LXVI…

LXVI

Even the saintly of this earth are prone to rare, occasional displays of temper. Saxham's white saint had proved her descent from Eve by stamping her slender foot at her hulking Doctor; had, after a sudden outburst of passionate, unreasonable upbraiding, risen from the dinner-table and run out of the room, to hide a petulant, remorseful shower of tears.

Such a trivial thing had provoked the outburst--merely an invitation from Captain and Mrs. Saxham, who were settled for the London summer season in Eaton Square, for Owen and his wife to spend the scorching months of August and September at the old home, perched on the South Dorset cliffs, among its thrush-haunted shrubberies of ilex and oleander and rose--nothing more.

But Mrs. Owen Saxham had passionately resented the idea. Why never occurred to Saxham. He had long ago forgiven and forgotten Mildred's old treachery. If David's betrayal had brought him shame and anguish, it had borne him fruit of joy as well. And if the fruit might never be gathered, if its divine juices might never solace her husband's bitter thirst, at least, while he lived, it was his--to look at and long for. He owed that cruel bliss to his brother and that brother's wife. And their meeting had been, upon his side, free of constraint, unshadowed by the recollection of what had once appeared to him a base betrayal--a gross, foul, unpardonable wrong.

Suppose he had married Mildred, and been uneventfully happy and successful. Then, Saxham told himself, he would never have seen and known Lynette. She would never have come to him and laid in his the slight hand whose touch thrilled him to such piercing agony of yearning for the little more that would have meant so much--so much....

Ah, yes! he was even grateful to Mildred. She had not worn well. She had grown thin and passee, and nervous and hysterical. But she was amiable, even demonstrative in her professions of admiration and enthusiasm for Owen's wife. Her regard for the Doctor was elaborate in the sisterliness of its expression when he was present, if in his absence it was tempered by a regretful sigh--even by a reference to the time:

"When poor dear Owen thought me the only woman worth looking at in the whole world. Ah, well! that is all over, long ago!" Mildred would say, with an inflection that was meant to be tenderly reassuring. And she would tilt her still pretty head on one side and smile with pensive kindness at her successor upon the throne of poor dear Owen's heart.

These gentle, retrospective references were never made in the Doctor's hearing. With truly feminine tact they were reserved for Mrs. Owen's delectation. And possibly they might have rankled in those pretty shell-like ears, if their owner had loved Saxham.

But Saxham knew that she did not;--had even ceased to wish that the miracle might be wrought. Brainy men can be very dense. When she stamped her foot and cried, "I decline to accept Mrs. Saxham's invitation, either with you or without you. I wonder that you should dream of asking me to! If you can forget how hideously she and your brother have treated you, I cannot! I loathe treachery! I abominate ingratitude and deceit! And I hate her--and I shall not go!" Saxham opened his eyes, as well he might. He had never before seen his wife otherwise than gentle and submissive. He found his own bitter explanation of the sudden storm that had burst among the debris of dessert on the Harley Street dinner-table. Her fetters were galling her to agony, he knew! His square pale face grew more Rhadamanthine than ever, and the glass he had been filling with port overflowed unnoticed on the cloth. But he kept the mask of set composure before his agony of remorse. Then the frou-frou of light silken draperies passed over the soft carpet. The door opened and shut with a slam. Lynette had left the room. As Saxham sat alone, a heavy, brooding figure, mechanically sipping at his port, and staring at the empty place opposite, where the overset flower-glass, and the crookedly pushed-back chair, and the serviette that made a white streak on the dark crimson carpet, marked the haste and emotion of her departure, he said to himself that the West End upholsterer who had the contract for refurnishing Plas Bendigaid must be warned to complete his work without delay.

For Plas Bendigaid, the solid, stone-built grange that had been a Convent in the fifteenth century, and probably long before, the South Welsh home of his mother's girlhood, perched in the shadow of Herion Castle upon a wide shelf of the headland that commands the treacherous shoals and snowy shell-strewn sands and wild tumbling waters of Nantmadoc Bay ... Plas Bendigaid, with that hoarded, invested money, was to be Saxham's bequest to his young widow.

Everything that loving care and forethought could plan had already been done to make the old home pleasant and charming. Nothing was needed but the upholsterer's finishing touches. Saxham had planned that Lynette should be there when he wiped out the shame of failure by keeping that promise made in the Cemetery at Gueldersdorp, little more than a year before.

He had always meant to keep it, but not when the north-east gales of winter and spring should be sweeping over the mountain-passes and lashing the waves to madness; not when the ceaseless scurry of hunted clouds should have piled the south-west horizon with scowling blue-black ramparts, topped by awful towers, themselves belittled by stupendous heights built of intangible vapours, and reproducing with added grandeur and terror the soaring peaks and awful vales and appalling precipices of snow-helmed Frore and her daughters.

When the promise of Summer should have been fulfilled in sweetness, Saxham would keep his promise. When the swallows should hatch out their young broods between the huge stones that the hands of men who returned to dust cycles of centuries ago hauled up with the twisted hide-rope and the groaning crane, to rear with them upon the jut of the rugged headland two hundred feet above the waves that now break a mile away, the Lonely Tower, now merged in the huge dilapidated Edwardian keep that broods over Herion. When those blocks of cyclopaean masonry should be tufted with the golden wallflower and the perfumed wild geranium, and starred with the delicate blossom of the lavender scabious and the wild marguerite, then the little blue bottle that stood in the deep table-drawer near the big whisky-flask should come into use.

When the vast pale sweep of the sandy dunes should be covered for leagues by the perfumed cloth-of-gold spread by the broom and the furze; when the innumerable little yellow dwarf-roses should blossom on their prickly bushes, thrusting pertly through the powdery white sand, and every hollow and hillock should be gay with the star convolvulus and the flaunting scarlet poppies--then Death should come, borne on winged feet, and bearing the sword of keenness, to sever the iron bonds of Andromeda chained to the rock. And here was Summer, knocking at the door!

Lynette did not reappear. He did not seek her out and ask the reason of her strange display of emotion. Only a husband could do that who had the right to take her in his arms and kiss the last remaining traces of her tears away. Saxham went to his consulting-room, and while all the clocks of London made time, and the moon veered southward, and the stars rose and set, he toiled over his notes and case-books in the brilliant circle cast by the shaded electric lamp upon his writing-table, and the tide in the big whisky-flask in the table-drawer ebbed low.

Hours hence he laid down his pen. The flask had long been emptied; the alcohol-flare was dying out in the grey chambers of his brain. Weariness of life weighed on him like a leaden panoply. He had almost stretched his hand to take the little blue-glass vial that sat waiting, waiting in the deep table-drawer aside the drained flask before sleep overcame him. His head sank against the chair-back. His was a sudden, heavy lapsing into forgetfulness, unmarred by dreams.

Time sped. The silver table-clock, the clock upon the mantelshelf, and the grandfather clock in the corner, ran a race with the chronometer in the pocket of the sleeping man. The brilliant unwavering circle of electric light did not reach the face of the Dop Doctor. It bathed his hands, that hung lax over the arms of the Sheraton chair, and tipped his lifted chin, leaving the strong brow and closed eyes in shadow. But as the pale glimmer of dawn began to outline the edges of the blinds and stretched at length a broad, pointing finger across the quiet room, the sleeping face showed greyish pale and luminous as a drawing by Whistler in silver-point.

The dawn had not rested on it long before there came a knock upon the panel of the consulting-room door. It was so faint and diffident a knock, no wonder it passed unheeded. Then the door opened timidly, and a slender figure in pale flowing draperies of creamy embroidered cashmere stole upon small, noiseless, slippered feet over the thick Turkey carpet.

It was Lynette. She had risen from her bed, and looked out from the landing into the hall below, and, seeing the light of the unextinguished lamp shining under the lintel of the consulting-room door, had stolen timidly down to ask Owen's pardon. Why had she behaved so badly? She could not explain. Only she was sorry. She must tell him so. His name was upon her lips, when she saw the Dop Doctor sleeping in his chair.

Breathlessly silent, she crossed the room to his side. And then--it was to her as though she looked upon her husband's face for the first time.

There was no stain of his secret excess upon it--no bloating of the features. You would have said this was a sane and strong and temperate man, upon whom the mighty brother of all-conquering Death had come, like one armed, and overthrown in the heat and stress of the life-battle. Only the sorrow of a suffering soul was written as deeply on that pale mask of human flesh as though the sculptor-slaves of a Pharao, dead seven thousand years agone, had cut it with tools of unknown, resistless temper in the diamond-hard Egyptian granite.

He breathed deeply and evenly, and not a muscle twitched as Lynette bent over and looked at him. A mass of her red-brown hair, heavy with the weight of its own glossy luxuriance, slipped from her half-bared bosom as she leaned over him, and fell upon his breast. A sudden blush burned over her as it fell. He never stirred. But as though the rod of Moses had touched the rock in Horeb, one slow tear oozed from between Saxham's black fringed, close-sealed eyelids, and hung there, a burnished, trembling point of steely light. And the deep, still, manly anguish of his face cried out to the reawakening womanhood in Lynette, and a strange, new, overwhelming emotion seized and shook her as a stream of white and liquid fire seemed to pass into her veins and mingle with her blood.

She began to understand, as she pored, with beating heart and bated breath, upon the living page before her eyes.

In its reticence and lonely strength of endurance, that face of Saxham's pleaded with her. In its stern acceptance of suffering and disappointment for Saxham, in its rugged confrontation of the inevitable; in its resolute long-suffering and grim patience; in its silent abnegation of any claim upon her gratitude or any right to demand her tenderness, the face was more than eloquent to-night. In the pride that would never stoop to beg for pity--would rather die hungered than accept one crumb of grudged and measured love; in its secret, inscrutable, unyielding loyalty to that promise given to a dead man; in the nobility of its refusal to shine brighter in its faith and truth and chivalry by the revelation of that other man's mean baseness; in its almost paternal solicitude; in its agony of love for her, insensible and careless; in the sick despair that had given up and left off hoping: even in the pride that had--or so it seemed to her--asserted itself at the last, and said, "I have left off crying for the moon; I wish for your love no longer!"--it pleaded--pleaded.... Words struggled for answering utterance in her, but none came.... She leaned nearer, drawn by an irresistible fascination, and laid her lips lightly upon the broad white forehead, with the bar of black meeting eyebrow smudged across it, and then, with a sudden leap and thrill, she knew....

All that had been in the past went for nothing. Only this man mattered who sat sleeping in the chair. How easy to awaken him with a touch, and tell him all! She dared not, though she longed to.

He was her master as well as her mate. When he had said to her that he had ceased to care, his eyes had given his words the lie. He had looked at her.... She shivered deliciously at the recollection of that look. If he were to open those stern, ardent eyes now, he would know her his. His--all his, to deal with as he chose!... His alone!

If Saxham had awakened then.... But he slept on. She did not dare to kiss that broad white buckler of his forehead again. She kissed the sleeve of his coat instead, and, scared by a sudden sigh and movement of one of the hands that hung over the chair-arms, gathered her draperies around her, and stole as noiselessly as a pale sunbeam, out of the room.

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LXVII

It was barely five o'clock, and the balmiest summer day at Herion is wont to waken, like a spoilt child, in a bad temper of angry wind and lashing rain. Lynette, who had risen from her bed and thrown her dressing-gown about her, to kneel on the broad window-seat and look out upon this strange new world, shivered, standing barefoot on the mossy carpet. Then she looked round the room, and smiled with delight. For she had found it, upon her arrival of the previous night, a reproduction, down to the smallest detail, of her blue-and-white bedroom at Harley Street, with this notable difference--that on the wall facing the bed-head hung a fine copy of a Millais portrait that was one of the treasures of Bawne House. Lady Bridget-Mary, in the glory of her beautiful youth, shone from the canvas splendid as a star.

How kind, how kind of Owen!... Her eyes filled as she gazed, comparing the glowing, radiant face upon the canvas with the enlarged photograph of the Mother in her habit that stood in an ebony and silver frame upon a little table beside the bed. A worn "Garden of the Soul" lay near, and the "Imitation" of inspired A Kempis. Both had been the Mother's gifts. The Breviary and the Little Office of Our Lady had belonged to the dead. Lynette had brought these treasured possessions with her from Harley Street, leaving the ivory Crucifix hanging in its place above the vacant pillow. So many sleepless nights she had known of late upon that pillow that there were faint bluish-shaded hollows under the beautiful eyes, and wistful lines about the mouth.

Since the revelation made to her by her own heart, when the heavy tress of hair dropped from her bosom upon the unconscious breast above which she bent, an insurmountable wall of diffidence and shyness upon her side, and of stern, self-concentrated isolation on her husband's, had risen up between them, dwarfing the barrier that was already there.

His writing-table lamp had burned through the nights, but she had never ventured upon another stolen visit to Saxham's consulting-room. The memory of that kiss she had put upon the velvety-smooth space above the broad meeting eyebrows stung in her like a sense of guilt, and yet it had its sweetness. She had claimed her right. The man was hers, though she might never be his.... To know it was to realise at once her riches and her poverty.

Out of a vague yearning and a formless, nameless pain had come to her the knowledge of the true herb needed for her healing. The unsated hunger for sympathy and love and loveliness, the loneliness that gnawed him, she comprehended now. And as she looked about her at the dainty, carefully-chosen furniture, and the exquisite old-world-patterned chintz draperies, recognising what his care had been to please her, and how every little taste and preference of hers had been remembered and gratified, a sense of her own ingratitude pierced her to the quick.

She had parted from Owen without one tender word, without even one glance of greater kindness than she would have bestowed upon a stranger. She ached with futile remorse at the recollection of that frigid, distant good-bye at Euston Station, when Lady Hannah's shrill laugh had jangled through Major Bingo's blustering admonitions to perspiring porters to put the luggage in one compartment, to stow canvas bags of golf-clubs and fishing-rods in the racks, and to damage bicycles at their personal peril, since the company evaded liability.

It had been Saxham's wish that Lady Hannah and Major Wrynche should be his wife's guests at Plas Bendigaid. Looking from her bedroom casements over the syringas and lilacs and larches, the laburnums and hawthorns and hollies of the low-walled garden that ended at the sheer cliff-edge, from whence you looked down upon the tops of the pines and chestnuts, whose green foliage hid the shining metals of the iron way, and made a sea of verdure in place of the salt blue waves that once had lapped and sighed there--gazing across the powdery sand-dunes that were prickly with sea-holly and gay with flaunting poppies and purple scabious, the pink and white convolvulus, and the thorny yellow dwarf rose, that somehow finds nourishment in the pale sand of Herion Links, to the line of white breakers that rose and fell more than a mile away. Lynette sighed a small sigh of resignation at the prospect of long weeks to be spent in the society of these pleasant, well-bred, rather fidgety people Owen had chosen to bear her company.

Of course, Owen could not leave his patients! He had explained that, and Lady Hannah and her big Major were old friends of hers and his. And the little woman with the jangling laugh and the snapping black eyes had known the Mother in her youth....

At that remembrance Lynette's eyes went lovingly to the copy of the Millais portrait, and as the sun burst through the streaming wind-chased clouds, and smote bright diamond-rays from the dripping window-panes, the firm lips seemed to curve in the rare, sudden smile, the great grey eyes to gleam with life and tenderness.

Ah, to spend a long, sweet summer here, alone with that dearest of all companions! Lynette's white throat swelled at the thought, and a mist blotted out the noble face, crowned with its diadem of rich black tresses. She wiped the tears away, and beheld a world miraculously changed. For land and sea were drenched in radiant sunshine.

She unlatched the casements and threw them wide, and clean, salt, sweet air came streaming in, bringing the fragrance of mignonette and wallflower and sweetbriar, and the aromatic smells of the larch and pine. She leaned her white arms upon the grey stone window-sill, and drank the freshness and fragrance. And it seemed to her that this ancient grange, perched on the cliff-ledge in the tremendous shadow of Herion Castle, looking across the restless grey-blue waters of Nantmadoc Bay to St. Tirlan's Roads, was an ideal place to spend a honeymoon in, supposing you loved the man you had married, and were loved by him?

Her bosom heaved and her wild heart fell to throbbing. A blush burned over her, and she drove the thought away. It came back, whispering like a guest who wishes not to be dismissed. It pleaded and urged and compelled. Something like a strong hand closed upon her heart and drew her, drew her.... A voice called to her in the silence that was only broken by the voices of birds, and the rustling of wind-stirred leaves, and the crying of the gulls above the white restless breakers. And the voice was Owen's.

How strangely he had looked and spoken in that last moment of their parting! It came back in every detail for the hundredth time, as she leaned her white arms upon the window-sill and looked out with wistful eyes upon the beauty of the blossoming world.

"Good-bye, good-bye! Be happy--and forget!"

The train had begun to move as he uttered the words He had gripped her hand painfully and released it. As he drew his arm sharply away, a button, hanging loosely by a thread or two, became detached from his coat-cuff, and fell upon the rubber matting of the corridor. She was conscious of the button as Saxham and the crowded, grimy platform receded from her view. And before she went back to her seat in the compartment that had been reserved for herself and her fellow-travellers, she picked up the tiny disc of black horn, and secretly kissed it, and slipped it into her purse. She was silent and preoccupied during the eleven hours' journey, turning over and over in her mind, mentally repeating with every shade of expression that could vary their meaning, Saxham's strange words of farewell.

She repeated them now aloud. They were tossed to and fro in her heart on waves of wonder and regret and apprehension. Did Owen really believe that to be happy she must forget him? Did he comprehend that she had long arrived at the conclusion that this loveless, joyless companionship, mocked by the name of marriage, was a miserable mistake?

He had never been under any illusion as concerned it. He had accepted the iron terms of the contract she offered him with open eyes and full knowledge. She heard his voice again, as it had spoken in the Cemetery at Gueldersdorp, saying:

"Would I be content to enter, with you for my partner, into a marriage that should be practically no marriage at all--a formal contract that is not wedlock? That might never change as Time went on, and ripen into the close union that physically and mentally makes happiness for men and women who love? Is that what you ask me, Miss Mildare?"

That was just what she had asked. He had accepted her iron conditions, and stipulated for nothing. He had given his all. What had she given him? Nothing but suffering, being rendered pitiless by the ache and sting in her own bosom--absorbed, swallowed up by her agony of grief for the Mother, her passion of regret for dead Beauvayse.

Beauvayse.... Suppose he and Owen Saxham stood side by side down there on the green short grass beneath her windows, which of the two men would to-day be the dearer and the more desired? The tall, soldierly young figure, with the sunburnt, handsome face, the gay, amorous, challenging glance, the red mouth that laughed under the golden moustache, and the shallow brain under the close-clipped golden curls, or the black-haired, hulking Doctor, with the square-cut, powerful face and the stern blue eyes, the man of heart and intellect, whose indomitable, patient tenderness had led a stricken girl back from the borders of that strange land where the brain-sick dwell, to wholesome consciousness of common things, and renewed healthfulness of body and of mind?

She had hardly thanked him. She realised, with tears of shame, that this inestimable service she had accepted as matter of course. It was the way of Saxham's world to take of him and render nothing; he who was worthy to be a King among his fellow-men had been their servant as long as she had known him.

To call him hard and stern, and seek his aid and sympathy at every pinch; to deem him cold and grudging, and accept his sacrifices as matter of course--that was the way of the world with grim-jawed, tender-hearted Owen Saxham. And she, who had done like the rest, knew him now, and valued him for what he was, and--loved him!

For this was love that had come upon her like a strong man armed, not as he had shown himself to her before--laughing and merry, playful and sweet.... This was no ephemeral, girlish passion, evoked by the beauty of gay, wanton, grey-green jewel-eyes and a bold, smiling mouth. This was a love that drew you with irresistible strength, and knitted you to the soul, and the heart, and the flesh of another, until his breath became your breath, and his life your life. It called you with a voice that plucked at the secret chords of your being, and was stern and compelling rather than sweet to implore. It drew you to the beloved, not with ribbons of silk, but with ropes of tempered steel. It was potent and resistless as death, and infinitely deeper than the grave. It reached out aspiring hands beyond the grave, into Eternity. And, newly born as it rose in the heart of this woman, it was yet as old as Eden, where Heavenly Love created the earthly love, that is more than half-divine.

Why, why had he sent her away, bidding her be happy and forget him?... The memory of his hollow eyes and haggard face pierced her to the quick. He was ill--he was in trouble; he had sent her away that he might bear the burden solely.... Or ... an iron hand closed upon her heart, and wrung it until points of moisture started upon her fair temples under the fine tendrils of her hair ... could the reason be--another woman?

Another woman?... She set her little teeth and drove the unworthy thought away. But it came again and again--a persistent mental gadfly. Was Owen not worthy of love? Suppose another sweeter, gentler creature had found a throne in the heart that his wife had prized so lightly, would it be so very strange, after all? Perhaps that was why he had asked her to forgive him for having married her a little while ago!

She dropped her head upon her folded arms, and sobbed at the thought. Then she dried her tears and rang for her maid, and presently came down to breakfast with Lady Hannah, smiling and composed, cheerful and attentive as a hostess ought to be. But her reddened eyelids told tales.

"Misses her Doctor, no doubt," thought Lady Hannah, as she commended the country eggs and butter, and was enthusiastic over the thyme-scented Welsh mountain-honey, and apologetic over the absence of her Bingo from the board.

She would carry her nuisance his breakfast with her own hands, she vowed, as he had left his man behind, on hearing from the Doctor that the house was a small one.

"But why?" asked Lynette. "There is Marie, my maid, and the red-cheeked parlourmaid, whose name I don't yet know, and Mrs. Pugh, the housekeeper ..."

"Who was Dr. Saxham's nurse when he was a little boy, and adores him. And Mrs. Pugh's husband, who is gardener, and handy-man, and coachman when required." Lady Hannah's laugh jangled out over the capacious tray, containing the comprehensive assortment of viands representing what the invalid was wont to term his "brekker." "But I'm not to be deprived of my privilege, for all that. Do you suppose you young married creatures are the only wives who enjoy cosseting their husbands? There! it's out, and I ought to be ashamed of myself, I suppose, but I'm not. Is that collared brawn on the sideboard? Bingo has a devouring passion for collared brawn." She added a goodly slice to the contents of the tray. "I warn you, if you regard the billing and cooing of a middle-aged couple as indecent," she went on, "to look the other way a great deal while we're here. For I was for the first time seriously smitten with my husband when he rode out to meet me, returning from ignoble captivity in the tents of Brounckers, eighteen months ago. When I nursed him through enteric in the Hospital at Frostenberg--I won't disguise it--I fell in love! With a bag of bones, for he was nothing else: but genuine passion is indifferent to the personal appearance of the beloved object, though I hadn't suspected it before. The wound completed my conquest, and since then I'm madly jealous if another woman looks at him!... I see red--green would be a better colour--because he prefers to have his valet brush his hair. I don't know that I didn't reduce the holding capacity of this house by a storey--there's a pun for you!--so as to engineer my hated rival being left at home in Wilton Place. Is that lovely murrey-coloured stuff in the cut-glass jar quince marmalade? No! I won't pamper Bingo, if he is the idol of my soul. And please don't wait for me. He likes me to take off the tops of his eggs for him, and he usually eats three...."

Lady Hannah tripped off with her load, and deposited it before the idol, who was sitting up in a Japanese bed-jacket of wadded pink satin, left-handedly reading the Herion newspaper that comes out once a week, and is published at St. Tirlan's, twenty miles away.

"I've made a discovery," she announced. "No, don't look frightened. It's only that poor Biddy's belle trouvaille has got a heart. She's not the tinted Canova-nymph, the piece of correct inanity, I honestly believed her.... She idolised Biddy--small credit, for who could help it? She submitted to be adored by that poor foolish boy who's dead.... Now she's her black-avised Doctor's humble worshipper and slave."

"Can't understand a woman worshippin' a chap with a chin like the bows of an armoured Destroyer, and eyebrows like another man's moustaches," Bingo objected.

"Chin or no chin, eyebrows or not a hair, what does that count to a woman in love?" She placed the laden tray before him, and with a maternal air proceeded to tuck a napkin under his chin. He grumbled:

"There's no knowin' what will take the female fancy. But even if you haven't harked away on a wrong scent, slave's a dash too strong. Struck me they parted uncommon chilly and off-hand at Euston yesterday mornin', considerin' they've not been married much above a year! Do take this thing from round my neck! Makes me feel like Little Willie!"

Lady Hannah unpinned the napkin that framed the bulldog jowl, and said, patting the sandy-pink bullet-head:

"That's what it is to be Eyes and No Eyes in amatory affairs. No Eyes sees two people part, 'uncommon off-hand and chilly.'" She mimicked Bingo's tone. "Eyes sees that and something more! A man's coat-button dropped on the floor of a railway carriage, for instance, and a young woman who slyly picks it up--silly little gage d'amour--and kisses it when a considerate observer pretends not to be looking, and hides it away! Is that evidence, Major Mole?"

"By the Living Tinker!" he thundered, "I wouldn't have believed it of her!"

"Of course you wouldn't!" She rummaged in an open suit-case. "What necktie do you want to wear to-day?"

He mumbled ruefully, eyeing her over the coffee-cup:

"Any of 'em. It don't matter which. They're all alike when you've tied 'em!"

She beamed at what seemed to her a gallant speech.

"Sans compliment? You really mean it? And you won't miss Grindlay so frightfully, after all?"

He shook his head ambiguously.

"I shan't begin really to suffer for Grindlay--not till it comes to tubbin' with one fin."

"Mercy upon us!" She gasped in consternation. He said, controlling his features from wreathing into triumphant smiles:

"You were so cast-iron certain you could fill his place, you know!"

Her bright black eyes were hidden under abashed and drooping eyelids. Blushes played hide-and-seek in the small cheeks that were usually pale.

"In--in everything essential," she stammered, avoiding his intolerable gaze.

"Then that's what it is to be Eyes and No Eyes in ordinary, everyday affairs!" The man pursued his advantage pitilessly. "Didn't you regard it as essential that I should wash?"

She winked tears away, though her laugh answered him.

"Most certainly I did, and do. One of the reasons that decided me on marrying you was that you were invariably propre comme un sou neuf."

"I thought, on mature reflection," said Bingo, lying down under the lightened tray with a replete and satisfied air, "that you would prefer a clean husband to a dirty one. Therefore I engaged a bedroom for Grindlay at the Herion Arms. That's his knock. Come in!"

The valet presented himself upon the threshold, backing respectfully at sight of her ladyship, who gave him a gracious good-morning, dissembling the intense relief experienced at sight of his smug, clean-shaven countenance.

"Good-morning, Grindlay. I hope the Hotel people made you comfortable. And now you have arrived to take responsibility off my hands," she announced, "I'll go and get some breakfast."

"Haven't you ... You're joking!" The tray shot from the bed into Grindlay's saving clutch as Bingo suddenly assumed the perpendicular. "You don't mean to say that you've been starving all the time I've been gorging myself like--like a boa-constrictor?" he demanded furiously. "Why on earth are women such blessed----"

"--Idiots?" she supplied, turning on the threshold to launch her Parthian shaft. "Because if they were intellectual, logical beings they would know better than to lavish devotion upon stupid, selfish, unappreciative, heartless, dull dolts of men!"

The door slammed behind an injured woman. Grindlay's face was a study in immobility. Bingo, after a little more meditation, ponderingly rose and submitted himself to the hands of the attendant. When the Major's toilet had reached the stage of hair-parting, he roused himself from his reflections with a sigh.

"Hold on. Put down that comb and go and ask her ladyship to be good enough to step up here. Tell her that your style of hairdressin' don't suit me. I want a little more imagination thrown into the thing! Hurry up, will you!"

"O Lord! What a liar I am!" he murmured fervently, addressing his reflection in the glass. His wife's face appeared over his shoulder, bright, alert, and pleased. She said, as she adroitly assumed the office vacated by the discarded Grindlay, who discreetly delayed his re-entrance on the scene:

"So you can't get on, it appears, without your blessed idiot?"

"Blessed angel, you mean!" said mendacious Bingo, blinking under a Little Lord Fauntleroy fringe. "You banged the door before I'd got out the word!"

"If I could believe that!" she sighed, and the ivory-backed hair-brushes played rather a tremulous fantasia upon her idol's head, "perhaps I might be induced to confide to you a piece of genuine Secret Intelligence."

"Concernin'----?"

"Concerning your wife, Hannah Wrynche."

"Well, what of her?"

She took him by the chin and began to part his hair. But her eyes were misty, and her hand travelled unsteadily.

"This of her. She owned to you, months and months back, that in your place she wouldn't have been one-millionth part as patient with a restless, ambitious woman cursed with an especial capacity for getting herself and other people into hot water." She made a little affected grimace that masked a genuine smart. "Not hot water only--boiling lava sometimes--fizzling vitriol----"

He said, looking kindly up at the small mobile face and quivering chin:

"Restlessness and ambition are in the blood, y' know, like gout and the rest of it. You can't eradicate 'em, however much you try. It's like shavin' a Danish carriage-dog to change his colour. You can't for nuts; his spots are in his skin! See?"

"Merci du compliment!" Her jangling laugh rang out as if a stick had been smartly rattled down the keys of a piano. But her eyes were wet. His own eyes reverted to his reflection in the toilet-glass. Now his sudden bellow made her drop the comb.

"My Aunt Maria! See what you've been and done! Made a Loop Railway down the middle of my head, unless my liver's making me see things curly. Don't swot at it any more; let that ass Grindlay earn his pay for once.... By the Living Tinker! you're cryin'. Don't go and say I've been a brute!" he pleaded.

"Darling!--dearest!--you haven't--you've never!... The boot's on the other leg, though wild horses wouldn't get you to own as much!" His strong left arm was round her slight waist, her wet cheek pressed against her Major's bulldog jowl. Bingo cleared his throat in his ponderous, scraping way, admitting:

"Well, perhaps I may have dropped a briny or so--of nights in bed at Nixey's, or on duty at Staff Bombproof South, between ring-ups on the telephone when the off-duty men were snorin', and one had nothin' on the blessed earth to do but wonder whether one had a wife or not?"

"There were people ready to tell you--years before we saw Gueldersdorp--that the one you'd got was as good as none...."

"Lucky for 'em they refrained from expressin' their opinions!" She felt his great muscles swell as the big hand tightened on her waist. "Though, mind you, there have been times when for your own sake, by Jingo! I'd have given all I was worth to have you a bit more like other women----"

"Who weren't dying to dabble in Diplomacy and win distinction as War Correspondents. Who funk raw-head and bloody bones"--she shook with a nervous giggle--"and all that sort of thing.... Would it please you to know that the plumes of my panache of ambition have been cut to the last quill--that henceforth my sole aim is to rival the domestic Partlet, clucking of barnyard matters in the discreet retirement of the coop?"

"You've said as much before!" he objected.

"But now I mean it! Put me to the test. Let the house in Wilton Place--we'll live at Wrynche Rodelands, if you think you won't be bored?"

He bellowed joyously!

"Me bored! With ten thousand acres arable and wood and moorland to farm and preserve and shoot over, two first-class packs meetin' within a fifty-mile radius of my doorstep, the Committee of the local Polo Association shriekin' for a President, and the whole County beggin' me with tears in its eyes to take the hint a Certain Person dropped when he gave me my C.B., and accept the Crown Commission as Lord-Lieutenant! 'Bored'--I like that!"

"If you would like it, be it!" she flashed. "Trust me to back you up. I can and I will! I'll help you entertain the military authorities and their women, keep the Rolls, sit on the Bench when you weigh in as Chief Magistrate, and prompt you when you get into a hat. I'll be all things to one man--and you shall be the man! Only"--she laughed hysterically, her face hidden against his big shoulder--"I don't quite know how far these things are compatible with my new role!"

"Of domestic Henny-Penny cluckin' in the Home Coop." His big hand patted her almost paternally. "Leave cluckin' to hens with families. Do you suppose I'm such a pachydermatous ass that I can't understand that home is a make-believe to a real woman, when--when there isn't even one chicken to tuck under her wing! Worse luck for me and you!"

She laughed wildly, lifting her wet, flushed face up to him. Her black eyes were shining through the tears that rose and brimmed over and fell.

"If I told you that the luck had changed, would that make you happy?"

He cried out with a great oath:

"Yes, by G----!" and caught her to his leaping heart.

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LXVIII

In the weeks that followed, Lynette, in the course of many interviews held with Janellan Pugh on the subject of lunch and dinner, learned much anent the difficulty of obtaining fresh fish in a sea-coast village, more as regards the Satanic duplicity with which even a Calvinistic Methodist butcher will substitute New Zealand lamb for the native animal, and still more about Saxham.

Janellan, who had been a rosy maid in the service of the Doctor's grandfather, the Parson, had thought the world's worth of Master Owen, from the first time she set eyes on him in a white frock, with a sausage-roll curl and diamond-patterned socks. She had a venerable and spotty photograph of him as a square-headed, blinking little boy in a velvet suit and lace collar, and another photograph, coloured by hand, taken at the age of fourteen, and paid for out of his own pocket-money, to send to Janellan, who had nursed him through a holiday scarlet-fever. And regularly had her blessed boy remembered her and Tafydd, said Janellan, until the Cruel Time came, and he was lost sight of in Foreign Parts. Then Mrs. Saxham died, and the Captain--mentioned by Janellan with the ringing sniff that speaks volumes of disparagement--had turned her and her old man out of the Plas "without as much as that!"--here Janellan snapped her strong thumb-nail against her remaining front tooth--in recognition of their forty years of faithful service.

But Master Owen, coming to his own again, "and 'deed an' 'deed, but the Plas ought to have been his from the beginning!" had sought out the old couple, living in decent poverty at St. Tirlan's, and reinstated them in their old home. And well might Tafydd, who was a better judge of the points of a pig than any man in Herion--or in all Wales for the matter of that--well might Tafydd declare that the Lord never made a better man than Dr. Owen Saxham! What grand things they had said of him in the papers! No doubt the young mistress would have plenty more to tell that had not got into print?

"I can tell you many things of the Doctor," said Lynette, smiling in the black-eyed, streaky-apple face "that you and Tafydd will be proud and glad to hear."

She shunned the giving or receiving of caresses as a rule but this morning she stooped and kissed the red-veined, wrinkled cheek within Janellan's white-quilled cap-border. Then, her household duties done, she pinned a rough, shady straw-hat upon the red-brown hair, and drew loose chamois-leather gloves over the slim white exquisite hands that were, perhaps her greatest beauty, chose a walking-stick from the hall-rack, ran down the steep cliff pathway, crossed the spidery, red-rusted iron foot-bridge that spanned the railway-line, descended upon the farther side of the wood of chestnut and larch that made green shadows at the base of the cliff, and was upon the sand-dunes, walking with the free, undulating gait she had acquired from the Mother, towards the restless line of white breakers that rose and fell a mile away.

She was happy. A glorious secret kept her bosom-company; a new hope gave her strength. She drank in long draughts of the strong, salt, fragrant air, and as it filled her lungs, knew her soul brimmed with fresh delight in the beauty of the world. And a renewed and quickened sense of the joy of life made music of the beating of her pulses and the throbbing of her heart.

She was a child of the wild veld, but none the less a daughter of this sea-girt Britain: the blue, restless waves beyond that line of white frothing breakers washed the shores of the Mother's beloved green island, Emerald Airinn, set in silver foam. A few miles, St. George's Channel spanned--then straight as the crow flies over Wicklow, Queen's County, King's County, taking Galway at the acute angle of the wild mallard's flight; and there would be the chained lakes and winding silver rivers, the grey-green mountains and the beetling cliffs, the dreamy valleys and wild glens of Connemara, with the ancient towers of Castleclare rising from its mossed lawns studded with immemorial oaks. And Loch Kilbawne among the wild highlands, and Lochs Innsa and Barre, and Ballybarron Harbour, with its Titanic breakwater, and three beacons, and the dun-brown islands bidden in their veil of surf-edged spindrift, shaken by the voices of hidden waters roaring in their secret caves.

A faint smile played about her sensitive lips. Her golden eyes dreamed as she walked on swiftly, a slender figure dressed in a plain skirt of rough grey-blue, and a loose-sleeved blouse of thick white silk, her slight waist belted with a silver-mounted lizard-skin girdle, a pleasant tinkle of silver chatelaine appendages accompanying her steps.

And those steps were to her no longer uncompanioned. It was as though the Mother were living, so enfolding and close was the sense of her presence to-day. God was in His Heaven, and the world, His footstool, bore the visible impress of His Feet. And it seemed to Lynette, who had learned to see the faces of Christ and of His Mother Mary through the lineaments of the earthly face that had first looked love upon herself in her terrible abandonment, that those Divine and glorious countenances looked down on her and smiled. And her chilled faith spread quivering wings, basking in their ineffable mild radiance as the little blue and tortoiseshell butterflies basked in the glorious sunshine that had followed the morning's storm.

The tangible presence seemed to move beside her, through the white powdery sand. Over the knotted grasses, between the tufts of poppies and the prickly little yellow roses that fringed the hollows, the garments of another seemed to sweep beside her own. The folds of a thin veil upborne on the elastic breeze fluttered beside her cheek, blew against her lips, bringing the rare delicate fragrance--the familiar perfume that clung to everything the Mother habitually wore and used and touched. She did not look round, or stretch out her hand. She walked along, drinking in blissfulness and companionship at every pore of her thirsty soul, joyfully realising that this would last; that by-and-by the great void of loneliness would not close in on her again.

Only the night before, upon the brink of the supreme discovery that the dead in Christ are not only living in Him, but for us also who are His, she had hesitated and doubted. Before the sunrise of this glorious day she had learned to doubt no more.

* * * * *

She had been restless and unhappy. Saxham had not written for a week. She bitterly missed the short, cold, kind letters in the clear, small, firm handwriting, that had reached her at intervals of three days, to be answered by her constrained and timid notes, hoping that he was well and not overworking, describing the place and her pleasure in it, without mention of her loneliness; giving details of Major Wrynche's progress towards recovery, and left-handed attempts at golf, winding up with messages from Lady Hannah and dutiful remembrances from Tafydd and Janellan, and signed, his affectionate wife, Lynette Saxham.

Trite and laboured and schoolgirlish enough those epistles seemed to their writer. To Saxham they were drops of rain upon the parching soil of his heart, the one good that life had for him in this final lap of the race. And yet he had ceased to write that they might come no more.

If he had known how his own letters to her were welcomed, how tenderly they were read and re-read, how sweetly kept and cherished.... But he did not know! He could only look ahead, and strain on to the nearing goal with the great, dim, mysterious curtain hanging beyond it, hearing the thudding of his wearied heart, and the whistling of those sharp breaths in his strained lungs, and the measured sound of his own footfalls bearing him on to the end, while night closed in on her, fevered and wakeful in her bed, thinking of him, praying for him, longing for the sight and sound of him. Sleep, when it came now, brought her dreams less crystal than of old. Hued with the fiery rose of opals some, because in these he loved her; and that shadowy woman, in whose existence she only half-believed, had no part in him at all. But on the night preceding the revelation she had not dreamed.

She awakened in the grey of dawn, when the thrushes were calling, and lay straight and still, listening to the glad bird-voices from the garden, her soft, fringed eyelids closed, her white breasts gently heaving, her small feet crossed, her slender, bare arms pillowing the little Greek head; a heavy plait of the silken wealth that crowned it drawn down on either side of the sweet, pale face and the pure throat, intensifying their virginal beauty. The dull smart of loneliness, the famished ache of loss, were gone altogether. She felt strangely peaceful and calm and glad. Then she knew she was not at Herion; she was not even in London.... She was back at the Convent, in the little whitewashed room with the stained deal furniture--the room with the pleasant outlook on the gardens that had been hers from the first. Surely it was past the rising hour? Ah, yes! but she had had a touch of fever. That was why she was lying here so quietly, with the Mother sitting by the bed.

There could be no doubt.... The light firm, pressure that she knew of old was upon her bosom, just above the beating of her heart.... That was always the Mother's way of waking you. She sat beside you, and looked at you, and touched you, and presently your eyes opened, that was all!... Thinking this, a streak of gold glimmered between Lynette's thick dusky lashes; her lips wore a smile of infinite content. She stole a glance, and there it was, the large, beautiful, lightly clenched hand. The loose sleeve of thin black serge flowed away from the strong, finely moulded wrist; the white starched guimpe showed snowy between the drooping folds of the nun's veil.... These familiar things Lynette drank in with a sense of unspeakable content and pleasure. Then--her eyes opened widely, and she knew.

She was looking into eyes that had seen the Beatific Vision--great grey eyes that were unfathomable lakes of heavenly tenderness and love divine. And the face that framed them was a radiant pale splendour, indescribable in its glorious beauty, unfathomable in its fulfilled peace. Her own eyes drank peace from them, deeply, insatiably, while the Herion thrushes sang their dewy matins, and the scent of mignonette and sweet-peas and early roses mingled with the smell of the sea, stole in at the open casement where the white blind swelled out like a breeze-filled sail.

How long Lynette lay there storing up content and rapture she did not know, or want to know. But at last the wonder of those eyes came nearer--nearer! She felt the dear pressure of the familiar lips upon her own. A fragrance enveloped her, an exquisite joy overbrimmed her, as a voice--the beloved, unforgotten voice of matchless music--spoke. It said:

"Love your husband as I loved Richard! Be to a child of his what I have been to you!"

* * * * *

Eyes and face and voice, white hand and flowing veil, were all gone then. Lynette sat up, sobbing for joy, and blindly holding out her arms, and the rising sun looked over the mountains eastward, and drew one hushing, golden finger over the lips of the cold, grey, whispering sea.

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LXIX

A thin, subterraneous screech, accompanied by a whiff of cinder-flavoured steam, heralded the Down Express as it plunged out of the cliff-tunnel, flashed across an intervening space, and was lost among the chestnuts and larches. A metallic rattle and scroop told that the official in the box on the other side of the Castle bluff had opened the points. And hearing the clanking bustle of the train's arrival in the station, Lynette reminded herself with a sigh of relief that her maid was packing, that she would presently make her excuses to Major Wrynche and Lady Hannah, and that the midnight up-mail should take her home to Owen.

Her course lay clear now, pointed out by the beloved, lost hand. But for this Heaven-sent light that had been cast upon her way, Lynette knew that she might have wandered on in doubt and darkness to the very end.

She was not of the race of hero-women, who deserve the most of men, and are doomed to receive in grudging measure. A pliant, dependent, essentially feminine creature, she was made to lean and look up, to be swayed and influenced by the stronger nature, to be guided and ruled, and led, and to love the guide.

Her nature had flowered: sun and breeze and dew had worked their miracle of form and fragrance and colour, the ripened carpels waited, conscious of the crown of tall golden-powdered anthers bending overhead. Instead of the homely hive-bee a messenger had come from Heaven, the air vibrated yet with the beating of celestial wings.

She was going to Saxham to ask him to forgive her, to throw down the pitiless barrier she had reared between them in her ignorance of herself and of him. She would humble herself to entreat for that rejected crown of wifehood. Even though that conjectural other woman had won Owen from her, she said to herself that she would win him back again.

She reached the wet, shining strip of creamy sand where the frothing line of foam-horses reared and wallowed. The prints of her little brown shoes were brimmed with sea-water, she lifted her skirt daintily, and went forward still. Numberless delicate little winged shells were scattered over the moist surface, tenantless homes of tiny bivalves, wonderfully tinted. Rose-pink, brilliant yellow, tawny-white, delicate lilac, it was as though a lapful of blossoms rifled from some mermaid's deep-sea garden, had been scattered by the spoiler at old Ocean's marge. Lynette cried out with pleasure at their beauty, stooped and gathered a palmful, then dropped them. She stood a moment longer drinking in the keen, stinging freshness, then turned to retrace her steps, still with that unseen companion at her side.

The vast, undulating green and white expanse, save for a distant golf-player with the inevitable ragged following, seemed bare of human figures. The veering breeze shepherded flocks of white clouds across the harebell-tinted meadows of the sky. It sang a thin, sweet song in Lynette's little rose-tipped ears. And innumerable larks carolled, building spiral towers of melody on fields of buoyant air. And suddenly a human note mingled with their music and with the thick drone of the little, black-and-grey humble-bees that feasted on the corn-bottles. And Lynette's visionary companion was upon the instant gone.

It was a baby's cooing chuckle that arrested the little brown shoes upon the verge of a deep sand hollow. Lynette looked down. A pearly-pale cup fringed with blazing poppies held the lost treasure of some weeping mother--a flaxen-headed coquette of some eighteen months old, arrayed in expensive, diaphanous, now sadly crumpled whiteness, the divine human peach served up in whipped cream of muslin and frothy Valenciennes. Absorbed in delightful sand-dabbling, Miss Baby crowed and gurgled; then, as a little cry of womanly delight in her beauty and womanly pity for her isolation broke from Lynette, she looked up and laughed roguishly in the stranger's face, narrowing her eyes.

Naughty, mischievous eyes of jewel-bright, grey-green, long-shaped and thick-lashed; bold red, laughing mouth--where had Lynette seen them before? With a strange sense of renewing an experience she ran down into the hollow, and dropping on her knees beside the pretty thing, caught it up and kissed it soundly.

"Where do you come from, sweet?" she asked, between the kisses. "Where are mother and nurse?"

"Ga!" said the baby. Then, with a sudden puckering of pearly-golden brows, and a little querulous cry of impatience, the Hon. Alyse Rosabel Tobart squirmed out of the arms that held her, exhibiting in the process the most cherubic of pink legs, and the loveliest silk socks and kid shoes, and wriggled back into her sandy nest. Once re-established there, she answered no more questions, but with truly aristocratic composure resumed her interrupted task of stuffing a costly bonnet of embroidered cambric and quilled lace with sand. When the bonnet would hold no more, she had arranged to fill her shoe: she was perfectly clear upon the point of having no other engagement so absorbing.

Smiling, Lynette abandoned the attempt to question. Perhaps the missing guardians of this lost jewel were quite near after all, sitting with books and work and other babies in the shelter of some neighbouring hollow, from whence this daring adventurer had escaped unseen.... She ran up the steep side where the frieze of poppies nodded against the sky, and the white sand streamed back from under the little brown shoes that had trodden upon Saxham's heart so heavily.

No one was near. Only in the distance, toiling over the dry waves of the sand-dunes towards the steep ascent by which the hilly main street of Herion may be gained, went a white perambulator, canopied with white, and propelled by a nurse in starched white skirts and flying white bonnet-strings--a nurse who kept her head well down, and was evidently reading a novel as she went. Some yards in advance a red umbrella bobbed against the breeze like a giant poppy on a very short stem. The lady who carried the flaming object was young; that much was plain, for the fluttering heliotrope chiffons of her gown were held at a high, perhaps at an unnecessarily lofty, altitude above the powdery sand, and her plumply-filled and gleaming stockings of scarlet, fantastically barred with black, and her dainty little high-heeled shoes were very much in evidence as they topped a rising crest. Then they disappeared over the farther edge, the red umbrella followed, and the nurse, in charging up the steep after her mistress, discovered, perhaps by a glance of investigation underneath the canopy, prompted by a too tardy realisation of the suspicious lightness of the perambulator, that the shell was void of the pearl.

Lynette heard the wretched woman's piercing shriek, glimpsed the red umbrella as it reappeared over the sand-crest, comprehended the horrible consternation of mistress and maid. She must signal to them--cry out.... Involuntarily she gave the call of the Kaffir herd: the shrill, prolonged ululation that carries from spitzkop to spitzkop across the miles of karroo or high-grass veld between. And she unpinned her hat and waved it, standing amongst the thickly-growing poppies and chamomile on the high crest of the sand-wave, while her shadow--a squat, blue dwarf with arms out of all proportion--flourished and gesticulated at her feet.

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LXX

It is Fate who comes hurrying to Lynette under the becoming shadow of a red umbrella, on the starched and rustling skirts of the agitated nurse, whose mouth is seen to be shaping sentences long before she can be heard panting:

"Did you call, 'm? Her ladyship thought you did, and might have found ... Oh, ma'am! have you seen a baby? We've lost ours!"

Lynette nods and laughs reassuringly, pointing down into the hollow. The nurse, with a squawk of relief, leaves her perambulator bogged in the sand, flutters up the powdery rise like some large species of seagull, squawks again, and swoops to retrieve her lost charge. Miss Baby, perfectly contented until the scarlet face and whipping ribbons of her attendant appear over the edge of her Paradise, throws herself backwards, strikes out with kicking, dimpled legs, and sets up an indignant roar.

"There now--there! 'A was a pessus!" vociferates the owner of the streaming ribbons and the scarlet countenance. "And did she tumble out of her pram, the duck, and wicked Polly never see her? And thank Good Gracious, not a bruise on her blessed little body-woddy, nor nothing but the very tiddiest scratch!"

"Which is not your fault, Watkins, I am compelled to say it," pronounces the Red Umbrella, arriving breathless and decidedly indignant, on the scene. "The idea of a person of your class being so wrapped up in a rotten penny novel that you can't even keep your eye upon the darling entrusted to your charge is too perfectly shameful for words. Baby, don't cry," she continues, as the repentant Polly appears, bearing the retrieved treasure. "Come to mummy and kiss her, and tell her all about it, do!"

"I sa-t!" bellows Baby, now keenly alive to the pathos of the situation, and digging a sandy pink fist into either eye ...

"Don't, then, you obstinate little pig!" returns Red Umbrella, with maternal asperity. She looks up to the fair vision that stands on high amongst the poppies, and nods and smiles. "However I am to thank you!... Such a turn when we missed her!..." She utters these incoherences with a great deal of eye-play, pressing a small, plump, jewelled hand, with short, broad fingers, and squat, though elaborately rouged and polished, nails, upon the bountiful curve of a Parisian corsage. "My heart did a double flip-flap ... hasn't done thumping yet. Am I pale still, Watkins?" She appeals to the recreant Watkins, who is busily repacking Baby in her luxurious perambulator. "I felt to go as white as chalk!"

"Perfect gassly, my lady!" agrees Watkins, and it occurs to Lynette that the process of blanching must, taking into consideration the artificial blushes that bloom so thickly upon the pretty, piquante face under the red umbrella, have been attended with some difficulty.

Everything is round in the coquettish face, shaded by a hat that is an expensive triumph of Parisian millinery, trimmed with a whole branch of wistaria in bloom. The big brown eyes are round, so is the cherry-stained mouth, so is the pert, button nose. The thick, dark eyebrows are like inky half-moons, in the middle of the little round chin a circular dimple is cunningly set. Round, pinky-olive shoulders and rounded arms gleam temptingly through the bodice of heliotrope chiffon. Other roundnesses, artfully exaggerated by the Parisian modiste, are liberally suggested, as Red Umbrella gathers her frothy draperies about her hips, lifting her multitudinous frills to reveal black and scarlet openwork silk stockings, bedecking her plump legs and tiny feet, whose high-heeled silver-buckled shoes are sinking in the hot, white, powdery sand.

"Please don't go on! I haven't half thanked you," she pleads, still pressing the podgy little bejewelled paw upon the heaving corsage. Then she sinks, with an air of graceful languor, down upon a long, prostrate monolith of granite, that is thickly crusted with velvety orange lichen and grey-green moss, starred with infinitesimal yellow flowers. And Lynette, habitually courteous and rather amused, and not at all unwilling to know a little more of the affected, slangy, overdressed little woman, sits down upon the other end of the sprawling stone column, and says, smiling at Baby, who is clutching at a hovering butterfly with her eager, dimpled hands:

"Of course, it was a terrible shock to you when you missed her. She is such a darling! Aren't you, Baby?"

Baby, her long, grey-green eyes melting and gleaming dangerously, her golden head tilted coquettishly, and a gay, provoking laugh on the bold red mouth, makes another snatch, captures the hovering blue butterfly, opens the rosy hand, and with a wry face of disgust, drops the crushed morsel over the edge of the perambulator. The superb, unconscious cruelty of the act gives Lynette a little pang even as she goes on:

"She was not in the least shy. I think we should soon be very great friends. May her nurse bring her to see me sometimes? Most babies love flowers, and there is a garden full of them where I am staying. Do you live here?"

"Live here? Gracious, no!" Red Umbrella opens the round, brown eyes that Baby's are so unlike in shape and expression, and shrugs her pretty shoulders as high as the big ruby buttons that blaze in her pretty ears. "Me and Baby are only visiting--stopping with her nurse and my two maids for a change at the Herion Arms--me having been recommended sea-air by the doctors for tonsils in the throat. The house is advertised as an up-to-date hotel in the ABC Railway Guide, but diggings more wretched I never struck, and you do fetch up in some queer places on tour in the Provinces, let alone the States," says Red Umbrella, tossing the wistaria-wreathed hat. "Which may be a surprise to people who think it must be nothing but jam for those ladies and gentlemen that have made their mark in the Profession."

"Yes?"

Lynette's golden eyes smile back into the laughing brown ones with pleasant friendliness, combined with an irritating lack of comprehension. And Red Umbrella, who derives a considerable income from percentages upon the sale of her photographs, and is conscious that her celebrated features are figuring upon several of the postcards that hang up for sale in the window of the only stationer in Herion, is a little nettled.

"I refer to the stage, of course." She fingers a long neck-chain of sapphires, and tinkles her innumerable bangles with their load of jingling charms. "But perhaps you're not a Londoner? Or you don't patronise the theatre?"

"Oh yes. We have a house in Harley Street. And I am very fond of the Opera," says Lynette, smiling still, "and of seeing plays too; and I often go to the theatre with Lord and Lady Castleclare, or Major Wrynche and Lady Hannah, when my husband is too much engaged to take me. One of the last pieces we saw before we left town was 'The Chiffon Girl' at The Variety," she adds.

"Indeed! And how did you like 'The Chiffon Girl'?" asks the lady of the red umbrella, with a gracious and encouraging smile. Unconscious tribute rendered to one's beauty and one's genius is ever well worth the having. And the editor of the Keyhole, a certain weekly journal of caterings for the curious, will gladly publish any little anecdote which will serve the dual purpose of amusing his readers and keeping the name of Miss Lessie Lavigne before the public eye. "How did you enjoy the performance of the lady who played the part?"

Lynette ponders, and her fine brows knit. Vexed and indignant, Red Umbrella, scanning the thoughtful face, admits its youth, its high-breeding, its delicate, chiselled beauty, and the slender grace of the supple figure in the grey-blue serge skirt and white silk blouse; nor is she slow to appreciate the value of the diamond keeper on the slight, fine, ungloved hand that rests upon the sun-hot moss between them.

"I think I felt rather sorry for her," says the soft cultured voice with the exquisite, precise inflections. The golden eyes look dreamily out over the undulating sand-dunes beyond the crisp line of foam to the silken shimmer of the smoothing water. The little wind has fallen. It is very still. The nurse, sitting on a hillock of bents in dutiful nearness to the perambulator, has taken out her paper-covered volume, and is deep in a story of blood and woe. And Baby, a sleepy, pink rosebud, dozes among her white embroidered pillows, undisturbed by Red Umbrella's shrill exclamation:

"Sorry for her! Why on earth should you be?"

The shriek startles Lynette. She brings back her grave eyes from the distance, flushing faint coral pink to the red-brown waves at her fair temples.

"She--she had on so few clothes!" she says. And there is a profound silence, broken by Lessie's saying with icy dignity:

"If the Lord Chamberlain opined I'd got enough on, I expect that ought to do for you!"

"I--don't quite understand."

Lynette opens her golden eyes in sincere wonder at the marvellous change that has been wrought in the little lady who sits beside her.

"I am Miss Lessie Lavigne," says the little lady, with an angry toss of the pretty head, adorned with the wistaria-trimmed hat. "At least, that is the name I am known by in the profession."

"I beg your pardon," Lynette falters. "I did not recognise you. I am afraid you must think me rather rude!"

"Oh, pray don't mention it!" cries the owner of the red umbrella. "Rude?--not in the least!"

Mere rudeness would be preferable, infinitely, to the outrage the little lady has suffered. She, Lessie Lavigne, the original exponent of the role of "The Chiffon Girl," the idol of the pit and gallery, Queen regnant over the hearts beating behind the polished shirt-fronts in the stalls, has lived to hear herself pitied--not envied, but commiserated--for the scantiness of the costume in which it is alike her privilege and her joy to trill and caper seven times in the week before her patrons and adorers. Small wonder that she feels her carefully-manicured nails elongating with the desire to scratch and rend.

Then she reveals the chief arrow in her quiver. Not for nothing is she the widow of an English nobleman. With all the hereditary dignities of the Foltlebarres she will arm herself, and reduce this presuming stranger to the level of the dust. At the thought of the humiliation it is in her power to inflict she smiles quite pleasantly, displaying a complete double row of beautifully stopped teeth. And she says, as she fumbles in a chatelaine bag of golden links, studded with turquoises, and with elaborately ostentatious dignity produces therefrom a card-case, as precious as regards material, and emblazoned with a monogram and coronet, enriched with diamonds and pearls:

"I think you mentioned that you lived in the neighbourhood? May I know who I have the a--pleasure of being indebted to for finding my daughter to-day?"

"I am Mrs. Owen Saxham. I live at that grey stone house up there on the cliff. 'Plas Bendigaid,' they call it," explains Lynette, a little nervously, as her reluctant eyes scan the face and figure of the woman who owns the legal right to bear Beauvayse's name. The encounter is distasteful to her. She is painfully conscious of an acute sensation of antagonism and dislike. "The house belongs to my husband, and this is my first visit to Herion," she adds hurriedly, "because we--my husband and I--have not been very long married. But I like the place. And the house is charming, and there is a hall that was once the chapel, when it was a Convent. It shall be a chapel again; that is"--the wild-rose colour deepens on the lovely face--"if my husband agrees? To have it so restored would make the Plas seem more like a home, because I was brought up in a Convent, though not in England."

Her eyes stray back to the sun-kissed beauty of Nantmadoc Bay and the dotted line of white spots that indicate the town of St. Tudwalls at the base of the green promontory beyond the Roads. She forgets that this little overdressed person is Beauvayse's wife. She forgets in the moment that she herself is Saxham's. She is back in the beloved past with the Mother.

"It was in South Africa, my Convent ... more than a thousand miles from Cape Town, in British Baraland, on the Transvaal Border--in a little village-town, dumped down in the middle of the veld."

"What on earth is the veld?" asks the lady of the red umbrella, with acerbity. "I'm sick of seeing the word in the papers, and nobody seems to know what it means."

Lynette's soft voice answers:

"You can never know what it means until you have lived its life, and it has become part of yours. It spreads away farther than your eyes can follow it, for miles and miles. It is jade colour in spring, blue-green in early summer, desolate, scorching yellow-brown in winter, with dreadful black tracts of cinders, where it has been burned to let the young grass grow up. There is hardly a tree; there is scarcely a bird, except a vulture, a black speck high in the hot blue sky. There are flat-topped mountains and cone-shaped kopjes, reddish, or pale pink, or mauve-coloured, as they are nearer or farther away. And that is all!"

"All?"

"All, except the sunshine, bathing everything, soaking you through and through."

"But there is not always sunshine? It must be sometimes night?" argues Lessie, a little peevishly.

"There are deep violet nights, full of great white stars," Lynette answers. "There are storms of dust and rain, lightning and thunder, such as are only read of here.... There are plots, conspiracies, raids, robberies, murders, slumps and losses, plagues and massacres. There are rebellions of white men, and native risings. There have been wars; there is war to-day, and there will be war again in the days that are yet to come!"

She has almost forgotten the little woman beside her, staring at her with big, brown, rather animal eyes. Now she turns to her with her rare and lovely smile:

"The war that is going on now began at the little village-town where I was a Convent schoolgirl. We were shut for months within the lines. But, of course, you have read the newspaper accounts of the Siege of Gueldersdorp? I am only telling you what you know!"

Lessie laughs, and the laugh has the hard, unpleasant, mirthless little tinkle of a toy dog's collar-bell, or bits of crushed ice rattled in a champagne-glass.

"What I have good reason to know!"

Her podgy, jewelled hands are clenching and unclenching in her heliotrope chiffon lap; there is a well-defined scowl between the black arched eyebrows, and the murky light of battle gleams in the eyes that no longer languish between their bistred eyelids as she scans the pure pale face under the sweep of her heavily blackened lashes. She would almost give the ruby buttons out of her ears to see it wince and quiver, and crimson into angry blushes. And yet Lessie is rather amiable than otherwise in her attitude towards other women. True, she has never before met one who had the insolence to pity her to her face.

"So quite too interesting!" she says, with an exaggerated affectation of amiability, and in high, fashionable accents, "you having been at Gueldersdorp through the Siege and all. Were you ever--I suppose you must have been sometimes--shot at with a gun?"

The faintest quiver of a smile comes over the lovely face her grudging eyes are trying to find a flaw in.

"Often when I have been crossing the veld between the town and the Hospital, the Mauser bullets have hummed past like bees, or raised little spurts of dust close by my feet where they had hit the ground. And once a shell burst close to us, and a splinter knocked off my hat and tore a corner of her veil----"

"Weren't you in a petrified fright?" demands Lessie.

"I was with her!"

"Who was she?"

A swift change of sudden, quickening, poignant emotion passes over the still face. A sudden swelling of the white throat, a rising mist in the golden eyes, suggests to Lessie that she has been fortunate enough to touch upon a painful subject, and that possibly this presumptuous young woman who has pitied a Viscountess may be going to cry! But Lynette drives back the tears.

"She was the Reverend Mother, the Mother-Superior of the Convent where I lived at Gueldersdorp."

"Where is she now?"

"She is with God."

"With----"

Lessie is oddly nonplussed by the calm, direct answer. People who talk in that strangely familiar way of--of subjects that properly belong to parsons are rare in her world. She hastens to put her next question.

"Was yours the only Convent in Gueldersdorp where young ladies were taught?"

"It is the only Convent there."

"Did you know--among the pupils--a young person by the name of Mildare?"

There is such concentrated essence of spite in Lessie's utterance of the name, that Lynette winces a little, and the faint, sweet colour rises in her cheeks.

"I--know her, certainly; as far as one can be said to know oneself. My unmarried name was Mildare."

"You--don't say so! Lord, how funny!"

The seagulls fishing in the shallows beyond the foam-line, rise up affrighted by the shrill peal of triumphant laughter with which Lessie makes her discovery.

"Ha, ha, ha! Talk of a situation!... On the boards I've never seen one to touch it!" She jumps from the boulder, with more bounce than dignity, dropping the red umbrella and the jewelled card-case, and, extending in one pudgy ringed hand a highly-glazed and coroneted card, "Permit me to introduce myself," she says through set teeth, smiling rancorously. "My professional name, as I have had the honour and pleasure of explaining to you, is Lessie Lavigne, but in private"--the dignity of the speaker's tone is marred by its extreme huffiness--"in private I am Lady Beauvayse."

As Lynette looks in the painted, angry, piquante face she is more than ever conscious of that feeling of antagonism. Then her eyes, turning from it, encounter the cherub rosily sleeping on embroidered pillows, and a rush of blood colours her to the hair. His child--his child by the dancer--this dimpled creature she has clasped and kissed! The icy, tinkling giggle of the mother breaks in upon the thought.

"Of all the queer situations I ever struck, I do call this the queerest! Me, meeting you like this, and both of us getting quite pally! All over Baby, too!... Lord! isn't it enough to make you die? Don't mind me being a bit hysterical!" Lady Beauvayse dabs her tearful eyes with a cobwebby square of laced cambric. "It'll be over in a sec. And then, Miss Mildare--I beg pardon--Mrs. Saxham--you and me will have it out!"

"I am afraid I must be going." Lynette rises, and stands beside Lessie, looking down in painful hesitation at the blinking, reddened eyelids and the working mouth. "I have guests waiting for me at the Plas. And would it not be wise of you to go home and lie down?"

The words, for some obscure reason or other, convey an intolerable sting. Lessie jumps in her buckled Louis Quinze shoes, wheels, and confronts her newly-discovered enemy with glaring eyes.

"Go home ... lie down!" she shrieks, so shrilly that the sleeping cherub awakens, and adds her frightened roars to the clamour that scares the gulls. "If I had lain down and gone to my long home eighteen months ago, when you were cooped up in Gueldersdorp with my husband, it would have suited you both down to the ground!" She turns, with a stamp of her imperious little foot, upon the scared nurse, who is vainly endeavouring to still Baby. "Take her away! Carry her out of hearing! Do what you're told, you silly fool!" she orders. "And you"--she wheels again upon Lynette, her wistarias nodding, her chains and bangles clanking--"why do you stand there, like a white deer in a park--like an image cut out of ivory? Don't you understand that I, the woman you've pitied--my God! pitied, for singing and dancing on the public stage 'with so few clothes on'"--she savagely mimics the manner and tone--"I am the lawful wife of the man you tried to trap--the Right Honourable John Basil Edward Tobart!" The painted lips sneer savagely. "Beautiful Beau, who never went back on a man, or told the truth to a woman!--that's his character, and it pretty well sizes him up!"

Lessie stops, gasping and out of breath, the plump, jewelled hand clutching at her heaving bosom. The theatrical instinct in the daughter of the footlights has led her to work up the scene; but her rage of wounded love and jealousy is genuine enough, though not as real as the innocence in the eyes that meet hers, less poignant than the shame and indignation that drive the blood from those ivory cheeks.

"He married me on the strict QT at the Registrar's at Cookham," goes on Lessie, her painted mouth twisting, "a fortnight before he was ordered out on the Staff. We'd been friends for over a year. There was a child coming, since we're by way of being plain-spoken," says Lessie, picking up the prostrate red umbrella and the jewelled card-case, possibly to conceal a blush; "and he swore he'd never look at another woman, and write by every mail. And so he did at first, and I used to cry over the blooming piffle he put into his letters, and wish I'd been a straighter woman, for his sake. And then the Siege began, and the letters stopped coming, and I cried enough to spoil my voice, little thinking how my husband was playing the giddy bachelor thousands of miles away. And then came the news of the Relief, and despatches, saying that he"--her pretty face is distorted by the wry grimace of genuine anguish--"he was killed! And a month later I got a copy of a rotten Siege newspaper, sent me by I don't know who, and never shall, with a flowery paragraph in it, announcing his lordship's engagement to Miss Something Mildare. Oh! it was merry hell to know how he'd done me--me that worshipped the very ground he trod!... Me that had made a Judy of myself in crape and weepers--widow's weepers for the man that wished me dead!"

Her voice is thick with rage. Her face is convulsed. Her eyes are burning coals. She has never been so nearly a great actress, this meretricious little dancer and comedian, as in this moment when she forgets her art.

"Picture it, you!... Don't you fancy me in 'em? Don't you see me in my bedroom tearing 'em off?" She rends her flimsy cobweb of a handkerchief into tatters and spurns them from her. "So!... so!... that's what I did to 'em!" She snarls with a sudden access of tigerishness. "And if that white face of yours had been within reach of my ten fingers, I'd have ragged it into ribbons like the blooming fallals. Don't dare tell me you'd not have done the same! Perhaps, though, you wouldn't. You're a lady, born and bred," owns Lessie grudgingly, "and I was a jobbing tailor's kid, that worked to keep myself and other folks as a baby imp in Pantomime, while you were being coddled up and kept in cotton-wool!"

She ends with a husky laugh and a shrug of the shoulders. The swollen face with the wet eyes is averted, or Lessie might be roused to fresh resentment by the tenderness of pity that is dawning in Lynette's.

"You have suffered cruelly, Lady Beauvayse; but I was not knowingly or wilfully to blame. Please try to believe it!"

Lessie blows her small nose with a toot of incredulity, and says through an intervening wad of damp lace-edged cambric:

"Go on!"

"I met Lord Beauvayse out at Gueldersdorp." The voice that comes from Lynette's pale lips is singularly level and quiet. "He was very handsome and very brave; he was an officer of the Colonel's Staff. He asked me to marry him, and I--I believed him honourable and true, and I said, 'Yes.' ... That was one Sunday, when we were sitting by the river. On Thursday he was killed, and later--nearly a year after my marriage to Dr. Saxham--I found out the truth."

Lessie shrugs her pretty shoulders, but the face and voice of the speaker have brought conviction. She realises that if she has been injured, her rival has suffered equal wrong.

"You were pretty quick in taking on another man, it strikes me. But that's not my business. You say you found out?" She shows her admirably preserved teeth in a little grin of sardonic contempt--"nearly a year after your marriage. Don't tell me your husband let you go on burning joss-sticks to Beau's angelic memory when he might have made you spit on it by telling you the truth!"

Lynette's lip curls, and she lifts her little head proudly.

"He never once hinted at the truth. Nor was it through him I learned it!"

"Ought to be kept under glass, then," comments Lessie, "as a model husband. Now, my poor----"

Lynette interrupts, with angry emphasis:

"I will not hear Dr. Saxham mentioned in the same breath with Lord Beauvayse!"

"He's dead--let him be!" Beau's widow snarls, her mouth twisting. Yet in the same breath, with another of the mental pirouettes characteristic of her class and type, she adds: "Do you suppose I don't know my own husband? Take him one way with another, you might have sifted the world for liars, and never found the equal of Beau."

She gathers up the red umbrella and the jewelled card-case with reviving briskness, and shakes out her crumpled chiffons in the bright hot sun.

"Me and Baby are leaving to-morrow. I don't suppose we're likely ever to come across you again. Good-bye! I forgive you for pitying me," she says frankly, holding out the plump, over-jewelled hand. "As for the other grudge.... What, are you going to kiss me?... Give Baby another before you go, dear ... and ... forgive him when you can!"

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LXXI

Lynette sat still upon the boulder, thinking, long after the red umbrella had departed. While it was yet visible in the white-hot distance, hovering like some gaudy Brobdingnagian butterfly in advance of the white perambulator pushed by the white-clad nurse, the heads of two little shabbyish, youngish people of the unmistakable Cockney tourist type rose over the edge of a pale sand-crest, fringed with wild chamomile and blazing poppies. And the female, a small draggled young woman in a large hat, trimmed with fatigued and dusty peonies, called out excitedly:

"Oh, William, it's 'er--it's 'er!"

"By Cripps, so it is!" came from the male companion of the battered peonies. He advanced with a swagger that was the unconvincing mask of diffidence assumed by an undersized, lean young man, in the chauffeur's doubtful-weather panoply of black waterproof jacket, breeches merging into knee-boots, the whole crowned with a portentous peaked cap, with absurd brass ventilators, and powdered with many thicknesses and shades of dust. His hair was dusty. The very eyelashes of the honest, ugly light eyes, set wide apart in the thin wedge-shaped, tanned face that the absurd cap shaded, were dusty as a miller's; dust lay thick in all the chinks and creases of his leading features, and a large black smudge of oily grime was upon his wide upper lip, impinging upon his nose. Nor was his companion much less dusty, though the checks of a travelling ulster of green and yellow plaid, adorned with huge steel buttons, would have advertised the Kentish Town Ladies' Drapery Establishment whence they emanated, through the medium of a Fleet Street fog.

"Might we speak to you, ma'am?" The dusty young man respectfully touched the dusty peak of the cap with brass ventilators, and, with a shock of surprise, Lynette recognised Saxham's chauffeur.

"Keyse!... It is Keyse!" She looked at him in surprise.

"Keyse, ma'am." He touched the cap again, and made a not ungraceful gesture, indicating the wearer of the weather-beaten peonies and the green-and-yellow ulster, who clung to his thin elbow with a red, hard-working hand. "Me an' my wife, that is. Bein' on a sort of outin', a kind of Beanfeast for Two, we took the notion, being stryngers to South Wyles, of droppin' in 'ere an' tippin' the 'Ow Do." He breathed hard, and rivulets of perspiration began to trickle down from under the preposterous cap, converting the dust that filled the haggard lines of his thin face into mud. "An' payin' our respects." His eye slewed appealingly at his companion, asking as plainly as an eye can, "What price that?" And the glance that shot back from the dusty shadow of the exhausted peonies answered, "Not bad by 'arf--for you!"

Lynette smiled at the little Cockney couple. The surprise that had checked the beating of her heart had passed. It was pleasant to see these faces from Harley Street. She answered:

"I understand. My husband has given you a holiday. Is he well?" She flushed, realising that it was pain to have to ask others for the news of him that he had denied her. "I mean because he has not written.... I have been feeling rather anxious. Was he quite well when you left?"

"'Was he----'? Yes, 'm!" W. Keyse shot out the affirmative with such explosive suddenness that the hand upon his arm must have nipped hard.

"I am so glad!" Lynette turned to the young woman in the ulster, whose face betrayed no guilty knowledge of the pinch. She was small, and pale, and gritty, and her blue eyes had red rims to them from the fatigue of the journey, or some other cause. But they were honest and clear, and not unpretty eyes, looking out from a forest of dusty yellowish fringe, deplorably out of curl. Yet a fringe that had associations for Lynette, reaching a long way from Harley Street, and back to the old days at Gueldersdorp before the Siege.

"Surely I know you? I must have known you at Gueldersdorp." She added as Mrs. Keyse's eyes said "Yes": "You used to be a housemaid at the Convent. How strange that I should not have remembered it until now! And your husband.... I do not remember ever having seen him before he came to us at Harley Street. But his name comes back to me in connection with a letter"--she knitted her brows, chasing the vague, fleeting memory--"a love-letter that was sent to Miss Du Taine inside a chocolate-box, just when school was breaking up. It was you who smuggled the box in!"

"To oblige, bein' begged to by Keyse as a fyvour. 'E didn't know 'is own mind--them d'ys!" explained Mrs. Keyse, sweeping her husband's scorching countenance with a glance of withering scorn.

"Nor did you," retorted W. Keyse, stung to defiance. "Walkin' out with a Dopper you was--if it comes to that." He spun round, mid-ankle deep in sand, to finish. "An' you'd 'ave bin joined by a Dutch dodger and settled down on a Vaal sheep-farm, if the order 'adn't come 'ummin' along the wire from 'Eadquarters that said, 'Jane 'Arris, you're to 'ave this bloke, and no other. Till Death do you part. Everlasting--Amen!'"

There was so strong a flavour of Church about the final sentence that Mrs. Keyse could not keep admiration out of her eyes.

Her own eyes dancing with mirthful amusement, Lynette looked from one to the other of the unexpected visitors, and, tactfully changing the subject of the conversation, hoped that they were enjoying their trip?--a query which so obviously failed to evoke an expression of pleased assent in either of the small, thin, wearied faces that she hastened to add:

"But perhaps this is the very beginning of your holiday? When did you leave London?"

"Yes'dy mornin' at 'arf-past six," said W. Keyse, carefully avoiding her eyes. A spasm contracted the tired face under the dusty peonies. Their wearer put her hand to the collar of the green-and-yellow ulster, and undid a button there.

"'Yesterday morning at half-past six'!" Lynette repeated in wonder.

"An' if the machine I 'ad on 'ire from a pal o' mine--chap what keeps a second-hand shop for 'em in the Portland Road--'adn't 'ad everythink 'appen to 'er wot can 'appen to a three-an'-a-'arf 'orse-power Baby Junot wot 'ad seen 'er best d'ys before automobilin' 'ad cut its front teeth," said W. Keyse, with bitterness, "we would 'ave bin 'ere before! As it is, we've left the car at a little 'Temperance Tavern' in S'rewsbury, kep' by a Methodist widder, 'oo thinks such new-fangled inventions sinful--an' only consented to take charge on account o' the Prophet Elijer a-going up to 'Eaven in a fiery chariot--an' come on 'ere by tryne."

Lynette looked at the man in silence. She even repeated after him, rather dully:

"You came on here--by train?"

"Slow Parliamentary--stoppin' at every 'arf-dozen stytions," explained W. Keyse, "for collectors in velveteens and Scotch caps to ask for tickets, plyse? And but that the porter on the 'Erion Down Platform 'ad see you walkin' on the Links, and my wife knoo your dress and the colour of your 'air 'arf a mile 'orf, we'd 'ave lost precious time in finding you, and giving you the--the message what we've come 'ere to bring!"

"From my husband? From Dr. Saxham?"

W. Keyse shifted from one foot to the other, and coughed an embarrassed cough.

"Not exac'ly from Dr. Saxham."

Lynette looked at W. Keyse, and it seemed to her that the little sallow Cockney face had Fate in it. A sudden terror whitened her to the lips. She cried out in a voice that had lost all its sweetness:

"You have deceived me in saying he was well. Something has happened to him! He is very ill, or----?"

She could not utter the word. Instinctively her eyes went past the stammering man to the woman who hung behind his elbow. And the wearer of the nodding peonies cried out:

"No, no! The Doctor isn't dead--or ill, to call ill!" She turned angrily upon her husband. "See wot a turn you've give 'er," she snapped. "Why couldn't you up and speak out?"

W. Keyse was plainly nonplussed. He took off the giant cap with the brass ventilators, and turned it round and round, looking carefully inside it. But he found no eloquence therein.

"Why did I bring a skirt, I arsk, if I'm to do the patter?" He addressed himself in an audible aside to Mrs. Keyse. "You might as well 'ave stopped at 'ome with the nipper," he added, complainingly, "if I ain't to 'ave no better 'elp than this!"

"You mean kindly, I know." Lynette tried to smile in saying it. "There is trouble that you are here to break to me; I understand that very well. Please tell me without delay, plainly what has happened? I am very--strong! I shall not faint--if that is what you are afraid of?"

She caught her breath, for the woman broke out into dry sobbing and cried out wildly:

"Oh, come back to 'im! Come back, if you're a woman! Gawd, Who made 'im, knows as 'ow 'e can't bear no more! Oh! if my 'art's so wrung by what I've seen him suffer, think what he's bore these crooil weeks an' months!"

The peonies rocked in the gale of Emigration Jane's emotion. Her hard-worked hands went out, entreating for him; her dowdy little figure seemed to grow tall, so impressive was the earnestness of her appeal.

"Him and you are toffs, and me and Keyse are common folks.... Flesh and blood's the syme, though, only covered wiv different skins. An' Human Nature's Human Nature, 'owever you fake 'er up an' christen 'er! An' Love must 'ave give an' take of Love, or else Love's got to die! Burn a lamp wivout oil, and see wot 'appens. It goes out!--You're left in the dark!"--Her homely gesture, illustrating the homely analogy, seemed to bring down blackness. Lynette hung speechless upon her fateful lips.

"--Then, like as not, you'll overturn the table gropin'. 'Smashed!' you'll say, 'an' nobody but silly me to blyme! It would 'ave lighted up a 'appy 'ome if I 'adn't been a barmy idiot. It would 'ave showed me the face of my 'usband leanin' to kiss me in our blessed marriage-bed, an' my baby smilin' in its cradle-sleep 'ard by.... Oh!--Oh!"--She choked and clutched her bosom, and her voice rose in the throaty screech of incipient hysteria--"An' I've left my own sweet, unweaned boy to come and say these words to you!... An' the darlin' darlin' fightin' with the bottle they're tryin' to give 'im, and roarin' for 'is mam.... And my breasts as 'ard as stones, an' throbbin'!... Gawd 'elp me!" She panted and fought and choked, striving for speech.

"Keep your hair on!" advised W. Keyse in a hoarse whisper. She turned on him like a tigress, her eyes flaming under her straightened fringe.

"Keep yours! I've come to speak, and speak I mean to--for the sake of the best man Gawd's made for a 'undred years. Bar one, you says, but bar none, says I, an' charnce it! Since the day 'e stood up for you in that Dutch saloon-bar at Gueldersdorp, what is there we don't owe to 'im--you and me, and all the blooming crew of us? And because 'e'll tyke no thanks, 'e gits ingratitude--the dirtiest egg the Devil ever hatched!"

"Cripps!" gasped W. Keyse, awe-stricken by this lofty flight of rhetoric. Ignoring him, she pursued her way.

"You're a beautiful young lydy"--her tone softened from its strenuous pitch--"wot 'ave 'ad a disappyntment, like many of us 'ave at the start. You'd set your 'art on Another One. 'E got killed, an' you married the Doctor--but it's never bin no real marriage. You've ate 'is bread, as the sayin' is, an' give 'im a stone. An' e's beat 'is pore 'art to bloody rags agynst it--d'y after d'y, an' night after night! I seen it, I tell you!" she shrilled--"I seen it wiv me own eyes! You pretty, silly kid! Don't you know wot 'arm you're doing? You crooil byby! do you reckon Gawd gave you the man to torture an' break an' spoil?"

A hand, imperatively clapped over the mouth of Mrs. W. Keyse, stemmed the torrent of her eloquence.

"Dry up! You've said enough," ordered her spouse.

"Do not stop her!" Lynette said, without removing her fascinated eyes from the Pythoness. "Let her tell me everything that she has seen and knows."

"I seen the Doctor--many, many times," the woman went on, as W. Keyse reluctantly ungagged her, "watchin' Keyse and me in our poor 'ome-life together--with the eyes of a starvin' dog lookin' at a bone. You ought to know 'ow starvin' 'urts...." The strenuous voice soared and quivered. "You learned that at Gueldersdorp! Yet you can see your 'usband dyin' of 'unger, an' never put out your 'and! Dyin' for want of a kiss an' a bit o' cuddle--that's the kind o' dyin' I mean--dyin' for what Gawd gives to the very brutes He myde! Seems to you I talk low!... Well, there's nothink lower than Nature, An' She Goes As 'Igh As 'Eaven!" said Emigration Jane.

The wide, sweeping gesture with which the shabby little woman took in land and sea and sky was quite noble and inspiring to witness. And now the tears were running down her face, and her voice lost its raucous shrillness, and became plaintive, and even soft.

"I'm to tell you everythink I've seen, an' know about the Doctor.... I've seen 'im age, age, a bit more every d'y. I've seen 'im waste, waste, with loneliness and trouble--never turnin' bitter on accounts of it--never grudgin' 'elp that 'e could give to man or woman or kid. Late on the night you left 'ome I see 'im come up to your bedroom. 'E switched on the light. 'E forgot the blinds was up. 'E looked round, all 'aggard an' lost an' wild-like, before 'e dropped down cryin' beside the bed."

She sobbed, and dropped on her own knees in the sand among the prickly yellow dwarf roses, weeping quite wildly, and wringing her hands.

"The mornin' found 'im there. Six weeks ago that was; an' every night since then it's bin the syme gyme. Never the blinds left up since that first time, but always light, and his shadow moves about. An' in my bed I wake a-cryin' so, an' don't know which of 'em I'm cryin' for--the lonely shadow or the lonely man----"

She could not go on, and W. Keyse took up the tale.

"She's told you true. Maybe we'd never 'ave come but for the feelin' that things was workin' up to wot the pypers call a Domestic Tragedy. Or at the best the break-up of a 'Ome. That's wot my wife she kep' on stuffin' into me," said W. Keyse. "An'--strewth! when the Doctor sent for me an' pyde me orf ... full wages right on up to the end o' the year, an' the syme to Morris an' the 'ouse'old staff, tellin' us e's goin' on a voyage, I s'ys to 'er, 'It's come!'"

"On a voyage! Where?"

"Oh, carn't you guess?" cried the woman on the ground, desperately looking up with tragic eyes out of a swollen, tear-stained face.

A mist came before Lynette's vision, and a sudden tremor shook her like a reed. She swayed as though the ground had heaved beneath her, but she would not fall. She choked back the cry that had risen in her throat. This was the time to act, not the time to weep for him. She knelt an instant by the woman on the ground, put her arms round her, kissed her wet cheek, and then rose up, pale and calm and collected, saying to W. Keyse:

"Take her to the Plas. Ask for Mrs. Pugh, the housekeeper. She is to prepare a room for you; you are to breakfast, and rest all day, and return to London by the night mail. Good-bye! God bless you both! I was going to him to-night at latest.... I am going to him now.... Pray that he is alive when I reach him! But he will be. God is good!"

Her face was transfigured by the new light that shone in it. She was strong, salient, resourceful--no longer the shy willowy girl. She was moving from them with her long swift step, when W. Keyse recovered himself.

"'Old 'ard! Beg pardon, ma'am! but 'ave you the spondulics?" He blushed at her puzzled look, and amended: "'Ave you money enough upon you to pay the railway-fare?"

She lifted a little gold-netted purse attached to her neck-chain.

"Five pounds. My maid is to follow. You know Marie? You will let her travel with you?"

"Righto! But you'll want a wrap, coat or shawl, or somethink. Midnight before you gits in--if you catch this next up-Express.... Watto! Give us 'old o' this 'ere, Missus! You can 'ave mine instead."

"Please, no! I need nothing ... nothing!" She stayed his savage attack on the buttons of Mrs. Keyse's green-and-yellow ulster by holding out her watch. "How much time have I left to catch the up-Express?"

"Eight minutes. By Cripps! you'll 'ave to run for it."

She waved her white hand, and was gone, swiftly as a bird or a deer.

"They've signalled!" W. Keyse announced after a breathless interval, during which the slender flying figure grew smaller upon the straining sight. It vanished, and a thin, nearing screech announced the up-Express. His wife jumped up and clutched him.

"William! Suppose she's lost it!"

"Garn! No fear!" scoffed W. Keyse.

As he scoffed he was full of fear. They heard the clanking stoppage, the shrill whistle of departure. They looked breathlessly towards the green wood that fringed the cliff-base under the Castle head. The iron way ran through the belt of trees. The Express rushed through, broke roaring upon their unimpeded vision, devoured the gleaming line of metals that lay between wood and tunnel, and left them with the taste of cindery steam in their open mouths, and the memory of a white handkerchief waved at a carriage-window by a slender hand.

"It's a'right, old gal!" said W. Keyse, beaming. "Come on up to the 'ouse. I could do wiv a bit o' peck, an' I lay so could you. Lumme!" His triumphant face fell by the fraction of an inch. "What'll she do when she lands in 'ome, wivout a woman to git a cup o' tea for 'er? Or curl 'er 'air, or undo 'er st'yl'yoes an' things?"

"She'll do wot other young wimmen does under sim'lar circumstances," said Mrs. Keyse enigmatically. She added: "If she 'as luck, she'll 'ave a man for' er maid, an' if she 'as sense, she'll reckon the swop a good one!"

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LXXII

Until the actual moment of their parting at Euston, Saxham had never fully realised the anguish of the last moment when Lynette's face should pass for ever out of his thirsting sight.

It was going.... He quickened his long strides to keep up with it. He must have called to her, for she came hurriedly to the corridor-window, her sweet cheeks suffused with lovely glowing colour, her sweet eyes shining, her small gloved hand held frankly out. He gripped it, uttered some incoherency--what, he could not remember--was shouted at by a porter with a greasy lamp-truck, cannoned heavily against a man with a basket of papers, awakened with a great pang to the knowledge that she was gone. And the great, bare, dirty, populous glass-hive of Euston, that has been the forcing-house of so many sorrowful partings, held another breaking heart.

In the days that followed he saw his private patients as usual, and operated upon a regular mid-week morning at St. Stephen's, whose senior surgeon had recently resigned. The rest of the time he spent in making his arrangements.

Sanely, logically, methodically, everything had been thought out. Major Wrynche was to be her guardian, co-trustee with Lord Castleclare, and executor of the Will. It left her, simply and unconditionally, everything of which Saxham was possessed. She would live with the Wrynches until she married again. His agents were instructed to find a tenant for the house, and privately a purchaser for the practice. They wrote to him of a client already found. Matters were progressing steadily. Very soon now the desired end.

His table-lamp burned through the nights as he made up his ledgers and settled his accounts. In leisure moments he read in the intolerable book of the Past. Of all its sorrows and failures, its frantic follies and its besotted sins. Memory omitted nothing. Not a blot upon those sordid pages was spared him. It was not possible for an instant to turn away his eyes. His mental clarity was unrelieved by weariness. No shadow dimmed the keen crystal of his brain. He was at tension, like a bowstring that is stretched continually. He realised this, thinking: "Presently I will cut the bow-string, and the bow shall have rest! Even if my once-boasted will-power reasserted itself--even if I rose triumphant for the second time, cured of my vile craving, I do not the less owe my debt to the woman I have married. I promised her that I would die rather than fail her. I failed her! There is no excuse!"

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LXXIII

The West End pavements were shining wet. Belated cabs spun homewards with sleepy revellers. Neat motor-broughams slid between the kerbs and rounded corners at unrebuked excess-speeds, winking their blazing head-lights at drowsy policemen muffled in oilskin capes. On all these accustomed things the blue-white arc-lights shone.

The most belated of all the hansom cabs in London stopped at the door of the house in Harley Street as the narrow strip of sky between the grim, drab-faced houses began to be dappled with the leaden grey of dawn. A faint moon reeled northwards, hunted by sable shapes of screaming terror, pale Venus clinging to her tattered robe. The house was all black and silent, a dead face with blinded windows. Did Saxham wake behind them? Or did he sleep, not to wake again?

Lynette tried her latchkey. The unchained door swung backwards. She passed into the house silently, a tall, slender shape. A light was shining under the consulting-room door. Her heart leaped to greet it. She kissed her hand to it, and turned, moving noiselessly, and put up the chain of the hall-door. She felt for the switch of the electric light, and snapped it on.

She was jarred and aching and weary with her journey; but it was a very fair woman whom she saw reflected in the hall-mirror as she unpinned her hat and tossed it upon the hall-table, and passed on to the consulting-room door--a woman whose face was strange to herself, with that new fire, and decision, and strength of purpose in it; a woman with glowing roses of colour in her cheeks, and eager, shining eyes.

All through the long hours of the journey she had pictured him, her husband, bending over his work, sleeping in his chair, or in his bed. Yet behind these pictures was another image that started through their lines and colours dreadfully, persistently, and the image was that of a dead man. She thrust it from her for the hundredth time, as the door-handle yielded to her touch. She went into the room. Saxham was not there.

The lamp shed its circle of light upon the consulting-room writing-table. The armchair stood aside, as though hastily pushed back.... Signs of his recent presence were visible. The fireplace was heaped high with the ashes of burned papers; the acrid smell of their burning hung still on the close air.

She glanced back at the table. All its drawers stood open. Ledgers and case-books stood on it, neatly arrayed. A thick packet, heavily sealed, was addressed in Saxham's small, firm handwriting to Major Bingham Wrynche, Plas Bendigaid, Herion, South Wales. There were other letters in an orderly pile.

She glanced at the uppermost. It bore her own name. She took it and kissed it, and put it in her breast. There was an enclosure, heavy, and of oval shape. She wondered what it might be? As she did so, she looked at the letter hers had covered, and read what was written on the cover in the small, firm hand:

"'To the Coroner.' ... Merciful God!..."

The cry broke from her without her knowledge. The room rang with it as she turned and ran. With the nightmare-feeling of running up dream-stairs, of feeling nothing tangible under her footsteps, with the dreadful certainty that of all those crowding pictures of him seen through the long hours in the racing Express, only the one that she had not dared to look at was the real, true picture of Saxham now.

Higher, higher, in a series of swift rushes, she mounted like the dream-woman in her dream. From solid cubes of darkness to grey landing-glimmers. To the third-story bedroom that had never been done up. In the company of Little Miss Muffet, the Four-and-Twenty Blackbirds, and Georgy Porgy, would he be lying, cold and ghastly, with a wound across his throat?

But the room was unoccupied; the bed had not been slept in. Pale dawn peeping in at the corners of the scanty blinds assured her of that. Where might she find him? Where seek him?

Fool! said a voice within her; there is but one answer to such a question! Where has he gone night after night? Coward, you knew, and yet avoided!... What threshold has he crossed when the world was sleeping round him? By whose vacant pillow has his broken heart sought vain relief in tears?

She passed downstairs, gliding noiselessly over the thick carpets, and went into the room it had been his pleasure to furnish and decorate as his wife's boudoir. Its seashell pinkness was merged in darkness, faintly striped by the grey dawn-glimmer, but the door of the bedroom that opened from it was ajar. Light edged the heavy fold of the portiere curtain and made a pool upon the carpet. She held her breath as she stole to the door, and, trembling, looked in. He was there, kneeling by the bed. His heavily-shouldered black figure made a blotch upon the dainty white and azure draperies; his arms were outflung upon the silken counterpane.

A rush of thanks sprang from her full heart to Heaven as she heard the heavy sighing breaths that proved him living yet.

She would have gone to him and touched him then, but the sound of his voice took courage from her, and drew her strength away. He spoke, lifting his face to the ivory Crucifix that hung upon the wall above the bed-head. It was a voice of groanings rather than the quiet voice with which she was familiar. She comprehended that a soul in mortal anguish was speaking aloud to God.

"I cannot live!" groaned Saxham. "I am weary, body and spirit. What I have borne I have borne in the hope of laying my burden down. Everything is ready! I have cleared the way; my loins are girded for departure. All I asked was to lie down in the earth and wake again no more. All I asked--and what happens? My dead faith quickens again in me. I must bow my neck once more to the yoke of the Inconceivable! I must perforce believe in Thee again! I hear the voice of the pale thorn-crowned Victim, saying, 'I am Thy God who lived and suffered and died for thee! Live on, then, and suffer also, and pass to the Life Eternal when thine hour comes!' O God!--my God! have I not earned deliverance? Have I not borne anguish enough?"

His fierce, upbraiding voice died out in inarticulate mutterings. His head fell forwards upon his arms. Presently he lifted it, and cried out, as if replying to some unseen speaker:

"If a self-sought death entails eternal torment, am I not in hell here upon earth? How else, when to live is to hold her in bondage, knowing that she longs and pines to be free? And yet, to go out into the dark and leave her! never again to see her! never more to feel the light of her eyes flow into me! Never to hear her voice--to be of my own deed separate from her throughout Eternity--that were of all the Judgments that are Thine to scourge with the most terrible that Thou couldst lay upon my soul!"

A sob tore him. He moaned out brokenly:

"Give me a sign, if Thou art indeed merciful! Show me that there is relenting in Thee! Grant me the hope, at least, that my great renunciation may open a gate by which, after cycles of expiatory suffering, I may at last pass through to where she dwells in Thy Brightness. Give me to see her face with a smile on it--to touch her hand--after all--after all! The lips I have never kissed, may they not be mine, O God--mine one day in Heaven? If Thou art Love, there should be love there."

She glided over the deep carpet, stretched out a timid hand, and touched his shoulder. He lifted his great square head, and slowly looked round. The black hair, mingled with white, clung damp to the broad forehead. His eyes were bloodshot, strained, and haggard, and wild. Sorrow was charted deep upon the haggard features. Amazement struck them into folly as he started up, stammering out her name, and clutching for support at the brass rail that was at the foot of the bed.

"Lynette! You.... It is you?..." He shook, staring at her with dilated eyes.

"Owen, you are ill. You speak and look so strangely. It is me--really me!" she said, trying to speak calmly through the tumult of her heart.

"I am not ill. How is it that you are here?"

He lifted a hand to his strained and smarting eyes and moved it to and fro before them. He was staring at her still, but with pupils that were less dilated, and the veins upon his broad forehead were no longer purple now.

"Have I talked nonsense? I had dozed, and you startled me coming upon me.... Why have you?..." He strove to speak and look as usual. "Has anything happened, that you have come back?"

She pressed her hands together, wrestling for collected thought and clear, explicit utterance, though the room rocked about her, and the floor seemed to rise and fall beneath her feet.

"Something happened. I have come back from Wales to tell you that I ... I cannot live upon your friendship any longer! I--I must have more, or I shall die!"

He knew all. She had met the man whose look and breath and touch had revealed to her her own misery. Chained to her harsh yoke-fellow; denied Love's bread and wine of life! He looked at her, and answered coldly:

"You shall not die. You shall be free! If you had waited until to-morrow----"

"It is already day," she told him, and, as though to confirm her, a neighbouring steeple-clock clanged twice. He moved uneasily as his eyes fell on the disordered coverlet, half dragged from the bed and trailing on the floor. They shunned hers as he said, a dark flush rising through his haggard pallor:

"I beg your pardon for the intrusion here. But you were away.... I could not sleep, and the house was lonely.... Is your maid with you? Surely you are not alone?"

She bent her head with a faint smile.

"Quite alone. I did not wish for a companion."

"It was not wise----" he began, and took a step door-wards. "I will call one of the servants," he added, and was going, when he remembered, and stopped, saying hoarsely:

"I forgot. They are gone. I have sent them all away!"

She looked at him in silence. He continued:

"I have paid and dismissed them. You will think it curious--you will know the reason later--I have written to you to explain."

"I found upon your table a letter addressed to me," she said. He started, knitting his black brows.

"You have not read it?" he asked, breathing quickly.

"Not yet." She touched her bosom, where the letter lay. "I have it here."

"Please do not open it! Give me back the letter!" He stretched out his hand to take it, and breathed more freely when she drew it out and gave it to him. And a sweet wild pang shot through him; the paper was so warm and fragrant from the nest where it had lain so short a time. But he mastered the emotion and tore open the envelope. He took from it the enclosure, wrapped in folds of tissue-paper, and put it in her hand, saying, as he thrust the letter in his coat-pocket:

"There is something that by right is yours."

"Mine?..." She unrolled the tissue-paper, and the brilliants that were set about the miniature sent spurts of white and green and rosy fire between the slender, ivory-hued fingers that turned it about. She gave a little gasping cry of recognition:

"It is--me! How could you have managed----?" Then, as the sweet grey eyes of fair dead Lucy smiled up into her own: "I do not know how I am sure of it," she said, with a catching in her breath, "but this must be my mother!"

Saxham bent his head in answer to her look. His eyes bade her question no further. She faltered:

"May I not know how it came into your hands?"

"Through the death," Saxham answered, "of an evil man. You know his name. He probably robbed your father of that miniature with other things; but I can only surmise this. I cannot positively say."

"You speak of my father." Her face was quivering, her eyes entreated. "Tell me what you know of him, and of"--she kissed the miniature, and held it to her cheek--"of my mother?"

"Your father," said Saxham, "was an officer and a gentleman. The surname that you exchanged for mine, poor child! was really his. His Christian name is engraved there"--he pointed to the inner rim of the band of brilliants --"with that of the lady who was your mother. She was beautiful; she was tender and devoted; she loved your father well enough to give up every social aim and every worldly advantage for his sake. She died loving him. He died--I should not wonder if he died of sorrow for her loss. For hearts can break, though the Faculty deny it!"

He swung about to leave the room. She was murmuring over her new-found treasure.

"'Lucy to Richard' ... 'Richard' ..." she repeated. A wave of roseate colour broke over her with the memory of the hand that had touched and the voice that had spoken to her in her Heaven-sent vision of the previous morning, when the Beloved had come back from Paradise to lay a charge upon her child.

"My father knew the Mother?" It was not a question, it was a statement of the fact. Saxham wondered at the assured tone, as he told her:

"It is true. They had been friends--in the world they both gave up afterwards--the man for the love that is of earth, the woman for the love of Heaven."

"She never told me then, but she must have known who I was from the beginning," Lynette ventured. "She gave me the surname of Mildare because it belonged to me! Do not you think so too?"

Saxham made no answer. He swung about to leave the room. She slipped the miniature into her bosom, where his letter had lain, and asked:

"Where are you going?"

He answered, with his eyes avoiding hers:

"You have been travelling all night; you must be tired and hungry. Go to bed and try to rest, while I forage for you downstairs. You shall not suffer for lack of attendance. I am quite a good cook, as you shall find presently. When you have eaten you must sleep, and then we will talk of your returning home to your friends."

"Are not you my chief friend?" she asked. "Is not this my home?"

He avoided her look, replying awkwardly:

"Hardly, when there are no servants to wait upon you!"

"May I not know why you sent them away?"

He said, his haggard profile turned to her, a muscle of his pale cheek twitching:

"I am going away myself: that is the reason why. All debts are paid. I have completed all the arrangements, entailing the minimum of annoyance upon you."

"May I not come with you upon your voyage?"

His eyes were still averted as his grey lips answered:

"No! I am going where you cannot come!"

"Owen, tell me where you are going?"

Her tone of entreaty knocked at the door of his barred heart. He winced palpably. "Excuse me," he said, and took another step towards the door. She stopped him with:

"You are not excused from answering my question!"

"I am going, first to get you some breakfast," said Saxham curtly, "and then to find a woman to attend upon you here."

"I need no breakfast, thanks! I want no attendant!"

"You must have someone," said Saxham brusquely.

"I must have your answer," she said in a tone quite new to him. "What is your secret purpose? What are you hiding from me in that closed hand?"

He moved his left hand slightly, undoing the fingers and giving a glimpse of the empty palm.

"Not that hand. The other!" She pointed to the clenched right. How tall she had grown, and how womanly! "Love has done this!" was his aching thought. She seemed a princess of faery, fresh from a bath of magic waters. Her very gait was changed, her every gesture seemed new. Purpose and decision and quiet self-control breathed from her; her voice had tones in it unheard of him before. Her eyes were radiant as he had never yet seen them, golden stars, centred and rimmed with night, shining in a pale glory that was her face....

"All that for the other man! Well, let him have it!" thought Saxham, and involuntarily glanced at his clenched right hand.

"Please open it and show me what you have there!" she begged him.

Her tones were full of pleading music. His face hardened grimly to withstand. His muscular fingers closed in a vice-like grip over what he held. But she moved to him with a whisper of soft trailing garments, and took the shut hand in both her own. She bent her exquisite head and kissed it, and Saxham's fingers of iron were no more than wax. Something clicked in his throat as they opened, that was like the turning of a rusty lock. And the little blue phial, with the yellow poison-label, gave up his deadly intention to her eyes. She cried out and snatched it, and flung it away from her. It fell soundlessly on the soft carpet, and rolled under a chair.

"Owen! You would have ... done that!..."

Divine reproach was to her face. He snarled:

"It would have been done by now if you had not come back!"

"I thank our Lord I came!... It is His doing! Once He had sent me knowledge, I could not stay away. For, Owen ... I have made a discovery...."

"Yes." He laughed harshly. "As I knew you would one day! Never was I fool enough to doubt what would come!"

She put both her hands to her lips and kissed them, and held them out to him. He cried:

"What is this? What interlude of folly are you playing? It was your freedom you came to demand. You have not told me who the man you love is. I do not ask--I will not even know! He is your choice; that is enough!"

"He is my choice!" Her bosom heaved to the measure of her quickened breathing. The splendid colour rose over the edge of the lace scarf that was loosely knotted about her sweet throat, and surged to the pure temples, and climbed to the line of the rich red-brown hair.

"You will soon be free to tell the world so. Marry him," said Saxham, "and forget the dreary months dragged out beside the sot! For I who promised you I would never fail you; I who told you so confidently that I was cured of the accursed liquor-crave; I--well, I reckoned without my host----"

His laugh jarred her heartstrings. She cried out hotly:

"You did not deceive me wilfully! You believed what you said!"

"I believed ... and the first snare set for me tripped up my heels," said Saxham. "I paid the penalty of being cocksure. And I had not the common decency to die then and release you. True, there were reasons--they are swept away now!... I sent you to Wales that I might be free of the sight of you, that I might end the sordid comedy and have done. You have come too soon! There's no more to be said than that!"

"There is this to be said."

She came towards him, her tender eyes wooing his. Her lips were parted, her breath came in sighs.

"What you have told me is sorrowful, but not hopeless. You were cured once--you will be cured again! And I will help you--comfort you--suffer with you and pray for you. You shall never be alone, my husband, any more!"

He was melting. His hard blue eyes had the softening gleam of tears. He stretched out his hands and took hers, holding them close. He stooped, and let his burning lips rest on the cool, fragrant flesh, and said tenderly:

"Dear saint, sweet would-be martyr, you shall not sacrifice your long life's happiness to me. Rather than live on sane and sober, to see you famishing beside me for the want of Love, I would die a thousand deaths, Lynette! Try to believe it. You shall be free! You must be free, my child!"

She winced as though he had stabbed her, and cried out:

"Why do you harp continually upon your death? I will not listen to you! If I do not desire to be 'free,' as you term it, what barrier is there between us now?"

He said, amazed:

"What barrier? Do you ask what barrier? Your love--for that other man!"

"There is no other man!" She looked him full in the eyes now, with a lovely colour dyeing her sweet cheeks, and an exquisite quivering wistfulness about her mouth. She moved so near that her fragrant breath fanned warm upon his eyelids. "There is no man but you--there will never be any other man!... Dearest"--her hands were on his shoulders; her bosom rose and fell close to his broad breast--"I have been very slow at learning. But--Owen!--I love you as your wife should love!"

"You cannot!" He stepped back sharply, and her hands fell from him. "You shall not! I am not worthy. I thought so once.... I know better now. Do not deceive yourself. Love cannot be compelled at will, and I have ceased to wish--to desire yours! All I want now is rest and silence and forgetfulness--where alone they may be found!" He drew a breath of weariness.

"If you have ceased to wish for love from me, that is my punishment," she said, very pale. "For without yours I cannot live! God hears me speak the truth!"

"Lynette!..."

He swayed like a tree cut through and falling. She caught his hands, and drew them to her heart.

"I have been blind and deaf and senseless. I am changed, I am altered--I am awake at last! I know how great and precious is the love you have given me.... Do not tell me it is mine no longer! Owen, if you do that, it is I who shall die!"

A sob tore its way through him. His great frame quivered. His mask-like immobility broke up ... was gone. Her own tears falling, she stretched her arms to him; yet while his eyes devoured her, his arms hungered for her, he delayed, knitting his brows. She caught a word or two, whispered brokenly. He asked himself: "Can this be Love?"

"It is Love! Owen, I kissed you one night when I found you sleeping! When will you kiss me back again?"

He cried out wildly upon God, and fell down upon his knees before her. He reached out groping, desperate arms, and snatched her close. His deep, shuddering breaths vibrated through her; her own knees were trembling, her bosom in storm. She swayed like a young palm. Nearer--nearer! he felt her hands about his neck, her tears upon his face....

"Dear love, dearest husband, I have a message for you! Owen, shall I tell you what it is?"

"Tell me, my heart's beloved," said Saxham in a whisper.

Their looks united in azure fire and golden. Their breath mingled, their lips were very near. She felt his strength about her; he drank in her sweetness. The kiss, the supreme boon, was as yet withheld.

She whispered....

"I awakened in the light of the early morning--the morning of the day I came to you. She sat beside me--the Mother, Owen! her dear hand on my heart, her dear eyes waiting for mine. She stooped and kissed me ... it was real ... I felt it! She said: 'Love your husband as I loved Richard! Be to a child of his what I have been to you!'"

His arms wrapped round her, gathered her, enfolded her. His scalding tears wetted her white bosom as she drew the square black head to rest there, and drooped her cheek upon the broad brow. Her rich hair, loosed from its coils, fell in a heavy silken rope upon his shoulder ... their lips met in the nuptial, sacramental kiss....

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