if you please, and just behave yourself. Any of your old tricks, my lady, and I shall drop the hint to Horace. Him and me knew one another before ever he set eyes on you.”

“All the more reason for not making mischief between us now. He’s jealous enough as it is, making a fuss of anyone so much as looks the same side of the room as I happen to be.”

“I don’t blame him,” said Mrs. Palmer curtly. “You’re a caution, you are, and always have been. I don’t mind telling you that I never was more thankful in my life than to get you safely married. And don’t you go casting sheep’s eyes at poor Geraldine’s fellow, for I tell you I won’t have it.”

Elsie laughed scornfully. She was secretly flattered at the alarm that was conveyed by Mrs. Palmer’s reiterated cautions.

“What should I want with a boy like him? He must be six years younger than Geraldine, at the very least.”

“Nothing of the kind. And if he was, it wouldn’t matter. It’s the first time anyone has looked like business, where Geraldine’s concerned, and with you off my hands I can afford to make things a bit easy for her. She’s been a good daughter to me, has Geraldine,” said Mrs. Palmer with a significant emphasis.

“Well, I’m sure I don’t want to stand in her way,” Elsie declared contemptuously.

“Anyone less selfish than you are, Elsie, would offer to help things on a bit. I can’t be for ever asking him here, and he’s not got the money to take her out a great deal. Why don’t you get them to meet at your place?”

“Perhaps I will,” said Elsie slowly.

She was rather silent during tea, mentally reviewing her mother’s suggestion from various angles.

Leslie Morrison definitely attracted her. She asked him how long he was to remain in London.

“Not long, Mrs. Williams. I’m doing Bristol and Gloucestershire next week, and then I’m taking my holiday.”

“Where are you going for that?” Mrs. Palmer enquired.

“I haven’t made up my mind. Anywhere near the sea is good enough for me.”

“My husband and I are thinking of Torquay,” Elsie said. “We’ve been wondering if you’d care to come along, Geraldine. I suppose Mother wants to stew on in London, as per usual.”

“That’s right,” Mrs. Palmer assented complacently. She looked at her younger daughter with approval. It was the first time, actually, that Elsie had ever invited Geraldine to spend a holiday with her.

“Torquay is a first-rate place,” declared Leslie Morrison enthusiastically. “I was there once on business, and I quite made up my mind to return one day.”

“Thanks very much, Elsie,” Geraldine said rather coldly. “It’s a long journey, isn’t it, and I’m a wretched traveller, as you know.”

“Please yourself. Horace wants a thorough change, and we’re sick of Wales. We’ve been there every year ever since we were married.”

“Come, I don’t suppose that makes much of a total, does it?” Morrison gallantly remarked, looking at Elsie.

“More than you’d think for, perhaps. I was caught young--eighteen, if you want to know.”

“Elsie,” said her mother abruptly, “have you been to see your aunties lately?”

She directed the conversation so that no more personalities were possible, until Elsie rose and said good-bye.

“Allow me,” said Morrison, as he helped her to put on her coat.

Elsie fumbled for the sleeve-hole until she felt the guiding pressure of his fingers on her arm.

“Thanks ever so much. Well, good-bye, Mr. Morrison. Let me know if you come up our way any time.”

“I ... I hope you’re going to let me see you to your ’bus,” he said rather awkwardly.

“Really, there’s no need--I couldn’t think of troubling you.”

Elsie took no pains to hide that her protest was a purely conventional one.

“Put on your hat, Geraldine, and go with them. A walk’ll do you good,” urged Mrs. Palmer.

But Geraldine, as she frequently did, had turned sulky. “I’ve got something to do upstairs,” she muttered, and disappeared.

It was exactly like Geraldine, Elsie thought, to cut off her nose just to spite her face. Not that it could have made any difference if she had succeeded in preventing that brief walk taken by Leslie Morrison and Elsie Williams.

Elsie knew, beyond any possibility of mistake, the very first moment at which a spark from her own personality had lit the flame destined to burn more or less fiercely in that of another.

But this time she experienced an odd excitement that held in it something new.

She wondered, rather wistfully, whether this was because it was such a long while since she had had any opportunity of talking to a man other than her husband or one of his elderly married acquaintances. Her conversation with Morrison did no more than skirt the edge of personalities that were implied, rather than spoken. Yet when they parted Elsie knew, and knew that Morrison knew, that each was determined to see the other again. She travelled home in a dream, and hardly heard her husband’s vexed enquiry as to the reason of her lateness.

Williams had always shown a very strong conviction that it was a wife’s duty invariably to be at home in time to welcome her husband’s return from business.

“I’ve been to Hillbourne Terrace.”

“H’m. You’ve made yourself very smart. That hat suits you, Elsie.”

He so seldom paid a compliment that Elsie was astonished, and ran to look at herself in the mirror over the dining-room sideboard.

It was the hat, was it?

Her full face was softly flushed, and her eyes looked bigger and darker than usual. Elsie saw her own closed mouth break into an involuntary smile as she gazed at her reflection. She went up to her room singing softly.

Two days later Leslie Morrison came to see her.

“I hope you won’t think I’m taking a liberty. Knowing your people so well, it seemed quite natural, like, to take advantage of your kind invitation.”

“That’s right,” Elsie encouraged him.

She hardly knew what she was saying, but already their intercourse seemed to be on a plane where conventional interchanges of words were unnecessary.

Although it was only the second time they had met, Morrison told her a great deal about himself, and Elsie listened, with a growing, tremulous tenderness.

He went away before her husband came in, and Elsie underwent a momentary, essentially superficial, reaction.

“I’m getting soppy about that boy--that’s what I’m doing! Just because he’s got a pair of eyes like--like I don’t know what. Him and Geraldine! It’s too ridiculous. Why, he’s younger even than me.”

She reflected that if Morrison, indeed, had been a year or two older, he would certainly have kissed her by this time. But it was quite evident to her that such an idea had never even crossed his mind. He viewed her with obvious admiration, and with great respect.

The next day Elsie bought a book of poems, about which Morrison had told her. She read some of them, and it seemed to her that she had a new understanding of a form of expression which had never made the least appeal to her before.

“I’m a fool!” Elsie told herself in astonishment, but with an ominous sensation of strange, new emotions, softer than any she had yet known, taking possession of her life. She felt that she would like to give the book to Morrison as a present, but they had made no definite arrangement for meeting again, and she could not bring herself to send it by post. Restlessness possessed her.

It was a relief when one evening her husband began to speak of their summer holiday.

“We can start on Tuesday, like we planned. Cleaver gets back on Monday morning, and the sooner we get to the sea in this weather, the better. It won’t last.”

“It might. September can be a ripping month sometimes,” said Elsie dreamily.

“That’s your experience, is it? Well, it’s not mine. I only hope we shan’t have a rainy spell as we did last year, and sit in an everlasting sitting-room without so much as a book to look at.”

Elsie shuddered at the recollection. She and Horace had quarrelled incessantly throughout their last holiday.

“Is your sister coming with us?”

“Yes.”

“Well, that’ll be better than nobody. She’ll be somebody for you to go with to those picture-houses that you’re so fond of. But it’s a pity that girl hasn’t got a sensible husband. We might get a decent game of bridge, then.”

“It’s a pity you haven’t got any men friends,” Elsie retorted. “I never knew anybody like you for that.”

Williams did not answer, but he turned upon his wife a look, peculiar to himself, that always vaguely frightened her. It held not only utter contempt, but something of quiet, unspecified menace.

She hastily spoke again. “Geraldine’s got a--a young fellow that she thinks is going with her now. A boy called Morrison.”

“Is he coming to Torquay?”

It was Horace Williams’ own matter-of-course tone in making the suggestion that suddenly filled Elsie with a frantic determination to see it carried out.

“Yes, most likely he is. So you’ll get your bridge, I daresay, and there’ll be somebody to take us to the pictures of an evening.”

As Elsie said the words, her heart seemed to herself suddenly to leap against her side, as though in anticipation of a joy almost too great to be borne.

She lay awake most of that night, revolving schemes by which Leslie Morrison could be brought to Torquay without letting Williams know that it was Elsie who had originated the idea.

Although formerly she had been as much flattered as irritated by her husband’s suspicious jealousy, it seemed to Elsie now to be of the utmost importance that he should not look upon Morrison in any other light than that of Geraldine’s friend. She wondered if she could induce Geraldine herself to suggest that Morrison should come to Torquay, but decided that it was unlikely. Finally, after a great deal of deliberation, Elsie next day wrote a note to the young man:

“DEAR MR. MORRISON,

“If not otherwise engaged, we shall be pleased if you will come to tea on Saturday afternoon. It will be the last time for some weeks we shall be at home, as we go to Torquay on the Tuesday. My sister, Miss Palmer, is coming with us. Why not join the party, as you say you would like to visit Torquay again?!!!

“Yours sincerely, “E. WILLIAMS.”

Elsie thought about this note incessantly after it was written and posted, and awaited the reply with proportionate excitement.

It came by return of post:

“MY DEAR MRS. WILLIAMS,

“Very many thanks indeed for your most kind invitation to tea. Unfortunately I am not able to avail myself of it, as am already engaged to go to Hillbourne Terrace. The suggestion about me going to Torquay is simply great--that is, if you really meant it! I intend talking it over with your sister when we meet on Saturday.

“Believe me, with kind regards,

“Yours very sincerely, “LESLIE M. MORRISON.”

Elsie came downstairs earlier than usual in order to conceal her letter before Williams should ask to see it, as he invariably did with his wife’s correspondence.

She put it in her pocket, and kept it there all day. On Saturday she wanted very much to go to Hillbourne Terrace, but Williams was at home, and on such occasions he never expected his wife to go out except with him. They spent the afternoon drearily enough, Williams reading the newspaper, and Elsie pretending to sew, and in reality wholly occupied with speculations as to how Geraldine would receive Leslie Morrison’s suggestion.

She felt pretty certain that Mrs. Palmer, at all events, would be in favour of it. “If only he has the sense to make it sound as if it came from him, and not from me!” thought Elsie.

She had felt confident of receiving another letter from Morrison before starting for Torquay, but to her dismay there was no word, either from him or from Geraldine, and on the eve of departure she still did not know whether or not her scheme had succeeded. For the first time, she heartily wished that there had been a telephone in her mother’s house.

On the morning of their journey the weather changed and became suddenly sultry. The train was crowded and unbearably hot.

Geraldine was to meet them at the station, and the fact that she arrived late made Horace Williams angry, in his own unpleasant, silent way. There was only one empty seat in the railway carriage, which Elsie at once took, and Williams and Geraldine were forced to stand in the corridor, already strewn with hand baggage and full of heated, perspiring people.

The train ran from London to Taunton without a stop, and at the end of two hours Williams forced his way into the carriage and spoke quietly to his wife.

“Here, Elsie, give me your place for a little while. One of my boots is hurting, and I can’t stand any longer. Go and take your turn for a bit.”

Elsie joined Geraldine in the corridor without demur. There were certain tones in Horace Williams’ voice that she had learnt to obey. Geraldine, her face pallid and shiny with heat, her tight blue cloth dress looking as though it constricted even her narrow chest and shoulders, was sitting in an uncomfortable, crouching position on a roll of rugs.

Both she and Elsie had removed their hats, and while Elsie’s hair dropped naturally into soft, flattened curls and rings, Geraldine’s clung damply in straight, short wisps to her neck and forehead, and she constantly raised her hand to push away, quite ineffectually, a straggling end that immediately fell down again.

“Hell, I call this,” she remarked shortly, as Elsie, stumbling over bags and packages and the feet of other passengers, reached her side and propped herself up against the side of the swaying train.

“You’re a nice one to take on a holiday, I must say,” Elsie retorted, but without acrimony. She felt that nothing would really matter if she could once get the assurance that she craved.

“Horace is in a foul temper. He never can stand the hot weather. I’m sure I hope it’ll be cooler at the sea than what it is here. Have you brought a new bathing costume, Geraldine?”

“M’m. A blue one, with a decent skirt--not one of those horrible skin-tight things you see in the picture papers. Improper, I call them.”

“You couldn’t be improper if you tried,” said Elsie cryptically. “Besides, there’ll be nobody to go in the water with you except me. Horace never bathes--makes him turn green, or something.”

She eyed her sister carefully as she spoke. Something in the wariness of Geraldine’s return glance gave her a rising hope.

“I’m sure I wish we were going to have someone we knew there. Horace would be much easier to keep in a decent temper if he had another man to go with sometimes.”

Then Geraldine spoke. “That boy Leslie Morrison said something about coming down one day this week, and spending part of his holiday at Torquay. He was awfully keen I should go and stay with his mother, near Bristol, too.”

“Was he? Well, you could do that later,” said Elsie. She was nearly breathless with triumph, but strove to make her voice sound matter-of-fact. “But I hope to goodness he will come to Torquay. It’ll make all the difference to Horace.”

Geraldine sneered. “I daresay you think it’ll make all the difference to you, too. It’s anything in trousers with you, old girl, whether the fellow belongs to another girl or not. But I’m not afraid of anything of that sort while Horace is about. He knows how to keep you in order, as Mother said.”

“I’ll thank you, and Mother too, to keep your opinion of me till it’s asked for.” Elsie, however, spoke mechanically.

She had immediately become obsessed by visions of herself and Morrison, walking, swimming, sitting beside one another on the sands, or in the intimate closeness and darkness of the picture palace....

“I’ll just tell you this, young Elsie. Leslie Morrison isn’t the sort of fellow you’ve been used to--not like Johnnie Osborne, and that truck. And as for carrying on with a married woman--why, he’d be ashamed to think of such a thing.”

Elsie smiled, and said nothing. She hardly heard what her sister was saying.

A hand laid upon her shoulder made her jump violently.

“Are you in the moon, Elsie? I’ve been making signs to you for ten minutes, I should think. It’s more than time we had our sandwiches,” said Horace Williams querulously.

“Oh, all right.”

By tugging and pulling at piled-up packages, they succeeded in getting hold of the basket in which Elsie had packed ham sandwiches, seed-cake, and bananas.

The train sped onwards....

III

The Williamses and Geraldine stayed in a boarding-house that proudly advertised itself as being situated “right on the front,” and young Morrison had a room in an apartment house, much cheaper and more remote, half-way up one of Torquay’s steepest hills. He arranged to have all his meals except breakfast at the boarding-house.

The weather was very hot, and sunny, and breathless.

Elsie felt as though she had never lived before. Every morning she came downstairs, her face sunburnt and glowing, but never unbecomingly freckled, her open-necked, short-sleeved blouses and jumpers indefinably smart and well put on, her undependable and essentially variable good looks seeming always to increase.

She was greatly admired in the boarding-house, and Williams for the first time did not appear to resent this.

He had suddenly become absorbed in a new and obscure digestive complaint, and would discuss the subject endlessly with his neighbours at meal-times. An elderly widow without any companion took a fancy to Geraldine, and as she sometimes gave her presents of clothes, or took her for a drive, Geraldine always sat next to her at the long table in the dining-room, and listened to her with a fair pretence of amiability.

Breakfast was a long, hot, abundant meal. The boarding-house knew its _clientèle_ and catered for it according to the views of business men who never allowed themselves to eat as much as they would have liked on week-day mornings during all the rest of the year. Tea and coffee, eggs and bacon, and fish and sausages were provided, toast and jam and marmalade and potted meat.

Elsie, who never ate anything but bread-and-butter with jam, and drank innumerable cups of tea, at her own home, enjoyed the novel fare because it was novel, and because she had not bought and ordered it herself, and because she was living in a haze of happiness that made everything enjoyable.

The prophecy of the clairvoyante had come true. Elsie knew the love that she had never yet known.

Every morning they went down to the sands and met Leslie Morrison there. They sat in deck chairs, and ate fruit from paper bags, and listened to a pierrot entertainment. At midday Elsie and Geraldine ran back to the boarding-house, undressed, and put on their bathing-suits, and came back to find Morrison already in the water and Horace Williams asleep in his deck-chair behind a newspaper.

Elsie’s bathing-dress was blue, trimmed with white braid, and she wore a rubber cap with a blue-and-red handkerchief knotted over it. Her bare legs and arms and neck had tanned very slightly; Geraldine’s showed scarlet patches of sunburn.

As they joined Morrison in the water, both girls always screamed, clinging to one another’s hands. But once the water was high above their waists, Elsie, a naturally strong swimmer, struck out boldly, consciously enjoying the cold water and the exercise of her muscles. Geraldine, of poor physique and defective circulation, only bobbed up and down in the shallows, still uttering staccato shrieks.

At first, Elsie and Morrison would keep near her, swimming short distances, and then returning, or splashing beside her in shallow water, but sooner or later they would both strike out, swimming side by side. They spoke very little.

“I say, you swim simply splendidly, Mrs. Williams. Why, I’ve never seen a girl swim as well as you do.”

“D’you think so? It’s nice, isn’t it?”

“It’s ripping. I’ve never had a holiday like this one--I mean, one that I’ve enjoyed so much.”

“Neither have I.”

“I hadn’t looked forward to my holiday a bit this year. I never thought it would be anything like this. I didn’t know that anything in the world----”

It was always Elsie who suggested that it was time to go back.

“Geraldine’s gone out already. She turns a funny colour if she stays in too long.”

Once, when they were rather further out than usual, Elsie said that she was getting tired.

“Put your hand on my shoulder--I’ll help you. Yes, do.”

“Oh no, I couldn’t.”

“Yes, you must.”

“Well, if you are sure you don’t mind....”

“_Mind!_”

His voice was very eloquent, and Elsie was abundantly satisfied.

She laid her hand upon his shoulder, and kept it there after her feet touched the sandy bottom once more and they were almost out of the water.

They raced to the bath-towel cloak that she had left under the wall, and as she put it round her Elsie said, without looking at him and in a peculiar tone:

“Did you enjoy it?”

“I loved it,” Morrison replied very low, and after a moment he added:

“Better than any of our other bathes.”

Elsie had never before conducted any one of her numerous love-affairs in a key so reticent, and the very novelty of the experience rendered it strange and precious.

Subconsciously, they might both be waiting for the spoken word, but on the surface each was supremely contented in the present.

The presence of Geraldine did not disturb Elsie in the least. Geraldine had been jealous of her intermittently ever since the days of their earliest childhood, and her manifestations of temper were always latent, rather than active. Elsie was used to them, and indifferent to them.

Besides, Leslie Morrison was always very nice to Geraldine. He sat between the sisters at the entertainments to which they went frequently, he gave chocolates and sweets to Geraldine oftener than to Elsie, and he was always ready to talk of Geraldine’s favourite topic, the old days in the office.

Only his dark eyes sought Elsie’s face with increasing frequency, his pleasant young voice altered slightly and indescribably when he found himself alone with her.

It seemed part of the magic of those enchanted days that Geraldine should make no scene, Horace Williams appear to perceive nothing.

On Sunday evening a band played in the public gardens. They decided to go and hear it.

Then Williams developed his mysterious symptoms, and refused to come out.

“You girls can go with Morrison. I shall take a glass of boiling water with peppermint,” he declared, “and go to bed. I’m in agony.”

“Would you like me to stay with you?” Elsie asked, her heart sinking.

“No, no, go and enjoy yourself.”

“Perhaps you’ll feel better in a bit, and come and join us,” she suggested, and thankfully made her escape.

The gardens were lit with Japanese lanterns and crowded with holiday-makers. Pale frocks and scarves flickered oddly in and out of the shadows and beyond the bright circle of glaring white light thrown out from the raised and roofed circular platform of the bandstand.

“No hope of chairs, I suppose,” said Geraldine disconsolately. “We’re late, thanks to Horace. Just look at the people.”

Morrison volunteered to try and find a seat, and they watched his tall figure disappear into the throng of people.

“I shall be sick if I have to stand for long, that’s certain,” declared Geraldine. “I believe the sun was too hot for me this afternoon. My head’s splitting.”

“Take off your hat, why don’t you?”

Elsie’s own hair was only covered with a blue motor veil, knotted at either ear, and with floating ends.

“My hair would be all over the place. I like to look tidy, thank you.”

“Please yourself,” said Elsie indifferently. She was absorbed in watching for the first glimpse of Morrison returning to them.

When she caught sight of him, elbowing his way through the crowd, it actually seemed to her as though the heart in her body leaped forward to meet him.

As usual, his eyes sought Elsie’s and held them for an instant before he turned to Geraldine.

“There’s one chair there. I’ve taken it, and a fellow is kindly keeping it for me. I thought you and your sister could take it in turns to sit down.”

“I don’t know....” Geraldine began ungraciously.

“It’s quite a good place, and nice-looking people on either side. The chap that’s keeping it for us seemed very decent.”

“Oh, go on, Geraldine!” said Elsie. “Hark, they are beginning again.”

The band had struck into a selection from a popular musical comedy.

Leslie Morrison put his arm beneath the girl’s elbow, and they moved away, Geraldine still grumbling sub-audibly.

Elsie, motionless, waited.

Never before in her life had she known this ecstasy of anticipation, so poignant as to be almost indistinguishable from pain.

When Leslie came back to her, she thought that she must fall, and instinctively caught at his arm for support.

Without speaking, he drew her away from the ring of light, into the deep shadow of a clump of trees. She stumbled against something in the sudden obscurity, and discerned the low railing that separated the ornamental shrubs and flower-beds from the crowded gravel paths.

“Come,” said Leslie’s voice in her ear, hoarsely. They stepped together over the little railing on to the grass. Another few steps, and they were in an isolation as complete as though a curtain had fallen between them and the seething mass of talking, laughing, swaying people in the gardens.

Even the sound of the band only reached them faintly as though from a great distance.

Leslie Morrison halted abruptly, and they faced one another, their eyes already accustomed to the semi-darkness.

By an impulse as inevitable as it was irresistible, they were in one another’s arms.

Neither spoke a word whilst that long throbbing embrace endured.

Through Elsie’s whole being flashed the wordless conviction: “_This_ is what I’ve been waiting for....”

“Elsie,” whispered the man. “Elsie ... Elsie ... Elsie ... I love you!”

“I love you,” she whispered back again.

They stood clinging to one another, entwined, the hot summer darkness encompassing them.

“What shall we do?” Morrison murmured at last. “I have no right to say a word to you, Elsie--I never meant to.”

“What does it matter?” said Elsie recklessly. “Horace and I have never been happy together. I ought never to have married him. It’s you I belong to.”

“My darling ... my sweetheart.”

They kissed passionately, again and again.

“What are we going to do?”

Elsie pressed closer and closer against him. “Forget everything, as long as this holiday lasts, except that we can be together. It’s been so heavenly, Leslie! We can settle--something--later on, when it’s all over.”

“I can’t let you go back to that man again. It would drive me mad.”

“Take me away with you,” she whispered.

“Oh, if I could ... if I only could, little girl!”

They spoke as lovers talk, ardently, and tenderly, and with long silences.

A sudden surging movement, and the distant sound of the National Anthem, penetrated at last to them through the darkness.

“It’s all over!” Morrison cried, aghast. “Your sister?...”

“I’ll manage her,” said Elsie. “Leslie ... once more....”

Her mouth found his, and then she tore herself out of his arms.

“Come with me.”

Rapidly Elsie found her way to the little pay-desk outside the enclosure, in which the lights were already being extinguished.

“She’s bound to come out this way.”

They waited, Elsie’s eyes at first dazzled, striving to find her sister’s form in the crowd. Every fibre of her being was acutely aware of the presence of Leslie Morrison, standing just behind her, so that her shoulder touched his breast.

Without turning her head she put out her hand, and felt it clasped in his and held tightly.

Her senses swam, and it was Geraldine’s own voice that first warned her of her sister’s approach.

To her relief, Geraldine was talking to a strange young man.

“Good-night,” she said amiably.

“Good-night, and thanks so much for a pleasant evening,” he returned, raising his soft hat.

Elsie compelled herself to speak. “Have you met a friend?” she enquired, with simulated interest.

“Hallo! Where have you been, I should like to know? Isn’t it funny?--that’s a fellow who was at our place for nearly a month during the war. Belcher, his name is. He was the very one that kept the chair for me. Did you two get seats somewhere else?”

“Yes,” said Elsie swiftly.

“It was good, wasn’t it--the band I mean? Horace has missed something by staying at home.”

Geraldine was evidently, and contrary to her wont, in high good humour.

They walked back to the boarding-house, Leslie Morrison between the two girls, Geraldine openly hanging on to his arm. His other hand was out of sight in his pocket, Elsie’s warm, soft fingers locked in his.

At the door they parted.

“Good-night and sweet repose,” said Geraldine indifferently, but she waited for her sister to precede her into the lighted house.

Elsie moved in a dream. It startled her when Geraldine, looking curiously at her under the glare of the electric light in the hall, said suddenly:

“What’s the matter with you, Elsie? You look moon-struck, and your hair’s all over the place, half down your back.”

“Is it?” Elsie put up her hands and pushed up the soft, loose mass under her veil again. “I’m going to bed,” she said, in a voice that sounded oddly in her own ears. “Tell Horace, will you? I’ve a splitting head.”

She felt an unutterable longing to be in the dark, and alone with her new and overwhelming bliss.

“You’re a nice one, I must say, leaving me alone all the evening, and then dashing off upstairs the minute we get in. I should think Horace would find something to say to you----”

Elsie neither heard nor heeded.

She ran upstairs and into the small double bedroom. It contained two beds, and for the first time since their marriage she and Horace had occupied separate ones.

To-night Elsie felt that she could never be thankful enough for the comparative solitude that would enable her to feel herself free again.

She tore off her thin summer clothes, shook down her cloud of hair, ran across the room in her nightdress to snap off the light, and then almost threw herself into bed.

In the blessed darkness, Elsie lay with hands clasped over her throbbing heart, and relived every instant of the evening, thrilling to a happiness so intense that she felt as though she must die of it.

She was perfectly incapable just then of looking beyond the immediate present and the glorious certainty of seeing Leslie Morrison again in the morning.

Although Elsie had been attracted, in a sensual and superficial manner, by a number of men, she had never in her life loved before, and the passion for Morrison that had suddenly swept into her life held all the force of a long repressed element violently and unexpectedly liberated.

Body, soul and spirit, she was obsessed almost to madness by this young man, several years her junior, whom she had not known a month.

When Horace Williams came up to bed it was nearly midnight, and Elsie, her face half buried under the sheet, pretended to be asleep.

IV

The love-affair of Elsie Williams and Leslie Morrison swept on its course, and in the early days of their madness neither of them paused for an instant to count its possible cost.

It seemed, indeed, as though Fate were deliberately simplifying their way.

Horace Williams appeared unable to give his attention to anything beyond his newly-discovered digestive trouble, and remained constantly indoors through the hottest and finest of the summer days, experimenting upon himself with drugs, and studying tables of dietetic values. He questioned Elsie very little as to her movements, taking it for granted that she, Morrison, and Geraldine formed a trio.

In point of fact, the youth whom Geraldine had met at the Sunday evening concert, and whom she spoke of as Percy Belcher, now almost always made a fourth in the party.

Geraldine monopolised him eagerly, and openly showed her triumph at feeling that she could now afford to relinquish Leslie Morrison.

Elsie and Morrison went swimming together, and lay on the hot, crowded sands, and dropped behind the others when they all went for walks, and sat with locked hands and her cheek against his shoulder in the stifling, thrilling darkness of the picture theatre, watching together the representation of a love that was never anything but the reflection of their own, the eternal triumph of a Man and a Woman, pale representatives on the screen of Elsie Williams and Leslie Morrison.

The golden fortnight drew to its close, and with the end of the Torquay holiday, it suddenly seemed to Elsie as though the end of the world must come.

“What are we to do, Leslie?” she gasped.

“I don’t know, darling,” he said miserably.

“You’re going to be in town for a bit?”

“For a little while. They’re sending me off again, pretty soon--abroad this time.”

“I can’t live without seeing you sometimes. Oh, Les, how can I go back to the old life with Horace after _this_?”

“Elsie,” said Morrison very low, “would he divorce you if----?”

“Not a hope. It costs money, and he’s too mean. Besides, he’d never do it if he thought I wanted it. He’s cruel, is Horace.”

“Not to you?”

“He doesn’t knock me about, if that’s what you mean--he knows I wouldn’t stand it--but of course he doesn’t care for me, or for anybody but himself. I was told he gave his first a rotten time--anyway, I know she used to look wretched enough. You know there was a first Mrs. Williams?”

“No, I didn’t. Of course, I saw he was much older than you. Oh, Elsie, whatever made you marry him?”

“Oh, I was a fool and I thought I’d like to be married, and get away from home. I didn’t know what it was going to be like, that’s certain. Oh, Les, fancy if I was still Elsie Palmer, and you and me could get married!” She gave a sob.

“Don’t, sweetheart! I’d have asked for your promise, fast enough, if you’d been free, but I couldn’t marry any girl till I’m earning a bit more.”

“Don’t you get a good screw, Leslie?”

“Rotten. But I’m jolly lucky to be in a job at all these days, I suppose.”

“Lucky!” Elsie echoed the word drearily. “You and I aren’t amongst the lucky ones, boy. I don’t see how things are ever going to come right for us, without a miracle happens.”

“He--Williams--may ... he may die.”

“Not he!” said Elsie bitterly. “There’s nothing the matter with him. All this talk about indigestion is stuff and nonsense--just fads he’s got into his head. There’s nothing wrong with Horace. And it’s always the ones who aren’t wanted that live on and on. But how am I going to bear it, after this wonderful time we’ve been having?” She began to cry.

“Elsie, don’t, darling! I’ll think of a way. There must be some way out.”

Leslie took her in his arms and she forgot everything else.

On the last evening they all went to the theatre together, and it was there, for the first time seeming awake to the situation, that Horace Williams, sitting at the end of the row of stalls, suddenly leaned across Geraldine and looked long and balefully at his wife.

She felt herself changing colour.

Morrison, however, observed nothing. He talked only to Elsie, looked only at her during the interval, and whilst the play was in progress and the lights in the theatre lowered, his hand sought and held hers.

“Elsie, we can’t part like this. How can I see you alone?”

“We can’t--not here. But Horace starts at the office again on Wednesday, and he’s there all day. Come to the house.”

“It means an age without seeing you. Elsie, can I write to you?”

“Yes ... no....” She was startled. “Oh, Les, darling, I’d love your letters!... But he’d see them. Wait a minute.”

She thought rapidly.

“Address them to the post-office--I’ll call there. He doesn’t know or care what I do all day, so long as I’m always there in the evenings when he gets back.”

But Elsie was to find herself mistaken. Her husband, after their return to the suburban villa, displayed a very unmistakable interest in her movements during the hours of his absence at work.

He obliged her to give him an account of her day, and took to ringing her up on the telephone for no acknowledged reason, and always at a different hour.

At first, Elsie cared little. She and Leslie Morrison met daily, and on one occasion spent the afternoon in the country together. Elsie recklessly telephoned to her own house at seven o’clock that evening, and said that she was with Irene Tidmarsh, and should not come home that night.

“You must,” said the hollow voice at the other end of the line.

“I can’t. Her father’s awfully ill, and she’s afraid of being left.”

“When shall you be home?”

“To-morrow.”

“I’ll come and fetch you.”

“All right,” said Elsie boldly. “What time?”

There was no answer. Williams had rung off.

Elsie knew, beyond the possibility of mistake, that her husband suspected her; but in the intense excitement that possessed her she was conscious of nothing so much as of relief that a crisis should be at hand.

She spent the night with Leslie Morrison at a tiny hotel in Essex.

Early next morning they travelled back to London, parting at Liverpool Street station.

“Let me know what happens directly you can, darling,” urged the man.

“I’ll telephone. Anyway, come round as soon as you can get away. _He_ won’t be in before seven.”

“Good-bye, Elsie darling. I’ll never, never forget....”

He left her, joining a hurrying throng of other young men wearing soft hats and carrying little brown bags, nearly all of them hastening towards the City.

Elsie proceeded by train and tram to the house of Irene’s father.

Her friend opened the door to her. “Hullo! I thought I should see you. That hubby of yours is on the warpath.”

“What’s happened?”

“Oh, nothing, thanks to me! Come in, Elsie. Have you had breakfast?”

“I’ve had some tea; I don’t want anything else. Tell me about Horace.”

“Well, Horace, as you call him, saw fit to come round here at eleven o’clock p.m. last night, and got me out of my virtuous downy by ringing at the front door bell till I thought the house was on fire. He said he’d ‘come for’ his wife, if you please!”

“I know. I told him I was going to spend the night at your place,” said Elsie calmly. “I suppose you didn’t happen to tumble to it, Ireen?”

“I’ve not known you all these years for nothing, old girl,” said Irene, grinning. “What do you take me for? I told him you were in bed and asleep, and had been for hours.”

“You’re a real sport, Ireen! How did he take it?”

Irene pursed up her lips and shook her head. “He asked me to tell you to ring him up first thing this morning. If you ask me, you’re in for trouble. And p’r’aps now you’ll be so kind as to tell me what it all means, and why on earth you couldn’t have given me fair warning before saying you were here. It’s lucky for you I didn’t give the whole show away on the spot.”

Elsie, habitually ready to discuss any of her love-affairs with Irene, had told her nothing about Leslie Morrison. But she saw now that a degree of frankness was inevitable.

Irene listened, sitting on the kitchen table, her shrewd, cynical gaze fixed upon Elsie. “You’re for it, all right,” she observed dryly. “I thought directly I saw you after you’d got back from Torquay that there was something up. But I somehow didn’t think you’d go off the deep end like that, Elsie. Why, you’re dotty about him!”

“Yes,” said Elsie, “I am.”

“And what do you suppose is going to happen?”

Elsie groaned. “I wish to the Lord that Horace would do the decent thing, or go West--and let me have a chance of happiness.”

“He won’t,” said Irene. “Well, whatever you do, don’t make a fool of yourself and run off with this fellow. It simply isn’t worth it, when he hasn’t got a penny, and not very often when he has.”

“If I thought Horace would divorce me it’d be different,” Elsie said. She was not listening to Irene at all. “Though even then, I don’t know what we would live on. Leslie hasn’t anything except his salary, and that’s tiny, and I’m sure I couldn’t earn a penny if I tried. Mother wouldn’t help me, either, if I did a thing like that.”

“No more would anybody else. And surely to goodness, Elsie, you’d never be such a fool. Think what it would mean to be disgraced, and have a scandal.”

“I wouldn’t mind that with him.”

Irene groaned. “You are far gone! Well, the worse it is while it lasts, the sooner it’s over. You’ll see sense again one of these days, I suppose. Meanwhile, you’d better ’phone that husband of yours.”

Elsie’s conversation with Williams over the telephone was brief. She agreed to come home at midday, and neither made any reference to the visit of Williams at eleven o’clock on the previous night.

Elsie anticipated a scene with her husband, and felt indifferent to the prospect. She had not enough imagination to work herself up in advance, and, moreover, her faculties were entirely occupied with the blissful expectation of seeing Morrison again that afternoon.

He came some hours after she had arrived home.

Elsie had done some shopping in the morning. With her husband’s money she had bought a gold-nibbed fountain-pen for Leslie, and had paid for copies of a photograph of herself.

She had scarcely ever in her life before given anyone a present, and Leslie Morrison’s ardent thanks, and rapture over the photograph, caused her the most acute pleasure.

“Darling, it’s lovely, and it’s just you! I shall always carry it about with me, done up with your dear letters.”

“Don’t keep my letters, Leslie,” said Elsie suddenly.

“Why ever not?”

A sudden recollection had come to her ... “_Beware of the written word...._”

The medium to whom Irene had once taken her had said that. She had also said other things; had told Elsie that love would come to her.... Perhaps she really knew....

“I’d rather you didn’t, really,” she said feebly. “Suppose--suppose Horace ever got hold of them----”

“How could he? Besides, Elsie darling, he’s got to know about us some time. I wish you’d let me tell him now. I can’t go on like this; it’s a low-down game coming to a man’s house without his knowledge and--and making love to his wife.”

“His wife!” said Elsie angrily. “Don’t call me that. I may be his wife in law, but it’s you that I really belong to.”

“Well, let me have it out with him then,” said Morrison earnestly. “We don’t know, after all. He may be ready to do the decent thing, and set you free.”

“I don’t care if you do. I’m pretty sure he guesses.... Horace has always been jealous, though he’s never had any cause before.”

“He didn’t say anything at Torquay?”

“No, it’s since we got back. He asked me once if you were engaged to Geraldine, and I said no. And he asked if you meant to come and see us here, and I told him most likely you would. He didn’t say anything much, but he hates a man coming near the place, really.”

“I’d far rather have it out with him,” young Morrison repeated. His face was resolute, and he stood his ground when Elsie, starting violently, exclaimed:

“I believe that’s Horace now! I can hear his key in the door. He’s never in at this hour as a rule--the skunk, he’s come to spy on me!”

“Darling, it’s all right!” said Morrison.

He put the photograph away in his breast-pocket with hands that trembled slightly. Both fixed their eyes on the door as it opened upon the figure of the little elderly solicitor. His face wore a no more sardonic expression than was habitual with him, and Elsie could not deduce from it whether or not he was surprised to see Leslie Morrison.

Neither man made any movement towards shaking hands, but they greeted one another conventionally, and talked a little, as though indifferently, of the holiday at Torquay.

Leslie asked whether Mr. Williams was any better in health, and the solicitor replied coldly:

“No, I am no better. I daresay my case would be a very interesting one, from the point of view of a doctor. But I am not one to give up, and I have no doubt that a great many people do not realise there is anything the matter with me.”

He turned his eyes upon Elsie for a moment as he spoke.

At the same instant, the inevitable thought that had flashed through her mind at his words caused Elsie to cast a lightning glance towards Leslie Morrison.

It was that glance that her husband intercepted.

V

They had another evening together before the storm broke.

Morrison took Elsie to a dance.

He issued his invitation boldly, in the presence of Williams, and to Elsie’s secret astonishment, her husband made no objection to her acceptance.

She wanted terribly to buy a new dress for the dance, but dared not risk a reminder to her husband, for fear he should suddenly forbid her to go. Finally she decided to wear a black dress, covered with black net, and with black net shoulder-straps. It was not new, but she had seldom had any occasion for wearing it, and she had enough money in hand for the housekeeping to enable her to buy a pair of black artificial silk stockings and slim black satin shoes with high heels.

Round her thick, light hair she tied a black velvet band with a spray of forget-me-nots worked in blue silk across it, but instinct told her to leave her full, beautiful throat unadorned by any of the few cheap ornaments that she possessed. Her smooth skin showed a sort of golden glow that merged imperceptibly into the warm pallor of her round arms and the dimpled base of her neck.

Elsie looked for a long while at herself in the glass, rubbed lip-salve into her already scarlet mouth, and, despite the “Japanesey” effect of lids that seemed half-closed, wondered at the brilliant light in her own hazel-grey eyes.

Leslie Morrison came for her, and they left the house together before Williams arrived from the office.

To both of them it was an unforgettable evening.

Elsie, like all women of her type, was a born dancer. Nevertheless, before the evening was half over, they had left the crowded hall for a screened alcove in an upper gallery, where the reiterated refrain of syncopated airs, and the wistful rhythm of valse-times, reached them through the haze of ascending cigarette-smoke.

It was three o’clock when they exchanged a last close, passionate embrace and Elsie, pale, exhausted, with indescribably shining eyes, crept upstairs to her room, undressed, and lay down noiselessly by the side of her husband to relive the evening that she had spent with her lover.

Williams left the house next morning without waking her, but it was that evening that the inevitable crisis came.

The solicitor returned home nearly two hours before his usual time, and found Leslie Morrison just preparing to enter the house.

The two men went in together.

Elsie started violently at the sight of her husband, and then laughed artificially. “Hullo! It’s a case of Oh, what a surprise, isn’t it? You’re back early, Horace.”

“Yes,” said her husband.

“I hope you’re not too tired after last night,” Morrison began.

“Oh no, thanks! It was fine. Horace, I haven’t told you about the dance yet. It’s a shame you weren’t there.”

The moment she said the words, Elsie knew that she had made a mistake.

“Yes,” Williams remarked quietly, “you’d have liked me to be there, wouldn’t you? Well, let me inform you that you aren’t going to any more dances for the present.”

“Whatever do you mean, Horace?”

“Morrison knows what I mean all right, and so do you, you little ----” His low, snarling tone gave the effect of spitting the ugly word at her.

Leslie Morrison sprang to his feet. “Look here, sir----”

The solicitor held up his hand. “That’ll do. It’s not for you to adopt that tone in speaking to me, you know. Please to remember that I’m Elsie’s husband.”

“Look here,” Morrison began again, “I’m perfectly ready to make a clean breast of it. I do love Elsie. Her and me were just pals at first, and then I suppose I didn’t exactly realise where I was drifting. But I’m free to confess that I lost my head one--one evening a little while ago--and I told her I loved her.” He glanced at Elsie, as though for a further cue.

“And of course she told you that she was a pure woman, and a loving wife, and you must never speak like that again?” sneered Horace Williams.

“Elsie, don’t let him speak like that.... Tell him!” urged Morrison.

“I don’t need any telling,” Williams retorted smoothly. “She thinks she’s in love with you, of course.”

“I am in love with Leslie,” said Elsie suddenly. “And if you did the decent thing, Horace, you’d set me free to marry him. You and me have never been happy together. I didn’t ever ought to have married you, but I was a young fool.”

“Understand this, the pair of you,” said the little solicitor clearly and deliberately. “I shall never set you free, as you call it. You’ve married me, and you’ve got to stay with me. As for you,” he turned to Leslie Morrison, “you can leave my house. And understand clearly that I won’t have you inside it again. And if I catch you speaking to my wife again, or meeting her, or having anything whatsoever to do with her, it’ll be the worse for you.”

Morrison took a sudden step forward, his hands clenched, and Elsie screamed, but Horace Williams stood his ground.

“I’m well within my rights, and you know it,” he declared. “I could horsewhip you, in fact, and if you were fool enough to bring a case for assault it’d go against you. _Clear out!_ That’s my last word to you.”

“Will you let Elsie have a divorce?”

“No, I won’t.”

“Will you let her have a legal separation, then? You’ve her own word for it that she’s not happy with you. I’m not thinking of myself, but you can’t have the cruelty to keep her tied to you when she’s miserable. Let her have her freedom.”

For all answer, Williams pointed to the door. The expression of his face had not altered by a hair’s-breadth.

Morrison turned to Elsie, white and tense. “Elsie, you hear what he says. What d’you want me to do?”

Elsie had lost her nerve. She began to cry hysterically. Instead of answering Morrison’s appeal, she turned to her husband.

“Why can’t you let us just be pals, Leslie and me?” she sobbed. “You bring your horrid, mean jealousy into everything. I s’pose you don’t grudge me having a friend of my own age, do you?”

Leslie Morrison instantly and loyally followed her lead. “If Elsie is kind enough to let me be her friend, and--and take her out every now and then, and that sort of thing, I’m willing to forget what’s just passed, and simply ask you as man to man if you’ve any objection to us being, as she says, just pals,” he said steadily enough.

“I have every objection. You young fool, Elsie has just said in so many words that she’s in love with you. Did you mean that, Elsie, or did you not?”

Elsie sobbed more and more violently, and her voice rose to an incoherent screech. “How do I know what I mean or don’t mean, when you make a row like this? But I’ll tell you this much, anyway, it’s true what he said; I’m wretched with you, and if you were half a man, you’d set me free.”

“There, that’s enough,” said Williams. “Going round and round in a circle won’t help any of us, and you ought to know by this time, Elsie, that I always mean what I say. You’ll please to remember what you were when I married you--a little fool of a typist, without a penny, whose mother kept a boarding-house and was only too glad of the money I gave her. It doesn’t take a genius to say what would have happened to you if you hadn’t found a man fool enough to marry you, either.”

“Stop that!” Morrison shouted.

The solicitor blinked at him quietly. “I’ve twice told you to get out of my house,” he observed. “Don’t make me say it a third time. It’ll be the worse, if you do--for Elsie.”

“Are you threatening her, you--you brute, you?”

“I object to your friendship with my wife. That’s all--and enough too. Now go.”

“Oh yes, go!” said Elsie suddenly, breaking into renewed sobs and tears. “I can’t stand this. You’d better go, Leslie boy, really you had. I shall do myself in, that’s all.”

“Don’t talk like that----” the youth began frantically, but Williams opened the door, and stood silently pointing to it.

There was something strangely inexorable in his little, trivial figure and sinister, passionless expression.

“Elsie,” said Morrison brokenly, “if ever you want me, send for me. I’ll come!”

He went out of the room, and they heard him go down the stairs and let himself out at the front door.

“That’s the end of that,” said Williams in a quiet, satisfied voice. “Stop that howling, Elsie. You didn’t really suppose that I didn’t know what was going on?”

She sobbed and would not answer.

There was a long silence, and at last Elsie, face downwards on the sofa, began to feel frightened and curious. She bore it as long as she could, and then looked up.

Her husband was gazing out of the window, in which a potted aspidistra stood upon a wicker stand between soiled white curtains.

At the slight movement that she made he turned his head. “Elsie, tell me. Did you really mean what you said, that you’re in love with that boy?”

To her incredulous surprise, his voice had become hoarse and almost maudlin.

“You only said it to make me angry, didn’t you?”

In a flash Elsie saw the wisdom of allowing him at least to pretend to such a belief. “Perhaps I did,” she said slowly. “Anyway, it’s true enough that we aren’t particularly happy together, and never have been. And I meant what I said about a separation, right enough, Horace.”

“You won’t get one,” said Williams, and his voice had become vicious-sounding once more. “And remember what I’ve said--that fellow is never to set foot in here again, and you and he are not to meet in future.”

* * * * *

The following morning Elsie went to the High Street post-office and found there the letter that she had expected.

“MY OWN DARLING GIRLIE,

“What is to be done? I can’t tell you, darling, what a hound I felt to leave you all alone with that jealous brute yesterday and yet the awful thing is that he has the right to you and I have none. Oh, Elsie life is hard isn’t it darling? I wish I could take you away but that cannot be and it is you that have to bear the brunt of it all except that I am in hell knowing what you are going through all the time. Perhaps that is not an expression I ought to use to you but you must excuse it for I hardly know what I am writing.

“One of our chaps has gone sick, and they are sending me to the North instead of him which means we can’t meet again as I go off to-morrow. But write to me darling and tell me what it is best to do now. Would it simplify things if we were to be just friends and no more?

“Cheer up, Elsie perhaps some day things may come right for us--who knows? He may die; doesn’t he always say there is something wrong with him?

“A thousand kisses for you, dearie. I have your sweet photo with me and love to look at it and re-read your wonderful letters. Write and tell me everything, and what you think we had better do. Shall we be able to meet when I come back at the end of the month?

“No more at present, from

“Your own true lover, Leslie, “BOY.”

To Elsie, Leslie Morrison’s love-letters were wonderful.

She read and re-read this one, but when she had answered it, she burnt it.

Certain words of the clairvoyante, whom she had once visited with Irene Tidmarsh, she had never been able to forget, and of late they had haunted her anew.

“_Beware of the written word...._”

Elsie burnt all Morrison’s letters to her, and asked him to burn all those that she wrote him.

Gradually these letters that passed between them grew to be the most important factor in her life.

Elsie, who had detested writing, now desired nothing so much as to pour out her soul on paper, and the limitations that she found imposed upon her through lack of education and the power to express herself made her angry.

Again and again she asked Morrison in her letters to take her away, and after a time his steadfast refusals bred in her mind the first unbearable suspicion that her passion was the greater of the two. Her letters became wilder and wilder.

Sometimes she threatened suicide, or gave hysterical and entirely imaginary descriptions of scenes with her husband; sometimes she expressed a reckless desire for Horace’s death, or asked if she could “give him something” unspecified. These phrases, to a large extent, were meaningless, but Elsie frantically hoped by them to impress upon Morrison the extent of her love for him.

When he got back from the North of England they met surreptitiously.

A certain café in a small street not far from Elsie’s home became their rendezvous. Sometimes Morrison was able to get there in the middle of the day, but generally he came at about five o’clock, and they had tea together. Very occasionally they met early in the afternoon and went out together.

Each meeting was entirely inconclusive, save in exciting Elsie almost to frenzy and reducing young Morrison to further depths of despondency.

The months dragged on. Morrison was often away, and then he and Elsie wrote to one another daily. She was entirely obsessed with the thought of her lover, and hardly ever saw Irene Tidmarsh, or went to Hillbourne Terrace. And all the while, Horace Williams said nothing.

He and his wife did not quarrel; indeed, they hardly spoke to one another, but the atmosphere between them, day by day, was becoming more heavily charged with mutual hatred and apprehension.

VI

The tension under which Elsie now lived began at last to affect her health. She slept badly, and was nervous as she had never been before.

Williams watched her without comment--a sinister little figure. Sometimes, utterly overwrought, Elsie tried to force a scene with him, but she only once succeeded in making him evince anger.

Strangely reckless, she suddenly suggested that Leslie Morrison should be invited to lodge in their house, with no slightest expectation that her husband would entertain such a scheme, but with a wild desire to provoke him to a scene that should release some of her own pent-up emotion.

“He’s looking for rooms, Geraldine says,” she declared, “and we’ve a bedroom to spare, and might as well use it.”

Williams gazed at her incredulously. “Are you aware that I’ve shown Morrison the door once already?” he asked at last.

“Yes, I’m quite aware of that,” said Elsie, with insolence in her voice. “I thought you might have got more sense now, that’s all.”

“Listen to me, Elsie. I forbade you to speak to that fellow again--and by God, if you’ve done so, I’ll see you never forget it!” His face was livid and he spoke through his clenched teeth.

“I’ll speak to whom I please.”

“Have you been meeting Morrison?”

“Why shouldn’t I?”

Elsie felt a curious pleasure and relief in thus mocking at the furious jealousy that was evident in her husband’s face and manner.

“Answer my question.”

She remained silent.

“Are you and that fellow in love?”

“I’ve answered that before. I told you months ago, when you first started to insult me, that he was nothing to me.”

“That wasn’t true then--and it isn’t now. Morrison’s in love with you, damn him, and you’re in love with him!”

“Am I?”

Elsie laughed derisively in the new and uncomprehended realisation that she was no longer afraid of Horace.

“You little bitch!...”

He caught her by the shoulders and suddenly flung her against the wall.

Elsie screamed, but it was reflex action from the physical shock alone that made her do so. She was neither frightened nor very much startled. There was even an odd exhilaration for her in the sudden release of those pent-up forces that had for so long vibrated tensely between herself and her husband.

However, her arm and shoulder were bruised, and her whole body violently jarred. “You’re a coward!” she panted. “Hitting a woman!”

“You drove me to it.... Elsie, get up!... I’m sorry I did that, but you’re driving me mad. God, if I had that fellow here I’d wring the life out of him!”

“No, you wouldn’t,” Elsie taunted him. “He’s a great deal stronger than you are--he’s a man, he is--you’d never dare to touch him. All you can do is to knock a woman about.”

“That’s a lie! I’ve never touched you before, though there’s many a man in my place would have beaten you within an inch of your life. I didn’t know what I was doing just now.”

He took a step towards her, but Elsie pulled herself up from the floor without appearing to notice the movement. She felt slightly giddy, and her head ached.

“Aren’t you going to--to forgive me? I oughtn’t to have hit you, I acknowledge, but you’ve done everything to drive me to it. Elsie, swear to me that there’s nothing now between you and Morrison.”

“Oh, all right,” she said wearily. “I swear it.” She felt that she no longer cared what happened in a sudden overwhelming fatigue.

“I don’t believe you,” said Williams bitterly.

Elsie shrugged her shoulders, and turned, moving stiffly, to leave the room.

“Are you--are you hurt?”

“Yes, of course I am. My shoulder will be black and blue to-morrow, I should think.”

“Shall I get you anything?” Williams muttered, shamefaced.

She made no answer.

That afternoon Elsie rang up Leslie Morrison on the telephone after her husband had gone out. “Is that you, Les?”

“Yes. How’s yourself?”

He had told her never to be prodigal of verbal endearments in their telephone communications, and she knew that he was probably not alone, but it struck her painfully that his tone was a purely casual one, such as he might have used to anyone.

“We’ve had an awful scene, boy.”

“What--who?”

“Him--Horace--and me. The same old thing, of course--jealousy. I stood up to him, and told him I didn’t intend to put up with that sort of treatment any longer, and I’d never give up anyone I--I liked.”

“I say, Elsie, you were careful, weren’t you?” asked Morrison, his voice grown anxious.

“Yes, yes, darling, of course I was, for your sake. But Leslie--this is what happened--he knocked me down.”

There was a smothered exclamation that made her heart leap with sudden exultation. Of course Leslie cared....

“Elsie--girlie--he didn’t! Are you hurt?”

She could have laughed in pure joy at his sharply-anxious question.

“Nothing bad. Shaken, of course, and I expect there’ll be a bad bruise, but I can put up with worse than that, you know.”

“You oughtn’t to have to! The hound! I’d like to.... Look here, can’t we meet?”

“Yes, yes!” she said eagerly. “What about tea? I’ll come to----”

“The same place,” he interrupted quickly, and she understood that he did not want her to mention the name of the tea-shop that had so often served them as rendezvous.

“What time?”

“About half-past five. I shan’t get away any earlier.”

“All right, darling. I’ll be there.”

“Sure you’re all right?”

“Yes, quite all right now,” Elsie declared, laughing happily.

“I must go. See you later, then?”

“Yes. Good-bye, boy.”

The answering good-bye came to her faintly over the wires as the final click warned her that he had hung up the receiver.

Elsie looked at the clock on the mantelpiece. Only three o’clock--two hours and a quarter before she could think of starting out.

The telephone rang again, and Elsie, with a joyful hope that Morrison had been unable to resist a further word, snatched at the instrument.

“Hallo, hallo! Who’s there?”

“I am--Horace,” said her husband’s flat, nasal voice. “Look here. How would you like to go to the play to-night, Elsie?”

“What!” said Elsie, disappointed at not hearing Leslie Morrison’s voice again, and still dazed from the scene of the morning.

“I said, how would you like to do a theatre to-night? I’ve got tickets for ‘The Girl on the Pier’--good places--for to-night.”

She understood at last that he was seeking to propitiate her, and to make up for his violence. “I don’t mind. What time does it start?”

“Half-past eight, but we’d better meet in town somewhere for some food. I shan’t have time to come home first. What about the Corner House, at about seven o’clock? That’ll give us plenty of time to go on to Shaftesbury Avenue afterwards.”

“All right. How many tickets have you got, Horace?”

“Just the two. I thought you and I would go by ourselves and have a jolly evening,” said the far-away voice rather tremulously.

Elsie laughed drearily as she rang off.

It seemed to her that the time dragged interminably until she could go upstairs and dress herself for the evening’s outing. She meant to meet Morrison first and then go on to the Corner House and wait there for her husband.

Elsie put on a dark blue coat and skirt, with a new pale blue jumper of artificial silk, and a big black hat with a blue feather. Round her neck she wore a small black fur.

After her variable wont, she had suddenly recovered her looks, after the sodden, stupefied ugliness that the morning’s unhappiness had produced in her. Her eyes seemed more widely opened than usual, her hair fell into thick curls and rings, and a soft, bright colour lay under her oddly prominent cheek-bones. She rubbed lip-stick on to her full, sulkily-cut mouth, and lavishly powdered her straight, beautiful neck. The glow of excitement and gladness transformed her as she went out to meet Morrison, slamming the door of the villa behind her.

“Darling!”

“My own dear little girl!” said Leslie, and held both her gloved hands for a moment in his. “I haven’t been able to think of anything but what you told me this afternoon. Are we going for a walk, or will you come in?”

“I’d like to come in and sit down,” said Elsie languidly. “Have you had tea?”

“No. I’ll order some.”

“Not for me, boy. I’m meeting Horace for a meal in about an hour and a half. We’re going to the theatre.”

“Have you made it up, then?”

“Oh, I suppose so! He telephoned and said he had these tickets. I suppose he thought it’d make up, in a way.”

They chose a corner table at the further end of the tea-shop, and Elsie took off her coat and leant against it as it lay folded over the back of her chair.

“Where did he hurt you this morning?” said Morrison intently.

She pulled up the loose sleeve of her silk jumper. “Look!”

Her smooth, soft arm was already discoloured all round the elbow and up to the shoulder.

“It’s worse higher up, only I can’t get at it now to show you.”

“_Damn_ him!” Leslie Morrison muttered between his teeth.

His boyish face was black with an intensity of feeling that Elsie had seldom seen there of late. It sent a rush of joyful reassurance all through her.

“Darling, I don’t care about anything while we’ve got each other.”

“But it can’t go on, Elsie. He’s making your life miserable. Isn’t there any hope of a divorce, or even a separation?”

“He says he never will.”

Elsie spoke slowly. She was revolving a possibility, that she had often viewed before in her own mind.

“Les, can’t we go away together? I don’t care what happens, or what people think of me. I’d face anything, with you.”

Even as she spoke, she knew--and one side of her was relieved to know--that Morrison would negative the suggestion, as he had often done before.

“Out of the question, darling girl. Think what I’m getting--two twenty-five a year and no particular prospect of a rise for years to come. And look at what you’ve been used to!”

“Not before I married.”

“Times were different then. It was before the war. Living has gone up five hundred per cent. since then, and it’ll be many a long year before it comes down again. Why, Elsie, we couldn’t even live!”

“I don’t know whether you think I’m living now!” she exclaimed vehemently. “Existing, I call it. And we shall only be young once, Leslie, and it seems so hard to waste it all.”

He groaned, and they sat silent for a time, their hands locked together beneath the table.

“Would you be ready to--to end it all?” she asked suddenly. “I mean for us to go out together, right out of life?”

“Do you mean suicide?”

“Yes--a suicide pact.”

She fixed her eyes upon him, anxious to believe that he was startled, and acutely touched, at the lengths to which her love could carry her. The actual idea behind the word--that of suicide--conveyed very little to her. Although she believed herself to be fully in earnest, Elsie never seriously contemplated her own death, nor that of her lover.

She had often thought of Williams’s death as the one possible solution of their problem, but she had actually never really abandoned the secret expectation that a way out would be found for herself and Morrison that would secure their happiness.

She had read of suicide-pacts, and seized upon the idea eagerly as one more peg upon which to hang the proofs of her passion for Morrison, and maintain his love, and his interest in herself, at the level of her own ardour. Although never consciously owning it to herself, Elsie knew that his love was a lesser one than hers.

Leslie Morrison, now, did not make the passionate response for which she had hoped. “Don’t talk like that. Oh, Elsie, it is hard, isn’t it? And you don’t know what it’s like for me to think of that brute making your life miserable. If only there was anything I could do!... I think about it till I see red sometimes. Why doesn’t he die?”

“Because we want him to, I suppose,” said Elsie, suddenly listless. “He’s always talking about his health failing, and things like that, but I don’t see any sign of it myself. Things will never come right for us in this world, Leslie.”

“Elsie, I’ll make him get a separation; I swear I will. It’s the only possible thing. Then at least you’ll be free.”

She noticed that he did not refer to the separation between herself and her husband as to a means of furthering their own love.

“Haven’t your people ever tried to get your freedom for you?”

“Oh, I’ve nobody much, you know! Only mother and Geraldine, and the old aunties. They don’t approve of me either--never did.”

“Poor little girl, they don’t understand you!”

“I don’t care while I’ve got you, Leslie.”

They made love to one another, their voices low, until Morrison reminded Elsie suddenly that it was late.

“You’ll hardly get to the West End by seven now. I’m glad you’re going to enjoy yourself to-night, anyway.”

“I wish we were going together, Les, just you and I. That’s how it ought to be. Are we going to meet to-morrow, dearest?”

“Lunch here, can you? One o’clock. And meanwhile, darling, I’m going to think hard what I can do to make things better for you. He’s got to stop leading you this sort of life, anyway, and it’s up to me to find a way of making him do so. When I think of his knocking you about....”

The blood rushed into his face, and Elsie saw that he had clenched his hand involuntarily. It was balm to her to realise that she still had the power of exciting him to a frenzied anxiety on her account.

“He’s hit me before now, you know,” she said suddenly, hardly realising, and caring not at all, that she was not speaking the truth.

“You never told me. I’ve sometimes wondered....”

“I didn’t mean to say anything about it. I knew it would upset you.... Never mind, darling, I don’t care.”

“But I do. I tell you it’s driving me mad. Oh, what’s the good of talking when one can’t do anything! Look here, darling, I’m not fit to talk to you now--and besides, you’ll be frightfully late. I shall see you to-morrow.”

“One o’clock. Good-night, sweetheart. I wish it was you and me going to this show to-night. Wouldn’t it be heaven!”

“Indeed it would. But things may come right for us even yet, darling--don’t give up hope. Good-bye.”

“Good-bye!” she echoed.

Elsie was late for her appointment with her husband, but he did not complain. He seemed anxious to do everything in his power to conciliate her, and it was characteristic of their relations together that, as her fear of his sarcastic petulance vanished, so her contempt for him increased.

“I got dress-circle places,” said Williams impressively. “I know you like them.”

The piece, a musical comedy, amused her, and she was pleased at various glances that were cast upon her by their neighbours in the theatre. At the back of it all was a warm inward glow that pervaded all her consciousness at the remembrance of Leslie Morrison’s championship of her, his assurance that he would “think out a way.”

Perhaps Leslie would make up his mind to take her away. She had asked him to do so, and he had always refused. Elsie, with an ever-latent fear that Morrison was already beginning to tire of an attachment that to her was the one reality in life, told herself passionately that, with him, she would care nothing for poverty.

“It’s good, isn’t it?” said her husband’s nasal voice.

“Rather. Topping!”

For a minute or two she listened to the comedian on the stage, and was genuinely amused by his facial contortions and wilful mispronunciations of polysyllabic words.

“He’s so silly, you can’t help laughing at him,” Elsie declared, wiping her eyes.

Then she drifted back again into the dream wherein she and Leslie Morrison figured as sole protagonists, with complete and unexplained elimination of Horace Williams.

“Look who’s here, Elsie!”

She started violently, convinced against all reason that she would see Morrison.

“Isn’t that your aunties?”

“So it is,” said Elsie without enthusiasm.

Aunt Ada and Aunt Gertie were making violent signs to her, and in the interval Horace, still evidently bent upon doing everything possible to please her, insisted upon going to speak to them, and suggested supper after the play.

“He is going it,” Elsie reflected dispassionately, not in the least touched, but a good deal amazed at the lavishness of Horace’s amends.

She was in reality very much bored by the company of the two aunts in the little restaurant to which they eventually went.

“Why don’t you go and see your poor mother, Elsie?”

“I do see her, Aunt Gertie.”

“Not very often, dear.”

“As often as I’ve time for,” said Elsie curtly.

“Geraldine’s not looking well,” Aunt Ada began next.

“What happened to that young fellow she was supposed to be going with last year?”

Horace Williams called abruptly for his bill. “It’s after twelve, and I’ve got to be at work to-morrow, if you ladies haven’t. All good things must come to an end, you know.”

“It’s been most pleasant, I’m sure,” said Aunt Gertie.

And when Horace had gone to pay the account at the cash-desk, she added sentimentally to Elsie:

“It’s a real pleasure to have seen you and him together--and so happy.”

“Thanks,” said Elsie sarcastically. “We’re as happy as the day is long, of course.”

“So you ought to be,” said Aunt Ada very sharply.

They exchanged good-byes outside the restaurant, and Elsie and her husband went by Tube to their own station.

The long suburban road was almost deserted when they came out into it.

“We’ll go by the Grove, of course,” said Elsie, indicating the narrow alleyway that eventually merged into their own street, with a high blank wall upon one side of it and the backs of a rather sordid row of houses upon the other.

A few leafless plane-trees showed above the top of the wall, and an occasional tall lamp slightly relieved the gloom of the long, paved passage-way.

Their footsteps on the stones were clearly audible in the unusual stillness that belonged both to the deserted locality and to the small hours of the morning.

“Who’s that?” said Horace so suddenly that Elsie jumped.

Footsteps were hurrying behind them, and they both turned. With a strange sense of foreknowledge, Elsie saw Leslie Morrison.

The two men stopped dead as they came face to face with one another. Elsie shrank back against the high yellow brick wall, her eyes fixed upon Morrison’s ravaged face.

“I couldn’t rest for thinking of it all. I know what happened to-day, Williams,” he said in a high, strained voice. “It can’t go on. You’re making Elsie’s life hell. Give her her freedom.”

“Damn you! Who are you to interfere between man and wife?” said Williams, low and fiercely. “I know what you want, both of you, but you won’t have it. Elsie’s my wife, and I shan’t let her go.”

“You’ve got to.”

Horace Williams, looking full at the youth, who was shaking from head to foot with excitement, gave his low, malevolent laugh.

Almost at the same instant Elsie heard her own voice screaming, “Don’t ... don’t...!” and saw the flash of a knife as Morrison raised his arm and struck again and again.

Williams spun round as though to run, and his eyes, oddly surprised-looking, glared, straight and unseeing, at Elsie.

Leslie Morrison stabbed at him again in the back.

“What have you done?” sobbed Elsie to Morrison. “Oh, go!”

She saw Morrison dash away up the passage, and at the same moment Horace Williams took a few steps forward.

“Keep up--I’ll help you!” gasped Elsie.

She thrust her arm beneath his elbow, dimly astonished and relieved to find that he was walking, when he suddenly lurched heavily against her, the upper part of his body sagging forward. Then he fell heavily and lay motionless, blood trickling from his mouth.

Elsie, utterly distraught, and her knees shaking under her, felt her screams strangled in her throat. A distant figure showed at the near end of the alley, and she flew, rather than ran, towards the stranger, calling out in a high, sobbing voice for a doctor--for help.

The woman, elderly and respectable-looking, asked what had happened.

“I don’t know,” said Elsie. A blind horror was upon her, but instinct warned her to make no definite statement of any kind.

A nightmare confusion followed. The alleyway, from being a silent and deserted spot, became clamorous with footsteps and voices. Elsie dimly heard a tall man in evening clothes saying that he was a doctor, and saw him kneel beside the blood-spattered form huddled upon the pavement. It was he, and a stalwart policeman, who finally lifted that which had been Horace Williams on to a hand-ambulance and took it away.

Another man in police uniform took Elsie’s arm, giving her the support that alone enabled her to move, and helped her to a taxi.

She almost fell into it, weeping hysterically, and he took his place beside her as a matter of course. In the sick, convulsed terror that shook her, his stolid presence was an actual relief. She thought that he was taking her home until he gently explained that she was coming with him to the police-station.

“We want to get this cleared up, you know, and you can help us by telling us just what happened.”

A new and more dreadful fear came over her. If Horace was dead someone would be accused of having killed him. They might suspect her.... Elsie felt as though she were going mad with the horror of it all.

She began hysterically to scream and cry.

VII

It was still early in the day when Elsie’s mother came to her at the police-station. Her fat face was white, stained and mottled with tears.

“It seems too bad to be true,” she kept on repeating again and again. “That’s what I said when I heard about poor Horace: too bad to be true. And you in this dreadful place, Elsie, and such a state as you’re in--and no wonder. The whole thing seems too bad to be true.”

“Have they--found anything? Shall I be able to go home soon?” asked Elsie.

“I don’t know, dearie. They’ve got to find out who killed poor Horace, you know. Elsie, you’ve always been a sensible girl. You must tell them all you know, however dreadful to you it is to speak of such things. Or I’ll tell them for you, if you’d rather just have it out with mother. Didn’t you see anyone?”

“Someone flew past, and as I turned to speak to Horace, I saw the blood coming out of his mouth.”

“Who was it flew past?” said Mrs. Palmer.

“I don’t know. It all happened in a flash, like,” said Elsie.

“You and Horace were happy together, weren’t you?”

“Yes, always,” said Elsie stolidly. She had made up her mind not to say anything else.

“You didn’t quarrel?”

“No, never.”

“You’ll tell them that, won’t you, dearie? The police, I mean.”

“It’s nothing to do with them,” said Elsie childishly.

“Now don’t talk that way. That’s silly. You don’t seem to realise, my lady, the sort of mess you’re in.”

Mrs. Palmer’s voice rose to stridency as she let her fear and her temper get the mastery of her attempt at caution.

“My God, Elsie, can’t you see what it means? They may try you for murder. Murder--the same as the horrid common people in the newspapers. Who’s to know what happened--you and Horace in that empty street at one o’clock in the morning, and he gets done in, and whatever you may say--and mind you, I’ll back you up in it-they’ll get hold of the fact that you and poor Horace didn’t hit it off together.”

“We were quite happy together.”

“That’s right,” said Mrs. Palmer approvingly. “You stick to that.”

Then she began to cry. “To think it should have come to this! I that have always held my head high--I don’t know what your aunts will say! It’ll be an awful shock for them.”

Elsie hardly heard what her mother was saying. Waves of physical nausea kept on passing over her, and she was conscious of nothing but thankfulness when an elderly woman in uniform came to her with a cup of tea, and suggested that she should lie down and get some sleep.

Elsie followed her, scarcely replying to Mrs. Palmer’s voluble farewell and assurances of her own speedy return.

She could not afterwards have told where it was that she was taken, but a small, narrow bed awaited her, and she flung herself on to it and fell almost at once into the trance-like sleep of utter bodily and mental exhaustion.

The same uniformed woman was waiting for her when she woke, after several hours, and the sight of her brought back in a sick rush the horrors of the morning.

“Oh, I must go home!” cried Elsie.

The woman took very little notice of her words, but she conducted her to a lavatory and helped her to make her toilette.

Cold water and the effects of sleep combined slightly to steady the wretched Elsie. “I should like to go home at once, please,” she said, in a voice that she tried in vain to render firm.

“Yes. Well, I daresay your mother will take you away as soon as you’ve answered a few questions,” said the woman indifferently and quietly. “They want you downstairs first for a few minutes now.”

“Is Mother there?”

“She’s in the waiting-room. You’ll be able to see her afterwards.”

“_Afterwards?_”

Elsie’s agonised perceptions fastened upon that one word. She sought with frantic and irrational intensity to pierce the veiled threat that she felt it to convey.

A man whom she knew to be a police-inspector appeared at an open door, and the uniformed woman went away.

“Now, Mrs. Williams, I’m afraid we must trouble you for a short statement,” said the man pleasantly. “Will you follow me, if you please?”

He moved forward, and Elsie saw into the room that he had just left.

Leslie Morrison was within it.

As their eyes met, it seemed to Elsie that the last shreds of self-control deserted her, and she screamed on a high and hideous note words that came incoherently and frenziedly from some power outside herself.

“Leslie, Leslie! Oh, God, what shall I do? Why did you do it? I didn’t ever mean you to do it.... I must tell the truth....”

The inspector swung sharply round and gripped her by the arm. “Do you realise what you’re saying? It is my duty to caution you that anything you say now may be used in evidence against you.”

Elsie burst into hysterical sobs and tears.

The man pushed her gently into another room where another official and a young man in plain clothes sat at a table with papers and pens in front of them.

The interrogatory that followed was conducted with grave suavity by the senior official, but Elsie was conscious only of a horror of committing herself.

She said again and again that she and her husband had always been happy together.

It was a faint relief when at last they came to actual questions of fact, and she could reply with direct statements to the enquiries as to her movements on the previous evening.

(O God, was it only last night that she and Horace had gone to the theatre--only _this morning_ that they had started to walk home from the Tube station?)

“Mrs. Williams, I want you to tell me in your own words exactly what happened in the alleyway just before your husband was struck.”

Elsie realised with despair that she must say something.

She was not imaginative, but almost without her own knowledge she had evolved a sort of account by which, it seemed to her, confusedly, that she might safeguard herself.

“We were walking along,” she said in a trembling, almost inaudible voice, “and there wasn’t anybody in sight, and suddenly someone rushed up from behind and pushed me away from my husband. I was sort of dazed for a moment--I think I must have been pushed against the wall--and when I recovered I saw Horace--my husband--struggling with a man. Then the man ran away.”

“Did you see the man’s face?”

“No,” said Elsie, with ashen lips.

“But you know who it was?”

“It was Leslie Morrison.”

The room reeled before her eyes, and she made an ineffectual clutch at a chair.

Through a sort of thick fog she heard the official repeating in a low tone: “It was the man known as Leslie Morrison.”

Then she felt herself fall.

Her mother was with her when she recovered consciousness, and the woman who had attended to her before, and whom Mrs. Palmer now repeatedly and volubly addressed as “Matron.”

Elsie looked round her, but the officials were gone. With a groan she let her head drop backwards again on to the rail of the chair in which she found herself.

“Come along now, don’t give way. You’re better now,” said the matron briskly. “Don’t let yourself go, Mrs. Williams.”

“Oh, Elsie, Elsie,” wailed Mrs. Palmer, “whatever will become of us? Didn’t I always tell you----”

“Give her an arm, Mrs. Palmer, and I’ll take her on the other side, and we’ll get her into the other room. There’s a nice couch there, and she can lie down a bit.”

They half led, half dragged Elsie away, the matron exhorting her all the time with impersonal, professional brightness to pull herself together.

She was conscious of thankfulness when the woman left her alone with her mother, although leaving the door open behind her.

Mrs. Palmer instantly bent forward and asked with avidity: “What did you say to them, Elsie?”

“Let me alone, Mother, for pity’s sake!”

“How can I let you alone, as you call it, you unnatural girl? What a way to speak to your own mother, on whom you’re bringing sorrow and shame, and may bring worse yet, if you’re not careful! Now you tell me this, Elsie Williams, directly this minute: Did you or did you not tell them that you and Horace were on bad terms together?”

“I said we were quite happy together----”

“Stick to that,” said Mrs. Palmer significantly. “Did anyone know--any neighbour or anybody--that you quarrelled? He never made a row, or knocked you about, did he?”

“Only the once,” Elsie said automatically.

She pushed up her sleeve, then shuddered violently as she recalled that she had last made use of that same gesture in the tea-shop with Morrison.

“My goodness, did Horace do that? You must have tried him pretty high, _I_ know. How are you going to account for that bruise, young Elsie?”

“Who’s to know about it?”

“Oh, they’ll find out fast enough! They get to know about everything. Look here, did you say that you’d been pushed against the wall by whoever it was who did in poor Horace?”

Elsie nodded, too much stunned even to wonder how her mother had become possessed of this information.

“Very well, then. Those bruises on your arm are where you fell against that wall. Don’t forget. I shall say you showed them to me, and told me about it.”

“Say what--when?” Elsie asked stupidly. “I suppose all this’ll be over before I’m quite mad, and they’ll let me go home to-day.”

Her mother’s fat face puckered up suddenly, and she began to cry with loud, gulping sobs. “I don’t know!” she wailed. “I don’t know.”

“But what--what--for Heaven’s sake, Mother, stop that noise, and tell me what they’re going to do. _What is it?_” almost shrieked Elsie, striving to fight down the panic that threatened to overwhelm her.

“Don’t you understand, you little fool? (God forgive me for speaking like that!) Oh, Elsie, I’m afraid--I’m afraid they’ll--they’ll arrest you--for murder!”

“Don’t use that word!” almost screamed Elsie.

“How can I help it? Murder’s what’s been done, and it lies between you and that fellow Morrison. Elsie, how far have things gone between you and him? But there, I needn’t ask. I know you.” Mrs. Palmer wept convulsively.

She remained with her daughter until late in the afternoon, and twice during that time Elsie was summoned to a further interrogatory. She learnt that Morrison’s knife had been found close to the alley, and that he had been fetched from his office early in the day and taken away by the police.

It was after her mother had gone away, as the dusk was gathering, that Elsie Williams and Leslie Morrison were charged together with the wilful murder of Horace Williams.

* * * * *

“For God’s sake, Mrs. Williams, tell me the whole truth!”

Elsie looked dumbly at Mr. Cleaver, too sick with fright to speak.

“Do you understand that you’re in the most frightful danger?”

A sound that just amounted to an interrogation forced its way between her dry lips.

“You know what the sentence is for anyone found guilty of wilful murder?”

Elsie screamed and shrank.

Cleaver bent forward, deep dents coming and going at the corners of his nostrils, his white face working with earnestness. She could see the sweat shining upon his forehead.

“Try and understand. You will be committed for trial for the murder of your husband.”

“But Leslie Morrison....”

“He’s in the same boat. His one idea, it seems, is to shield you--to pay the whole of the penalty himself.”

“It was him who--who....” Elsie’s voice trailed away.

“I know. But who inspired him to do it, Mrs. Williams? I tell you that nothing but absolute frankness can give you a chance.”

“Shall I be in the witness-box?”

A bewildered idea that she could still make use of her charm to serve her present cause made Elsie ask the question.

“You will be in the dock,” said Cleaver grimly. “Understand that everything--your life itself--depends upon your being absolutely straightforward with me. Don’t conceal anything--don’t attempt to. I tell you, it’s your one hope.”

Elsie stared and stared at Mr. Cleaver. “I never meant Leslie to do it!” she cried suddenly and wildly.

“But you knew he was going to?”

“No, no, no!”

“Mrs. Williams, tell me the truth. You and Morrison were madly in love with one another, and had been for over a year?”

She nodded.

“You knew that your husband would never, in any circumstances, set you free?”

“Yes. We asked him, begged him to. He--he was very cruel, Mr. Cleaver.”

“You and Morrison would not face open scandal by going away together?”

“It wasn’t that.”

“What was it, then?”

She hesitated, twisting her handkerchief round and round in her fingers.

The solicitor moistened his lips with his tongue. “Your only hope, your one and only hope in this world, Mrs. Williams, is to speak the truth. I’m powerless to help you if you won’t be open. Don’t be afraid that everything you say now will come out in the police-court; it won’t necessarily be so at all--far from it. But I can judge of nothing unless I know every single thing.”

“I’ll tell you,” said Elsie, white to the lips.

“Why would you and Morrison not have gone away together? Were you afraid?”

“We had no money.”

“I see. Morrison’s pay was very small, and you had nothing but what your husband gave you?”

“Yes.”

“Whereas if you were a widow, you had reason to suppose that Williams would leave you comfortably provided for?”

“Yes.”

“Did it not occur to you, then, that his death would be a very convenient solution of the whole problem?”

“Oh yes! How could I help thinking that?”

“You not only thought it, Mrs. Williams, you said it, and you wrote it.”

“I never----” The denial sprang from her quite instinctively.

Mr. Cleaver put up his hand authoritatively. “Wait! Do you remember a conversation with a friend of yours, Miss Irene Tidmarsh, on the eighteenth of last October, when you made use of the words, ‘I wish to the Lord that Horace would do the decent thing or go West, and let me have a chance of happiness’?”

Elsie was terrified at the precision with which her very words were quoted and the occasion known. “I can’t remember,” she gasped.

“Mrs. Williams, you _must_ speak the truth. Remember that a great deal is known already, and banish any idea of false shame from your mind. This is a question of life and death to you: neither more nor less. If I know the truth from you, I can advise you as to the line you must take under cross-examination. Remember that it will be a terrible ordeal for you, and it’s essential that you should be properly prepared for it. And weight will be attached, without a doubt, to that conversation of yours with Miss Tidmarsh.”

“But how will they know about it?” she sobbed, forgetting her previous denial.

“Miss Tidmarsh will be called as a witness against you,” said Mr. Cleaver gravely. “We’ve got to account for those words of yours somehow, and what is more serious still--if anything could be more serious--we’ve got to keep out of sight, if we can, those damning letters of yours.”

“What letters?” screamed Elsie, a new and unbearable horror clutching at her.

“The letters, Mrs. Williams, that you have repeatedly written to Leslie Morrison during the past months.”

“They’re burnt, they’re burnt!” shrieked Elsie. “He swore he’d burn them!”

“I wish to God he had, but he never did, Mrs. Williams. Those letters may form the bulk of the evidence against you. You repeat in them, again and again, that Williams ill-treated you, made you miserable, and that you wish he was dead. In one of them occurs the words: ‘He’s ill now, and taking sleeping draughts. One little mistake in pouring out the mixture, Leslie, and you and I might be free! I’d do more than that for our love’s sake, darling.’ Do you understand the awful weight that those expressions and many, many similar ones would carry with a jury, Mrs. Williams? We’ve got to put some construction on them other than the obvious one, if we can’t get a ruling that they’re inadmissible as evidence, which is what we shall try for. I want to make it very, very clear to you. Everything depends on your co-operation. Are you fit to listen to me?”

Elsie was sobbing and writhing.

“Have you any letters whatever from Morrison?” pursued the relentless voice of the solicitor.

“No.”

“What have you done with them?”

“I burnt them all.”

He looked at her as though doubting her words. “Very few women burn their love-letters, Mrs. Williams.”

“I was afraid to keep them.”

“For fear of your husband seeing them?”

She hesitated. “Partly.”

In Elsie’s mind was a piercing recollection of the haunting fear that had obsessed her ever since the scene at the house of Madame Clara, the medium.

“_Beware of the written word...._”

But she would not give that reason for having destroyed Morrison’s letters to the solicitor. The strange, undying remnant of vanity that finds a lurking-place upon the most apparently trivial and unlikely ground held her back from the truth.

Elsie Williams realised that Mr. Cleaver was in grimmest earnest when he told her that only the absolute truth could possibly save her; she was prepared to tell him the truth in spite of her deadly terror and shame, but she could not bring herself to say that the reason why she had destroyed the letters of Leslie Morrison was because she could never forget the words spoken by the clairvoyante whom she had visited.

“I burnt the letters because I had nowhere to keep them, and I was afraid they might be found,” she repeated, her young face grey and ravaged.

It was the only particular in which she lied to Mr. Cleaver, and she did so with blind and irrational persistence.

After the hours that he spent with her, Elsie, physically exhausted, and psychically strung to a pitch of tension that she had never known in her life before, was left alone in her cell, face to face with her own soul.

At first, fragmentary recollections of the past forty-eight hours obsessed her. She went over and over her conversations with the police officials, her own replies to Mr. Cleaver, her mother’s hysterical ejaculations. Then she thought of Leslie Morrison, who had backed up her statements to the police, and who, when both were arrested together, had only asked through white lips: “Why her? She was not aware of my movements.”

But since her own half-unconscious betrayal of him, Elsie’s feeling for Morrison had undergone an extraordinary revulsion.

It had all turned out so utterly unlike anything that they had ever planned. It still seemed to Elsie that catastrophe had fallen, a bolt from the blue, into the midst of their lives without warning. She still felt that none of it could be true, that she must wake as from a hideous dream.

When had she had a hideous dream--something about Horace--something like this?

Dim associations of horror and bewilderment awoke slowly within her, and brought to her the remembrance of her visit with Irene Tidmarsh to the woman who had called herself “clairvoyante.” She had talked in a deep, rather artificial voice about love and intrigue; she had bade Elsie beware of the written word. And then all of a sudden the atmosphere had altered, Madame Clara’s voice itself had altered, horribly, and she had screamed out terrifying words and phrases. “Blood, and worse than blood ... you’re all over blood! O, my God, what’s this? It’s all over England--_you_--they’re talking about you.”

Elsie understood. In a flash of searing, anguished intuition she understood what would happen.

With the appalling rapidity of a vision, there came to her the realisation of all that would come to pass in the near future.

She knew already that the police-court trial was the almost certain preliminary to her committal and Morrison’s for trial at the Old Bailey. _They would be tried for murder._

She and the man who had been her lover would stand in the dock together as prisoners; lawyers would fight out questions concerning their past relations; people would give evidence against them--evidence in their favour; Elsie would in all probability hear her own letters to Leslie Morrison read aloud in court....

It would be a sensational trial, such as she had often followed with avidity in the newspapers.

“_It’s all over England--they’re talking about you...._”

But why ... why?...

Elsie Williams’ instant of vision fled from her as suddenly as it had come, and left her agonisedly and wildly rebellious, bewildered at the vortex of terror and shame and misery into which it seemed to her that she had suddenly, without volition of her own, been flung.

She could not trace the imperceptibly-graduated stages that had brought her to the pass where catastrophe became inevitable. To her, it seemed that she had swiftly been hurled from security into deadly peril by some agency as irresistible as it was malignant.

Every now and then realisation came to her, when certain frightful words sprang into frightful meaning, as they had never done before.

“Murder....”

“Conspiracy ... and incitement to murder....”

“Principal in the second degree....” The police officials had made use of that expression--so had Mr. Cleaver.

Elsie’s mother had fetched Mr. Cleaver, and had wildly repeated, in front of Elsie and the lawyer, that she would grudge no expense, not if it cost her her last penny.

“And the aunties will help, Elsie, they’ve been ever so good--anything we can get together, says your Aunt Gertie, and her face the colour of the tablecloth. Mr. Cleaver here will tell us the best man, if it--if it comes to--to....”

“You could scarcely do better than Sir Cambourne Trevor, Mrs. Palmer, but his fee, I ought to warn you, is a thousand guineas.”

“A thousand guineas!” Elsie and Mrs. Palmer had screamed together.

And Mr. Cleaver, gaunt and haggard and grey-faced, had made answer: “It’s her life that will be at stake.”

From time to time, Elsie understood. She knew, at those moments, what it all meant. There would be no more concealments, everything would be dragged out into a publicity that could only bring with it dishonour and shameful notoriety, and hatred, and execration.

And she would have to live through it--to suffer through an ordeal of vast, incredible magnitude, of which the climax--she knew it in a prescience that mercifully could not endure--would come in the ghastly dawn of a prison-yard, beneath the shadow of the scaffold....

Inexorable results would be suffered by herself, and she would never know how it was that these things had become inevitable--had happened.

_Dawlish_, 1923.

THE BOND OF UNION

THE BOND OF UNION

(To A. P. D.)

A wide, cushioned seat runs round three sides of the deep fireplace in Torry Delorian’s library for the admitted reason that Lady Pamela March likes to face the room when she is talking.

The room, of course, means the audience. Personally, I consider that she could safely--I mean, without spoiling her picture of herself--make use of the very word itself. It is so obviously the only one that applies, when she sits there, smoking one cigarette after another, and we sit there, smoking one cigarette after another, all listening to Pamela, playing up to Pamela, and all more or less sexually attracted by Pamela.

The subconscious mind of Pamela projects on these occasions, I think, something of this kind:

=“_The girlish figure dominated the room. Magnetism vibrated in every gesture of the slim hands, every glance from the brilliant eyes, every modulation of the rather deep voice. She held them all, by sheer force of personality. The peacock-blue folds of her dress, with its girdle of barbaric, coloured stones...._”=

The bit about the dress, of course, varies. Sometimes the folds may be saffron-yellow, and the girdle opalescent, or there is no girdle at all; and anyhow, in those particulars, the same effect is never repeated twice. But I imagine that, like all women, she makes a point to herself of the accoutrements, not realising that the audience--almost altogether composed of men--attribute the entire effect to the sheer, smooth slope of her shoulders, the alluring curves of her mouth, the rich swell of her breasts beneath semi-transparencies.

The impression that inwardly she is projecting really does reflect itself on to the minds of most people, I believe.

It is only slightly distorted, even in my own version of it, which runs something like this:

=“_The girlish figure dominated the room. Animal magnetism vibrated in every gesture_”= ... and so on--only leaving out the brilliancy of the eyes and the deepness of the voice, both of them rather cheap accessories to a pose that really is quite strong enough without them--to the end:

=“_She held them all, by sheer will-to-dominate._”=

Pamela, being a brilliant talker, prefers always to talk personalities.

Two nights ago, sitting on that cushioned rail that runs round the fireplace, she recounted an adventure.

“... Only it’s the spiritual adventure that I’m telling all of you. Because you’ll understand. The other part was all obvious, the danger and all that. You’ve probably seen it in the papers.”

She was right. It had been lavishly paragraphed, with photograph inset. Her _flair_ for publicity is unerring.

“Darlings, how I loathe the Press--if I could only tell you! But the other part of the affair was so utterly wonderful, that it’s swamped everything else. It was like a revelation.

“You know how essentially super-civilised I am? A man once wrote a poem about my being like a piece of jade--hard, and brilliant, and polished, and yet with the unfathomable subtlety and agelessness of the East. My civilisation is partly temperamental, I suppose, and of course to a certain extent the result of elaborate education--and then hereditary as well. Look at Anthony. Could anyone have a more utterly civilised parent, I ask you? Elma is less poised, of course, but mercifully for me I’ve managed to inherit my mother’s physique and my father’s mentality. Like a sensitised plate, isn’t it? It does mean isolation of soul, and those terrible nerve-storms of mine, but in my heart of hearts I know it’s worth it.

“Only people are so ghastly. My friends have to rescue me.... You remember what it was like, Torry, the night that woman assaulted me at the Embassy, and talked, and talked, and talked. O Christ! it was all about food, or flannel, or babies--something too utterly indecent, I know. I sat there, helpless, martyred--and darling Torry came and rescued me. I shall never forget it, Torry, you sweet, never.

“Now this is what happened the other day. (Why do you allow me to be discursive, dear people?) You know my car was held up by Sinn Feiners? I, who adore everything lawless! But it was simply for being Anthony’s daughter, of course. They hate him so.

“You know how I drive for miles and miles, entirely alone, just so as to feel the air in my face, and my hands--rather small, really, by comparison--controlling that great swift machine. Well, I’d got to such a lonely place that it was like finding God--when suddenly these men appeared.

“I wasn’t a bit frightened--I never am frightened--but it was horrible, all the same. And I kept thinking of the people who’d be so sorry if I were killed, and wondering who’d be the sorriest, and who’d remember longest.”

=(_She looked round the room, her dark brows raised in an expression part whimsical, part pathetic._)=

“All this isn’t the adventure, you know, though they took my jewels, and tied me up to a bench on a sort of heath place. They tied me here, and here.”

She held out a slim ankle, and extended both wrists.

“Dear hearts, don’t, don’t touch me! I’m so dreadfully on edge to-night. Nothing to do with the adventure, though. That was altogether beautiful.

“You see there was another woman on the bench, to whom they’d done exactly the same thing--only she’d been walking, not driving. They left us together, and said they’d come back later and shoot us. Terrorism, of course, but it would be such an ugly way of going out, wouldn’t it?

“She and I looked at one another, tied to either end of that bench, and in some way that I simply can’t describe, our spirits leapt together. She, it turned out afterwards, recognised me at once--that’s the worst of being too weak to refuse sittings when one’s pestered by every photographer in London--but I hadn’t the least idea who she was, and don’t care. Bright red hair, quite distinguished-looking, and altogether rather lovely in a pallid, blanc-de-Ninon way, though no actual physical charm. But I felt it wouldn’t have mattered if she’d been a _déclassée_. By the way, what is a _déclassée_?

“This still isn’t the adventure--besides, you know this part already, all of you--but some of those ruffians came back again, and untied us, and said we could find our own way home. They’d taken my car, needless to say. I gave them one of my looks--the sort that means I’m really, really angry, like when someone kisses me in a clumsy way, or spills something on my frock--and the men melted, literally melted, away. Then she and I began to walk, and this is really when the part that matters started to happen.

“Having come through this shattering episode, and found ourselves unshot, and alive, it was almost like two disembodied spirits communing together. We got into the realities straight away. It was far more wonderful than if one of us had been a man, because then sex must have come into it, but as it was, each of us laid her whole soul perfectly bare, in the way one can never do to a man, if he loves one, for fear it should kill his love, or if he doesn’t love one, for fear it should make him think he does.

“But as it was, each of us was perfectly fearless, and in a way perfectly shameless. It was partly violent emotional reaction. You see, we’d both thought we were facing death.

“She told me that she was utterly miserable. Her husband was a brute, and her lover had let her down. He’d fallen in love with a girl, a sort of pure-eyed-baby person, and had just told this woman--who’d been giving him everything, of course, for years--that he wanted to _se ranger_ and get married.

“She was nearly out of her mind, that woman. You see, she wasn’t young, and then some skin treatment she’d been having hadn’t succeeded, and was helping to break her up. She told me about that, too. Oh, there was nothing she didn’t say, but she simply didn’t care, we were so utterly intimate for that fleeting moment. Nobody else in the world knew, she told me. She’d always tried to avoid scandal, and no one had ever really known about her _liaison_ with this man. (Women _are_ clever about love.)

“And then I told her every single thing about myself--things that I’d never dream of breathing in this room, nor you of believing, most likely. Foul, filthy, hateful things about myself.... I know now why Catholics go to confession. It releases so much.

“Darlings, words can’t ever describe what it was like. I shall never forget it, as long as I live, and neither will she.

“We parted, of course, but we both knew that there was a link between us that nothing could ever break, even though we never met again. It was too utterly perfect and complete as it was.”

There was a silence, and then someone said, suitably: “Wonderful Pamela!”

She smiled vaguely, shook her head, and then tragically clasped both hands to her breast. “Please, a cocktail. I’m so tired. Oh, and what’s the time? I’m dining with a man at eight, and he’s thrown over a most important engagement to take me, and he’d be quite capable of getting angry if I failed him. Sweet, no! Not a quarter past nine! Oh, please, someone, a car, and take me to the little tiny, tiny French restaurant in Wardour Street.”

Lady Pamela waved away the cocktail, spilling it, prayed for another one and drank it, and then wafted away on the wings of little distressed exclamations and futile, effective gestures of farewell.

That was two nights ago.

This morning I was in Bond Street, and I saw Pamela March in her father’s car, held up by a block in the traffic.

On the other side of the narrow street another car with a solitary woman in it passed slowly. I recognised the woman instantly from Pamela’s description, for she had bright red hair, was quite distinguished-looking, and altogether rather lovely in a pallid, blanc-de-Ninon way, and radiated a marked degree of physical charm.

The eyes of the two women who had been as disembodied spirits communing together met in a long look.

And the expression in each pair of eyes was momentarily identical, and it was with the same effect of immutable determination that each simultaneously administered and received the cut direct.

_They knew...._

LOST IN TRANSMISSION

LOST IN TRANSMISSION

I

The Lambes were very rich.

This was all the nicer for Mrs. Lambe, because once upon a time, not so very long ago, when she was still Maude Gunning, she had been poor. From the time she was eighteen to the time she was thirty, she had taught music at the girls’ school in Carlorossa Road. She had gone to and from her work four days a week all through term time by tram. Fortunately, the tram took her almost from door to door. She was a bad walker, owing to corns.

During the school holidays Maude had always tried to find private pupils, and as she and her father and mother were well known in the big manufacturing town and its suburbs, and her successes at the L.R.C.M. examinations were a subject of local pride, she had generally succeeded.

And it was odd to think, as Mrs. Lambe quite often did think, that most of the large, comfortable, expensive houses to which she had gone--with a very keen appreciation, on autumn and winter afternoons, of the big fire blazing in the pupil’s schoolroom or dining-room, as the case might be--to think that these houses, for the most part, were less large, comfortable, and expensive than the one of which she was now the mistress.

Edgar Lambe, when he first met Miss Maude Gunning at a tea-party, was already a wealthy man, although not as rich as the demand for houses that sprang up during the war afterwards made him.

At the party, Maude played the piano, and played it very well. Mr. Lambe, who was naturally musical, asked to be introduced to her. He had never married, although he was forty years old, and he had recently made up his mind to look for a wife. Maude attracted him, although she was neither pretty nor very young.

Three months after their first meeting they were married.

Mr. Lambe bought the largest corner house in Victoria Avenue.

It was, of course, wholly detached from its neighbours. There was a carriage-sweep in the front, and a long, wide garden at the back, and a high wall all round. There was a tennis-court, two greenhouses, and a vegetable garden beyond the flower-garden.

The inside of Melrose was even more magnificent than the outside, and far more interesting to Mrs. Lambe, who was not very fond of being out-of-doors, having had a great deal too much of it in her tram-journeying days. But she had many ideas as to comfort and elegance indoors, and Edgar was generous with money, and had a standard of his own--and one that secretly rather scared her--as to the way in which a house should be “run.”

This standard of Edgar’s was principally applied to lighting, heating, food and service. The house was fitted with electric light, of course, and Edgar had had a separate boiler put in for the three bathrooms, so that it was his favourite boast that if anyone wanted a bath in the middle of the night, the water would still come out of the tap almost boiling. There were radiators in all the rooms except the kitchen, offices and servants’ bedrooms, and hot pipes in the linen-cupboard.

It took Mrs. Lambe a little while to assimilate Edgar’s views as to meals. She quite understood that these must be served punctually, and that the plates must be hot--really hot--and that there must always be a relay of fresh toast towards the end of breakfast; and of course late dinner every night except Sunday, when it was cold supper. But she did find it a little bit difficult, just at first, to realise that Edgar disapproved strongly of twice-cooked meat. At her own home there had been a weekly joint, which was hot on Sunday, cold on Monday, hashed on Tuesday, and cottage-pie’d on Wednesday--and sometimes, if it had been a larger joint than usual, curried on Thursday and turned into rissoles on Friday.

At Melrose, after one, or at the most two, appearances in the dining-room, the beef disappeared into the kitchen and was finished there, while a new joint, or a pair of fowls, took its place on the upstairs _menu_.

The amount of “butcher’s meat” that came into the house amazed and disconcerted its mistress, until she found that her servants took it as a matter of course, and that her husband continually praised her to his friends as a good manager, and that the monthly bills--which at first had appalled her--by no means exceeded the sum which he had himself suggested that he should allow her for the housekeeping.

By the time that Mrs. Lambe had a nursery, with two little girls in it, and a nurse, and a nursery-maid to wait upon them, she took it quite as a matter of course that there should be yet a third list of items to consider in the ordering of meals--weekly chickens, and special dairy produce, and a regular supply of white fish, for the nursery. This question of food for the household was, of course, immensely important, and she gave a great deal of conscientious thought to it, thankful when the cook suggested a new variety of sweet for the dinner-parties to which Edgar so much enjoyed inviting his business friends and their families.

On these occasions he himself selected the wines with the utmost care, and instructed the two parlour-maids minutely and repeatedly in the proper formula to be employed with each course.

Mrs. Lambe was always relieved that this great responsibility did not in any way rest upon her. A mistake, she felt, would be altogether _too_ terrible.

The parlour-maid and the waitress who always came in for the evening when the Lambes entertained, never made mistakes.

Mrs. Lambe was very “good” with servants, and never had any difficulty in finding and keeping thoroughly satisfactory domestics. The little girls’ nurse, who received far higher wages than any of them except the cook, was the only one with whom there was sometimes a little trouble.

She occasionally hinted that Ena and Evelyn were rather spoiled, and inclined to come up to the nursery disposed to be fretful and out of sorts after too much notice in the drawing-room, and far too many expensive chocolates from the pink and blue and gilt boxes that were always being given to them.

Mr. Lambe was a lavish and indulgent father. He thought his fair-haired, pretty little daughters wonderful, and took the greatest delight in associating “Dad’s” return from the office with new toys or “surprises” of sweetmeats.

Mrs. Lambe never had the heart to disappoint him by suggesting that his munificence was making the little girls rather critical and capricious, even at six and four years old. Edgar only roared with appreciative laughter when they told him, seriously and rather crossly, that they always wanted the chocolates to come from Blakiston’s--which was the best, and by far the most expensive, confectioner’s in the city. They did not care for any other kind.

Edgar repeated this story to a great many of his friends, who were as much amused as he was himself at such an instance of early discrimination.

Mrs. Lambe was amused herself, and could not help thinking that Ena and Evelyn were smart and original children.

They were also very pretty; rather pallid, sharp-featured little things, always beautifully dressed, exactly alike. Neither she nor Edgar regretted in the very least that neither of them had been a boy.

Every night Maude Lambe, who had been brought up to be thoroughly religious, knelt at the side of her enormous bed, with its opulent pink satin duvet, and humbly thanked God for all that He had given her--Edgar and the children, and Edgar’s wealth and kindness, and her beautiful, comfortable home.

There was only one fly in the ointment--Aunt Tessie.

Edgar had told her all about Aunt Tessie before they were married. He had explained that she would live with him always, in spite of the undeniable fact that she was Not like Other People, and that he would never allow her to be sent away to an institution, whatever the other Lambe relations might say.

Aunt Tessie had been very good to him when he was a little boy, and this Edgar never intended to forget. He had had a very unhappy childhood, with a mother who drank and a stepfather who beat him. Aunt Tessie, who had actually made a living for herself in those days out of painting pictures, had done everything that she could do to induce them to let little Edgar come and live with her, and when they would not agree to that, she had still sent him presents and surreptitiously given him pocket-money, and when he had been sent away to school, she had come regularly and taken him out, and invited him to her flat whenever she could. She was the only person who had ever shown him any affection when he was a child, Edgar had once told his wife.

Maude had been very much touched, and thought it noble of dear Edgar to remember so faithfully, in his great prosperity, the good old aunt who had long ceased to be able to paint even bad pictures, and who had become terribly, almost dangerously, eccentric about ten years earlier. Edgar had then immediately taken her to live with him, declaring Aunt Tessie once and for all to be his charge.

All this he had explained to his wife before they were married, and her generous and even eager acquiescence had met him more than half-way.

Maude, indeed, had been ready to accept Aunt Tessie as her charge, too. She had felt nothing but a tender compassion for the probably frail, half-childish invalid, towards whose garrulousness she would never fail of kindly semi-attention, and to whose bodily weakness every care should be extended. But Aunt Tessie had turned out not to be that sort of invalid at all.

To begin with, her physical health was robust and powerful. She was only fifty-five, and her hair was not grey, but a strong, virulent auburn.

Her complexion was sanguine, her large, harshly-lined face suffused with colour and disfigured by swelling, purplish veins.

Her voice was very loud and hoarse, and she laughed with a sound like a neigh. As for Aunt Tessie’s appetite, it was simply prodigious. Even had expense been a serious consideration at Melrose, Mrs. Lambe would never have grudged anyone a hearty meal--she had too often gone semi-hungry herself for that--but really, Aunt Tessie, with her second and third helping of beef, and her two glasses of claret, and her frank eagerness for dessert chocolates, was not decent.

She always had her meals in the dining-room, and it was really on that account that Ena and Evelyn had their midday dinner upstairs, and only came downstairs when the starched and mob-capped maids were handing round coffee. Their mother would have liked them to come to the dining-room for luncheon, at least on Sundays, but they both hated Aunt Tessie, and made faces and laughed at each other when she uttered any of her loud, inconsequent remarks, or pushed her food into her mouth with her fingers.

Maude, and even Edgar, had tried to persuade Aunt Tessie that it would be more comfortable for her to have all her meals in the large upstairs sitting-room that they had given her, but Aunt Tessie had been first angry and then hurt. They wanted her out of the way, she said angrily, they were ashamed of her, and did not like her to meet their friends.

Mrs. Lambe could not help thinking that it was rather ungrateful of Aunt Tessie to say this, after all that had been done for her. However, they would not vex and disappoint the poor old lady, and so she continued to appear downstairs, even when there was a party, and to embarrass and disconcert everybody by her ineptitudes and her uncouth manners at the dinner-table.

II

By the time the Armistice was signed, Mr. Lambe had become richer than ever.

He entertained his friends even more often to dinner, and gave them better wine, although it had always been so good before. He increased Mrs. Lambe’s allowance for the housekeeping, and frequently gave her presents of money to be spent upon herself or the little girls. He would have given Aunt Tessie money too, but she had grown even queerer in the course of the past year, and it was only too evident that what had been called her “eccentricity” was now becoming something much more serious. For the very first time, there was trouble with the maids.

They did not like waiting on Miss Lambe. It was no wonder, either, poor Mrs. Lambe was forced to admit.

Aunt Tessie was untidy, even dirty, and as the housemaid once pertly remarked, her bedroom only needed three gold balls over the door. She kept things to eat upstairs, and scattered crumbs everywhere.

The parlour-maid, speaking for herself and for the housemaid, declared that it was quite impossible to do the proper work of the house and to clear up after Miss Lambe as well.

In another moment she would have given notice.... Mrs. Lambe could see it coming.

Hastily she sent for Emma, the little between-maid, and informed her that in future she would have the sole care of Miss Lambe’s bedroom and her sitting-room, and would wait upon her, instead of the housemaid. She at the same time raised Emma’s wages by two pounds a year, for she always tried to be very just.

Emma was only seventeen, and a very childish little thing, and Mrs. Lambe had not expected her to raise any objection to the new scheme; but it was surprising, although satisfactory, to find that Emma seemed to be actually pleased by it.

She said “Yes’m,” a good many times, and smiled at her mistress as though joyfully accepting a form of promotion.

Mrs. Lambe was relieved, the parlour-maid and the housemaid did not give notice, and even Aunt Tessie--very difficult to please nowadays--appeared contented and satisfied.

But she was getting worse all the time.

It became more and more embarrassing when visitors came to Melrose.

The old lady always found out when anyone was expected, and the more people were coming the noisier and more excited she became.

One dreadful Sunday there were guests for luncheon--two of Edgar’s important clients, and little Ena’s godfather--a rich old bachelor cousin--and two unmarried ladies, friends of Mrs. Lambe’s maiden days. She was always very faithful to her friends.

Aunt Tessie actually pranced downstairs and met some of these people in the hall as they arrived, and greeted them boisterously, and so incoherently that really they might almost have been excused for thinking that she had been taking too much to drink.

Mrs. Lambe, hastening downstairs from her own room, could hear it all, although she could not see it, and it was thus that she afterwards described it to Edgar.

“So glad--so glad to see you!” shouted Aunt Tessie. “This fine house--always open, and my nephew is so generous and hospitable. They take advantage, sometimes--there are bad people about, very bad people. Sometimes they make attempts ... one’s life isn’t as safe as it looks, I can assure you....”

She had thrown out such ridiculous and yet sinister hints once or twice lately. But what _could_ the poor guests think of it all?

They were very polite, and soon saw that the best thing to do was to ignore Aunt Tessie as far as possible, and pretend not to hear when she talked, and not to see when she shuffled about the room, upsetting ornaments here and there, and every now and then whisking round suddenly to look behind her as though she expected someone or something to be following her. Once she shouted very loud, “Get out, I tell you! I can _smell_ the poison from here!...” But after the first involuntary, startled silence, everyone began simultaneously to talk again, and very soon after that, luncheon was announced.

Mrs. Lambe saw that her husband, talking to his principal guest and smiling a great deal, kept on all the time turning an anxious eye towards Aunt Tessie, and this emboldened her to do what she had never done before.

She put her hand on the old lady’s arm, and detained her whilst the others were all going into the dining-room.

“Dear auntie,” she said, speaking low and very gently, “I’m sure you’re not well. You look so flushed and tired. All these people are really too much for you. Do let Emma carry your lunch upstairs on a tray and have it comfortably in your own room.”

But it was of no use.

Aunt Tessie, her looks and her manner stranger than ever, vociferated an incoherent refusal, mixed up with something about Emma, to whom she had taken a violent fancy.

“A good girl--the only one you can trust. She never _plots against people_!” Aunt Tessie shouted, nodding her head with wild emphasis, and rolling her eyeballs round in their sockets.

Mrs. Lambe could do nothing. She dared not let Aunt Tessie sit next to any of the visitors, and of course she herself had to have one of the important clients upon either side of her, but she made Ena and Evelyn, who were lunching downstairs in honour of the godfather’s presence, take their places one on each side of their extraordinary old relative.

Evelyn, who was very little, began to whine and protest, but Mrs. Lambe pretended not to hear. She knew that Evelyn’s attention was always very easily distracted. She felt much more afraid of Ena, and her heart sank when, out of the corner of her eye, she saw Aunt Tessie officiously trying to put Ena’s long curls away from her shoulders.

The little girl’s fair, pretty face turned black with scowls in an instant, and she twitched herself away from the big, heavy, mottled hand fumbling clumsily at her neck, and sat with her back as nearly as possible turned to Aunt Tessie.

One couldn’t really blame the poor children for disliking her so much, but it was very bad for them ... it made them naughty and ill-mannered....

Poor Mrs. Lambe could only give half her attention to her guests, and she saw that Edgar, too, underneath his geniality and his urgent and repeated invitations that everyone should have more food and more wine, was anxious and ill at ease.

Every now and then Aunt Tessie’s strident tones rose above all the other sounds in the big, hot dining-room.

“Not any more--no. They put things into one’s food sometimes, and then they think one doesn’t notice. But the one who waits on me--Emma, her name is--she’s all right. You can trust her.”

Aunt Tessie’s words, no less than her emphasis on Emma’s trustworthiness, would of course be noticed, and bitterly resented, by the other two servants, waiting deftly and quietly at the table. But neither of them moved a muscle, even when she went on to something worse.

“Never put any confidence in upper servants,” declared Aunt Tessie, leaning across the table and almost shouting. “They may be civil enough, but they plot and plan behind people’s backs. There’s cases in the newspapers very often ... it’s ... it’s murder, really, you know. They call it accidental, but sometimes it’s poisoning. One can’t be too auspicious--suspicious, I should say.”

She paused to laugh vacantly at her own slip of the tongue, and to let her eyes rove all over the table as though in search of something.

Mr. Lambe clumsily wrenched at the conversation: “Talking about newspaper reports, that was a curious case in Staffordshire....”

The visitors seconded him gamely, and Aunt Tessie’s voice was overborne and heard again only in snatches.

Mrs. Lambe, however, was very much upset, and she ordered coffee to be brought to the drawing-room so as to make a move as soon as possible.

Things were a little better in the drawing-room. Ena and Evelyn were soon screaming and romping round Ena’s godfather, and one of Maude’s humble friends, perhaps feeling that she owed her something in return for the splendid luncheon and lavish hospitality, sat in the bow-window with Aunt Tessie and kept her away from the rest of the room. This was a great relief, although it led to an uncomfortable moment when the party was breaking up, and Aunt Tessie, vehemently taking leave of her kind companion, actually caught up a little gilt trifle from Maude’s knick-knack shelf and tried to press it upon her acceptance.

Miss Mason was very tactful, pretending with rather an embarrassed look to accept the impossible gift, and secretly slipping it on to a table near the door as she went out.

Aunt Tessie did not see, but Maude did. She was nearly crying by the time it was all over and everyone had gone away. The children had been sent upstairs again, and Aunt Tessie’s heavy footsteps had taken her to her own part of the house.

Curiously enough, she and Edgar hardly spoke to one another about the disastrous subject, but Maude Lambe knew very well that he now, as well as she, fully realised the discomfort and humiliation entailed upon the whole household by his too-generous treatment of Aunt Tessie.

III

Soon it was no longer possible to pretend that Aunt Tessie was not getting worse and worse. Her constant, irrelevant allusions to plots, and poisonings, and wicked people, had become a fixed delusion.

She really thought that everyone at Melrose was conspiring against her life, and she would allow no one, except Emma, to do anything for her.

It was a mercy, Mrs. Lambe often told herself, that Emma was such a good little thing. She was so willing, and never seemed to grudge the time and trouble that she was obliged to spend over cleaning Aunt Tessie’s apartments and tidying up after her. She would even listen, respectfully and yet compassionately, to Aunt Tessie’s long, rambling denunciations and accusations.

“Poor old lady!” Maude once overheard Emma saying to another servant. “She’s a lady just the same, for all she’s gone queer, and I behaves towards her like I would to any other lady, that’s all.”

“Funny kind of a lady that makes a face at a servant, as she did at me this morning.”

“She never done that to me, nor nothing the least like it,” said Emma stoutly.

It was only too true that Aunt Tessie was very rude to all the maids except Emma, and sometimes to Edgar and Maude as well. As she grew worse, she seemed to forget all their kindness and generosity, and to look upon them as being her enemies.

Mrs. Lambe would not let the little girls go near her any more, and the nurse had orders to keep them away from Miss Lambe “until she grew better.”

Aunt Tessie, however, did not grow better.

The doctor, an old friend of Edgar Lambe’s, advised them to have a nurse for her, if they were still determined to keep her on at Melrose, instead of sending her to one of the many excellent establishments that he could have recommended.

“Nothing in the least like an institution or--or asylum. Simply a nursing home where Miss Lambe would have entire freedom and every possible comfort, but would yet receive the constant medical supervision that her unfortunate condition renders necessary.”

But Edgar Lambe remained obstinate. Aunt Tessie had been very good to him in the past, and he had always said that she should be his special charge. He would not send her away to any nursing home, however highly recommended.

He was, however, quite willing that a professional nurse should be installed at Melrose. The expense, he said, was nothing, if it would make things easier for Maude and be of advantage to Aunt Tessie.

The presence of Nurse Alberta certainly fulfilled both these requirements.

She was an intelligent, pleasant-looking woman of five- or six-and-thirty, with none of the pretensions so often associated with her class. She had meals with Aunt Tessie, in the latter’s big, comfortable sitting-room, and slept in a little room adjoining hers. Both of them were waited upon by Emma.

Aunt Tessie nowadays made no difficulty about not coming to the dining-room. Her crazy old mind had fastened upon the idea of poison, and Emma and Nurse Alberta were the only people from whom she would accept food or drink.

The nurse told Emma, with whom she became quite friendly by dint of constant association, that the “persecution mania” was a very common symptom amongst those who were mentally deranged.

“They always think that everybody’s against them,” she declared cheerfully, “even those who do most for them. Look at this poor old lady, for instance! She thinks Mr. and Mrs. Lambe are plotting against her, and I’m sure they’re goodness itself to her, and have been for years, I should think. No expense grudged, and everything done to make her comfortable. Why, most people would have had an own mother sent away by this time and put under restraint--and Miss Lambe is only an aunt. No real relation at all, as you may say, to Mrs. Lambe. Really, I do think Mrs. Lambe’s behaved wonderfully, and I’m sure she finds it a strain.”

Nurse Alberta was quite right. Mrs. Lambe did find the presence of Aunt Tessie in the house a great strain, even now.

In her heart, she was terribly afraid that the old aunt, who had so rapidly passed from one distressing stage to another, might suddenly become a real danger to those around her.

She thought of Ena and Evelyn and shuddered. Very often, she woke in the night and crept out to the landing, trembling, to listen at the night-nursery door.

One day, when Nurse Alberta had been in the house for some time, Mrs. Lambe felt so wretched and so much unstrung by her state of now chronic nervousness, that she detained the doctor after his habitual visit to Aunt Tessie, and timidly spoke to him of her own symptoms.

He listened very attentively, asked her several questions, and finally made a suggestion which Mrs. Lambe saw at once ought to have occurred to her earlier.

She was going to have another child.

It was over five years since Evelyn’s birth, and she had somehow never expected to have any more babies, but both Mr. and Mrs. Lambe were honestly pleased.

They hoped for a son.

It was this discovery that led to the modification of Edgar Lambe’s views about Aunt Tessie. Obviously, the presence of the unfortunate old lady subjected Maude to a continual strain that might easily become more and more severe as time went on.

The doctor, privately consulted by Mr. Lambe, admitted that in his opinion it was not quite fair on Mrs. Lambe, in her condition, to keep the aggressive, turbulent invalid in the house with her. And it wasn’t as if Aunt Tessie herself really benefited by it, either. She was far past appreciating any kindness or attention shown to her now. Her _idée fixe_ was that everyone at Melrose excepting poor little Emma, the maid, was plotting against her in some way, and seeking to poison her.

Mr. Lambe listened, nodding his head, his red, heavy-jowled face puckered with distress. It went against the grain with him to invalidate the boast of years--that Aunt Tessie should always share his home--and yet in his heart he felt that the doctor was right.

Aunt Tessie was past minding or knowing, poor soul--and Maude and their unborn son must come first.

When once he had fairly made up his mind to it, Edgar Lambe could not help feeling a certain relief. He, too, in his own way, had suffered on those dreadful occasions when Aunt Tessie had insisted upon appearing downstairs, and had made his friends and his family uncomfortable by her strange, noisy eccentricity. Even nowadays his daily visit to her room was a miserable affair. It gave her no pleasure now to see the nephew for whom she had once done so much, and who had done so much for her in return. She classed him with her imaginary enemies.

It was very difficult for Edgar Lambe, who was not at all an imaginative man, not to feel irrationally wounded by those wild accusations of enmity. He could scarcely be brought to understand that poor Aunt Tessie’s floods of foolish vituperation had, in themselves, no meaning at all.

“But she was always devoted to me,” he said, half resentfully and half piteously. “I can’t make it out at all. You’d think that even now she’d be able to--to distinguish a bit between me and the wretched cook or charwoman. But no, she abuses us all alike, and seems to think we’re all in league to do her in.”

“It’s part of her illness, Mr. Lambe,” said Nurse Alberta soothingly. “You know, she really is quite cracky, poor old lady.”

The “arrangements,” as the doctor called them, were made as speedily as possible, since they were naturally distressing to everybody, and Mr. and Mrs. Lambe went themselves to see Aunt Tessie’s new quarters, and to talk to the charming lady at the head of the establishment, and get special permission for Nurse Alberta, to whom Aunt Tessie was used, to take her there and remain with her for some time until she grew accustomed to it all.

“Fires in her room, of course, and any extras that she may fancy,” said Mr. Lambe impressively. “Expense is of no consideration at all. I shall send round a comfortable couch for the sitting-room this afternoon.”

He did so, and Mrs. Lambe added two or three fat cushions, and a decorated lampshade and waste-paper basket, such as she liked in her own drawing-room.

When Aunt Tessie was told that she was going away from Melrose for a time, she was delighted.

“Then I can relish my food again,” she said rather coarsely.

“There’s never any knowing what they’re all up to here.”

That remained her attitude up to the very last. She dumped them all together as objects of her aggrieved resentment. Edgar, Maude, the two little girls, the impassive, well-behaved servants.

But when she said good-bye to Emma the night before she was to go away, Aunt Tessie squeezed her hand hard, and gave her some money and several ornaments and little trinkets from her own possessions.

Soft-hearted Emma cried, and hurried away to the sitting-room to find Nurse Alberta. “I just can’t bear to listen to her, poor old lady, saying I’m the only one as never tried to do her a mischief,” she sobbed.

“You’re a silly girl to take on so,” said the nurse good-naturedly. “Why, she’ll be ever so well looked after where she’s going, and there’s good money being spent on her comforts, I can tell you, and Mr. Lambe won’t let that be wasted. It isn’t like some poor looneys, that get put away and not a soul of their own people ever goes near them to see how they’re getting on. She’ll be kept an eye on, you may be very sure, and it’ll be best for all parties to have her under another roof, really it will.”

“Oh yes, I know!” said Emma.

“It isn’t even as if she wanted to stay, you know, Emma. She’s turned dead against them, like cases of her sort often do. Look at the way she spoke to you about your being the only one that didn’t want to poison her, or some such rubbish.”

There was a pause.

“Nurse,” said Emma suddenly, “do mad people _know_ as they’re mad?”

“They say not,” indifferently returned Nurse Alberta, biting a thread off her piece of needlework. “Why, Emma?”

“Because--well, me and Cook got to talking last night about poor Miss Lambe, and--I can’t say it how I mean,” Emma rambled on confusedly, “but Cook would have it that people as go off their heads--well, they _are_ off their heads. They don’t look at anything like we do any more--it’s sort of all upside down to them. But I didn’t think it was like that--well, at any rate not with Miss Lambe.”

“Why not?” said Nurse Alberta.

She looked interested and Emma was encouraged.

“I thought, perhaps,” she said timidly, “that the inside of her poor mind is still like everybody’s else’s, in a way, only she can’t get the thoughts to come out right. And I thought, perhaps, that when she said all that about them wanting to poison her, it was only her--her mad sort of way of saying that she’d felt, all along, they really wanted her to go away. And that would be why she said I was the only person that she was safe with. Because I never did want her to go away. The master and mistress and the young ladies may have felt like that. Of course, it’s been ever so trying for them, I know, having her here like that--and the girls downstairs, they wanted her to go. But I never did, and I wondered if perhaps that was what she sort of felt, only she couldn’t explain it right, and so it came out that way--in all her talk about being poisoned, and that.”

Emma stopped and looked rather wistfully at the nurse.

“You’ll think I’m balmy myself, talking like that. And I can’t explain what I mean a bit well. It’s not as if I’d been educated like you----”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Nurse Alberta, smiling. “I think I understand what you mean, Emma. According to your notion, the poor old lady feels and thinks pretty much the same as we do, but she’s lost the trick of communicating her feelings and her thoughts. They--they get lost in transmission, so to say.”

“You do put it well, Nurse!” said Emma admiringly.

Nurse Alberta looked gratified. “I don’t know,” she said modestly. But she was herself rather pleased by the sound of the phrase that she had used, and could not resist repeating it.

“It’s a bit far-fetched, perhaps, but there’s certainly something in what you say, Emma,” she observed, biting off another thread. “Lost in transmission--that’s the idea--lost in transmission!”

TIME WORKS WONDERS

TIME WORKS WONDERS

I

“You funny little thing!” he said patronisingly.

Adela resented the term violently, but because he was the only man who had ever attempted to talk personalities with her, she accepted it smilingly.

“I must read some of those books of yours. Tell me what the names are.”

“Oh, it doesn’t matter! Never mind about my books,” she said hurriedly.

Adela could not imagine Willoughby reading anybody’s books, unless definitely of that class which deals with a fictitious Secret Service or the intrigues of an imaginary kingdom.

Her own books were small masterpieces of psychology, subtly ironical. A shudder, half-humorous, half-despairing, came over her at the idea of Hal Willoughby, bored and mystified, ploughing his way through one of her books.

“Never mind about my books,” she repeated. “I’d rather you thought of me as a girl than as a writer.”

She felt wildly daring in so speaking, partly because she had called herself a girl, although she was thirty, and partly because it was the first time that she had ever attempted what she supposed to be a flirtation.

Her reputation for cleverness had always been so great and so terrible that young men had never dared to approach her.

She supposed that must be the reason for their aloofness, since she had always been passably pretty; and even now, by artificial light, she looked five years younger than she was.

Her hair and her colouring were charming in a subdued and unvivid way, her features straight and very clean-cut. She hardly realised how much too thin were the lips of her tiny mouth, how intense and over-prominent her large hazel eyes.

“I never can imagine how anybody can write a book,” said Willoughby.

Adela moved uneasily. She could tell what was coming.

“Do you think of a plot first, or do you just make it up as you go along?”

“It all depends.”

She made the meaningless reply that had so often served her before.

“I should never know what to make the people say next. Aren’t conversations awfully difficult?”

“Sometimes.”

“I suppose you are always on the look-out for people to put into your books--under invented names, of course.”

“I don’t think I am.”

“Oh, but I expect you are! I expect really you sit there, taking it all in, you know.”

Why did people always think it necessary to talk to her like this?

“You ought to write a play. They say it pays like fun.”

“But, you see, I’m not a dramatist.”

“Oh, rubbish! If you’re clever enough to write books, of course you could write a play. I should, if I were you--really I should.” His voice was charged with encouragement.

“No, I couldn’t. Don’t let’s talk about that.”

“Why not? I want to hear about these books of yours. I’ve never met a literary lady before.”

It was of no use. He would not talk to her as she was almost sure that he would have talked to any other woman in the room, given those distant sounds of music from the ballroom, that hazy moonlight above the bench beneath the syringa-bushes.

Adela grimly sacrificed her art, perjuring her soul away. “I expect you think it’s very funny of me to write books,” she said, desperately adapting her vocabulary to his own. “I really do it mostly--a good deal--because it brings in money.” She tried to laugh, and hated herself for the artificiality of the sound.

“I suppose girls are always glad of extra pocket-money,” he assented indifferently.

A girl--that was how he thought of her.

She was pleased at that, but she struggled for a more serious recognition of her capabilities, too. “It’s not only pocket-money. I can really get a living from my writing, though I’m always at home with my mother. But I could be independent to-morrow if I liked.”

“Oh, come now!” The words might have expressed remonstrance, incredulity, astonishment.

“The advance royalty--that’s the money the publishers give me in advance--on my last book was two hundred pounds,” she said calmly.

She had never gone away to work, never had to pay for her food or for a roof over her head, never tried her strength or the strength of her resources in the struggle for livelihood amongst unsupported women.

Two hundred pounds for her year’s work was a large sum, with no calls upon it.

Willoughby repeated after her: “Two hundred pounds! I say! You don’t expect me to believe you get that just for writing a story?”

“Yes.” She was uncertain of the reason for his disbelief, and even whether he really did disbelieve her.

“But was it a serious book, or just a novel?” He really sounded perplexed.

“Oh, ‘just a novel’!” she said bitterly.

“Good Lord! How many do you write in a year?”

“That last one took me over a year. My first one I worked at, on and off, for five years.”

“I suppose it doesn’t matter to you, taking your time, but it would be quite worth scribbling them off one after the other, if you can get money like that without working for it, so to speak,” said Hal Willoughby.

He fingered his thick, fair moustache, and Adela looked up at him furtively in the moonlight.

He was very big and good-looking; and when she danced with him, and met his full, bold gaze, Adela could almost forget about such conversations between them as the present one.

Besides, he had not always talked like this. Once he had pretended not to know what colour her eyes were, and once he had told her about his life in India. She wished intensely that the conversation now would shift to some such topic.

The moonlight and the heavy scent of the syringa seemed to mock her.

“And what are your books about?” said Willoughby laboriously. “Love, I suppose?” He broke into a roar of laughter. “Does the heroine fall fainting into the hero’s arms in the last chapter, eh? That’s the style, isn’t it?”

Adela stood up, trembling. “I think I want to go in now, please. The--the dance must be finished now.”

He stood up also. “But I say! What’s the matter? You’re not ratty, are you?” He pulled unceremoniously at the prim velvet ribbons that hung from her waist. “Sit down again. Don’t you know I’m going away to-morrow? You might be a little bit nice to me, I do think.”

“I didn’t know you wanted me to be,” she said swiftly.

He laughed, and pulled her on to the bench again.

Adela’s mother, with whom she always lived, had told her very often that men never really respected a woman who let them “take liberties.” Adela, never before put to the test, recklessly determined to disregard the parental axiom.

When Willoughby caught hold of her chilly little ringless hand, she made no movement of withdrawal.

He looked down at her and laughed again. “What an odd little thing you are! I don’t believe you’ve ever been kissed, have you?”

She was silent.

“Has anybody ever made love to you, now?”

“Yes,” she said defiantly and untruly.

He laughed quite openly, and declared, “I don’t believe it!”

Still laughing, he put his hand under her chin, tilting up her face, and kissed her.

II

Hal Willoughby’s careless parting kiss remained the only one that Adela was destined to receive.

For ten years more she lived with her mother, and heard her say proudly to other mothers, coming with the news of Mollie’s engagement, or Dolly’s beautiful new baby:

“Ah, I still keep my Adela, I’m glad to say. She’s almost too fastidious, I sometimes think. She’s never made herself cheap with anyone. And then there’s her writing, too.”

Adela had slowly been making a name for herself, but her great success only came after her mother’s death. A long novel, at which she had been working for several years, made her reputation in the world of letters.

She had inherited money from her mother, and her books brought her in more.

Adela was able to indulge in artistic necessities.

It became imperative that she should retire, whenever she wanted to write, to a Yorkshire moor with an atmosphere of ruggedness and strength, and very few trees.

So many journalists, so many fellow-writers, such a number of the new-born coterie that “followed the Adela Alston method” had inquired so earnestly in what peculiar setting Adela found it necessary to enshrine her inspiration, that the need of the Yorkshire moor had suddenly sprung, full-grown, into being.

She built a two-roomed cottage, engaged a caretaker, and wrote in a small summer-house, wearing knickerbockers and sandals, and smoking violently. This was in the summer. In the winter, inspiration was obliged to content itself with Hampstead, and Adela had to wear shoes and stockings and a skirt.

At forty she had gained greatly in assurance, and knew herself for the leading spirit in a small group of intensely modern women writers, by whom she was devoutly worshipped.

Adela became accustomed to being the person who was listened to, in the society of her fellows.

They were not only interested in her work, but deeply, intensely interested in herself.

“You know almost too much of human nature, Adela. It’s not decent.”

Adela enjoyed being told that.

“I’ve seen all sorts in my time,” she said musingly.

It would no longer have pleased her to be thought younger than she was. On the contrary, she was apt to emphasise in herself the aspect of a full maturity.

“That last study of yours is simply magnificent. Dear, I don’t wonder you’ve never chosen to marry. No man’s vanity could survive your insight.”

A newcomer to the group leant forward eagerly. Her characteristic was lack of self-restraint, which she acclaimed in herself as fearlessness.

“But you’ve known the great realities--you’ve known passion,” she urged foolishly. “You could never write as you do, otherwise.”

Adela gazed at her new disciple from under drooping eyelids. “I am not ashamed of it,” she said quietly. “I am proud of it.”

The girl nodded with grotesque, unconscious vehemence.

The two other women-friends of Adela who were present, exchanged a meaning look with one another. Each had heard Adela’s story before, had shown loyal pride and understanding. There was no need of further demonstration from them. Adela was looking at the girl.

“There was one man in my life,” she said low and deeply. “There is never more than one--that counts. And a woman who has never loved, never been loved, never met her mate--has never lived.”

The room was tensely silent.

“It was more than ten years ago, and I have outlived the poignancy of it. I have never seen him since--I never shall. But I make no secret of having known fulfilment.”

Her voice was low and rich with intense enjoyment of her own effect.

“Even now, though, when all the storm and stress is long, long past--it’s odd, but the scent of a syringa in bloom can still hurt me. You see--I was swept right off my feet.”

She paused before concluding with the words that she had unconsciously learnt by heart, so significantly did they always round off her retrospect.

“I had waited for him all my life. He asked everything, and I gave--everything.”

“Ah!”

“You splendid woman!”

Adela leant back again, her large eyes gazing abstractedly into the past, full of a brooding satisfaction. Her lips exhaled a sound that was barely audible.

“Hal Willoughby!”

* * * * *

Time works wonders.

THE GALLANT LITTLE LADY

THE GALLANT LITTLE LADY

I

“I hope you are using all your influence to prevent the marriage?” said Clyde, in the impersonal tone that he always adopted when speaking to his wife of her only daughter.

“Why, Charles? They’re madly in love.”

“That is why,” said Sir Charles.

“What do you mean?”

Lady Clyde had not the slightest desire to know what her husband meant, and had already made up her mind that she disagreed with it root and branch, so she said, “What do you mean?” in a tone of indignation, and not one of enquiry, and gave him no time to answer.

“Richard is a gentleman, he’s earning a very good salary, and he adores Rita. The only possible objection is their having to live in the East, but everyone says the Malay States are quite healthy, and she’s very strong, thank heaven. If she’s plucky enough to face it, I don’t see how _we_ can object.”

“My objection has nothing to do with their living in the Malay States. It is simply concerned with the fact that they will have nothing whatever to depend upon except Richard Lambourne’s salary. He is a young man, he has saved nothing, and he has no expectations from anybody.”

“Rita has her own small income.”

“It might keep them from starvation, certainly, but it wouldn’t be enough for a family.”

“No one expects it to be. Richard will save if he has a wife, naturally, and he hopes to become a part owner of the rubber estate, later on. After all, it’s very creditable for a man of his age to have been made general manager already.”

“Very.”

“Then what have you against him?”

“Nothing at all,” said Sir Charles mildly.

“A minute ago you were telling me how you hoped I should use my influence to prevent this marriage. If you have nothing against him, why shouldn’t they marry?”

“Perhaps I have ‘something against’ Rita, as you express it.”

“Rita is only your step-daughter, Charles, and I know very well that your own children----”

“_Our_ own children----”

“That they come first, and always have. But I have an unprejudiced eye,” said Lady Clyde warmly, “and I don’t pretend that Rita isn’t a greater deal cleverer, prettier, and more attractive than all the others put together. And as for talking of having anything against her, it’s the sheerest nonsense, as even you must know.”

Sir Charles looked at his wife with an expression which she had long ago summed up, not inaptly, as “Charles looking as though he couldn’t decide if one were worth explaining the alphabet to or not.” On this occasion, Sir Charles appeared to decide in favour of the modicum of intelligence required.

“My case is simply this, Catherine. If Richard Lambourne and Rita marry now, they are entirely dependent upon Richard’s job. Say he loses it, or loses his health--which amounts to the same thing--or falls off his horse and breaks his neck, Rita may be left with a child, or children, and nothing whatever to live on except a yearly sum which she has hitherto spent upon her clothes, largely supplemented by presents from you.”

“As though Rita wouldn’t always have a welcome from me, and as though I wouldn’t share my last crust with her!”

“On the contrary, I should expect you to divide your last crust into equal parts between Rita and your four other children,” said Sir Charles with coldness. “But apart from last crusts, which is a rhetorical way of speaking, you had better understand once and for all, my dear Catherine, that my sons and daughter are not to be sacrificed to Rita. If she marries this man, he must keep her. This house is her home, and has been so for twenty years or so, but once she is married, it ceases to be her home. I am sorry if I hurt your feelings, but if Rita is to take the risk of marriage with a man who has nothing to depend on but what he can earn for himself, she had better understand exactly what she is doing. Personally, I consider her entirely unfitted to take such a risk.”

“She is more than ready to take any risk. You are perfectly incapable of understanding Rita, Charles, and what a generous, ardent nature she has. And she is very, very much in love, for the first time in her life. You know as well as I do that plenty of people have wanted to marry Rita, and I think it’s wonderful that she should have refused so many offers, to give herself to a man who isn’t rich, simply because she loves him.”

“You look upon it as being decided, then?”

“Of course I do. She is absolutely determined to marry him and go out with him at once. I can’t refuse my consent--and I shan’t--and they’re not dependent upon yours, Charles.”

She looked at him with a rather nervous defiance, but Sir Charles said with great calm:

“Certainly they’re not. I shall therefore consider the subject closed, so far as my objections go.”

He kept his word, as he invariably did.

The wedding of Rita and Richard took place six weeks later.

Rita was little and very pretty, with big dark eyes, a pathetic baby face, and, in rather quaint contrast, a very erect little figure and a decided bearing.

Unlike her stepfather, the majority of her friends and relations fully realised the beautiful recklessness of Rita’s love-match.

“A very gallant little lady!” said an old friend of Lady Clyde’s, and she reversed an opinion which she had hitherto held as to his senility. He used the same phrase, which had evidently caught his ancient fancy, when the bride was making her farewells, and it oddly suited her appearance, in a velvet dress and a three-cornered hat with a long plume, vaguely recalling pictures of cavalier heroines.

“So she’s marrying all for love, and going eight thousand miles away from home!” said Rita’s aged admirer. “None of your mercenary, modern, ideas there. A gallant little lady, I call her.”

II

The same phrase was repeated, and by many people, when Rita and Richard Lambourne came home again, three years later. The great rubber slump had come, and Richard had lost his job. He said that he hoped to find something to do in England.

“Professional men of all classes are hoping exactly the same thing at the present moment, all over the country,” said Sir Charles Clyde.

The Lambournes stayed with the Clydes for a little while, then they and their baby and their nurse moved into a tiny house on the outskirts of a large neighbouring town, and then it was that such a number of people took to making use of the apt descriptive phrase first employed when Rita married.

Many of them had known her in her girlhood, the spoilt and favoured child of Lady Clyde, at home in her stepfather’s house.

They could fully appreciate the contrast with her present position.

Richard could not find any work, although he answered advertisements and wrote to influential friends. He was not a strong man, and very soon showed signs of great discouragement and anxiety.

Rita, on the contrary, was always cheerful, and discussed the situation very frankly, laughing merrily at her own struggle with unaccustomed privations.

“It’s so lucky I’ve got a little money that my own father left me. By managing very, very carefully, we’re living on that. Poor Richard hadn’t a penny beyond his salary, and now of course that’s all gone--poor darling!”

She was drolly confidential with her numerous friends.

“It’s so funny to have to think before I take a second helping of pudding, even, and yet I suppose I really ought to. But I don’t think I’ve got a very large appetite, have I, Richard?”

“No, you haven’t.”

“What a good thing!” She laughed as she spoke, but Richard remained unsmiling and miserable, and gradually it became evident to Rita’s friends that one of Rita’s trials was her husband’s inability to face their position with a gallant laugh, as she did.

As time went on, and there appeared to be no hope of a salary for Richard, she sent away the little girl’s nurse.

“I think I ought to be able to manage. Lots of poor women have to, only it’s a great pity I was brought up to play the piano, and dance, and play tennis, instead of learning to cook. One somehow never thought of it’s being necessary.”

“It oughtn’t to be necessary now,” said Richard violently, “if you’d married a fellow with money, or brains enough to make some.”

“Why, I might have been a millionairess, if I’d married the first man that ever proposed to me,” she said brightly. “Doesn’t it seem odd?”

He made no answer.

“D’you know, darling, I saw a really lovely jumper in Colson’s window to-day. It was real old rose, the colour that suits me. It was one of the sale things and marked down to half a guinea. I had a frightful struggle--it is such ages since I had anything new. I wouldn’t even let myself go into the shop, though I had to get some things for baby. I went somewhere else. I felt I couldn’t bear to come out of Colson’s without that jumper. It was so lovely--and really marvellously cheap. It’s been haunting me ever since.”

“Surely we can find half a guinea,” said Richard, his face flushing.

“Richard!” She gave a little laughing scream. “Why, I work out every penny of my income on paper before I spend it, and do you know what’s left over for my clothes, when I’ve paid the wages and the rent, and rates and taxes, and the housekeeping books? Just--exactly--five pounds a year!”

She held up five fingers, laughing.

“I know.”

“I can’t believe that I once spent five pounds a year, or thereabouts, on gloves, but I suppose I did. I don’t really know how I could manage now, if mummie didn’t still give me so many presents.”

She looked at him with her head on one side, rather like a very pretty squirrel.

“I do manage rather well, don’t I, dear? I have to work pretty hard, you know.”

“Of course you manage well,” he said ungraciously. He hardly ever encouraged her with praise nowadays, although she was doing wonders. He only gave way to violent outbreaks of despair and self-reproach, when she assured him that she could do without things that she had had all her life, and that she wasn’t really so _very_ tired after two bad nights with the baby.

“Isn’t it lucky I’m so strong?” she sometimes asked her friends. “I do a lot of the housework myself, you know, because we can only afford one servant, of course, and she’s a rough sort of girl. It was so funny at first, I couldn’t understand that class of servant at all. At home, of course, the maids were all quite different. Ellen means very well, really, though I’ve had to learn cooking, so as to do a certain amount myself. Will you forgive me now, if I run to see that Richard’s supper is all right--not burning?”

She tripped away, still laughing, in spite of the tired lines that were beginning to show beneath her sparkling dark eyes.

“Rita is too wonderful, poor darling!” said Lady Clyde. “As she says herself, she’s never in her life been used to poverty. And look at the way she makes the best of things! You know they’re living on her tiny little income, that she manages too wonderfully for words. You can’t say _now_, Charles, as I remember you once did, that Rita, of all people, wasn’t fitted to take the risk of poverty.”

Whether Sir Charles could, or could not, have repeated his axiom, was not destined to be made clear, for he said nothing at all.

He did, however, make many attempts to find a job for Richard, and went to see the originator of the phrase that described Richard’s wife so well--“a gallant little lady”--who was connected with some highly-remunerative business.

The old man shook his head.

“I’m on the point of retiring, Sir Charles. Times are bad, though I’ve made my pile, but it was done by hard work at one job all my life. I’ll see if there’s anything for your--stepson, is it?”

“He is no relation of mine,” said Sir Charles very distinctly. “He married my wife’s only daughter by her first husband. He is now obliged to live upon her--very small--fortune.”

“I’ve heard something of that. Poor little lady--she’s doing wonders, I hear. Well, well, I’ll see if they’ve anything to offer the lad, but we don’t want men without experience these days, you know. But I’d like to do something, for the sake of that gallant little lady.”

III

“Richard dear, I _would_ like to ask mummie and Sir Charles to dinner--supper, I mean--one night. I’ve got a little cash in hand, so I shouldn’t feel too extravagant. You know I got rather more than I expected, for the sale of that old bracelet of mine.”

Richard did know, because Rita had told him this already, quite gleefully, although admitting that the bracelet had been a legacy from a specially beloved grandmother, and that it cost her a pang to let it go.

“I loathe your selling your jewellery. It makes me feel such a cad for having got you into this mess, though God knows I never foresaw anything like this. Rita, _must_ you do these things?”

She looked at him with a face of piteous, childlike surprise. “Oh, aren’t you _at all_ pleased that we’ve got an extra pound or two, Richard? I’m sure you’ve no idea what a difference it makes.”

He groaned impatiently.

“Of course, if you think I’ve no right to suggest entertaining _any_body, even on a tiny scale, now we’re so poor, I won’t do it. It was silly of me, I daresay, but I haven’t really properly got used not to having an occasional little party, I suppose. It’s all right, Richard darling. Never mind.”

She smiled bravely.

“Rita, I shall go mad if I can’t find a job, and take you out of this sort of thing,” said Richard, and he began to pace up and down the little room.

When Lady Clyde and her husband did come to dinner, Rita told her mother privately that poor darling Richard was becoming almost hysterical sometimes. It did make things so much, much harder when one was doing all one could to keep up under the strain, and be always bright and ready to make the best of it.

“No one can say you’re not doing that, my dearest child,” said her mother.

Tears of mingled admiration and compassion rose to her eyes when Rita apologised gaily for the poverty of the fare, when she corrected herself every time that she mentioned the word dinner instead of supper, and when she laughingly excused herself for having to run away and help with the washing-up, because the servant now was only a daily one, and went home early.

“It seemed so funny at first, mummy, and I was always ringing the bell and expecting it to be answered, like when I used to ring for Cooper or Ellis or Mary, at home. I really can’t believe that I had a maid all for myself, just to do my hair and keep my clothes tidy, not so very long ago.”

“What a plucky little thing she is!” said her mother in a choked voice.

She glanced resentfully at Richard, who sat silent, moody and haggard, without endorsing her tribute to his wife in any way.

He looked very ill, but Lady Clyde at the moment could only realise to what straits he had brought Rita, and with what surly unresponsiveness he seemed to confront her courageous acceptance of poverty.

Lady Clyde asked her husband that night if he could not, as man to man, give Richard Lambourne a hint that his ungracious attitude to his wife, whilst living on her money, was the final crown of the wrongs that he had done her.

“I was going to suggest, personally, that you should give Rita a hint,” said Sir Charles.

“Rita! Why, when I think of that poor child’s gallantry----”

“Exactly. My own impression is that a very little more of it will drive Lambourne into a mad-house, or worse.”

Sir Charles spoke in his usual level accents, and Lady Clyde did not attempt to attach any meaning to his words. Neither did they recur to her when Richard Lambourne disproved her assertion that he had placed the crown upon the wrongs done to his wife, by the final ignominy of suicide.

* * * * *

“Coward, coward!” sobbed Lady Clyde. “Can you deny that he was a coward, Charles?”

“No. Richard was a coward,” said Sir Charles gravely.

“After all that poor little Rita had done!”

“And said,” added Sir Charles, not flippantly, and half under his breath.

The old magnate who had admired Rita at her wedding made use of almost the same words as Lady Clyde.

“After all that his wife had done, and was doing, to quit like that, and leave her to face the life he’d brought her to! What a _brute_!”

A little while afterwards he proposed to Rita, diffident, in spite of his wealth, because of the great difference in their ages.

She accepted him, and this time it was Sir Charles, looking at the bridegroom’s bald head and infirm gait beside the pretty bride at the quiet wedding, who repeated to himself the old man’s catchword, with an ironical emphasis of his own:

“A _very_ gallant little lady.”

THE HOTEL CHILD

THE HOTEL CHILD

(TO Y. DE LA P.)

I

The first time that I saw her was in Rome. I was governess to the children at the British Embassy, and every morning before breakfast I took them out into the Borghese Gardens.

They were very good, insignificant little children, and never gave me any trouble. Whilst they played tame little games between the grey-green olive trees, I used to watch the more amusing Italian children in the Gardens, the biggest groups consisting of pupils from the great white Convento dell’ Assunzione, on the corner of the Pincio.

But the little girl in whom I took the greatest interest was always by herself. An enormous grey limousine would leave her at the entrance to the Gardens, and fetch her away again at the end of an hour. Sometimes the limousine, which was always empty except for a liveried chauffeur, appeared to have forgotten her, and then I was obliged to take my children away, leaving her serious and solitary, and quite undisconcerted, sitting on her bench. I judged her to be about eight years old, and the child of rich people. Her white embroidered dresses, far too elaborate, were expensive, and she always wore white shoes and stockings.

At first, her nationality puzzled me. Her quite straight hair was black, cropped short round her beautifully shaped little head in a fashion that was then very unusual, and her lashes were as long and as black as those of any Roman-born child. But her grave eyes were of a deep grey, and her skin, fine and colourless. Perhaps she was scarcely pretty, but her poise, her erect gracefulness, above all, her unmistakable air of breeding, made her remarkable. It was that air of aristocracy that made me feel sure that, in spite of her independence, she was not American. One gets to know, after seven years spent in the best families. The American children are well-drilled, well-dressed, well-behaved--sometimes--but they never achieve that look of distinction. Some of the French ones have it, but then those are the children of the old Catholic families, and so they are poor, and generally badly dressed. On the whole, it is to be seen amongst the English as often as anywhere--and then, it is almost always accompanied by the expression that denotes, to an experienced governess, either stupidity or adenoids--and sometimes, indeed, both.

My little aristocrat of the Borghese Gardens spoke Italian perfectly. I heard her greet the chauffeur when he came for her, and those were the times when she was most childlike. The man very often let her take the wheel, after he had started the car, and I used to watch, not without misgivings, the great car sliding away, with the small erect figure in the driving-seat, her straight black fringe blowing back from her forehead, her tiny hands gripping the big wheel.

My charges, it need hardly be said, might never speak to strange children, but one day the unknown little girl restored to me a toy that one of them had dropped the day before.

“I found it, after you’d gone,” she said very politely and distinctly.

I knew then that she must be English, at least in part.

My children were playing at a distance, and after thanking her for returning the plaything, I sat down on the stone bench that she had made her own.

After an instant’s hesitation, she sat down there, too.

We entered into conversation.

I asked whether she lived in Rome.

“No. My papa is here on business for a little while, and then we are going to Paris again.”

“Your home is in Paris, then?”

She looked rather puzzled. “I don’t know Paris well,” she observed apologetically. “We were only there once before, when mama was with us. It was a nice hotel, I thought, but noisy. This one--the Grand--is better. Have you been much in Paris?”

“Not since I was at school there. My French was acquired in Paris,” I added, automatically.

One says that kind of thing so often, to please the parents.

“Mademoiselle aime parler francais, hein?” she enquired, with a little smile.

Her French was as perfect as her Italian, or her English; and it was evidently natural to her to speak either language.

“Are you English?” I could not refrain from asking her.

“My papa is Italian--mama was half English, and half French.”

Was? Then her mother must be dead. That would account for the empty limousine, and the strange independence of the child.

“Mama is in New York, now, we think,” she remarked. “I am to join her when I am ten; that was arranged for, in the deed of separation.”

“Separation?” said I.

“There is no divorce in Italy,” said the little creature, shrugging her shoulders. “Papa is a Catholic, though not, of course _pratiquant_. They have been separated since I was seven.”

“Then who--who----” I wanted to ask who looked after her, but such a form of words seemed singularly inappropriate. “Who looks after your papa’s house?” I found at last.

“We are in hotels, most of the time, papa and I, and my maid, Carlotta, but in the holidays--_les grandes vacances_--we go to the country somewhere--_villegiatura_--and there is a lady then, always.”

Her grave eyes looked at me. “A different one,” she explained, “each time.”

Her very complete understanding of the status held by the “ladies” was implicit in her manner, but that struck me less poignantly than did her philosophical acceptance of all that they stood for.

The grey limousine came into sight, and she made an amiable little sign to the chauffeur.

“I must go now. It doesn’t _do_ to keep the _auto_ waiting.”

In her grave little voice, was all the circumspection of the child that has learnt to fend for itself, that knows by experience that it will only be tolerated so long as it gives no trouble, runs counter to no prejudices, is guilty of no indiscretions.

“It has been so pleasant to talk to someone English. Good-bye Miss----?”

Her little pause was exactly that of a grown-up person, before an unknown or unremembered name. And what precocity of discernment had told her that “Miss” was the suitable prefix?

“Miss Arbell,” said I. “Tell me your name before you go.”

“Laura di san Marzano.”

She pronounced Laura in the Italian way--_Lah-o-ra_.

When I held out my hand, she kissed it, as Italian children do, and after she had climbed to the driving-seat, she waved to me, before turning the grey car down the hill.

I looked for her every morning after that, but she never came to the Borghese Gardens again.

II

The second time that I saw Laura di san Marzano was nearly four years afterwards, in the hall of the Majestic Hotel, at Lucerne.

I had thought of her, at intervals, and had no difficulty in recognising her, in spite of the difference between eight years old and twelve.

She was tall and very slim, and the set of her dark head on her straight shoulders was just the same. Her black hair now fell in a long plait to her waist, but she still wore the straight, short fringe that suited her du Maurier profile.

It was late afternoon--tea-time, and the hall was full of people, and noisy.

Laura sat motionless, but somehow, one felt, very attentive, beside a beautifully-gowned and jewelled and painted woman, who was talking to half a dozen men.

Mama?

She looked very young to have a child of Laura’s age.

Then I saw that Laura’s green silk frock was absurdly short, and made in a babyish style, that matched the huge bow of green satin ribbon unnecessarily fastened over one ear.

My pupil, a nearly grown-up one, was late, and as I waited for her, I watched Laura.

Presently our eyes met. At once recognition leapt into hers, and she smiled at me, and bowed.

I returned the salutation--with infinitely less grace, as I knew in my middle-class British self-consciousness--and wondered whether she would come and speak to me.

Later on she did so, when the group round mama was at its noisiest.

“How do you do, Miss Arbell?” There was not the faintest hesitation over my name. “I used to see you often in the Borghese Gardens, in Rome, and once we talked together. I hope you remember?”

“I remember very well,” said I, “but I am surprised at your doing so. You were so very young then, and you must have met so many people since.”

“I never forget people,” said Laura simply.

“You left Rome suddenly, didn’t you?” I continued. “I was there for nearly a month after our meeting, but I never saw you in the gardens again.”

Laura shook her head slightly.

“I can’t remember,” she admitted. “Very likely we left suddenly. One does that so often. The management of the hotel becomes intolerable, or tiresome acquaintances appear--and then the simplest thing is to pack up and go elsewhere.”

She spoke so evidently from experience that one could but accept her strange, rootless, attitude as part of her natural equipment.

We talked for a little while, and she told me, or I deduced, that since the Roman days she had been a great deal in Paris--(“I adore the Opera there, but the theatres not much”)--and then in New York, with mama. She was to spend the next few years with mama.

Where?

Laura’s shoulders indicated the faintest of shrugs. Anywhere. Mama liked New York as well as most places, but personally Laura thought that the rooms in the hotels there were always too hot. They went to London a good deal. Delightful--she smiled at me politely--but one missed the sunshine. Her point of view, inevitably, was one of great sophistication. It did not, to my mind, detract from her charm, which had never been of a direct, childlike kind, but rather of a description so subtle that amongst the many it might easily pass for mere oddity.

“I hope we shall meet again,” she said to me, when a certain nervous movement in the group of mama’s admirers had culminated in the detachment of a tall, fair youth, who was coming now towards Laura herself.

“I am afraid that I leave here to-morrow. My pupil and I are on our way to rejoin her parents in Italy.”

“We may be gone ourselves to-morrow. I meant for later on--any time, anywhere.” She smiled charmingly, but her unchildlike eyes remained serious and rather weary.

I heard the fair youth say something to her, with a burst of meaningless laughter. She did not laugh in return, but her clear, well-bred little voice was raised to a sympathetic tone of interest.

“Mama likes an olive in hers, always, but for me I prefer a sweet Martini--with _two_ cherries, if you please.”

* * * * *

I saw Laura twice again before leaving Lucerne, but we did not speak to one another.

The first time, at seven o’clock the evening of that same day, was in one of the gigantic hotel corridors, on the first floor, where I was waiting for the lift that was to take me to the fifth.

The hotel hairdresser, in a white coat, with an immense head of curled and discoloured yellow hair, stood before a shut bedroom door. It flew open suddenly, and then closed sharply behind Laura di san Marzano.

“Vous voila donc! Eh bien, il est trop tard.”

Her voice was ice, her face scornful and unbelieving as she listened to the man’s torrent of excuses for his tardiness.

“Assez,” said Laura. “Madame est fort mécontente. Elle ne veut plus de vous.”

“Mademoiselle----”

“C’est inutile. Madame se passera de vous.”

And as the hairdresser turned away, grumbling and disconcerted, she added superbly:

“J’arrangerai la chose. Soyez exacte demain. Mais pour ce soir, c’est moi qui coifferai madame.”

Much later in the evening, when I had long ago despatched my pupil to the bedroom opening out of mine, I returned for a moment to the hot and strident lounge in order to make certain enquiries at the office.

Mama was in a white wicker armchair, with crimson and orange cushions overflowing upon either side of it, and showing up the elaborate waves of her hair, as black as Laura’s own. The paint that I had seen on her face earlier in the day was now concentrated into one scarlet curve upon her mouth, her white lace dress was held up by narrow black velvet straps cutting across the opulent creaminess of her shoulders, and the electric light above her head had fastened upon the diamond butterfly bows of her satin shoes, so that they winked and flashed right across the hall.

One hardly saw--certainly did not distinguish--the figures that composed her numerous entourage, but the prevailing black and whiteness, the glitter of continually raised small glasses, gave a general impression of unrelieved masculinity.

Laura sat beside her mother, on an upright chair. She was dressed in rose colour, a frock even shorter than the green one that I had seen before. Her straight hair had been somehow persuaded into a semblance of long curls; the green silk bow over her left ear had been replaced by a pink one with fringed ends.

She did not see me. Her eyes, indeed, were glazed with fatigue, and every now and then her head fell forwards and was jerked upwards again.

The hall was unendurably hot with a breathless, artificial heat, and the orchestra was playing an American rag-time that every now and then succeeded in out-sounding the medley of raised voices and high-pitched laughter and clinking glasses.

It was long after eleven o’clock.

As I looked at Laura, I saw that her slim, silk-clad legs were swinging gently to and fro between the bars of the high-backed chair. Her feet, in bronze-coloured dancing slippers, could not quite reach the floor.

For the first time, I saw her as the child she really was--the efficient, helpless, cosmopolitan, traditionless, hotel child.

III

It is a far cry from the family of a British Ambassador--collectively distinguished, if individually dull--and the blue wonders of Italy, to an English Girls’ School and the grey horrors of an east coast town.

The post that I filled temporarily at Lundeen School was not one that I should have considered, but for personal and family reasons of convenience. They are long since past, and matter nothing to the story.

But it was at Lundeen School that I saw Laura di san Marzano for the third and last time.

It was the most inappropriate setting imaginable.

She was left there by mama, in mid-term, because a continental doctor had declared that she needed bracing air and companionship of her own age, and also--this I learnt later, quite incidentally, from Laura herself--because mama and a _cher ami_ had suddenly planned a visit to Monte Carlo for the express purpose of visiting the Casino, to which Laura, being under twenty-one, could not have been admitted.

Laura, as the hotel child, had been pathetic, but her dignity had been safeguarded, if not actually enhanced, by the kaleidescopic background of her surroundings.

At school, she was pitiful--and out of place. The girls, without ill nature, despised her from the first.

She arrived amongst them in the short, fanciful, ultra-picturesque silk frocks and infantile bows of hair ribbon that I had seen her wear abroad. Those unimaginative, untravelled English schoolgirls had seen no one like her before, and what they did not know, by experience or by tradition, they distrusted and disliked.

Lundeen School made demands upon the pupils’ _physiques_, upon their powers of conformity, and upon each one’s capacity for assimilating wholesale a universally applied system.

Laura di san Marzano had no chance at all.

The child who “never forgot people” could not remember her multiplication table, and although she spoke perfectly at least three languages besides English, she had never learnt syntax, nor read a line of any history. She had seen the Guitrys play in Paris--(and from her crisp appreciations and criticisms I deduced that no finest _nuance_ of their art had been lost upon her)--but she had memorized no standard selections from the poets. And she did not know how to learn.

No one, not even the head mistress, was very much disturbed by Laura’s educational deficiencies, because it was so evident from the first that her stay amongst us would only be a very temporary affair.

Mama would certainly swoop down again, probably without warning, and resume Laura as suddenly as she had discarded her.

That was how mama always did things, one felt sure.

Laura herself, although evidently aware of her shortcomings, accepted them with a grave, but unexaggerated, regret. She seemed, quite without arrogance, to know that, even educationally, there were other standards than those of Lundeen, and that her connection with these latter was after all merely transitory.

What really distressed her, and shocked her too, I think, was the attitude of the other girls.

Compared with the hotel child, there was only one word that adequately described these daughters of so many excellent English homes--and that word was _uncivilised_.

They played unbeautiful games violently, they spoke in hideous slang, they were rudest when they intended to be most friendly.

Towards Laura di san Marzano, indeed, they did not wish nor attempt to display friendliness. They were simply contemptuous.

And I saw that the hotel child minded that, both from pride and from ultra-developed social instinct.

My work was entirely amongst the elder girls, and I saw very little of Laura during her brief stay, but towards the end of it, something happened. The rumour arose and spread like wild-fire, even to reaching the Common Room of the teaching staff, that Laura di san Marzano was in disgrace with her fellows for cheating over an examination paper.

The tradition of Lundeen was that of the public-school code. Cribbing was permissible: ‘copying’ or peeping at the questions set for an examination, was impossible.

They were already prejudiced against her; the accusation was accepted on the instant by her contemporaries.

The Prefectorial system was in full force at Lundeen, and in any case, I could not have made the affair my business. But it so happened that I was present when Laura uttered what I believe to have been her one and only specific denial of the charge against her. I came unexpectedly into the room, and saw the semi-circle of self-righteous inexpressive, young faces that confronted Laura, who stood, rather pale and with her head held proudly high, and spoke very softly and clearly.

“I didn’t cheat. Those who thought they saw me, made a mistake. You are being very unjust and cruel, all of you.”

She was looking the head of her class straight in the eyes as she spoke, and the girl, giving her back look for look, made a sound that unmistakably expressed contemptuous incredulity.

“What is all this?” said I sharply.

They were taken aback, all of them. There was an instant of confused silence, and it was, after all, only the hotel child who possessed enough of _savoir faire_ to reply to me.

“Miss Arbell,” she said courteously, “it was a--a necessary conversation. It is over now.”

She crossed the length of the room, very composedly, and went out quietly.

Her ostracism, after that, was complete. It lasted for a week, and then, just as one had always surmised would happen, mama, in sables and violets, drove up in a blue Lanchester car, and said that she and Laura (who looked so much stronger and better for the change) would at once go straight to Paris, give themselves enough time to find some clothes, and sail for New York the following week.

The hotel child, her face radiant, came to find me and say good-bye to me. She was incapable, for all mama’s imperious haste, of forgetting or omitting the courtesy.

“Do you actually leave this evening?” I asked her.

Mama had been even more impetuous than I had anticipated.

“Yes. I need never see any of _them_ again.”

“It has been an experience, at least,” I reminded her.

“Yes--but----” she shrugged her shoulders.

“Expensively bought?” I suggested. And, since she was leaving, I thought that I might add: “At least, my dear, you have kept your colours flying. These last days have been very trying, I am afraid, but you come out of them better than our friends of the Fourth Form, to my thinking.”

“Thank you,” said Laura. She looked at me with her grave, straightforward eyes.

“It would have been much easier, though, if only I really _hadn’t_ cheated.”

* * * * *

There is a postscript to the story of the hotel child. A very few years later I heard of her marriage to the Prince d’Armaillh’ac-Ambry, the representative of the noblest, and one of the wealthiest, of French families. I believe that they live almost entirely on his estates in Brittany, and that the Princess interests herself personally in the numerous peasantry around them.

Her two children, a boy and a girl, are brought up in great simplicity, and to the strictest and most orthodox Catholicism.

IMPASSE

IMPASSE

(TO S.M.A.)

Two, three, five Dedicated Virgins. They stood before their Reverend Mother, ponderous black folds of serge sweeping the boards round each flat-soled pair of black list slippers.

“The orphans must go to the dentist,” said Reverend Mother, mournfully, yet with determination. “Here we are in a Protestant country. We must adapt ourselves to the conditions of our exile. The orphans will have to be taken to the dentist’s house.”

The nuns looked at one another, and at Reverend Mother, and solemnly nodded.

It was an innovation, but if Reverend Mother said so, it must be right.

“Sister Clara and Sister Dominic, you will take three orphans to the dentist to-morrow.”

Sister Clara drew herself up a little. Her throat swelled beneath the white swathings that bound her head and neck, and her double chin momentarily became three.

“Yes, Mother dear,” she said proudly.

Her Irish voice was rich and deep, compared with the thin, nasal tones of the Frenchwomen.

“Shall I order a cab for them, Mother?”

That was Sister Caroline, the _sœur econome_.

“No, no. They must walk ... holy poverty.... You will put on the heavy travelling veils, Sisters, and the big cloaks, just the same as for a journey.”

The heat of that would be stifling, in this weather and on foot! An unmortified thought.... Sister Clara stuck a pin in her sleeve. She would remember to confess a slight yielding to sensuality of thought.

There had been similar yieldings, once or twice, within the last year.

“Yes, Mother dear. Sister Dominic’ll sit in the waiting-room with two of the dear orphans, and I’ll be looking after the one that’s in with the dentist. I’ll not take an eye off of her, on any pretext whatever. I quite understand, Mother dear, that’s the way it’ll be. Make your mind easy.”

One had to be knowing, and careful, going out into the world.

There was a sense of adventure in setting out, the additional veil hanging swart, and straight, and heavy, pulling a little so that one’s head jerked slightly backwards every now and then.

Sister Dominic held a stout umbrella in one black-cotton-gloved hand, whilst the other one grasped the wrist of the youngest orphan. The other two orphans, obscured in blue serge and hard, dark, straw hat-brims, each held on to a fold of Sister Clara’s habit.

One thing, Reverend Mother had promised that the community should recite the Litany of Loretto after office just as they did to ensure anyone from the convent a safe journey.

So they’d be protected, even scurrying, a row of five, holding on to one another, across the streets, in front of those frightful honking motor-cars, that looked like they’d take the heads off of you, give them a chance.

“This’ll be it, Dominic dear. No. 3.”

A maid in a cap and apron to open the door--and the smartness of her! All grey-and-white, and showing her shape the way a modest convent-bred girl would never have done.

And the waiting-room, with a carpet, and padded chairs, and a fine pot-plant--putting worldly ideas into the orphans’ heads, as likely as not. As for the pictures and books on the table....

“Don’t be casting your eyes about that way, children dear. Sit quiet now. Dominic, the hats’ll have to come off of them, we may be sure of that. We’ll pile them this way, on the chair, and you’ll keep an eye on them, for fear someone else’ll be coming in and perhaps making off with them. It’s not as though we were in a good Catholic country.”

The hats of the orphans were stacked upon a chair, and Sister Dominic sat upon the edge of another chair, facing them. She held her umbrella.

“If he does well by the children, the sisters’ll go to him. The Infirmarian says there’s some of them with teeth in a terrible state.”

Sister Clara’s tongue sought familiar cavities, and her hand went to the particular fold of serge sleeve in which were imbedded two large pins, one of which was taken out at the end of meals, and replaced after use in the exact same place, so as to save making a fresh hole.

“If you’ll step this way, Sister----”

Mother of Mercy! What a start she’d got! It was the man himself, and smiling, too, standing holding the door open. Awfully young-looking, with dark eyes that might have been Irish, and a queer white coat on him.

And the gentleness of him, when he’d got the orphan into that chair of his! She’d only to stir, and him stopping the machine, and saying, with that smile, that he was afraid it was hurting her.

As if one didn’t go to the dentist to be hurt, and the pain to be offered up for all Reverend Mother’s intentions!

Look at the hands of him!

She watched them, moving softly and skilfully. Presently he talked to her, at first friendly, joking, little questions, then at more length, telling about himself. He was a stranger in the town, too.

“It’ll be the grand thing for you, if Reverend Mother sends the orphans regularly. I’ll put in a good word for you,” she ventured, and he looked at her, screwing-up his eyes, and laughing.

She’d not spoken to any man, not counting the good holy priests which was a different thing altogether, for many years.

But if they were all like this, where would be the harm in them at all? She’d make the orphans start a novena for his conversion to the Faith, that very night.

“Now the next child, please.”

He spent half an hour on each orphan, and the last one, he said, would have to come again.

“I’ll be bringing her along.”

He entered the appointment in a little book.

“I’ve no secretary, you see, Sister--can’t afford one yet!” and then he shook hands with her. “Good-bye.”

The feel of his hand was just what she’d imagined it’d be, gentle, and yet strong. There were funny little dark hairs all down the back of it and along the wrist. And although it was such a hot day, the palm of him was cool and dry.

Sister Dominic spoke to her, humbly, on the way home.

“Well, you’re a wonderful woman of the world, Sister Clara dear, getting us all safe there and back and talking to the man just as though it was the gardener at dear old Noisy-le-Grand. It won’t be so hard, next time, if Reverend Mother sends us again.”

Reverend Mother did send them again, with relays of orphans, and then Sister Clara alone, with old Mother Seraphina who spoke no English and whose cheap _râtelier_ appeared to need endless adjustments.

And he was always kind, and he always smiled, with that screwing-up of his eyes, and talked to Sister Clara.

One day she said that she had toothache, and received Reverend Mother’s leave to make an appointment for herself after Mother Seraphina’s session. She had, for days, been devoured by an intense curiosity to know what it would feel like to have those hands hovering about one’s face. Once, he had had to put his arm right round the back of Mother Seraphina’s old head....

“No, it’s not hurting me at all, at all.” She smiled up at him; a smile that she felt to be beatific, half-hypnotised.

“Would you like to see what I’ve been doing?”

“I would.”

“There--on the left--that big molar----”

He put a little mirror into her hands. And she that hadn’t looked in a glass, hardly, since the day of her final vows, twelve years ago!

Gracious, what a colour she had! Plum-colour, that was her face. And the smile that had felt beatific, looking foolish and uncertain, as though she were ashamed of something. The glass turned dim as her heavy breathing struck it.

Would she perhaps have been breathing into his face that way all the time, and she never thinking of such a thing?

The face in the glass looked redder than ever. Mother of Mercy, this weather! The heat of it! And the holy habit no less than five smelly thicknesses of serge, and not wearing thin yet, though on the back of her year in and year out.

“That’s the last stopping, Sister. I shan’t have to trouble you again.”

“Amn’t I to come to you any more then?”

“It won’t be necessary. What I’ve done should last you for a long while. But if you have pain, come to me at once. Any time.”

What’d it be like, at all, not seeing him any more? Could it be that she’d become inordinately attached, the way the Imitation said was so wrong? And to a man, too.

She was a wicked creature, not worthy of the holy vocation.

“Is there nothing more needs doing?”

“Nothing at all. You have excellent teeth, Sister. There’ll be no more trouble, now those fillings are in.”

The smile he gave her! So that one hardly heard what he was saying....

“If the Reverend Mother wants anyone else seen to, I shall be very pleased to do what I can. Good-bye, Sister. I should like to have persuaded you that there’s plenty of good work to be done outside, too. Take a capable woman like yourself, now. It seems a shame you should be shutting yourself up inside four walls. Why, you--you might have been my secretary, if I could only afford to have one!”

That was a grand laugh of his, it made one want to laugh too, only that one might start crying somehow.

It seemed there’d be nothing left to look forward to in the whole world after the shake of the hand meaning good-bye. There was still that....

It was the queer way to feel entirely, and her forty years old.

Touching the hand of him for the last time, and it strong and yet gentle at one and the same time, quite different to the hand of any woman....

It was over now, and one hurried away, scared that old Seraphina’d see something strange in the face of one.

“Will any more of the sisters be going to him, Mother Seraphina?”

“No.”

“Nor any of the dear children?”

“No.”

* * * * *

Mother of Mercy, there was no sleeping in this heat! But it wasn’t the heat. It was the way one was fretting and crying after what couldn’t be. Though what for couldn’t it be, when he’d said himself that it was a sin and a shame for the like of her to be shut up inside four walls, and himself wanting a secretary and not able to pay one? There’d be some glad enough to work for him without any pay.

Day after day it went on, and night after night, till the pain in one’s head was past bearing, and still there was no getting to sleep.

The things one thought of!

There was the door, giving right on to the street, and then only a bit of a walk, and oneself knowing every step of the way, and then the sight of him, and the feel of those hands of his--it was that would put everything right, and take the spell off of one.

On the hottest night of all, Sister Clara made up her mind. She’d break her holy vows, that were already broken in the heart of her, and go back into the world.

In the morning she dressed and went downstairs.

She’d not be taking anything with her. After Mass the nuns’d be going to the refectory, and they’d not be missing her for awhile, and they keeping the custody of the eyes the way the Holy Rule enjoined.

Oh, it was the fine nun she was, to talk about the Holy Rule.

The door was unlocked. Once outside on the pavement, there was nothing to do but pull it to again.

The slam of it!

There’d be no getting in again now, without a great ringing of the bell, and the portress coming to answer it, and the giving of scandal to the whole of them.

If it hadn’t been for that slam of the door....

The weather had broken. It wasn’t hot any more, but raw and chilly.

The way he’d laugh, and look at you, so interested in any little thing you said! It was wonderful.

What time did people in the world get up and start their day? Later than this, no doubt. But there’d be the waiting-room, where she’d sat with Sister Dominic and the orphans that first time of all. (Maybe she’d never set eyes on Dominic again.)

What for did that maid of his take so long to come to the door?

But it wasn’t the maid who opened the door at last.

It was a person in a blue apron, with a man’s cap pulled down over her eyes, and her sleeves rolled up, and a bucket with a mop in it at her down-at-heel feet.

“’E ain’t come yet. Won’t be ’ere, not for a hower, but if it’s the toothache, you can come in and wait.”

“Does he not live here, then?”

“Ho no,’e don’t live ’ere. But ’e comes reg’lar, and ’e’ll be along by-and-by. You go in and sit down. You won’t mind me going on with the cleaning-up? Turned cold all of a sudden, ain’t it?”

The rolled-back carpet in the waiting-room, the chairs piled, seat against seat, round the walls, the broom that presently chased into all the corners, made it seem colder.

It grew colder and colder as the hour went by.

That was the sound of a key in the lock outside.

“’Morning, Mrs. Hatch. A nasty change in the weather, isn’t it?”

Mumble, mumble, mumble.

“Oh Lord, already!”

He came into the room where Sister Clara shuddered and cowered inside her folds of enveloping black serge.

Look at the face of him! Different, somehow.

You could see how he felt the sudden chilliness in the air, and he was rubbing his hands together, hard. They were different, too--all mottled with cold.

“You in pain, Sister?”

“I--I’ve come.”

“M’m? I don’t attend to anyone till nine o’clock, you know, as a rule, but if it’s a question of pain.... Well, what can I do for you? By the look of you, it’s an abscess, isn’t it?”

THE APPEAL

THE APPEAL

This isn’t a story. It’s an attempt at reconstruction. Given my knowledge of the principals--Mary Jarvis, and her mother, Mrs. St. Luth--I think I can do it.

Mary Jarvis was my mother, and Mrs. St. Luth, of course, my grandmother. Thank god, I’m a modern and can look at them impersonally--judge each on her own merits, as it were.

My mother and my grandmother made scenes as other women make jumpers. It was their form of self-expression. I imagine--although I never knew for certain--that it was my father’s inability to maintain himself _à la hauteur_, in the perennial melodrama that was my mother’s idea of life, that led to my grandmother being invited to live with them.

She came when I, their only child, had barely reached the stage of exchanging my baby frills for first knickerbockers. (I am certain, although I don’t remember it, that my mother wept and said she felt that she had lost her baby for ever.)

Already my parents were unhappy together. Mary--I call her so here for convenience, but she would never have tolerated it in reality--Mary, although really affectionate and impressionable, was fundamentally insincere, with herself and with everybody else. She lived entirely on the emotional plane, and when genuine emotions were not forthcoming she faked them by instinct. Her mother, who belonged to the same type, although with more strength of character, and far less capacity for affection, had always played up to her. They had their violent disputes and violent reconciliations--neither could have been happy without--but they did respect one another’s poses.

But my father never played up.

He couldn’t. Worse still, if he could have done so, he wouldn’t--on principle.

Again I can’t remember, but I can imagine, almost to the point of certainty, short and searing passages between my parents.

“Robert, I want you not to ask me to play the piano to-night.”

(He so seldom gave her an opening, that she had to force them.)

“Off colour?”

“It isn’t that. I heard to-day that Mrs. Thorndyke’s child is dead. It--it upset me.”

“But you didn’t know the child.”

“I know Katherine Thorndyke.”

“You’ve met her once or twice, I remember. And didn’t we hear that if the poor child had lived, it must have been an idiot?”

Probably, at that stage, my mother burst into tears. She’d been heading for that, of course, although she didn’t know it consciously. But my father did, and had made her aware that he did, in a rather brutal fashion.

That was the way they reacted on one another.

It was better, after grandmother came. Curiously enough, my father liked her, although she and Mary had so many of the same characteristics. But I think he regarded her as a sort of lightning conductor.

For Mary herself, however, it was different. Like so many people who manufacture continual unhappiness for themselves, she had a frantic craving for happiness, and an irrational conviction that happiness was her due.

She told me herself, long afterwards, that she never had any thought of infidelity towards my father, nor did she ever meet any man who could or would have caused her to break her marriage vows. But--and this she didn’t tell me, it’s part of the reconstruction--she was constantly obsessed by a vague and romantic expectation of some such encounter. I imagine that she could not believe the world to have been created without a special application to her yearnings.

And then undoubtedly the nervous wear and tear that she imposed upon herself, and upon us all, told on her spirits. Her scenes with grandmother, although they may have served as a safety-valve, were too frequent. They may also have served to throw into painful contrast her husband’s stolid opposition to any form of emotional stimulus.

However that may be, grandmother had formed part of our household for rather less than a year, when Mary suddenly ran away.

It was, I suppose, the only dramatic thing that she could think of, in a wet and dreary February, and I have no doubt at all that she did it on impulse. That is to say, she gave herself time to write an immensely long letter to my father--in which perhaps she set forth that view of herself which he never gave her adequate opportunity for putting into words--but she gave herself no time to pack up her things. She simply took her dressing-case, and I am sure that that was mostly filled with photographs in folding frames, and packets of letters tied up with ribbon, and little manuals of devotion heavily underscored in several places.

Then she walked out of the house, and to the station, and eventually got to Assisi. And they traced her there almost at once, partly because she took no pains to cover up her tracks, and partly because my grandmother--who understood the processes of her mind--found a copy of a Life of St. Francis on the drawing-room sofa, face downwards, with one page all blistered, as though tears had fallen upon it.

My father, for his part, found the long letter that no doubt told him how little he had understood a sensitive nature, and possibly to what point their life together had become intolerable.

And this had the strange effect of making him resolve, and declare aloud, that nothing would induce him to try and get her back again. There must have been a stormy scene between him and my grandmother, who had all the conventionally moral instincts of her day, and was genuinely shocked and disturbed at her daughter’s abrupt and violent casting off of her obvious responsibilities.

“For the child’s sake, at least, Robert ...” she must have repeated many times.

(Neither she nor my mother ever understood the futility of repeating, again and again, words which had already failed of their appeal.)

“A child whose mother can leave him, at four years old, is better without her.”

“It was madness, Robert, but you know she’s not a wicked woman--my poor Mary. If you go and bring her back now, no one will ever know what has happened, and you can start a new life together, and try again.”

“It would be useless.”

“Don’t, don’t say that.” The tears must have been pouring down her old face by that time. “Oh, Robert, give her another chance. This will have been a lesson to her--won’t you forgive her and take her back?”

Well, in the end she prevailed to a certain extent--that is to say, my father would not seek out the culprit himself, but he would allow grandmother to do so, and if she brought Mary home again properly repentant he would not refuse to receive her and give her the “chance” of starting their married life afresh. “For the boy’s sake.”

My grandmother must have repeated that phrase a hundred times at least, and it was certainly her _pièce de resistance_ in the scene at Assisi with Mary.

I’ve had a version of that scene from each one of them, and on the whole the accounts tally, although of course each viewed it--as they viewed everything--exclusively from the personal angle.

My mother saw only a young, beautiful, misunderstood woman, goaded to frenzy in the grip of an uncongenial marriage, taking a desperate step in search of freedom. And then, even stronger and more touching in her relinquishment, finding the courage, for love of her child, to return to the house of bondage.

And my grandmother, with equal inevitability, saw only a sorrow-worn woman, no longer young (but infinitely interesting), courageously undertaking a solitary journey, on a mission that should restore sanctity to a shattered home. And even as her urgent plea had shaken Robert’s defences, so her eloquence, her boundless influence and unfaltering understanding, must prevail with the slighter, more trivial personality of her daughter. The achievement of persuading Mary to return to her husband and child was, my grandmother told me, the ultimate justification of her existence, in her own eyes.

As a matter of fact, I doubt if she, any more than the rest of us, felt her existence to be in any need of justification whatsoever--but she was addicted to phrases, and this one at least served as an indication to the magnitude of her effort.

For Mary did not capitulate without a struggle. And it is in the details of that struggle that my reconstruction work comes in, for although each of the protagonists has quoted to me whole sentences, and even speeches, of brilliant oratory from herself and inadequate rejoinder from the other, I do not believe either of them. Accuracy, with that type, can never co-exist with emotion--and emotion, real or imaginary, is never absent.

But this, I imagine, is more or less what took place in the sitting-room of the tiny _albergo_ at Assisi:

“I’ve come to fetch you home, my child. You shall never hear one word of reproach--Robert only wants to begin again--a new life.”

“Never, mother. It’s impossible. I’ve borne too much. I can’t ever go back to it. I must live my own life.”

(Probably Mary had been reading _The Doll’s House_. People were discovering Ibsen in those days.)

“Mary, it’s not five years since you and Robert were married, in the little country church at home, by our dear old vicar, who held you at the font when I took you, a tiny baby, to be christened.”

It may have been at this stage that Mary began to cry. Anyway, I’m certain that my grandmother did. Any allusions, however irrelevant, to little country churches at home, and Mary as a tiny baby, were always apt to bring the tears to her eyes--and I’m sure that neither of them had thought for an instant of steadying their nerves by sitting down to a solid meal. So that tears must have been easier, even, than usual.

“Robert doesn’t understand me--he never will.”

“Darling, don’t you remember your early days together? The little things--little jokes, and allusions, and happinesses shared together? Does one ever forget?”

“_No._”

Mary sobbed. “But I can’t go back to him.”

I think that here, if my grandmother gave her a chance, she probably did make one--or part of one--of the speeches that she long afterwards quoted to me.

She was intensely unhappy. Robert did not understand her, and she could not live in an unsympathetic atmosphere. She should go mad. All that she had ever asked of life was peace, beautiful surroundings, and the ideal companion.... If she went back to Robert now, after having found courage to make the break, it would be a repetition of the misery that had broken her heart during the past three years.

(The hearts of my mother and grandmother both suffered innumerable breakages throughout their lives, neither of them ever seeming aware of the physiological absurdity of the expression.)

“It’s braver to stay away than to go back and try and patch up something that can never be anything but a failure,” quavered Mary, with a momentary flash of insight.

But of course grandmother couldn’t leave it at that. She had the justification of her own existence to think of, for one thing. I am quite sure that a fortuitous street-musician, rendering “Santa Lucia” or “Silver Threads Amongst the Gold” in the distance, would have broken down Mary’s frail barrier of honest thought, and have materially assisted my grandmother to her victory. Accessories were so absolutely essentials, to them both.

But so far as I know, grandmother had to win on points, as it were, and received no extraneous help in the shape of sentimental appeals from without.

She made her supreme effort.

“For the boy’s sake, Mary ... your little, little boy. Is he to be motherless?”

“Wouldn’t Robert let me have him?”

“No, my dear. How could he? I myself--the mother that bore you, Mary--I couldn’t think it right that a woman who had deliberately deserted her husband and home should have the care of a little, innocent child.”

“Oh, my baby!”

She sobbed and cried, but she had not yet capitulated. Grandmother, however, had gauged pretty accurately the force of the baby-_motif_.

“Before I came away, on my long, lonely journey,” she said slowly, “I went up to the nursery, to say good-bye to Bobbie. He had on his blue overall--the one you embroidered for him last summer, Mary--was it only last summer?--and he was playing with his engine, on the nursery floor, his dear, round face was so solemn....”

“Oh, don’t--don’t----”

But grandmother, the tears streaming from her eyes, relentlessly continued: “Darling, his big blue eyes looked up at me, and his little voice asked: ‘_Where’s Mummie?_’”

Did grandmother’s--even grandmother’s--conscience misgive her, at the quotation? That it was verbally correct, I have no doubt--but what of the intonation?

My grandmother’s poignant rendering of “_Where’s Mummie?_” no doubt contained all the pathetic appeal of bewildered and deserted childhood throughout the ages....

But mine--the original “_Where’s Mummie?_...” I have no recollection of it, of course, but I do remember myself at four years old--a stolid, rather cynical child, utterly independent by temperament, and reacting strongly even then against a perpetually emotional atmosphere. And one knows the way in which small children utter those conventional enquiries which they unconsciously know to be expected of them ... the soft, impersonal indifference of the tone, the immediate re-absorption, without waiting for a reply, in the engrossing occupation of the moment....

Mary held out for a little while longer, but the heart went out of her resistance after the pitiful sound of that “_Where’s Mummie?_” as my grandmother rendered it.

She gave in “for the boy’s sake.”

And my grandmother had justified her existence.

They travelled home together, and Mary averted anti-climax by quite a real nervous breakdown, that overtook her after she got home, before my father had had time to forgive her in so many words.

So they began again--literally.

It wasn’t, in fact, possible for them to be happy together, and they never were so. I grew up in the midst of scenes, tears, and intermittent periods of reconciliation. There was no stability about my childhood; and no reality. Undoubtedly I was the victim--far more so than my father, who presently sought and found consolation elsewhere, or than Mary, whom he thus provided with a perfectly legitimate grievance that lasted her until he died, fifteen years later. After that, she was able gradually to forget that there had ever been unhappiness between them, and to assume the identity of a heart-broken widow.

Mrs. St. Luth, my grandmother, lived to be very old.

“But useless old woman though I am, God gave me the opportunity of justifying my existence, when He let me bring a mother home to her little child....”

I wonder.

* * * * *

Thank god, I’m a modern.

THE FIRST STONE

THE FIRST STONE

A PLAY IN ONE ACT

_Characters_:

MRS. LLOYD-EVANS } _Members of the local Welfare MRS. BALLANTYNE } Committee_ MRS. AKERS } MISS MILLER _Secretary to the Committee._

SCENE

_A committee-room on the top floor of a house in a small provincial town. Back of the stage, centre, there is a door, opening inwards on to the stage. To the right of the door, a few pegs are on the wall for hanging coats, etc. Right of the stage, is a good-sized window, showing distant views of chimney-pots outside. Left of the stage, a small gas-fire burns. Near it, a table and chairs have been formally arranged for the meeting._

_The whole atmosphere of the room is cold and dreary. Time: a winter afternoon in 1917._

_Miss Miller discovered. She is cold and tired-looking, mechanically arranging blotting-paper, etc. on the table._

_Mrs. Ballantyne enters. She is prosperous-looking and clad in warm furs, and is out of breath from ascending the stairs._

MISS MILLER: Good afternoon, Mrs. Ballantyne.

MRS. BALLANTYNE (_out of breath_): Good afternoon. Oh dear, those stairs! I’m out of breath.

MISS MILLER: They are trying, aren’t they? Four flights!

MRS. BALLANTYNE: Oh, you oughtn’t to find them trying, at your age. Tell me, have you any idea why we’ve all been asked to come here to-day, Miss Miller? It’s not the day for our regular meeting, at all.

MISS MILLER: No, I’ve got the notice for that all ready to send out as usual. This is a special meeting that Mrs. Lloyd-Evans is calling. She only sent me a note about it last night, telling me to get the room ready.

MRS. BALLANTYNE: She wrote to me too, but she didn’t say what it was all about. I suppose she’ll have written to Mrs. Akers, as well.

MISS MILLER: Here they are.

(_Enter Mrs. Lloyd-Evans and Mrs. Akers. Mrs. Lloyd-Evans is mysterious and melancholy, and Mrs. Akers lively and full of undisguised curiosity. Both wear heavy coats, furs, etc. They shake hands with Mrs. Ballantyne, and nod and say how d’ye do to Miss Miller. Whilst they talk they loosen or take off their wraps, and place them on the pegs near the door._)

MRS. LLOYD-EVANS (_to Mrs. Ballantyne_): How d’ye do. We’re all a little before our time, I think, but then as I always say, it’s better to be too early than too late. (_This she says with an air of originality._)

MRS. BALLANTYNE: Of course, the minute I got your note I quite saw that something must have happened, or you wouldn’t have asked us to come out in this dreadful cold, _and_ up those awful stairs. I do think, when we’re doing the whole of this Welfare Committee business gratuitously, that they might have found us a room on the ground floor. Isn’t there any hope of getting better premises?

MRS. LLOYD-EVANS: They pretend that any accommodation is difficult to find nowadays, but I should like to know why some building shouldn’t be done? What I always say is, that there wouldn’t be half this unemployment trouble, if people were given _work_.

MRS. BALLANTYNE (_bored_): Yes, indeed.

MRS. LLOYD-EVANS: It’s just Bolshevism, you know, all this talk of unemployment. There’s always work for those who are willing to work. Now I can’t help thinking it would put a stop to all this labour unrest, if they could only send a few of the leaders to _Russia_, to show them what Bolshevism has resulted in, there.

Mrs. Ballantyne: Yes, of course. It really would be a lesson. (_She is arranging her dress, etc., as she speaks, and tidying herself at a little pocket-mirror._)

MRS. AKERS (_seating herself, to Mrs. Lloyd-Evans_): Well, I’m all agog to know what’s happened. Your note was most mysterious. What’s been happening at the School? Really, the present generation is the limit--always giving trouble. It seems to have come in with bobbed hair.

MRS. LLOYD-EVANS: Girls are often very artful.

MRS. AKERS: Well, we ought to be able to cope with the artfulness of mere schoolgirls, surely. Now do let’s sit down and get to business.

MRS. BALLANTYNE (_to Mrs. Lloyd-Evans_): As you see, I haven’t brought my daughter. I’m sure it was very thoughtful of you to warn me in your note, but I gather it means that we have something--painful--to discuss?

MRS. LLOYD-EVANS: One hardly likes to put things into words--but your Phyllis is a young girl, after all, and I always feel there ought to be something _sacred_ about a young girl.

MRS. BALLANTYNE: I had to pretend to Phyllis that you wanted to speak about some very dull question of finance. It was deceiving her, perhaps, but I _do_ so agree with you about how one ought to treat young girls as something _sacred_, as you say. So I told her the whole thing was going to be very formal, and only members of the actual Committee allowed to be present. I’m afraid it was rather in the nature of a pious fraud.

(_They all laugh, and draw slightly closer together_.)

MRS. LLOYD-EVANS: Before we begin, I should like to say that this must all be in absolute confidence.

MRS. BALLANTYNE (_looking at Miss Miller_): Excuse me a moment. (_She whispers to Mrs. Lloyd-Evans. The other ladies try to hear what is said, and at the same time to look as though they were doing nothing of the sort._)

MRS. LLOYD-EVANS (_aloud_): I am sure Miss Miller will be discreet. Charity sometimes forces one to face very painful things, and one must be brave and hear about various tragedies that one would far prefer never to mention at all. (_Pause._) One hardly knows how to word certain things. (_Pause._)

MRS. BALLANTYNE: Really, if it’s anything of _that_ sort, I think we ought to ask Miss Miller to leave us. (_Aside_): she’s only a girl.

MRS. AKERS (_eagerly_): _That_ sort? What sort?

MRS. BALLANTYNE: Well, you know what I mean. But I’m sure I hope I’m mistaken.

MRS. LLOYD-EVANS: I’m afraid you’re not, Mrs. Ballantyne.

MRS. AKERS: Call a spade a spade. Is it the usual thing?

MRS. LLOYD-EVANS: I should be sorry to call it the _usual_ thing. But I’m afraid that’s what it is.

MRS. AKERS: I’ve worked in a district, and my husband has a large medical practice amongst poor people. I suppose some girl has got into trouble?

(_Mrs. Lloyd-Evans bows her head in assent, and once more all three ladies draw their chairs closer together. Miss Miller covers her face with her hands for a moment._) _From now onwards, the three ladies are all much more animated, and full of barely-disguised enjoyment of a subject which they all regard as a delicate one._

MRS. BALLANTYNE: We’re all married women here, and I think we can discuss this better without Miss Miller.

MISS MILLER (_quickly, and with suppressed agitation_): If it’s a formal meeting, you’ll want the minutes entered.

MRS. AKERS: Yes. She’d better stay.

MRS. BALLANTYNE (_aside to Mrs. Akers_): I don’t agree. I’m the mother of a girl myself, as you know, and to me girlhood is _sacred_. We have a most painful subject to discuss.

MISS MILLER: Please let me stay. I--I might help.

MRS. LLOYD-EVANS: How could _you_ help, Miss Miller? And even if you could, it would be most unsuitable in an unmarried girl like yourself. Please wait in the next room until we call you to take down the results of the conference.

(_Exit Miss Miller, and shuts the door._)

MRS. LLOYD-EVANS: I don’t know that I altogether like that girl. Rather horrid of her to be so curious, wasn’t it?

MRS. BALLANTYNE: Any young woman with a _nice_ mind would have been only too thankful to be spared the embarrassment of staying in the room while such a thing was being discussed. (_Her tone changes to eagerness._) Well, this is too dreadful! Which of the girls is it?

MRS. AKERS: I’m certain it’s one of those twins! They really are pretty--you know what I mean, pretty _for_ that class. Which of them is it?

MRS. LLOYD-EVANS: It’s nothing to do with the twins. (Though I daresay it’ll be them next--one never knows, when once this sort of thing begins.) No, it’s the girl from London, the daughter of that widowed Mrs. Smith who has been taking in washing in West Street.

MRS. AKERS: Fanny!

MRS. BALLANTYNE: That child! But she can’t be more than sixteen.

MRS. LLOYD-EVANS: Fifteen. But one knows what London girls are, at any age.

MRS. AKERS: How did you find out? Is it absolutely certain?

MRS. LLOYD-EVANS: Absolutely. It ought to have been found out months ago, if the girl hadn’t been so artful. Even her mother says she had no idea, till just the other day.

MRS. AKERS (_decidedly_): That’s impossible.

MRS. LLOYD-EVANS: She pitched a long yarn about the girl herself not having known what was happening. They pretend it came to light by accident, through something Fanny said to her mother, which made her suspicious.

MRS. AKERS (_eagerly_): What was that? If we’re to help at all, we’d better know everything.

(_Mrs. Lloyd-Evans whispers to her, and Mrs. Akers whispers in her turn to Mrs. Ballantyne._)

MRS. BALLANTYNE: And when do they expect----

MRS. LLOYD-EVANS: In three months’ time, actually.

(_The members of the Committee, in silence, make rapid movements upon their fingers, in evident calculation._)

MRS. AKERS: Then it must have happened after they got down here, that’s clear.

MRS. LLOYD-EVANS: I think it’s much more likely it was in London. There’d just be time. Londoners are always immoral. Besides, as I said to her, _in our town these things don’t happen_.

MRS. BALLANTYNE: How did they take it?

MRS. LLOYD-EVANS: The girl herself seems absolutely callous. I couldn’t get a word out of her. The mother says she hasn’t been able to, either, and she’s been trying to force her to tell her when it happened. The grandmother was there, as well, and you know what an odious old woman _she_ is. I shouldn’t be at all surprised if she’d been in the plot the whole time.

MRS. BALLANTYNE: When did all this conversation take place, if I may ask?

MRS. LLOYD-EVANS: Only yesterday. I happened to go in there, and found the mother in tears, so of course I got the whole story out of her. I felt it was a question for the Welfare Committee--married women, like ourselves--and I’ve done absolutely nothing, except ask Dr. Akers to see the girl and make certain.

MRS. AKERS: Well! He’s never said a word to _me_ about it. I must say, he was out late last night and early this morning, but I do think he ought to have given me a hint.

MRS. LLOYD-EVANS: Gentlemen are so odd, about anything to do with their business. I’ve often noticed it. One has to probe for _hours_, sometimes, to get the simplest piece of information.

MRS. AKERS: Look here, we shall have to settle something. Of course the girl must go away.

THE OTHERS: Of course.

MRS. AKERS: The question is, where?

MRS. BALLANTYNE: Surely some Sisterhood would take her in.

MRS. LLOYD-EVANS: One doesn’t want to be hard on her. I told the mother that we should discuss it all quietly amongst ourselves before settling anything.

MRS. BALLANTYNE: _I_ think we ought to send for the girl, and see if we can get anything out of her. Of course, it would be very trying and dreadful, but I’m sure that’s what we ought to do. I, for one, shouldn’t shrink from it.

MRS. LLOYD-EVANS: You wouldn’t get a word out of her. They were all in league together, it seemed to me. Thoroughly artful and determined to stick together, I thought them, all three of them.

MRS. AKERS: I can’t see why the grandmother should have any say in the matter at all. Pray what has _she_ to do with it?

MRS. LLOYD-EVANS: She talked a great deal of nonsense about wanting to keep Fanny at home. As I said to her, if keeping Fanny at home results in _this_ sort of thing, then the sooner Fanny goes away from home the better. She was thoroughly nonplussed at that, as you may imagine, and couldn’t answer anything at all, though of course she chattered away, but I took not the slightest notice.

MRS. BALLANTYNE: But, Mrs. Lloyd-Evans, do you mean to say that they won’t tell who the man is?

MRS. LLOYD-EVANS: The girl won’t say a word. As I said to her myself, it _must_ have been somebody in London before they came away, and it’s no use telling me it happened here, because I simply shan’t believe it.

MRS. AKERS: Well, what about a Home, or some other place where the girl could go till it’s all over? It had better be as far away from here as possible, of course.

THE OTHER TWO AS BEFORE: Oh, of course.

MRS. AKERS: I have two or three addresses of that kind--one place is near London.

MRS. BALLANTYNE: The very thing. I’d gladly take her up myself, if necessary. She’s very young and one doesn’t want to be hard on her. What line are the mother and grandmother taking up?

MRS. LLOYD-EVANS: The mother cried a good deal, and said how ashamed she was that the girl should make such a return for all that’s been done for them down here. People have been very kind about employing her--I’ve sent washing there myself. (She charges less than the steam-laundry.) She was thoroughly upset, and one could have managed _her_ all right. It’s the grandmother that’s so impossible, and the girl looks as though she could be thoroughly obstinate. I’m bound to say she was looking very ill, so one didn’t want to frighten her.

MRS. AKERS: Well, that doesn’t apply to the old woman. She must be squashed. Leave the grandmother to me if necessary. If there’s any difficulty about their letting Fanny go, I can say we shall inform the police. These people are perfectly ignorant of the law, and would probably believe anything. (_She laughs in a slightly shamefaced, way._) After all, it’s for the girl’s own good.

MRS. BALLANTYNE: Certainly, and besides, for their own sake they want to avoid exposure. The mother can be told that the Committee is taking the whole expense and trouble off her hands, and she’ll be only too thankful to let the girl go. She can come back when it’s all over, and if they’re careful, people needn’t know anything about it.

MRS. BALLANTYNE: But what will happen--when----

MRS. LLOYD-EVANS: What?

MRS. BALLANTYNE: What will be done with the--with the little----

MRS. AKERS: The _results_, you mean?

MRS. LLOYD-EVANS: Oh, the baby. In these sad cases, one almost hopes that it may not live, dreadful though it sounds to say such a thing.

MRS. AKERS: My husband tells me that in his experience, illegitimate children are often particularly strong and healthy infants.

MRS. LLOYD-EVANS: God’s ways are not our ways.

MRS. AKERS (_to Mrs. Ballantyne_): But in this case, of course, the child will be taken away the minute it’s born, and the mother will probably never set eyes on it at all. It’s taken to some Institution where they look after it, and that gives the mother a chance of living it down. Especially when she’s so young.

MRS. LLOYD-EVANS: The grandmother said something about the baby, as she called it, but of course I stopped that at once. They can hardly earn enough to keep themselves, as it is, and if there was any question of Fanny being allowed to keep the child, it would simply amount, as I told her, to putting a premium upon immorality. Of course, if one knew who the man was, pressure could be brought to bear on him, but I don’t believe for an instant that it’s a case of the girl having been seduced. She’s probably a thorough little bad lot. Quite likely she doesn’t know who the father is. I’m told that some of these London girls are frightfully--promiscuous.

MRS. AKERS: I don’t know how to believe that--at fifteen! I’m afraid it may have been somebody down here, you know.

MRS. LLOYD-EVANS: Oh please don’t suggest such a thing. It’s the last thing we want to have established. Just think of the talk! As it is, if we don’t press the question, we can get the girl away quietly and nothing be known about it.

MRS. BALLANTYNE: You think we shan’t get anything out of her?

MRS. LLOYD-EVANS: Nothing, nor her mother either, according to her own account. The old grandmother began some story about an assault having perhaps been made on the girl, and she too frightened to tell; but as I said, if that sort of thing was new to her, a girl’s first impulse would be to rush to her mother with the story, and if she didn’t, it only showed that she thought nothing of it.

MRS. AKERS (_thoughtfully_): I wonder if _I_ could get anything out of her? I’ve a very good mind to go home that way. One dreads having to deal with this sort of sad case, but after all, it’s charity. I could put the old grandmother into her place once and for all, as you say she’s disposed to be tiresome, and make Fanny herself understand that we only want to help her. After all, we’ve all read our Bible, I hope: “Which amongst you shall cast the first stone?”

MRS. BALLANTYNE: As the mother of a girl myself, I was wondering if _I_ ought not to talk to Fanny, perhaps. Goodness knows, it’s a miserable affair, but the world is what it is, and it’s no use _shrinking_ from these things.

MRS. LLOYD-EVANS (_displeased_): As it was I who made this very sad and perplexing discovery, I think I had better be the person to see the business through. Naturally, one consults the Committee, but I can’t help feeling that there had better be only one intermediary between the Committee and the girl’s family. It’s more business-like, and one must be business-like.

MRS. BALLANTYNE: Oh, certainly!

MRS. AKERS: But this isn’t an official meeting, is it? We’ve had no notes taken, or anything. And we haven’t passed any resolution. Now, I should like to propose that I write to-night to St. Mary Magdalene’s Home and try and arrange to get Fanny taken in there as soon as possible, and kept till after the birth of the child.

MRS. BALLANTYNE: I second that.

MRS. LLOYD-EVANS: Proposed and seconded. Those in favour--(_they each lift up a hand_). Those against.... Carried unanimously, I think.

MRS. AKERS: Now, is there anything more we can do?

MRS. LLOYD-EVANS: I don’t think so. If there are any further developments, I will let you know, of course. I mean, if one can get any admission out of the girl, for instance. She seemed to me perfectly stolid and bewildered, but one doesn’t want to risk upsetting her, naturally. It would be extremely annoying if anything happened before we can get her away.

MRS. BALLANTYNE: What did they say about her health? Is she all right?

MRS. LLOYD-EVANS: Perfectly all right. Why shouldn’t she be--a young, healthy girl like that!

MRS. AKERS: After all, it’s nature.

MRS. LLOYD-EVANS: I don’t call it nature at all, at fifteen. I call it _sin_. (_Rises, and goes to put on her coat. The other two remain seated._)

MRS. BALLANTYNE (_shuddering_): Fifteen! Just think of it! My Phyllis is only two years older. Thank heaven, I’ve been able to keep her as innocent as a baby. She knows _nothing_--absolutely nothing.

MRS. AKERS: Innocence is such a safeguard.

MRS. BALLANTYNE: What I shall tell her about this meeting, I really don’t know. Unfortunately, she knew where I was coming, and I shall have to invent something to tell her in case she asks any questions about it, as she’s certain to do. Luckily, I think she trusts me absolutely.

MRS. AKERS: Come home to tea with me, dear Mrs. Ballantyne. It will help to take both our minds off the whole sad subject.

MRS. BALLANTYNE: How very kind of you! I should love to. We must try and forget all about it for the time being.

MRS. AKERS: I can’t help wondering how Fanny could have managed to deceive her mother for so long.

MRS. BALLANTYNE: I must say, I should have thought any woman with eyes in her head----

MRS. AKERS: Yes, and besides, why didn’t the girl, if she was a respectable girl, go _straight_ to her mother when----

(_Mrs. Akers and Mrs. Ballantyne, lean across the table, talking busily about Fanny’s behaviour, both at once. Meanwhile Mrs. Lloyd-Evans, who has now got her furs on, stands as though listening to some sound outside the door, unnoticed by the other two. She tiptoes rapidly to the door and flings it open. Miss Miller is crouching outside, having evidently been listening. One side of her face is scarlet where it has been pressed to the door, the other white. She rises awkwardly as the door opens, but not before they have all seen her._)

MRS. LLOYD-EVANS: I _thought_ so!

MISS MILLER (_wildly_): What did you think, Mrs. Lloyd-Evans? That I’ve been listening at the door? So I have! That I’ve overheard all your charitable plans for Fanny Smith and her illegitimate child? So I have!

MRS. AKERS: You should be ashamed of yourself.

MRS. BALLANTYNE: What’s the meaning of this?

MISS MILLER: I’ll tell you. You said just now that the world is what it is--there’s no use in shrinking from things--shrinking from them! Ha, ha, ha! (_she laughs hysterically_). You’re a great deal more likely to jump at them. But if you want to have my explanation, you shall have it.

MRS. LLOYD-EVANS (_pointing to the door_): Miss Miller, leave the room.

(_Miss Miller looks at her, still laughing, then turns the key in the door, shutting and locking it._)

MISS MILLER: I shan’t leave the room, nor you either, till you’ve heard what I’ve got to say.

MRS. AKERS: Good heavens, she’s mad!

MRS. LLOYD-EVANS (_advancing resolutely_): Give me that key this moment (_putting out her hand for it_).

(_Miss Miller, too quick for her, dashes to the window, throwing up the sash, and flings out the key. During the rest of the scene she stands with her back to the open window, while the three other women are grouped together behind the table, at the further side of the room._)

MISS MILLER (_her voice has grown cunning, and bitterly and vehemently ironical both at once. She gives the impression of dementia_): _I_ knew what you were going to talk about. _She_ (_pointing to Mrs. Akers_) gave it away when she said it must be “the usual thing.” Of course I listened, to hear what you’d do for Fanny--poor Fanny, who’s going to bring a little baby into the world, and who’s been ill and terrified and unhappy, all these months. And you (_to Mrs. Lloyd-Evans, bitter mockery in her tone_) found it out, and you asked these other kind, charitable, rich ladies to come and meet you here, so that you could all talk it over, and make plans about Fanny. (_Suddenly and viciously_): And oh, how you all _enjoyed_ it--didn’t you--telling each other how painful it was, and how sad, and how you could hardly put it into words!

(_Fiercely_): Why, you nearly scratched one another’s eyes out for the fun of going to Fanny’s mother, and “putting the old grandmother into her place” and putting Fanny through the Third Degree, nagging and nagging at her to _tell_, so that you could hear more shocking details, and come and gloat over them.

(_Mimicking_): “Oh, but we want to help her,” and “girlhood is so _sacred_.” (_To Mrs. Ballantyne_): Yes, you said that several times, didn’t you, you who are so thankful that your girl _trusts_ you--so that when you cheat her and tell little lies for her own good, the poor little fool swallows it. She won’t always swallow it, you know--she’ll find you out one day. Just like I’ve found out, what charity means and what’s done to girls who sin and get found out. I had to know, you see, because--I’ve done what Fanny did----

(_The women cry out, below their breath._)

MISS MILLER: You needn’t be frightened--it isn’t anyone down here. That’s what you’re afraid of, isn’t it--that it may all end up tamely after all, with a hasty marriage, and nothing left to talk about! You’d like to hustle me away, like Fanny, to somewhere that will take your money, and make you feel all nice and glowing and charitable--and where they’ll “take away the baby, and the mother probably never sets eyes on it at all.” To be allowed to keep it, would “put a premium on immorality” wouldn’t it? Ha, ha, ha! I’ve been frightened all these weeks, but I’m not frightened any more now. Something went snap inside my head, I think, all in a minute, while I was listening to all of you. I’d thought of appealing to you, you see--such kind ladies, all given over to works of charity! If you’re the _charitable_ (_laughing wildly_) what would _other_ people say? No, no, no--I’ll not be like Fanny, I’ve thought of a better plan than any of yours!

(_She springs on to the sill of the open window. Mrs. Akers cries “Stop her!” and they dash forward, but the table impedes them, and Miss Miller, still laughing, throws herself out._

_The curtain falls as Mrs. Lloyd-Evans, screaming, pulls at the locked door, and the other two women throw themselves against the window and look downwards._)

THE END

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