The Fruit of the Tree

Ah, it was cruel to be alive, to be young, to bubble with springs of mirth and tenderness and folly, and to live in perpetual contact with decay and pain—to look persistently into the grey face of death without having lifted even a corner of life’s veil! Now and then, when she felt her youth flame through the sheath of dullness which was gradually enclosing it, she rebelled at the conditions that tied a spirit like hers to its monotonous task, while others, without a quiver of wings on their dull shoulders, or a note of music in their hearts, had the whole wide world to range through, and saw in it no more than a frightful emptiness to be shut out with tight walls of habit….

A tap on the door announced Mrs. Dressel, garbed for conquest, and bestowing on her brilliant person the last anxious touches of the artist reluctant to part from a masterpiece.

“My dear, how well you look! I knew that dress would be becoming!” she exclaimed, generously transferring her self-approval to Justine; and adding, as the latter moved toward her: “I wish Westy Gaines could see you now!”

“Well, he will presently,” Miss Brent rejoined, ignoring the slight stress on the name.

Mrs. Dressel continued to brood on her maternally. “Justine—I wish you’d tell me! You say you hate the life you’re leading now—but isn’t there somebody who might–-?”

“Give me another, with lace dresses in it?” Justine’s slight shrug might have seemed theatrical, had it not been a part of the ceaseless dramatic play of her flexible person. “There might be, perhaps…only I’m not sure—” She broke off whimsically.

“Not sure of what?”

“That this kind of dress might not always be a little tight on the shoulders.”

“Tight on the shoulders? What do you mean, Justine? My clothes simply hang on you!”

“Oh, Effie dear, don’t you remember the fable of the wings under the skin, that sprout when one meets a pair of kindred shoulders?” And, as Mrs. Dressel bent on her a brow of unenlightenment—“Well, it doesn’t matter: I only meant that I’ve always been afraid good clothes might keep my wings from sprouting!” She turned back to the glass, giving herself a last light touch such as she had bestowed on the roses.

“And that reminds me,” she continued—“how about Mr. Amherst’s wings?”

“John Amherst?” Mrs. Dressel brightened into immediate attention. “Why, do you know him?”

“Not as the owner of the Westmore Mills; but I came across him as their assistant manager three years ago, at the Hope Hospital, and he was starting a very promising pair then. I wonder if they’re doing as well under his new coat.”

“I’m not sure that I understand you when you talk poetry,” said Mrs. Dressel with less interest; “but personally I can’t say I like John Amherst—and he is certainly not worthy of such a lovely woman as Mrs. Westmore. Of course she would never let any one see that she’s not perfectly happy; but I’m told he has given them all a great deal of trouble by interfering in the management of the mills, and his manner is so cold and sarcastic—the truth is, I suppose he’s never quite at ease in society. Her family have never been really reconciled to the marriage; and Westy Gaines says–-“

“Ah, Westy Gaines would,” Justine interposed lightly. “But if Mrs. Amherst is really the Bessy Langhope I used to know it must be rather a struggle for the wings!”

Mrs. Dressel’s flagging interest settled on the one glimpse of fact in this statement. “It’s such a coincidence that you should have known her too! Was she always so perfectly fascinating? I wish I knew how she gives that look to her hair!”

Justine gathered up the lace sunshade and long gloves which her friend had lent her. “There was not much more that was genuine about her character—that was her very own, I mean—than there is about my appearance at this moment. She was always the dearest little chameleon in the world, taking everybody’s colour in the most flattering way, and giving back, I must say, a most charming reflection—if you’ll excuse the mixed metaphor; but when one got her by herself, with no reflections to catch, one found she hadn’t any particular colour of her own. One of the girls used to say she ought to wear a tag, because she was so easily mislaid–- Now then, I’m ready!”

Justine advanced to the door, and Mrs. Dressel followed her downstairs, reflecting with pardonable complacency that one of the disadvantages of being clever was that it tempted one to say sarcastic things of other women—than which she could imagine no more crying social error.

During the drive to the garden-party, Justine’s thoughts, drawn to the past by the mention of Bessy Langhope’s name, reverted to the comic inconsequences of her own lot—to that persistent irrelevance of incident that had once made her compare herself to an actor always playing his part before the wrong stage-setting. Was there not, for instance, a mocking incongruity in the fact that a creature so leaping with life should have, for chief outlet, the narrow mental channel of the excellent couple between whom she was now being borne to the Gaines garden-party? All her friendships were the result of propinquity or of early association, and fate had held her imprisoned in a circle of well-to-do mediocrity, peopled by just such figures as those of the kindly and prosperous Dressels. Effie Dressel, the daughter of a cousin of Mrs. Brent’s, had obscurely but safely allied herself with the heavy blond young man who was to succeed his father as President of the Union Bank, and who was already regarded by the “solid business interests” of Hanaford as possessing talents likely to carry him far in the development of the paternal fortunes. Harry Dressel’s honest countenance gave no evidence of peculiar astuteness, and he was in fact rather the product of special conditions than of an irresistible bent. He had the sound Saxon love of games, and the most interesting game he had ever been taught was “business.” He was a simple domestic being, and according to Hanaford standards the most obvious obligation of the husband and father was to make his family richer. If Harry Dressel had ever formulated his aims, he might have said that he wanted to be the man whom Hanaford most respected, and that was only another way of saying, the richest man in Hanaford. Effie embraced his creed with a zeal facilitated by such evidence of its soundness as a growing income and the early prospects of a carriage. Her mother-in-law, a kind old lady with a simple unquestioning love of money, had told her on her wedding day that Harry’s one object would always be to make his family proud of him; and the recent purchase of the victoria in which Justine and the Dressels were now seated was regarded by the family as a striking fulfillment of this prophecy.

In the course of her hospital work Justine had of necessity run across far different types; but from the connections thus offered she was often held back by the subtler shades of taste that civilize human intercourse. Her world, in short, had been chiefly peopled by the dull or the crude, and, hemmed in between the two, she had created for herself an inner kingdom where the fastidiousness she had to set aside in her outward relations recovered its full sway. There must be actual beings worthy of admission to this secret precinct, but hitherto they had not come her way; and the sense that they were somewhere just out of reach still gave an edge of youthful curiosity to each encounter with a new group of people.

Certainly, Mrs. Gaines’s garden-party seemed an unlikely field for the exercise of such curiosity: Justine’s few glimpses of Hanaford society had revealed it as rather a dull thick body, with a surface stimulated only by ill-advised references to the life of larger capitals; and the concentrated essence of social Hanaford was of course to be found at the Gaines entertainments. It presented itself, however, in the rich June afternoon, on the long shadows of the well-kept lawn, and among the paths of the rose-garden, in its most amiable aspect; and to Justine, wearied by habitual contact with ugliness and suffering, there was pure delight in the verdant setting of the picture, and in the light harmonious tints of the figures peopling it. If the company was dull, it was at least decorative; and poverty, misery and dirt were shut out by the placid unconsciousness of the guests as securely as by the leafy barriers of the garden.

X

“AH, Mrs. Dressel, we were on the lookout for you—waiting for the curtain to rise. Your friend Miss Brent? Juliana, Mrs. Dressel’s friend Miss Brent–-“

Near the brilliantly-striped marquee that formed the axis of the Gaines garden-parties, Mr. Halford Gaines, a few paces from his wife and daughters, stood radiating a royal welcome on the stream of visitors pouring across the lawn. It was only to eyes perverted by a different social perspective that there could be any doubt as to the importance of the Gaines entertainments. To Hanaford itself they were epoch-making; and if any rebellious spirit had cherished a doubt of the fact, it would have been quelled by the official majesty of Mr. Gaines’s frock-coat and the comprehensive cordiality of his manner.

There were moments when New York hung like a disquieting cloud on the social horizon of Mrs. Gaines and her daughters; but to Halford Gaines Hanaford was all in all. As an exponent of the popular and patriotic “good-enough-for-me” theory he stood in high favour at the Hanaford Club, where a too-keen consciousness of the metropolis was alternately combated by easy allusion and studied omission, and where the unsettled fancies of youth were chastened and steadied by the reflection that, if Hanaford was good enough for Halford Gaines, it must offer opportunities commensurate with the largest ideas of life.

Never did Mr. Gaines’s manner bear richer witness to what could be extracted from Hanaford than when he was in the act of applying to it the powerful pressure of his hospitality. The resultant essence was so bubbling with social exhilaration that, to its producer at any rate, its somewhat mixed ingredients were lost in one highly flavoured draught. Under ordinary circumstances no one discriminated more keenly than Mr. Gaines between different shades of social importance; but any one who was entertained by him was momentarily ennobled by the fact, and not all the anxious telegraphy of his wife and daughters could, for instance, recall to him that the striking young woman in Mrs. Dressel’s wake was only some obscure protégée, whom it was odd of Effie to have brought, and whose presence was quite unnecessary to emphasize.

“Juliana, Miss Brent tells me she has never seen our roses. Oh, there are other roses in Hanaford, Miss Brent; I don’t mean to imply that no one else attempts them; but unless you can afford to give carte blanche to your man—and mine happens to be something of a specialist…well, if you’ll come with me, I’ll let them speak for themselves. I always say that if people want to know what we can do they must come and see—they’ll never find out from me!”

A more emphatic signal from his wife arrested Mr. Gaines as he was in the act of leading Miss Brent away.

“Eh?—What? The Amhersts and Mrs. Ansell? You must excuse me then, I’m afraid—but Westy shall take you. Westy, my boy, it’s an ill-wind…. I want you to show this young lady our roses.” And Mr. Gaines, with mingled reluctance and satisfaction, turned away to receive the most important guests of the day.

It had not needed his father’s summons to draw the expert Westy to Miss Brent: he was already gravitating toward her, with the nonchalance bred of cosmopolitan successes, but with a directness of aim due also to his larger opportunities of comparison.

“The roses will do,” he explained, as he guided her through the increasing circle of guests about his mother; and in answer to Justine’s glance of enquiry: “To get you away, I mean. They’re not much in themselves, you know; but everything of the governor’s always begins with a capital letter.”

“Oh, but these roses deserve to,” Justine exclaimed, as they paused under the evergreen archway at the farther end of the lawn.

“I don’t know—not if you’ve been in England,” Westy murmured, watching furtively for the impression produced, on one who had presumably not, by the great blush of colour massed against its dusky background of clipped evergreens.

Justine smiled. “I have been—but I’ve been in the slums since; in horrible places that the least of those flowers would have lighted up like a lamp.”

Westy’s guarded glance imprudently softened. “It’s the beastliest kind of a shame, your ever having had to do such work–-“

“Oh, had to?” she flashed back at him disconcertingly. “It was my choice, you know: there was a time when I couldn’t live without it. Philanthropy is one of the subtlest forms of self-indulgence.”

Westy met this with a vague laugh. If a chap who was as knowing as the devil did, once in a way, indulge himself in the luxury of talking recklessly to a girl with exceptional eyes, it was rather upsetting to discover in those eyes no consciousness of the risk he had taken!

“But I am rather tired of it now,” she continued, and his look grew guarded again. After all, they were all the same—except in that particular matter of the eyes. At the thought, he risked another look, hung on the sharp edge of betrayal, and was snatched back, not by the manly instinct of self-preservation, but by some imp of mockery lurking in the depths that lured him.

He recovered his balance and took refuge in a tone of worldly ease. “I saw a chap the other day who said he knew you when you were at Saint Elizabeth’s—wasn’t that the name of your hospital?”

Justine assented. “One of the doctors, I suppose. Where did you meet him?”

Ah, now she should see! He summoned his utmost carelessness of tone. “Down on Long Island last week—I was spending Sunday with the Amhersts.” He held up the glittering fact to her, and watched for the least little blink of awe; but her lids never trembled. It was a confession of social blindness which painfully negatived Mrs. Dressel’s hint that she knew the Amhersts; if she had even known of them, she could not so fatally have missed his point.

“Long Island?” She drew her brows together in puzzled retrospection. “I wonder if it could have been Stephen Wyant? I heard he had taken over his uncle’s practice somewhere near New York.”

“Wyant—that’s the name. He’s the doctor at Clifton, the nearest town to the Amhersts’ place. Little Cicely had a cold—Cicely Westmore, you know—a small cousin of mine, by the way—” he switched a rose-branch loftily out of her path, explaining, as she moved on, that Cicely was the daughter of Mrs. Amherst’s first marriage to Richard Westmore. “That’s the way I happened to see this Dr. Wyant. Bessy—Mrs. Amherst—asked him to stop to luncheon, after he’d seen the kid. He seems rather a discontented sort of a chap—grumbling at not having a New York practice. I should have thought he had rather a snug berth, down there at Lynbrook, with all those swells to dose.”

Justine smiled. “Dr. Wyant is ambitious, and swells don’t have as interesting diseases as poor people. One gets tired of giving them bread pills for imaginary ailments. But Dr. Wyant is not strong himself and I fancy a country practice is better for him than hard work in town.”

“You think him clever though, do you?” Westy enquired absently. He was already bored with the subject of the Long Island doctor, and vexed at the lack of perception that led his companion to show more concern in the fortunes of a country practitioner than in the fact of his own visit to the Amhersts; but the topic was a safe one, and it was agreeable to see how her face kindled when she was interested.

Justine mused on his question. “I think he has very great promise—which he is almost certain not to fulfill,” she answered with a sigh which seemed to Westy’s anxious ear to betray a more than professional interest in the person referred to.

“Oh, come now—why not? With the Amhersts to give him a start—I heard my cousin recommending him to a lot of people the other day–-“

“Oh, he may become a fashionable doctor,” Justine assented indifferently; to which her companion rejoined, with a puzzled stare: “That’s just what I mean—with Bessy backing him!”

“Has Mrs. Amherst become such a power, then?” Justine asked, taking up the coveted theme just as he despaired of attracting her to it.

“My cousin?” he stretched the two syllables to the cracking-point. “Well, she’s awfully rich, you know; and there’s nobody smarter. Don’t you think so?”

“I don’t know; it’s so long since I’ve seen her.”

He brightened. “You did know her, then?” But the discovery made her obtuseness the more inexplicable!

“Oh, centuries ago: in another world.”

“Centuries—I like that!” Westy gallantly protested, his ardour kindling as she swam once more within his social ken. “And Amherst? You know him too, I suppose? By Jove, here he is now–-“

He signalled a tall figure strolling slowly toward them with bent head and brooding gaze. Justine’s eye had retained a vivid image of the man with whom, scarcely three years earlier, she had lived through a moment of such poignant intimacy, and she recognized at once his lean outline, and the keen spring of his features, still veiled by the same look of inward absorption. She noticed, as he raised his hat in response to Westy Gaines’s greeting, that the vertical lines between his brows had deepened; and a moment later she was aware that this change was the visible token of others which went deeper than the fact of his good clothes and his general air of leisure and well-being—changes perceptible to her only in the startled sense of how prosperity had aged him.

“Hallo, Amherst—trying to get under cover?” Westy jovially accosted him, with a significant gesture toward the crowded lawn from which the new-comer had evidently fled. “I was just telling Miss Brent that this is the safest place on these painful occasions—Oh, confound it, it’s not as safe as I thought! Here’s one of my sisters making for me!”

There ensued a short conflict of words, before his feeble flutter of resistance was borne down by a resolute Miss Gaines who, as she swept him back to the marquee, cried out to Amherst that her mother was asking for him too; and then Justine had time to observe that her remaining companion had no intention of responding to his hostess’s appeal.

Westy, in naming her, had laid just enough stress on the name to let it serve as a reminder or an introduction, as circumstances might decide, and she saw that Amherst, roused from his abstraction by the proffered clue, was holding his hand out doubtfully.

“I think we haven’t met for some years,” he said.

Justine smiled. “I have a better reason than you for remembering the exact date;” and in response to his look of surprise she added: “You made me commit a professional breach of faith, and I’ve never known since whether to be glad or sorry.”

Amherst still bent on her the gaze which seemed to find in external details an obstacle rather than a help to recognition; but suddenly his face cleared. “It was you who told me the truth about poor Dillon! I couldn’t imagine why I seemed to see you in such a different setting….”

“Oh, I’m disguised as a lady this afternoon,” she said smiling. “But I’m glad you saw through the disguise.”

He smiled back at her. “Are you? Why?”

“It seems to make it—if it’s so transparent—less of a sham, less of a dishonesty,” she began impulsively, and then paused again, a little annoyed at the overemphasis of her words. Why was she explaining and excusing herself to this stranger? Did she propose to tell him next that she had borrowed her dress from Effie Dressel? To cover her confusion she went on with a slight laugh: “But you haven’t told me.”

“What was I to tell you?”

“Whether to be glad or sorry that I broke my vow and told the truth about Dillon.”

They were standing face to face in the solitude of the garden-walk, forgetful of everything but the sudden surprised sense of intimacy that had marked their former brief communion. Justine had raised her eyes half-laughingly to Amherst, but they dropped before the unexpected seriousness of his.

“Why do you want to know?” he asked.

She made an effort to sustain the note of pleasantry.

“Well—it might, for instance, determine my future conduct. You see I’m still a nurse, and such problems are always likely to present themselves.”

“Ah, then don’t!”

“Don’t?”

“I mean—” He hesitated a moment, reaching up to break a rose from the branch that tapped his shoulder. “I was only thinking what risks we run when we scramble into the chariot of the gods and try to do the driving. Be passive—be passive, and you’ll be happier!”

“Oh, as to that—!” She swept it aside with one of her airy motions. “But Dillon, for instance—would he have been happier if I’d been passive?”

Amherst seemed to ponder. “There again—how can one tell?”

“And the risk’s not worth taking?”

“No!”

She paused, and they looked at each other again. “Do you mean that seriously, I wonder? Do you–-“

“Act on it myself? God forbid! The gods drive so badly. There’s poor Dillon…he happened to be in their way…as we all are at times.” He pulled himself up, and went on in a matter-of-fact tone: “In Dillon’s case, however, my axioms don’t apply. When my wife heard the truth she was, of course, immensely kind to him; and if it hadn’t been for you she might never have known.”

Justine smiled. “I think you would have found out—I was only the humble instrument. But now—” she hesitated—“now you must be able to do so much—”

Amherst lifted his head, and she saw the colour rise under his fair skin. “Out at Westmore? You’ve never been there since? Yes—my wife has made some changes; but it’s all so problematic—and one would have to live here….”

“You don’t, then?”

He answered by an imperceptible shrug. “Of course I’m here often; and she comes now and then. But the journey’s tiresome, and it is not always easy for her to get away.” He checked himself, and Justine saw that he, in turn, was suddenly conscious of the incongruity of explaining and extenuating his personal situation to a stranger. “But then we’re not strangers!” a voice in her exulted, just as he added, with an embarrassed attempt to efface and yet justify his moment of expansion: “That reminds me—I think you know my wife. I heard her asking Mrs. Dressel about you. She wants so much to see you.”

The transition had been effected, at the expense of dramatic interest, but to the obvious triumph of social observances; and to Justine, after all, regaining at his side the group about the marquee, the interest was not so much diminished as shifted to the no less suggestive problem of studying the friend of her youth in the unexpected character of John Amherst’s wife.

Meanwhile, however, during the brief transit across the Gaines greensward, her thoughts were still busy with Amherst. She had seen at once that the peculiar sense of intimacy reawakened by their meeting had been chilled and deflected by her first allusion to the topic which had previously brought them together: Amherst had drawn back as soon as she named the mills. What could be the cause of his reluctance? When they had last met, the subject burned within him: her being in actual fact a stranger had not, then, been an obstacle to his confidences. Now that he was master at Westmore it was plain that another tone became him—that his situation necessitated a greater reserve; but her enquiry did not imply the least wish to overstep this restriction: it merely showed her remembrance of his frankly-avowed interest in the operatives. Justine was struck by the fact that so natural an allusion should put him on the defensive. She did not for a moment believe that he had lost his interest in the mills; and that his point of view should have shifted with the fact of ownership she rejected as an equally superficial reading of his character. The man with whom she had talked at Dillon’s bedside was one in whom the ruling purposes had already shaped themselves, and to whom life, in whatever form it came, must henceforth take their mould. As she reached this point in her analysis, it occurred to her that his shrinking from the subject might well imply not indifference, but a deeper preoccupation: a preoccupation for some reason suppressed and almost disavowed, yet sustaining the more intensely its painful hidden life. From this inference it was but a leap of thought to the next—that the cause of the change must be sought outside of himself, in some external influence strong enough to modify the innate lines of his character. And where could such an influence be more obviously sought than in the marriage which had transformed the assistant manager of the Westmore Mills not, indeed, into their owner—that would rather have tended to simplify the problem—but into the husband of Mrs. Westmore? After all, the mills were Bessy’s—and for a farther understanding of the case it remained to find out what manner of person Bessy had become.

Justine’s first impression, as her friend’s charming arms received her—with an eagerness of welcome not lost on the suspended judgment of feminine Hanaford—the immediate impression was of a gain of emphasis, of individuality, as though the fluid creature she remembered had belied her prediction, and run at last into a definite mould. Yes—Bessy had acquired an outline: a graceful one, as became her early promise, though with, perhaps, a little more sharpness of edge than her youthful texture had promised. But the side she turned to her friend was still all softness—had in it a hint of the old pliancy, the impulse to lean and enlace, that at once woke in Justine the corresponding instinct of guidance and protection, so that their first kiss, before a word was spoken, carried the two back to the precise relation in which their school-days had left them. So easy a reversion to the past left no room for the sense of subsequent changes by which such reunions are sometimes embarrassed. Justine’s sympathies had, instinctively, and almost at once, transferred themselves to Bessy’s side—passing over at a leap the pained recognition that there were sides already—and Bessy had gathered up Justine into the circle of gentle self-absorption which left her very dimly aware of any distinctive characteristic in her friends except that of their affection for herself—since she asked only, as she appealingly put it, that they should all be “dreadfully fond” of her.

“And I’ve wanted you so often, Justine: you’re the only clever person I’m not afraid of, because your cleverness always used to make things clear instead of confusing them. I’ve asked so many people about you—but I never heard a word till just the other day—wasn’t it odd?—when our new doctor at Rushton happened to say that he knew you. I’ve been rather unwell lately—nervous and tired, and sleeping badly—and he told me I ought to keep perfectly quiet, and be under the care of a nurse who could make me do as she chose: just such a nurse as a wonderful Miss Brent he had known at St. Elizabeth’s, whose patients obeyed her as if she’d been the colonel of a regiment. His description made me laugh, it reminded me so much of the way you used to make me do what you wanted at the convent—and then it suddenly occurred to me that I had heard of you having gone in for nursing, and we compared notes, and I found it was really you! Wasn’t it odd that we should discover each other in that way? I daresay we might have passed in the street and never known it—I’m sure I must be horribly changed….”

Thus Bessy discoursed, in the semi-isolation to which, under an overarching beech-tree, the discretion of their hostess had allowed the two friends to withdraw for the freer exchange of confidences. There was, at first sight, nothing in her aspect to bear out Mrs. Amherst’s plaintive allusion to her health, but Justine, who knew that she had lost a baby a few months previously, assumed that the effect of this shock still lingered, though evidently mitigated by a reviving interest in pretty clothes and the other ornamental accessories of life. Certainly Bessy Amherst had grown into the full loveliness which her childhood promised. She had the kind of finished prettiness that declares itself early, holds its own through the awkward transitions of girlhood, and resists the strain of all later vicissitudes, as though miraculously preserved in some clear medium impenetrable to the wear and tear of living.

“You absurd child! You’ve not changed a bit except to grow more so!” Justine laughed, paying amused tribute to the childish craving for “a compliment” that still betrayed itself in Bessy’s eyes.

“Well, you have, then, Justine—you’ve grown extraordinarily handsome!”

“That is extraordinary of me, certainly,” the other acknowledged gaily. “But then think what room for improvement there was—and how much time I’ve had to improve in!”

“It is a long time, isn’t it?” Bessy assented. “I feel so intimate, still, with the old Justine of the convent, and I don’t know the new one a bit. Just think—I’ve a great girl of my own, almost as old as we were when we went to the Sacred Heart: But perhaps you don’t know anything about me either. You see, I married again two years ago, and my poor baby died last March…so I have only Cicely. It was such a disappointment—I wanted a boy dreadfully, and I understand little babies so much better than a big girl like Cicely…. Oh, dear, here is Juliana Gaines bringing up some more tiresome people! It’s such a bore, but John says I must know them all. Well, thank goodness we’ve only one more day in this dreadful place—and of course I shall see you, dear, before we go….”

XI

AFTER conducting Miss Brent to his wife, John Amherst, by the exercise of considerable strategic skill, had once more contrived to detach himself from the throng on the lawn, and, regaining a path in the shrubbery, had taken refuge on the verandah of the house.

Here, under the shade of the awning, two ladies were seated in a seclusion agreeably tempered by the distant strains of the Hanaford band, and by the shifting prospect of the groups below them.

“Ah, here he is now!” the younger of the two exclaimed, turning on Amherst the smile of intelligence that Mrs. Eustace Ansell was in the habit of substituting for the idle preliminaries of conversation. “We were not talking of you, though,” she added as Amherst took the seat to which his mother beckoned him, “but of Bessy—which, I suppose, is almost as indiscreet.”

She added the last phrase after an imperceptible pause, and as if in deprecation of the hardly more perceptible frown which, at the mention of his wife’s name, had deepened the lines between Amherst’s brows.

“Indiscreet of his own mother and his wife’s friend?” Mrs. Amherst protested, laying her trimly-gloved hand on her son’s arm; while the latter, with his eyes on her companion, said slowly: “Mrs. Ansell knows that indiscretion is the last fault of which her friends are likely to accuse her.”

“Raison de plus, you mean?” she laughed, meeting squarely the challenge that passed between them under Mrs. Amherst’s puzzled gaze. “Well, if I take advantage of my reputation for discretion to meddle a little now and then, at least I do so in a good cause. I was just saying how much I wish that you would take Bessy to Europe; and I am so sure of my cause, in this case, that I am going to leave it to your mother to give you my reasons.”

She rose as she spoke, not with any sign of haste or embarrassment, but as if gracefully recognizing the desire of mother and son to be alone together; but Amherst, rising also, made a motion to detain her.

“No one else will be able to put your reasons half so convincingly,” he said with a slight smile, “and I am sure my mother would much rather be spared the attempt.”

Mrs. Ansell met the smile as freely as she had met the challenge. “My dear Lucy,” she rejoined, laying, as she reseated herself, a light caress on Mrs. Amherst’s hand, “I’m sorry to be flattered at your expense, but it’s not in human nature to resist such an appeal. You see,” she added, raising her eyes to Amherst, “how sure I am of myself—and of you, when you’ve heard me.”

“Oh, John is always ready to hear one,” his mother murmured innocently.

“Well, I don’t know that I shall even ask him to do as much as that—I’m so sure, after all, that my suggestion carries its explanation with it.”

There was a moment’s pause, during which Amherst let his eyes wander absently over the dissolving groups on the lawn.

“The suggestion that I should take Bessy to Europe?” He paused again. “When—next autumn?”

“No: now—at once. On a long honeymoon.”

He frowned slightly at the last word, passing it by to revert to the direct answer to his question.

“At once? No—I can’t see that the suggestion carries its explanation with it.”

Mrs. Ansell looked at him hesitatingly. She was conscious of the ill-chosen word that still reverberated between them, and the unwonted sense of having blundered made her, for the moment, less completely mistress of herself.

“Ah, you’ll see farther presently—” She rose again, unfurling her lace sunshade, as if to give a touch of definiteness to her action. “It’s not, after all,” she added, with a sweet frankness, “a case for argument, and still less for persuasion. My reasons are excellent—I should insist on putting them to you myself if they were not! But they’re so good that I can leave you to find them out—and to back them up with your own, which will probably be a great deal better.”

She summed up with a light nod, which included both Amherst and his mother, and turning to descend the verandah steps, waved a signal to Mr. Langhope, who was limping disconsolately toward the house.

“What has she been saying to you, mother?” Amherst asked, returning to his seat beside his mother.

Mrs. Amherst replied by a shake of her head and a raised forefinger of reproval. “Now, Johnny, I won’t answer a single question till you smooth out those lines between your eyes.”

Her son relaxed his frown to smile back at her. “Well, dear, there have to be some wrinkles in every family, and as you absolutely refuse to take your share—” His eyes rested affectionately on the frosty sparkle of her charming old face, which had, in its setting of recovered prosperity, the freshness of a sunny winter morning, when the very snow gives out a suggestion of warmth.

He remembered how, on the evening of his dismissal from the mills, he had paused on the threshold of their sitting-room to watch her a moment in the lamplight, and had thought with bitter compunction of the fresh wrinkle he was about to add to the lines about her eyes. The three years which followed had effaced that wrinkle and veiled the others in a tardy bloom of well-being. From the moment of turning her back on Westmore, and establishing herself in the pretty little house at Hanaford which her son’s wife had placed at her disposal, Mrs. Amherst had shed all traces of the difficult years; and the fact that his marriage had enabled him to set free, before it was too late, the pent-up springs of her youthfulness, sometimes seemed to Amherst the clearest gain in his life’s confused total of profit and loss. It was, at any rate, the sense of Bessy’s share in the change that softened his voice when he spoke of her to his mother.

“Now, then, if I present a sufficiently unruffled surface, let us go back to Mrs. Ansell—for I confess that her mysterious reasons are not yet apparent to me.”

Mrs. Amherst looked deprecatingly at her son. “Maria Ansell is devoted to you too, John–-“

“Of course she is! It’s her rôle to be devoted to everybody—especially to her enemies.”

“Her enemies?”

“Oh, I didn’t intend any personal application. But why does she want me to take Bessy abroad?”

“She and Mr. Langhope think that Bessy is not looking well.”

Amherst paused, and the frown showed itself for a moment. “What do you think, mother?”

“I hadn’t noticed it myself: Bessy seems to me prettier than ever. But perhaps she has less colour—and she complains of not sleeping. Maria thinks she still frets over the baby.”

Amherst made an impatient gesture. “Is Europe the only panacea?”

“You should consider, John, that Bessy is used to change and amusement. I think you sometimes forget that other people haven’t your faculty of absorbing themselves in a single interest. And Maria says that the new doctor at Clifton, whom they seem to think so clever, is very anxious that Bessy should go to Europe this summer.”

“No doubt; and so is every one else: I mean her father and old Tredegar—and your friend Mrs. Ansell not least.”

Mrs. Amherst lifted her bright black eyes to his. “Well, then—if they all think she needs it–-“

“Good heavens, if travel were what she needed!—Why, we’ve never stopped travelling since we married. We’ve been everywhere on the globe except at Hanaford—this is her second visit here in three years!” He rose and took a rapid turn across the deserted verandah. “It’s not because her health requires it—it’s to get me away from Westmore, to prevent things being done there that ought to be done!” he broke out vehemently, halting again before his mother.

The aged pink faded from Mrs. Amherst’s face, but her eyes retained their lively glitter. “To prevent things being done? What a strange thing to say!”

“I shouldn’t have said it if I hadn’t seen you falling under Mrs. Ansell’s spell.”

His mother had a gesture which showed from whom he had inherited his impulsive movements. “Really, my son—!” She folded her hands, and added after a pause of self-recovery: “If you mean that I have ever attempted to interfere–-“

“No, no: but when they pervert things so damnably–-“

“John!”

He dropped into his chair again, and pushed the hair from his forehead with a groan.

“Well, then—put it that they have as much right to their view as I have: I only want you to see what it is. Whenever I try to do anything at Westmore—to give a real start to the work that Bessy and I planned together—some pretext is found to stop it: to pack us off to the ends of the earth, to cry out against reducing her income, to encourage her in some new extravagance to which the work at the mills must be sacrificed!”

Mrs. Amherst, growing pale under this outbreak, assured herself by a nervous backward glance that their privacy was still uninvaded; then her eyes returned to her son’s face.

“John—are you sure you’re not sacrificing your wife to the mills?”

He grew pale in turn, and they looked at each other for a moment without speaking.

“You see it as they do, then?” he rejoined with a discouraged sigh.

“I see it as any old woman would, who had my experiences to look back to.”

“Mother!” he exclaimed.

She smiled composedly. “Do you think I mean that as a reproach? That’s because men will never understand women—least of all, sons their mothers. No real mother wants to come first; she puts her son’s career ahead of everything. But it’s different with a wife—and a wife as much in love as Bessy.”

Amherst looked away. “I should have thought that was a reason–-“

“That would reconcile her to being set aside, to counting only second in your plans?”

“They were her plans when we married!”

“Ah, my dear—!” She paused on that, letting her shrewd old glance, and all the delicate lines of experience in her face, supply what farther comment the ineptitude of his argument invited.

He took the full measure of her meaning, receiving it in a baffled silence that continued as she rose and gathered her lace mantle about her, as if to signify that their confidences could not, on such an occasion, be farther prolonged without singularity. Then he stood up also and joined her, resting his hand on hers while she leaned on the verandah rail.

“Poor mother! And I’ve kept you to myself all this time, and spoiled your good afternoon.”

“No, dear; I was a little tired, and had slipped away to be quiet.” She paused, and then went on, persuasively giving back his pressure: “I know how you feel about doing your duty, John; but now that things are so comfortably settled, isn’t it a pity to unsettle them?”

Amherst had intended, on leaving his mother, to rejoin Bessy, whom he could still discern, on the lawn, in absorbed communion with Miss Brent; but after what had passed it seemed impossible, for the moment, to recover the garden-party tone, and he made his escape through the house while a trio of Cuban singers, who formed the crowning number of the entertainment, gathered the company in a denser circle about their guitars.

As he walked on aimlessly under the deep June shadows of Maplewood Avenue his mother’s last words formed an ironical accompaniment to his thoughts. “Now that things are comfortably settled—” he knew so well what that elastic epithet covered! Himself, for instance, ensconced in the impenetrable prosperity of his wonderful marriage; herself too (unconsciously, dear soul!), so happily tucked away in a cranny of that new and spacious life, and no more able to conceive why existing conditions should be disturbed than the bird in the eaves understands why the house should be torn down. Well—he had learned at last what his experience with his poor, valiant, puzzled mother might have taught him: that one must never ask from women any view but the personal one, any measure of conduct but that of their own pains and pleasures. She, indeed, had borne undauntedly enough the brunt of their earlier trials; but that was merely because, as she said, the mother’s instinct bade her heap all her private hopes on the great devouring altar of her son’s ambition; it was not because she had ever, in the very least, understood or sympathized with his aims.

And Bessy—? Perhaps if their little son had lived she might in turn have obeyed the world-old instinct of self-effacement—but now! He remembered with an intenser self-derision that, not even in the first surprise of his passion, had he deluded himself with the idea that Bessy Westmore was an exception to her sex. He had argued rather that, being only a lovelier product of the common mould, she would abound in the adaptabilities and pliancies which the lords of the earth have seen fit to cultivate in their companions. She would care for his aims because they were his. During their precipitate wooing, and through the first brief months of marriage, this profound and original theory had been gratifyingly confirmed; then its perfect surface had begun to show a flaw. Amherst had always conveniently supposed that the poet’s line summed up the good woman’s rule of ethics: He for God only, she for God in him. It was for the god in him, surely, that she had loved him: for that first glimpse of an “ampler ether, a diviner air” that he had brought into her cramped and curtained life. He could never, now, evoke that earlier delusion without feeling on its still-tender surface the keen edge of Mrs. Ansell’s smile. She, no doubt, could have told him at any time why Bessy had married him: it was for his beaux yeux, as Mrs. Ansell would have put it—because he was young, handsome, persecuted, an ardent lover if not a subtle one—because Bessy had met him at the fatal moment, because her family had opposed the marriage—because, in brief, the gods, that day, may have been a little short of amusement. Well, they were having their laugh out now—there were moments when high heaven seemed to ring with it….

With these thoughts at his heels Amherst strode on, overtaken now and again by the wheels of departing guests from the garden-party, and knowing, as they passed him, what was in their minds—envy of his success, admiration of his cleverness in achieving it, and a little half-contemptuous pity for his wife, who, with her wealth and looks, might have done so much better. Certainly, if the case could have been put to Hanaford—the Hanaford of the Gaines garden-party—it would have sided with Bessy to a voice. And how much justice was there in what he felt would have been the unanimous verdict of her class? Was his mother right in hinting that he was sacrificing Bessy to the mills? But the mills were Bessy—at least he had thought so when he married her! They were her particular form of contact with life, the expression of her relation to her fellow-men, her pretext, her opportunity—unless they were merely a vast purse in which to plunge for her pin-money! He had fancied it would rest with him to determine from which of these standpoints she should view Westmore; and at the outset she had enthusiastically viewed it from his. In her eager adoption of his ideas she had made a pet of the mills, organizing the Mothers’ Club, laying out a recreation-ground on the Hopewood property, and playing with pretty plans in water-colour for the Emergency Hospital and the building which was to contain the night-schools, library and gymnasium; but even these minor projects—which he had urged her to take up as a means of learning their essential dependence on his larger scheme—were soon to be set aside by obstacles of a material order. Bessy always wanted money—not a great deal, but, as she reasonably put it, “enough”—and who was to blame if her father and Mr. Tredegar, each in his different capacity, felt obliged to point out that every philanthropic outlay at Westmore must entail a corresponding reduction in her income? Perhaps if she could have been oftener at Hanaford these arguments would have been counteracted, for she was tender-hearted, and prompt to relieve such suffering as she saw about her; but her imagination was not active, and it was easy for her to forget painful sights when they were not under her eye. This was perhaps—half-consciously—one of the reasons why she avoided Hanaford; why, as Amherst exclaimed, they had been everywhere since their marriage but to the place where their obligations called them. There had, at any rate, always been some good excuse for not returning there, and consequently for postponing the work of improvement which, it was generally felt, her husband could not fitly begin till she had returned and gone over the ground with him. After their marriage, and especially in view of the comment excited by that romantic incident, it was impossible not to yield to her wish that they should go abroad for a few months; then, before her confinement, the doctors had exacted that she should be spared all fatigue and worry; and after the baby’s death Amherst had felt with her too tenderly to venture an immediate return to unwelcome questions.

For by this time it had become clear to him that such questions were, and always would be, unwelcome to her. As the easiest means of escaping them, she had once more dismissed the whole problem to the vague and tiresome sphere of “business,” whence he had succeeded in detaching it for a moment in the early days of their union. Her first husband—poor unappreciated Westmore!—had always spared her the boredom of “business,” and Halford Gaines and Mr. Tredegar were ready to show her the same consideration; it was part of the modern code of chivalry that lovely woman should not be bothered about ways and means. But Bessy was too much the wife—and the wife in love—to consent that her husband’s views on the management of the mills should be totally disregarded. Precisely because her advisers looked unfavourably on his intervention, she felt bound—if only in defense of her illusions—to maintain and emphasize it. The mills were, in fact, the official “platform” on which she had married: Amherst’s devoted rôle at Westmore had justified the unconventionality of the step. And so she was committed—the more helplessly for her dense misintelligence of both sides of the question—to the policy of conciliating the opposing influences which had so uncomfortably chosen to fight out their case on the field of her poor little existence: theoretically siding with her husband, but surreptitiously, as he well knew, giving aid and comfort to the enemy, who were really defending her own cause.

All this Amherst saw with that cruel insight which had replaced his former blindness. He was, in truth, more ashamed of the insight than of the blindness: it seemed to him horribly cold-blooded to be thus analyzing, after two years of marriage, the source of his wife’s inconsistencies. And, partly for this reason, he had put off from month to month the final question of the future management of the mills, and of the radical changes to be made there if his system were to prevail. But the time had come when, if Bessy had to turn to Westmore for the justification of her marriage, he had even more need of calling upon it for the same service. He had not, assuredly, married her because of Westmore; but he would scarcely have contemplated marriage with a rich woman unless the source of her wealth had offered him some such opportunity as Westmore presented. His special training, and the natural bent of his mind, qualified him, in what had once seemed a predestined manner, to help Bessy to use her power nobly, for her own uplifting as well as for that of Westmore; and so the mills became, incongruously enough, the plank of safety to which both clung in their sense of impending disaster.

It was not that Amherst feared the temptation to idleness if this outlet for his activity were cut off. He had long since found that the luxury with which his wife surrounded him merely quickened his natural bent for hard work and hard fare. He recalled with a touch of bitterness how he had once regretted having separated himself from his mother’s class, and how seductive for a moment, to both mind and senses, that other life had appeared. Well—he knew it now, and it had neither charm nor peril for him. Capua must have been a dull place to one who had once drunk the joy of battle. What he dreaded was not that he should learn to love the life of ease, but that he should grow to loathe it uncontrollably, as the symbol of his mental and spiritual bondage. And Westmore was his safety-valve, his refuge—if he were cut off from Westmore what remained to him? It was not only the work he had found to his hand, but the one work for which his hand was fitted. It was his life that he was fighting for in insisting that now at last, before the close of this long-deferred visit to Hanaford, the question of the mills should be faced and settled. He had made that clear to Bessy, in a scene he still shrank from recalling; for it was of the essence of his somewhat unbending integrity that he would not trick her into a confused surrender to the personal influence he still possessed over her, but must seek to convince her by the tedious process of argument and exposition, against which she knew no defense but tears and petulance. But he had, at any rate, gained her consent to his setting forth his views at the meeting of directors the next morning; and meanwhile he had meant to be extraordinarily patient and reasonable with her, till the hint of Mrs. Ansell’s stratagem produced in him a fresh reaction of distrust. XII

THAT evening when dinner ended, Mrs. Ansell, with a glance through the tall dining-room windows, had suggested to Bessy that it would be pleasanter to take coffee on the verandah; but Amherst detained his wife with a glance.

“I should like Bessy to stay,” he said.

The dining-room being on the cool side the house, with a refreshing outlook on the garden, the men preferred to smoke there rather than in the stuffily-draped Oriental apartment destined to such rites; and Bessy Amherst, with a faint sigh, sank back into her seat, while Mrs. Ansell drifted out through one of the open windows.

The men surrounding Richard Westmore’s table were the same who nearly three years earlier had gathered in his house for the same purpose: the discussion of conditions at the mills. The only perceptible change in the relation to each other of the persons composing this group was that John Amherst was now the host of the other two, instead of being a subordinate called in for cross-examination; but he was so indifferent, or at least so heedless, a host—so forgetful, for instance, of Mr. Tredegar’s preference for a “light” cigar, and of Mr. Langhope’s feelings on the duty of making the Westmore madeira circulate with the sun—that the change was manifest only in his evening-dress, and in the fact of his sitting at the foot of the table.

If Amherst was conscious of the contrast thus implied, it was only as a restriction on his freedom. As far as the welfare of Westmore was concerned he would rather have stood before his companions as the assistant manager of the mills than as the husband of their owner; and it seemed to him, as he looked back, that he had done very little with the opportunity which looked so great in the light of his present restrictions. What he had done with it—the use to which, as unfriendly critics might insinuate, he had so adroitly put it—had landed him, ironically enough, in the ugly impasse of a situation from which no issue seemed possible without some wasteful sacrifice of feeling.

His wife’s feelings, for example, were already revealing themselves in an impatient play of her fan that made her father presently lean forward to suggest: “If we men are to talk shop, is it necessary to keep Bessy in this hot room?”

Amherst rose and opened the window behind his wife’s chair.

“There’s a breeze from the west—the room will be cooler now,” he said, returning to his seat.

“Oh, I don’t mind—” Bessy murmured, in a tone intended to give her companions the full measure of what she was being called on to endure.

Mr. Tredegar coughed slightly. “May I trouble you for that other box of cigars, Amherst? No, not the Cabañas.” Bessy rose and handed him the box on which his glance significantly rested. “Ah, thank you, my dear. I was about to ask,” he continued, looking about for the cigar-lighter, which flamed unheeded at Amherst’s elbow, “what special purpose will be served by a preliminary review of the questions to be discussed tomorrow.”

“Ah—exactly,” murmured Mr. Langhope. “The madeira, my dear John? No—ah—_please_—to the left!”

Amherst impatiently reversed the direction in which he had set the precious vessel moving, and turned to Mr. Tredegar, who was conspicuously lighting his cigar with a match extracted from his waist-coat pocket.

“The purpose is to define my position in the matter; and I prefer that Bessy should do this with your help rather than with mine.”

Mr. Tredegar surveyed his cigar through drooping lids, as though the question propounded by Amherst were perched on its tip.

“Is not your position naturally involved in and defined by hers? You will excuse my saying that—technically speaking, of course—I cannot distinctly conceive of it as having any separate existence.”

Mr. Tredegar spoke with the deliberate mildness that was regarded as his most effective weapon at the bar, since it was likely to abash those who were too intelligent to be propitiated by it.

“Certainly it is involved in hers,” Amherst agreed; “but how far that defines it is just what I have waited till now to find out.”

Bessy at this point recalled her presence by a restless turn of her graceful person, and her father, with an affectionate glance at her, interposed amicably: “But surely—according to old-fashioned ideas—it implies identity of interests?”

“Yes; but whose interests?” Amherst asked.

“Why—your wife’s, man! She owns the mills.”

Amherst hesitated. “I would rather talk of my wife’s interest in the mills than of her interests there; but we’ll keep to the plural if you prefer it. Personally, I believe the terms should be interchangeable in the conduct of such a business.”

“Ah—I’m glad to hear that,” said Mr. Tredegar quickly, “since it’s precisely the view we all take.”

Amherst’s colour rose. “Definitions are ambiguous,” he said. “Before you adopt mine, perhaps I had better develop it a little farther. What I mean is, that Bessy’s interests in Westmore should be regulated by her interest in it—in its welfare as a social body, aside from its success as a commercial enterprise. If we agree on this definition, we are at one as to the other: namely that my relation to the matter is defined by hers.”

He paused a moment, as if to give his wife time to contribute some sign of assent and encouragement; but she maintained a puzzled silence and he went on: “There is nothing new in this. I have tried to make Bessy understand from the beginning what obligations I thought the ownership of Westmore entailed, and how I hoped to help her fulfill them; but ever since our marriage all definite discussion of the subject has been put off for one cause or another, and that is my reason for urging that it should be brought up at the directors’ meeting tomorrow.”

There was another pause, during which Bessy glanced tentatively at Mr. Tredegar, and then said, with a lovely rise of colour: “But, John, I sometimes think you forget how much has been done at Westmore—the Mothers’ Club, and the playground, and all—in the way of carrying out your ideas.”

Mr. Tredegar discreetly dropped his glance to his cigar, and Mr. Langhope sounded an irrepressible note of approval and encouragement.

Amherst smiled. “No, I have not forgotten; and I am grateful to you for giving my ideas a trial. But what has been done hitherto is purely superficial.” Bessy’s eyes clouded, and he added hastily: “Don’t think I undervalue it for that reason—heaven knows the surface of life needs improving! But it’s like picking flowers and sticking them in the ground to make a garden—unless you transplant the flower with its roots, and prepare the soil to receive it, your garden will be faded tomorrow. No radical changes have yet been made at Westmore; and it is of radical changes that I want to speak.”

Bessy’s look grew more pained, and Mr. Langhope exclaimed with unwonted irascibility: “Upon my soul, Amherst, the tone you take about what your wife has done doesn’t strike me as the likeliest way of encouraging her to do more!”

“I don’t want to encourage her to do more on such a basis—the sooner she sees the futility of it the better for Westmore!”

“The futility—?” Bessy broke out, with a flutter of tears in her voice; but before her father could intervene Mr. Tredegar had raised his hand with the gesture of one accustomed to wield the gavel.

“My dear child, I see Amherst’s point, and it is best, as he says, that you should see it too. What he desires, as I understand it, is the complete reconstruction of the present state of things at Westmore; and he is right in saying that all your good works there—night-schools, and nursery, and so forth—leave that issue untouched.”

A smile quivered under Mr. Langhope’s moustache. He and Amherst both knew that Mr. Tredegar’s feint of recognizing the justice of his adversary’s claim was merely the first step to annihilating it; but Bessy could never be made to understand this, and always felt herself deserted and betrayed when any side but her own was given a hearing.

“I’m sorry if all I have tried to do at Westmore is useless—but I suppose I shall never understand business,” she murmured, vainly seeking consolation in her father’s eye.

“This is not business,” Amherst broke in. “It’s the question of your personal relation to the people there—the last thing that business considers.”

Mr. Langhope uttered an impatient exclamation. “I wish to heaven the owner of the mills had made it clear just what that relation was to be!”

“I think he did, sir,” Amherst answered steadily, “in leaving his wife the unrestricted control of the property.”

He had reddened under Mr. Langhope’s thrust, but his voice betrayed no irritation, and Bessy rewarded him with an unexpected beam of sympathy: she was always up in arms at the least sign of his being treated as an intruder.

“I am sure, papa,” she said, a little tremulously, “that poor Richard, though he knew I was not clever, felt he could trust me to take the best advice–-“

“Ah, that’s all we ask of you, my child!” her father sighed, while Mr. Tredegar drily interposed: “We are merely losing time by this digression. Let me suggest that Amherst should give us an idea of the changes he wishes to make at Westmore.”

Amherst, as he turned to answer, remembered with what ardent faith in his powers of persuasion he had responded to the same appeal three years earlier. He had thought then that all his cause needed was a hearing; now he knew that the practical man’s readiness to let the idealist talk corresponds with the busy parent’s permission to destructive infancy to “run out and play.” They would let him state his case to the four corners of the earth—if only he did not expect them to act on it! It was their policy to let him exhaust himself in argument and exhortation, to listen to him so politely and patiently that if he failed to enforce his ideas it should not be for lack of opportunity to expound them…. And the alternative struck him as hardly less to be feared. Supposing that the incredible happened, that his reasons prevailed with his wife, and, through her, with the others—at what cost would the victory be won? Would Bessy ever forgive him for winning it? And what would his situation be, if it left him in control of Westmore but estranged from his wife?

He recalled suddenly a phrase he had used that afternoon to the dark-eyed girl at the garden-party: “What risks we run when we scramble into the chariot of the gods!” And at the same instant he heard her retort, and saw her fine gesture of defiance. How could he ever have doubted that the thing was worth doing at whatever cost? Something in him—some secret lurking element of weakness and evasion—shrank out of sight in the light of her question: “Do you act on that?” and the “God forbid!” he had instantly flashed back to her. He turned to Mr. Tredegar with his answer.

Amherst knew that any large theoretical exposition of the case would be as much wasted on the two men as on his wife. To gain his point he must take only one step at a time, and it seemed to him that the first thing needed at Westmore was that the hands should work and live under healthier conditions. To attain this, two important changes were necessary: the floor-space of the mills must be enlarged, and the company must cease to rent out tenements, and give the operatives the opportunity to buy land for themselves. Both these changes involved the upheaval of the existing order. Whenever the Westmore mills had been enlarged, it had been for the sole purpose of increasing the revenues of the company; and now Amherst asked that these revenues should be materially and permanently reduced. As to the suppression of the company tenement, such a measure struck at the roots of the baneful paternalism which was choking out every germ of initiative in the workman. Once the operatives had room to work in, and the hope of homes of their own to go to when work was over, Amherst was willing to trust to time for the satisfaction of their other needs. He believed that a sounder understanding of these needs would develop on both sides the moment the employers proved their good faith by the deliberate and permanent sacrifice of excessive gain to the well-being of the employed; and once the two had learned to regard each other not as antagonists but as collaborators, a long step would have been taken toward a readjustment of the whole industrial relation. In regard to general and distant results, Amherst tried not to be too sanguine, even in his own thoughts. His aim was to remedy the abuse nearest at hand, in the hope of thus getting gradually closer to the central evil; and, had his action been unhampered, he would still have preferred the longer and more circuitous path of practical experiment to the sweeping adoption of a new industrial system.

But his demands, moderate as they were, assumed in his hearers the consciousness of a moral claim superior to the obligation of making one’s business “pay”; and it was the futility of this assumption that chilled the arguments on his lips, since in the orthodox creed of the business world it was a weakness and not a strength to be content with five per cent where ten was obtainable. Business was one thing, philanthropy another; and the enthusiasts who tried combining them were usually reduced, after a brief flight, to paying fifty cents on the dollar, and handing over their stock to a promoter presumably unhampered by humanitarian ideals.

Amherst knew that this was the answer with which his plea would be met; knew, moreover, that the plea was given a hearing simply because his judges deemed it so pitiably easy to refute. But the knowledge, once he had begun to speak, fanned his argument to a white heat of pleading, since, with failure so plainly ahead, small concessions and compromises were not worth making. Reason would be wasted on all; but eloquence might at least prevail with Bessy….

When, late that night, he went upstairs after long pacings of the garden, he was surprised to see a light in her room. She was not given to midnight study, and fearing that she might be ill he knocked at her door. There was no answer, and after a short pause he turned the handle and entered.

In the great canopied Westmore couch, her arms flung upward and her hands clasped beneath her head, she lay staring fretfully at the globe of electric light which hung from the centre of the embossed and gilded ceiling. Seen thus, with the soft curves of throat and arms revealed, and her face childishly set in a cloud of loosened hair, she looked no older than Cicely—and, like Cicely, inaccessible to grown-up arguments and the stronger logic of experience.

It was a trick of hers, in such moods, to ignore any attempt to attract her notice; and Amherst was prepared for her remaining motionless as he paused on the threshold and then advanced toward the middle of the room. There had been a time when he would have been exasperated by her pretense of not seeing him, but a deep weariness of spirit now dulled him to these surface pricks.

“I was afraid you were not well when I saw the light burning,” he began.

“Thank you—I am quite well,” she answered in a colourless voice, without turning her head.

“Shall I put it out, then? You can’t sleep with such a glare in your eyes.”

“I should not sleep at any rate; and I hate to lie awake in the dark.”

“Why shouldn’t you sleep?” He moved nearer, looking down compassionately on her perturbed face and struggling lips.

She lay silent a moment; then she faltered out: “B—because I’m so unhappy!”

The pretense of indifference was swept away by a gush of childish sobs as she flung over on her side and buried her face in the embroidered pillows.

Amherst, bending down, laid a quieting hand on her shoulder. “Bessy–-“

She sobbed on.

He seated himself silently in the armchair beside the bed, and kept his soothing hold on her shoulder. The time had come when he went through all these accustomed acts of pacification as mechanically as a nurse soothing a fretful child. And once he had thought her weeping eloquent! He looked about him at the spacious room, with its heavy hangings of damask and the thick velvet carpet which stifled his steps. Everywhere were the graceful tokens of her presence—the vast lace-draped toilet-table strewn with silver and crystal, the embroidered muslin cushions heaped on the lounge, the little rose-lined slippers she had just put off, the lace wrapper, with a scent of violets in its folds, which he had pushed aside when he sat down beside her; and he remembered how full of a mysterious and intimate charm these things had once appeared to him. It was characteristic that the remembrance made him more patient with her now. Perhaps, after all, it was his failure that she was crying over….

“Don’t be unhappy. You decided as seemed best to you,” he said.

She pressed her handkerchief against her lips, still keeping her head averted. “But I hate all these arguments and disputes. Why should you unsettle everything?” she murmured.

His mother’s words! Involuntarily he removed his hand from her shoulder, though he still remained seated by the bed.

“You are right. I see the uselessness of it,” he assented, with an uncontrollable note of irony.

She turned her head at the tone, and fixed her plaintive brimming eyes on him. “You are angry with me!”

“Was that troubling you?” He leaned forward again, with compassion in his face. Sancta simplicitas! was the thought within him.

“I am not angry,” he went on; “be reasonable and try to sleep.”

She started upright, the light masses of her hair floating about her like silken sea-weed lifted on an invisible tide. “Don’t talk like that! I can’t endure to be humoured like a baby. I am unhappy because I can’t see why all these wretched questions should be dragged into our life. I hate to have you always disagreeing with Mr. Tredegar, who is so clever and has so much experience; and yet I hate to see you give way to him, because that makes it appear as if…as if….”

“He didn’t care a straw for my ideas?” Amherst smiled. “Well, he doesn’t—and I never dreamed of making him. So don’t worry about that either.”

“You never dreamed of making him care for your ideas? But then why do you–-“

“Why do I go on setting them forth at such great length?” Amherst smiled again. “To convince you—that’s my only ambition.”

She stared at him, shaking her head back to toss a loose lock from her puzzled eyes. A tear still shone on her lashes, but with the motion it fell and trembled down her cheek.

“To convince me? But you know I am so ignorant of such things.”

“Most women are.”

“I never pretended to understand anything about—economics, or whatever you call it.”

“No.”

“Then how–-“

He turned and looked at her gently. “I thought you might have begun to understand something about me.”

“About you?” The colour flowered softly under her clear skin.

“About what my ideas on such subjects were likely to be worth—judging from what you know of me in other respects.” He paused and glanced away from her. “Well,” he concluded deliberately, “I suppose I’ve had my answer tonight.”

“Oh, John–-!”

He rose and wandered across the room, pausing a moment to finger absently the trinkets on the dressing-table. The act recalled with a curious vividness certain dulled sensations of their first days together, when to handle and examine these frail little accessories of her toilet had been part of the wonder and amusement of his new existence. He could still hear her laugh as she leaned over him, watching his mystified look in the glass, till their reflected eyes met there and drew down her lips to his. He laid down the fragrant powder-puff he had been turning slowly between his fingers, and moved back toward the bed. In the interval he had reached a decision.

“Well—isn’t it natural that I should think so?” he began again, as he stood beside her. “When we married I never expected you to care or know much about economics. It isn’t a quality a man usually chooses his wife for. But I had a fancy—perhaps it shows my conceit—that when we had lived together a year or two, and you’d found out what kind of a fellow I was in other ways—ways any woman can judge of—I had a fancy that you might take my opinions on faith when it came to my own special business—the thing I’m generally supposed to know about.”

He knew that he was touching a sensitive chord, for Bessy had to the full her sex’s pride of possessorship. He was human and faulty till others criticized him—then he became a god. But in this case a conflicting influence restrained her from complete response to his appeal.

“I do feel sure you know—about the treatment of the hands and all that; but you said yourself once—the first time we ever talked about Westmore—that the business part was different–-“

Here it was again, the ancient ineradicable belief in the separable body and soul! Even an industrial organization was supposed to be subject to the old theological distinction, and Bessy was ready to co-operate with her husband in the emancipation of Westmore’s spiritual part if only its body remained under the law.

Amherst controlled his impatience, as it was always easy for him to do when he had fixed on a definite line of conduct.

“It was my situation that was different; not what you call the business part. That is inextricably bound up with the treatment of the hands. If I am to have anything to do with the mills now I can deal with them only as your representative; and as such I am bound to take in the whole question.”

Bessy’s face clouded: was he going into it all again? But he read her look and went on reassuringly: “That was what I meant by saying that I hoped you would take me on faith. If I want the welfare of Westmore it’s above all, I believe, because I want Westmore to see you as I do—as the dispenser of happiness, who could not endure to benefit by any wrong or injustice to others.”

“Of course, of course I don’t want to do them injustice!”

“Well, then–-“

He had seated himself beside her again, clasping in his the hand with which she was fretting the lace-edged sheet. He felt her restless fingers surrender slowly, and her eyes turned to him in appeal.

“But I care for what people say of you too! And you know—it’s horrid, but one must consider it—if they say you’re spending my money imprudently….” The blood rose to her neck and face. “I don’t mind for myself…even if I have to give up as many things as papa and Mr. Tredegar think…but there is Cicely…and if people said….”

“If people said I was spending Cicely’s money on improving the condition of the people to whose work she will some day owe all her wealth—” Amherst paused: “Well, I would rather hear that said of me than any other thing I can think of, except one.”

“Except what?”

“That I was doing it with her mother’s help and approval.”

She drew a long tremulous sigh: he knew it was always a relief to her to have him assert himself strongly. But a residue of resistance still clouded her mind.

“I should always want to help you, of course; but if Mr. Tredegar and Halford Gaines think your plan unbusinesslike–-“

“Mr. Tredegar and Halford Gaines are certain to think it so. And that is why I said, just now, that it comes, in the end, to your choosing between us; taking them on experience or taking me on faith.”

She looked at him wistfully. “Of course I should expect to give up things…. You wouldn’t want me to live here?”

“I should not ask you to,” he said, half-smiling.

“I suppose there would be a good many things we couldn’t do–-“

“You would certainly have less money for a number of years; after that, I believe you would have more rather than less; but I should not want you to think that, beyond a reasonable point, the prosperity of the mills was ever to be measured by your dividends.”

“No.” She leaned back wearily among the pillows. “I suppose, for instance, we should have to give up Europe this summer–-?”

Here at last was the bottom of her thought! It was always on the immediate pleasure that her soul hung: she had not enough imagination to look beyond, even in the projecting of her own desires. And it was on his knowledge of this limitation that Amherst had deliberately built.

“I don’t see how you could go to Europe,” he said.

“The doctor thinks I need it,” she faltered.

“In that case, of course—” He stood up, not abruptly, or with any show of irritation, but as if accepting this as her final answer. “What you need most, in the meantime, is a little sleep,” he said. “I will tell your maid not to disturb you in the morning.” He had returned to his soothing way of speech, as though definitely resigned to the inutility of farther argument. “And I will say goodbye now,” he continued, “because I shall probably take an early train, before you wake–-“

She sat up with a start. “An early train? Why, where are you going?”

“I must go to Chicago some time this month, and as I shall not be wanted here tomorrow I might as well run out there at once, and join you next week at Lynbrook.”

Bessy had grown pale. “But I don’t understand–-“

Their eyes met. “Can’t you understand that I am human enough to prefer, under the circumstances, not being present at tomorrow’s meeting?” he said with a dry laugh.

She sank back with a moan of discouragement, turning her face away as he began to move toward his room.

“Shall I put the light out?” he asked, pausing with his hand on the electric button.

“Yes, please.”

He pushed in the button and walked on, guided through the obscurity by the line of light under his door. As he reached the threshold he heard a little choking cry.

“John—oh, John!”

He paused.

“I can’t bear it!” The sobs increased.

“Bear what?”

“That you should hate me–-“

“Don’t be foolish,” he said, groping for his door-handle.

“But you do hate me—and I deserve it!”

“Nonsense, dear. Try to sleep.”

“I can’t sleep till you’ve forgiven me. Say you don’t hate me! I’ll do anything…only say you don’t hate me!”

He stood still a moment, thinking; then he turned back, and made his way across the room to her side. As he sat down beside her, he felt her arms reach for his neck and her wet face press itself against his cheek.

“I’ll do anything…” she sobbed; and in the darkness he held her to him and hated his victory.

XIII

MRS. ANSELL was engaged in what she called picking up threads. She had been abroad for the summer—had, in, fact, transferred herself but a few hours earlier from her returning steamer to the little station at Lynbrook—and was now, in the bright September afternoon, which left her in sole possession of the terrace of Lynbrook House, using that pleasant eminence as a point of observation from which to gather up some of the loose ends of history dropped at her departure.

It might have been thought that the actual scene outspread below her—the descending gardens, the tennis-courts, the farm-lands sloping away to the blue sea-like shimmer of the Hempstead plains—offered, at the moment, little material for her purpose; but that was to view them with a superficial eye. Mrs. Ansell’s trained gaze was, for example, greatly enlightened by the fact that the tennis-courts were fringed by a group of people indolently watchful of the figures agitating themselves about the nets; and that, as she turned her head toward the entrance avenue, the receding view of a station omnibus, followed by a luggage-cart, announced that more guests were to be added to those who had almost taxed to its limits the expansibility of the luncheon-table.

All this, to the initiated eye, was full of suggestion; but its significance was as nothing to that presented by the approach of two figures which, as Mrs. Ansell watched, detached themselves from the cluster about the tennis-ground and struck, obliquely and at a desultory pace, across the lawn toward the terrace. The figures—those of a slight young man with stooping shoulders, and of a lady equally youthful but slenderly erect—moved forward in absorbed communion, as if unconscious of their surroundings and indefinite as to their direction, till, on the brink of the wide grass terrace just below their observer’s parapet, they paused a moment and faced each other in closer speech. This interchange of words, though brief in measure of time, lasted long enough to add a vivid strand to Mrs. Ansell’s thickening skein; then, on a gesture of the lady’s, and without signs of formal leave-taking, the young man struck into a path which regained the entrance avenue, while his companion, quickening her pace, crossed the grass terrace and mounted the wide stone steps sweeping up to the house.

These brought her out on the upper terrace a few yards from Mrs. Ansell’s post, and exposed her, unprepared, to the full beam of welcome which that lady’s rapid advance threw like a searchlight across her path.

“Dear Miss Brent! I was just wondering how it was that I hadn’t seen you before.” Mrs. Ansell, as she spoke, drew the girl’s hand into a long soft clasp which served to keep them confronted while she delicately groped for whatever thread the encounter seemed to proffer.

Justine made no attempt to evade the scrutiny to which she found herself exposed; she merely released her hand by a movement instinctively evasive of the mechanical endearment, explaining, with a smile that softened the gesture: “I was out with Cicely when you arrived. We’ve just come in.”

“The dear child! I haven’t seen her either.” Mrs. Ansell continued to bestow upon the speaker’s clear dark face an intensity of attention in which, for the moment, Cicely had no perceptible share. “I hear you are teaching her botany, and all kinds of wonderful things.”

Justine smiled again. “I am trying to teach her to wonder: that is the hardest faculty to cultivate in the modern child.”

“Yes—I suppose so; in myself,” Mrs. Ansell admitted with a responsive brightness, “I find it develops with age. The world is a remarkable place.” She threw this off absently, as though leaving Miss Brent to apply it either to the inorganic phenomena with which Cicely was supposed to be occupied, or to those subtler manifestations that engaged her own attention.

“It’s a great thing,” she continued, “for Bessy to have had your help—for Cicely, and for herself too. There is so much that I want you to tell me about her. As an old friend I want the benefit of your fresher eye.”

“About Bessy?” Justine hesitated, letting her glance drift to the distant group still anchored about the tennis-nets. “Don’t you find her looking better?”

“Than when I left? So much so that I was unduly disturbed, just now, by seeing that clever little doctor—it was he, wasn’t it, who came up the lawn with you?”

“Dr. Wyant? Yes.” Miss Brent hesitated again. “But he merely called—with a message.”

“Not professionally? Tant mieux! The truth is, I was anxious about Bessy when I left—I thought she ought to have gone abroad for a change. But, as it turns out, her little excursion with you did as well.”

“I think she only needed rest. Perhaps her six weeks in the Adirondacks were better than Europe.”

“Ah, under your care—that made them better!” Mrs. Ansell in turn hesitated, the lines of her face melting and changing as if a rapid stage-hand had shifted them. When she spoke again they were as open as a public square, but also as destitute of personal significance, as flat and smooth as the painted drop before the real scene it hides.

“I have always thought that Bessy, for all her health and activity, needs as much care as Cicely—the kind of care a clever friend can give. She is so wasteful of her strength and her nerves, and so unwilling to listen to reason. Poor Dick Westmore watched over her as if she were a baby; but perhaps Mr. Amherst, who must have been used to such a different type of woman, doesn’t realize…and then he’s so little here….” The drop was lit up by a smile that seemed to make it more impenetrable. “As an old friend I can’t help telling you how much I hope she is to have you with her for a long time—a long, long time.”

Miss Brent bent her head in slight acknowledgment of the tribute. “Oh, soon she will not need any care–-“

“My dear Miss Brent, she will always need it!” Mrs. Ansell made a movement inviting the young girl to share the bench from which, at the latter’s approach, she had risen. “But perhaps there is not enough in such a life to satisfy your professional energies.”

She seated herself, and after an imperceptible pause Justine sank into the seat beside her. “I am very glad, just now, to give my energies a holiday,” she said, leaning back with a little sigh of retrospective weariness.

“You are tired too? Bessy wrote me you had been quite used up by a trying case after we saw you at Hanaford.”

Miss Brent smiled. “When a nurse is fit for work she calls a trying case a ‘beautiful’ one.”

“But meanwhile—?” Mrs. Ansell shone on her with elder-sisterly solicitude. “Meanwhile, why not stay on with Cicely—above all, with Bessy? Surely she’s a ‘beautiful’ case too.”

“Isn’t she?” Justine laughingly agreed.

“And if you want to be tried—” Mrs. Ansell swept the scene with a slight lift of her philosophic shoulders—“you’ll find there are trials enough everywhere.”

Her companion started up with a glance at the small watch on her breast. “One of them is that it’s already after four, and that I must see that tea is sent down to the tennis-ground, and the new arrivals looked after.”

“I saw the omnibus on its way to the station. Are many more people coming?”

“Five or six, I believe. The house is usually full for Sunday.”

Mrs. Ansell made a slight motion to detain her. “And when is Mr. Amherst expected?”

Miss Brent’s pale cheek seemed to take on a darker tone of ivory, and her glance dropped from her companion’s face to the vivid stretch of gardens at their feet. “Bessy has not told me,” she said.

“Ah—” the older woman rejoined, looking also toward the gardens, as if to intercept Miss Brent’s glance in its flight. The latter stood still a moment, with the appearance of not wishing to evade whatever else her companion might have to say; then she moved away, entering the house by one window just as Mr. Langhope emerged from it by another.

The sound of his stick tapping across the bricks roused Mrs. Ansell from her musings, but she showed her sense of his presence simply by returning to the bench she had just left; and accepting this mute invitation, Mr. Langhope crossed the terrace and seated himself at her side.

When he had done so they continued to look at each other without speaking, after the manner of old friends possessed of occult means of communication; and as the result of this inward colloquy Mr. Langhope at length said: “Well, what do you make of it?”

“What do you?” she rejoined, turning full upon him a face so released from its usual defences and disguises that it looked at once older and more simple than the countenance she presented to the world.

Mr. Langhope waved a deprecating hand. “I want your fresher impressions.”

“That’s what I just now said to Miss Brent.”

“You’ve been talking to Miss Brent?”

“Only a flying word—she had to go and look after the new arrivals.”

Mr. Langhope’s attention deepened. “Well, what did you say to her?”

“Wouldn’t you rather hear what she said to me?”

He smiled. “A good cross-examiner always gets the answers he wants. Let me hear your side, and I shall know hers.”

“I should say that applied only to stupid cross-examiners; or to those who have stupid subjects to deal with. And Miss Brent is not stupid, you know.”

“Far from it! What else do you make out?”

“I make out that she’s in possession.”

“Here?”

“Don’t look startled. Do you dislike her?”

“Heaven forbid—with those eyes! She has a wit of her own, too—and she certainly makes things easier for Bessy.”

“She guards her carefully, at any rate. I could find out nothing.”

“About Bessy?”

“About the general situation.”

“Including Miss Brent?”

Mrs. Ansell smiled faintly. “I made one little discovery about her.”

“Well?”

“She’s intimate with the new doctor.”

“Wyant?” Mr. Langhope’s interest dropped. “What of that? I believe she knew him before.”

“I daresay. It’s of no special importance, except as giving us a possible clue to her character. She strikes me as interesting and mysterious.”

Mr. Langhope smiled. “The things your imagination does for you!”

“It helps me to see that we may find Miss Brent useful as a friend.”

“A friend?”

“An ally.” She paused, as if searching for a word. “She may restore the equilibrium.”

Mr. Langhope’s handsome face darkened. “Open Bessy’s eyes to Amherst? Damn him!” he said quietly.

Mrs. Ansell let the imprecation pass. “When was he last here?” she asked.

“Five or six weeks ago—for one night. His only visit since she came back from the Adirondacks.”

“What do you think his motive is? He must know what he risks in losing his hold on Bessy.”

“His motive? With your eye for them, can you ask? A devouring ambition, that’s all! Haven’t you noticed that, in all except the biggest minds, ambition takes the form of wanting to command where one has had to obey? Amherst has been made to toe the line at Westmore, and now he wants Truscomb—yes, and Halford Gaines, too!—to do the same. That’s the secret of his servant-of-the-people pose—gad, I believe it’s the whole secret of his marriage! He’s devouring my daughter’s substance to pay off an old score against the mills. He’ll never rest till he has Truscomb out, and some creature of his own in command—and then, vogue la galère! If it were women, now,” Mr. Langhope summed up impatiently, “one could understand it, at his age, and with that damned romantic head—but to be put aside for a lot of low mongrelly socialist mill-hands—ah, my poor girl—my poor girl!”

Mrs. Ansell mused. “You didn’t write me that things were so bad. There’s been no actual quarrel?” she asked.

“How can there be, when the poor child does all he wants? He’s simply too busy to come and thank her!”

“Too busy at Hanaford?”

“So he says. Introducing the golden age at Westmore—it’s likely to be the age of copper at Lynbrook.”

Mrs. Ansell drew a meditative breath. “I was thinking of that. I understood that Bessy would have to retrench while the changes at Westmore were going on.”

“Well—didn’t she give up Europe, and cable over to countermand her new motor?”

“But the life here! This mob of people! Miss Brent tells me the house is full for every week-end.”

“Would you have my daughter cut off from all her friends?”

Mrs. Ansell met this promptly. “From some of the new ones, at any rate! Have you heard who has just arrived?”

Mr. Langhope’s hesitation showed a tinge of embarrassment. “I’m not sure—some one has always just arrived.”

“Well, the Fenton Carburys, then!” Mrs. Ansell left it to her tone to annotate the announcement.

Mr. Langhope raised his eyebrows slightly. “Are they likely to be an exceptionally costly pleasure?”

“If you’re trying to prove that I haven’t kept to the point—I can assure you that I’m well within it!”

“But since the good Blanche has got her divorce and married Carbury, wherein do they differ from other week-end automata?”

“Because most divorced women marry again to be respectable.”

Mr. Langhope smiled faintly. “Yes—that’s their punishment. But it would be too dull for Blanche.”

“Precisely. She married again to see Ned Bowfort!”

“Ah—that may yet be hers!”

Mrs. Ansell sighed at his perversity. “Meanwhile, she’s brought him here, and it is unnatural to see Bessy lending herself to such combinations.”

“You’re corrupted by a glimpse of the old societies. Here Bowfort and Carbury are simply hands at bridge.”

“Old hands at it—yes! And the bridge is another point: Bessy never used to play for money.”

“Well, she may make something, and offset her husband’s prodigalities.”

“There again—with this train de vie, how on earth are both ends to meet?”

Mr. Langhope grown suddenly grave, struck his cane resoundingly on the terrace. “Westmore and Lynbrook? I don’t want them to—I want them to get farther and farther apart!”

She cast on him a look of startled divination. “You want Bessy to go on spending too much money?”

“How can I help it if it costs?”

“If what costs—?” She stopped, her eyes still wide; then their glances crossed, and she exclaimed: “If your scheme costs? It is your scheme, then?”

He shrugged his shoulders again. “It’s a passive attitude–-“

“Ah, the deepest plans are that!” Mr. Langhope uttered no protest, and she continued to piece her conjectures together. “But you expect it to lead up to something active. Do you want a rupture?”

“I want him brought back to his senses.”

“Do you think that will bring him back to her?”

“Where the devil else will he have to go?”

Mrs. Ansell’s eyes dropped toward the gardens, across which desultory knots of people were straggling back from the ended tennis-match. “Ah, here they all come,” she said, rising with a half-sigh; and as she stood watching the advance of the brightly-tinted groups she added slowly: “It’s ingenious—but you don’t understand him.”

Mr. Langhope stroked his moustache. “Perhaps not,” he assented thoughtfully. “But suppose we go in before they join us? I want to show you a set of Ming I picked up the other day for Bessy. I flatter myself I do understand Ming.”

XIV

JUSTINE BRENT, her household duties discharged, had gone upstairs to her room, a little turret chamber projecting above the wide terrace below, from which the sounds of lively intercourse now rose increasingly to her window.

Bessy, she knew, would have preferred to have her remain with the party from whom these evidences of gaiety proceeded. Mrs. Amherst had grown to depend on her friend’s nearness. She liked to feel that Justine’s quick hand and eye were always in waiting on her impulses, prompt to interpret and execute them without any exertion of her own. Bessy combined great zeal in the pursuit of sport—a tireless passion for the saddle, the golf-course, the tennis-court—with an almost oriental inertia within doors, an indolence of body and brain that made her shrink from the active obligations of hospitality, though she had grown to depend more and more on the distractions of a crowded house.

But Justine, though grateful, and anxious to show her gratitude, was unwilling to add to her other duties that of joining in the amusements of the house-party. She made no pretense of effacing herself when she thought her presence might be useful—but, even if she had cared for the diversions in favour at Lynbrook, a certain unavowed pride would have kept her from participating in them on the same footing with Bessy’s guests. She was not in the least ashamed of her position in the household, but she chose that every one else should be aware of it, that she should not for an instant be taken for one of the nomadic damsels who form the camp-followers of the great army of pleasure. Yet even on this point her sensitiveness was not exaggerated. Adversity has a deft hand at gathering loose strands of impulse into character, and Justine’s early contact with different phases of experience had given her a fairly clear view of life in the round, what might be called a sound working topography of its relative heights and depths. She was not seriously afraid of being taken for anything but what she really was, and still less did she fear to become, by force of propinquity and suggestion, the kind of being for whom she might be temporarily taken.

When, at Bessy’s summons, she had joined the latter at her camp in the Adirondacks, the transition from a fatiguing “case” at Hanaford to a life in which sylvan freedom was artfully blent with the most studied personal luxury, had come as a delicious refreshment to body and brain. She was weary, for the moment, of ugliness, pain and hard work, and life seemed to recover its meaning under the aspect of a graceful leisure. Lynbrook also, whither she had been persuaded to go with Bessy at the end of their woodland cure, had at first amused and interested her. The big house on its spreading terraces, with windows looking over bright gardens to the hazy distances of the plains, seemed a haven of harmless ease and gaiety. Justine was sensitive to the finer graces of luxurious living, to the warm lights on old pictures and bronzes, the soft mingling of tints in faded rugs and panellings of time-warmed oak. And the existence to which this background formed a setting seemed at first to have the same decorative qualities. It was pleasant, for once, to be among people whose chief business was to look well and take life lightly, and Justine’s own buoyancy of nature won her immediate access among the amiable persons who peopled Bessy’s week-end parties. If they had only abounded a little more in their own line she might have succumbed to their spell. But it seemed to her that they missed the poetry of their situation, transacting their pleasures with the dreary method and shortness of view of a race tethered to the ledger. Even the verbal flexibility which had made her feel that she was in a world of freer ideas, soon revealed itself as a form of flight from them, in which the race was distinctly to the swift; and Justine’s phase of passive enjoyment passed with the return of her physical and mental activity. She was a creature tingling with energy, a little fleeting particle of the power that moves the sun and the other stars, and the deadening influences of the life at Lynbrook roused these tendencies to greater intensity, as a suffocated person will suddenly develop abnormal strength in the struggle for air.

She did not, indeed, regret having come. She was glad to be with Bessy, partly because of the childish friendship which had left such deep traces in her lonely heart, and partly because what she had seen of her friend’s situation stirred in her all the impulses of sympathy and service; but the idea of continuing in such a life, of sinking into any of the positions of semi-dependence that an adroit and handsome girl may create for herself in a fashionable woman’s train—this possibility never presented itself to Justine till Mrs. Ansell, that afternoon, had put it into words. And to hear it was to revolt from it with all the strength of her inmost nature. The thought of the future troubled her, not so much materially—for she had a light bird-like trust in the morrow’s fare—but because her own tendencies seemed to have grown less clear, because she could not rest in them for guidance as she had once done. The renewal of bodily activity had not brought back her faith in her calling: her work had lost the light of consecration. She no longer felt herself predestined to nurse the sick for the rest of her life, and in her inexperience she reproached herself with this instability. Youth and womanhood were in fact crying out in her for their individual satisfaction; but instincts as deep-seated protected her from even a momentary illusion as to the nature of this demand. She wanted happiness, and a life of her own, as passionately as young flesh-and-blood had ever wanted them; but they must come bathed in the light of imagination and penetrated by the sense of larger affinities. She could not conceive of shutting herself into a little citadel of personal well-being while the great tides of existence rolled on unheeded outside. Whether they swept treasure to her feet, or strewed her life with wreckage, she felt, even now; that her place was there, on the banks, in sound and sight of the great current; and just in proportion as the scheme of life at Lynbrook succeeded in shutting out all sense of that vaster human consciousness, so did its voice speak more thrillingly within her.

Somewhere, she felt—but, alas! still out of reach—was the life she longed for, a life in which high chances of doing should be mated with the finer forms of enjoying. But what title had she to a share in such an existence? Why, none but her sense of what it was worth—and what did that count for, in a world which used all its resources to barricade itself against all its opportunities? She knew there were girls who sought, by what is called a “good” marriage, an escape into the outer world, of doing and thinking—utilizing an empty brain and full pocket as the key to these envied fields. Some such chance the life at Lynbrook seemed likely enough to offer—one is not, at Justine’s age and with her penetration, any more blind to the poise of one’s head than to the turn of one’s ideas; but here the subtler obstacles of taste and pride intervened. Not even Bessy’s transparent manœuvrings, her tender solicitude for her friend’s happiness, could for a moment weaken Justine’s resistance. If she must marry without love—and this was growing conceivable to her—she must at least merge her craving for personal happiness in some view of life in harmony with hers.

A tap on her door interrupted these musings, to one aspect of which Bessy Amherst’s entrance seemed suddenly to give visible expression.

“Why did you run off, Justine? You promised to be downstairs when I came back from tennis.”

“Till you came back—wasn’t it, dear?” Justine corrected with a smile, pushing her armchair forward as Bessy continued to linger irresolutely in the doorway. “I saw that there was a fresh supply of tea in the drawing-room, and I knew you would be there before the omnibus came from the station.”

“Oh, I was there—but everybody was asking for you–-“

“Everybody?” Justine gave a mocking lift to her dark eyebrows.

“Well—Westy Gaines, at any rate; the moment he set foot in the house!” Bessy declared with a laugh as she dropped into the armchair.

Justine echoed the laugh, but offered no comment on the statement which accompanied it, and for a moment both women were silent, Bessy tilting her pretty discontented head against the back of the chair, so that her eyes were on a level with those of her friend, who leaned near her in the embrasure of the window.

“I can’t understand you, Justine. You know well enough what he’s come back for.”

“In order to dazzle Hanaford with the fact that he has been staying at Lynbrook!”

“Nonsense—the novelty of that has worn off. He’s been here three times since we came back.”

“You are admirably hospitable to your family–-“

Bessy let her pretty ringed hands fall with a discouraged gesture. “Why do you find him so much worse than—than other people?”

Justine’s eyebrows rose again. “In the same capacity? You speak as if I had boundless opportunities of comparison.”

“Well, you’ve Dr. Wyant!” Mrs. Amherst suddenly flung back at her.

Justine coloured under the unexpected thrust, but met her friend’s eyes steadily. “As an alternative to Westy? Well, if I were on a desert island—but I’m not!” she concluded with a careless laugh.

Bessy frowned and sighed. “You can’t mean that, of the two—?” She paused and then went on doubtfully: “It’s because he’s cleverer?”

“Dr. Wyant?” Justine smiled. “It’s not making an enormous claim for him!”

“Oh, I know Westy’s not brilliant; but stupid men are not always the hardest to live with.” She sighed again, and turned on Justine a glance charged with conjugal experience.

Justine had sunk into the window-seat, her thin hands clasping her knee, in the attitude habitual to her meditative moments. “Perhaps not,” she assented; “but I don’t know that I should care for a man who made life easy; I should want some one who made it interesting.”

Bessy met this with a pitying exclamation. “Don’t imagine you invented that! Every girl thinks it. Afterwards she finds out that it’s much pleasanter to be thought interesting herself.”

She spoke with a bitterness that issued strangely from her lips. It was this bitterness which gave her soft personality the sharp edge that Justine had felt in it on the day of their meeting at Hanaford.

The girl, at first, had tried to defend herself from these scarcely-veiled confidences, distasteful enough in themselves, and placing her, if she listened, in an attitude of implied disloyalty to the man under whose roof they were spoken. But a precocious experience of life had taught her that emotions too strong for the nature containing them turn, by some law of spiritual chemistry, into a rankling poison; and she had therefore resigned herself to serving as a kind of outlet for Bessy’s pent-up discontent. It was not that her friend’s grievance appealed to her personal sympathies; she had learned enough of the situation to give her moral assent unreservedly to the other side. But it was characteristic of Justine that where she sympathized least she sometimes pitied most. Like all quick spirits she was often intolerant of dulness; yet when the intolerance passed it left a residue of compassion for the very incapacity at which she chafed. It seemed to her that the tragic crises in wedded life usually turned on the stupidity of one of the two concerned; and of the two victims of such a catastrophe she felt most for the one whose limitations had probably brought it about. After all, there could be no imprisonment as cruel as that of being bounded by a hard small nature. Not to be penetrable at all points to the shifting lights, the wandering music of the world—she could imagine no physical disability as cramping as that. How the little parched soul, in solitary confinement for life, must pine and dwindle in its blind cranny of self-love!

To be one’s self wide open to the currents of life does not always contribute to an understanding of narrower natures; but in Justine the personal emotions were enriched and deepened by a sense of participation in all that the world about her was doing, suffering and enjoying; and this sense found expression in the instinct of ministry and solace. She was by nature a redresser, a restorer; and in her work, as she had once told Amherst, the longing to help and direct, to hasten on by personal intervention time’s slow and clumsy processes, had often been in conflict with the restrictions imposed by her profession. But she had no idle desire to probe the depths of other lives; and where there seemed no hope of serving she shrank from fruitless confidences. She was beginning to feel this to be the case with Bessy Amherst. To touch the rock was not enough, if there were but a few drops within it; yet in this barrenness lay the pathos of the situation—and after all, may not the scanty spring be fed from a fuller current?

“I’m not sure about that,” she said, answering her friend’s last words after a deep pause of deliberation. “I mean about its being so pleasant to be found interesting. I’m sure the passive part is always the dull one: life has been a great deal more thrilling since we found out that we revolved about the sun, instead of sitting still and fancying that all the planets were dancing attendance on us. After all, they were not; and it’s rather humiliating to think how the morning stars must have laughed together about it!”

There was no self-complacency in Justine’s eagerness to help. It was far easier for her to express it in action than in counsel, to grope for the path with her friend than to point the way to it; and when she had to speak she took refuge in figures to escape the pedantry of appearing to advise. But it was not only to Mrs. Dressel that her parables were dark, and the blank look in Bessy’s eyes soon snatched her down from the height of metaphor.

“I mean,” she continued with a smile, “that, as human nature is constituted, it has got to find its real self—the self to be interested in—outside of what we conventionally call ‘self’: the particular Justine or Bessy who is clamouring for her particular morsel of life. You see, self isn’t a thing one can keep in a box—bits of it keep escaping, and flying off to lodge in all sorts of unexpected crannies; we come across scraps of ourselves in the most unlikely places—as I believe you would in Westmore, if you’d only go back there and look for them!”

Bessy’s lip trembled and the colour sprang to her face; but she answered with a flash of irritation: “Why doesn’t he look for me there, then—if he still wants to find me?”

“Ah—it’s for him to look here—to find himself here,” Justine murmured.

“Well, he never comes here! That’s his answer.”

“He will—he will! Only, when he does, let him find you.”

“Find me? I don’t understand. How can he, when he never sees me? I’m no more to him than the carpet on the floor!”

Justine smiled again. “Well—be that then! The thing is to be.”

“Under his feet? Thank you! Is that what you mean to marry for? It’s not what husbands admire in one, you know!”

“No.” Justine stood up with a sense of stealing discouragement. “But I don’t think I want to be admired–-“

“Ah, that’s because you know you are!” broke from the depths of the other’s bitterness.

The tone smote Justine, and she dropped into the seat at her friend’s side, silently laying a hand on Bessy’s feverishly-clasped fingers.

“Oh, don’t let us talk about me,” complained the latter, from whose lips the subject was never long absent. “And you mustn’t think I want you to marry, Justine; not for myself, I mean—I’d so much rather keep you here. I feel much less lonely when you’re with me. But you say you won’t stay—and it’s too dreadful to think of your going back to that dreary hospital.”

“But you know the hospital’s not dreary to me,” Justine interposed; “it’s the most interesting place I’ve ever known.”

Mrs. Amherst smiled indulgently on this extravagance. “A great many people go through the craze for philanthropy—” she began in the tone of mature experience; but Justine interrupted her with a laugh.

“Philanthropy? I’m not philanthropic. I don’t think I ever felt inclined to do good in the abstract—any more than to do ill! I can’t remember that I ever planned out a course of conduct in my life. It’s only,” she went on, with a puzzled frown, as if honestly trying to analyze her motives, “it’s only that I’m so fatally interested in people that before I know it I’ve slipped into their skins; and then, of course, if anything goes wrong with them, it’s just as if it had gone wrong with me; and I can’t help trying to rescue myself from their troubles! I suppose it’s what you’d call meddling—and so should I, if I could only remember that the other people were not myself!”

Bessy received this with the mild tolerance of superior wisdom. Once safe on the tried ground of traditional authority, she always felt herself Justine’s superior. “That’s all very well now—you see the romantic side of it,” she said, as if humouring her friend’s vagaries. “But in time you’ll want something else; you’ll want a husband and children—a life of your own. And then you’ll have to be more practical. It’s ridiculous to pretend that comfort and money don’t make a difference. And if you married a rich man, just think what a lot of good you could do! Westy will be very well off—and I’m sure he’d let you endow hospitals and things. Think how interesting it would be to build a ward in the very hospital where you’d been a nurse! I read something like that in a novel the other day—it was beautifully described. All the nurses and doctors that the heroine had worked with were there to receive her…and her little boy went about and gave toys to the crippled children….”

If the speaker’s concluding instance hardly produced the effect she had intended, it was perhaps only because Justine’s attention had been arrested by the earlier part of the argument. It was strange to have marriage urged on her by a woman who had twice failed to find happiness in it—strange, and yet how vivid a sign that, even to a nature absorbed in its personal demands, not happiness but completeness is the inmost craving! “A life of your own”—that was what even Bessy, in her obscure way, felt to be best worth suffering for. And how was a spirit like Justine’s, thrilling with youth and sympathy, to conceive of an isolated existence as the final answer to that craving? A life circumscribed by one’s own poor personal consciousness would not be life at all—far better the “adventure of the diver” than the shivering alone on the bank! Bessy, reading encouragement in her silence, returned her hand-clasp with an affectionate pressure.

“You would like that, Justine?” she said, secretly proud of having hit on the convincing argument.

“To endow hospitals with your cousin’s money? No; I should want something much more exciting!”

Bessy’s face kindled. “You mean travelling abroad—and I suppose New York in winter?”

Justine broke into a laugh. “I was thinking of your cousin himself when I spoke.” And to Bessy’s disappointed cry—“Then it is Dr. Wyant, after all?” she answered lightly, and without resenting the challenge: “I don’t know. Suppose we leave it to the oracle.”

“The oracle?”

“Time. His question-and-answer department is generally the most reliable in the long run.” She started up, gently drawing Bessy to her feet. “And just at present he reminds me that it’s nearly six, and that you promised Cicely to go and see her before you dress for dinner.”

Bessy rose obediently. “Does he remind you of your promises too? You said you’d come down to dinner tonight.”

“Did I?” Justine hesitated. “Well, I’m coming,” she said, smiling and kissing her friend.

XV

WHEN the door closed on Mrs. Amherst a resolve which had taken shape in Justine’s mind during their talk together made her seat herself at her writing-table, where, after a moment’s musing over her suspended pen, she wrote and addressed a hurried note. This business despatched, she put on her hat and jacket, and letter in hand passed down the corridor from her room, and descended to the entrance-hall below. She might have consigned her missive to the post-box which conspicuously tendered its services from a table near the door; but to do so would delay the letter’s despatch till morning, and she felt a sudden impatience to see it start.

The tumult on the terrace had transferred itself within doors, and as Justine went down the stairs she heard the click of cues from the billiard-room, the talk and laughter of belated bridge-players, the movement of servants gathering up teacups and mending fires. She had hoped to find the hall empty, but the sight of Westy Gaines’s figure looming watchfully on the threshold of the smoking-room gave her, at the last bend of the stairs, a little start of annoyance. He would want to know where she was going, he would offer to go with her, and it would take some time and not a little emphasis to make him understand that his society was not desired.

This was the thought that flashed through Justine’s mind as she reached the landing; but the next moment it gave way to a contradictory feeling. Westy Gaines was not alone in the hall. From under the stairway rose the voices of a group ensconced in that popular retreat about a chess-board; and as Justine reached the last turn of the stairs she perceived that Mason Winch, an earnest youth with advanced views on political economy, was engaged, to the diversion of a circle of spectators, in teaching the Telfer girls chess. The futility of trying to fix the spasmodic attention of this effervescent couple, and their instructor’s grave unconsciousness of the fact, constituted, for the lookers-on, the peculiar diversion of the scene. It was of course inevitable that young Winch, on his arrival at Lynbrook, should have succumbed at once to the tumultuous charms of the Telfer manner, which was equally attractive to inarticulate youth and to tired and talked-out middle-age; but that he should have perceived no resistance in their minds to the deliberative processes of the game of chess, was, even to the Telfers themselves, a source of unmitigated gaiety. Nothing seemed to them funnier than that any one should credit them with any mental capacity; and they had inexhaustibly amusing ways of drawing out and showing off each other’s ignorance.

It was on this scene that Westy’s appreciative eyes had been fixed till Justine’s appearance drew them to herself. He pronounced her name joyfully, and moved forward to greet her; but as their hands met she understood that he did not mean to press his company upon her. Under the eye of the Lynbrook circle he was chary of marked demonstrations, and even Mrs. Amherst’s approval could not, at such moments, bridge over the gap between himself and the object of his attentions. A Gaines was a Gaines in the last analysis, and apart from any pleasing accident of personality; but what was Miss Brent but the transient vehicle of those graces which Providence has provided for the delectation of the privileged sex?

These influences were visible in the temperate warmth of Westy’s manner, and in his way of keeping a backward eye on the mute interchange of comment about the chess-board. At another time his embarrassment would have amused Justine; but the feelings stirred by her talk with Bessy had not subsided, and she recognized with a sting of mortification the resemblance between her view of the Lynbrook set and its estimate of herself. If Bessy’s friends were negligible to her she was almost non-existent to them; and, as against herself, they were overwhelmingly provided with tangible means of proving their case.

Such considerations, at a given moment, may prevail decisively even with a nature armed against them by insight and irony; and the mere fact that Westy Gaines did not mean to join her, and that he was withheld from doing so by the invisible pressure of the Lynbrook standards, had the effect of precipitating Justine’s floating intentions.

If anything farther had been needed to hasten this result, it would have been accomplished by the sound of footsteps which, overtaking her a dozen yards from the house, announced her admirer’s impetuous if tardy pursuit. The act of dismissing him, though it took but a word and was effected with a laugh, left her pride quivering with a hurt the more painful because she would not acknowledge it. That she should waste a moment’s resentment on the conduct of a person so unimportant as poor Westy, showed her in a flash the intrinsic falseness of her position at Lynbrook. She saw that to disdain the life about her had not kept her intact from it; and the knowledge made her feel anew the need of some strong decentralizing influence, some purifying influx of emotion and activity.

She had walked on quickly through the clear October twilight, which was still saturated with the afterglow of a vivid sunset; and a few minutes brought her to the village stretching along the turnpike beyond the Lynbrook gates. The new post-office dominated the row of shabby houses and “stores” set disjointedly under reddening maples, and its arched doorway formed the centre of Lynbrook’s evening intercourse.

Justine, hastening toward the knot of loungers on the threshold, had no consciousness of anything outside of her own thoughts; and as she mounted the steps she was surprised to see Dr. Wyant detach himself from the group and advance to meet her.

“May I post your letter?” he asked, lifting his hat.

His gesture uncovered the close-curling hair of a small delicately-finished head just saved from effeminacy by the vigorous jut of heavy eyebrows meeting above full grey eyes. The eyes again, at first sight, might have struck one as too expressive, or as expressing things too purely decorative for the purposes of a young country doctor with a growing practice; but this estimate was corrected by an unexpected abruptness in their owner’s voice and manner. Perhaps the final impression produced on a close observer by Dr. Stephen Wyant would have been that the contradictory qualities of which he was compounded had not yet been brought into equilibrium by the hand of time.

Justine, in reply to his question, had drawn back a step, slipping her letter into the breast of her jacket.

“That is hardly worth while, since it was addressed to you,” she answered with a slight smile as she turned to descend the post-office steps.

Wyant, still carrying his hat, and walking with quick uneven steps, followed her in silence till they had passed beyond earshot of the loiterers on the threshold; then, in the shade of the maple boughs, he pulled up and faced her.

“You’ve written to say that I may come tomorrow?”

Justine hesitated. “Yes,” she said at length.

“Good God! You give royally!” he broke out, pushing his hand with a nervous gesture through the thin dark curls on his forehead.

Justine laughed, with a trace of nervousness in her own tone. “And you talk—well, imperially! Aren’t you afraid to bankrupt the language?”

“What do you mean?” he said, staring.

“What do you mean? I have merely said that I would see you tomorrow–-“

“Well,” he retorted, “that’s enough for my happiness!”

She sounded her light laugh again. “I’m glad to know you’re so easily pleased.”

“I’m not! But you couldn’t have done a cruel thing without a struggle; and since you’re ready to give me my answer tomorrow, I know it can’t be a cruel one.”

They had begun to walk onward as they talked, but at this she halted. “Please don’t take that tone. I dislike sentimentality!” she exclaimed, with a tinge of imperiousness that was a surprise to her own ears.

It was not the first time in the course of her friendship with Stephen Wyant that she had been startled by this intervention of something within her that resisted and almost resented his homage. When they were apart, she was conscious only of the community of interests and sympathies that had first drawn them together. Why was it then—since his looks were of the kind generally thought to stand a suitor in good stead—that whenever they had met of late she had been subject to these rushes of obscure hostility, the half-physical, half-moral shrinking from some indefinable element in his nature against which she was constrained to defend herself by perpetual pleasantry and evasion?

To Wyant, at any rate, the answer was not far to seek. His pale face reflected the disdain in hers as he returned ironically: “A thousand pardons; I know I’m not always in the key.”

“The key?”

“I haven’t yet acquired the Lynbrook tone. You must make allowances for my lack of opportunity.”

The retort on Justine’s lips dropped to silence, as though his words had in fact brought an answer to her inward questioning. Could it be that he was right—that her shrinking from him was the result of an increased sensitiveness to faults of taste that she would once have despised herself for noticing? When she had first known him, in her work at St. Elizabeth’s some three years earlier, his excesses of manner had seemed to her merely the boyish tokens of a richness of nature not yet controlled by experience. Though Wyant was somewhat older than herself there had always been an element of protection in her feeling for him, and it was perhaps this element which formed the real ground of her liking. It was, at any rate, uppermost as she returned, with a softened gleam of mockery: “Since you are so sure of my answer I hardly know why I should see you tomorrow.”

“You mean me to take it now?” he exclaimed.

“I don’t mean you to take it at all till it’s given—above all not to take it for granted!”

His jutting brows drew together again. “Ah, I can’t split hairs with you. Won’t you put me out of my misery?”

She smiled, but not unkindly. “Do you want an anæsthetic?”

“No—a clean cut with the knife!”

“You forget that we’re not allowed to despatch hopeless cases—more’s the pity!”

He flushed to the roots of his thin hair. “Hopeless cases? That’s it, then—that’s my answer?”

They had reached the point where, at the farther edge of the straggling settlement, the tiled roof of the railway-station fronted the post-office cupola; and the shriek of a whistle now reminded Justine that the spot was not propitious to private talk. She halted a moment before speaking.

“I have no answer to give you now but the one in my note—that I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“But if you’re sure of knowing tomorrow you must know now!”

Their eyes met, his eloquently pleading, hers kind but still impenetrable. “If I knew now, you should know too. Please be content with that,” she rejoined.

“How can I be, when a day may make such a difference? When I know that every influence about you is fighting against me?”

The words flashed a refracted light far down into the causes of her own uncertainty.

“Ah,” she said, drawing a little away from him, “I’m not so sure that I don’t like a fight!”

“Is that why you won’t give in?” He moved toward her with a despairing gesture. “If I let you go now, you’re lost to me!”

She stood her ground, facing him with a quick lift of the head. “If you don’t let me go I certainly am,” she said; and he drew back, as if conscious of the uselessness of the struggle. His submission, as usual, had a disarming effect on her irritation, and she held out her hand. “Come tomorrow at three,” she said, her voice and manner suddenly seeming to give back the hope she had withheld from him.

He seized on her hand with an inarticulate murmur; but at the same moment a louder whistle and the thunder of an approaching train reminded her of the impossibility of prolonging the scene. She was ordinarily careless of appearances, but while she was Mrs. Amherst’s guest she did not care to be seen romantically loitering through the twilight with Stephen Wyant; and she freed herself with a quick goodbye.

He gave her a last look, hesitating and imploring; then, in obedience to her gesture, he turned away and strode off in the opposite direction.

As soon as he had left her she began to retrace her steps toward Lynbrook House; but instead of traversing the whole length of the village she passed through a turnstile in the park fencing, taking a more circuitous but quieter way home.

She walked on slowly through the dusk, wishing to give herself time to think over her conversation with Wyant. Now that she was alone again, it seemed to her that the part she had played had been both inconsistent and undignified. When she had written to Wyant that she would see him on the morrow she had done so with the clear understanding that she was to give, at that meeting, a definite answer to his offer of marriage; and during her talk with Bessy she had suddenly, and, as it seemed to her, irrevocably, decided that the answer should be favourable. From the first days of her acquaintance with Wyant she had appreciated his intelligence and had been stimulated by his zeal for his work. He had remained only six months at Saint Elizabeth’s, and though his feeling for her had even then been manifest, it had been kept from expression by the restraint of their professional relation, and by her absorption in her duties. It was only when they had met again at Lynbrook that she had begun to feel a personal interest in him. His youthful promise seemed nearer fulfillment than she had once thought possible, and the contrast he presented to the young men in Bessy’s train was really all in his favour. He had gained in strength and steadiness without losing his high flashes of enthusiasm; and though, even now, she was not in love with him, she began to feel that the union of their common interests might create a life full and useful enough to preclude the possibility of vague repinings. It would, at any rate, take her out of the stagnant circle of her present existence, and restore her to contact with the fruitful energies of life.

All this had seemed quite clear when she wrote her letter; why, then, had she not made use of their chance encounter to give her answer, instead of capriciously postponing it? The act might have been that of a self-conscious girl in her teens; but neither inexperience nor coquetry had prompted it. She had merely yielded to the spirit of resistance that Wyant’s presence had of late aroused in her; and the possibility that this resistance might be due to some sense of his social defects, his lack of measure and facility, was so humiliating that for a moment she stood still in the path, half-meaning to turn back and overtake him–-

As she paused she was surprised to hear a man’s step behind her; and the thought that it might be Wyant’s brought about another revulsion of feeling. What right had he to pursue her in this way, to dog her steps even into the Lynbrook grounds? She was sure that his persistent attentions had already attracted the notice of Bessy’s visitors; and that he should thus force himself on her after her dismissal seemed suddenly to make their whole relation ridiculous.

She turned about to rebuke him, and found herself face to face with John Amherst.

XVI

AMHERST, on leaving the train at Lynbrook, had paused in doubt on the empty platform. His return was unexpected, and no carriage awaited him; but he caught the signal of the village cab-driver’s ready whip. Amherst, however, felt a sudden desire to postpone the moment of arrival, and consigning his luggage to the cab he walked away toward the turnstile through which Justine had passed. In thus taking the longest way home he was yielding another point to his reluctance. He knew that at that hour his wife’s visitors might still be assembled in the drawing-room, and he wished to avoid making his unannounced entrance among them.

It was not till now that he felt the embarrassment of such an arrival. For some time past he had known that he ought to go back to Lynbrook, but he had not known how to tell Bessy that he was coming. Lack of habit made him inexpert in the art of easy transitions, and his inability to bridge over awkward gaps had often put him at a disadvantage with his wife and her friends. He had not yet learned the importance of observing the forms which made up the daily ceremonial of their lives, and at present there was just enough soreness between himself and Bessy to make such observances more difficult than usual.

There had been no open estrangement, but peace had been preserved at the cost of a slowly accumulated tale of grievances on both sides. Since Amherst had won his point about the mills, the danger he had foreseen had been realized: his victory at Westmore had been a defeat at Lynbrook. It would be too crude to say that his wife had made him pay for her public concession by the private disregard of his wishes; and if something of this sort had actually resulted, his sense of fairness told him that it was merely the natural reaction of a soft nature against the momentary strain of self-denial. At first he had been hardly aware of this consequence of his triumph. The joy of being able to work his will at Westmore obscured all lesser emotions; and his sentiment for Bessy had long since shrunk into one of those shallow pools of feeling which a sudden tide might fill, but which could never again be the deep perennial spring from which his life was fed.

The need of remaining continuously at Hanaford while the first changes were making had increased the strain of the situation. He had never expected that Bessy would stay there with him—had perhaps, at heart, hardly wished it—and her plan of going to the Adirondacks with Miss Brent seemed to him a satisfactory alternative to the European trip she had renounced. He felt as relieved as though some one had taken off his hands the task of amusing a restless child, and he let his wife go without suspecting that the moment might be a decisive one between them. But it had not occurred to Bessy that any one could regard six weeks in the Adirondacks as an adequate substitute for a summer abroad. She felt that her sacrifice deserved recognition, and personal devotion was the only form of recognition which could satisfy her. She had expected Amherst to join her at the camp, but he did not come; and when she went back to Long Island she did not stop to see him, though Hanaford lay in her way. At the moment of her return the work at the mills made it impossible for him to go to Lynbrook; and thus the weeks drifted on without their meeting.

At last, urged by his mother, he had gone down to Long Island for a night; but though, on that occasion, he had announced his coming, he found the house full, and the whole party except Mr. Langhope in the act of starting off to a dinner in the neighbourhood. He was of course expected to go too, and Bessy appeared hurt when he declared that he was too tired and preferred to remain with Mr. Langhope; but she did not suggest staying at home herself, and drove off in a mood of exuberant gaiety. Amherst had been too busy all his life to know what intricacies of perversion a sentimental grievance may develop in an unoccupied mind, and he saw in Bessy’s act only a sign of indifference. The next day she complained to him of money difficulties, as though surprised that her income had been suddenly cut down; and when he reminded her that she had consented of her own will to this temporary reduction, she burst into tears and accused him of caring only for Westmore.

He went away exasperated by her inconsequence, and bills from Lynbrook continued to pour in on him. In the first days of their marriage, Bessy had put him in charge of her exchequer, and she was too indolent—and at heart perhaps too sensitive—to ask him to renounce the charge. It was clear to him, therefore, how little she was observing the spirit of their compact, and his mind was tormented by the anticipation of financial embarrassments. He wrote her a letter of gentle expostulation, but in her answer she ignored his remonstrance; and after that silence fell between them.

The only way to break this silence was to return to Lynbrook; but now that he had come back, he did not know what step to take next. Something in the atmosphere of his wife’s existence seemed to paralyze his will-power. When all about her spoke a language so different from his own, how could he hope to make himself heard? He knew that her family and her immediate friends—Mr. Langhope, the Gaineses, Mrs. Ansell and Mr. Tredegar—far from being means of communication, were so many sentinels ready to raise the drawbridge and drop the portcullis at his approach. They were all in league to stifle the incipient feelings he had roused in Bessy, to push her back into the deadening routine of her former life, and the only voice that might conceivably speak for him was Miss Brent’s.

The “case” which, unexpectedly presented to her by one of the Hope Hospital physicians, had detained Justine at Hanaford during the month of June, was the means of establishing a friendship between herself and Amherst. They did not meet often, or get to know each other very well; but he saw her occasionally at his mother’s and at Mrs. Dressel’s, and once he took her out to Westmore, to consult her about the emergency hospital which was to be included among the first improvements there. The expedition had been memorable to both; and when, some two weeks later, Bessy wrote suggesting that she should take Miss Brent to the Adirondacks, it seemed to Amherst that there was no one whom he would rather have his wife choose as her companion.

He was much too busy at the time to cultivate or analyze his feeling for Miss Brent; he rested vaguely in the thought of her, as of the “nicest” girl he had ever met, and was frankly pleased when accident brought them together; but the seeds left in both their minds by these chance encounters had not yet begun to germinate.

So unperceived had been their gradual growth in intimacy that it was a surprise to Amherst to find himself suddenly thinking of her as a means of communication with his wife; but the thought gave him such encouragement that, when he saw Justine in the path before him he went toward her with unusual eagerness.

Justine, on her part, felt an equal pleasure. She knew that Bessy did not expect her husband, and that his prolonged absence had already been the cause of malicious comment at Lynbrook; and she caught at the hope that this sudden return might betoken a more favourable turn of affairs.

“Oh, I am so glad to see you!” she exclaimed; and her tone had the effect of completing his reassurance, his happy sense that she would understand and help him.

“I wanted to see you too,” he began confusedly; then, conscious of the intimacy of the phrase, he added with a slight laugh: “The fact is, I’m a culprit looking for a peace-maker.”

“A culprit?”

“I’ve been so tied down at the mills that I didn’t know, till yesterday, just when I could break away; and in the hurry of leaving—” He paused again, checked by the impossibility of uttering, to the girl before him, the little conventional falsehoods which formed the small currency of Bessy’s circle. Not that any scruple of probity restrained him: in trifling matters he recognized the usefulness of such counters in the social game; but when he was with Justine he always felt the obscure need of letting his real self be seen.

“I was stupid enough not to telegraph,” he said, “and I am afraid my wife will think me negligent: she often has to reproach me for my sins of omission, and this time I know they are many.”

The girl received this in silence, less from embarrassment than from surprise; for she had already guessed that it was as difficult for Amherst to touch, even lightly, on his private affairs, as it was instinctive with his wife to pour her grievances into any willing ear. Justine’s first thought was one of gratification that he should have spoken, and of eagerness to facilitate the saying of whatever he wished to say; but before she could answer he went on hastily: “The fact is, Bessy does not know how complicated the work at Westmore is; and when I caught sight of you just now I was thinking that you are the only one of her friends who has any technical understanding of what I am trying to do, and who might consequently help her to see how hard it is for me to take my hand from the plough.”

Justine listened gravely, longing to cry out her comprehension and sympathy, but restrained by the sense that the moment was a critical one, where impulse must not be trusted too far. It was quite possible that a reaction of pride might cause Amherst to repent even so guarded an avowal; and if that happened, he might never forgive her for having encouraged him to speak. She looked up at him with a smile.

“Why not tell Bessy yourself? Your understanding of the case is a good deal clearer than mine or any one else’s.”

“Oh, Bessy is tired of hearing about it from me; and besides—” She detected a shade of disappointment in his tone, and was sorry she had said anything which might seem meant to discourage his confidence. It occurred to her also that she had been insincere in not telling him at once that she had already been let into the secret of his domestic differences: she felt the same craving as Amherst for absolute openness between them.

“I know,” she said, almost timidly, “that Bessy has not been quite content of late to have you give so much time to Westmore, and perhaps she herself thinks it is because the work there does not interest her; but I believe it is for a different reason.”

“What reason?” he asked with a look of surprise.

“Because Westmore takes you from her; because she thinks you are happier there than at Lynbrook.”

The day had faded so rapidly that it was no longer possible for the speakers to see each other’s faces, and it was easier for both to communicate through the veil of deepening obscurity.

“But, good heavens, she might be there with me—she’s as much needed there as I am!” Amherst exclaimed.

“Yes; but you must remember that it’s against all her habits—and against the point of view of every one about her—that she should lead that kind of life; and meanwhile–-“

“Well?”

“Meanwhile, isn’t it expedient that you should, a little more, lead hers?”

Always the same answer to his restless questioning! His mother’s answer, the answer of Bessy and her friends. He had somehow hoped that the girl at his side would find a different solution to the problem, and his disappointment escaped in a bitter exclamation.

“But Westmore is my life—hers too, if she knew it! I can’t desert it now without being as false to her as to myself!”

As he spoke, he was overcome once more by the hopelessness of trying to put his case clearly. How could Justine, for all her quickness and sympathy, understand a situation of which the deeper elements were necessarily unknown to her? The advice she gave him was natural enough, and on her lips it seemed not the counsel of a shallow expediency, but the plea of compassion and understanding. But she knew nothing of the long struggle for mutual adjustment which had culminated in this crisis between himself and his wife, and she could therefore not see that, if he yielded his point, and gave up his work at Westmore, the concession would mean not renewal but destruction. He felt that he should hate Bessy if he won her back at that price; and the violence of his feeling frightened him. It was, in truth, as he had said, his own life that he was fighting for. If he gave up Westmore he could not fall back on the futile activities of Lynbrook, and fate might yet have some lower alternative to offer. He could trust to his own strength and self-command while his energies had a normal outlet; but idleness and self-indulgence might work in him like a dangerous drug.

Justine kept steadily to her point. “Westmore must be foremost to both of you in time; I don’t see how either of you can escape that. But the realization of it must come to Bessy through you, and for that reason I think that you ought to be more patient—that you ought even to put the question aside for a time and enter a little more into her life while she is learning to understand yours.” As she ended, it seemed to her that what she had said was trite and ineffectual, and yet that it might have passed the measure of discretion; and, torn between two doubts, she added hastily: “But you have done just that in coming back now—that is the real solution of the problem.”

While she spoke they passed out of the wood-path they had been following, and rounding a mass of shrubbery emerged on the lawn below the terraces. The long bulk of the house lay above them, dark against the lingering gleam of the west, with brightly-lit windows marking its irregular outline; and the sight produced in Amherst and Justine a vague sense of helplessness and constraint. It was impossible to speak with the same freedom, confronted by that substantial symbol of the accepted order, which seemed to glare down on them in massive disdain of their puny efforts to deflect the course of events: and Amherst, without reverting to her last words, asked after a moment if his wife had many guests.

He listened in silence while Justine ran over the list of names—the Telfer girls and their brother, Mason Winch and Westy Gaines, a cluster of young bridge-playing couples, and, among the last arrivals, the Fenton Carburys and Ned Bowfort. The names were all familiar to Amherst—he knew they represented the flower of week-end fashion; but he did not remember having seen the Carburys among his wife’s guests, and his mind paused on the name, seeking to regain some lost impression connected with it. But it evoked, like the others, merely the confused sense of stridency and unrest which he had brought away from his last Lynbrook visit; and this reminiscence made him ask Miss Brent, when her list was ended, if she did not think that so continuous a succession of visitors was too tiring for Bessy.

“I sometimes think it tires her more than she knows; but I hope she can be persuaded to take better care of herself now that Mrs. Ansell has come back.”

Amherst halted abruptly. “Is Mrs. Ansell here?”

“She arrived from Europe today.”

“And Mr. Langhope too, I suppose?”

“Yes. He came from Newport about ten days ago.”

Amherst checked himself, conscious that his questions betrayed the fact that he and his wife no longer wrote to each other. The same thought appeared to strike Justine, and they walked across the lawn in silence, hastening their steps involuntarily, as though to escape the oppressive weight of the words which had passed between them. But Justine was unwilling that this fruitless sense of oppression should be the final outcome of their talk; and when they reached the upper terrace she paused and turned impulsively to Amherst. As she did so, the light from an uncurtained window fell on her face, which glowed with the inner brightness kindled in it by moments of strong feeling.

“I am sure of one thing—Bessy will be very, very glad that you have come,” she exclaimed.

“Thank you,” he answered.

Their hands met mechanically, and she turned away and entered the house.

XVII

BESSY had not seen her little girl that day, and filled with compunction by Justine’s reminder, she hastened directly to the school-room.

Of late, in certain moods, her maternal tenderness had been clouded by a sense of uneasiness in the child’s presence, for Cicely was the argument most effectually used by Mr. Langhope and Mr. Tredegar in their efforts to check the triumph of Amherst’s ideas. Bessy, still unable to form an independent opinion on the harassing question of the mills, continued to oscillate between the views of the contending parties, now regarding Cicely as an innocent victim and herself as an unnatural mother, sacrificing her child’s prospects to further Amherst’s enterprise, and now conscious of a vague animosity against the little girl, as the chief cause of the dissensions which had so soon clouded the skies of her second marriage. Then again, there were moments when Cicely’s rosy bloom reminded her bitterly of the child she had lost—the son on whom her ambitions had been fixed. It seemed to her now that if their boy had lived she might have kept Amherst’s love and have played a more important part in his life; and brooding on the tragedy of the child’s sickly existence she resented the contrast of Cicely’s brightness and vigour. The result was that in her treatment of her daughter she alternated between moments of exaggerated devotion and days of neglect, never long happy away from the little girl, yet restless and self-tormenting in her presence.

After her talk with Justine she felt more than usually disturbed, as she always did when her unprofitable impulses of self-exposure had subsided. Bessy’s mind was not made for introspection, and chance had burdened it with unintelligible problems. She felt herself the victim of circumstances to which her imagination attributed the deliberate malice that children ascribe to the furniture they run against in playing. This helped her to cultivate a sense of helpless injury and to disdain in advance the advice she was perpetually seeking. How absurd it was, for instance, to suppose that a girl could understand the feelings of a married woman! Justine’s suggestion that she should humble herself still farther to Amherst merely left in Bessy’s mind a rankling sense of being misunderstood and undervalued by those to whom she turned in her extremity, and she said to herself, in a phrase that sounded well in her own ears, that sooner or later every woman must learn to fight her battles alone.

In this mood she entered the room where Cicely was at supper with her governess, and enveloped the child in a whirl of passionate caresses. But Cicely had inherited the soberer Westmore temper, and her mother’s spasmodic endearments always had a repressive effect on her. She dutifully returned a small fraction of Bessy’s kisses, and then, with an air of relief, addressed herself once more to her bread and marmalade.

“You don’t seem a bit glad to see me!” Bessy exclaimed, while the little governess made a nervous pretence of being greatly amused at this prodigious paradox, and Cicely, setting down her silver mug, asked judicially: “Why should I be gladder than other days? It isn’t a birthday.”

This Cordelia-like answer cut Bessy to the quick. “You horrid child to say such a cruel thing when you know I love you better and better every minute! But you don’t care for me any longer because Justine has taken you away from me!”

This last charge had sprung into her mind in the act of uttering it, but now that it was spoken it instantly assumed the proportions of a fact, and seemed to furnish another justification for her wretchedness. Bessy was not naturally jealous, but her imagination was thrall to the spoken word, and it gave her a sudden incomprehensible relief to associate Justine with the obscure causes of her suffering.

“I know she’s cleverer than I am, and more amusing, and can tell you about plants and animals and things…and I daresay she tells you how tiresome and stupid I am….”

She sprang up suddenly, abashed by Cicely’s astonished gaze, and by the governess’s tremulous attempt to continue to treat the scene as one of “Mamma’s” most successful pleasantries.

“Don’t mind me—my head aches horribly. I think I’ll rush off for a gallop on Impulse before dinner. Miss Dill, Cicely’s nails are a sight—I suppose that comes of grubbing up wild-flowers.”

And with this parting shot at Justine’s pursuits she swept out of the school-room, leaving pupil and teacher plunged in a stricken silence from which Cicely at length emerged to say, with the candour that Miss Dill dreaded more than any punishable offense: “Mother’s prettiest—but I do like Justine the best.”

It was nearly dark when Bessy mounted the horse which had been hastily saddled in response to her order; but it was her habit to ride out alone at all hours, and of late nothing but a hard gallop had availed to quiet her nerves. Her craving for occupation had increased as her life became more dispersed and agitated, and the need to fill every hour drove her to excesses of bodily exertion, since other forms of activity were unknown to her.

As she cantered along under the twilight sky, with a strong sea-breeze in her face, the rush of air and the effort of steadying her nervous thoroughbred filled her with a glow of bodily energy from which her thoughts emerged somewhat cleansed of their bitterness.

She had been odious to poor little Cicely, for whom she now felt a sudden remorseful yearning which almost made her turn her horse’s head homeward, that she might dash upstairs and do penance beside the child’s bed. And that she should have accused Justine of taking Cicely from her! It frightened her to find herself thinking evil of Justine. Bessy, whose perceptions were keen enough in certain directions, knew that her second marriage had changed her relation to all her former circle of friends. Though they still rallied about her, keeping up the convenient habit of familiar intercourse, she had begun to be aware that their view of her had in it an element of criticism and compassion. She had once fancied that Amherst’s good looks, and the other qualities she had seen in him, would immediately make him free of the charmed circle in which she moved; but she was discouraged by his disregard of his opportunities, and above all by the fundamental differences in his view of life. He was never common or ridiculous, but she saw that he would never acquire the small social facilities. He was fond of exercise, but it bored him to talk of it. The men’s smoking-room anecdotes did not amuse him, he was unmoved by the fluctuations of the stock-market, he could not tell one card from another, and his perfunctory attempts at billiards had once caused Mr. Langhope to murmur, in his daughter’s hearing: “Ah, that’s the test—I always said so!”

Thus debarred from what seemed to Bessy the chief points of contact with life, how could Amherst hope to impose himself on minds versed in these larger relations? As the sense of his social insufficiency grew on her, Bessy became more sensitive to that latent criticism of her marriage which—intolerable thought!—involved a judgment on herself. She was increasingly eager for the approval and applause of her little audience, yet increasingly distrustful of their sincerity, and more miserably persuaded that she and her husband were the butt of some of their most effective stories. She knew also that rumours of the disagreement about Westmore were abroad, and the suspicion that Amherst’s conduct was the subject of unfriendly comment provoked in her a reaction of loyalty to his ideas….

From this turmoil of conflicting influences only her friendship with Justine Brent remained secure. Though Justine’s adaptability made it easy for her to fit into the Lynbrook life, Bessy knew that she stood as much outside of it as Amherst. She could never, for instance, be influenced by what Maria Ansell and the Gaineses and the Telfers thought. She had her own criteria of conduct, unintelligible to Bessy, but giving her an independence of mind on which her friend leaned in a kind of blind security. And that even her faith in Justine should suddenly be poisoned by a jealous thought seemed to prove that the consequences of her marriage were gradually infecting her whole life. Bessy could conceive of masculine devotion only as subservient to its divinity’s least wish, and she argued that if Amherst had really loved her he could not so lightly have disturbed the foundations of her world. And so her tormented thoughts, perpetually circling on themselves, reverted once more to their central grievance—the failure of her marriage. If her own love had died out it would have been much simpler—she was surrounded by examples of the mutual evasion of a troublesome tie. There was Blanche Carbury, for instance, with whom she had lately struck up an absorbing friendship…it was perfectly clear that Blanche Carbury wondered how much more she was going to stand! But it was the torment of Bessy’s situation that it involved a radical contradiction, that she still loved Amherst though she could not forgive him for having married her.

Perhaps what she most suffered from was his too-prompt acceptance of the semi-estrangement between them. After nearly three years of marriage she had still to learn that it was Amherst’s way to wrestle with the angel till dawn, and then to go about his other business. Her own mind could revolve in the same grievance as interminably as a squirrel in its wheel, and her husband’s habit of casting off the accepted fact seemed to betoken poverty of feeling. If only he had striven a little harder to keep her—if, even now, he would come back to her, and make her feel that she was more to him than those wretched mills!

When she turned her mare toward Lynbrook, the longing to see Amherst was again uppermost. He had not written for weeks—she had been obliged to tell Maria Ansell that she knew nothing of his plans, and it mortified her to think that every one was aware of his neglect. Yet, even now, if on reaching the house she should find a telegram to say that he was coming, the weight of loneliness would be lifted, and everything in life would seem different….

Her high-strung mare, scenting the homeward road, and excited by the fantastic play of wayside lights and shadows, swept her along at a wild gallop with which the fevered rush of her thoughts kept pace, and when she reached the house she dropped from the saddle with aching wrists and brain benumbed.

She entered by a side door, to avoid meeting any one, and ran upstairs at once, knowing that she had barely time to dress for dinner. As she opened the door of her sitting-room some one rose from the chair by the fire, and she stood still, facing her husband….

It was the moment both had desired, yet when it came it found them tongue-tied and helpless.

Bessy was the first to speak. “When did you get here? You never wrote me you were coming!”

Amherst advanced toward her, holding out his hand. “No; you must forgive me. I have been very busy,” he said.

Always the same excuse! The same thrusting at her of the hateful fact that Westmore came first, and that she must put up with whatever was left of his time and thoughts!

“You are always too busy to let me hear from you,” she said coldly, and the hand which had sprung toward his fell back to her side.

Even then, if he had only said frankly: “It was too difficult—I didn’t know how,” the note of truth would have reached and moved her; but he had striven for the tone of ease and self-restraint that was habitual among her friends, and as usual his attempt had been a failure.

“I am sorry—I’m a bad hand at writing,” he rejoined; and his evil genius prompted him to add: “I hope my coming is not inconvenient?”

The colour rose to Bessy’s face. “Of course not. But it must seem rather odd to our visitors that I should know so little of your plans.”

At this he humbled himself still farther. “I know I don’t think enough about appearances—I’ll try to do better the next time.”

Appearances! He spoke as if she had been reproaching him for a breach of etiquette…it never occurred to him that the cry came from her humiliated heart! The tide of warmth that always enveloped her in his presence was receding, and in its place a chill fluid seemed to creep up slowly to her throat and lips.

In Amherst, meanwhile, the opposite process was taking place. His wife was still to him the most beautiful woman in the world, or rather, perhaps, the only woman to whose beauty his eyes had been opened. That beauty could never again penetrate to his heart, but it still touched his senses, not with passion but with a caressing kindliness, such as one might feel for the bright movements of a bird or a kitten. It seemed to plead with him not to ask of her more than she could give—to be content with the outward grace and not seek in it an inner meaning. He moved toward her again, and took her passive hands in his.

“You look tired. Why do you ride so late?”

“Oh, I just wanted to give Impulse a gallop. I hadn’t time to take her out earlier, and if I let the grooms exercise her they’ll spoil her mouth.”

Amherst frowned. “You ought not to ride that mare alone at night. She shies at everything after dark.”

“She’s the only horse I care for—the others are all cows,” she murmured, releasing her hands impatiently.

“Well, you must take me with you the next time you ride her.”

She softened a little, in spite of herself. Riding was the only amusement he cared to share with her, and the thought of a long gallop across the plains at his side brought back the warmth to her veins.

“Yes, we’ll go tomorrow. How long do you mean to stay?” she asked, looking up at him eagerly.

He was pleased that she should wish to know, yet the question embarrassed him, for it was necessary that he should be back at Westmore within three days, and he could not put her off with an evasion.

Bessy saw his hesitation, and her colour rose again. “I only asked,” she explained, “because there is to be a fancy ball at the Hunt Club on the twentieth, and I thought of giving a big dinner here first.”

Amherst did not understand that she too had her inarticulate moments, and that the allusion to the fancy ball was improvised to hide an eagerness to which he had been too slow in responding. He thought she had enquired about his plans only that he might not again interfere with the arrangements of her dinner-table. If that was all she cared about, it became suddenly easy to tell her that he could not stay, and he answered lightly: “Fancy balls are a little out of my line; but at any rate I shall have to be back at the mills the day after tomorrow.”

The disappointment brought a rush of bitterness to her lips. “The day after tomorrow? It seems hardly worth while to have come so far for two days!”

“Oh, I don’t mind the journey—and there are one or two matters I must consult you about.”

There could hardly have been a more ill-advised answer, but Amherst was reckless now. If she cared for his coming only that he might fill a place at a fancy-dress dinner, he would let her see that he had come only because he had to go through the form of submitting to her certain measures to be taken at Westmore.

Bessy was beginning to feel the physical reaction of her struggle with the mare. The fatigue which at first had deadened her nerves now woke them to acuter sensibility, and an appealing word from her husband would have drawn her to his arms. But his answer seemed to drive all the blood back to her heart.

“I don’t see why you still go through the form of consulting me about Westmore, when you have always done just as you pleased there, without regard to me or Cicely.”

Amherst made no answer, silenced by the discouragement of hearing the same old grievance on her lips; and she too seemed struck, after she had spoken, by the unprofitableness of such retorts.

“It doesn’t matter—of course I’ll do whatever you wish,” she went on listlessly. “But I could have sent my signature, if that is all you came for–-“

“Thanks,” said Amherst coldly. “I shall remember that the next time.”

They stood silent for a moment, he with his eyes fixed on her, she with averted head, twisting her riding-whip between her fingers; then she said suddenly: “We shall be late for dinner,” and passing into her dressing-room she closed the door.

Amherst roused himself as she disappeared.

“Bessy!” he exclaimed, moving toward her; but as he approached the door he heard her maid’s voice within, and turning away he went to his own room.

Bessy came down late to dinner, with vivid cheeks and an air of improvised ease; and the manner of her entrance, combined with her husband’s unannounced arrival, produced in their observant guests the sense of latent complications. Mr. Langhope, though evidently unaware of his son-in-law’s return till they greeted each other in the drawing-room, was too good a card-player to betray surprise, and Mrs. Ansell outdid herself in the delicate art of taking everything for granted; but these very dissimulations sharpened the perception of the other guests, whom long practice had rendered expert in interpreting such signs.

Of all this Justine Brent was aware; and conscious also that, by every one but herself, the suspected estrangement between the Amhersts was regarded as turning merely on the question of money. To the greater number of persons present there was, in fact, no other conceivable source of conjugal discord, since every known complication could be adjusted by means of the universal lubricant. It was this unanimity of view which bound together in the compactness of a new feudalism the members of Bessy Amherst’s world; which supplied them with their pass-words and social tests, and defended them securely against the insidious attack of ideas.

The Genius of History, capriciously directing the antics of its marionettes, sometimes lets the drama languish through a series of unrelated episodes, and then, suddenly quickening the pace, packs into one scene the stuff of a dozen. The chance meeting of Amherst and Justine, seemingly of no significance to either, contained the germ of developments of which both had begun to be aware before the evening was over. Their short talk—the first really intimate exchange of words between them—had the effect of creating a sense of solidarity that grew apace in the atmosphere of the Lynbrook dinner-table.

Justine was always reluctant to take part in Bessy’s week-end dinners, but as she descended the stairs that evening she did not regret having promised to be present. She frankly wanted to see Amherst again—his tone, his view of life, reinforced her own convictions, restored her faith in the reality and importance of all that Lynbrook ignored and excluded. Her extreme sensitiveness to surrounding vibrations of thought and feeling told her, as she glanced at him between the flowers and candles of the long dinner-table, that he too was obscurely aware of the same effect; and it flashed across her that they were unconsciously drawn together by the fact that they were the only two strangers in the room. Every one else had the same standpoint, spoke the same language, drew on the same stock of allusions, used the same weights and measures in estimating persons and actions. Between Mr. Langhope’s indolent acuteness of mind and the rudimentary processes of the rosy Telfers there was a difference of degree but not of kind. If Mr. Langhope viewed the spectacle more objectively, it was not because he had outlived the sense of its importance, but because years of experience had familiarized him with its minutest details; and this familiarity with the world he lived in had bred a profound contempt for any other.

In no way could the points of contact between Amherst and Justine Brent have been more vividly brought out than by their tacit exclusion from the currents of opinion about them. Amherst, seated in unsmiling endurance at the foot of the table, between Mrs. Ansell, with her carefully-distributed affabilities, and Blanche Carbury, with her reckless hurling of conversational pebbles, seemed to Justine as much of a stranger as herself among the people to whom his marriage had introduced him. So strongly did she feel the sense of their common isolation that it was no surprise to her, when the men reappeared in the drawing-room after dinner, to have her host thread his way, between the unfolding bridge-tables, straight to the corner where she sat. Amherst’s methods in the drawing-room were still as direct as in the cotton-mill. He always went up at once to the person he sought, without preliminary waste of tactics; and on this occasion Justine, without knowing what had passed between himself and Bessy, suspected from the appearance of both that their talk had resulted in increasing Amherst’s desire to be with some one to whom he could speak freely and naturally on the subject nearest his heart.

She began at once to question him about Westmore, and the change in his face showed that his work was still a refuge from all that made life disheartening and unintelligible. Whatever convictions had been thwarted or impaired in him, his faith in the importance of his task remained unshaken; and the firmness with which he held to it filled Justine with a sense of his strength. The feeling kindled her own desire to escape again into the world of deeds, yet by a sudden reaction it checked the growing inclination for Stephen Wyant that had resulted from her revolt against Lynbrook. Here was a man as careless as Wyant of the minor forms, yet her appreciation of him was not affected by the lack of adaptability that she accused herself of criticizing in her suitor. She began to see that it was not the sense of Wyant’s social deficiencies that had held her back; and the discovery at once set free her judgment of him, enabling her to penetrate to the real causes of her reluctance. She understood now that the flaw she felt was far deeper than any defect of manner. It was the sense in him of something unstable and incalculable, something at once weak and violent, that was brought to light by the contrast of Amherst’s quiet resolution. Here was a man whom no gusts of chance could deflect from his purpose; while she felt that the career to which Wyant had so ardently given himself would always be at the mercy of his passing emotions.

As the distinction grew clearer, Justine trembled to think that she had so nearly pledged herself, without the excuse of love, to a man whose failings she could judge so lucidly…. But had she ever really thought of marrying Wyant? While she continued to talk with Amherst such a possibility became more and more remote, till she began to feel it was no more than a haunting dream. But her promise to see Wyant the next day reminded her of the nearness of her peril. How could she have played with her fate so lightly—she, who held her life so dear because she felt in it such untried powers of action and emotion? She continued to listen to Amherst’s account of his work, with enough outward self-possession to place the right comment and put the right question, yet conscious only of the quiet strength she was absorbing from his presence, of the way in which his words, his voice, his mere nearness were slowly steadying and clarifying her will.

In the smoking-room, after the ladies had gone upstairs, Amherst continued to acquit himself mechanically of his duties, against the incongruous background of his predecessor’s remarkable sporting-prints—for it was characteristic of his relation to Lynbrook that his life there was carried on in the setting of foils and boxing-gloves, firearms and racing-trophies, which had expressed Dick Westmore’s ideals. Never very keenly alive to his material surroundings, and quite unconscious of the irony of this proximity, Amherst had come to accept his wife’s guests as unquestioningly as their background, and with the same sense of their being an inevitable part of his new life. Their talk was no more intelligible to him than the red and yellow hieroglyphics of the racing-prints, and he smoked in silence while Mr. Langhope discoursed to Westy Gaines on the recent sale of Chinese porcelains at which he had been lucky enough to pick up the set of Ming for his daughter, and Mason Winch expounded to a group of languid listeners the essential dependence of the labouring-man on the prosperity of Wall Street. In a retired corner, Ned Bowfort was imparting facts of a more personal nature to a chosen following who hailed with suppressed enjoyment the murmured mention of proper names; and now and then Amherst found himself obliged to say to Fenton Carbury, who with one accord had been left on his hands, “Yes, I understand the flat-tread tire is best,” or, “There’s a good deal to be said for the low tension magneto–-“

But all the while his conscious thoughts were absorbed in the remembrance of his talk with Justine Brent. He had left his wife’s presence in that state of moral lassitude when the strongest hopes droop under the infection of indifference and hostility, and the effort of attainment seems out of all proportion to the end in view; but as he listened to Justine all his energies sprang to life again. Here at last was some one who felt the urgency of his task: her every word and look confirmed her comment of the afternoon: “Westmore must be foremost to you both in time—I don’t see how either of you can escape it.”

She saw it, as he did, to be the special outlet offered for the expression of what he was worth to the world; and with the knowledge that one other person recognized his call, it sounded again loudly in his heart. Yes, he would go on, patiently and persistently, conquering obstacles, suffering delay, enduring criticism—hardest of all, bearing with his wife’s deepening indifference and distrust. Justine had said “Westmore must be foremost to you both,” and he would prove that she was right—spite of the powers leagued against him he would win over Bessy in the end!

Those observers who had been struck by the length and animation of Miss Brent’s talk with her host—and among whom Mrs. Ansell and Westy Gaines were foremost—would hardly have believed how small a part her personal charms had played in attracting him. Amherst was still under the power of the other kind of beauty—the soft graces personifying the first triumph of sex in his heart—and Justine’s dark slenderness could not at once dispel the milder image. He watched her with pleasure while she talked, but her face interested him only as the vehicle of her ideas—she looked as a girl must look who felt and thought as she did. He was aware that everything about her was quick and fine and supple, and that the muscles of character lay close to the surface of feeling; but the interpenetration of spirit and flesh that made her body seem like the bright projection of her mind left him unconscious of anything but the oneness of their thoughts.

So these two, in their hour of doubt, poured strength into each other’s hearts, each unconscious of what they gave, and of its hidden power of renewing their own purposes. XVIII

IF Mr. Langhope had ever stooped to such facile triumphs as that summed up in the convenient “I told you so,” he would have loosed the phrase on Mrs. Ansell in the course of a colloquy which these two, the next afternoon, were at some pains to defend from the incursions of the Lynbrook house-party.

Mrs. Ansell was the kind of woman who could encircle herself with privacy on an excursion-boat and create a nook in an hotel drawing-room, but it taxed even her ingenuity to segregate herself from the Telfers. When the feat was accomplished, and it became evident that Mr. Langhope could yield himself securely to the joys of confidential discourse, he paused on the brink of disclosure to say: “It’s as well I saved that Ming from the ruins.”

“What ruins?” she exclaimed, her startled look giving him the full benefit of the effect he was seeking to produce.

He addressed himself deliberately to the selecting and lighting of a cigarette. “Truscomb is down and out—resigned, ‘the wise it call.’ And the alterations at Westmore are going to cost a great deal more than my experienced son-in-law expected. This is Westy’s morning budget—he and Amherst had it out last night. I tell my poor girl that at least she’ll lose nothing when the bibelots I’ve bought for her go up the spout.”

Mrs. Ansell received this with a troubled countenance. “What has become of Bessy? I’ve not seen her since luncheon.”

“No. She and Blanche Carbury have motored over to dine with the Nick Ledgers at Islip.”

“Did you see her before she left?”

“For a moment, but she said very little. Westy tells me that Amherst hints at leasing the New York house. One can understand that she’s left speechless.”

Mrs. Ansell, at this, sat bolt upright. “The New York house?” But she broke off to add, with seeming irrelevance: “If you knew how I detest Blanche Carbury!”

Mr. Langhope made a gesture of semi-acquiescence. “She is not the friend I should have chosen for Bessy—but we know that Providence makes use of strange instruments.”

“Providence and Blanche Carbury?” She stared at him. “Ah, you are profoundly corrupt!”

“I have the coarse masculine habit of looking facts in the face. Woman-like, you prefer to make use of them privately, and cut them when you meet in public.”

“Blanche is not the kind of fact I should care to make use of under any circumstances whatever!”

“No one asks you to. Simply regard her as a force of nature—let her alone, and don’t put up too many lightning-rods.”

She raised her eyes to his face. “Do you really mean that you want Bessy to get a divorce?”

“Your style is elliptical, dear Maria; but divorce does not frighten me very much. It has grown almost as painless as modern dentistry.”

“It’s our odious insensibility that makes it so!”

Mr. Langhope received this with the mildness of suspended judgment. “How else, then, do you propose that Bessy shall save what is left of her money?”

“I would rather see her save what is left of her happiness. Bessy will never be happy in the new way.”

“What do you call the new way?”

“Launching one’s boat over a human body—or several, as the case may be!”

“But don’t you see that, as an expedient to bring this madman to reason–-“

“I’ve told you that you don’t understand him!”

Mr. Langhope turned on her with what would have been a show of temper in any one less provided with shades of manner. “Well, then, explain him, for God’s sake!”

“I might explain him by saying that she’s still in love with him.”

“Ah, if you’re still imprisoned in the old formulas!”

Mrs. Ansell confronted him with a grave face. “Isn’t that precisely what Bessy is? Isn’t she one of the most harrowing victims of the plan of bringing up our girls in the double bondage of expediency and unreality, corrupting their bodies with luxury and their brains with sentiment, and leaving them to reconcile the two as best they can, or lose their souls in the attempt?”

Mr. Langhope smiled. “I may observe that, with my poor child so early left alone to me, I supposed I was doing my best in committing her guidance to some of the most admirable women I know.”

“Of whom I was one—and not the least lamentable example of the system! Of course the only thing that saves us from their vengeance,” Mrs. Ansell added, “is that so few of them ever stop to think….”

“And yet, as I make out, it’s precisely what you would have Bessy do!”

“It’s what neither you nor I can help her doing. You’ve given her just acuteness enough to question, without consecutiveness enough to explain. But if she must perish in the struggle—and I see no hope for her—” cried Mrs. Ansell, starting suddenly and dramatically to her feet, “at least let her perish defending her ideals and not denying them—even if she has to sell the New York house and all your china pots into the bargain!”

Mr. Langhope, rising also, deprecatingly lifted his hands, “If that’s what you call saving me from her vengeance—sending the crockery crashing round my ears!” And, as she turned away without any pretense of capping his pleasantry, he added, with a gleam of friendly malice: “I suppose you’re going to the Hunt ball as Cassandra?”

Amherst, that morning, had sought out his wife with the definite resolve to efface the unhappy impression of their previous talk. He blamed himself for having been too easily repelled by her impatience. As the stronger of the two, with the power of a fixed purpose to sustain him, he should have allowed for the instability of her impulses, and above all for the automatic influences of habit.

Knowing that she did not keep early hours he delayed till ten o’clock to present himself at her sitting-room door, but the maid who answered his knock informed him that Mrs. Amherst was not yet up.

His reply that he would wait did not appear to hasten the leisurely process of her toilet, and he had the room to himself for a full half-hour. Many months had passed since he had spent so long a time in it, and though habitually unobservant of external details, he now found an outlet for his restlessness in mechanically noting the intimate appurtenances of Bessy’s life. He was at first merely conscious of a soothing harmony of line and colour, extending from the blurred tints of the rug to the subdued gleam of light on old picture-frames and on the slender flanks of porcelain vases; but gradually he began to notice how every chair and screen and cushion, and even every trifling utensil on the inlaid writing-desk, had been chosen with reference to the whole composition, and to the minutest requirements of a fastidious leisure. A few months ago this studied setting, if he had thought of it at all, would have justified itself as expressing the pretty woman’s natural affinity with pretty toys; but now it was the cost of it that struck him. He was beginning to learn from Bessy’s bills that no commodity is taxed as high as beauty, and the beauty about him filled him with sudden repugnance, as the disguise of the evil influences that were separating his wife’s life from his.

But with her entrance he dismissed the thought, and tried to meet her as if nothing stood in the way of their full communion. Her hair, still wet from the bath, broke from its dryad-like knot in dusky rings and spirals threaded with gold, and from her loose flexible draperies, and her whole person as she moved, there came a scent of youth and morning freshness. Her beauty touched him, and made it easier for him to humble himself.

“I was stupid and disagreeable last night. I can never say what I want when I have to count the minutes, and I’ve come back now for a quiet talk,” he began.

A shade of distrust passed over Bessy’s face. “About business?” she asked, pausing a few feet away from him.

“Don’t let us give it that name!” He went up to her and drew her two hands into his. “You used to call it our work—won’t you go back to that way of looking at it?”

Her hands resisted his pressure. “I didn’t know, then, that it was going to be the only thing you cared for–-“

But for her own sake he would not let her go on. “Some day I shall make you see how much my caring for it means my caring for you. But meanwhile,” he urged, “won’t you overcome your aversion to the subject, and bear with it as my work, if you no longer care to think of it as yours?”

Bessy, freeing herself, sat down on the edge of the straight-backed chair near the desk, as though to mark the parenthetical nature of the interview.

“I know you think me stupid—but wives are not usually expected to go into all the details of their husband’s business. I have told you to do whatever you wish at Westmore, and I can’t see why that is not enough.”

Amherst looked at her in surprise. Something in her quick mechanical utterance suggested that not only the thought but the actual words she spoke had been inspired, and he fancied he heard in them an echo of Blanche Carbury’s tones. Though Bessy’s intimacy with Mrs. Carbury was of such recent date, fragments of unheeded smoking-room gossip now recurred to confirm the vague antipathy which Amherst had felt for her the previous evening.

“I know that, among your friends, wives are not expected to interest themselves in their husbands’ work, and if the mills were mine I should try to conform to the custom, though I should always think it a pity that the questions that fill a man’s thoughts should be ruled out of his talk with his wife; but as it is, I am only your representative at Westmore, and I don’t see how we can help having the subject come up between us.”

Bessy remained silent, not as if acquiescing in his plea, but as though her own small stock of arguments had temporarily failed her; and he went on, enlarging on his theme with a careful avoidance of technical terms, and with the constant effort to keep the human and personal side of the question before her.

She listened without comment, her eyes fixed on a little jewelled letter-opener which she had picked up from the writing-table, and which she continued to turn in her fingers while he spoke.

The full development of Amherst’s plans at Westmore, besides resulting, as he had foreseen, in Truscomb’s resignation, and in Halford Gaines’s outspoken resistance to the new policy, had necessitated a larger immediate outlay of capital than the first estimates demanded, and Amherst, in putting his case to Bessy, was prepared to have her meet it on the old ground of the disapproval of all her advisers. But when he had ended she merely said, without looking up from the toy in her hand: “I always expected that you would need a great deal more money than you thought.”

The comment touched him at his most vulnerable point. “But you see why? You understand how the work has gone on growing—?”

His wife lifted her head to glance at him for a moment. “I am not sure that I understand,” she said indifferently; “but if another loan is necessary, of course I will sign the note for it.”

The words checked his reply by bringing up, before he was prepared to deal with it, the other and more embarrassing aspect of the question. He had hoped to reawaken in Bessy some feeling for the urgency of his task before having to take up the subject of its cost; but her cold anticipation of his demands as part of a disagreeable business to be despatched and put out of mind, doubled the difficulty of what he had left to say; and it occurred to him that she had perhaps foreseen and reckoned on this result.

He met her eyes gravely. “Another loan is necessary; but if any proper provision is to be made for paying it back, your expenses will have to be cut down a good deal for the next few months.”

The blood leapt to Bessy’s face. “My expenses? You seem to forget how much I’ve had to cut them down already.”

“The household bills certainly don’t show it. They are increasing steadily, and there have been some very heavy incidental payments lately.”

“What do you mean by incidental payments?”

“Well, there was the pair of cobs you bought last month–-“

She returned to a resigned contemplation of the letter-opener. “With only one motor, one must have more horses, of course.”

“The stables seemed to me fairly full before. But if you required more horses, I don’t see why, at this particular moment, it was also necessary to buy a set of Chinese vases for twenty-five hundred dollars.”

Bessy, at this, lifted her head with an air of decision that surprised him. Her blush had faded as quickly as it came, and he noticed that she was pale to the lips.

“I know you don’t care about such things; but I had an exceptional chance of securing the vases at a low price—they are really worth twice as much—and Dick always wanted a set of Ming for the drawing-room mantelpiece.”

Richard Westmore’s name was always tacitly avoided between them, for in Amherst’s case the disagreeable sense of dependence on a dead man’s bounty increased that feeling of obscure constraint and repugnance which any reminder of the first husband’s existence is wont to produce in his successor.

He reddened at the reply, and Bessy, profiting by an embarrassment which she had perhaps consciously provoked, went on hastily, and as if by rote: “I have left you perfectly free to do as you think best at the mills, but this perpetual discussion of my personal expenses is very unpleasant to me, as I am sure it must be to you, and in future I think it would be much better for us to have separate accounts.”

“Separate accounts?” Amherst echoed in genuine astonishment.

“I should like my personal expenses to be under my own control again—I have never been used to accounting for every penny I spend.”

The vertical lines deepened between Amherst’s brows. “You are of course free to spend your money as you like—and I thought you were doing so when you authorized me, last spring, to begin the changes at Westmore.”

Her lip trembled. “Do you reproach me for that? I didn’t understand…you took advantage….”

“Oh!” he exclaimed.

At his tone the blood rushed back to her face. “It was my fault, of course—I only wanted to please you–-“

Amherst was silent, confronted by the sudden sense of his own responsibility. What she said was true—he had known, when he exacted the sacrifice, that she made it only to please him, on an impulse of reawakened feeling, and not from any real recognition of a larger duty. The perception of this made him answer gently: “I am willing to take any blame you think I deserve; but it won’t help us now to go back to the past. It is more important that we should come to an understanding about the future. If by keeping your personal account separate, you mean that you wish to resume control of your whole income, then you ought to understand that the improvements at the mills will have to be dropped at once, and things there go back to their old state.”

She started up with an impatient gesture. “Oh, I should like never to hear of the mills again!”

He looked at her a moment in silence. “Am I to take that as your answer?”

She walked toward her door without returning his look. “Of course,” she murmured, “you will end by doing as you please.”

The retort moved him, for he heard in it the cry of her wounded pride. He longed to be able to cry out in return that Westmore was nothing to him, that all he asked was to see her happy…. But it was not true, and his manhood revolted from the deception. Besides, its effect would be only temporary—would wear no better than her vain efforts to simulate an interest in his work. Between them, forever, were the insurmountable barriers of character, of education, of habit—and yet it was not in him to believe that any barrier was insurmountable.

“Bessy,” he exclaimed, following her, “don’t let us part in this way–-“

She paused with her hand on her dressing-room door. “It is time to dress for church,” she objected, turning to glance at the little gilt clock on the chimney-piece.

“For church?” Amherst stared, wondering that at such a crisis she should have remained detached enough to take note of the hour.

“You forget,” she replied, with an air of gentle reproof, “that before we married I was in the habit of going to church every Sunday.”

“Yes—to be sure. Would you not like me to go with you?” he rejoined gently, as if roused to the consciousness of another omission in the long list of his social shortcomings; for church-going, at Lynbrook, had always struck him as a purely social observance.

But Bessy had opened the door of her dressing-room. “I much prefer that you should do what you like,” she said as she passed from the room.

Amherst made no farther attempt to detain her, and the door closed on her as though it were closing on a chapter in their lives.

“That’s the end of it!” he murmured, picking up the letter-opener she had been playing with, and twirling it absently in his fingers. But nothing in life ever ends, and the next moment a new question confronted him—how was the next chapter to open?

BOOK III

XIX

IT was late in October when Amherst returned to Lynbrook.

He had begun to learn, in the interval, the lesson most difficult to his direct and trenchant nature: that compromise is the law of married life. On the afternoon of his talk with his wife he had sought her out, determined to make a final effort to clear up the situation between them; but he learned that, immediately after luncheon, she had gone off in the motor with Mrs. Carbury and two men of the party, leaving word that they would probably not be back till evening. It cost Amherst a struggle, when he had humbled himself to receive this information from the butler, not to pack his portmanteau and take the first train for Hanaford; but he was still under the influence of Justine Brent’s words, and also of his own feeling that, at this juncture, a break between himself and Bessy would be final.