New Grub Street

‘I refuse to argue such questions with you.’

‘Then you are very unjust. I am not a child, and there’s nothing wrong in my asking you why home is made a place of misery, instead of being what home ought to be.’

‘You prove that you are a child, in asking for explanations which ought to be clear enough to you.’

‘You mean that mother is to blame for everything?’

‘The subject is no fit one to be discussed between a father and his daughter. If you cannot see the impropriety of it, be so good as to go away and reflect, and leave me to my occupations.’

Marian came to a pause. But she knew that his rebuke was mere unworthy evasion; she saw that her father could not meet her look, and this perception of shame in him impelled her to finish what she had begun.

‘I will say nothing of mother, then, but speak only for myself. I suffer too much from your unkindness; you ask too much endurance.’

‘You mean that I exact too much work from you?’ asked her father, with a look which might have been directed to a recalcitrant clerk.

‘No. But that you make the conditions of my work too hard. I live in constant fear of your anger.’

‘Indeed? When did I last ill-use you, or threaten you?’

‘I often think that threats, or even ill-usage, would be easier to bear than an unchanging gloom which always seems on the point of breaking into violence.’

‘I am obliged to you for your criticism of my disposition and manner, but unhappily I am too old to reform. Life has made me what I am, and I should have thought that your knowledge of what my life has been would have gone far to excuse a lack of cheerfulness in me.’

The irony of this laborious period was full of self-pity. His voice quavered at the close, and a tremor was noticeable in his stiff frame.

‘It isn’t lack of cheerfulness that I mean, father. That could never have brought me to speak like this.’

‘If you wish me to admit that I am bad-tempered, surly, irritable—I make no difficulty about that. The charge is true enough. I can only ask you again: What are the circumstances that have ruined my temper? When you present yourself here with a general accusation of my behaviour, I am at a loss to understand what you ask of me, what you wish me to say or do. I must beg you to speak plainly. Are you suggesting that I should make provision for the support of you and your mother away from my intolerable proximity? My income is not large, as I think you are aware, but of course, if a demand of this kind is seriously made, I must do my best to comply with it.’

‘It hurts me very much that you can understand me no better than this.’

‘I am sorry. I think we used to understand each other, but that was before you were subjected to the influence of strangers.’

In his perverse frame of mind he was ready to give utterance to any thought which confused the point at issue. This last allusion was suggested to him by a sudden pang of regret for the pain he was causing Marian; he defended himself against self-reproach by hinting at the true reason of much of his harshness.

‘I am subjected to no influence that is hostile to you,’ Marian replied.

‘You may think that. But in such a matter it is very easy for you to deceive yourself.’

‘Of course I know what you refer to, and I can assure you that I don’t deceive myself.’

Yule flashed a searching glance at her.

‘Can you deny that you are on terms of friendship with a—a person who would at any moment rejoice to injure me?’

‘I am friendly with no such person. Will you say whom you are thinking of?’

‘It would be useless. I have no wish to discuss a subject on which we should only disagree unprofitably.’

Marian kept silence for a moment, then said in a low, unsteady voice:

‘It is perhaps because we never speak of that subject that we are so far from understanding each other. If you think that Mr Milvain is your enemy, that he would rejoice to injure you, you are grievously mistaken.’

‘When I see a man in close alliance with my worst enemy, and looking to that enemy for favour, I am justified in thinking that he would injure me if the right kind of opportunity offered. One need not be very deeply read in human nature to have assurance of that.’

‘But I know Mr Milvain!’

‘You know him?’

‘Far better than you can, I am sure. You draw conclusions from general principles; but I know that they don’t apply in this case.’

‘I have no doubt you sincerely think so. I repeat that nothing can be gained by such a discussion as this.’

‘One thing I must tell you. There was no truth in your suspicion that Mr Milvain wrote that review in The Current. He assured me himself that he was not the writer, that he had nothing to do with it.’

Yule looked askance at her, and his face displayed solicitude, which soon passed, however, into a smile of sarcasm.

‘The gentleman’s word no doubt has weight with you.’

‘Father, what do you mean?’ broke from Marian, whose eyes of a sudden flashed stormily. ‘Would Mr Milvain tell me a lie?’

‘I shouldn’t like to say that it is impossible,’ replied her father in the same tone as before.

‘But—what right have you to insult him so grossly?’

‘I have every right, my dear child, to express an opinion about him or any other man, provided I do it honestly. I beg you not to strike attitudes and address me in the language of the stage. You insist on my speaking plainly, and I have spoken plainly. I warned you that we were not likely to agree on this topic.’

‘Literary quarrels have made you incapable of judging honestly in things such as this. I wish I could have done for ever with the hateful profession that so poisons men’s minds.’

‘Believe me, my girl,’ said her father, incisively, ‘the simpler thing would be to hold aloof from such people as use the profession in a spirit of unalloyed selfishness, who seek only material advancement, and who, whatever connection they form, have nothing but self-interest in view.’

And he glared at her with much meaning. Marian—both had remained standing all through the dialogue—cast down her eyes and became lost in brooding.

‘I speak with profound conviction,’ pursued her father, ‘and, however little you credit me with such a motive, out of desire to guard you against the dangers to which your inexperience is exposed. It is perhaps as well that you have afforded me this— ‘

There sounded at the house-door that duplicated double-knock which generally announces the bearer of a telegram. Yule interrupted himself, and stood in an attitude of waiting. The servant was heard to go along the passage, to open the door, and then return towards the study. Yes, it was a telegram. Such despatches rarely came to this house; Yule tore the envelope, read its contents, and stood with gaze fixed upon the slip of paper until the servant inquired if there was any reply for the boy to take with him.

‘No reply.’

He slowly crumpled the envelope, and stepped aside to throw it into the paper-basket. The telegram he laid on his desk. Marian stood all the time with bent head; he now looked at her with an expression of meditative displeasure.

‘I don’t know that there’s much good in resuming our conversation,’ he said, in quite a changed tone, as if something of more importance had taken possession of his thoughts and had made him almost indifferent to the past dispute. ‘But of course I am quite willing to hear anything you would still like to say.

Marian had lost her vehemence. She was absent and melancholy.

‘I can only ask you,’ she replied, ‘to try and make life less of a burden to us.’

‘I shall have to leave town tomorrow for a few days; no doubt it will be some satisfaction to you to hear that.’

Marian’s eyes turned involuntarily towards the telegram.

‘As for your occupation in my absence,’ he went on, in a hard tone which yet had something tremulous, emotional, making it quite different from the voice he had hitherto used, ‘that will be entirely a matter for your own judgment. I have felt for some time that you assisted me with less good-will than formerly, and now that you have frankly admitted it, I shall of course have very little satisfaction in requesting your aid. I must leave it to you; consult your own inclination.’

It was resentful, but not savage; between the beginning and the end of his speech he softened to a sort of self-satisfied pathos.

‘I can’t pretend,’ replied Marian, ‘that I have as much pleasure in the work as I should have if your mood were gentler.’

‘I am sorry. I might perhaps have made greater efforts to appear at ease when I was suffering.’

‘Do you mean physical suffering?’

‘Physical and mental. But that can’t concern you. During my absence I will think of your reproof. I know that it is deserved, in some degree. If it is possible, you shall have less to complain of in future.’

He looked about the room, and at length seated himself; his eyes were fixed in a direction away from Marian.

‘I suppose you had dinner somewhere?’ Marian asked, after catching a glimpse of his worn, colourless face.

‘Oh, I had a mouthful of something. It doesn’t matter.’

It seemed as if he found some special pleasure in assuming this tone of martyrdom just now. At the same time he was becoming more absorbed in thought.

‘Shall I have something brought up for you, father?’

‘Something—? Oh no, no; on no account.’

He rose again impatiently, then approached his desk, and laid a hand on the telegram. Marian observed this movement, and examined his face; it was set in an expression of eagerness.

‘You have nothing more to say, then?’ He turned sharply upon her.

‘I feel that I haven’t made you understand me, but I can say nothing more.’

‘I understand you very well—too well. That you should misunderstand and mistrust me, I suppose, is natural. You are young, and I am old. You are still full of hope, and I have been so often deceived and defeated that I dare not let a ray of hope enter my mind. Judge me; judge me as hardly as you like. My life has been one long, bitter struggle, and if now—. I say,’ he began a new sentence, ‘that only the hard side of life has been shown to me; small wonder if I have become hard myself. Desert me; go your own Way, as the young always do. But bear in mind my warning. Remember the caution I have given you.’

He spoke in a strangely sudden agitation. The arm with which he leaned upon the table trembled violently. After a moment’s pause he added, in a thick voice:

‘Leave me. I will speak to you again in the morning.’

Impressed in a way she did not understand, Marian at once obeyed, and rejoined her mother in the parlour. Mrs Yule gazed anxiously at her as she entered.

‘Don’t be afraid,’ said Marian, with difficulty bringing herself to speak. ‘I think it will be better.’

‘Was that a telegram that came?’ her mother inquired after a silence.

‘Yes. I don’t know where it was from. But father said he would have to leave town for a few days.’

They exchanged looks.

‘Perhaps your uncle is very ill,’ said the mother in a low voice.

‘Perhaps so.’

The evening passed drearily. Fatigued with her emotions, Marian went early to bed; she even slept later than usual in the morning, and on descending she found her father already at the breakfast-table. No greeting passed, and there was no conversation during the meal. Marian noticed that her mother kept glancing at her in a peculiarly grave way; but she felt ill and dejected, and could fix her thoughts on no subject. As he left the table Yule said to her:

‘I want to speak to you for a moment. I shall be in the study.’

She joined him there very soon. He looked coldly at her, and said in a distant tone:

‘The telegram last night was to tell me that your uncle is dead.’

‘Dead!’

‘He died of apoplexy, at a meeting in Wattleborough. I shall go down this morning, and of course remain till after the funeral. I see no necessity for your going, unless, of course, it is your desire to do so.’

‘No; I should do as you wish.’

‘I think you had better not go to the Museum whilst I am away. You will occupy yourself as you think fit.’

‘I shall go on with the Harrington notes.’

‘As you please. I don’t know what mourning it would be decent for you to wear; you must consult with your mother about that. That is all I wished to say.’

His tone was dismissal. Marian had a struggle with herself but she could find nothing to reply to his cold phrases. And an hour or two afterwards Yule left the house without leave-taking.

Soon after his departure there was a visitor’s rat-tat at the door; it heralded Mrs Goby. In the interview which then took place Marian assisted her mother to bear the vigorous onslaughts of the haberdasher’s wife. For more than two hours Mrs Goby related her grievances, against the fugitive servant, against Mrs Yule, against Mr Yule; meeting with no irritating opposition, she was able in this space of time to cool down to the temperature of normal intercourse, and when she went forth from the house again it was in a mood of dignified displeasure which she felt to be some recompense for the injuries of yesterday.

A result of this annoyance was to postpone conversation between mother and daughter on the subject of John Yule’s death until a late hour of the afternoon. Marian was at work in the study, or endeavouring to work, for her thoughts would not fix themselves on the matter in hand for many minutes together, and Mrs Yule came in with more than her customary diffidence.

‘Have you nearly done for to-day, dear?’

‘Enough for the present, I think.’

She laid down her pen, and leant back in the chair.

‘Marian, do you think your father will be rich?’

‘I have no idea, mother. I suppose we shall know very soon.’

Her tone was dreamy. She seemed to herself to be speaking of something which scarcely at all concerned her, of vague possibilities which did not affect her habits of thought.

‘If that happens,’ continued Mrs Yule, in a low tone of distress, ‘I don’t know what I shall do.’

Marian looked at her questioningly.

‘I can’t wish that it mayn’t happen,’ her mother went on; ‘I can’t, for his sake and for yours; but I don’t know what I shall do. He’d think me more in his way than ever. He’d wish to have a large house, and live in quite a different way; and how could I manage then? I couldn’t show myself; he’d be too much ashamed of me. I shouldn’t be in my place; even you’d feel ashamed of me.’

‘You mustn’t say that, mother. I have never given you cause to think that.’

‘No, my dear, you haven’t; but it would be only natural. I couldn’t live the kind of life that you’re fit for. I shall be nothing but a hindrance and a shame to both of you.’

‘To me you would never be either hindrance or shame; be quite sure of that. And as for father, I am all but certain that, if he became rich, he would be a very much kinder man, a better man in every way. It is poverty that has made him worse than he naturally is; it has that effect on almost everybody. Money does harm, too, sometimes; but never, I think, to people who have a good heart and a strong mind. Father is naturally a warm-hearted man; riches would bring out all the best in him. He would be generous again, which he has almost forgotten how to be among all his disappointments and battlings. Don’t be afraid of that change, but hope for it.’

Mrs Yule gave a troublous sigh, and for a few minutes pondered anxiously.

‘I wasn’t thinking so much about myself’ she said at length. ‘It’s the hindrance I should be to father. Just because of me, he mightn’t be able to use his money as he’d wish. He’d always be feeling that if it wasn’t for me things would be so much better for him and for you as well.’

‘You must remember,’ Marian replied, ‘that at father’s age people don’t care to make such great changes. His home life, I feel sure, wouldn’t be so very different from what it is now; he would prefer to use his money in starting a paper or magazine. I know that would be his first thought. If more acquaintances came to his house, what would that matter? It isn’t as if he wished for fashionable society. They would be literary people, and why ever shouldn’t you meet with them?’

‘I’ve always been the reason why he couldn’t have many friends.’

‘That’s a great mistake. If father ever said that, in his bad temper, he knew it wasn’t the truth. The chief reason has always been his poverty. It costs money to entertain friends; time as well. Don’t think in this anxious way, mother. If we are to be rich, it will be better for all of us.’

Marian had every reason for seeking to persuade herself that this was true. In her own heart there was a fear of how wealth might affect her father, but she could not bring herself to face the darker prospect. For her so much depended on that hope of a revival of generous feeling under sunny influences.

It was only after this conversation that she began to reflect on all the possible consequences of her uncle’s death. As yet she had been too much disturbed to grasp as a reality the event to which she had often looked forward, though as to something still remote, and of quite uncertain results. Perhaps at this moment, though she could not know it, the course of her life had undergone the most important change. Perhaps there was no more need for her to labour upon this ‘article’ she was manufacturing.

She did not think it probable that she herself would benefit directly by John Yule’s will. There was no certainty that even her father would, for he and his brother had never been on cordial terms. But on the whole it seemed likely that he would inherit money enough to free him from the toil of writing for periodicals. He himself anticipated that. What else could be the meaning of those words in which (and it was before the arrival of the news) he had warned her against ‘people who made connections only with self-interest in view?’ This threw a sudden light upon her father’s attitude towards Jasper Milvain. Evidently he thought that Jasper regarded her as a possible heiress, sooner or later. That suspicion was rankling in his mind; doubtless it intensified the prejudice which originated in literary animosity.

Was there any truth in his suspicion? She did not shrink from admitting that there might be. Jasper had from the first been so frank with her, had so often repeated that money was at present his chief need. If her father inherited substantial property, would it induce Jasper to declare himself more than her friend? She could view the possibility of that, and yet not for a moment be shaken in her love. It was plain that Jasper could not think of marrying until his position and prospects were greatly improved; practically, his sisters depended upon him. What folly it would be to draw back if circumstances led him to avow what hitherto he had so slightly disguised! She had the conviction that he valued her for her own sake; if the obstacle between them could only be removed, what matter how?

Would he be willing to abandon Clement Fadge, and come over to her father’s side? If Yule were able to found a magazine?

Had she read or heard of a girl who went so far in concessions, Marian would have turned away, her delicacy offended. In her own case she could indulge to the utmost that practicality which colours a woman’s thought even in mid passion. The cold exhibition of ignoble scheming will repel many a woman who, for her own heart’s desire, is capable of that same compromise with her strict sense of honour.

Marian wrote to Dora Milvain, telling her what had happened. But she refrained from visiting her friends.

Each night found her more restless, each morning less able to employ herself. She shut herself in the study merely to be alone with her thoughts, to be able to walk backwards and forwards, or sit for hours in feverish reverie. From her father came no news. Her mother was suffering dreadfully from suspense, and often had eyes red with weeping. Absorbed in her own hopes and fears, whilst every hour harassed her more intolerably, Marian was unable to play the part of an encourager; she had never known such exclusiveness of self-occupation.

Yule’s return was unannounced. Early in the afternoon, when he had been absent five days, he entered the house, deposited his travelling-bag in the passage, and went upstairs. Marian had come out of the study just in time to see him up on the first landing; at the same moment Mrs Yule ascended from the kitchen.

‘Wasn’t that father?’

‘Yes, he has gone up.’

‘Did he say anything?’

Marian shook her head. They looked at the travelling-bag, then went into the parlour and waited in silence for more than a quarter of an hour. Yule’s foot was heard on the stairs; he came down slowly, paused in the passage, entered the parlour with his usual grave, cold countenance.

CHAPTER XXII. THE LEGATEES

Each day Jasper came to inquire of his sisters if they had news from Wattleborough or from Marian Yule. He exhibited no impatience, spoke of the matter in a disinterested tone; still, he came daily.

One afternoon he found Dora working alone. Maud, he was told, had gone to lunch at Mrs Lane’s.

‘So soon again? She’s getting very thick with those people. And why don’t they ask you?’

‘Maud has told them that I don’t care to go out.’

‘It’s all very well, but she mustn’t neglect her work. Did she write anything last night or this morning?’

Dora bit the end of her pen and shook her head.

‘Why not?’

‘The invitation came about five o’clock, and it seemed to unsettle her.’

‘Precisely. That’s what I’m afraid of. She isn’t the kind of girl to stick at work if people begin to send her invitations. But I tell you what it is, you must talk seriously to her; she has to get her living, you know. Mrs Lane and her set are not likely to be much use, that’s the worst of it; they’ll merely waste her time, and make her discontented.’

His sister executed an elaborate bit of cross-hatching on some waste paper. Her lips were drawn together, and her brows wrinkled. At length she broke the silence by saying:

‘Marian hasn’t been yet.’

Jasper seemed to pay no attention; she looked up at him, and saw that he was in thought.

‘Did you go to those people last night?’ she inquired.

‘Yes. By-the-bye, Miss Rupert was there.’

He spoke as if the name would be familiar to his hearer, but Dora seemed at a loss.

‘Who is Miss Rupert?’

‘Didn’t I tell you about her? I thought I did. Oh, I met her first of all at Barlow’s, just after we got back from the seaside. Rather an interesting girl. She’s a daughter of Manton Rupert, the advertising agent. I want to get invited to their house; useful people, you know.’

‘But is an advertising agent a gentleman?’

Jasper laughed.

‘Do you think of him as a bill-poster? At all events he is enormously wealthy, and has a magnificent house at Chislehurst. The girl goes about with her stepmother. I call her a girl, but she must be nearly thirty, and Mrs Rupert looks only two or three years older. I had quite a long talk with her—Miss Rupert, I mean—last night. She told me she was going to stay next week with the Barlows, so I shall have a run out to Wimbledon one afternoon.’

Dora looked at him inquiringly.

‘Just to see Miss Rupert?’ she asked, meeting his eyes.

‘To be sure. Why not?’

‘Oh!’ ejaculated his sister, as if the question did not concern her.

‘She isn’t exactly good-looking,’ pursued Jasper, meditatively, with a quick glance at the listener, ‘but fairly intellectual. Plays very well, and has a nice contralto voice; she sang that new thing of Tosti’s—what do you call it? I thought her rather masculine when I first saw her, but the impression wears off when one knows her better. She rather takes to me, I fancy.’

‘But—’ began Dora, after a minute’s silence.

‘But what?’ inquired her brother with an air of interest.

‘I don’t quite understand you.’

‘In general, or with reference to some particular?’

‘What right have you to go to places just to see this Miss Rupert?’

‘What right?’ He laughed. ‘I am a young man with my way to make. I can’t afford to lose any opportunity. If Miss Rupert is so good as to take an interest in me, I have no objection. She’s old enough to make friends for herself.’

‘Oh, then you consider her simply a friend?’

‘I shall see how things go on.’

‘But, pray, do you consider yourself perfectly free?’ asked Dora, with some indignation.

‘Why shouldn’t I?’

‘Then I think you have been behaving very strangely.’

Jasper saw that she was in earnest. He stroked the back of his head and smiled at the wall.

‘With regard to Marian, you mean?’

‘Of course I do.’

‘But Marian understands me perfectly. I have never for a moment tried to make her think that—well, to put it plainly, that I was in love with her. In all our conversations it has been my one object to afford her insight into my character, and to explain my position. She has no excuse whatever for misinterpreting me. And I feel assured that she has done nothing of the kind.’

‘Very well, if you feel satisfied with yourself—’

‘But come now, Dora; what’s all this about? You are Marian’s friend, and, of course, I don’t wish you to say a word about her.

But let me explain myself. I have occasionally walked part of the way home with Marian, when she and I have happened to go from here at the same time; now there was nothing whatever in our talk at such times that anyone mightn’t have listened to. We are both intellectual people, and we talk in an intellectual way. You seem to have rather old-fashioned ideas—provincial ideas. A girl like Marian Yule claims the new privileges of woman; she would resent it if you supposed that she couldn’t be friendly with a man without attributing “intentions” to him—to use the old word. We don’t live in Wattleborough, where liberty is rendered impossible by the cackling of gossips.’

‘No, but—’

‘Well?’

‘It seems to me rather strange, that’s all. We had better not talk about it any more.’

‘But I have only just begun to talk about it; I must try to make my position intelligible to you. Now, suppose—a quite impossible thing—that Marian inherited some twenty or thirty thousand pounds; I should forthwith ask her to be my wife.’

‘Oh indeed!’

‘I see no reason for sarcasm. It would be a most rational proceeding. I like her very much; but to marry her (supposing she would have me) without money would he a gross absurdity, simply spoiling my career, and leading to all sorts of discontents.’

‘No one would suggest that you should marry as things are.’

‘No; but please to bear in mind that to obtain money somehow or other—and I see no other way than by marriage—is necessary to me, and that with as little delay as possible. I am not at all likely to get a big editorship for some years to come, and I don’t feel disposed to make myself prematurely old by toiling for a few hundreds per annum in the meantime. Now all this I have frankly and fully explained to Marian. I dare say she suspects what I should do if she came into possession of money; there’s no harm in that. But she knows perfectly well that, as things are, we remain intellectual friends.’

‘Then listen to me, Jasper. If we hear that Marian gets nothing from her uncle, you had better behave honestly, and let her see that you haven’t as much interest in her as before.’

‘That would be brutality.’

‘It would be honest.’

‘Well, no, it wouldn’t. Strictly speaking, my interest in Marian wouldn’t suffer at all. I should know that we could be nothing but friends, that’s all. Hitherto I haven’t known what might come to pass; I don’t know yet. So far from following your advice, I shall let Marian understand that, if anything, I am more her friend than ever, seeing that henceforth there can be no ambiguities.’

‘I can only tell you that Maud would agree with me in what I have been saying.’

‘Then both of you have distorted views.’

‘I think not. It’s you who are unprincipled.’

‘My dear girl, haven’t I been showing you that no man could be more above-board, more straightforward?’

‘You have been talking nonsense, Jasper.’

‘Nonsense? Oh, this female lack of logic! Then my argument has been utterly thrown away. Now that’s one of the things I like in Miss Rupert; she can follow an argument and see consequences. And for that matter so can Marian. I only wish it were possible to refer this question to her.’

There was a tap at the door. Dora called ‘Come in!’ and Marian herself appeared.

‘What an odd thing!’ exclaimed Jasper, lowering his voice. ‘I was that moment saying I wished it were possible to refer a question to you.’

Dora reddened, and stood in an embarrassed attitude.

‘It was the old dispute whether women in general are capable of logic. But pardon me, Miss Yule; I forget that you have been occupied with sad things since I last saw you.’

Dora led her to a chair, asking if her father had returned.

‘Yes, he came back yesterday.’

Jasper and his sister could not think it likely that Marian had suffered much from grief at her uncle’s death; practically John Yule was a stranger to her. Yet her face bore the signs of acute mental trouble, and it seemed as if some agitation made it difficult for her to speak. The awkward silence that fell upon the three was broken by Jasper, who expressed a regret that he was obliged to take his leave.

‘Maud is becoming a young lady of society,’ he said—just for the sake of saying something—as he moved towards the door. ‘If she comes back whilst you are here, Miss Yule, warn her that that is the path of destruction for literary people.’

‘You should bear that in mind yourself’ remarked Dora, with a significant look.

‘Oh, I am cool-headed enough to make society serve my own ends.’

Marian turned her head with a sudden movement which was checked before she had quite looked round to him. The phrase he uttered last appeared to have affected her in some way; her eyes fell, and an expression of pain was on her brows for a moment.

‘I can only stay a few minutes,’ she said, bending with a faint smile towards Dora, as soon as they were alone. ‘I have come on my way from the Museum.’

‘Where you have tired yourself to death as usual, I can see.’

‘No; I have done scarcely anything. I only pretended to read; my mind is too much troubled. Have you heard anything about my uncle’s will?’

‘Nothing whatever.’

‘I thought it might have been spoken of in Wattleborough, and some friend might have written to you. But I suppose there has hardly been time for that. I shall surprise you very much. Father receives nothing, but I have a legacy of five thousand pounds.’

Dora kept her eyes down.

‘Then—what do you think?’ continued Marian. ‘My cousin Amy has ten thousand pounds.’

‘Good gracious! What a difference that will make!’

‘Yes, indeed. And her brother John has six thousand. But nothing to their mother. There are a good many other legacies, but most of the property goes to the Wattleborough park—”Yule Park” it will be called—and to the volunteers, and things of that kind. They say he wasn’t as rich as people thought.’

‘Do you know what Miss Harrow gets?’

‘She has the house for her life, and fifteen hundred pounds.’

‘And your father nothing whatever?’

‘Nothing. Not a penny. Oh I am so grieved! I think it so unkind, so wrong. Amy and her brother to have sixteen thousand pounds and father nothing! I can’t understand it. There was no unkind feeling between him and father. He knew what a hard life father has had. Doesn’t it seem heartless?’

‘What does your father say?’

‘I think he feels the unkindness more than he does the disappointment; of course he must have expected something. He came into the room where mother and I were, and sat down, and began to tell us about the will just as if he were speaking to strangers about something he had read in the newspaper—that’s the only way I can describe it. Then he got up and went away into the study. I waited a little, and then went to him there; he was sitting at work, as if he hadn’t been away from home at all. I tried to tell him how sorry I was, but I couldn’t say anything. I began to cry foolishly. He spoke kindly to me, far more kindly than he has done for a long time; but he wouldn’t talk about the will, and I had to go away and leave him. Poor mother! for all she was afraid that we were going to be rich, is broken-hearted at his disappointment.’

‘Your mother was afraid?’ said Dora.

‘Because she thought herself unfitted for life in a large house, and feared we should think her in our way.’ She smiled sadly. ‘Poor mother! she is so humble and so good. I do hope that father will be kinder to her. But there’s no telling yet what the result of this may be. I feel guilty when I stand before him.’

‘But he must feel glad that you have five thousand pounds.’

Marian delayed her reply for a moment, her eyes down.

‘Yes, perhaps he is glad of that.’

‘Perhaps!’

‘He can’t help thinking, Dora, what use he could have made of it.

It has always been his greatest wish to have a literary paper of his own—like The Study, you know. He would have used the money in that way, I am sure.’

‘But, all the same, he ought to feel pleasure in your good fortune.’

Marian turned to another subject.

‘Think of the Reardons; what a change all at once! What will they do, I wonder? Surely they won’t continue to live apart?’

‘We shall hear from Jasper.’

Whilst they were discussing the affairs of that branch of the family, Maud returned. There was ill-humour on her handsome face, and she greeted Marian but coldly. Throwing off her hat and gloves and mantle she listened to the repeated story of John Yule’s bequests.

‘But why ever has Mrs Reardon so much more than anyone else?’ she asked.

‘We can only suppose it is because she was the favourite child of the brother he liked best. Yet at her wedding he gave her nothing, and spoke contemptuously of her for marrying a literary man.’

‘Fortunate for her poor husband that her uncle was able to forgive her. I wonder what’s the date of the will? Who knows but he may have rewarded her for quarrelling with Mr Reardon.’

This excited a laugh.

‘I don’t know when the will was made,’ said Marian. ‘And I don’t know whether uncle had even heard of the Reardons’ misfortunes. I suppose he must have done. My cousin John was at the funeral, but not my aunt. I think it most likely father and John didn’t speak a word to each other. Fortunately the relatives were lost sight of in the great crowd of Wattleborough people; there was an enormous procession, of course.’

Maud kept glancing at her sister. The ill-humour had not altogether passed from her face, but it was now blended with reflectiveness.

A few moments more, and Marian had to hasten home. When she was gone the sisters looked at each other.

‘Five thousand pounds,’ murmured the elder. ‘I suppose that is considered nothing.’

‘I suppose so.—He was here when Marian came, but didn’t stay.’

‘Then you’ll take him the news this evening?’

‘Yes,’ replied Dora. Then, after musing, ‘He seemed annoyed that you were at the Lanes’ again.’

Maud made a movement of indifference.

‘What has been putting you out?’

‘Things were rather stupid. Some people who were to have come didn’t turn up. And—well, it doesn’t matter.’

She rose and glanced at herself in the little oblong mirror over the mantelpiece.

‘Did Jasper ever speak to you of a Miss Rupert?’ asked Dora.

‘Not that I remember.’

‘What do you think? He told me in the calmest way that he didn’t see why Marian should think of him as anything but the most ordinary friend—said he had never given her reason to think anything else.’

‘Indeed! And Miss Rupert is someone who has the honour of his preference?’

‘He says she is about thirty, and rather masculine, but a great heiress. Jasper is shameful!’

‘What do you expect? I consider it is your duty to let Marian know everything he says. Otherwise you help to deceive her. He has no sense of honour in such things.’

Dora was so impatient to let her brother have the news that she left the house as soon as she had had tea on the chance of finding Jasper at home. She had not gone a dozen yards before she encountered him in person.

‘I was afraid Marian might still be with you,’ he said, laughing.

‘I should have asked the landlady. Well?’

‘We can’t stand talking here. You had better come in.’

He was in too much excitement to wait.

‘Just tell me. What has she?’

Dora walked quickly towards the house, looking annoyed.

‘Nothing at all? Then what has her father?’

‘He has nothing,’ replied his sister, ‘and she has five thousand pounds.’

Jasper walked on with bent head. He said nothing more until he was upstairs in the sitting-room, where Maud greeted him carelessly.

‘Mrs Reardon anything?’

Dora informed him.

‘What?’ he cried incredulously. ‘Ten thousand? You don’t say so!’

He burst into uproarious laughter.

‘So Reardon is rescued from the slum and the clerk’s desk! Well, I’m glad; by Jove, I am. I should have liked it better if Marian had had the ten thousand and he the five, but it’s an excellent joke. Perhaps the next thing will be that he’ll refuse to have anything to do with his wife’s money; that would be just like him.’ After amusing himself with this subject for a few minutes more, he turned to the window and stood there in silence.

‘Are you going to have tea with us?’ Dora inquired.

He did not seem to hear her. On a repetition of the inquiry, he answered absently:

‘Yes, I may as well. Then I can go home and get to work.’

During the remainder of his stay he talked very little, and as Maud also was in an abstracted mood, tea passed almost in silence. On the point of departing he asked:

‘When is Marian likely to come here again?’

‘I haven’t the least idea,’ answered Dora.

He nodded, and went his way.

It was necessary for him to work at a magazine article which he had begun this morning, and on reaching home he spread out his papers in the usual businesslike fashion. The subject out of which he was manufacturing ‘copy’ had its difficulties, and was not altogether congenial to him; this morning he had laboured with unwonted effort to produce about a page of manuscript, and now that he tried to resume the task his thoughts would not centre upon it. Jasper was too young to have thoroughly mastered the art of somnambulistic composition; to write, he was still obliged to give exclusive attention to the matter under treatment. Dr Johnson’s saying, that a man may write at any time if he will set himself doggedly to it, was often upon his lips, and had even been of help to him, as no doubt it has to many another man obliged to compose amid distracting circumstances; but the formula had no efficacy this evening. Twice or thrice he rose from his chair, paced the room with a determined brow, and sat down again with vigorous clutch of the pen; still he failed to excogitate a single sentence that would serve his purpose.

‘I must have it out with myself before I can do anything,’ was his thought as he finally abandoned the endeavour. ‘I must make up my mind.’

To this end he settled himself in an easy-chair and began to smoke cigarettes. Some dozen of these aids to reflection only made him so nervous that he could no longer remain alone. He put on his hat and overcoat and went out—to find that it was raining heavily. He returned for an umbrella, and before long was walking aimlessly about the Strand, unable to make up his mind whether to turn into a theatre or not. Instead of doing so, he sought a certain upper room of a familiar restaurant, where the day’s papers were to be seen, and perchance an acquaintance might be met. Only half-a-dozen men were there, reading and smoking, and all were unknown to him. He drank a glass of lager beer, skimmed the news of the evening, and again went out into the bad weather.

After all it was better to go home. Everything he encountered had an unsettling effect upon him, so that he was further than ever from the decision at which he wished to arrive. In Mornington Road he came upon Whelpdale, who was walking slowly under an umbrella.

‘I’ve just called at your place.’

‘All right; come back if you like.’

‘But perhaps I shall waste your time?’ said Whelpdale, with unusual diffidence.

Reassured, he gladly returned to the house. Milvain acquainted him with the fact of John Yule’s death, and with its result so far as it concerned the Reardons. They talked of how the couple would probably behave under this decisive change of circumstances.

‘Biffen professes to know nothing about Mrs Reardon,’ said Whelpdale. ‘I suspect he keeps his knowledge to himself, out of regard for Reardon. It wouldn’t surprise me if they live apart for a long time yet.’

‘Not very likely. It was only want of money.’

‘They’re not at all suited to each other. Mrs Reardon, no doubt, repents her marriage bitterly, and I doubt whether Reardon cares much for his wife.’

‘As there’s no way of getting divorced they’ll make the best of it. Ten thousand pounds produce about four hundred a year; it’s enough to live on.’

‘And be miserable on—if they no longer love each other.’

‘You’re such a sentimental fellow!’ cried Jasper. ‘I believe you seriously think that love—the sort of frenzy you understand by it—ought to endure throughout married life. How has a man come to your age with such primitive ideas?’

‘Well, I don’t know. Perhaps you err a little in the opposite direction.’

‘I haven’t much faith in marrying for love, as you know. What’s more, I believe it’s the very rarest thing for people to be in love with each other. Reardon and his wife perhaps were an instance; perhaps—I’m not quite sure about her. As a rule, marriage is the result of a mild preference, encouraged by circumstances, and deliberately heightened into strong sexual feeling. You, of all men, know well enough that the same kind of feeling could be produced for almost any woman who wasn’t repulsive.’

‘The same kind of feeling; but there’s vast difference of degree.’

‘To be sure. I think it’s only a matter of degree. When it rises to the point of frenzy people may strictly be said to be in love; and, as I tell you, I think that comes to pass very rarely indeed. For my own part, I have no experience of it, and think I never shall have.’

‘I can’t say the same.’

They laughed.

‘I dare say you have imagined yourself in love—or really been so for aught I know—a dozen times. How the deuce you can attach any importance to such feeling where marriage is concerned I don’t understand.’

‘Well, now,’ said Whelpdale, ‘I have never upheld the theory—at least not since I was sixteen—that a man can be in love only once, or that there is one particular woman if he misses whom he can never be happy. There may be thousands of women whom I could love with equal sincerity.’

‘I object to the word “love” altogether. It has been vulgarised. Let us talk about compatibility. Now, I should say that, no doubt, and speaking scientifically, there is one particular woman supremely fitted to each man. I put aside consideration of circumstances; we know that circumstances will disturb any degree of abstract fitness. But in the nature of things there must be one woman whose nature is specially well adapted to harmonise with mine, or with yours. If there were any means of discovering this woman in each case, then I have no doubt it would be worth a man’s utmost effort to do so, and any amount of erotic jubilation would be reasonable when the discovery was made. But the thing is impossible, and, what’s more, we know what ridiculous fallibility people display when they imagine they have found the best substitute for that indiscoverable. This is what makes me impatient with sentimental talk about marriage. An educated man mustn’t play so into the hands of ironic destiny. Let him think he wants to marry a woman; but don’t let him exaggerate his feelings or idealise their nature.’

‘There’s a good deal in all that,’ admitted Whelpdale, though discontentedly.

‘There’s more than a good deal; there’s the last word on the subject. The days of romantic love are gone by. The scientific spirit has put an end to that kind of self-deception. Romantic love was inextricably blended with all sorts of superstitions— belief in personal immortality, in superior beings, in—all the rest of it. What we think of now is moral and intellectual and physical compatibility; I mean, if we are reasonable people.’

‘And if we are not so unfortunate as to fall in love with an incompatible,’ added Whelpdale, laughing.

‘Well, that is a form of unreason—a blind desire which science could explain in each case. I rejoice that I am not subject to that form of epilepsy.’

‘You positively never were in love!’

‘As you understand it, never. But I have felt a very distinct preference.’

‘Based on what you think compatibility?’

‘Yes. Not strong enough to make me lose sight of prudence and advantage. No, not strong enough for that.’

He seemed to be reassuring himself.

‘Then of course that can’t be called love,’ said Whelpdale.

‘Perhaps not. But, as I told you, a preference of this kind can be heightened into emotion, if one chooses. In the case of which I am thinking it easily might be. And I think it very improbable indeed that I should repent it if anything led me to indulge such an impulse.’

Whelpdale smiled.

‘This is very interesting. I hope it may lead to something.’

‘I don’t think it will. I am far more likely to marry some woman for whom I have no preference, but who can serve me materially.’

‘I confess that amazes me. I know the value of money as well as you do, but I wouldn’t marry a rich woman for whom I had no preference. By Jove, no!’

‘Yes, yes. You are a consistent sentimentalist.’

‘Doomed to perpetual disappointment,’ said the other, looking disconsolately about the room.

‘Courage, my boy! I have every hope that I shall see you marry and repent.’

‘I admit the danger of that. But shall I tell you something I have observed? Each woman I fall in love with is of a higher type than the one before.’

Jasper roared irreverently, and his companion looked hurt.

‘But I am perfectly serious, I assure you. To go back only three or four years. There was the daughter of my landlady in Barham Street; well, a nice girl enough, but limited, decidedly limited.

Next came that girl at the stationer’s—you remember? She was distinctly an advance, both in mind and person. Then there was Miss Embleton; yes, I think she made again an advance. She had been at Bedford College, you know, and was really a girl of considerable attainments; morally, admirable. Afterwards—’

He paused.

‘The maiden from Birmingham, wasn’t it?’ said Jasper, again exploding.

‘Yes, it was. Well, I can’t be quite sure. But in many respects that girl was my ideal; she really was.’

‘As you once or twice told me at the time.’

‘I really believe she would rank above Miss Embleton—at all events from my point of view. And that’s everything, you know. It’s the effect a woman produces on one that has to be considered.’

‘The next should be a paragon,’ said Jasper.

‘The next?’

Whelpdale again looked about the room, but added nothing, and fell into a long silence.

When left to himself Jasper walked about a little, then sat down at his writing-table, for he felt easier in mind, and fancied that he might still do a couple of hours’ work before going to bed. He did in fact write half-a-dozen lines, but with the effort came back his former mood. Very soon the pen dropped, and he was once more in the throes of anxious mental debate.

He sat till after midnight, and when he went to his bedroom it was with a lingering step, which proved him still a prey to indecision.

PART FOUR

CHAPTER XXIII. A PROPOSED INVESTMENT

Alfred Yule’s behaviour under his disappointment seemed to prove that even for him the uses of adversity could be sweet. On the day after his return home he displayed a most unwonted mildness in such remarks as he addressed to his wife, and his bearing towards Marian was gravely gentle. At meals he conversed, or rather monologised, on literary topics, with occasionally one of his grim jokes, pointed for Marian’s appreciation. He became aware that the girl had been overtaxing her strength of late, and suggested a few weeks of recreation among new novels. The coldness and gloom which had possessed him when he made a formal announcement of the news appeared to have given way before the sympathy manifested by his wife and daughter; he was now sorrowful, but resigned.

He explained to Marian the exact nature of her legacy. It was to be paid out of her uncle’s share in a wholesale stationery business, with which John Yule had been connected for the last twenty years, but from which he had not long ago withdrawn a large portion of his invested capital. This house was known as ‘Turberville & Co.,’ a name which Marian now heard for the first time.

‘I knew nothing of his association with them,’ said her father. ‘They tell me that seven or eight thousand pounds will be realised from that source; it seems a pity that the investment was not left to you intact. Whether there will be any delay in withdrawing the money I can’t say.’

The executors were two old friends of the deceased, one of them a former partner in his paper-making concern.

On the evening of the second day, about an hour after dinner was over, Mr Hinks called at the house; as usual, he went into the study. Before long came a second visitor, Mr Quarmby, who joined Yule and Hinks. The three had all sat together for some time, when Marian, who happened to be coming down stairs, saw her father at the study door.

‘Ask your mother to let us have some supper at a quarter to ten,’ he said urbanely. ‘And come in, won’t you? We are only gossiping.’

It had not often happened that Marian was invited to join parties of this kind.

‘Do you wish me to come?’ she asked.

‘Yes, I should like you to, if you have nothing particular to do.’

Marian informed Mrs Yule that the visitors would have supper, and then went to the study. Mr Quarmby was smoking a pipe; Mr Hinks, who on grounds of economy had long since given up tobacco, sat with his hands in his trouser pockets, and his long, thin legs tucked beneath the chair; both rose and greeted Marian with more than ordinary warmth.

‘Will you allow me five or six more puffs?’ asked Mr Quarmby, laying one hand on his ample stomach and elevating his pipe as if it were a glass of beaded liquor. ‘I shall then have done.’

‘As many more as you like,’ Marian replied.

The easiest chair was placed for her, Mr Hinks hastening to perform this courtesy, and her father apprised her of the topic they were discussing.

‘What’s your view, Marian? Is there anything to be said for the establishment of a literary academy in England?’

Mr Quarmby beamed benevolently upon her, and Mr Hinks, his scraggy neck at full length, awaited her reply with a look of the most respectful attention.

‘I really think we have quite enough literary quarrelling as it is,’ the girl replied, casting down her eyes and smiling.

Mr Quarmby uttered a hollow chuckle, Mr Hinks laughed thinly and exclaimed, ‘Very good indeed! Very good!’ Yule affected to applaud with impartial smile.

‘It wouldn’t harmonise with the Anglo-Saxon spirit,’ remarked Mr Hinks, with an air of diffident profundity.

Yule held forth on the subject for a few minutes in laboured phrases. Presently the conversation turned to periodicals, and the three men were unanimous in an opinion that no existing monthly or quarterly could be considered as representing the best literary opinion.

‘We want,’ remarked Mr Quarmby, ‘we want a monthly review which shall deal exclusively with literature. The Fortnightly, the Contemporary—they are very well in their way, but then they are mere miscellanies. You will find one solid literary article amid a confused mass of politics and economics and general clap-trap.’

‘Articles on the currency and railway statistics and views of evolution,’ said Mr Hinks, with a look as if something were grating between his teeth.

‘The quarterlies?’ put in Yule. ‘Well, the original idea of the quarterlies was that there are not enough important books published to occupy solid reviewers more than four times a year. That may be true, but then a literary monthly would include much more than professed reviews. Hinks’s essays on the historical drama would have come out in it very well; or your “Spanish Poets,” Quarmby.’

‘I threw out the idea to Jedwood the other day,’ said Mr Quarmby, ‘and he seemed to nibble at it.’

‘Yes, yes,’ came from Yule; ‘but Jedwood has so many irons in the fire. I doubt if he has the necessary capital at command just now. No doubt he’s the man, if some capitalist would join him.’

‘No enormous capital needed,’ opined Mr Quarmby. ‘The thing would pay its way almost from the first. It would take a place between the literary weeklies and the quarterlies. The former are too academic, the latter too massive, for multitudes of people who yet have strong literary tastes. Foreign publications should be liberally dealt with. But, as Hinks says, no meddling with the books that are no books—biblia abiblia; nothing about essays on bimetallism and treatises for or against vaccination.’

Even here, in the freedom of a friend’s study, he laughed his Reading-room laugh, folding both hands upon his expansive waistcoat.

‘Fiction? I presume a serial of the better kind might be admitted?’ said Yule.

‘That would be advisable, no doubt. But strictly of the better kind.’

‘Oh, strictly of the better kind,’ chimed in Mr Hinks.

They pursued the discussion as if they were an editorial committee planning a review of which the first number was shortly to appear. It occupied them until Mrs Yule announced at the door that supper was ready.

During the meal Marian found herself the object of unusual attention; her father troubled to inquire if the cut of cold beef he sent her was to her taste, and kept an eye on her progress. Mr Hinks talked to her in a tone of respectful sympathy, and Mr Quarmby was paternally jovial when he addressed her. Mrs Yule would have kept silence, in her ordinary way, but this evening her husband made several remarks which he had adapted to her intellect, and even showed that a reply would be graciously received.

Mother and daughter remained together when the men withdrew to their tobacco and toddy. Neither made allusion to the wonderful change, but they talked more light-heartedly than for a long time.

On the morrow Yule began by consulting Marian with regard to the disposition of matter in an essay he was writing. What she said he weighed carefully, and seemed to think that she had set his doubts at rest.

‘Poor old Hinks!’ he said presently, with a sigh. ‘Breaking up, isn’t he? He positively totters in his walk. I’m afraid he’s the kind of man to have a paralytic stroke; it wouldn’t astonish me to hear at any moment that he was lying helpless.’

‘What ever would become of him in that case?’

‘Goodness knows! One might ask the same of so many of us. What would become of me, for instance, if I were incapable of work?’

Marian could make no reply.

‘There’s something I’ll just mention to you,’ he went on in a lowered tone, ‘though I don’t wish you to take it too seriously. I’m beginning to have a little trouble with my eyes.’

She looked at him, startled.

‘With your eyes?’

‘Nothing, I hope; but—well, I think I shall see an oculist. One doesn’t care to face a prospect of failing sight, perhaps of cataract, or something of that kind; still, it’s better to know the facts, I should say.’

‘By all means go to an oculist,’ said Marian, earnestly.

‘Don’t disturb yourself about it. It may be nothing at all. But in any case I must change my glasses.’

He rustled over some slips of manuscript, whilst Marian regarded him anxiously.

‘Now, I appeal to you, Marian,’ he continued: ‘could I possibly save money out of an income that has never exceeded two hundred and fifty pounds, and often—I mean even in latter years—has been much less?’

‘I don’t see how you could.’

‘In one way, of course, I have managed it. My life is insured for five hundred pounds. But that is no provision for possible disablement. If I could no longer earn money with my pen, what would become of me?’

Marian could have made an encouraging reply, but did not venture to utter her thoughts.

‘Sit down,’ said her father. ‘You are not to work for a few days, and I myself shall be none the worse for a morning’s rest. Poor old Hinks! I suppose we shall help him among us, somehow. Quarmby, of course, is comparatively flourishing. Well, we have been companions for a quarter of a century, we three. When I first met Quarmby I was a Grub Street gazetteer, and I think he was even poorer than I. A life of toil! A life of toil!’

‘That it has been, indeed.’

‘By-the-bye’—he threw an arm over the back of his chair—’what did you think of our imaginary review, the thing we were talking about last night?’

‘There are so many periodicals,’ replied Marian, doubtfully.

‘So many? My dear child, if we live another ten years we shall see the number trebled.’

‘Is it desirable?’

‘That there should be such growth of periodicals? Well, from one point of view, no. No doubt they take up the time which some people would give to solid literature. But, on the other hand, there’s a far greater number of people who would probably not read at all, but for the temptations of these short and new articles; and they may be induced to pass on to substantial works. Of course it all depends on the quality of the periodical matter you offer. Now, magazines like’—he named two or three of popular stamp—’might very well be dispensed with, unless one regards them as an alternative to the talking of scandal or any other vicious result of total idleness. But such a monthly as we projected would be of distinct literary value. There can be no doubt that someone or other will shortly establish it.’

‘I am afraid,’ said Marian, ‘I haven’t so much sympathy with literary undertakings as you would like me to have.’

Money is a great fortifier of self-respect. Since she had become really conscious of her position as the owner of five thousand pounds, Marian spoke with a steadier voice, walked with firmer step; mentally she felt herself altogether a less dependent being. She might have confessed this lukewarmness towards literary enterprise in the anger which her father excited eight or nine days ago, but at that time she could not have uttered her opinion calmly, deliberately, as now. The smile which accompanied the words was also new; it signified deliverance from pupilage.

‘I have felt that,’ returned her father, after a slight pause to command his voice, that it might be suave instead of scornful. ‘I greatly fear that I have made your life something of a martyrdom

–-‘

‘Don’t think I meant that, father. I am speaking only of the general question. I can’t be quite so zealous as you are, that’s all. I love books, but I could wish people were content for a while with those we already have.’

‘My dear Marian, don’t suppose that I am out of sympathy with you here. Alas! how much of my work has been mere drudgery, mere labouring for a livelihood! How gladly I would have spent much more of my time among the great authors, with no thought of making money of them! If I speak approvingly of a scheme for a new periodical, it is greatly because of my necessities.’

He paused and looked at her. Marian returned the look.

‘You would of course write for it,’ she said.

‘Marian, why shouldn’t I edit it? Why shouldn’t it be your property?’,

‘My property—?’

She checked a laugh. There came into her mind a more disagreeable suspicion than she had ever entertained of her father. Was this the meaning of his softened behaviour? Was he capable of calculated hypocrisy? That did not seem consistent with his character, as she knew it.

‘Let us talk it over,’ said Yule. He was in visible agitation and his voice shook. ‘The idea may well startle you at first. It will seem to you that I propose to make away with your property before you have even come into possession of it.’ He laughed. ‘But, in fact, what I have in mind is merely an investment for your capital, and that an admirable one. Five thousand pounds at three per cent.—one doesn’t care to reckon on more—represents a hundred and fifty a year. Now, there can be very little doubt that, if it were invested in literary property such as I have in mind, it would bring you five times that interest, and before long perhaps much more. Of course I am now speaking in the roughest outline. I should have to get trustworthy advice; complete and detailed estimates would be submitted to you. At present I merely suggest to you this form of investment.’

He watched her face eagerly, greedily. When Marian’s eyes rose to his he looked away.

‘Then, of course,’ she said, ‘you don’t expect me to give any decided answer.’

‘Of course not—of course not. I merely put before you the chief advantages of such an investment. As I am a selfish old fellow, I’ll talk about the benefit to myself first of all. I should be editor of the new review; I should draw a stipend sufficient to all my needs—quite content, at first, to take far less than another man would ask, and to progress with the advance of the periodical. This position would enable me to have done with mere drudgery; I should only write when I felt called to do so—when the spirit moved me.’ Again he laughed, as though desirous of keeping his listener in good humour. ‘My eyes would be greatly spared henceforth.’

He dwelt on that point, waiting its effect on Marian. As she said nothing he proceeded:

‘And suppose I really were doomed to lose my sight in the course of a few years, am I wrong in thinking that the proprietor of this periodical would willingly grant a small annuity to the man who had firmly established it?’

‘I see the force of all that,’ said Marian; ‘but it takes for granted that the periodical will be successful.’

‘It does. In the hands of a publisher like Jedwood—a vigorous man of the new school—its success could scarcely be doubtful.’

‘Do you think five thousand pounds would be enough to start such a review?’

‘Well, I can say nothing definite on that point. For one thing, the coat must be made according to the cloth; expenditure can be largely controlled without endangering success. Then again, I think Jedwood would take a share in the venture. These are details. At present I only want to familiarise you with the thought that an investment of this sort will very probably offer itself to you.’

‘It would be better if we called it a speculation,’ said Marian, smiling uneasily.

Her one object at present was to oblige her father to understand that the suggestion by no means lured her. She could not tell him that what he proposed was out of the question, though as yet that was the light in which she saw it. His subtlety of approach had made her feel justified in dealing with him in a matter-of-fact way. He must see that she was not to be cajoled. Obviously, and in the nature of the case, he was urging a proposal in which he himself had all faith; but Marian knew his judgment was far from infallible. It mitigated her sense of behaving unkindly to reflect that in all likelihood this disposal of her money would be the worst possible for her own interests, and therefore for his. If, indeed, his dark forebodings were warranted, then upon her would fall the care of him, and the steadiness with which she faced that responsibility came from a hope of which she could not speak.

‘Name it as you will,’ returned her father, hardly suppressing a note of irritation. ‘True, every commercial enterprise is a speculation. But let me ask you one question, and beg you to reply frankly. Do you distrust my ability to conduct this periodical?’

She did. She knew that he was not in touch with the interests of the day, and that all manner of considerations akin to the prime end of selling his review would make him an untrustworthy editor.

But how could she tell him this?

‘My opinion would be worthless,’ she replied.

‘If Jedwood were disposed to put confidence in me, you also would?’

‘There’s no need to talk of that now, father. Indeed, I can’t say anything that would sound like a promise.’

He flashed a glance at her. Then she was more than doubtful?

‘But you have no objection, Marian, to talk in a friendly way of a project that would mean so much to me?’

‘But I am afraid to encourage you,’ she replied, frankly. ‘It is impossible for me to say whether I can do as you wish, or not.’

‘Yes, yes; I perfectly understand that. Heaven forbid that I should regard you as a child to be led independently of your own views and wishes! With so large a sum of money at stake, it would be monstrous if I acted rashly, and tried to persuade you to do the same. The matter will have to be most gravely considered.’

‘Yes.’ She spoke mechanically.

‘But if only it should come to something! You don’t know what it would mean to me, Marian.’

‘Yes, father; I know very well how you think and feel about it.’

‘Do you?’ He leaned forward, his features working under stress of emotion. ‘If I could see myself the editor of an influential review, all my bygone toils and sufferings would be as nothing; I should rejoice in them as the steps to this triumph. Meminisse juvabit! My dear, I am not a man fitted for subordinate places. My nature is framed for authority. The failure of all my undertakings rankles so in my heart that sometimes I feel capable of every brutality, every meanness, every hateful cruelty. To you I have behaved shamefully. Don’t interrupt me, Marian. I have treated you abominably, my child, my dear daughter—and all the time with a full sense of what I was doing. That’s the punishment of faults such as mine. I hate myself for every harsh word and angry look I have given you; at the time, I hated myself!’

‘Father—’

‘No, no; let me speak, Marian. You have forgiven me; I know it. You were always ready to forgive, dear. Can I ever forget that evening when I spoke like a brute, and you came afterwards and addressed me as if the wrong had been on your side? It burns in my memory. It wasn’t I who spoke; it was the demon of failure, of humiliation. My enemies sit in triumph, and scorn at me; the thought of it is infuriating. Have I deserved this? Am I the inferior of—of those men who have succeeded and now try to trample on me? No! I am not! I have a better brain and a better heart!’

Listening to this strange outpouring, Marian more than forgave the hypocrisy of the last day or two. Nay, could it be called hypocrisy? It was only his better self declared at the impulse of a passionate hope.

‘Why should you think so much of these troubles, father? Is it such a great matter that narrow-minded people triumph over you?’

‘Narrow-minded?’ He clutched at the word. ‘You admit they are that?’

‘I feel very sure that Mr Fadge is.’

‘Then you are not on his side against me?’

‘How could you suppose such a thing?’

‘Well, well; we won’t talk of that. Perhaps it isn’t a great matter. No—from a philosophical point of view, such things are unspeakably petty. But I am not much of a philosopher.’ He laughed, with a break in his voice. ‘Defeat in life is defeat, after all; and unmerited failure is a bitter curse. You see, I am not too old to do something yet. My sight is failing, but I can take care of it. If I had my own review, I would write every now and then a critical paper in my very best style. You remember poor old Hinks’s note about me in his book? We laughed at it, but he wasn’t so far wrong. I have many of those qualities. A man is conscious of his own merits as well as of his defects. I have done a few admirable things. You remember my paper on Lord Herbert of Cherbury? No one ever wrote a more subtle piece of criticism; but it was swept aside among the rubbish of the magazines. And it’s just because of my pungent phrases that I have excited so much enmity. Wait! Wait! Let me have my own review, and leisure, and satisfaction of mind—heavens! what I will write! How I will scarify!’

‘That is unworthy of you. How much better to ignore your enemies!

In such a position, I should carefully avoid every word that betrayed personal feeling.’

‘Well, well; you are of course right, my good girl. And I believe I should do injustice to myself if I made you think that those ignoble motives are the strongest in me. No; it isn’t so. From my boyhood I have had a passionate desire of literary fame, deep down below all the surface faults of my character. The best of my life has gone by, and it drives me to despair when I feel that I have not gained the position due to me. There is only one way of doing this now, and that is by becoming the editor of an important periodical. Only in that way shall I succeed in forcing people to pay attention to my claims. Many a man goes to his grave unrecognised, just because he has never had a fair judgment. Nowadays it is the unscrupulous men of business who hold the attention of the public; they blow their trumpets so loudly that the voices of honest men have no chance of being heard.’

Marian was pained by the humility of his pleading with her—for what was all this but an endeavour to move her sympathies?—and by the necessity she was under of seeming to turn a deaf ear. She believed that there was some truth in his estimate of his own powers; though as an editor he would almost certainly fail, as a man of letters he had probably done far better work than some who had passed him by on their way to popularity. Circumstances might enable her to assist him, though not in the way he proposed. The worst of it was that she could not let him see what was in her mind. He must think that she was simply balancing her own satisfaction against his, when in truth she suffered from the conviction that to yield would be as unwise in regard to her father’s future as it would be perilous to her own prospect of happiness.

‘Shall we leave this to be talked of when the money has been paid over to me?’ she said, after a silence.

‘Yes. Don’t suppose I wish to influence you by dwelling on my own hardships. That would be contemptible. I have only taken this opportunity of making myself better known to you. I don’t readily talk of myself and in general my real feelings are hidden by the faults of my temper. In suggesting how you could do me a great service, and at the same time reap advantage for yourself I couldn’t but remember how little reason you have to think kindly of me. But we will postpone further talk. You will think over what I have said?’

Marian promised that she would, and was glad to bring the conversation to an end.

When Sunday came, Yule inquired of his daughter if she had any engagement for the afternoon.

‘Yes, I have,’ she replied, with an effort to disguise her embarrassment.

‘I’m sorry. I thought of asking you to come with me to Quarmby’s. Shall you be away through the evening?’

‘Till about nine o’clock, I think.’

‘Ah! Never mind, never mind.’

He tried to dismiss the matter as if it were of no moment, but Marian saw the shadow that passed over his countenance. This was just after breakfast. For the remainder of the morning she did not meet him, and at the mid-day dinner he was silent, though he brought no book to the table with him, as he was wont to do when in his dark moods. Marian talked with her mother, doing her best to preserve the appearance of cheerfulness which was natural since the change in Yule’s demeanour.

She chanced to meet her father in the passage just as she was going out. He smiled (it was more like a grin of pain) and nodded, but said nothing.

When the front door closed, he went into the parlour. Mrs Yule was reading, or, at all events, turning over a volume of an illustrated magazine.

‘Where do you suppose she has gone?’ he asked, in a voice which was only distant, not offensive.

‘To the Miss Milvains, I believe,’ Mrs Yule answered, looking aside.

‘Did she tell you so?’

‘No. We don’t talk about it.’

He seated himself on the corner of a chair and bent forward, his chin in his hand.

‘Has she said anything to you about the review?’

‘Not a word.’

She glanced at him timidly, and turned a few pages of her book.

‘I wanted her to come to Quarmby’s, because there’ll be a man there who is anxious that Jedwood should start a magazine, and it would be useful for her to hear practical opinions. There’d be no harm if you just spoke to her about it now and then. Of course if she has made up her mind to refuse me it’s no use troubling myself any more. I should think you might find out what’s really going on.’

Only dire stress of circumstances could have brought Alfred Yule to make distinct appeal for his wife’s help. There was no underhand plotting between them to influence their daughter; Mrs Yule had as much desire for the happiness of her husband as for that of Marian, but she felt powerless to effect anything on either side.

‘If ever she says anything, I’ll let you know.’

‘But it seems to me that you have a right to question her.’

‘I can’t do that, Alfred.’

‘Unfortunately, there are a good many things you can’t do.’ With that remark, familiar to his wife in substance, though the tone of it was less caustic than usual, he rose and sauntered from the room. He spent a gloomy hour in the study, then went off to join the literary circle at Mr Quarmby’s.

CHAPTER XXIV. JASPER’S MAGNANIMITY

Occasionally Milvain met his sisters as they came out of church on Sunday morning, and walked home to have dinner with them. He did so to-day, though the sky was cheerless and a strong north-west wind made it anything but agreeable to wait about in open spaces.

‘Are you going to Mrs Wright’s this afternoon?’ he asked, as they went on together.

‘I thought of going,’ replied Maud. ‘Marian will be with Dora.’

‘You ought both to go. You mustn’t neglect that woman.’

He said nothing more just then, but when presently he was alone with Dora in the sitting-room for a few minutes, he turned with a peculiar smile and remarked quietly:

‘I think you had better go with Maud this afternoon.’

‘But I can’t. I expect Marian at three.’

‘That’s just why I want you to go.’

She looked her surprise.

‘I want to have a talk with Marian. We’ll manage it in this way. At a quarter to three you two shall start, and as you go out you can tell the landlady that if Miss Yule comes she is to wait for you, as you won’t be long. She’ll come upstairs, and I shall be there. You see?’

Dora turned half away, disturbed a little, but not displeased.

‘And what about Miss Rupert?’ she asked.

‘Oh, Miss Rupert may go to Jericho for all I care. I’m in a magnanimous mood.’

‘Very, I’ve no doubt.’

‘Well, you’ll do this? One of the results of poverty, you see; one can’t even have a private conversation with a friend without plotting to get the use of a room. But there shall be an end of this state of things.’

He nodded significantly. Thereupon Dora left the room to speak with her sister.

The device was put into execution, and Jasper saw his sisters depart knowing that they were not likely to return for some three hours. He seated himself comfortably by the fire and mused. Five minutes had hardly gone by when he looked at his watch, thinking Marian must be unpunctual. He was nervous, though he had believed himself secure against such weakness. His presence here with the purpose he had in his mind seemed to him distinctly a concession to impulses he ought to have controlled; but to this resolve he had come, and it was now too late to recommence the arguments with himself. Too late? Well, not strictly so; he had committed himself to nothing; up to the last moment of freedom he could always—

That was doubtless Marian’s knock at the front door. He jumped up, walked the length of the room, sat down on another chair, returned to his former seat. Then the door opened and Marian came in.

She was not surprised; the landlady had mentioned to her that Mr Milvain was upstairs, waiting the return of his sisters.

‘I am to make ‘Dora’s excuses,’ Jasper said. ‘She begged you would forgive her—that you would wait.’

‘Oh yes.’

‘And you were to be sure to take off your hat,’ he added in a laughing tone; ‘and to let me put your umbrella in the corner— like that.’

He had always admired the shape of Marian’s head, and the beauty of her short, soft, curly hair. As he watched her uncovering it, he was pleased with the grace of her arms and the pliancy of her slight figure.

‘Which is usually your chair?’

‘I’m sure I don’t know.’

‘When one goes to see a friend frequently, one gets into regular habits in these matters. In Biffen’s garret I used to have the most uncomfortable chair it was ever my lot to sit upon; still, I came to feel an affection for it. At Reardon’s I always had what was supposed to be the most luxurious seat, but it was too small for me, and I eyed it resentfully on sitting down and rising.’

‘Have you any news about the Reardons?’

‘Yes. I am told that Reardon has had the offer of a secretaryship to a boys’ home, or something of the kind, at Croydon. But I suppose there’ll be no need for him to think of that now.’

‘Surely not!’

‘Oh there’s no saying.’

‘Why should he do work of that kind now?’

‘Perhaps his wife will tell him that she wants her money all for herself.’

Marian laughed. It was very rarely that Jasper had heard her laugh at all, and never so spontaneously as this. He liked the music.

‘You haven’t a very good opinion of Mrs Reardon,’ she said.

‘She is a difficult person to judge. I never disliked her, by any means; but she was decidedly out of place as the wife of a struggling author. Perhaps I have been a little prejudiced against her since Reardon quarrelled with me on her account.’

Marian was astonished at this unlooked-for explanation of the rupture between Milvain and his friend. That they had not seen each other for some months she knew from Jasper himself but no definite cause had been assigned.

‘I may as well let you know all about it,’ Milvain continued, seeing that he had disconcerted the girl, as he meant to. ‘I met Reardon not long after they had parted, and he charged me with being in great part the cause of his troubles.’

The listener did not raise her eyes.

‘You would never imagine what my fault was. Reardon declared that the tone of my conversation had been morally injurious to his wife. He said I was always glorifying worldly success, and that this had made her discontented with her lot. Sounds rather ludicrous, don’t you think?’

‘It was very strange.’

‘Reardon was in desperate earnest, poor fellow. And, to tell you the truth, I fear there may have been something in his complaint.

I told him at once that I should henceforth keep away from Mrs Edmund Yule’s; and so I have done, with the result, of course, that they suppose I condemn Mrs Reardon’s behaviour. The affair was a nuisance, but I had no choice, I think.’

‘You say that perhaps your talk really was harmful to her.’

‘It may have been, though such a danger never occurred to me.’

‘Then Amy must be very weak-minded.’

‘To be influenced by such a paltry fellow?’

‘To be influenced by anyone in such a way.’

‘You think the worse of me for this story?’ Jasper asked.

‘I don’t quite understand it. How did you talk to her?’

‘As I talk to everyone. You have heard me say the same things many a time. I simply declare my opinion that the end of literary work— unless one is a man of genius—is to secure comfort and repute. This doesn’t seem to me very scandalous. But Mrs Reardon was perhaps too urgent in repeating such views to her husband. She saw that in my case they were likely to have solid results, and it was a misery to her that Reardon couldn’t or wouldn’t work in the same practical way.

‘It was very unfortunate.’

‘And you are inclined to blame me?’

‘No; because I am so sure that you only spoke in the way natural to you, without a thought of such consequences.’

Jasper smiled.

‘That’s precisely the truth. Nearly all men who have their way to make think as I do, but most feel obliged to adopt a false tone, to talk about literary conscientiousness, and so on. I simply say what I think, with no pretences. I should like to be conscientious, but it’s a luxury I can’t afford. I’ve told you all this often enough, you know.’

‘Yes.’

‘But it hasn’t been morally injurious to you,’ he said with a laugh.

‘Not at all. Still I don’t like it.’

Jasper was startled. He gazed at her. Ought he, then, to have dealt with her less frankly? Had he been mistaken in thinking that the unusual openness of his talk was attractive to her? She spoke with quite unaccustomed decision; indeed, he had noticed from her entrance that there was something unfamiliar in her way of conversing. She was so much more self-possessed than of wont, and did not seem to treat him with the same deference, the same subdual of her own personality.

‘You don’t like it?’ he repeated calmly. ‘It has become rather tiresome to you?’

‘I feel sorry that you should always represent yourself in an unfavourable light.’

He was an acute man, but the self-confidence with which he had entered upon this dialogue, his conviction that he had but to speak when he wished to receive assurance of Marian’s devotion, prevented him from understanding the tone of independence she had suddenly adopted. With more modesty he would have felt more subtly at this juncture, would have divined that the girl had an exquisite pleasure in drawing back now that she saw him approaching her with unmistakable purpose, that she wished to be wooed in less offhand fashion before confessing what was in her heart. For the moment he was disconcerted. Those last words of hers had a slight tone of superiority, the last thing he would have expected upon her lips.

‘Yet I surely haven’t always appeared so—to you?’ he said.

‘No, not always.’

‘But you are in doubt concerning the real man?’

‘I’m not sure that I understand you. You say that you do really think as you speak.’

‘So I do. I think that there is no choice for a man who can’t bear poverty. I have never said, though, that I had pleasure in mean necessities; I accept them because I can’t help it.’

It was a delight to Marian to observe the anxiety with which he turned to self-defence. Never in her life had she felt this joy of holding a position of command. It was nothing to her that Jasper valued her more because of her money; impossible for it to be otherwise. Satisfied that he did value her, to begin with, for her own sake, she was very willing to accept money as her ally in the winning of his love. He scarcely loved her yet, as she understood the feeling, but she perceived her power over him, and passion taught her how to exert it.

‘But you resign yourself very cheerfully to the necessity,’ she said, looking at him with merely intellectual eyes.

‘You had rather I lamented my fate in not being able to devote myself to nobly unremunerative work?’

There was a note of irony here. It caused her a tremor, but she held her position.

‘That you never do so would make one think—but I won’t speak unkindly.’

‘That I neither care for good work nor am capable of it,’ Jasper finished her sentence. ‘I shouldn’t have thought it would make you think so.’

Instead of replying she turned her look towards the door. There was a footstep on the stairs, but it passed.

‘I thought it might be Dora,’ she said.

‘She won’t be here for another couple of hours at least,’ replied Jasper with a slight smile.

‘But you said—?’

‘I sent her to Mrs Boston Wright’s that I might have an opportunity of talking to you. Will you forgive the stratagem?’

Marian resumed her former attitude, the faintest smile hovering about her lips.

‘I’m glad there’s plenty of time,’ he continued. ‘I begin to suspect that you have been misunderstanding me of late. I must set that right.’

‘I don’t think I have misunderstood you.’

‘That may mean something very disagreeable. I know that some people whom I esteem have a very poor opinion of me, but I can’t allow you to be one of them. What do I seem to you? What is the result on your mind of all our conversations?’

‘I have already told you.’

‘Not seriously. Do you believe I am capable of generous feeling?’

‘To say no, would be to put you in the lowest class of men, and that a very small one.”Good! Then I am not among the basest. But that doesn’t give me very distinguished claims upon your consideration. Whatever I am, I am high in some of my ambitions.’

‘Which of them?’

‘For instance, I have been daring enough to hope that you might love me.’

Marian delayed for a moment, then said quietly:

‘Why do you call that daring?’

‘Because I have enough of old-fashioned thought to believe that a woman who is worthy of a man’s love is higher than he, and condescends in giving herself to him.’

His voice was not convincing; the phrase did not sound natural on his lips. It was not thus that she had hoped to hear him speak. Whilst he expressed himself thus conventionally he did not love her as she desired to be loved.

‘I don’t hold that view,’ she said.

‘It doesn’t surprise me. You are very reserved on all subjects, and we have never spoken of this, but of course I know that your thought is never commonplace. Hold what view you like of woman’s position, that doesn’t affect mine.’

‘Is yours commonplace, then?’

‘Desperately. Love is a very old and common thing, and I believe I love you in the old and common way. I think you beautiful, you seem to me womanly in the best sense, full of charm and sweetness. I know myself a coarse being in comparison. All this has been felt and said in the same way by men infinite in variety. Must I find some new expression before you can believe me?’

Marian kept silence.

‘I know what you are thinking,’ he said. ‘The thought is as inevitable as my consciousness of it.’

For an instant she looked at him.

‘Yes, you look the thought. Why have I not spoken to you in this way before? Why have I waited until you are obliged to suspect my sincerity?’

‘My thought is not so easily read, then,’ said Marian.

‘To be sure it hasn’t a gross form, but I know you wish—whatever your real feeling towards me—that I had spoken a fortnight ago. You would wish that of any man in my position, merely because it is painful to you to see a possible insincerity. Well, I am not insincere. I have thought of you as of no other woman for some time. But—yes, you shall have the plain, coarse truth, which is good in its way, no doubt. I was afraid to say that I loved you. You don’t flinch; so far, so good. Now what harm is there in this confession? In the common course of things I shouldn’t be in a position to marry for perhaps three or four years, and even then marriage would mean difficulties, restraints, obstacles. I have always dreaded the thought of marriage with a poor income. You remember?

Love in a hut, with water and a crust, Is—Love forgive us!— cinders, ashes, dust.

You know that is true.’

‘Not always, I dare say.’

‘But for the vast majority of mortals. There’s the instance of the Reardons. They were in love with each other, if ever two people were; but poverty ruined everything. I am not in the confidence of either of them, but I feel sure each has wished the other dead. What else was to be expected? Should I have dared to take a wife in my present circumstances—a wife as poor as myself?’

‘You will be in a much better position before long,’ said Marian. ‘If you loved me, why should you have been afraid to ask me to have confidence in your future?’

‘It’s all so uncertain. It may be another ten years before I can count on an income of five or six hundred pounds—if I have to struggle on in the common way.’

‘But tell me, what is your aim in life? What do you understand by success?’

‘Yes, I will tell you. My aim is to have easy command of all the pleasures desired by a cultivated man. I want to live among beautiful things, and never to be troubled by a thought of vulgar difficulties. I want to travel and enrich my mind in foreign countries. I want to associate on equal terms with refined and interesting people. I want to be known, to be familiarly referred to, to feel when I enter a room that people regard me with some curiosity.’

He looked steadily at her with bright eyes.

‘And that’s all?’ asked Marian.

‘That is very much. Perhaps you don’t know how I suffer in feeling myself at a disadvantage. My instincts are strongly social, yet I can’t be at my ease in society, simply because I can’t do justice to myself. Want of money makes me the inferior of the people I talk with, though I might be superior to them in most things. I am ignorant in many ways, and merely because I am poor. Imagine my never having been out of England! It shames me when people talk familiarly of the Continent. So with regard to all manner of amusements and pursuits at home. Impossible for me to appear among my acquaintances at the theatre, at concerts. I am perpetually at a disadvantage; I haven’t fair play. Suppose me possessed of money enough to live a full and active life for the next five years; why, at the end of that time my position would be secure. To him that hath shall be given—you know how universally true that is.’

‘And yet,’ came in a low voice from Marian, ‘you say that you love me.’

‘You mean that I speak as if no such thing as love existed. But you asked me what I understood by success. I am speaking of worldly things. Now suppose I had said to you:

My one aim and desire in life is to win your love. Could you have believed me? Such phrases are always untrue; I don’t know how it can give anyone pleasure to hear them. But if I say to you: All the satisfactions I have described would be immensely heightened if they were shared with a woman who loved me—there is the simple truth.’

Marian’s heart sank. She did not want truth such as this; she would have preferred that he should utter the poor, common falsehoods. Hungry for passionate love, she heard with a sense of desolation all this calm reasoning. That Jasper was of cold temperament she had often feared; yet there was always the consoling thought that she did not see with perfect clearness into his nature. Now and then had come a flash, a hint of possibilities. She had looked forward with trembling eagerness to some sudden revelation; but it seemed as if he knew no word of the language which would have called such joyous response from her expectant soul.

‘We have talked for a long time,’ she said, turning her head as if his last words were of no significance. ‘As Dora is not coming, I think I will go now.’

She rose, and went towards the chair on which lay her out-of-door things. At once Jasper stepped to her side.

‘You will go without giving me any answer?’

‘Answer? To what?’

‘Will you be my wife?’

‘It is too soon to ask me that.’

‘Too soon? Haven’t you known for months that I thought of you with far more than friendliness?’

‘How was it possible I should know that? You have explained to me why you would not let your real feelings be understood.’

The reproach was merited, and not easy to be outfaced. He turned away for an instant, then with a sudden movement caught both her hands.

‘Whatever I have done or said or thought in the past, that is of no account now. I love you, Marian. I want you to be my wife. I have never seen any other girl who impressed me as you did from the first. If I had been weak enough to try to win anyone but you, I should have known that I had turned aside from the path of my true happiness. Let us forget for a moment all our circumstances. I hold your hands, and look into your face, and say that I love you. Whatever answer you give, I love you!’

Till now her heart had only fluttered a little; it was a great part of her distress that the love she had so long nurtured seemed shrinking together into some far corner of her being whilst she listened to the discourses which prefaced Jasper’s declaration. She was nervous, painfully self-conscious, touched with maidenly shame, but could not abandon herself to that delicious emotion which ought to have been the fulfilment of all her secret imaginings. Now at length there began a throbbing in her bosom. Keeping her face averted, her eyes cast down, she waited for a repetition of the note that was in that last ‘I love you.’ She felt a change in the hands that held hers—a warmth, a moist softness; it caused a shock through her veins.

He was trying to draw her nearer, but she kept at full arm’s length and looked irresponsive.

‘Marian?’

She wished to answer, but a spirit of perversity held her tongue.

‘Marian, don’t you love me? Or have I offended you by my way of speaking?’

Persisting, she at length withdrew her hands. Jasper’s face expressed something like dismay.

‘You have not offended me,’ she said. ‘But I am not sure that you don’t deceive yourself in thinking, for the moment, that I am necessary to your happiness.’

The emotional current which had passed from her flesh to his whilst their hands were linked, made him incapable of standing aloof from her. He saw that her face and neck were warmer hued, and her beauty became more desirable to him than ever yet.

‘You are more to me than anything else in the compass of life!’ he exclaimed, again pressing forward. ‘I think of nothing but you—you yourself—my beautiful, gentle, thoughtful Marian!’

His arm captured her, and she did not resist. A sob, then a strange little laugh, betrayed the passion that was at length unfolded in her.

‘You do love me, Marian?’

‘I love you.’

And there followed the antiphony of ardour that finds its first utterance—a subdued music, often interrupted, ever returning upon the same rich note.

Marian closed her eyes and abandoned herself to the luxury of the dream. It was her first complete escape from the world of intellectual routine, her first taste of life. All the pedantry of her daily toil slipped away like a cumbrous garment; she was clad only in her womanhood. Once or twice a shudder of strange self-consciousness went through her, and she felt guilty, immodest; but upon that sensation followed a surge of passionate joy, obliterating memory and forethought.

‘How shall I see you?’ Jasper asked at length. ‘Where can we meet?’

It was a difficulty. The season no longer allowed lingerings under the open sky, but Marian could not go to his lodgings, and it seemed impossible for him to visit her at her home.

‘Will your father persist in unfriendliness to me?’

She was only just beginning to reflect on all that was involved in this new relation.

‘I have no hope that he will change,’ she said sadly.

‘He will refuse to countenance your marriage?’

‘I shall disappoint him and grieve him bitterly. He has asked me to use my money in starting a new review.’

‘Which he is to edit?’

‘Yes. Do you think there would be any hope of its success?’

Jasper shook his head.

‘Your father is not the man for that, Marian. I don’t say it disrespectfully; I mean that he doesn’t seem to me to have that kind of aptitude. It would be a disastrous speculation.’

‘I felt that. Of course I can’t think of it now.’

She smiled, raising her face to his.

‘Don’t trouble,’ said Jasper. ‘Wait a little, till I have made myself independent of Fadge and a few other men, and your father shall see how heartily I wish to be of use to him. He will miss your help, I’m afraid?’

‘Yes. I shall feel it a cruelty when I have to leave him. He has only just told me that his sight is beginning to fail. Oh, why didn’t his brother leave him a little money? It was such unkindness! Surely he had a much better right than Amy, or than myself either. But literature has been a curse to father all his life. My uncle hated it, and I suppose that was why he left father nothing.’

‘But how am I to see you often? That’s the first question. I know what I shall do. I must take new lodgings, for the girls and myself, all in the same house. We must have two sitting-rooms; then you will come to my room without any difficulty. These astonishing proprieties are so easily satisfied after all.’

‘You will really do that?’

‘Yes. I shall go and look for rooms tomorrow. Then when you come you can always ask for Maud or Dora, you know. They will be very glad of a change to more respectable quarters.’

‘I won’t stay to see them now, Jasper,’ said Marian, her thoughts turning to the girls.

‘Very well. You are safe for another hour, but to make certain you shall go at a quarter to five. Your mother won’t be against us?’

‘Poor mother—no. But she won’t dare to justify me before father.’

‘I feel as if I should play a mean part in leaving it to you to tell your father. Marian, I will brave it out and go and see him.’

‘Oh, it would be better not to.’

‘Then I will write to him—such a letter as he can’t possibly take in ill part.’

Marian pondered this proposal.

‘You shall do that, Jasper, if you are willing. But not yet; presently.’

‘You don’t wish him to know at once?’

‘We had better wait a little. You know,’ she added laughing, ‘that my legacy is only in name mine as yet. The will hasn’t been proved. And then the money will have to be realised.’

She informed him of the details; Jasper listened with his eyes on the ground.

They were now sitting on chairs drawn close to each other. It was with a sense of relief that Jasper had passed from dithyrambs to conversation on practical points; Marian’s excited sensitiveness could not but observe this, and she kept watching the motions of his countenance. At length he even let go her hand.

‘You would prefer,’ he said reflectively, ‘that nothing should be said to your father until that business is finished?’

‘If you consent to it.’

‘Oh, I have no doubt it’s as well.’

Her little phrase of self-subjection, and its tremulous tone, called for another answer than this. Jasper fell again into thought, and clearly it was thought of practical things.

‘I think I must go now, Jasper,’ she said.

‘Must you? Well, if you had rather.’

He rose, though she was still seated. Marian moved a few steps away, but turned and approached him again.

‘Do you really love me?’ she asked, taking one of his hands and folding it between her own.

‘I do indeed love you, Marian. Are you still doubtful?’

‘You’re not sorry that I must go?’

‘But I am, dearest. I wish we could sit here undisturbed all through the evening.’

Her touch had the same effect as before. His blood warmed again, and he pressed her to his side, stroking her hair and kissing her forehead.

‘Are you sorry I wear my hair short?’ she asked, longing for more praise than he had bestowed on her.

‘Sorry? It is perfect. Everything else seems vulgar compared with this way of yours. How strange you would look with plaits and that kind of thing!’

‘I am so glad it pleases you.’

‘There is nothing in you that doesn’t please me, my thoughtful girl.’

‘You called me that before. Do I seem so very thoughtful?’

‘So grave, and sweetly reserved, and with eyes so full of meaning.’

She quivered with delight, her face hidden against his breast.

‘I seem to be new-born, Jasper. Everything in the world is new to me, and I am strange to myself. I have never known an hour of happiness till now, and I can’t believe yet that it has come to me.’

She at length attired herself, and they left the house together, of course not unobserved by the landlady. Jasper walked about half the way to St Paul’s Crescent. It was arranged that he should address a letter for her to the care of his sisters; but in a day or two the change of lodgings would be effected.

When they had parted, Marian looked back. But Jasper was walking quickly away, his head bent, in profound meditation.

CHAPTER XXV. A FRUITLESS MEETING

Refuge from despair is often found in the passion of self-pity and that spirit of obstinate resistance which it engenders. In certain natures the extreme of self-pity is intolerable, and leads to self-destruction; but there are less fortunate beings whom the vehemence of their revolt against fate strengthens to endure in suffering. These latter are rather imaginative than passionate; the stages of their woe impress them as the acts of a drama, which they cannot bring themselves to cut short, so various are the possibilities of its dark motive. The intellectual man who kills himself is most often brought to that decision by conviction of his insignificance; self-pity merges in self-scorn, and the humiliated soul is intolerant of existence. He who survives under like conditions does so because misery magnifies him in his own estimate.

It was by force of commiserating his own lot that Edwin Reardon continued to live through the first month after his parting from Amy. Once or twice a week, sometimes early in the evening, sometimes at midnight or later, he haunted the street at Westbourne Park where his wife was dwelling, and on each occasion he returned to his garret with a fortified sense of the injustice to which he was submitted, of revolt against the circumstances which had driven him into outer darkness, of bitterness against his wife for saving her own comfort rather than share his downfall. At times he was not far from that state of sheer distraction which Mrs Edmund Yule preferred to suppose that he had reached. An extraordinary arrogance now and then possessed him; he stood amid his poor surroundings with the sensations of an outraged exile, and laughed aloud in furious contempt of all who censured or pitied him.

On hearing from Jasper Milvain that Amy had fallen ill, or at all events was suffering in health from what she had gone through, he felt a momentary pang which all but determined him to hasten to her side. The reaction was a feeling of distinct pleasure that she had her share of pain, and even a hope that her illness might become grave; he pictured himself summoned to her sick chamber, imagined her begging his forgiveness. But it was not merely, nor in great part, a malicious satisfaction; he succeeded in believing that Amy suffered because she still had a remnant of love for him. As the days went by and he heard nothing, disappointment and resentment occupied him. At length he ceased to haunt the neighbourhood. His desires grew sullen; he became fixed in the resolve to hold entirely apart and doggedly await the issue.

At the end of each month he sent half the money he had received from Carter, simply enclosing postal orders in an envelope addressed to his wife. The first two remittances were in no way acknowledged; the third brought a short note from Amy:

‘As you continue to send these sums of money, I had perhaps better let you know that I cannot use them for any purposes of my own. Perhaps a sense of duty leads you to make this sacrifice, but I am afraid it is more likely that you wish to remind me every month that you are undergoing privations, and to pain me in this way. What you have sent I have deposited in the Post Office Savings’ Bank in Willie’s name, and I shall continue to do so.— A.R.’

For a day or two Reardon persevered in an intention of not replying, but the desire to utter his turbid feelings became in the end too strong. He wrote:

‘I regard it as quite natural that you should put the worst interpretation on whatever I do. As for my privations, I think very little of them; they are a trifle in comparison with the thought that I am forsaken just because my pocket is empty. And I am far indeed from thinking that you can be pained by whatever I may undergo; that would suppose some generosity in your nature.’

This was no sooner posted than he would gladly have recalled it. He knew that it was undignified, that it contained as many falsehoods as lines, and he was ashamed of himself for having written so. But he could not pen a letter of retractation, and there remained with him a new cause of exasperated wretchedness.

Excepting the people with whom he came in contact at the hospital, he had no society but that of Biffen. The realist visited him once a week, and this friendship grew closer than it had been in the time of Reardon’s prosperity. Biffen was a man of so much natural delicacy, that there was a pleasure in imparting to him the details of private sorrow; though profoundly sympathetic, he did his best to oppose Reardon’s harsher judgments of Amy, and herein he gave his friend a satisfaction which might not be avowed.

‘I really do not see,’ he exclaimed, as they sat in the garret one night of midsummer, ‘how your wife could have acted otherwise. Of course I am quite unable to judge the attitude of her mind, but I think, I can’t help thinking, from what I knew of her, that there has been strictly a misunderstanding between you.

It was a hard and miserable thing that she should have to leave you for a time, and you couldn’t face the necessity in a just spirit. Don’t you think there’s some truth in this way of looking at it?’

‘As a woman, it was her part to soften the hateful necessity; she made it worse.’

‘I’m not sure that you don’t demand too much of her. Unhappily, I know little or nothing of delicately-bred women, but I have a suspicion that one oughtn’t to expect heroism in them, any more than in the women of the lower classes. I think of women as creatures to be protected. Is a man justified in asking them to be stronger than himself?’

‘Of course,’ replied Reardon, ‘there’s no use in demanding more than a character is capable of. But I believed her of finer stuff. My bitterness comes of the disappointment.’

‘I suppose there were faults of temper on both sides, and you saw at last only each other’s weaknesses.’

‘I saw the truth, which had always been disguised from me.’ Biffen persisted in looking doubtful, and in secret Reardon thanked him for it.

As the realist progressed with his novel, ‘Mr Bailey, Grocer,’ he read the chapters to Reardon, not only for his own satisfaction, but in great part because he hoped that this example of productivity might in the end encourage the listener to resume his own literary tasks. Reardon found much to criticise in his friend’s work; it was noteworthy that he objected and condemned with much less hesitation than in his better days, for sensitive reticence is one of the virtues wont to be assailed by suffering, at all events in the weaker natures. Biffen purposely urged these discussions as far as possible, and doubtless they benefited Reardon for the time; but the defeated novelist could not be induced to undertake another practical illustration of his own views. Occasionally he had an impulse to plan a story, but an hour’s turning it over in his mind sufficed to disgust him. His ideas seemed barren, vapid; it would have been impossible for him to write half a dozen pages, and the mere thought of a whole book overcame him with the dread of insurmountable difficulties, immeasurable toil.

In time, however, he was able to read. He had a pleasure in contemplating the little collection of sterling books that alone remained to him from his library; the sight of many volumes would have been a weariness, but these few—when he was again able to think of books at all—were as friendly countenances. He could not read continuously, but sometimes he opened his Shakespeare, for instance, and dreamed over a page or two. From such glimpses there remained in his head a line or a short passage, which he kept repeating to himself wherever he went; generally some example of sweet or sonorous metre which had a soothing effect upon him.

With odd result on one occasion. He was walking in one of the back streets of Islington, and stopped idly to gaze into the window of some small shop. Standing thus, he forgot himself and presently recited aloud:

‘Caesar, ‘tis his schoolmaster: An argument that he is pluck’d, when hither He sends so poor a pinion of his wing, Which had superfluous kings for messengers Not many moons gone by.’

The last two lines he uttered a second time, enjoying their magnificent sound, and then was brought back to consciousness by the loud mocking laugh of two men standing close by, who evidently looked upon him as a strayed lunatic.

He kept one suit of clothes for his hours of attendance at the hospital; it was still decent, and with much care would remain so for a long time. That which he wore at home and in his street wanderings declared poverty at every point; it had been discarded before he left the old abode. In his present state of mind he cared nothing how disreputable he looked to passers-by. These seedy habiliments were the token of his degradation, and at times he regarded them (happening to see himself in a shop mirror) with pleasurable contempt. The same spirit often led him for a meal to the poorest of eating-houses, places where he rubbed elbows with ragged creatures who had somehow obtained the price of a cup of coffee and a slice of bread and butter. He liked to contrast himself with these comrades in misfortune. ‘This is the rate at which the world esteems me; I am worth no better provision than this.’ Or else, instead of emphasising the contrast, he defiantly took a place among the miserables of the nether world, and nursed hatred of all who were well-to-do.

One of these he desired to regard with gratitude, but found it difficult to support that feeling. Carter, the vivacious, though at first perfectly unembarrassed in his relations with the City Road clerk, gradually exhibited a change of demeanour. Reardon occasionally found the young man’s eye fixed upon him with a singular expression, and the secretary’s talk, though still as a rule genial, was wont to suffer curious interruptions, during which he seemed to be musing on something Reardon had said, or on some point of his behaviour. The explanation of this was that Carter had begun to think there might be a foundation for Mrs Yule’s hypothesis—that the novelist was not altogether in his sound senses. At first he scouted the idea, but as time went on it seemed to him that Reardon’s countenance certainly had a gaunt wildness which suggested disagreeable things. Especially did he remark this after his return from an August holiday in Norway. On coming for the first time to the City Road branch he sat down and began to favour Reardon with a lively description of how he had enjoyed himself abroad; it never occurred to him that such talk was not likely to inspirit the man who had passed his August between the garret and the hospital, but he observed before long that his listener was glancing hither and thither in rather a strange way.

‘You haven’t been ill since I saw you?’ he inquired.

‘Oh no!’

‘But you look as if you might have been. I say, we must manage for you to have a fortnight off, you know, this month.’

‘I have no wish for it,’ said Reardon. ‘I’ll imagine I have been to Norway. It has done me good to hear of your holiday.’

‘I’m glad of that; but it isn’t quite the same thing, you know, as having a run somewhere yourself.’

‘Oh, much better! To enjoy myself may be mere selfishness, but to enjoy another’s enjoyment is the purest satisfaction, good for body and soul. I am cultivating altruism.’

‘What’s that?’

‘A highly rarefied form of happiness. The curious thing about it is that it won’t grow unless you have just twice as much faith in it as is required for assent to the Athanasian Creed.’

‘Oh!’

Carter went away more than puzzled. He told his wife that evening that Reardon had been talking to him in the most extraordinary fashion—no understanding a word he said.

All this time he was on the look-out for employment that would be more suitable to his unfortunate clerk. Whether slightly demented or not, Reardon gave no sign of inability to discharge his duties; he was conscientious as ever, and might, unless he changed greatly, be relied upon in positions of more responsibility than his present one. And at length, early in October, there came to the secretary’s knowledge an opportunity with which he lost no time in acquainting Reardon. The latter repaired that evening to Clipstone Street, and climbed to Biffen’s chamber. He entered with a cheerful look, and exclaimed:

‘I have just invented a riddle; see if you can guess it. Why is a London lodging-house like the human body?’

Biffen looked with some concern at his friend, so unwonted was a sally of this kind.

‘Why is a London lodging-house—? Haven’t the least idea.’

‘Because the brains are always at the top. Not bad, I think, eh?’

‘Well, no; it’ll pass. Distinctly professional though. The general public would fail to see the point, I’m afraid. But what has come to you?’

‘Good tidings. Carter has offered me a place which will be a decided improvement. A house found—or rooms, at all events—and salary a hundred and fifty a year.

‘By Plutus! That’s good hearing. Some duties attached, I suppose?’

‘I’m afraid that was inevitable, as things go. It’s the secretaryship of a home for destitute boys at Croydon. The post is far from a sinecure, Carter assures me. There’s a great deal of purely secretarial work, and there’s a great deal of practical work, some of it rather rough, I fancy. It seems doubtful whether I am exactly the man. The present holder is a burly fellow over six feet high, delighting in gymnastics, and rather fond of a fight now and then when opportunity offers. But he is departing at Christmas—going somewhere as a missionary; and I can have the place if I choose.’

‘As I suppose you do?’

‘Yes. I shall try it, decidedly.’

Biffen waited a little, then asked:

‘I suppose your wife will go with you?’

‘There’s no saying.’

Reardon tried to answer indifferently, but it could be seen that he was agitated between hopes and fears.

‘You’ll ask her, at all events?’

‘Oh yes,’ was the half-absent reply.

‘But surely there can be no doubt that she’ll come. A hundred and fifty a year, without rent to pay. Why, that’s affluence!’

‘The rooms I might occupy are in the home itself. Amy won’t take very readily to a dwelling of that kind. And Croydon isn’t the most inviting locality.’

‘Close to delightful country.’

‘Yes, yes; but Amy doesn’t care about that.’

‘You misjudge her, Reardon. You are too harsh. I implore you not to lose the chance of setting all right again! If only you could be put into my position for a moment, and then be offered the companionship of such a wife as yours!’

Reardon listened with a face of lowering excitement.

‘I should be perfectly within my rights,’ he said sternly, ‘if I merely told her when I have taken the position, and let her ask me to take her back—if she wishes.’

‘You have changed a great deal this last year,’ replied Biffen, shaking his head, ‘a great deal. I hope to see you your old self again before long. I should have declared it impossible for you to become so rugged. Go and see your wife, there’s a good fellow.’

‘No; I shall write to her.’

‘Go and see her, I beg you! No good ever came of letter-writing between two people who have misunderstood each other. Go to Westbourne Park tomorrow. And be reasonable; be more than reasonable. The happiness of your life depends on what you do now. Be content to forget whatever wrong has been done you. To think that a man should need persuading to win back such a wife!’

In truth, there needed little persuasion. Perverseness, one of the forms or issues of self-pity, made him strive against his desire, and caused him to adopt a tone of acerbity in excess of what he felt; but already he had made up his mind to see Amy. Even if this excuse had not presented itself he must very soon have yielded to the longing for a sight of his wife’s face which day by day increased among all the conflicting passions of which he was the victim. A month or two ago, when the summer sunshine made his confinement to the streets a daily torture, he convinced himself that there remained in him no trace of his love for Amy; there were moments when he thought of her with repugnance, as a cold, selfish woman, who had feigned affection when it seemed her interest to do so, but brutally declared her true self when there was no longer anything to be hoped from him. That was the self-deception of misery. Love, even passion, was still alive in the depths of his being; the animation with which he sped to his friend as soon as a new hope had risen was the best proof of his feeling.

He went home and wrote to Amy.

‘I have a reason for wishing to see you. Will you have the kindness to appoint an hour on Sunday morning when I can speak with you in private? It must be understood that I shall see no one else.’

She would receive this by the first post tomorrow, Saturday, and doubtless would let him hear in reply some time in the afternoon. Impatience allowed him little sleep, and the next day was a long weariness of waiting. The evening he would have to spend at the hospital; if there came no reply before the time of his leaving home, he knew not how he should compel himself to the ordinary routine of work. Yet the hour came, and he had heard nothing. He was tempted to go at once to Westbourne Park, but reason prevailed with him. When he again entered the house, having walked at his utmost speed from the City Road, the letter lay waiting for him; it had been pushed beneath his door, and when he struck a match he found that one of his feet was upon the white envelope.

Amy wrote that she would be at home at eleven tomorrow morning. Not another word.

In all probability she knew of the offer that had been made to him; Mrs Carter would have told her. Was it of good or of ill omen that she wrote only these half-dozen words? Half through the night he plagued himself with suppositions, now thinking that her brevity promised a welcome, now that she wished to warn him against expecting anything but a cold, offended demeanour. At seven he was dressed; two hours and a half had to be killed before he could start on his walk westward. He would have wandered about the streets, but it rained.

He had made himself as decent as possible in appearance, but he must necessarily seem an odd Sunday visitor at a house such as Mrs Yule’s. His soft felt hat, never brushed for months, was a greyish green, and stained round the band with perspiration. His necktie was discoloured and worn. Coat and waistcoat might pass muster, but of the trousers the less said the better. One of his boots was patched, and both were all but heelless.

Very well; let her see him thus. Let her understand what it meant to live on twelve and sixpence a week.

Though it was cold and wet he could not put on his overcoat. Three years ago it had been a fairly good ulster; at present, the edges of the sleeves were frayed, two buttons were missing, and the original hue of the cloth was indeterminable.

At half-past nine he set out and struggled with his shabby umbrella against wind and rain. Down Pentonville Hill, up Euston Road, all along Marylebone Road, then north-westwards towards the point of his destination. It was a good six miles from the one house to the other, but he arrived before the appointed time, and had to stray about until the cessation of bell-clanging and the striking of clocks told him it was eleven. Then he presented himself at the familiar door.

On his asking for Mrs Reardon, he was at once admitted and led up to the drawing-room; the servant did not ask his name.

Then he waited for a minute or two, feeling himself a squalid wretch amid the dainty furniture. The door opened. Amy, in a simple but very becoming dress, approached to within a yard of him; after the first glance she had averted her eyes, and she did not offer to shake hands. He saw that his muddy and shapeless boots drew her attention.

‘Do you know why I have come?’ he asked.

He meant the tone to be conciliatory, but he could not command his voice, and it sounded rough, hostile.

‘I think so,’ Amy answered, seating herself gracefully. She would have spoken with less dignity but for that accent of his.

‘The Carters have told you?’

‘Yes; I have heard about it.’

There was no promise in her manner. She kept her face turned away, and Reardon saw its beautiful profile, hard and cold as though in marble.

‘It doesn’t interest you at all?’

‘I am glad to hear that a better prospect offers for you.’

He did not sit down, and was holding his rusty hat behind his back.

‘You speak as if it in no way concerned yourself. Is that what you wish me to understand?’

‘Won’t it be better if you tell me why you have come here? As you are resolved to find offence in whatever I say, I prefer to keep silence. Please to let me know why you have asked to see me.’

Reardon turned abruptly as if to leave her, but checked himself at a little distance.

Both had come to this meeting prepared for a renewal of amity, but in these first few moments each was so disagreeably impressed by the look and language of the other that a revulsion of feeling undid all the more hopeful effects of their long severance. On entering, Amy had meant to offer her hand, but the unexpected meanness of Reardon’s aspect shocked and restrained her. All but every woman would have experienced that shrinking from the livery of poverty. Amy had but to reflect, and she understood that her husband could in no wise help this shabbiness; when he parted from her his wardrobe was already in a long-suffering condition, and how was he to have purchased new garments since then? None the less such attire degraded him in her eyes; it symbolised the melancholy decline which he had suffered intellectually. On Reardon his wife’s elegance had the same repellent effect, though this would not have been the case but for the expression of her countenance. Had it been possible for them to remain together during the first five minutes without exchange of words, sympathies might have prevailed on both sides; the first speech uttered would most likely have harmonised with their gentler thoughts. But the mischief was done so speedily.

A man must indeed be graciously endowed if his personal appearance can defy the disadvantage of cheap modern clothing worn into shapelessness. Reardon had no such remarkable physique, and it was not wonderful that his wife felt ashamed of him. Strictly ashamed; he seemed to her a social inferior; the impression was so strong that it resisted all memory of his spiritual qualities. She might have anticipated this state of things, and have armed herself to encounter it, but somehow she had not done so. For more than five months she had been living among people who dressed well; the contrast was too suddenly forced upon her. She was especially susceptible in such matters, and had become none the less so under the demoralising influence of her misfortunes. True, she soon began to feel ashamed of her shame, but that could not annihilate the natural feeling and its results.

‘I don’t love him. I can’t love him.’ Thus she spoke to herself, with immutable decision. She had been doubtful till now, but all doubt was at an end. Had Reardon been practical man enough to procure by hook or by crook a decent suit of clothes for this interview, that ridiculous trifle might have made all the difference in what was to result.

He turned again, and spoke with the harshness of a man who feels that he is despised, and is determined to show an equal contempt.

‘I came to ask you what you propose to do in case I go to Croydon.’

‘I have no proposal to make whatever.’

‘That means, then, that you are content to go on living here?’

‘If I have no choice, I must make myself content.’

‘But you have a choice.’

‘None has yet been offered me.’

‘Then I offer it now,’ said Reardon, speaking less aggressively. ‘I shall have a dwelling rent free, and a hundred and fifty pounds a year—perhaps it would be more in keeping with my station if I say that I shall have something less than three pounds a week. You can either accept from me half this money, as up to now, or come and take your place again as my wife. Please to decide what you will do.’

‘I will let you know by letter in a few days.’

It seemed impossible to her to say she would return, yet a refusal to do so involved nothing less than separation for the rest of their lives. Postponement of decision was her only resource.

‘I must know at once,’ said Reardon.

‘I can’t answer at once.’

‘If you don’t, I shall understand you to mean that you refuse to come to me. You know the circumstances; there is no reason why you should consult with anyone else. You can answer me immediately if you will.’

‘I don’t wish to answer you immediately,’ Amy replied, paling slightly.

‘Then that decides it. When I leave you we are strangers to each other.’

Amy made a rapid study of his countenance. She had never entertained for a moment the supposition that his wits were unsettled, but none the less the constant recurrence of that idea in her mother’s talk had subtly influenced her against her husband. It had confirmed her in thinking that his behaviour was inexcusable. And now it seemed to her that anyone might be justified in holding him demented, so reckless was his utterance.

It was difficult to know him as the man who had loved her so devotedly, who was incapable of an unkind word or look.

‘If that is what you prefer,’ she said, ‘there must be a formal separation. I can’t trust my future to your caprice.’

‘You mean it must be put into the hands of a lawyer?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘That will be the best, no doubt.’

‘Very well; I will speak with my friends about it.’

‘Your friends!’ he exclaimed bitterly. ‘But for those friends of yours, this would never have happened. I wish you had been alone in the world and penniless.’

‘A kind wish, all things considered.’

‘Yes, it is a kind wish. Then your marriage with me would have been binding; you would have known that my lot was yours, and the knowledge would have helped your weakness. I begin to see how much right there is on the side of those people who would keep women in subjection. You have been allowed to act with independence, and the result is that you have ruined my life and debased your own. If I had been strong enough to treat you as a child, and bid you follow me wherever my own fortunes led, it would have been as much better for you as for me. I was weak, and I suffer as all weak people do.’

‘You think it was my duty to share such a home as you have at present?’

‘You know it was. And if the choice had lain between that and earning your own livelihood you would have thought that even such a poor home might be made tolerable. There were possibilities in you of better things than will ever come out now.’

There followed a silence. Amy sat with her eyes gloomily fixed on the carpet; Reardon looked about the room, but saw nothing. He had thrown his hat into a chair, and his fingers worked nervously together behind his back.

‘Will you tell me,’ he said at length, ‘how your position is regarded by these friends of yours? I don’t mean your mother and brother, but the people who come to this house.’

‘I have not asked such people for their opinion.’

‘Still, I suppose some sort of explanation has been necessary in your intercourse with them. How have you represented your relations with me?’

‘I can’t see that that concerns you.’

‘In a manner it does. Certainly it matters very little to me how I am thought of by people of this kind, but one doesn’t like to be reviled without cause. Have you allowed it to be supposed that I have made life with me intolerable for you?’

‘No, I have not. You insult me by asking the question, but as you don’t seem to understand feelings of that kind I may as well answer you simply.’

‘Then have you told them the truth? That I became so poor you couldn’t live with me?’

‘I have never said that in so many words, but no doubt it is understood. It must be known also that you refused to take the step which might have helped you out of your difficulties.’

‘What step?’

She reminded him of his intention to spend half a year in working at the seaside.

‘I had utterly forgotten it,’ he returned with a mocking laugh. ‘That shows how ridiculous such a thing would have been.’

‘You are doing no literary work at all?’ Amy asked.

‘Do you imagine that I have the peace of mind necessary for anything of that sort?’

This was in a changed voice. It reminded her so strongly of her husband before his disasters that she could not frame a reply.

‘Do you think I am able to occupy myself with the affairs of imaginary people?’

‘I didn’t necessarily mean fiction.’

‘That I can forget myself, then, in the study of literature?—I wonder whether you really think of me like that. How, in Heaven’s name, do you suppose I spend my leisure time?’

She made no answer.

‘Do you think I take this calamity as light-heartedly as you do, Amy?’

‘I am far from taking it light-heartedly.’

‘Yet you are in good health. I see no sign that you have suffered.’

She kept silence. Her suffering had been slight enough, and chiefly due to considerations of social propriety; but she would not avow this, and did not like to make admission of it to herself. Before her friends she frequently affected to conceal a profound sorrow; but so long as her child was left to her she was in no danger of falling a victim to sentimental troubles.

‘And certainly I can’t believe it,’ he continued, ‘now you declare your wish to be formally separated from me.’

‘I have declared no such wish.’

‘Indeed you have. If you can hesitate a moment about returning to me when difficulties are at an end, that tells me you would prefer final separation.’

‘I hesitate for this reason,’ Amy said after reflecting. ‘You are so very greatly changed from what you used to be, that I think it doubtful if I could live with you.’

‘Changed?—Yes, that is true, I am afraid. But how do you think this change will affect my behaviour to you?’

‘Remember how you have been speaking to me.’

‘And you think I should treat you brutally if you came into my power?’

‘Not brutally, in the ordinary sense of the word. But with faults of temper which I couldn’t bear. I have my own faults. I can’t behave as meekly as some women can.’

It was a small concession, but Reardon made much of it.

‘Did my faults of temper give you any trouble during the first year of our married life?’ he asked gently.

‘No,’ she admitted.

‘They began to afflict you when I was so hard driven by difficulties that I needed all your sympathy, all your forbearance. Did I receive much of either from you, Amy?’

‘I think you did—until you demanded impossible things of me.’

‘It was always in your power to rule me. What pained me worst, and hardened me against you, was that I saw you didn’t care to exert your influence. There was never a time when I could have resisted a word of yours spoken out of your love for me. But even then, I am afraid, you no longer loved me, and now—’

He broke off, and stood watching her face.

‘Have you any love for me left?’ burst from his lips, as if the words all but choked him in the utterance.

Amy tried to shape some evasive answer, but could say nothing.

‘Is there ever so small a hope that I might win some love from you again?’

‘If you wish me to come and live with you when you go to Croydon I will do so.’

‘But that is not answering me, Amy.’

‘It’s all I can say.’

‘Then you mean that you would sacrifice yourself out of—what? Out of pity for me, let us say.’

‘Do you wish to see Willie?’ asked Amy, instead of replying.

‘No. It is you I have come to see. The child is nothing to me, compared with you. It is you, who loved me, who became my wife— you only I care about. Tell me you will try to be as you used to be. Give me only that hope, Amy; I will ask nothing except that, now.’

‘I can’t say anything except that I will come to Croydon if you wish it.’

‘And reproach me always because you have to live in such a place, away from your friends, without a hope of the social success which was your dearest ambition?’

Her practical denial that she loved him wrung this taunt from his anguished heart. He repented the words as soon as they were spoken.

‘What is the good?’ exclaimed Amy in irritation, rising and moving away from him. ‘How can I pretend that I look forward to such a life with any hope?’

He stood in mute misery, inwardly cursing himself and his fate.

‘I have said I will come,’ she continued, her voice shaken with nervous tension. ‘Ask me or not, as you please, when you are ready to go there. I can’t talk about it.’

‘I shall not ask you,’ he replied. ‘I will have no woman slave dragging out a weary life with me. Either you are my willing wife, or you are nothing to me.’

‘I am married to you, and that can’t be undone. I repeat that I shan’t refuse to obey you. I shall say no more.’

She moved to a distance, and there seated herself, half turned from him.

‘I shall never ask you to come,’ said Reardon, breaking a short silence. ‘If our married life is ever to begin again it must be of your seeking. Come to me of your own will, and I shall never reject you. But I will die in utter loneliness rather than ask you again.’

He lingered a few moments, watching her; she did not move. Then he took his hat, went in silence from the room, and left the house.

It rained harder than before. As no trains were running at this hour, he walked in the direction where he would be likely to meet with an omnibus. But it was a long time before one passed which was any use to him. When he reached home he was in cheerless plight enough; to make things pleasanter, one of his boots had let in water abundantly.

‘The first sore throat of the season, no doubt,’ he muttered to himself.

Nor was he disappointed. By Tuesday the cold had firm grip of him. A day or two of influenza or sore throat always made him so weak that with difficulty he supported the least physical exertion; but at present he must go to his work at the hospital. Why stay at home? To what purpose spare himself? It was not as if life had any promise for him. He was a machine for earning so much money a week, and would at least give faithful work for his wages until the day of final breakdown.

But, midway in the week, Carter discovered how ill his clerk was.

‘You ought to be in bed, my dear fellow, with gruel and mustard plasters and all the rest of it. Go home and take care of yourself—I insist upon it.’

Before leaving the office, Reardon wrote a few lines to Biffen, whom he had visited on the Monday. ‘Come and see me if you can. I am down with a bad cold, and have to keep in for the rest of the week. All the same, I feel far more cheerful. Bring a new chapter of your exhilarating romance.’

CHAPTER XXVI. MARRIED WOMAN’S PROPERTY

On her return from church that Sunday Mrs Edmund Yule was anxious to learn the result of the meeting between Amy and her husband. She hoped fervently that Amy’s anomalous position would come to an end now that Reardon had the offer of something better than a mere clerkship. John Yule never ceased to grumble at his sister’s permanence in the house, especially since he had learnt that the money sent by Reardon each month was not made use of; why it should not be applied for household expenses passed his understanding.

‘It seems to me,’ he remarked several times, ‘that the fellow only does his bare duty in sending it. What is it to anyone else whether he lives on twelve shillings a week or twelve pence? It is his business to support his wife; if he can’t do that, to contribute as much to her support as possible. Amy’s scruples are all very fine, if she could afford them; it’s very nice to pay for your delicacies of feeling out of other people’s pockets.’

‘There’ll have to be a formal separation,’ was the startling announcement with which Amy answered her mother’s inquiry as to what had passed.

‘A separation? But, my dear—!’

Mrs Yule could not express her disappointment and dismay.

‘We couldn’t live together; it’s no use trying.’

‘But at your age, Amy! How can you think of anything so shocking? And then, you know it will be impossible for him to make you a sufficient allowance.’

‘I shall have to live as well as I can on the seventy-five pounds a year. If you can’t afford to let me stay with you for that, I must go into cheap lodgings in the country, like poor Mrs Butcher did.’

This was wild talking for Amy. The interview had upset her, and for the rest of the day she kept apart in her own room. On the morrow Mrs Yule succeeded in eliciting a clear account of the conversation which had ended so hopelessly.

‘I would rather spend the rest of my days in the workhouse than beg him to take me back,’ was Amy’s final comment, uttered with the earnestness which her mother understood but too well.

‘But you are willing to go back, dear?’

‘I told him so.’

‘Then you must leave this to me. The Carters will let us know how things go on, and when it seems to be time I must see Edwin myself.’

‘I can’t allow that. Anything you could say on your own account would be useless, and there is nothing to say from me.’

Mrs Yule kept her own counsel. She had a full month before her during which to consider the situation, but it was clear to her that these young people must be brought together again. Her estimate of Reardon’s mental condition had undergone a sudden change from the moment when she heard that a respectable post was within his reach; she decided that he was ‘strange,’ but then all men of literary talent had marked singularities, and doubtless she had been too hasty in interpreting the peculiar features natural to a character such as his.

A few days later arrived the news of their relative’s death at Wattleborough.

This threw Mrs Yule into a commotion. At first she decided to accompany her son and be present at the funeral; after changing her mind twenty times, she determined not to go. John must send or bring back the news as soon as possible. That it would be of a nature sensibly to affect her own position, if not that of her children, she had little doubt; her husband had been the favourite brother of the deceased, and on that account there was no saying how handsome a legacy she might receive. She dreamt of houses in South Kensington, of social ambitions gratified even thus late.

On the morning after the funeral came a postcard announcing John’s return by a certain train, but no scrap of news was added.

‘Just like that irritating boy! We must go to the station to meet him. You’ll come, won’t you, Amy?’

Amy readily consented, for she too had hopes, though circumstances blurred them. Mother and daughter were walking about the platform half an hour before the train was due; their agitation would have been manifest to anyone observing them. When at length the train rolled in and John was discovered, they pressed eagerly upon him.

‘Don’t you excite yourself,’ he said gruffly to his mother. ‘There’s no reason whatever.’

Mrs Yule glanced in dismay at Amy. They followed John to a cab, and took places with him.

‘Now don’t be provoking, Jack. Just tell us at once.’

‘By all means. You haven’t a penny.’

‘I haven’t? You are joking, ridiculous boy!’

‘Never felt less disposed to, I assure you.’

After staring out of the window for a minute or two, he at length informed Amy of the extent to which she profited by her uncle’s decease, then made known what was bequeathed to himself. His temper grew worse every moment, and he replied savagely to each successive question concerning the other items of the will.

‘What have you to grumble about?’ asked Amy, whose face was exultant notwithstanding the drawbacks attaching to her good fortune. ‘If Uncle Alfred receives nothing at all, and mother has nothing, you ought to think yourself very lucky.’

‘It’s very easy for you to say that, with your ten thousand.’

‘But is it her own?’ asked Mrs Yule. ‘Is it for her separate use?’

‘Of course it is. She gets the benefit of last year’s Married Woman’s Property Act. The will was executed in January this year, and I dare say the old curmudgeon destroyed a former one.

‘What a splendid Act of Parliament that is!’ cried Amy. ‘The only one worth anything that I ever heard of.’

‘But my dear—’ began her mother, in a tone of protest. However, she reserved her comment for a more fitting time and place, and merely said: ‘I wonder whether he had heard what has been going on?’

‘Do you think he would have altered his will if he had?’ asked Amy with a smile of security.

‘Why the deuce he should have left you so much in any case is more than I can understand,’ growled her brother. ‘What’s the use to me of a paltry thousand or two? It isn’t enough to invest; isn’t enough to do anything with.’

‘You may depend upon it your cousin Marian thinks her five thousand good for something,’ said Mrs Yule. ‘Who was at the funeral? Don’t be so surly, Jack; tell us all about it. I’m sure if anyone has cause to be ill-tempered it’s poor me.’

Thus they talked, amid the rattle of the cab-wheels. By when they reached home silence had fallen upon them, and each one was sufficiently occupied with private thoughts.

Mrs Yule’s servants had a terrible time of it for the next few days. Too affectionate to turn her ill-temper against John and Amy, she relieved herself by severity to the domestic slaves, as an English matron is of course justified in doing. Her daughter’s position caused her even more concern than before; she constantly lamented to herself: ‘Oh, why didn’t he die before she was married!’—in which case Amy would never have dreamt of wedding a penniless author. Amy declined to discuss the new aspect of things until twenty-four hours after John’s return; then she said:

‘I shall do nothing whatever until the money is paid to me. And what I shall do then I don’t know.’

‘You are sure to hear from Edwin,’ opined Mrs Yule.

‘I think not. He isn’t the kind of man to behave in that way.’

‘Then I suppose you are bound to take the first step?’

‘That I shall never do.’

She said so, but the sudden happiness of finding herself wealthy was not without its softening effect on Amy’s feelings. Generous impulses alternated with moods of discontent. The thought of her husband in his squalid lodgings tempted her to forget injuries and disillusions, and to play the part of a generous wife. It would be possible now for them to go abroad and spend a year or two in healthful travel; the result in Reardon’s case might be wonderful. He might recover all the energy of his imagination, and resume his literary career from the point he had reached at the time of his marriage.

On the other hand, was it not more likely that he would lapse into a life of scholarly self-indulgence, such as he had often told her was his ideal? In that event, what tedium and regret lay before her! Ten thousand pounds sounded well, but what did it represent in reality? A poor four hundred a year, perhaps; mere decency of obscure existence, unless her husband could glorify it by winning fame. If he did nothing, she would be the wife of a man who had failed in literature. She would not be able to take a place in society. Life would be supported without struggle; nothing more to be hoped.

This view of the future possessed her strongly when, on the second day, she went to communicate her news to Mrs Carter. This amiable lady had now become what she always desired to be, Amy’s intimate friend; they saw each other very frequently, and conversed of most things with much frankness. It was between eleven and twelve in the morning when Amy paid her visit, and she found Mrs Carter on the point of going out.

‘I was coming to see you,’ cried Edith. ‘Why haven’t you let me know of what has happened?’

‘You have heard, I suppose?’

‘Albert heard from your brother.’

‘I supposed he would. And I haven’t felt in the mood for talking about it, even with you.’

They went into Mrs Carter’s boudoir, a tiny room full of such pretty things as can be purchased nowadays by anyone who has a few shillings to spare, and tolerable taste either of their own or at second-hand. Had she been left to her instincts, Edith would have surrounded herself with objects representing a much earlier stage of artistic development; but she was quick to imitate what fashion declared becoming. Her husband regarded her as a remarkable authority in all matters of personal or domestic ornamentation.

‘And what are you going to do?’ she inquired, examining Amy from head to foot, as if she thought that the inheritance of so substantial a sum must have produced visible changes in her friend.

‘I am going to do nothing.’

‘But surely you’re not in low spirits?’

‘What have I to rejoice about?’

They talked for a while before Amy brought herself to utter what she was thinking.

‘Isn’t it a most ridiculous thing that married people who both wish to separate can’t do so and be quite free again?’

‘I suppose it would lead to all sorts of troubles—don’t you think?’

‘So people say about every new step in civilisation. What would have been thought twenty years ago of a proposal to make all married women independent of their husbands in money matters? All sorts of absurd dangers were foreseen, no doubt. And it’s the same now about divorce. In America people can get divorced if they don’t suit each other—at all events in some of the States— and does any harm come of it? Just the opposite I should think.’

Edith mused. Such speculations were daring, but she had grown accustomed to think of Amy as an ‘advanced’ woman, and liked to imitate her in this respect.

‘It does seem reasonable,’ she murmured.

‘The law ought to encourage such separations, instead of forbidding them,’ Amy pursued. ‘If a husband and wife find that they have made a mistake, what useless cruelty it is to condemn them to suffer the consequences for the whole of their lives!’

‘I suppose it’s to make people careful,’ said Edith, with a laugh.

‘If so, we know that it has always failed, and always will fail; so the sooner such a profitless law is altered the better. Isn’t there some society for getting that kind of reform? I would subscribe fifty pounds a year to help it. Wouldn’t you?’

‘Yes, if I had it to spare,’ replied the other.

Then they both laughed, but Edith the more naturally.

‘Not on my own account, you know,’ she added.

‘It’s because women who are happily married can’t and won’t understand the position of those who are not that there’s so much difficulty in reforming marriage laws.’

‘But I understand you, Amy, and I grieve about you. What you are to do I can’t think.’

‘Oh, it’s easy to see what I shall do. Of course I have no choice really. And I ought to have a choice; that’s the hardship and the wrong of it. Perhaps if I had, I should find a sort of pleasure in sacrificing myself.’

There were some new novels on the table; Amy took up a volume presently, and glanced over a page or two.

‘I don’t know how you can go on reading that sort of stuff, book after book,’ she exclaimed.

‘Oh, but people say this last novel of Markland’s is one of his best.’

‘Best or worst, novels are all the same. Nothing but love, love, love; what silly nonsense it is! Why don’t people write about the really important things of life? Some of the French novelists do; several of Balzac’s, for instance. I have just been reading his “Cousin Pons,” a terrible book, but I enjoyed it ever so much because it was nothing like a love story. What rubbish is printed about love!’

‘I get rather tired of it sometimes,’ admitted Edith with amusement.

‘I should hope you do, indeed. What downright lies are accepted as indisputable! That about love being a woman’s whole life; who believes it really? Love is the most insignificant thing in most women’s lives. It occupies a few months, possibly a year or two, and even then I doubt if it is often the first consideration.’

Edith held her head aside, and pondered smilingly.

‘I’m sure there’s a great opportunity for some clever novelist who will never write about love at all.’

‘But then it does come into life.’

‘Yes, for a month or two, as I say. Think of the biographies of men and women; how many pages are devoted to their love affairs? Compare those books with novels which profess to be biographies, and you see how false such pictures are. Think of the very words “novel,” “romance”—what do they mean but exaggeration of one bit of life?’

‘That may be true. But why do people find the subject so interesting?’

‘Because there is so little love in real life. That’s the truth of it. Why do poor people care only for stories about the rich? The same principle.’

‘How clever you are, Amy!’

‘Am I? It’s very nice to be told so. Perhaps I have some cleverness of a kind; but what use is it to me? My life is being wasted. I ought to have a place in the society of clever people. I was never meant to live quietly in the background. Oh, if I hadn’t been in such a hurry, and so inexperienced!’

‘Oh, I wanted to ask you,’ said Edith, soon after this. ‘Do you wish Albert to say anything about you—at the hospital?’

‘There’s no reason why he shouldn’t.’

‘You won’t even write to say—?’

‘I shall do nothing.’

Since the parting from her husband, there had proceeded in Amy a noticeable maturing of intellect. Probably the one thing was a consequence of the other. During that last year in the flat her mind was held captive by material cares, and this arrest of her natural development doubtless had much to do with the appearance of acerbity in a character which had displayed so much sweetness, so much womanly grace. Moreover, it was arrest at a critical point. When she fell in love with Edwin Reardon her mind had still to undergo the culture of circumstances; though a woman in years she had seen nothing of life but a few phases of artificial society, and her education had not progressed beyond the final schoolgirl stage. Submitting herself to Reardon’s influence, she passed through what was a highly useful training of the intellect; but with the result that she became clearly conscious of the divergence between herself and her husband. In endeavouring to imbue her with his own literary tastes, Reardon instructed Amy as to the natural tendencies of her mind, which till then she had not clearly understood. When she ceased to read with the eyes of passion, most of the things which were Reardon’s supreme interests lost their value for her. A sound intelligence enabled her to think and feel in many directions, but the special line of her growth lay apart from that in which the novelist and classical scholar had directed her.

When she found herself alone and independent, her mind acted like a spring when pressure is removed. After a few weeks of desoeuvrement she obeyed the impulse to occupy herself with a kind of reading alien to Reardon’s sympathies. The solid periodicals attracted her, and especially those articles which dealt with themes of social science. Anything that savoured of newness and boldness in philosophic thought had a charm for her palate. She read a good deal of that kind of literature which may be defined as specialism popularised; writing which addresses itself to educated, but not strictly studious, persons, and which forms the reservoir of conversation for society above the sphere of turf and west-endism. Thus, for instance, though she could not undertake the volumes of Herbert Spencer, she was intelligently acquainted with the tenor of their contents; and though she had never opened one of Darwin’s books, her knowledge of his main theories and illustrations was respectable. She was becoming a typical woman of the new time, the woman who has developed concurrently with journalistic enterprise.

Not many days after that conversation with Edith Carter, she had occasion to visit Mudie’s, for the new number of some periodical which contained an appetising title. As it was a sunny and warm day she walked to New Oxford Street from the nearest Metropolitan station. Whilst waiting at the library counter, she heard a familiar voice in her proximity; it was that of Jasper Milvain, who stood talking with a middle-aged lady. As Amy turned to look at him his eye met hers; clearly he had been aware of her. The review she desired was handed to her; she moved aside, and turned over the pages. Then Milvain walked up.

He was armed cap-a-pie in the fashions of suave society; no Bohemianism of garb or person, for Jasper knew he could not afford that kind of economy. On her part, Amy was much better dressed than usual, a costume suited to her position of bereaved heiress.

‘What a time since we met!’ said Jasper, taking her delicately gloved hand and looking into her face with his most effective smile.

‘And why?’ asked Amy.

‘Indeed, I hardly know. I hope Mrs Yule is well?’

‘Quite, thank you.’

It seemed as if he would draw back to let her pass, and so make an end of the colloquy. But Amy, though she moved forward, added a remark:

‘I don’t see your name in any of this month’s magazines.’

‘I have nothing signed this month. A short review in The Current, that’s all.’

‘But I suppose you write as much as ever?’

‘Yes; but chiefly in weekly papers just now. You don’t see the Will-o’-the-Wisp?’

‘Oh yes. And I think I can generally recognise your hand.’

They issued from the library.

‘Which way are you going?’ Jasper inquired, with something more of the old freedom.

‘I walked from Gower Street station, and I think, as it’s so fine, I shall walk back again.’

He accompanied her. They turned up Museum Street, and Amy, after a short silence, made inquiry concerning his sisters.

‘I am sorry I saw them only once, but no doubt you thought it better to let the acquaintance end there.’

‘I really didn’t think of it in that way at all,’ Jasper replied.’We naturally understood it so, when you even ceased to call, yourself.’

‘But don’t you feel that there would have been a good deal of awkwardness in my coming to Mrs Yule’s?’

‘Seeing that you looked at things from my husband’s point of view?’

‘Oh, that’s a mistake! I have only seen your husband once since he went to Islington.’

Amy gave him a look of surprise.

‘You are not on friendly terms with him?’

‘Well, we have drifted apart. For some reason he seemed to think that my companionship was not very profitable. So it was better, on the whole, that I should see neither you nor him.’

Amy was wondering whether he had heard of her legacy. He might have been informed by a Wattleborough correspondent, even if no one in London had told him.

‘Do your sisters keep up their friendship with my cousin Marian?’ she asked, quitting the previous difficult topic.

‘Oh yes!’ He smiled. ‘They see a great deal of each other.’

‘Then of course you have heard of my uncle’s death?’

‘Yes. I hope all your difficulties are now at an end.’

Amy delayed a moment, then said: ‘I hope so,’ without any emphasis.

‘Do you think of spending this winter abroad?’

It was the nearest he could come to a question concerning the future of Amy and her husband.

‘Everything is still quite uncertain. But tell me something about our old acquaintances. How does Mr Biffen get on?’

‘I scarcely ever see him, but I think he pegs away at an interminable novel, which no one will publish when it’s done. Whelpdale I meet occasionally.’

He talked of the latter’s projects and achievements in a lively strain.

‘Your own prospects continue to brighten, no doubt,’ said Amy.

‘I really think they do. Things go fairly well. And I have lately received a promise of very valuable help.’

‘From whom?’

‘A relative of yours.’

Amy turned to interrogate him with a look.

‘A relative? You mean—?’

‘Yes; Marian.’

They were passing Bedford Square. Amy glanced at the trees, now almost bare of foliage; then her eyes met Jasper’s, and she smiled significantly.

‘I should have thought your aim would have been far more ambitious,’ she said, with distinct utterance.

‘Marian and I have been engaged for some time—practically.’

‘Indeed? I remember now how you once spoke of her. And you will be married soon?’

‘Probably before the end of the year. I see that you are criticising my motives. I am quite prepared for that in everyone who knows me and the circumstances. But you must remember that I couldn’t foresee anything of this kind. It enables us to marry sooner, that’s all.’

‘I am sure your motives are unassailable,’ replied Amy, still with a smile. ‘I imagined that you wouldn’t marry for years, and then some distinguished person. This throws new light upon your character.’

‘You thought me so desperately scheming and cold-blooded?’

‘Oh dear no! But—well, to be sure, I can’t say that I know Marian. I haven’t seen her for years and years. She may be admirably suited to you.’

‘Depend upon it, I think so.’

‘She’s likely to shine in society? She is a brilliant girl, full of tact and insight?’

‘Scarcely all that, perhaps.’

He looked dubiously at his companion.

‘Then you have abandoned your old ambitions?’ Amy pursued.

‘Not a bit of it. I am on the way to achieve them.’

‘And Marian is the ideal wife to assist you?’

‘From one point of view, yes. Pray, why all this ironic questioning?’

‘Not ironic at all.’

‘It sounded very much like it, and I know from of old that you have a tendency that way.’

‘The news surprised me a little, I confess. But I see that I am in danger of offending you.’

‘Let us wait another five years, and then I will ask your opinion as to the success of my marriage. I don’t take a step of this kind without maturely considering it. Have I made many blunders as yet?’

‘As yet, not that I know of.’

‘Do I impress you as one likely to commit follies?’

‘I had rather wait a little before answering that.’

‘That is to say, you prefer to prophesy after the event. Very well, we shall see.’

In the length of Gower Street they talked of several other things less personal. By degrees the tone of their conversation had become what it was used to be, now and then almost confidential.

‘You are still at the same lodgings?’ asked Amy, as they drew near to the railway station.

‘I moved yesterday, so that the girls and I could be under the same roof—until the next change.’

‘You will let us know when that takes place?’

He promised, and with exchange of smiles which were something like a challenge they took leave of each other.

CHAPTER XXVII. THE LONELY MAN

A touch of congestion in the right lung was a warning to Reardon that his half-year of insufficient food and general waste of strength would make the coming winter a hard time for him, worse probably than the last. Biffen, responding in person to the summons, found him in bed, waited upon by a gaunt, dry, sententious woman of sixty—not the landlady, but a lodger who was glad to earn one meal a day by any means that offered.

‘It wouldn’t be very nice to die here, would it?’ said the sufferer, with a laugh which was cut short by a cough. ‘One would like a comfortable room, at least. Why, I don’t know. I dreamt last night that I was in a ship that had struck something and was going down; and it wasn’t the thought of death that most disturbed me, but a horror of being plunged in the icy water. In fact, I have had just the same feeling on shipboard. I remember waking up midway between Corfu and Brindisi, on that shaky tub of a Greek boat; we were rolling a good deal, and I heard a sort of alarmed rush and shouting up on deck. It was so warm and comfortable in the berth, and I thought with intolerable horror of the possibility of sousing into the black depths.’

‘Don’t talk, my boy,’ advised Biffen. ‘Let me read you the new chapter of “Mr Bailey.” It may induce a refreshing slumber.’

Reardon was away from his duties for a week; he returned to them with a feeling of extreme shakiness, an indisposition to exert himself, and a complete disregard of the course that events were taking. It was fortunate that he had kept aside that small store of money designed for emergencies; he was able to draw on it now to pay his doctor, and provide himself with better nourishment than usual. He purchased new boots, too, and some articles of warm clothing of which he stood in need—an alarming outlay.

A change had come over him; he was no longer rendered miserable by thoughts of Amy—seldom, indeed, turned his mind to her at all. His secretaryship at Croydon was a haven within view; the income of seventy-five pounds (the other half to go to his wife) would support him luxuriously, and for anything beyond that he seemed to care little. Next Sunday he was to go over to Croydon and see the institution.

One evening of calm weather he made his way to Clipstone Street and greeted his friend with more show of light-heartedness than he had been capable of for at least two years.

‘I have been as nearly as possible a happy man all to-day,’ he said, when his pipe was well lit. ‘Partly the sunshine, I suppose. There’s no saying if the mood will last, but if it does all is well with me. I regret nothing and wish for nothing.’

‘A morbid state of mind,’ was Biffen’s opinion.

‘No doubt of that, but I am content to be indebted to morbidness. One must have a rest from misery somehow. Another kind of man would have taken to drinking; that has tempted me now and then, I assure you. But I couldn’t afford it. Did you ever feel tempted to drink merely for the sake of forgetting trouble?’

‘Often enough. I have done it. I have deliberately spent a certain proportion of the money that ought to have gone for food in the cheapest kind of strong liquor.’

‘Ha! that’s interesting. But it never got the force of a habit you had to break?’

‘No. Partly, I dare say, because I had the warning of poor Sykes before my eyes.’

‘You never see that poor fellow?’

‘Never. He must be dead, I think. He would die either in the hospital or the workhouse.’

‘Well,’ said Reardon, musing cheerfully, ‘I shall never become a drunkard; I haven’t that diathesis, to use your expression. Doesn’t it strike you that you and I are very respectable persons? We really have no vices. Put us on a social pedestal, and we should be shining lights of morality. I sometimes wonder at our inoffensiveness. Why don’t we run amuck against law and order? Why, at the least, don’t we become savage revolutionists, and harangue in Regent’s Park of a Sunday?’

‘Because we are passive beings, and were meant to enjoy life very quietly. As we can’t enjoy, we just suffer quietly, that’s all. By-the-bye, I want to talk about a difficulty in one of the Fragments of Euripides. Did you ever go through the Fragments?’

This made a diversion for half an hour. Then Reardon returned to his former line of thought.

‘As I was entering patients yesterday, there came up to the table a tall, good-looking, very quiet girl, poorly dressed, but as neat as could be. She gave me her name, then I asked “Occupation?” She said at once, “I’m unfortunate, sir.” I couldn’t help looking up at her in surprise; I had taken it for granted she was a dressmaker or something of the kind. And, do you know, I never felt so strong an impulse to shake hands, to show sympathy, and even respect, in some way. I should have liked to say, “Why, I am unfortunate, too!” such a good, patient face she had.’

‘I distrust such appearances,’ said Biffen in his quality of realist.

‘Well, so do I, as a rule. But in this case they were convincing. And there was no need whatever for her to make such a declaration; she might just as well have said anything else; it’s the merest form. I shall always hear her voice saying, “I’m unfortunate, sir.” She made me feel what a mistake it was for me to marry such a girl as Amy. I ought to have looked about for some simple, kind-hearted work-girl; that was the kind of wife indicated for me by circumstances. If I had earned a hundred a year she would have thought we were well-to-do. I should have been an authority to her on everything under the sun—and above it. No ambition would have unsettled her. We should have lived in a couple of poor rooms somewhere, and—we should have loved each other.’

‘What a shameless idealist you are!’ said Biffen, shaking his head. ‘Let me sketch the true issue of such a marriage. To begin with, the girl would have married you in firm persuasion that you were a “gentleman” in temporary difficulties, and that before long you would have plenty of money to dispose of. Disappointed in this hope, she would have grown sharp-tempered, querulous, selfish. All your endeavours to make her understand you would only have resulted in widening the impassable gulf. She would have misconstrued your every sentence, found food for suspicion in every harmless joke, tormented you with the vulgarest forms of jealousy. The effect upon your nature would have been degrading. In the end, you must have abandoned every effort to raise her to your own level, and either have sunk to hers or made a rupture. Who doesn’t know the story of such attempts? I myself ten years ago, was on the point of committing such a folly, but, Heaven be praised! an accident saved me.’

‘You never told me that story.’

‘And don’t care to now. I prefer to forget it.’

‘Well, you can judge for yourself but not for me. Of course I might have chosen the wrong girl, but I am supposing that I had been fortunate. In any case there would have been a much better chance than in the marriage that I made.’

‘Your marriage was sensible enough, and a few years hence you will be a happy man again.’

‘You seriously think Amy will come back to me?’

‘Of course I do.’

‘Upon my word, I don’t know that I desire it.’

‘Because you are in a strangely unhealthy state.’

‘I rather think I regard the matter more sanely than ever yet. I am quite free from sexual bias. I can see that Amy was not my fit intellectual companion, and all emotion at the thought of her has gone from me. The word “love” is a weariness to me. If only our idiotic laws permitted us to break the legal bond, how glad both of us would be!’

‘You are depressed and anaemic. Get yourself in flesh, and view things like a man of this world.’

‘But don’t you think it the best thing that can happen to a man if he outgrows passion?’

‘In certain circumstances, no doubt.’

‘In all and any. The best moments of life are those when we contemplate beauty in the purely artistic spirit—objectively. I have had such moments in Greece and Italy; times when I was a free spirit, utterly remote from the temptations and harassings of sexual emotion. What we call love is mere turmoil. Who wouldn’t release himself from it for ever, if the possibility offered?’

‘Oh, there’s a good deal to be said for that, of course.’

Reardon’s face was illumined with the glow of an exquisite memory.

‘Haven’t I told you,’ he said, ‘of that marvellous sunset at Athens? I was on the Pnyx; had been rambling about there the whole afternoon. For I dare say a couple of hours I had noticed a growing rift of light in the clouds to the west; it looked as if the dull day might have a rich ending. That rift grew broader and brighter—the only bit of light in the sky. On Parnes there were white strips of ragged mist, hanging very low; the same on Hymettus, and even the peak of Lycabettus was just hidden. Of a sudden, the sun’s rays broke out. They showed themselves first in a strangely beautiful way, striking from behind the seaward hills through the pass that leads to Eleusis, and so gleaming on the nearer slopes of Aigaleos, making the clefts black and the rounded parts of the mountain wonderfully brilliant with golden colour. All the rest of the landscape, remember, was untouched with a ray of light. This lasted only a minute or two, then the sun itself sank into the open patch of sky and shot glory in every direction; broadening beams smote upwards over the dark clouds, and made them a lurid yellow. To the left of the sun, the gulf of Aegina was all golden mist, the islands floating in it vaguely. To the right, over black Salamis, lay delicate strips of pale blue—indescribably pale and delicate.’

‘You remember it very clearly.’

‘As if I saw it now! But wait. I turned eastward, and there to my astonishment was a magnificent rainbow, a perfect semicircle, stretching from the foot of Parnes to that of Hymettus, framing Athens and its hills, which grew brighter and brighter—the brightness for which there is no name among colours. Hymettus was of a soft misty warmth, a something tending to purple, its ridges marked by exquisitely soft and indefinite shadows, the rainbow coming right down in front. The Acropolis simply glowed and blazed. As the sun descended all these colours grew richer and warmer; for a moment the landscape was nearly crimson. Then suddenly the sun passed into the lower stratum of cloud, and the splendour died almost at once, except that there remained the northern half of the rainbow, which had become double. In the west, the clouds were still glorious for a time; there were two shaped like great expanded wings, edged with refulgence.’

‘Stop!’ cried Biffen, ‘or I shall clutch you by the throat. I warned you before that I can’t stand those reminiscences.’

‘Live in hope. Scrape together twenty pounds, and go there, if you die of hunger afterwards.’

‘I shall never have twenty shillings,’ was the despondent answer.

‘I feel sure you will sell “Mr Bailey.”’

‘It’s kind of you to encourage me; but if “Mr Bailey” is ever sold I don’t mind undertaking to eat my duplicate of the proofs.’

‘But now, you remember what led me to that. What does a man care for any woman on earth when he is absorbed in contemplation of that kind?’

‘But it is only one of life’s satisfactions.’

‘I am only maintaining that it is the best, and infinitely preferable to sexual emotion. It leaves, no doubt, no bitterness of any kind. Poverty can’t rob me of those memories. I have lived in an ideal world that was not deceitful, a world which seems to me, when I recall it, beyond the human sphere, bathed in diviner light.’

It was four or five days after this that Reardon, on going to his work in City Road, found a note from Carter. It requested him to call at the main hospital at half-past eleven the next morning. He supposed the appointment had something to do with his business at Croydon, whither he had been in the mean time. Some unfavourable news, perhaps; any misfortune was likely.

He answered the summons punctually, and on entering the general office was requested by the clerk to wait in Mr Carter’s private room; the secretary had not yet arrived. His waiting lasted some ten minutes, then the door opened and admitted, not Carter, but Mrs Edmund Yule.

Reardon stood up in perturbation. He was anything but prepared, or disposed, for an interview with this lady. She came towards him with hand extended and a countenance of suave friendliness.

‘I doubted whether you would see me if I let you know,’ she said. ‘Forgive me this little bit of scheming, will you? I have something so very important to speak to you about.’

He said nothing, but kept a demeanour of courtesy.

‘I think you haven’t heard from Amy?’ Mrs Yule asked.

‘Not since I saw her.’

‘And you don’t know what has come to pass?’

‘I have heard of nothing.’

‘I am come to see you quite on my own responsibility, quite. I took Mr Carter into my confidence, but begged him not to let Mrs Carter know, lest she should tell Amy; I think he will keep his promise. It seemed to me that it was really my duty to do whatever I could in these sad, sad circumstances.’

Reardon listened respectfully, but without sign of feeling.

‘I had better tell you at once that Amy’s uncle at Wattleborough is dead, and that in his will he has bequeathed her ten thousand pounds.’

Mrs Yule watched the effect of this. For a moment none was visible, but she saw at length that Reardon’s lips trembled and his eyebrows twitched.

‘I am glad to hear of her good fortune,’ he said distantly and in even tones.

‘You will feel, I am sure,’ continued his mother-in-law, ‘that this must put an end to your most unhappy differences.’

‘How can it have that result?’

‘It puts you both in a very different position, does it not? But for your distressing circumstances, I am sure there would never have been such unpleasantness—never. Neither you nor Amy is the kind of person to take a pleasure in disagreement. Let me beg you to go and see her again. Everything is so different now. Amy has not the faintest idea that I have come to see you, and she mustn’t on any account be told, for her worst fault is that sensitive pride of hers. And I’m sure you won’t be offended, Edwin, if I say that you have very much the same failing. Between two such sensitive people differences might last a lifetime, unless one could be persuaded to take the first step. Do be generous! A woman is privileged to be a little obstinate, it is always said. Overlook the fault, and persuade her to let bygones be bygones.’

There was an involuntary affectedness in Mrs Yule’s speech which repelled Reardon. He could not even put faith in her assurance that Amy knew nothing of this intercession. In any case it was extremely distasteful to him to discuss such matters with Mrs Yule.

‘Under no circumstances could I do more than I already have done,’ he replied. ‘And after what you have told me, it is impossible for me to go and see her unless she expressly invites me.’

‘Oh, if only you would overcome this sensitiveness!’

‘It is not in my power to do so. My poverty, as you justly say, was the cause of our parting; but if Amy is no longer poor, that is very far from a reason why I should go to her as a suppliant for forgiveness.’

‘But do consider the facts of the case, independently of feeling.

I really think I don’t go too far in saying that at least some— some provocation was given by you first of all. I am so very, very far from wishing to say anything disagreeable—I am sure you feel that—but wasn’t there some little ground for complaint on Amy’s part? Wasn’t there, now?’

Reardon was tortured with nervousness. He wished to be alone, to think over what had happened, and Mrs Yule’s urgent voice rasped upon his ears. Its very smoothness made it worse.

‘There may have been ground for grief and concern,’ he answered, ‘but for complaint, no, I think not.’

‘But I understand’—the voice sounded rather irritable now—’that you positively reproached and upbraided her because she was reluctant to go and live in some very shocking place.’

‘I may have lost my temper after Amy had shown— But I can’t review our troubles in this way.’

‘Am I to plead in vain?’

‘I regret very much that I can’t possibly do as you wish. It is all between Amy and myself. Interference by other people cannot do any good.’

‘I am sorry you should use such a word as “interference,”’ replied Mrs Yule, bridling a little. ‘Very sorry, indeed. I confess it didn’t occur to me that my good-will to you could be seen in that light.’

‘Believe me that I didn’t use the word offensively.’

‘Then you refuse to take any step towards a restoration of good feeling?’

‘I am obliged to, and Amy would understand perfectly why I say so.’

His earnestness was so unmistakable that Mrs Yule had no choice but to rise and bring the interview to an end. She commanded herself sufficiently to offer a regretful hand.

‘I can only say that my daughter is very, very unfortunate.’

Reardon lingered a little after her departure, then left the hospital and walked at a rapid pace in no particular direction.

Ah! if this had happened in the first year of his marriage, what more blessed man than he would have walked the earth! But it came after irreparable harm. No amount of wealth could undo the ruin caused by poverty.

It was natural for him, as soon as he could think with deliberation, to turn towards his only friend. But on calling at the house in Clipstone Street he found the garret empty, and no one could tell him when its occupant was likely to be back. He left a note, and made his way back to Islington. The evening had to be spent at the hospital, but on his return Biffen sat waiting for him.

‘You called about twelve, didn’t you?’ the visitor inquired.

‘Half-past.’

‘I was at the police-court. Odd thing—but it always happens so— that I should have spoken of Sykes the other night. Last night I came upon a crowd in Oxford Street, and the nucleus of it was no other than Sykes himself very drunk and disorderly, in the grip of two policemen. Nothing could be done for him; I was useless as bail; he e’en had to sleep in the cell. But I went this morning to see what would become of him. Such a spectacle when they brought him forward! It was only five shillings fine, and to my astonishment he produced the money. I joined him outside—it required a little courage—and had a long talk with him. He’s writing a London Letter for some provincial daily, and the first payment had thrown him off his balance.’

Reardon laughed gaily, and made inquiries about the eccentric gentleman. Only when the subject was exhausted did he speak of his own concerns, relating quietly what he had learnt from Mrs Yule. Biffen’s eyes widened.

‘So,’ Reardon cried with exultation, ‘there is the last burden off my mind! Henceforth I haven’t a care! The only thing that still troubled me was my inability to give Amy enough to live upon. Now she is provided for in secula seculorum. Isn’t this grand news?’

‘Decidedly. But if she is provided for, so are you.’

‘Biffen, you know me better. Could I accept a farthing of her money? This has made our coming together again for ever impossible, unless—unless dead things can come to life. I know the value of money, but I can’t take it from Amy.’

The other kept silence.

‘No! But now everything is well. She has her child, and can devote herself to bringing the boy up. And I—but I shall be rich on my own account. A hundred and fifty a year; it would be a farce to offer Amy her share of it. By all the gods of Olympus, we will go to Greece together, you and I!’

‘Pooh!’

‘I swear it! Let me save for a couple of years, and then get a good month’s holiday, or more if possible, and, as Pallas Athene liveth! we shall find ourselves at Marseilles, going aboard some boat of the Messageries. I can’t believe yet that this is true. Come, we will have a supper to-night. Come out into Upper Street, and let us eat, drink, and be merry!’

‘You are beside yourself. But never mind; let us rejoice by all means. There’s every reason.’

‘That poor girl! Now, at last, she’ll be at ease.’

‘Who?’

‘Amy, of course! I’m delighted on her account. Ah! but if it had come a long time ago, in the happy days! Then she, too, would have gone to Greece, wouldn’t she? Everything in life comes too soon or too late. What it would have meant for her and for me! She would never have hated me then, never. Biffen, am I base or contemptible? She thinks so. That’s how poverty has served me. If you had seen her, how she looked at me, when we met the other day, you would understand well enough why I couldn’t live with her now, not if she entreated me to. That would make me base if you like. Gods! how ashamed I should be if I yielded to such a temptation! And once—’

He had worked himself to such intensity of feeling that at length his voice choked and tears burst from his eyes.

‘Come out, and let us have a walk,’ said Biffen.

On leaving the house they found themselves in a thick fog, through which trickled drops of warm rain. Nevertheless, they pursued their purpose, and presently were seated in one of the boxes of a small coffee-shop. Their only companion in the place was a cab-driver, who had just finished a meal, and was now nodding into slumber over his plate and cup. Reardon ordered fried ham and eggs, the luxury of the poor, and when the attendant woman was gone away to execute the order, he burst into excited laughter.

‘Here we sit, two literary men! How should we be regarded by— ‘

He named two or three of the successful novelists of the day.

‘With what magnificent scorn they would turn from us and our squalid feast! They have never known struggle; not they. They are public-school men, University men, club men, society men. An income of less than three or four hundred a year is inconceivable to them; that seems the minimum for an educated man’s support. It would be small-minded to think of them with rancour, but, by Apollo! I know that we should change places with them if the work we have done were justly weighed against theirs.’

‘What does it matter? We are different types of intellectual workers. I think of them savagely now and then, but only when hunger gets a trifle too keen. Their work answers a demand; ours- -or mine at all events—doesn’t. They are in touch with the reading multitude; they have the sentiments of the respectable; they write for their class. Well, you had your circle of readers, and, if things hadn’t gone against you, by this time you certainly could have counted on your three or four hundred a year.’

‘It’s unlikely that I should ever have got more than two hundred pounds for a book; and, to have kept at my best, I must have been content to publish once every two or three years. The position was untenable with no private income. And I must needs marry a wife of dainty instincts! What astounding impudence! No wonder Fate pitched me aside into the gutter.’

They ate their ham and eggs, and exhilarated themselves with a cup of chicory—called coffee. Then Biffen drew from the pocket of his venerable overcoat the volume of Euripides he had brought, and their talk turned once more to the land of the sun. Only when the coffee-shop was closed did they go forth again into the foggy street, and at the top of Pentonville Hill they stood for ten minutes debating a metrical effect in one of the Fragments.

Day after day Reardon went about with a fever upon him. By evening his pulse was always rapid, and no extremity of weariness brought him a refreshing sleep. In conversation he seemed either depressed or excited, more often the latter. Save when attending to his duties at the hospital, he made no pretence of employing himself; if at home, he sat for hours without opening a book, and his walks, excepting when they led him to Clipstone Street, were aimless.

The hours of postal delivery found him waiting in an anguish of suspense. At eight o’clock each morning he stood by his window, listening for the postman’s knock in the street. As it approached he went out to the head of the stairs, and if the knock sounded at the door of his house, he leaned over the banisters, trembling in expectation. But the letter was never for him. When his agitation had subsided he felt glad of the disappointment, and laughed and sang.

One day Carter appeared at the City Road establishment, and made an opportunity of speaking to his clerk in private.

‘I suppose,’ he said with a smile, ‘they’ll have to look out for someone else at Croydon?’

‘By no means! The thing is settled. I go at Christmas.’

‘You really mean that?’

‘Undoubtedly.’

Seeing that Reardon was not disposed even to allude to private circumstances, the secretary said no more, and went away convinced that misfortunes had turned the poor fellow’s brain.

Wandering in the city, about this time, Reardon encountered his friend the realist.

‘Would you like to meet Sykes?’ asked Biffen. ‘I am just going to see him.’

‘Where does he live?’

‘In some indiscoverable hole. To save fuel, he spends his mornings at some reading-rooms; the admission is only a penny, and there he can see all the papers and do his writing and enjoy a grateful temperature.’

They repaired to the haunt in question. A flight of stairs brought them to a small room in which were exposed the daily newspapers; another ascent, and they were in a room devoted to magazines, chess, and refreshments; yet another, and they reached the department of weekly publications; lastly, at the top of the house, they found a lavatory, and a chamber for the use of those who desired to write. The walls of this last retreat were of blue plaster and sloped inwards from the floor; along them stood school desks with benches, and in one place was suspended a ragged and dirty card announcing that paper and envelopes could be purchased downstairs. An enormous basket full of waste-paper, and a small stove, occupied two corners; ink blotches, satirical designs, and much scribbling in pen and pencil served for mural adornment. From the adjacent lavatory came sounds of splashing and spluttering, and the busy street far below sent up its confused noises.

Two persons only sat at the desks. One was a hunger-bitten, out-of-work clerk, evidently engaged in replying to advertisements; in front of him lay two or three finished letters, and on the ground at his feet were several crumpled sheets of note-paper, representing abortive essays in composition. The other man, also occupied with the pen, looked about forty years old, and was clad in a very rusty suit of tweeds; on the bench beside him lay a grey overcoat and a silk hat which had for some time been moulting. His face declared the habit to which he was a victim, but it had nothing repulsive in its lineaments and expression; on the contrary, it was pleasing, amiable, and rather quaint. At this moment no one would have doubted his sobriety. With coat-sleeve turned back, so as to give free play to his right hand and wrist, revealing meanwhile a flannel shirt of singular colour, and with his collar unbuttoned (he wore no tie) to leave his throat at ease as he bent myopically over the paper, he was writing at express speed, evidently in the full rush of the ardour of composition. The veins of his forehead were dilated, and his chin pushed forward in a way that made one think of a racing horse.

‘Are you too busy to talk?’ asked Biffen, going to his side.

‘I am! Upon my soul I am!’ exclaimed the other looking up in alarm. ‘For the love of Heaven don’t put me out! A quarter of an hour!’

‘All right. I’ll come up again.’

The friends went downstairs and turned over the papers.

‘Now let’s try him again,’ said Biffen, when considerably more than the requested time had elapsed. They went up, and found Mr Sykes in an attitude of melancholy meditation. He had turned back his coat sleeve, had buttoned his collar, and was eyeing the slips of completed manuscript. Biffen presented his companion, and Mr Sykes greeted the novelist with much geniality.

‘What do you think this is?’ he exclaimed, pointing to his work. ‘The first instalment of my autobiography for the “Shropshire Weekly Herald.” Anonymous, of course, but strictly veracious, with the omission of sundry little personal failings which are nothing to the point. I call it “Through the Wilds of Literary London.” An old friend of mine edits the “Herald,” and I’m indebted to him for the suggestion.’

His voice was a trifle husky, but he spoke like a man of education.