PART III

WELL WALK

I

As far as my worldly position is concerned, two leaps have sufficed to place me where I stand to-day--the first from the Vale of Health to the Well Walk, not a quarter of a mile away, and the second from Well Walk to Iddesleigh Gate. I am omitting such interludes as furnished rooms for short periods and odd times in which I have packed Evie off with the children to the seaside. We were in the Vale of Health for exactly a year, and in Well Walk for three. I took the Iddesleigh Gate House, wonderful ceilings and Amaranth Room and all, from the late Baron Stillhausen.

But this is a very summary statement of what my real advance has been. Those who have called me a lucky man--which on the whole I also am persuaded I am--know nothing of my hidden labour. Of this, since it is just beginning to show in the contemporary history of my country, I cannot say very much; and so, picking out a fact here and an incident there, I shall take leave for the rest of my tale to keep as closely as may be to my increasingly intricate personal story.

The incident with which I will resume--the incident which resulted in Louie Causton's appointment to the post still held by Miss Levey--came about as follows.

In taking the Well Walk house--(here I am skipping six months; my infant son was born; I still had seven or eight weeks to run with the F.B.C., but already our plans were perfected, and the new Consolidation had already secured its premises in Pall Mall)--in taking the Well Walk house I had made a woeful miscalculation of how far the Verandah Cottage furniture would go. Indeed I had so over-estimated its quantity that our new abode was almost as bare as a barracks, and, occupied as I was with important business, I had almost got used to its barrenness. But as Evie had to live in the place, I had found that I really must raise a sum of money for carpets, curtains, and other things indispensable to married folk who find themselves three; and I had decided that part of the one hundred pounds I got as an advance from Pepper was going to be spent on a dining-room table that I had not always to remember I must not sit down on. Well, on a Saturday afternoon in October this table came. I saw it into the dining-room, and then, feeling the need of air, I put on my hat and coat and took a walk as far as the Whitestone Pond. There I met Billy Izzard, in the dickens of a temper.

"Well, how goes it, Billy?" I asked cheerfully, seeing that he was put out. Billy's grumblings always have the effect of cheering me up.

He looked up, scowled, and then resumed his gazing across the Pond. Then he watched the passage of a horse and cart through the water, looked up again, and broke out.

"It goes rottenly--that's how it goes!" he growled. "Do you remember coming into my place one evening when I had a girl sitting for me--tallish girl, with a perfectly exquisite figure--Louie Causton her name was?"

I said that I did remember it.

"Well, she's the trouble. I want her--must have her--and I can't get her. She says she isn't sitting any more; her doctor's forbidden it. Her doctor!... The jade's as sound as a bell; she never had a doctor in her life, I'll swear; she just won't sit, doesn't want to. She wheedled that sketch out of me too, the one I was doing that day--walked off with it under her arm--stole it, practically--and now I can't get her for love or money."

This interested me. It interested me so much that to conceal my interest, I made a joke. "Oh? Tried both?" I said; but Billy went on.

"Perhaps she'll change her mind when she finds she's nothing to live on. She'll sit in costume, it appears; some cock and bull story about chills; and she said, Couldn't I paint her in some old supers' duds that she can hire at the Models' Club for sixpence a day?--me painting theatrical wardrobes _à la_ Coleman, Roma?... And her crochet!"

"What about her crochet?"

"Her crochet? Why, when I told her she wouldn't make fifteen shillings a week as Marguerite with the jewel-casket--she's not pretty--I told her so--she said she could fall back on her crochet! A goddess, I tell you ... and she pitches me a tale about a doctor that she can't help laughing at herself!"

He ran on, to Louie's detriment from his special point of view, but already I was wondering what her own point of view might be.

That I had not heard from Louie since that night of the Berkeley dinner had been, as far as it went, reassuring. Had she needed me, or I her, whichever in the tangled circumstances it might be, I should have heard from her; and I had had no reason for seeking her out. When Evie had told me that Louie now had charge of Kitty Windus she had told me nothing that I had not already known; and as Evie had had this from Miriam Levey, I find I must break off for a moment to speak of my relation with that lady.

Since she had got her fat, high-heeled foot inside my door, Miss Levey's devotion to Evie had been as unremitting as if, lacking her attentions, my little son would never have got himself born at all. Not a week had passed but she had dropped in once or twice, mostly alone, but not infrequently with the ringleted Aschael. It annoyed me that Evie should like her as much as apparently she did, and my annoyance was the greater that I could give no reason for it. One night I had given way rather petulantly to this annoyance. It had been just before we had left Verandah Cottage. Billy Izzard had come in and had made some remark about our Arab horsemen, and, more that I might relish its artistic vulgarity than for any other reason, I had taken one of these objects down from the mantelpiece. I had not known that I had held the thing in a rather vindictive grip until suddenly the plaster had broken in my hand. My other hand had made an instinctive movement by no means prompted by presence of mind. I had saved the body of the ornament from total smash, but the heads both of tamer and steed were in fragments. I had been on the point of throwing the ridiculous thing away, but had changed my mind, and put it back on the mantelpiece. Later I had expressed bland sorrow to Miss Levey, and had assured her that I was going to have it mended; but I had not done so during the remainder of our stay at Verandah Cottage. I did not know what had become either of it or of its companion statue.

During the last anxious days before the birth of our child, Miss Levey had triumphed over me completely. There had been no withstanding her. She had bidden me fetch hot-water bottles, had informed me when it was time for Evie to go to bed, and, conspiring with Aunt Angela, had, in a word, taken things out of my hands entirely. Once or twice she had overdone this even in Evie's eyes, but I had been dull enough not to see at first that her ascendancy over Evie was not direct, but mediate. Only lately had I discovered that Evie's real interest was, not in Miriam Levey, but in Kitty Windus.

For those talks I had dreaded yet had been powerless to prevent had already borne fruit. I don't think it was so much that Evie experienced again those compassions and magnanimities that had given her that gentle heartache in the tea-gardens on that Bank Holiday evening, as that she remembered the wish into which they had solidified--the wish to have Kitty completely off her mind. Miss Levey, I was pretty sure, had seen to it that this wish should become firmly fixed. She had evidently assumed, for example, that I should be adverse to a meeting between Kitty and Evie. "Your husband wouldn't like it," I could imagine her as having said; "quite naturally, my dear; one can't blame him; and so I suppose that ends it." And to the last words I could imagine her as having given the meaning, "We do seem to be dependent on the will of this dull opinionative sex for some reason or other--why I can't make out." Miss Levey, you see, was an economically emancipated woman.

So, though not a word had been said, Kitty had come, by reason of I knew not what sympathy Miriam Levey had worked up on her behalf, to be between Evie and myself. That poor Kitty deserved all the sympathy we could give her I had never a doubt, but you see the two things that stood in the way--the lesser thing that Miss Levey assumed I "should not like," and that other huge and fatal thing that was the truth. To the multitudinous harassings of my business these two things made a dense background of private harassings.... But I did not intend that another long and dogged duel should begin between Miriam Levey and myself. She was not going to be taken over by Pepper, Jeffries and the Consolidation. If this enterprise did anything at all it would do something very big indeed; soon I should be placed high above the wretched little Jewess's power to hurt; and after all, there is no man who attains to great power but leaves in his train a score of these carpers, wishful yet impotent to harm.

But the offering of the new post to Louie Causton was another matter. I hesitated and wavered. Plainly, I doubted whether I had the right to find Louie a job. In the close-packed fulness of her life, struggles and anxieties and all, her happiness consisted; and though she might need the money, as matters stood she had a peace that money could not give, and might take away. Let her, I thought at first, toil and keep her heaven.

But that, I thought presently, might be all very high and fine, but practically not very much to the point. Billy had been perfectly right when he had said that by costume-sitting and crochet she would hardly make fifteen shillings a week. I knew of old what heaven in those circumstances meant, and I had had no boy to look after, and no woman intermittently infirm. One can have too much even of heaven on those terms....

And yet it would be impossible to attach her to my own office. What I had seen in those grey eyes on the night of the Berkeley dinner would not brook daily meetings, dictation of letters, and the other duties I had already cast Whitlock for. Myself left out of the question, she, I was quite sure, would never accept it. Turn her over to Pepper, then? That would hardly be fair to Pepper, who might wish to choose for himself....

And one other thing, of which I will speak presently, had already caused my cheeks to burn.

Well, I should have to see what I could do.

It did not surprise me much that when I reached Well Walk again, Miss Levey was there. That echoing, half-furnished house of ours, I ought to say, was on the south side of the Walk, and my own study was on the ground floor at the back, with Evie's drawing-room immediately overhead. I heard this drawing-room door open as I entered, and it was on the bare half-landing, against the red and blue window, with cut-glass stars round its border, that I saw Miss Levey's flamingo-coloured costume with the black satin buttons.

"Oh, here he is," Evie was saying; "he'll take you on to your bus. Good-bye, Miriam, dear--remember me to Aschael----"

"Good-bye, darling--don't forget, will you?"

"Good-bye."

I remember that it was as I took Miss Levey to her bus that afternoon that she asked me to call her by her Christian name. Instantly I did so--and forgot her request again with a promptitude even greater. To tell the truth, that "Remember me to Aschael" of Evie's stuck a little in my throat. A little more ceremony, it seemed to me, would have fitted the relation better, and I differed from Miss Levey if she thought that in asking me to call her "Miriam," she, and not I, was conferring the favour. Therefore as I saw her off I again addressed her as "Miss Levey" and let her take it as an inadvertence or not as she list. Then, with that "Remember me to Aschael" again uppermost in my mind, I returned to Evie.

In hoping to see her alone, however, I was again disappointed. This time Aunt Angela was there. She was standing by the new dining-table, and apparently deploring my purchase.

"_What_ a pity!" she was saying. "Just when I'd arranged for you to have that one of mine! I meant it as a surprise--oh, why didn't I tell you sooner!"

I have referred, I hope not unkindly, to a certain laxity in this dear and harmless spinster's hold on life. Since the birth of our child this laxity had become intensified, if such a word can be used of laxity, and very rarely had she come up to see us empty-handed. From some mysterious hoard of belongings that seemed ever on the point of exhaustion and yet ever stood the strain of another gift, she had brought, now a tiny pair of knitted woollen socks, now a shawl, now a bit of silver, and even the mite's cradle was that in which Evie herself had been rocked. She found a pleasure quite paradisal in these continual givings. I think they were her spiritual boasts of how little she required for herself.

"_What_ a pity!" she purred again. "But I dare say they'd take it back----"

"Hallo!" I said, shaking hands. "Take what back? What's that you're saying?"

"This table. I'm sure they'd let you off your bargain for ten shillings or so. The money would be so much more useful."

I laughed. "Oh, money's no object," I said.

This, of course, was mere mischief. The truth was that Angela Soames, like Evie, had begun to hold my ambition a good deal in dread. It had been good fun to think about in the early stages; they had enjoyed that part as much as anybody; but to take the plunge as I was taking it was--in Miss Angela's case I might almost say "impious"; certainly it was a storming of destiny that was bound to bring a crop of consequences they were sure I had not sufficiently weighed. So it had become my habit to hold their timidity over them as a joke, talking sometimes in sums that might have staggered even the Consolidation. "Oh, money's no object!" I said, laughing.

"Well!" Aunt Angela retorted, "even you can't afford to throw it away till you've got it. So, Evie, I thought my round table in place of this one--send this back--and the tea-urn I promised you in the middle of the sideboard, with Mr. Pepper's candlesticks on each side of it--just here--and you could buy a quite nice pair of curtains with the pound Jeff turns up his nose at."

I interrupted. "Your tea-urn? Oh, come, come! We're not going to accept that!"

But she only dropped her eyes. "My wants are few," she said, "and I've more than enough for them. You young people come first. How do you know I haven't had a legacy?... And of course I shall have the table repolished, Evie, and if Jeff _will_ be stupid, you can have it in the drawing-room, in that corner by the bureau----"

I was about to laugh again at the artless mixture in her of expansive unworldliness and quite astute machination when suddenly I thought better of it, and turned away. Aunt Angela was taking off her hat and giving coquettish touches to her tall, snowy hair. As that meant that she proposed to spend the evening with us, I had to postpone what I wished to say to Evie until she should have departed.

II

This was no more than that I thought the Christian name business was being a little overdone; but the more I thought of it, the less easy did it become to put. Perhaps you see my difficulty. It was, in a word, this: that a man on whom circumstances have pressed with such unique urgency that he has had, or conceived himself to have, no choice but to effect the removal of a fellow-being from the world, cannot take even so small a matter as this precisely as another man can. The quick of his soul is perpetually exposed. There are no trifles in his world. What is another man's slight annoyance is to him the menace of an assassination; another's nothings are his doom. A single unconscious touch and the toucher starts back with an amazed "What's this?"

Yet I have said that it was not remorse that bred this sensitiveness in me, and I hasten to maintain that. Remorse is a damage, in which a man is penally mulcted; but this of mine was no more than a price, fairly and squarely agreed upon, which I was prepared to pay. It was a heavy one; you may take my word for it that there is no more costly purchase in the whole market of human happenings than a righteous murder; but it still remained a price, in the fixing of which I had concurred. More than this: men have been known, from remorse, to give themselves up; but at the thought of such a surrender I grew hot and vehement. I appreciated the point of view of the very revolutionaries against whom my life's work has been directed. What! Suffer an outside judgment when I was acquitted in my own!... I laughed, and in my laughter found courage. Not I!...

And a man is not in the grip of remorse who, asked whether he would do his deed again, can reply with a deep "By heaven--yes!"

Nevertheless, I was perilously open. I alone among men could not rebuff the freedom of a Christian name without bringing my soul into the transaction; nay, I could not even buy a dining-table without having (as I had just had) to check an utterance and to turn away. For at Aunt Angela's words, "How do you know I haven't had a legacy?" I had become vigilant again. She had had no legacy; I knew that; but she _had_ been twice or thrice to Guildford, and, if she wished to indulge herself in the luxury of giving, would be likely to make the most rather than the least of whatever mementoes of the late Mrs Merridew she might have chanced to come by. You see how, on an afternoon taken at random, two nothings had made still denser by a fraction that background of which I was every moment conscious. I was beginning to realise that I was the man who was denied the luxury of carelessness. I might not jest or laugh or move a finger without first looking around the corner. I went hampered among free men. I tell you it is a hard thing to live in a world that has no trifles....

Still, exposed or guarded, I had my life to live, and I was no longer disposed in the matter of this intimacy with Miss Levey to do nothing at all. Therefore, when I returned from seeing Aunt Angela away and found Evie still in the dining-room, I took my risk.

She ought to have been in bed; but instead she had drawn up a chair to an old bureau, and was quite unnecessarily fiddling with old papers and letters and nondescript objects put away in the nest of drawers. She looked up as I entered, and the vivacity with which she spoke seemed a little forced.

"Fancy, Jeff!" she exclaimed, her fingers in the leaves of some old twopenny notebook or other, "I can actually read my old shorthand yet! I should have thought I'd forgotten all about it, after all this time! I'll bet I could read as quickly as you!"

I stirred the dying fire. "Isn't it time you were in bed?" I said.

"Oh, just let me tidy this--I sha'n't be many minutes."

And while I picked up an evening paper she went on with her pottering about the bureau.

But the light sound of the moving paper began to get a little on my nerves. It does that sometimes. I suppose it's like some people fidgeting if there is a cat in the room. And presently I noticed that when she supposed me to be busily reading the rustling stopped. It was no good going on like this; the sooner I came to the point and said what I had to say, the better. I thought for a moment, and then put down my newspaper.

"Evie----" I said.

"Yes, dear?" she said brightly....

I put it with perfect gentleness. Suddenness and sharpness also are among the trifles of life I had had to forego. When I had finished, she did not seem surprised. She only nodded once or twice.

"I see," she said slowly. "Well, Miriam--I mean Miss Levey, if you wish it, dear----"

"No, darling; I don't know that I go as far as that. I was only speaking of these broadcast intimacies."

"Miriam, then--Miriam said you would object----"

"Well, I never denied Miriam a certain acuteness."

But she shook her head. For a minute or two I had been sure that I was not the only one who had something to say. When she did go on, it was at first haltingly, and then with just such a little setting of her resolution as she had used when, years ago, a sweet and awkward flapper, she had complimented me on my spurious engagement to the lady whose name she now suddenly mentioned.

"I don't mean to object to--to what you've been saying, Jeff. I mean--I mean object to this about poor Kitty. I know," she quickened, as if to forestall a remark, "that we haven't said anything about it--you and I--for a long time--but"--once more the rush--"I've felt you've known what I've been thinking, Jeff----"

I gained a little time. "But I wasn't speaking of Kitty Windus, dear," I said. "It was something quite different."

Then, before her look of trouble and appeal, I ceased my pretence.

"Very well, dearest," I sighed. "But tell me one thing. If I hadn't said anything to-night, _you_ wanted to say something."

"Yes," she mumbled in a low voice to the twopenny notebook.

"Is that what Miss Levey meant when she said 'Don't forget' an hour or two ago?"

"Yes."

"You hadn't to forget to--to bring something, whatever it is, up about Kitty?"

Her silence told me that that was so. Then, slowly:

"And why should she think I should object to that?" I asked.

Evie's manner changed with almost electrical suddenness. She thrust her hands into her lap, straightened her back, and spoke almost victoriously.

"_There!_ I _knew_! I told her so!" she triumphed. "'Miriam,' I said, 'you're _quite_ wrong in thinking that--that----'"

"In thinking there's something to be ashamed of in an old engagement you've changed your mind about?" I suggested gently.

"Yes!" she exulted. "I said to her, 'Jeff wouldn't in the _least_ mind my going to see her if I wanted'--and you wouldn't, would you, Jeff?"

"No," I said quickly. I said it quickly lest I should not say it at all. Then I qualified. "No.... One shrinks from pain, that's all, either enduring it or giving it."

"Giving Kitty pain?"

"Well, does Miss Levey think it would be pleasant to her--or is she merely willing to hurt her if she can hurt me too?"

"But--but--Miriam says she would really be awfully pleased--Kitty would--and I'm sure you're wrong, Jeff, about things like that lasting for years and years! They don't. I----" She checked herself.

But whether it was the check or what not that made the difference, all at once she started forward from the bureau and sank on her knees at my side. She herself put one of my hands about her waist, as if to compel it to a caress, and stroked her cheek against the other. The words she murmured were disjointed enough, but her tone was, oh, so eloquent....

"Dear, dear!" she besought me. "Miriam _was_ wrong, wasn't she? Not that I care in the very least, only I've been, oh, so wretched, thinking there was something between us! I don't want to see her--Miriam--nor Kitty--very much--but it was so lonely--till Jack came--and there isn't anything now, is there, Jeff? I know there has been--but it's gone now, hasn't it?... Great strong hand!" She moistened it with her breathing.... "But it _is_ all right now, isn't it, Jeff?"

I did not know why, all in a moment, I found myself remembering that curious prophecy of Louie Causton's: "I think you'll find that sooner or later you've got to tell her." Perhaps it was that in that moment I had my first glimpse of what Louie had really meant. Already it was useless to say there had been no slight shadow between us; Evie, who knew few things, at least knew that; but I had not dared to acknowledge it for fear of worse.... Yes, I began to see; and with my seeing I again grew hot and rebellious.

Why, since the act I had committed had had at least as much of good as of evil in it, should I be hounded thus? Why should trifles accrete to an ancient and hideous memory until it became a corporeal, living, malignant thing? Why should that commonest of experiences, an old rescinded engagement, not, in my case also, be what Evie thought it was--a wound made whole again, or at any rate so hardened over that it could be touched without provoking a sharp scream of pain? It was intolerable....

Oh, never, if you can help it, live in a world without trifles!

Evie, at my knee, continued to supplicate. "Oh, darling, I've so, _so_ wanted it to be like it was at first! Do you remember--in Kensington Gardens, sweetheart?"

And she turned up those loveliest eyes I ever looked into....

It had been in Kensington Gardens, early on a September evening, that I had asked her to marry me. Our chairs had been so drawn back into the clump of laurels that the man with the tickets had not noticed us, and we ourselves had seen little but a distant corner of the Palace, and, forty yards away across the grass, a dead ash gilded by the setting sun. At the F.B.C. Pepper had just begun to single out his new Jun. Ex. Con. for special jobs, and as a matter of fact I had had a small rise of salary that very week. Little enough it had been; certainly not enough to warrant me in exchanging our footing--one of increasingly frequent calls at Woburn Place and goodness knows how much lingering in likely streets on the chance of a sight of her--for a more explicit relation; but--well, as I say, I had thrust all else recklessly aside, and that evening had asked her to marry me.

There are some things that one must needs exaggerate if one is to speak of them at all; so if I say that at first it had seemed to her that my proposal was merely that two bruised spirits should thenceforward make the best of things together, I must leave you to discount that. I don't think she had known clearly what she had felt. The hand I had taken had trembled a little, and in the great dark eyes that had looked steadfastly away to the dead ash I had fancied I had discerned the beginnings of a refusal--a refusal out of mere customariness and a settled acceptance of our former relation. I had fancied that----

But even to the trembler a tremble may speak truer than words, and she had trembled and become conscious of it. For the first time it had occurred to her, sweet soul, that we had been all unconsciously passing from friendship to love, and were now making the discovery together. She had not known that I had never had anything but love from which to pass; and another access of trembling had taken her....

"The last evening you and I had a walk together," she had whispered at last, her eyes still gravely on the pale ash, "we--we didn't think of--this."

(Did I mention that during all the time I had known her we had only spent one other evening out of doors alone together? It had been more than four years before, and we had heard a nightingale sing on Wimbledon Common.)

I had not answered. To allow the memory of that other evening to repossess her had seemed the best answer to make. For though we pack our hearts daily with the stuff of life, only time shows us which is the tinsel we have coveted, and which the lump we have not known to be gold. More than four years had passed; presently those four years would have opened her eyes to differences too; and so I had waited....

And, if not yet discovered, at any rate sudden and troubling new questions had crowded into her eyes as I had watched. Another silence of many minutes, then:

"We've been such friends up to now," she had faltered, as much to the darkening evening as to myself.

"Need that mean 'No,' Evie?"...

"I don't know--it's so--strange--I never----"

I had drawn a little nearer.

"Never? Never once? You never once thought that perhaps----?"

Then once more had come the memories of that other evening, with the unhappiness of another's bringing, and the comfort of my own. Night had begun to creep under the trees, but the shadows but made zenith the purer. On such evenings lovers vie with one another in looking for the first star, but we were not lovers yet, and could see nothing save the ash, now become grey, and away to the north the faint yellow haze of the Bayswater Road. Evie's own figure had become dim until little of it had showed but the handkerchief in her lap, the narrow white stripe of her black and white blouse where her little black jacket parted, and, as at last she had turned, the motion of her eyes.

"You don't want an answer now, Jeff," she had said quickly, immediately dropping the eyes again.

But I had wanted my answer there and then.

"Now," I had replied as quickly as she, with I know not what grimness and resolution mingled with my tenderness.

"Not now, Jeff--I'm fonder of you than of anybody--you know that--but--but----"

But if her "buts" had included the vanished Kitty Windus, Archie Merridew, or anything else from that four-year-old dustheap, I had allowed them to avail her little. Over my heart too had come that nightingale's song, heard by a still mere, and her hapless sobbing on my breast because Life was harsh, and my own desperate struggle not to clasp her there and then. Repression so powerful as that had been is not given twice to a man, at any rate not to such a man as I; nor had I thought that she, whose tremors were more eloquent than her speech, had desired it either.... "Not now, Jeff--please--soon----" she had half sobbed, shrinking as it were from the wonder of her own enlightenment; and her handkerchief had fallen to the grass....

The next moment, in returning it to her, I had had her in my arms.

Those truer tidings than any words of hers could give expression to had come from the lips that had not even sought to avoid mine. Sought to avoid them? I call the first star that peeped through the laurels to witness the handful of dust that friendship of ours had become. Speech? Language? She used neither; to me in that moment she _was_ both speech and language--vocal flesh, her very hair and eyes an utterance. You will not ask me an utterance of what; I take my chance of being understood in the light of what Woman is to you. Make her what you will: a riddle herself--or the answer to the deepest enigma of the soul; as much earth as a man's hard hands must needs be filled with--or as much spirit as he can bear until he himself is all spirit; a lovely casket--yet not too lovely for the scroll of the Freedom it contains. Have it your own way. I only know that if she spoke thus I heard as if my whole body had been one attuned and exquisite nerve. We had drawn a little deeper into the laurels.... Again we kissed....

And in my heart there had been jealousy of no man, dead or living. That dead young man had awakened her from sleep, but I had made her mine with her eyes wide open. He had taken her by surprise, but me she had chosen. And as our lips had met once more, I had known that she loved even the pain I caused her in straining her in my arms.

"You never once--never once thought of it?" I had said huskily at last.

"Dear--dear! How _was_ I to?"

"Kiss me--kiss me----"

And now, on her knees at my knee by our dying dining-room fire, she asked me if I remembered that evening in Kensington Gardens.

All at once I vowed that I wouldn't stand it--wouldn't stand the intervention of anything on earth, whether of my own making or another's, between us and that first joy. And again, as I held her, I thought of Louie's words. Louie was right--or at least half right. For the present the shadow had passed, but unless I did something now, it would return. Again we should drift apart, and Miss Levey would keep us so. If I did not partly explain, circumstances might do so entirely. Yes, Louie was so far right. If I was to keep the dearest thing on earth to me, I must make a half-truth seem to guarantee the false remainder, and tell Evie of that cruel Kitty Windus episode.

And so I come to my first, though not to my last, attempt to tell without telling, and, as they say, to make my omelette without breaking my eggs.

Her cheek was still against my hand; I looked mournfully down on her. With such a goal it didn't much matter where I began.

"What do you suppose, darling," I began, "Miss Levey's object is in all this?"

Evie's eyes moved to the mantelpiece. It was a bare entablature of black marble, with nothing on it but a small Swiss clock and one or two cabinet photographs--no Arab horsemen. Shyly she glanced from the mantelpiece corner, where the horsemen should have been, to me.

"Yes, she asked to-day whether you'd got it mended," she murmured.

"Do you really like her?"

"I was so lonely, Jeff," she pleaded.

"Poor child!... Evie----"

She looked quickly up at my change of tone.

"What?"

"I want to tell you what her object is. I don't find it easy."

"What do you mean, Jeff?" she asked, strangely abruptly.

"And I'm afraid you won't find it easy either."

She had dropped my hand. "Jeff, what do you mean?"

"I mean that she thinks she's found out--is finding out--something discreditable about me."

At first I did not understand the change, almost to horror, that came into Evie's eyes. Only after a moment almost of fear of what I saw there did I fathom her thought. I don't know how men speak who have an unfaithfulness to confess to their wives, but it flashed on me that Evie actually thought it might be that--so can pure innocence and worldly experience be pierced by the same fear.

"Jeff," she said faintly, her colour all gone, "don't you--haven't you--loved me?"

"Loved you?" I laughed for the irony of it. "Yes, dearest," I said quietly, "I've loved you. Never fear for that. That was the beginning of it all."

"The beginning?"

"Of what Miss Levey thinks. Dear, could you bear to think she's right, and that I've been a blackguard?"

So great was her suspense that the little sound she made was one almost of irritation. "Oh, Jeff, say what you've got to say----"

"It's why I spoke of causing pain to Kitty Windus----"

"Oh, you're cruel----!"

I moistened my lips. "Very well...."

Locked up in my private desk, written in Pitman's shorthand, there lies a full statement of that curious affair of mine with Kitty Windus; but I am not going to quote from that statement here. So long as it is understood that that heartless thing had existed side by side with a love for Evie that had never for a moment wavered, that is all that matters. I had now no longer a thought for the undesirableness, the danger even, of a meeting between Evie and Kitty; risky though that would be, I now saw nothing save that we were reunited, and that we could only remain so by passing on to her a portion of my shame. If you don't see this you are lucky. Your life has trifles in it. You can buy dining-tables, and use or reject the familiarity of Christian names. You have not had to carry upon your shoulders a weight greater than a man can support, nor to choose which portion you are to leave on the road behind you unless your back is to break. You have not known the conclusion to which--but you shall hear the conclusion to which I have been driven all in good time.

In the meantime, sparing myself in her eyes no more than I am sparing myself in yours now, I told her how little she had ever had to fear from Kitty Windus.

The hands of the tiny Swiss clock on the mantelpiece pointed to half-past ten by the time I had finished. I gazed at the clock dully, thinking for a moment how little time my recital had occupied. Then I remembered that the hands had pointed to half-past ten before I had begun.... Mechanically I took the clock down and wound it up. To wind up a clock was something to do until Evie should speak.

She had not once interrupted me. At one point of my story she had merely got up from my knee and seated herself in a low rocking-chair, in which she now rocked softly. As I still sat with the clock in my hands I tried idly to remember at which point of my story she had got up; it might be an indication of her state of mind; but I forgot this again, and found myself examining the back of the clock almost with curiosity. I did not look at her. I put the clock back on the mantelpiece again and once more sat down, still without looking at her. Glancing presently at the clock again I saw that its hands pointed to five and twenty minutes to eleven. I had wound it up, but had forgotten to set it right. That again was something to do. I adjusted it by my watch, and again sat down.

Then she spoke, and my heart sank. There was nothing in her tone but wonderment--wonderment, not at the story I had told her, but that I should have found it worth telling at all.

After all that portentous preparation--only that!

Odd enough, of course--sad enough, if you liked--but----

"Well, but, Jeff," she said, puzzled, "what about it?"

"Don't you see?" I asked, in a lower voice.

"Of course I see--how do you mean, 'see'? And I think you were awfully stupid. She was _bound_ to find out, and she did find out, and left you, poor dear. It was absurd from beginning to end. Really I shall begin to think myself clever and you a simpleton, if that's all you've been moping about."

As you see, I had not advanced matters by one single inch.

"It _is_ all, isn't it, Jeff?" she asked anxiously, suddenly sitting forward in the rocking-chair. "I don't mean," she went on more anxiously still, "that the whole thing wasn't awfully queer--not quite nice, dear, to speak the truth--but--but"--again there returned that quick look of fear with which she had asked me whether I had not loved her--"but--there wasn't--anything--Jeff?"

I sank back in my chair.

"No, there wasn't--anything," I said wearily.

"Then, Jeff----" she cried gladly.

And the next moment she was at my knee again, overflowing with comfort and compassion.

"You poor boy--you poor darling boy!" she crooned, so melted by my contrition that my offence went uncondemned. "Poor love!... And," she looked adorably up, "how _could_ Evie reproach you, Jeff, when it was all for her? Darling!" she broke out, "_you_ ought to reproach _me_, for thinking.... But you were so fearfully solemn.... I thought perhaps you hadn't loved Evie.... _Has_ always loved Evie, hasn't he? And _will_ always love her, yes? Great strong hand!"

And as she murmured thus, again I thought of Louie. It was with something like awe that I did so. "I think you'll find that sooner or later you've got to tell her." How did she know that? Did she know it? Had she foreseen how half-attempts would end, and known them beforehand to be wasted breath?

Then there came upon me the great need to see Louie again. I must see her, and quickly. With Evie still unenlightened, the actual perils of a meeting between herself and Kitty stood forward again, exactly as before. Evie herself might not now wish for such a meeting, but that would be on my account, and not that, if Kitty didn't mind, or positively wished it, she saw any reason against it. Why should she, if Kitty didn't?... Yes, I must see Louie again, at once. To-morrow was Sunday. I must see her on the Monday. I must write--telephone--do something----

"And to-morrow, Jeff," Evie was saying, with decision, "you really must have a walk. You're working yourself ill--you look worried to death. I can't come, of course, but I wish you'd go to Amersham or Chalfont or somewhere, just for a blow. Leave horrid business just for one day, and I'll have a nice supper ready for you when you come back. I shall be all right.... Hush! Listen!"

From upstairs had come a low, reedy cry.

"That's Jackie--I must fly! Don't sit down here, dear--come now----"

And she was off.

I followed her; and as I stood looking down on the boy, who had gone to sleep again of himself, I remembered my former dream, that by the wonder of an innocent birth atonement was to have come. I sighed. Apparently it hadn't.

Well, I must see Louie on the Monday, that was all.

III

I did see her on the Monday. I saw her at the models' Club, to which place I telephoned early on the Monday morning. I had the luck to get on to her immediately. "Yes?... This is Miss Causton," came the diminished voice over the wire; and she said she would see me that evening at seven. I sent Evie a message that I should be late.

Perhaps you know those premises in the Chelsea Square. Two houses have been thrown into one, but all I know of the establishment is the two rooms of the ground floor, which, barring a narrow passage with a rustling bead curtain across it, communicate. The room on the left of the curtain is a large bare apartment that is used for parties, tableaux, dancing and such like entertainments; that on the right is the tea-room, sewing and wardrobe room, and room for general purposes. At one end of it is a kitchener; placed near the kitchener is a small service counter, brass foot-rail and all, that has done duty in some saloon bar or other--it was probably picked up in the York Road, N.; and the furniture has been given piecemeal by artists and is characterised by great variety. The members can get tea for threepence halfpenny and dinner for eightpence; and of course I was Louie Causton's guest. She was looking out of the window as I approached the house; she herself opened the door to me; and we walked through the bead portière and entered the party-room on the left. We sat down by a yellow upright piano at the farther end of this room. I heard the frying of chops across the passage. They wouldn't be long, Louie said, and then added that I was looking pretty well.

A long walk round Chalfont Woods the previous day had, in fact, done me good. She herself appeared to be in excellent health and spirits. She asked me whether I had seen Billy Izzard lately, and then, without waiting for an answer, laughed as two girls, in waltzing attitude, balanced in the doorway for a moment, and then, seeing us, went out again. "The girls dance in here," Louie explained. "Oh, do you?" I remarked. "Oh, _I_ don't," was her reply; and she went on to ask what was new with me. It was all refreshingly ordinary and matter-of-fact, and there was no indication that she had any serious care on her mind.

A stout woman in an apron appeared in the doorway and announced that our chops were ready. We passed into the other room. I said that the furniture of the Club had been given by artists; the table at which we sat down had been a card-table. As I could not get my legs under it I had to sit sideways at it, and our plates, cups and saucers were edge to edge, with the salt and pepper in the interstices. Louie smiled and said something about our interview being literally a tête-à-tête, and we attacked our chops.

From where I sat I could see the vista of the party-room across the passage, and Louie's eyes, as they met mine from time to time, had something of the same soft sheen of the polished floor of that apartment. She wore a navy blue skirt and plain white mercerised blouse without collar or any other finish at the neck; and as we ate and talked of this and that there rose in my mind again that surmise I had had when Billy had told me, by the Whitestone Pond, that she had stopped sitting. Nothing that I can describe happened to confirm that surmise, and yet somehow I was conscious of the growing confirmation. It had begun when she had twinkled and said, "How's Billy?" and a moment or two later, when the two girls had stood poised in the doorway for dancing, she had smiled and said, "Oh, _I_ don't dance." The twinkle about Billy had not been lost on me; and when I tell you that the single dance of my own life had been with her, years before, at a breaking-up party at the old Business College, perhaps you can make a guess at the nature of my surmise.

For I had read in those eyes of hers, on that night of the Berkeley dinner, that she loved me and must go on loving me; and she herself had said, in so many words, "It's nothing to do with you--you can't help that." And now she had taken this fantastic resolution not to sit any more. Whether I would have it so or not, she had a right in me, in which, quite calmly and ordinarily, she now exulted. Yet had ever before mortal woman exulted over anything less substantial? The whole thing seemed to me both preposterously lovely and quite movingly absurd. She had wheedled out of Billy that perfect sketch that had stood on his easel that evening I had walked, unannounced, into his room opposite the Cobden Statue. Why? What ridiculous and sacred tapers did she burn about it? Billy must now paint her in costume or not at all. Why? Of what beautiful and empty union was this a consummation? Did she seriously intend that thenceforward no eye but mine---- But I waste words. You see it or you don't see it. That, as near as makes no matter, appeared to be how things stood between us, and there was nothing to tell me that she was not happy in this beautiful lunacy. As for myself, I supposed I must be content to be owned almost to the point of insult in possession.

"I'm just beginning to get used to it," I remember she said to me at one stage of that evening--the thing she was just beginning to get used to being sitting under the new conditions. "Did you know it was really harder? Your clothes tingle on you, you know."

I mention this only to show that, since she might speak at her pleasure of a thing of which I might not even recognise the existence, her tyranny over me was pretty complete.

We had finished our chops, and I was wondering what she supposed my reason for having sought her to be, when she herself put the direct question. She put her plate on the floor so as to make room for her elbows on the table.

"Give me a cigarette if you have one," she said. "I'm afraid I've picked up that habit here. All the girls do it: there's a cigarette-case in their bags if there's nothing else."

And when I had given her a light, she put her elbows on the table again, her wrists and forearms fell into an attitude that really made me sorrow for Billy, and she said: "Well, what is it?"

With no more waste of words than she herself had used, I told her of Miss Levey's voracious curiosity, of Evie's perplexed sense of something unexplained, and of my own unsuccessful attempt to have my eggs and my omelette too.

She listened attentively: the change of which I shall speak in a moment did not come all at once. Other girls had now come into the Club, and two or three of them were gathered about a brown-paper parcel, some purchase of dress material or other which they were discussing with animation. Others fetched cups of tea from the saloon bar counter, eating and drinking, perched carelessly on the ends of tables, the spiral twist of the work of their stockings telling how readily they got into and out of their clothes.

Before I had finished my story Louie interrupted me with the first of a little series of detached remarks.

"One moment," she said. "When do you start--this Consolidation, I mean?"

"In a few weeks. We shall send some of the men on in advance in about a fortnight. Why?"

"You don't intend to take Miriam Levey over with you?"

"I do not."

"You don't suppose she doesn't know that?"

"Well?"

"Well--but go on." She made a little gesture. "I interrupted you."

I went on.

"Half-a-minute," she came in again presently. "All this was quite---- I mean, there was no quarrel?"

"With Evie? No--oh, no, no."

"Well----"

And the next time she interrupted me was merely to ask me whether I had another cigarette.

I admit that there had come over me as I had talked an increasing sense of the burden I had placed upon her. Nor do I mean that I had not had this sense before. I had, indeed, thought of little else during my walk to Chalfont the previous day. But it is yet another coin added to the price of a righteous but unlicenced slaying that a man's selfishness becomes merely inordinate. I had known more or less what she must bear; exactly what she had to bear it with I had taken for granted. She had perhaps herself to thank for that, and that tense and incredible calm she had shown on the night I had dined at the Berkeley. I had known the depths of her womanliness that other night; soon I was to learn the shallows of her femininity.

"Well," she said, when at last I had finished, "I really don't see what else you expected. And," she went on, but more slowly, and somehow as if she didn't quite trust herself, "I don't see either what you expect of me. I told you what I thought before."

"You mean that I should have to tell her?"

"Yes."

"Well, tell me why."

"You've just told me why."

"Well, put it another way. You see the frightful risk--to her. The question is, ought it to be taken?"

For a moment those tourmalines of her eyes seemed to flicker, as if she would have shown me again the abysses beyond them; but they remained shut as she spoke more slowly still.

"That's not quite the question. Can you--go on--as you are doing? And if you can't, what's the alternative?"

To that I had no answer to make.

Her cigarette had gone out, and her beautiful fingers were holding it listlessly. All at once I found myself noticing the contrast between her and the chattering group of models down the room. The girl with the brown-paper parcel had approached a cupboard and taken out some second-hand property or other of frayed velvet and torn gold: "It's hardly worth re-making: I vote we cut it up," I heard her say. And I wondered whether Louie had sat in the torn and tawdry thing--now that she had been warned against chills. The giggling and the skiddle of teacups went on, but Louie pressed her fingers on her eyeballs for a moment. Perhaps it was this pressure that made them, when she looked up again, seem dull and tired.

"At any rate, that's how it strikes me," she said.

She looked suddenly older--much older--so much older that it gave me a pang. During my walk on the previous day I had told myself over and over again that I must have made of her life also exactly what I had made of my own--a fearful thing without trifles; but I had _had_ to tell myself, if you appreciate what I mean. Now, to see it with my own eyes was another matter. There was that other quantity, the quantity unknown to me but drearily familiar enough to her, I didn't doubt--Kitty.... A word of advice to those who contemplate the putting out of a life on their own responsibility: When a woman, on a rainy night in St. James's Park, or wherever and whenever, lets you look down into her soul, and drops a plummet into your own, and asks you whether you are not a murderer, and you no more dare to lie than you would dare a foulness in the face of majesty, then do anything you like--fly from her, bite out your tongue, kill her also--but for mere pity of her don't answer "Yes." Don't, that is, unless you are sure that she will betray you. If you do, depend on it she'll ask you to a Models' Club or somewhere, and the horror of a life without trifles will come over you, and you'll see her press her fingers on her eyeballs and then look up again, five years older in as many minutes.

"What about Kitty?" I asked abruptly.

She answered quickly--too quickly: "Oh, Kitty's all right; you needn't bother about Kitty; leave her to me. As a matter of fact she's been awfully useful to me."

"How useful?"

"Oh, in quite the most material way," she said, with a short and mirthless laugh. "That's not been pure philanthropy, I assure you. I dare say you know----"

I did know that Kitty had perhaps a pound a week of her own money, from some tramways out Edgbaston way.

"And she types at home, too--authors' manuscript--when she can get it--and I save the ten shillings I had to pay somebody to look after the boy."

"And you yourself?" I ventured meaningly.

"Oh," she answered evasively, "we've not stuck fast yet."

"In spite of your chills," thought I; and then, as another burst of laughter broke from the girls down the room, I said aloud: "Tell me--I've never asked you--how did you drop into this kind of thing? You used to be at a business college."

Again she smiled. "Did I? Sometimes I can hardly believe that was I. It's precious little I learned there, anyway. And this other--I could explain to Billy--I'm not pretty, I know, not my face, but--well, it seemed a fairly obvious thing to do. There wasn't much else, anyhow, and remember I did fairly well out of it--better than most girls in offices."

She had grown faintly pink, and again the tourmalines had given, as it were, a half turn. I dropped my voice and looked earnestly at her.

"And these--chills--aren't they anything you could ever grow out of?"

The soft irradiation deepened as she looked as earnestly back at me.

"No," she said.

"I see. And what you learned at the College--have you forgotten all that?"

Then, looking almost challengingly at one another, we began to speak rather quickly, and a little elliptically.

"I think I can guess what you mean," she said, dropping her gaze again.

"I think you do."

"That's why I asked you just now when the Consolidation was starting.... You don't suppose she'll love you any more for throwing her out of a job, do you?"

"She can't hate me much more than she does."

"Well, you may depend upon it, she knows she's going."

"Well, that saves trouble."

"Oh, no, it doesn't."

"Ah!--You think not?"

"I'm sure not."

A pause.

"I gather you've seen her?"

"Oh, often."

"At your place?"

"Yes."

"I don't suppose you love her much. Why do you have her there?"

"You don't love her either. Why do you?"

"Well, there's Evie."

"And there's Kitty."

Another pause, and then: "I see."

Then suddenly I spoke a little more to the point.

"Well, would you accept the job if I could arrange it?"

She hesitated. "It's very necessary, of course, that I should do something."

"You'd take it?"

"I almost think--there's my boy, you see--but we'll talk about that in a minute. You were asking me about Kitty. I don't think you need worry about her. I keep her in hand. I don't think it would matter very much if she and your wife did meet, and, on the whole, you'd be doing more harm by objecting beyond a certain point than you would by allowing it. So, as far as she's concerned, things had better drift. The worst of it is"--again the fingers on the eyeballs--"they don't drift."

"Don't drift?"

"You know what Miriam Levey is."

I caught my breath. "You don't mean _she's_ any idea----" I said quickly.

"Oh, none whatever," Louie said hurriedly. "I don't mean that at all. But I _do_ mean she'd thoroughly enjoy seeing you made uncomfortable--got at--scored off--get her own back--you know what I mean."

"That's noth----" I began absently, but checked myself. "That's nothing," I had been on the point of saying, but there were no nothings for us. Louie's vigils must be as unremitting as my own.

Suddenly I found myself without the heart to ask her in detail what these were. We now had the tea-room to ourselves; the bevy of models had scurried off to the party-room, and two of them appeared to be playing an elementary duet on the piano, with wrong notes loudly and laboriously corrected, amid laughter and general high spirits. Again the contrast was cruel. _They_ hadn't to look before, behind and about them for the dread of a ruinous inadvertence.... You will find it difficult to reconcile with remorse, by the way, that, stealing another glance at Louie's drawn and anxious face, I cursed a heedless young cub who had gone to his account nearly six years before.

"Anyway," she said, after a long silence, "I'll see to that as far as I can. Plan as we like, we've got to take some risks. Don't look at me like that. It isn't more than I can bear. There's joy in it too. The only thing I don't quite understand is why _I_ should want to throw that joy away by--by giving you the advice I did."

"The advice you did?"

"To tell your wife."

"But----" It broke agitatedly from me. Again the tourmalines seemed to move.

"The risk; just so; don't think I don't see it. Oh, I see it--far more plainly than you do! Haven't you thought that perhaps it's that that----" She stopped abruptly, ending in a little twanging murmur.

And I had at last become conscious of something that hitherto I had only half consciously noticed--namely, that she spoke of Evie repeatedly as "your wife." Obstinately she refused to use her name. I think that I felt even then our approach to what I have called the shallows of her femininity. Can you wonder at it? Is it so very surprising that, with the tremors of those shut transmitters of her eyes, the whole fantastic and exhausting fabric of my interpretation of her feeling for myself tottered? He has to be a greater painter than Billy Izzard whose fiction can fill the life of a woman already past thirty, whom you have so heaped with cares that her face takes on age as you look at it! Her voice shook as she strove to hide all this from me.

"But you see the disadvantage you have me at," she said. "_You_ know what you really want, though you haven't put it quite plainly yet; but even if I were to try it you wouldn't let me say what _I_ mean."

"Oh, say it, say it: we're in the mess, and it's no good keeping things back."

"No, no--you've no right to expect that of me. I'll do everything else, but I'm only a mortal woman, with limbs and hungers, after all."

"You're a very wondrous one."

"Tch!" The exclamation broke from her as if I had blundered on a nerve with an instrument. "You're making big demands of my wondrousness, Jim!"

I gave a low groan. "Poor woman! Is it more than----"

But she broke out into quite a loud cry.

"Not that, Jim," she commanded, "not--that! That's the only thing I will _not_ bear! If you're going to make me out noble, or disinterested, or self-sacrificing, or anything of that sort I--I can't bear it. I'm not. I hate Evie. I hate myself. I almost hate you when I see how stupid and clumsy you can be. Oh, _you_ know what _you_ want! You want just one thing--to be happy with her; but do you think I scheme and contrive for you because _I_ want you to be happy with her? Oh no! I do it because I can't help myself, and because it's that or nothing between you and me, and that's all there is splendid about it! I won't be called 'Poor woman.' And you needn't shake your head either. If I could get you, I would; but there it is, I can't, and that's all the loyalty I have for _her_! And you ask me," she broke out anew, almost furiously, "you ask me whether I 'don't see' things! It's you who don't see, and never will! You get a fixed idea into your head, and everything else----" She snapped her fingers. "What do you suppose your wife would say if she knew you were here with me now? _I_ shouldn't care a straw about her knowing, but have you told _her_? _Will_ you tell her? You know you won't! You daren't--you daren't trust her! Oh, I know what you're going to say--that you can't discuss her with me--but in that case you shouldn't take my position quite so much for granted. I'm the last person to put on a pedestal. You ask me whether I see things: don't I! Don't I see what they might have been--yes, even in spite of the mess I made of them! With half a chance I could have----"

"Louie!"

"Sssh--it's got to come out now! I was happy till that night--you know the night I mean--and that night I was fool enough to think it was possible to stop up there--away up in the air. I gave you and got from you that night what no other woman on earth could have done, and I thought we could stop at that. I thought I could go on living at that. I thought that would be enough for me; and when I found it wasn't, I began to--bolster it up. You've seen Billy--you know what I mean. And I still have something of you that nobody else has, and--I want to give it away! I want you to give her that too! I advise you to tell her and leave me with nothing! I must be mad! Jim"--her voice dropped with startling effect--"you once said that to tell her would be to kill her: _if I could only think that_!... But there, you'll tell her, and take away the last thing I have of you.... But she won't get that thing. It's beyond her. That's yours and mine whether you wish it or not. If you don't believe me, try it. Tell her. Tell her her husband made away with her sweetheart; tell her why; tell her what you've told me, and if she takes it as I did, I haven't another word to say. I hate her; I'm not running away from that; so perhaps I'm not just. Perhaps there is a chance: if so, it's your only one. I've had no luck. I'm out of it, and there's no more to say. Give me a match."

She took up and relighted her half-smoked cigarette.

I have merely set down what she said, and the way she said it; for the rest, I leave you to draw your own conclusions. Perhaps it is unusual to allow these freedoms to be taken with your wife, but I think you will admit that the occasion was unusual. She had told me, in effect, that murderers ought to be careful whom they marry, and that I had married the wrong woman: but she had left out of the account one thing that made all the difference. You know as well as I what she had left out--the supreme sanctification of the flesh: "With my body I thee worship."... It was Evie, not Louie Causton, with whom I had heard that nightingale sing on Wimbledon Common. They had been Evie's lips, not Louie's, that had not sought to escape my own on that September evening in Kensington Gardens. It was Evie whom I had married.... It was natural that Louie should see how things might conceivably have been different; you can say that however they turn out; and perhaps that was where the fatality came in. Circumstance, propinquity, accident, a step rightly or wrongly taken, and the rest is predicated with a terrible inevitability. Louie had had no luck; and now, not because I had placed a crushing weight upon her, but because I had given her the pity while another got the love, she had broken out upon me.

At any rate, I saw her own position sadly clearly now.

And, there being no more to say, she rose.

In the hall, however, she did find one more word to say. They were playing Sir Roger in the party-room as I held aside the bead _portière_ for Louie to pass, and the couples, seen through the gauzy hanging, seemed spectrally charming. Louie stood on the other side of the curtain, mortal, unspectral enough under a cheap square hall lamp with tesseræ of coloured glass. With head downhung, she moved spiritlessly towards the outer door, where she stood meditatively with her hand on the letter-box. At last she looked up.

"About what you were saying about Miriam Levey," she said, without preface. "I don't think it would do--not now."

I knew she meant her own acceptance of Miriam's place. I asked her why not.

"Oh, I've said too much for that to be possible now. We've been too near. We mustn't come so near again."

"But surely," I said dispiritedly, "a job----"

She shook her head. "I should be seeing you," she said. "It wouldn't do. Good-night."

And I lost the strains of Sir Roger as the door closed between us.

IV

Looking back over what I have written, I find it will hasten my tale if I take events with rather a free hand in point of time, sequence and so forth; and I shall do so. For example, the setting up of the Consolidation in Pall Mall did not actually take place until the following spring, but our arrangements were complete long before that time, and, as my tale is about myself rather than about the Consolidation, I will say as much as is necessary about that enterprise now, and have done with it.

We have to all intents and purposes absorbed the old F.B.C., and this has been greatly to the advantage of both concerns. The Company's mercantile position is the firmer, and we are left the freer for things both larger and more special. In the handling of these Pepper has been brilliant. True, he has taken chances, sometimes more than I have liked; but he is a born taker of chances, and it is astonishing, on the whole, how seldom things have failed to come off. In his own line I have never met his equal. I think I mentioned that he had been in Russia: I never knew exactly what his errand was there; but I can make a guess at the kind of thing. Last summer, for instance, he was out in the West Indies--with a few tin specimen-boxes and a butterfly net (this is the man who doesn't know a butterfly from a bumble-bee, and once asked me what a birch was). Out in the West Indies he met Magnay, of Astbury, Phillips--a valetudinarian after tarpon. Sichel was there too; I forget whether he was playing golf, or healing a lung, or merely yawning his head off in deck-chairs. And of course (a nod being as good as a wink to a blind horse) there could be no possible connection between these innocent pursuits and the Panama Canal, trans-shipment stations and the South American coasting trade.... So maybe Pepper had had no thought of hides or timber or tallow when he had learned the Siberian method of hunting bear.... Anyway, all I want you to understand, without making it too plain, is that we leave these things to Pepper. He dines geologists and botanists and explorers and concessionaires: he does them well, and is perfectly charming; and it may quite well be that, before he has finished with them, a little inconspicuous piece of paper that not one in a thousand as much as glances at is posted up in Whitehall one day, Britain has proclaimed a new Protectorate somewhere or other, and the Consolidation is at the bottom of it. It pays us that Pepper keeps his nails manicured and knows his way about a wine-list. It may not be noble or altruistic or anything of that kind, but it's the way things get done in this world, and be hanged to Schmerveloff and the humanitarians.

So, while we were still with the F.B.C., Pepper was playing every ball straight back to the inquisitive folk who wanted to know what was in the wind, we were ready to go over at a month's notice to that great new cathedral of a place with the mosaic floors and the bronze statues in the niches, and I was free to rub my rosy prospects into Aunt Angela to my heart's content. It had come off, or, thanks to Pepper and Robson and the rest of them, could hardly now fail to do so. But Aunt Angela, when I twinkled at her, and mentioned this, only gave me back my smiles thrice spiritualised. She never failed to rejoice, for our sakes, whenever a new piece of furniture came into the house in Well Walk, but for herself, her attitude was piously and amusingly penitential. I never knew austerity so resemble luxuriousness--or the other way about, whichever it was. And of this new furniture we presently began to have quite a lot. Collecting, as I have since come to understand the word, was as yet, of course, far beyond my means; but I used a bronze copy of a lioness by Barye on my desk as a paper-weight, I had good autotypes of Méryon on my study walls, I had bought Evie a dinner service, quite good enough for most occasions even to-day, and I had sales' catalogues and auctioneers' circulars, a dozen a week. Oh, yes, we were getting on, and Pepper winked, remembering his candlesticks, but said nothing.

But let me return to Aunt Angela for a moment. The effect on her of these evidences of our increasing prosperity was curious. Without the loss of a jot of her amiability, but rather to the increase of it, she set herself apart from our modest splendours. If I use the word "religiosity" I mean it only in its most innocent sense: but something of the sort had been incipient in her for a long time, and now merely became declared. Perhaps I cannot do better than tell here of the evening in which I first discovered how far this had gone. If at this point my narrative seems a little diffuse, it is merely because the longest way round is often the shortest way home, and also because Aunt Angela's attitude was not the only thing I learned that night.

I think it would be a little before Christmas, on a Tuesday or Wednesday; I know the day, if not the week, because it was what Evie, who corrected some of my own recklessnesses by still clinging to small economies, called an "eating-up night." On those nights I was expressly forbidden to bring anybody home to dinner--I except Aunt Angela and Billy Izzard, who came when they pleased. As it happened, they had both turned up on that very evening, and had partaken of a rather scratch supper; and I, who had had an exceptionally heavy day, hoped that nobody would come in afterwards--not that anybody was very likely to. As Jackie had gone to bed, Billy had been allowed to play Evie's new piano only with the soft pedal down (Evie herself, I may say, did not play, but was resolved to learn); and Aunt Angela had several skeins of wool to wind into balls. From the arm-chair in which I half dozed I could see Evie, still in the waterproof apron in which she had given Jackie his bath, setting the child's basket to rights. Our only maid was taking her "evening out" and was probably up on the Spaniards Road.

I was not too sleepy to see that Aunt Angela needed somebody to hold her wool, and I volunteered drowsily for the service. But, "No, thanks, Jeff," she replied; "you have a nap; besides, I must be getting used to doing things for myself." I did not insist, and the last thing I remember before I dropped off for forty winks was seeing her reach for Pepper's candlesticks, place them on the hearthrug, and, passing a hank of wool about them, begin to wind.

It seemed to me that several sounds awoke me simultaneously--the stopping of a hansom at the front door, the ringing of a bell downstairs, and a quick exclamation from Evie. It was not impossible, of course, that any one of a number of visitors might have called in a hansom at half-past nine at night, but Evie had concluded, and rightly as it happened, that this was the one with whom she was least of all at home--Pepper. I heard her suppressed exclamation of "Bother!" The next moment she had whisked off the waterproof apron, thrust it under the piano lid, then, seeing Aunt Angela still placidly winding, had said, "Quick--in case--hide them, Auntie," and had flown to answer the bell.

But Aunt Angela, in her flurry, had only succeeded in making the candlesticks a hopeless cat's-cradle of wool before Evie's voice of vivacious welcome was heard, and Pepper himself entered.

He had Whitlock and a stranger with him, the latter a bearded and taciturn provincial who was introduced as Mr Toothill. Mr Toothill, indeed, I gathered to be the reason of the visit. Pepper has to be charming to a great variety of men, and is not often beaten, but occasionally there does fall to him ("for his virtues," he says) a man he can neither dine, wine nor take to a show, and I know the signs in him when he is at his most affable and most intensely bored. I may say at once that Mr Toothill has no connection with my tale other than as having been the cause of this visit.

Now Pepper has the gift of being able to make all manner of things (especially men) invisible when he chooses; and although Aunt Angela, in making out of sight with the wool and the candlesticks of Pepper's own giving, had only succeeded in putting them on the table and making them the most conspicuous objects in the room, for Pepper they did not exist. That bright photographic eye of his took in every other object in the room, but no candlesticks.

But not so Mr Toothill. He came, Whitlock told me afterwards, from the West Riding of Yorkshire, where he was a power; but so little of a power was he in London that, had Pepper not rashly burdened himself with him, he would probably have waited in King's Cross Station for the next train back to his own parts. Anyway, here he was in my house, and as his eyes fell on the wool-winding, they lighted up (so Whitlock said) with the first spark of interest they had shown that evening.

"This is like ho-o-ome, at all events," he said, giving the word I don't know how many "o's." "But you've got it felted, haven't you? If the ladies will excuse me----"

And without more ceremony, and in spite of Aunt Angela's protestations, he drew the candlesticks towards himself, began to unravel the ridiculous tangle, and became for purposes of conversation a piece of furniture with a beard.

Of course Mr Toothill had been foisted on us merely because Pepper had not known what else in the world to do with him; but Pepper's beautiful candour rarely confessed much of what was really passing in his mind, and I awaited with relish the reason he would give for his call. By this time I was quite wide awake again; and Mr Toothill had refused the whisky I had got out.

Well, Judy had several reasons, all sufficient, all perfect; but alas! he and Evie ever hit it off with deplorable lucklessness. He and Whitlock were Jackie's godfathers; but, as against the rather loud way in which he had rung the bell, his urbanities about the spiritual relationship availed him little with Evie. Her looks said plainly, to me at all events, that if Pepper intended her to believe that he had called on an eating-up night merely to ask how Jackie was getting on, he mistook her. Driven from this outpost, Pepper proudly refused to urge the commonplace excuse of private business with myself. Instead, he delicately adjusted his trousers, produced his cigar-case, besought Evie's permission with a glance, and then, lighting up with deliberation, astonished myself hardly less than Evie by saying: "Well--unless Whitlock's already told you--I've come for your congratulations, Mrs Jeffries."

"Oh? What on, Mr Pepper?" said Evie. She had summoned up a ready, glad look.

"Ah, I see he hasn't told you. Stupid of me--of course he couldn't have, as I only heard myself about four hours ago. Dear Mrs Jeffries, you may congratulate me on my impending knighthood."

Evie jumped up. "_Really?_" I myself was not so much surprised at the fact as at the moment of its coming, though my surprise at that also passed instantly. Of course it would be so much prestige for the Consolidation.

Yes, Judy was down among the approaching New Year's Honours. And so he ought to have been. If there is official recognition for a man who can merely advise in a party's interest which provincial mayors can be given the accolade without being made the laughing-stock of their neighbours, Judy's services to the Administration had been far greater. To the man on 'change this would doubtless seem a feather in the cap of the F.B.C.; only a few knew that before long it would prove a thorn in their sides. Yes, it was distinctly good preparation for the coming Consolidation, and, in the meantime, there was the knight-elect's health to drink, and I had only got the whisky out. I myself fetched up the claret for Aunt Angela and Evie. Both the announcement and the manner of it had been a huge success, and Billy Izzard, remarking "I won't say 'may I,'--" reached for Pepper's cigar-case.

"Well, I _am_ glad!" said Evie, maybe, wife-like, casting ahead in a wonder as to what my own chances might be. "And are we really the first to know?"

"Except Whitlock and Mr Toothill, yes. But of course I needn't say----"

"Oh, of course we wouldn't breathe a word! Isn't it splendid, auntie?"

Indeed, Evie seemed quite won over. I think she came nearer that evening to liking Pepper than she has done either before or since.

As I said, I have an object in relating all this--several objects. The next thing happened perhaps half-an-hour later, when Mr Toothill had almost freed one candlestick of wool, but otherwise had not greatly added to our sociability. For that half hour Pepper had reigned among us, but then, bit by bit, he had begun slowly to slip back again. We had guardedly discussed the prospects of the Consolidation; and then, as a preliminary to his coming down presently with a run, Pepper made a perfectly innocent but altogether luckless remark. It was about Miss Levey.

"It was understood she wasn't to come over," he grumbled; "I agreed to that; but I don't see why she should be taken away from me just now." (I had got rid of Miss Levey that very week.) "Hang her private convictions! What do I care about her private convictions as long as she does her work?"

I laughed, though a little lamely. "My dear Judy, we don't want a woman whose job interferes with her propaganda, and she's been incubating 'rights' of one sort and another for a long time. Send her to Schmerveloff: he receives that sort with open arms. Let him make a case of persecution out of it. We want efficiency."

"But, dash it all, she _was_ efficient."

"She wasn't. You had to pull her up last week, and I had twice the week before. She'd been warned."

Judy, who really didn't care a button about the loss of Miss Levey, laughed. "The red rag again, Jeffries! You have here, Mr Toothill, quite the most insular man in this realm, _and_ the most obstinate. I can make him do anything he's a mind to--and not much else. Well, well, if you won't have a suffragette, perhaps you'll find me a member of the Women's Primrose League?"

But here Whitlock struck in. "By the way, I'd an applicant this morning."

"From the Women's Primrose League?" Pepper tossed over his shoulder.

"I don't mean for the private work, but as general amanuensis," Whitlock went on. "I asked her how she heard we wanted anybody, and she said she hadn't--had just looked in on the chance."

"Go to Jeffries, since he's made it his affair," Pepper grumbled.

"Well, Miss Day _is_ getting married," Whitlock went on, "so that we shall want somebody in the outer office. Then promote Miss Lingard----"

"What was she like?"

Billy Izzard's eyes were dreamily on the smoke of Pepper's expensive cigar, but I saw a change come into them. Whitlock has a passable gift of description. He began to describe the woman who had looked in on the chance of a job: before he had finished I had no doubt, and Billy (I gathered) not much, of who the female out-o'-work had been. "Hallo, my model!" I guessed to be in his mind; but it was no business of his, and he appeared to be relishing his cigar as before.

"I've forgotten her name, but I have it in the book," Whitlock concluded. "Clouston or Christian or something like that."

"Well, see she isn't anti-suffrage either," quoth Pepper; "as far as I can see, that would be just as bad."

And he selected a fresh cigar.

My first thought had shaped itself in the very words for which Louie herself had pulled me up so sharply: "Poor woman!" For it was pathetically clear what had happened--what must have happened. Once more she had taken a resolution too heroic to be held to, and whether she had caved in because of myself or because of the necessity for feeding and clothing her boy made no practical difference. I could only hope it was the last. Poverty leaves little room for heroics. Later, as I think I told you, Louie got Miss Day's post, and after that Miss Lingard's, which she has still.

And my second thought was that, as she had applied of herself for Miss Levey's place, there would now be no more love lost between her and Miss Levey than there was between Miss Levey and myself. I began to muse on this....

But let me go on with that curiously broken evening.

Ever since Pepper had told us about his knighthood Aunt Angela had sat, her slender fingers folded in her lap, smiling from time to time into the fire. Now knighthood is a temporal distinction, and, as such (I am putting this bluntly), another nut for that new and dainty humility of hers to crack. For worldliness, it was my own promised wealth in another form; and against such things she seemed to have taken up some sort of a position. I think the less practicable human charities had given her a tenderness even for Miss Levey, for I had not escaped a soft look of reproach when I had made my observations on that lady; and altogether she appeared to be wrapped in a little private veil of dissociation from the rest of us and our doings.

So--again to anticipate what became plain a little later--she also was nursing her little surprise for us. Several times during the last month or two she had spoken vaguely of leaving her rooms in Woburn Place, the rooms she had shared with Evie before our marriage; but I had not taken her very seriously; she was welcome to come to us (as she afterwards did) whenever she chose, and she knew it. But she had got it into her head that she would like to take a single room--oh, quite a large, airy, cheerful one--and, as it turned out presently, she had actually done so that very day.

Some chance remark of Pepper's--I think it was something about how pleasant it was to see us thus in our little family circle--gave her the opportunity for her announcement. There had been a little byplay between Pepper and Evie, who had wanted to know why in that case he didn't get married himself; and to that Pepper, abolishing (as it were) the candlesticks under his nose by an act equal in potency to that of creation itself, had answered gallantly (and, in the presence of those candlesticks, rather naughtily) that our own ménage set him a standard which he would rather cherish in thought than fall from in miserable actuality. It was then that his look embraced Aunt Angela, and my maiden aunt by marriage smiled.

"I suppose Mr Pepper thinks I live here because he always finds me here," she said. "But that's only because I've no conscience about inflicting myself on other people. _My_ dwelling's a much more modest one than this, Mr Pepper."

I think Pepper was insincere enough to reply that that it might quite well be and yet almost everything that could be desired.

"I forgot to tell you that, Jeff," Aunt Angela continued, turning to me. "As a matter of fact I only settled the matter to-day--so you're not the only one for whom to-day's been _quite_ important, Mr Pepper." She preened herself.

"Oh!" I said shortly. I thought the whole idea rather stupid. But she continued:

"I go in in exactly ten days, as soon as the paint's dry. And as I don't begin to pay till Christmas, I actually get a week for nothing. That might not be much to some people," she purred, dropping her eyes, "but it's quite a lot to me. So, Jeff, I shall want you to bring a hammer and a foot-rule--or whatever it is. He's _so_ clever at putting up things, Mr Pepper."

She ran amiably on, describing her proposed arrangements.

I could hardly blame Pepper that, to save himself from talking, he drew her out. He was bored to death with the drowsy banality of the evening. So Aunt Angela told us how cosy she was going to be in her new quarters. With her bed screened off in one corner, and the day's fire still burning, she would be able (she said) to lie happily awake and watch the firelight on the ceiling and indulge "an old woman's fancies"; there would be no stairs except when she came out of doors; and she wouldn't have to cook in the same room, for there was a little landing with a stove left by the last tenant--and so on. Pepper was the picture of polite interest.

"And I shall give a little housewarming, I think," she said, as one who knew that hospitality consisted in the hostship and not in the entertainment provided. "Really I should like to ask you all, Mr Toothill too."

Toothill, who had now finished the "unfelting," had struck a match and was experimenting to find out how much of the worsted was cotton and how much wool. He looked up for a moment, but resumed his occupation. Pepper hoped that _he_ would not be left out of Aunt Angela's housewarming.

Aunt Angela murmured that that was very sweet of him.

And the smallest of small talk went on.

I don't know that I need give any more of it. Indeed, I don't remember any more of it. Toothill found the wool to be "sixty Botany" or something of the kind, and we sat on, everybody wanting to break the party up, but nobody (not even Pepper) knowing quite how to do so without an open reference to a watch. I omit the details of Pepper's complete downfall in Evie's eyes. I know that by some accident or other the piano lid was opened, displaying the waterproof apron, and that poor Evie, flurried until she hardly knew what she was saying, committed the solecism of calling Pepper "Sir Julius," grew pink (poor dear), and hated, not herself, but Pepper. Also her frugality received a shock when it was discovered that the hansom had been kept waiting all this time. Then the maid, returning from the Spaniards Road, filled my poor wife's cup by bringing in I know not what homely provision for Jackie's comfort during the night. Then they went.

Now, except when the flattery of personal attention is of the highest importance, Pepper turns all provincials over to Whitlock; and I myself, if ever Mr Toothill turns up at my house again, shall take the precaution of having a whole barrow-load of worsted for his entertainment, and if possible a kitten to "felt" it for him.

V.

I have now to tell how Aunt Angela was as good as her word about the housewarming of her new abode. I hope that in these last pages I have not seemed harsh in thought to the kind and aimless soul. She did not meditate the mischief that came of that evening, and it was not for lack of anything she was able to do to remedy it afterwards that partial, if not total shipwreck came. But that helped little. Malevolence, in my experience, is not the worst of dangers a man as exposed as I has to fear. It is the mischief hat grows as it were of itself, inherent in persons and their diverse characters and manifold relations that is the deadly thing. That is not mere bad luck; it is fatality, and there is no defeating it. I myself was so specially open to it that to all intents and purposes I might as well have gone skinless through the world.... Well, I grinned and bore it. Only one other person knew that I was skinless, and she, alas, was skinless too. Oh, take it on my authority if you cannot take it otherwise, that you will do wisely to keep out of my predicament unless you are of a different temper from mine, have skins to spare, or are prepared to endure the shock I was presently to endure.

I made no attempt to see that other skinless person. If she had found herself driven, from need or any other consideration, to seek a job with the Consolidation, so much the worse; I did not see that that released me from anything she had laid upon me. In any case, as Miss Day's successor, I should rarely see her; even did she pass to the place lately held by Miss Lingard I should, no doubt, be able to avoid her; and for the rest, as she herself had said, things must drift. Sometimes, if I must confess the truth, I found myself getting quite childishly petulant about her. Why had she given me to suppose she was something she wasn't? Why had she let me see her all caught-up and wise and able to bear, as she had shown herself on that first memorable night, and then gone to pieces like this? _I_ couldn't have known her private feelings, but _she_ must have known them....

And what kind of impossible situation was going to be created if, even avoiding other intercourse, I had to encounter those tourmalines of her eyes every time I passed through the busy office to Pepper's room?

So sometimes I forgot what I had laid upon her, and was callous enough and harassed enough to entertain almost a weak resentment against her.

Aunt Angela's new dwelling was in one of those curiously secluded little squares or "circuses" that lie immediately east of King's Cross Road in the neighbourhood of Mount Pleasant. You turn up from the squalid shops and public-houses and trams, and the length of a short steep street brings you into a space with well-built houses about it, trees and birds in the middle, and long narrow gardens with apple and plum and pear at the back. Away to the north the heights of Hampstead seem positively precipitous, and, looking the other way, the multitude of turrets and towers and spires, with St Paul's reigning over them all, is singularly inspiring. Aunt Angela's rooms were very advantageously placed for both these prospects. The first time I went she took me up a breakneck ladder, through a square trapdoor in which I almost stuck fast, and out on to the leads. The sky, torn in primrose-coloured rents and all smoke-browned, was very stormy and fine; and Aunt Angela was looking forward to taking tea out on the roof when the summer came.

"And I shall be able to look away to where my dear ones are," she said, looking north again.

Her room was immediately under this flat roof. It had two windows which looked on the trees in front, and, at the half turn of the stairs, a third which gave on the grimy back garden. In this garden poultry scratched; but there really was a plum-tree, and also a fig that had been known to bear. Her bed, being convertible into a couch by day, did not require to be screened off after all, and the tiny fireplace had brown tiles and a blackleaded iron kerb. One peculiarity the apartment had which I ought to mention: this was a large enclosed cistern, which by rights ought to have been on the roof outside. It held the water supply for the whole house, and as the ball inside it rose and sank, its sounds varied from a gentle tinkling to a soft whispering; the sounds never quite ceased. A stout post some feet from the wall supported one corner of this cistern, and this Aunt Angela, or rather I for her, converted into a hatstand.

It was as she handed me the four black hooks and the paper of screws for this purpose one evening that the sound of the cistern sank to a hissing. "Oh, do give a look to it," she said; "perhaps it wants a washer or something: you can reach it from the window-ledge. And oh, dear, I've got the screws but no screwdriver! There have been hooks in before, haven't there? You'll have to put these higher up then. I'll see if I can borrow a screwdriver downstairs; but see to the cistern first."

But there was nothing to be done with the cistern; if she stayed there she would have to get used to it, that was all. I went up from Pall Mall several evenings to see to her installation, but I never imagined she would stay there very long. The place looked too suddenly cosy when the fire was lighted and the tea-table brightly set.

And so I put her the hooks and a shelf or two up, and made her as comfortable as I could.

Then one night, just as she was settling down, I went in about something or other and found Miss Levey and Aschael there. They seemed to have come for the evening, for their hats were on the hooks on the cistern post. Miss Levey appeared to have forgotten that I had virtually forbidden her my house and turned her out of her job as well; as we shook hands anybody might have supposed that we were the best of friends. She and Aunt Angela appeared to be on quite affectionate terms; and I gathered that Miss Levey was giving lessons by post in secretarial work and doing quite well out of it. Her passing over by the Consolidation she spoke of as a resignation. She was planning to link up her Commercial Correspondence Class with some Guild or other for the Economic Emancipation of Women, and wanted to tell me all about it. I did not stay long.

And of course I couldn't choose Aunt Angela's associates for her.

At first I had refused to go to that party of Aunt Angela's. I had grounds enough for my refusal, for we live half our lives two or three years ahead at the Consolidation, and there were clouds on the economic horizon. Men who live what I may call "short-date" lives can provide for contingencies as they arise, but the surveyor of the future, though he may know things to be inevitable, must be prepared, not for one way in which they may come about, nor even for the most probable way, but for all possible ways. Any one of a thousand symptomatic occurrences may make the Consolidation's most elaborate plans of yesterday of no avail, and work is ten times work when this happens. It had happened several times lately, and but for Pepper's marvellous resilience, my own capacity for long spells of forced labour, and the invaluable inertia of administrative departments, it would have proved too much for us.

I can honestly say that, full of these preoccupations, I had not been influenced by the fact that in all probability Aschael and Miss Levey would be there. I had forgotten all about them.

But Evie's look of resignation when I had told her that I was not going had touched me. We now knew quite a number of people, some of them quite charming people too; and while Evie made less use of this advantage than I could sometimes have wished, I couldn't reproach her for being faithful to her older friends. For a long time we had not been anywhere together. Therefore, seeing her patient yet fallen face, I had promised to make an effort at least to fetch her away, and to arrive earlier if possible. Her instant brightening had amply repaid me.

The party was given on a sharp night towards the end of January, and, try as I would, I had been unable to leave Pall Mall before half-past nine. I should have liked to walk, but that would have taken nearly three-quarters of an hour, and so, near the old F.B.C., I had hailed a hansom. "King's Cross, and then I'll tell you," I had said to the driver; and as I had sped along Holborn and up Judd Street I had relapsed into consideration of the affairs of the day again. The stopping of the hansom and the lifting of the trap aroused me. I gave the man the name of a chapel, and bade him then take a turning to the left; and we went forward again. We passed up a short, steep street at a walk, and stopped in the little "circus."

Aunt Angela's two front windows were lighted and open at the top, and as I paid off my cabman sounds of a nasal singing floated out. I ascended the steps and rang twice--Aunt Angela's signal; but I had to give the double ring again, so merry were they making upstairs. Then I heard steps descending. They were a man's steps, and I gave a sort of mental nod when Aschael opened the door. I had thought he would be there.

"Ve'd about given you up," he said familiarly. "Come in, von't you?"

I followed Aschael upstairs.

It would not greatly have surprised me had Miss Levey taken it upon herself to receive me, as her _fiancé_ (if he was her _fiancé_; I never knew) had made me welcome downstairs; but Aunt Angela, trying to appear calm, but really one flutter of pleasure at the success of her little party, met me at the door.

"How late you are," she said gaily. "Yes, yes--I know you'd have come sooner if you could. I'm not scolding you. Now I expect you're hungry; you must have some supper first, and then you shall be introduced to anybody you don't know. Mr Aschael, you'll get him all he wants, won't you?"

"Vith pleasure, Miss Angela," said Aschael, bustling about, all hands and smiles and ringlets.

Along the wall to my right, as I entered, ran a table, spread with the disarray of a quite elaborate supper. Plates were littered with banana skins, grape-twigs with the tiny morsels of pulp still on them, broken biscuits and remnants of jelly; and beyond this table, under the cistern in the corner, was a smaller one, with half a frilled ham, the wreckage of a tongue and a severely mutilated cold pie. Several flasks of colonial Burgundy had been opened; syphons stood among these; and from that secret and inexhaustible hoard of her belongings Aunt Angela had unearthed quite a large number of wineglasses, red ones, green ones, and some of clear glass. Nay, the entertainment had even run into a large box of Christmas crackers; the coloured paper and bright gelatine of these lay scattered among the plates; and my first impression of the number of people who made the room very warm was that half of them had flimsy tissue-paper caps and bonnets on their heads.

But, as I happened to be more than a little hungry, I merely sketched a sort of general and inclusive bow, sat down, and allowed Aschael to wait on me.

Then, my hunger appeased, I began to look about me.

That the gathering was too large for Aunt Angela's not very large room I instinctively set down to Miss Levey's account, for several of those present appeared to be her friends. There must have been ten or a dozen people there. Miss Levey herself had already given me several welcoming nods across the room from where she sat, cross-legged and resolutely youthful, on the floor at Evie's feet; and on her black hair was a tissue-paper cap of Liberty, with a red spot on one side of it. I had already discovered that the sounds of nasal singing I had heard came from the metal corolla of a gramophone. This, I surmised, belonged to the gentleman who was operating it, a little Japanese named Kato, whom I had seen once or twice at Aunt Angela's old boarding-house in Woburn Place. He wore a dairymaid's bonnet of pale blue, with torn strings. Two other of Aunt Angela's old fellow-boarders also were there, one of them a delicate little man with white spats, a Mr Trimble, the other an attenuated little lady, with the red marks of a pince-nez across the bridge of her nose, and very thin hair, silver save for a few strands of a yellowish hue. Sitting on Aunt Angela's couch-bed was a younger couple, not very obviously engaged, yet nevertheless carrying on what I gathered to be a courtship by means of quick glad exchanges of the more paradoxical sayings of Schmerveloff. "Oh, rather!" the lady gasped from time to time; "And do you remember that passage?"... "Remember it! _I_ should say so--about the 'man-made law' you mean?" These at any rate bore all the marks of being friends of Miss Levey's, and members of the Emancipation Guild. Aunt Angela herself, Evie, and Billy Izzard completed the party.

As I was pushing back my chair, having supped, the gramophone broke out again. Not to interrupt it, I sat where I was, watching the little Japanese who operated it. Mr Kato seemed to have neither eyebrows nor lashes, and the slits of his eyes with their little bitumen dots held, as he looked slyly up from time to time, that indulgent, insulting expression that I distrust in his race over here. He had the appearance of trying the air of the "Intermezzo" from _Cavalleria Rusticana_ upon us, as if he contemptuously thought to gauge our taste; and his small hands touched screws and lifted little metal arms with a negligent intelligence. He, too, had nodded to me, though our acquaintance was of the slightest; and with him on the one hand, and Miss Levey on the other, I hoped Evie would not want me to stay very long.

The tune had finished, and I had made another motion to rise when suddenly a few words of Miss Levey's caused me to start, and then to sink slowly back into my chair again. She was speaking to Mr Kato.

"Oh, _do_ let's have 'Ora pro Nobis' again, Mr Kato--Miss Windus loves it so--don't you, Kitty?"

The next moment the lady whose silver hair was intermixed with brownish strands, the lady whom I had taken to be an old fellow-boarder from Woburn Place, had given a little nod and said "Please." As if to hear the better, she set her pince-nez on her nose.

I saw the little scalene triangles of her eyes....

Like so much obliterating smoke, the past six or seven years rolled away....

Only six or seven years, and I had failed to recognise her!

Not quite knowing what I did, I found myself crossing to the table under the cistern and returning again with a great hacked-off piece of tongue. I sat down to supper again.

There were candles on the table, and little bright refractions of light came darting through the angles of flower-stands and glasses. I watched these as I made pretence to eat. Presently I found myself quite curious about which fleck of light came from which angle, and my eyes sought to trace each sparkle to its origin. A few moments before I had been drinking Burgundy from a green glass; another glass, a red one, stood close to it; but as the candles were placed neither dyed the cloth with the little spot of its own hue. Perhaps--I am trying to tell you quite literally, and as nearly as I can remember, the infantile occupation that had suddenly engrossed me--perhaps if I moved the candle I should get the little spots. I moved the candle this way and that. Presently each of the glasses stood over its own little jewel of light, this one red as a ruby, the other green as grass....

And I cannot better tell you how curiously stunned even my sense of hearing seemed to be than by saying that I heard not one note of "Ora pro Nobis," but only the soft hissing of the cistern overhead in the corner.

But, after I know not what space of time in which I had become half hypnotised by those two tiny refractions of coloured light, I suddenly put the glasses away from me. Also I heard the gramophone once more, and felt the returnings of methodical thought. There came to me, after all this time, the very ordinary reflection that Kitty must have recognised me--had probably known I was coming--and had not been able to endure my presence in the room.... I remembered Evie's words: "I think you are wrong if you think that things like that go on for years and years." Looking covertly up, I saw that Evie had moved, and was now on the other side of Kitty from that occupied by Miss Levey. As I watched, she picked up Kitty's handkerchief, and Kitty smiled. Kitty's eyes even met mine, but whether they saw me or were merely full of "Ora pro Nobis," which was being played for the second or third time, I could not tell. They moved away again without having given any sign of recognition.

Then the tune ended, and Miss Levey jumped up.

"Now, let's have something jolly!" she cried. "And Mr Jeffries has finished his supper--make room for him in the circle--move up, Aschael."

It came suddenly upon me that there was one place, and one place only in that room for me to take. I had risen. I strode over the box of records in which Mr Kato was rummaging, sat down next to Kitty Windus, and held out my hand.

"How do you do, Kitty?" I said.

So far was she from starting or trembling that she merely turned, blinked a little, and, taking my hand, said, in the thin little voice I used to know so well, "Ah! I _thought_ you'd come and speak to me, by-and-by."

So if Miss Levey had deliberately planned this for my confusion, I triumphed over her.

For a quarter of an hour Evie and I sat one on either side of Kitty Windus. There was no difficulty whatever. Kitty, though she spoke little, showed no more restraint than it had been her wont to show, and there was nothing to bring up even the ghost of our past relation. And if I triumphed over Miriam Levey, so Evie triumphed over me in the private glances she gave me past the back of Kitty's head. She had been right, and I wrong. Those stories of how Kitty had been found walking round and round Lincoln's Inn Fields at night, unable, when confronted by a policeman, to remember her own name, or where she lived--I strongly doubted them. I even found Louie's account of her mental state difficult to believe.... She spoke of her neuralgias. She had been a martyr to them, she said, but they had been better lately. Somebody's Tic Mixture had done them more good than anything else. I ought to try it--she'd write the name of it down for me on a piece of paper in case I forgot--she hadn't been remembering things very well lately herself. Louie had advised her to try Somebody Else's Tincture, but she didn't believe in that at all; it was one of these imitations that the shopmen were always trying to palm off on people.... At this point, seeing she had mentioned Louie, I thought it safe to venture an offhand, "Oh, how's Louie, by the way?" But Kitty, apparently forgetting that she herself had introduced the name, pursed her lips. Louie, she mumbled, hadn't behaved very well. She didn't mean to herself; she wouldn't in the least have minded that; but one had friends, and liked to see them treated as friends, which some people---- She stopped as Billy Izzard came up, perhaps hearing Louie's name.

So great was my relief at all this, that I suddenly found myself quite carelessly gay. But for Miss Levey's presence I might have been positively happy. But that lady's fussy attentions to myself did not cause me to drop my guarded attitude towards her. I smiled when she put a paper cap on my head also (she had kept a cracker specially for me, she said); and I made a joke when she read some amatory motto or other; that, I said, would be more in her friends' line--indicating with a glance the couple who conducted the intellectual courtship on the couch. But Miss Levey wagged her short finger at me; she wasn't going to have fun made of the members of her League, she said; and she even went so far as to slap the back of my hand with a paper fan she carried and to tell me I was naughty. Mr Kato, the dotted almonds of his eyes blinkingly comprehending us all, ran through the remaining records and then asked if there were no more; and Aunt Angela herself said that if he wanted more she was afraid he'd have to fetch them from the landing. It was only then that I learned that the gramophone was Aunt Angela's. I had supposed it to belong to Mr Kato.

So we sat and laughed and enjoyed ourselves. Billy Izzard had taken an old letter from his pocket and was making a jotting of the scene. I suppose that mixture of littered supper-table, grotesque tissue-paper caps, and Aunt Angela's miscellaneous furniture must have appealed to his always keen sense of the incongruous. They had got fresh records; I had seen Mr Kato come in with an old soap-box, and had heard Miss Levey's cry of juvenile delight: "Oh, they're all comics!" They were entreating Aschael to sing, who liked being entreated, but said, No, Miriam was the singer. Miriam replied merrily that unless they were careful she _would_ sing, and then they would know all about it. Aunt Angela laughed heartily at this: and in the end Aschael sang, not very appropriately, "The Boys of the Bulldog Breed." Mr Kato "Hurrahed" and Miss Levey "Banzaied," and Aunt Angela, who had slipped out during the song to wash glasses in her little pantry, called the little nonentity from Woburn Place to help her in giving us all claret-cup.

"What a pity Mr Aschael's voice isn't properly trained!" Kitty remarked, turning to me.

"An awful pity!" Evie struck vivaciously in from the other side of her. "I'm sure he'd have a splendid voice!"

It was odd, the way in which the pair of us took Kitty under our wing.

"You don't sing, do you, Kitty?" Evie next asked.

Kitty didn't. Evie admitted that she didn't either. "But," she said, "we aren't going to let Mr Aschael off with one song, are we? Come, Mr Kato--you're Master of the Ceremonies----"

"I'm just finding one he knows." Mr Kato grinned over his shoulder.

"A comic, mind," warned Miss Levey, "and then Kitty can have 'Ora pro Nobis' again before we go."

And in token that the song was going to be comic, Aschael got up on his feet and set himself in a gesture he had doubtless picked up at the Middlesex Music Hall.

"Now, Mr Aschael," said Kato.

Aschael cleared his throat.

At the first notes of a curiously thin piano accompaniment, I felt Kitty shrink and close as a daisy closes at the approach of night....

You will tell me that I ought to have stopped the machine--smashed it--fallen on it--done something, anything; but put yourself in my place; nay, put yourself in the place of the three of us who sat together, and who had sat together the last time we had heard the song Aschael sang. Did I tell you when that had been, or didn't I? I had better tell you now.... It had been up the River, with a summer twilight falling, and distant banjos sounding, and the Japanese lanterns making long, wavy reflections in the water. Our party had been four, not three, then, and the fourth of us had sung this song Aschael was singing now. He had sung it, lolling in the stern, beating time with one hand, and very careful about the spotting of a new pair of white flannel trousers.

Oh yes, I daresay I ought to have done something rather than let those two other poor things hear _that_ song again....

But a hideous fear, of which they knew nothing, kept me fascinated and still. So long as they _only_ remembered the song and that other occasion they were the lucky ones. I envied them their luck. No let-off so merciful was mine.... And my horror was enhanced, not so much by those two faces at which I dared not glance, as by our atmosphere of tawdry festivity--the sprinkling of coloured gelatine on the floor, the mocking caps of tissue paper on our heads, and the florid antics of Aschael, turning and grimacing, now this way, now that.

That I might keep this added horror of mine from them, there was even yet a chance....

For the song, you understand, was being sung _twice_, once by the unknown maker of the record in the machine, and the second time, as it were over it, by Aschael. As the two voices did not perfectly coincide, the result was a sort of palimpsest of sound, with, as sometimes happens in palimpsests, the old and almost erased message the more significant one. Aschael kept irregular pace with a far-off amateur voice and the faint tinkling of a piano.... Like a bolt into my brain had come the knowledge of _whose_ that horrible instrument had been, and how it had come into Aunt Angela's possession. I remembered her visits to Guildford; I remembered Mrs Merridew's funeral; I remembered her old kindnesses in providing a certain young man in London with a "home from home." The machine had come from Guildford, a legacy, a memento, a giggle from the tomb....

But they, those two poor stricken souls, could yet be spared that knowledge. It was dreadfully too much that they knew the song, and that he had known it, and that he had sung it that summer's evening up the River. The rest of the horror might still be kept from them.

"All together--chorus," cried Aschael jubilantly:

"'Why--don't--you marry the girl? D'you want--the poor thing--to die? You can see--she's gone--upon--you By the twin--kle in--her eye! Do--the trick--for se--ven-and-six, Take--the tip--of a pal-- I've--been--watching your game-- Why don't you marry the gal?'"

Then I felt that last desperate hope of mine slipping away--Aschael was beginning to forget the words, and to make out with gestures and grimaces, leaving gaps through which there started up thin and tinkling and facetious horrors.... I saw that Kato had realised; I had once come upon him and Archie drinking whisky and soda together; his eyes met mine curiously, and I fancied his lips shaped the name:

"Merridew?"

This next I have from Billy Izzard. He tells me that all at once I sprang to my feet and cried, in a huge and boisterous voice that drowned everything else, "Never mind, Aschael--chorus--all together!--"

"'Why--don't--you marry the girl? D'you want--the poor thing to die? You can see--she's gone--upon you By the twin-kle in--her eye! La--la la--sing up! Take the tip--go on, Aschael!-- I've been--watching your game-- Why don't you marry the gal?'"

Clapping my hands, Billy says, I fell back into a chair.

But I was out of it again in an instant. I was not to escape so easily as all that. Kato had his finger on the lever; I cannot say how, nor whether, he guessed what was to come, nor whether he tried to avert it; if he did, he was too late. From that damnable box there came a long catarrhal wheeze--high-pitched and tenor the words came:

"Now, Evie--Evie's turn--make her sing, mother--bosh--of course she's going to sing!----"

I was neither at Aunt Angela's party nor yet in a boat on a summer's evening up the River. How can I tell you where I was? In what drawing-room? Sitting on what chair? Surrounded by what company?... I swear to you that I have seen a place I have never seen, been in a place I never in my life was in. I can describe to you a family gathering with Mrs Merridew there, and her son there, and Evie there, and myself never, never there. I have seen, whether they ever existed or not, French windows opening on a lawn, and a slackened tennis-net beyond, and an evening flush in the sky, and the air dark with homing rooks.... Nothing will persuade me that these eyes are in fact ignorant of that quiet home of Archie Merridew's--and yet Guildford is a place in which I have never been.

Then a sound like the hissing of a thousand cisterns filled my ears. Through it I heard Kitty Windus's scream of terror, but it sounded an infinite distance away. From Evie I had heard nothing. For one moment I saw everything reel and aslant--Kato, the Schmerveloffians on the sofa, the cistern-post with its hats and coats and one hook empty, steeving up towards a tilted ceiling....

Then came the blow on the back of my head, and the sounds of the cistern ceased. I had fallen across Aunt Angela's tiled hearth, and lay in a cloud of steam from the kettle I had overturned in my fall.