CHAPTER V

He found Kitty alone in the drawing-room, alone, with empty hands and

empty, waiting eyes. He saw that she had wept, and that his departure,

only a brief note to break it to her, had added deep indignation to her

sorrow. She was no longer timid, nor cowed by the change she felt in

him. She had cast aside subtlety and appeal. It was a challenge that met

him in her eyes.

He had intended to tell her his news at once and the preparatory smile

was on his lips as he entered, a smile, though he did not know this,

strangely like that smile of reassurance and consolation that had met

her in the library a month ago.

But she gave him no time for a word.

Leaping from her chair she faced him, and with a vision still clearer

than that which had showed him subtlety a month ago, he saw now her

pettiness, her piteousness, her girlish violence and weakness. "Cruel!

Cruel! Cruel!"--she cried.

He remained standing at a little distance from her, looking at her sadly

and appealingly. Her words of reproach rushed forth and overwhelmed him

like a frenzied torrent.

"To leave me without a word, after last night! You treat me like a dog

that one kicks aside because it wearies one with its love. You have no

heart--I've felt it for days and days!--No heart! You hate me! You

despise me! And what have I done to deserve it but love--love--love

you--like the poor dog! But I know--I know--It is Sir Walter. You can't

forgive me that--It has poisoned everything--that ignorant folly of

mine. At first you thought you could forgive, and then you grew to hate

me. And I--I--" her voice choked, gasped into sobs;--"I have only loved

you--loved you--more and more----"

"Kitty, you are mistaken," said Holland. "I've never given Sir Walter a

thought." It was a reed she grasped at in the torrent, he saw that

well;--a desperate hope.

"It's false!" she cried. "You have! You thought at first that you would

be magnanimous and save me,--you could be magnanimous because you were

going to die--it's easy enough to be magnanimous if you are going to

die! easy enough to be peaceful and sad--and to stand there and smile

and smile as if you were only sorry for me. But you found out that you

were alive enough to be jealous after all, and that you could not really

forgive me, and then you hated me."

"Kitty--you know that you do not believe what you are saying."

"Can you deny that if you had been going to live you would not have

forgiven me?"

"I can. I could have forgiven. But then, as I said to you--that day,

Kitty, on the lawn,--it would have been more difficult to save you."

"Your love, then, was a pretence to save me!"

"Nothing was pretence, at first," he answered her patiently. "At first I

was only glad for your sake that I was going to be out of the way so

soon; and when I found that you could care for me again I was glad that

I had still a month to live with you."

His words smote on her heart like stones. He saw it and yearned over her

pain; but such yearning, such dispassionate tenderness was, he knew, the

poison in her veins that maddened her.

She looked, now, at last, at the truth. He had not put it into words,

but with the abandonment of her specious hope she saw and spoke it.

"It was, then, because it was only for a month."

He hesitated, seeing, too. "That I was glad?"

"That you loved me."

Across the room, in a long silence, they looked at each other. And in

the silence another truth came to him, cruel, clear, salutary.

"Wasn't it, perhaps, for both of us, because it was only for a month?"

The shock went as visibly through her as though it had, indeed,

been a stone hurled at her breast. "You mean--you mean--" she

stammered--"Oh--you don't believe that I love you--You believe that it

could pass, with me, as it has with you!" She threw herself into the

chair, casting her arms on the back, burying her face in them.

Holland, timidly, approached her. He was afraid of the revelation he

must make. "I believe that you do love me, Kitty, and that I love you;

but not in the way we thought. We neither of us could go on loving like

that; it was because it was only for a month that we thought we could.

It wasn't real."

"Oh," she sobbed, "that is the difference--the cruel difference. You

love me in that terrible way--the way that could give me up and not

mind; but I am in love with you;--that's the dreadful difference. Men

get over it; but women are always in love."

Perhaps Kitty saw further than he did. Holland was abashed before the

helpless revelation of a mysterious and alien sorrow. For women the

brooding dream; for men the active dusty world. Yet even here, on the

threshold of a secret, absurd, yet perhaps, in its absurdity, lovelier

than man's sterner visions, he felt that, for her sake, he must draw her

away from the contemplation of it. That was one thing he had learned,

for Kitty. She, too, must manage to fly--or fall--out of the nest; she

must get, in some way, more dust into her life. He had forgotten the

news he was to tell her; he had forgotten all but her need.

"Perhaps that is true, dear Kitty," he said; "but isn't it, in a way,

that women are _merely_ in love. It's not with anybody; or, rather, it

is with anybody--with me or with Sir Walter; I mean, anybody who seems

to promise more love. Horrible I sound, I know. Forgive me. But I wish I

could shake you out of being in love. I want you to be more my comrade

than you have been. Don't let us think so much of love."

But Kitty moaned: "I don't want a comrade. I want a lover."

And, in the silence that followed, lifting her head suddenly, she fixed

her eyes on him.

"You talk as if we could be comrades," she said. "You talk as if we were

to go on living together. What did the doctor say? I don't believe that

you are going to die."

He felt ridiculous now. The real tragedy was there, between them; but

the tragedy upon which all their fictitious romance had been built was

to tumble about their ears.

It was as if he had all along been deceiving, misleading her, acting on

false pretences, winning her love by his borrowed funereal splendour.

Almost shamefacedly, looking down and stammering over the silly

confession, he said: "It was all a mistake. I'm not going to die."

He did not look at her for some moments. He was sure that she was deaf

and breathless with the crash and crumbling.

Presently, when he did raise his eyes, he found that she was staring at

him, curiously, intently. She had found herself: she had found him;

and--oh yes--he saw it--he was far from her. The stare, essentially, was

one of a hard hostility. She had been betrayed and robbed; she could

not forgive him.

"Kitty," he said timidly, "are you sorry?"

Her sombre gaze dwelt on him.

"Tell me you're not sorry," he pleaded.

She answered him at last: "How dare you ask me that? How dare you ask me

whether I am sorry that you are not going to die? You must know that it

is an insult."

"I mean--if I disappointed--failed you so--"

"I must wish you dead? You have a charming idea of me."

How her voice clashed and clanged with the hardness, the warfare, the

uproar of the outer world. After the hush, the gentleness of Paradise,

it was like being thrown, dizzy and bewildered, among the traffic and

turmoil of a great city.

"Don't be cruel," he murmured.

"I? Cruel!" she laughed.

She got up and walked up and down the room. A fever of desperate,

baffled anger burned in her. He saw that she did not trust herself to

speak. She was afraid of betraying, to herself and to him, the ugly

distortion of her soul.

He was not to die; he was not her lover; and Kitty was the primitive

woman. She could be in love, but she could not love unless pity were

appealed to. His loss of all passion had killed her romance. His loss of

all pathos had, perhaps, killed even human tenderness. For it was he who

had drawn away. She was humiliated to the dust.

And that she made a great effort upon herself, so that to his eyes the

ugliness might not be betrayed, he guessed presently when, looking

persistently away from him and out at the garden--their garden!

alas!--where a fine rain fell silently, she said: "I am glad that your

sorrow is over. I hope that you will find happier things--and realler

things--than you have found in this month. I will remember all that you

have said to-day. I think that you have cured me for ever. I shall not

be in love again."

"Kitty! Kitty!" he breathed out. She hurt him too much, the poor child,

arming its empty heart against him. "Don't speak like that.

Remember--the month has been beautiful."

The tears rose in her eyes, but the hostility did not leave them.

"Beautiful? When it has not been real?"

"Can't we remember the beauty--make something more real?" he now almost

wept. But there it was, the shallow, the hard child's heart. He was not

in love with her. And, like a nest of snakes, the memory of all her

humiliations--her appeals, her proffered love, his evasions and

withdrawals--was awake within her. She smiled, a smile that, seeking

magnanimity, found only bitterness. "You must speak for yourself, dear

Nicholas. For me it was real, and you have spoiled the beauty."

The servants came in while she spoke and she moved aside to make way for

the placing of the tea-table. Traces of the fever were upon her yet; her

delicate face was flushed, her eyes sparkled. But she had regained the

place she meant to keep. She would own to no discomfitures deeper than

those that were creditable to her. Moving here and there, touching the

flowers in a vase, straightening reviews scattered on a table, she was

even able to smile again at him a smile almost kind, and keeping, before

him, as well as for the servants, all the advantage of composure.

That smile would often meet him throughout life, and so he would see

her, moving delicately and gracefully, making order and comeliness about

her, for many years. She set the key. It was the key of their future

life together, Holland knew, as he heard her say: "Do sit down and rest.

You must want your tea after that tiresome journey."

THE WHITE PAGODA

The drama of the drawing-rooms had begun years ago, but Owen Stacpole

did not come into it until the day on which his cousin Gwendolen, after

examining the box of bric-a-brac, remarked, refolding the last pieces of

china in their dusty newspapers, that they were rubbish, and silly

rubbish, too, of just the sort that Aunt Pickthorne had always

unerringly accumulated. The box had arrived that morning, a legacy from

this deceased relative; it had been brought up to the drawing-room and

placed upon a sheet near the fire, so that Mrs. Conyers might examine

its contents in comfort, and Owen, while he wrote at the black lacquer

bureau in the window, had been aware of Gwendolen's gibes and

exclamations behind him. Now, when she asserted that she would send the

whole futile collection down to Mr. Glazebrook and see if he would give

her enough for it to buy a pair of gloves with, Owen rose and limped to

join her and to look down at the wooden box into which she was

thrusting, with some vindictiveness, the dingy parcels.

"Have you looked at them all?" he inquired. "I forget--was your Aunt

Pickthorne a Mrs. or a Miss? And how long has it been since she died?"

"About six months, poor old thing. And these treasures have evidently

never been dusted since. She was a Mrs. Her husband was old Admiral

Pickthorne--don't you remember?--and they lived, after he retired, at

Cheltenham. Two more guileless Philistines I've never known. It used to

make me feel quite ill to go and stay with them when I was a girl. I've

hardly been at all since then, and that's probably why she selected all

the most hideous objects in her drawing-room to leave me. How well I

remember that drawing-room! Crocheted antimacassars; and a round,

mahogany centre-table on which a lamp used to stand in the evening; and

the wall-paper of frosted robin's-egg-blue, with stuffed birds in cases,

and terracotta plaques framed in ruby plush, hanging upon it--a

perfectly horrible room. Half a dozen of the plaques are in there; the

birds she spared me. She had one or two lovely old family things which

I'd allowed myself to hope for; a Spode tea-set I remember. But, no;

there's nothing worth looking at."

Mrs. Conyers lightly dusted her hands together, and rose from her knees.

She was, at thirty-eight, a very graceful woman; tall, of ample form,

and attired with fashionable ease and fluency. Fashion had been a late

development with Gwendolen. In her gaunt and wistful girlhood she had

worn her hair in drooping Rossettian masses, and her throat had been

differently bare. Now she was as accurate as she was easy. Her hair was

even a little too sophisticatedly distended, and her long pearl

ear-rings, though they became the tender violet of her eyes, emphasized,

as her former Pre-Raphaelite ornaments had not seemed to do, a certain

genial commonplaceness in the contours of her cheek and chin. But almost

fat and decisively unpoetical as she had become, it was undeniable that

this last phase of dress and, in especial, these widow's weeds, with

sinuous lines of jet and lustrous falls of fringes, became her better

than any in which Owen remembered to have seen her.

Gwendolen's drawing-room, too, had undergone, since the days of her

girlhood, as complete a metamorphosis as she had. When she had married

and left the big house in Kensington where Owen had spent many a happy

holiday--when she had married crabbed old Mr. Conyers, the Chislebridge

dignitary, and gone to live in Chislebridge, her convictions had at once

expressed themselves luxuriantly in large-patterned wall-papers and

deep-cushioned divans and in Eastern fabrics draping the mantelpiece or

cast irrelevantly over carved Indian screens. Her teas had been brought

in on trays of Indian beaten brass, and the mosque-like opening between

the front and back drawing-room had been hung with translucent curtains

of beaded reeds, through which one had to plunge as though through a

sheet of dropping water. Owen well remembered their tinkle and rattle

and the perfume of burning Eastern pastilles that greeted one when,

emerging, one found oneself in the dim, rich gloom among the divans and

the brasses and the palms. In those days Gwendolen had been draped

rather than dressed, and the gestures and attitudes of her languid arms

and wrists seemed more adapted to a dulcimer than to a tea-pot. But she

dispensed excellent tea, and though her eyes were appropriately

yearning, her talk was quite as reassuringly commonplace as Owen had

always found it.

It was only in the course of years that the reed curtains and the

carved Indian screens and the divans ebbed away; but the change was

complete at last, and he found Gwendolen, with undulated hair puffed

over a frame, and a small waist,--large waists not having then come

in,--receiving her visitors in the most clear, calm, austere of rooms,

with polished floor, Sheraton furniture, and Japanese colour-prints

framed in white hanging on pensive spaces of willow-leaf-green wall.

Gwendolen talked of Strauss's music and of the New English Art Club, was

indignant at the prohibition of "Monna Vanna," and to some no longer apt

remark of an aspiring caller answered that to speak so was surely to

Ruskinize. He realized on this occasion that Gwendolen had become the

arbiter of taste in Chislebridge. He followed her into several

drawing-rooms and observed that she had set the fashion in furniture and

wall-paper; that some were pushing their way toward Japanese prints, and

some were even beginning to babble faintly of Manet. Five years had

passed since then, and now, on this his first visit to Chislebridge

since old Mr. Conyers's death, another change had taken place.

Gwendolen's hips were compressed, her waist was large once more, though

of a carefully calculated largeness, and only in a fine bit of the old

furniture here and there did a trace of the former green drawing-room

remain. This was certainly the most interesting room that Gwendolen had

yet achieved. There had been little character, if much charm, in the

green drawing-room; one knew so many like it. With a slight

self-discipline, its harmonies were really easy to attain. But it was

not easy to attain a mingled richness and austerity; to be recondite,

yet lovely; to set such cabinets of rosy old lacquer near such Chinese

screens or hang subtle strips of Chinese painting on just the right

shade of dim, white wall. It took money, it took time, it took knowledge

to find such delicate cane-seated settees framed in black lacquer, and

to pick up such engraved glass, such white Chinese porcelain and white

Italian earthenware. Melting together in their dim splendour and shining

softness, they had so enchantingly arrested Owen the night before that,

pausing on the threshold, he had said with a whole-heartedness she had

never yet heard from him, "Well, Gwen, yours is the loveliest room I've

ever seen."

It was indeed triumphantly lovely, although, examining it more

critically by the morning light, he had found slight dissatisfactions.

It was perhaps a little too much like an admirably sophisticated

curiosity-shop. It was an object to be examined with delight, hardly a

subject to be lived with with love. And it almost distressed him to see

the touch of genial commonplaceness expressing itself pervasively in the

big bowls and jars and vases of pink roses that burgeoned everywhere.

They showed no real sense of what the lacquer and glass and porcelain

demanded; for they demanded surely a more fragile, less obvious flower.

And one or two minor ornaments, though evidently selected with

scrupulous conscientiousness, seemed to him equally at fault. Still, he

had again that morning, before seating himself to write, repeated in all

sincerity, "This is really the loveliest room," and Gwendolen, from

where she knelt above Aunt Pickthorne's box, had answered, following his

eyes, "I am _so_ glad you like it, dear Owen."

Gwendolen was very fond of him, and her fondness had never been so

marked. It was of that he had been thinking as he wrote. He had never

felt fonder of Gwendolen. Her drawing-room was lovely, her widow's weeds

became her, and she was, as she had always been, the kindest of

creatures. In every sense the house would be a pleasanter one to stay at

than in old Mr. Conyers's lifetime. Owen had not liked old Mr. Conyers,

who had had too much the air of thinking himself an historical figure

and his breakfast historical events, who snubbed his wife and quoted

Greek and Latin pugnaciously, and took the cabinet ministers and

duchesses who sometimes sojourned under his roof, with an unctuousness

that made more marked the aridity of his manner toward less illustrious

guests. The Conyers had come to count in the eyes of Chislebridge and

the surrounding country as the social figure-heads of the studious old

town, and Owen had found himself, as Gwendolen's crippled, writing,

cousin, year by year of relatively less importance in the eyes of

Gwendolen's husband. Actually, as it happened, he had during those years

become almost illustrious himself; but his austere distinction, such as

it was, had been as moonrise rather than dawn, and had left him as

gently impersonal as before, and even more impoverished.

Negligible-looking as he knew he was, he had sometimes been amused to

note old Mr. Conyers's bewilderment when a cabinet minister or a duchess

manifested their pleasurable excitement in meeting him. As for

Gwendolen, her essential loyalty and kindness had always remained the

same since the days when she had protected him from the sallies of her

boisterous brothers and sisters in the Kensington family mansion--the

same till now. Last night and to-day he had recognised a difference. He

wondered whether he was a conceited fool for imagining in Gwendolen a

dwelling tenderness, a brooding touch, indeed, of reminiscent

wistfulness. Was it to show an unbecoming complacency if he allowed his

mind to dwell upon the possibilities that this development in Gwendolen

presented to his imagination? He was delicate and poor and, despite a

large visiting-list, he was lonely. He was fond of Gwendolen and of her

two nice, dull boys. She amused him, it was true, as she had always

amused him; for though her drawing-room had become interesting, though

she had developed a sense of humour, or at least the intention of

humorousness, though she often attempted playfulness and even irony, she

was still at heart as disproportionately earnest as she had been in

youth. But Gwendolen would make no romantic demands upon him, and she

would not expect him to take even red lacquer as seriously as she did,

or to follow with the same breathlessness the erratic movements of

modern aestheticism. She was accustomed to his passive unresponsiveness,

and would resent it no more in the husband than in the friend.

Altogether, as he sat there writing at Gwendolen's lovely bureau, he

knew that a sense of homely magic grew upon him.

Next morning, wandering about the pleasant streets of the old town, he

found himself before the window of Mr. Glazebrook's curiosity-shop--a

shop well known to more than Chislebridge. He paused to look at the

objects disposed with a dignified reticence against a dark background,

and his eye was attracted by a very delightful red lacquer box that at

once made him think of Gwendolen's drawing-room. Just the thing for her,

it was. But as he entered the shop, Mr. Glazebrook leaned from within

and took it from its place in the window. He was showing it to another

customer.

Owen now quite vehemently longed to possess the box, which, he saw, as

Mr. Glazebrook displayed it, was cunningly fitted with little inner

segments, beautifully patterned in gold. Feigning an indifferent survey

of the shop, he lingered near, hoping that his rival would relinquish

her opportunity.

"Five pounds! O dear, that is too much for me, I'm afraid," he heard her

say, and, at the voice, he turned and looked at her. The voice was

unusual--a rapid, rather husky voice that made him think of muffled

bells or snow-bound water, gay in rhythm, yet marred in tone, almost as

though the speaker had cried a great deal. She was an unusual figure,

too, though he could not have said why, except that her dress seemed to

recall bygone fashions quaintly, though without a hint of dowdiness or

affectation. She wore a skirt and jacket of soft gray, with pleated lawn

at neck and wrists, and her small gray hat was wreathed with violets.

She held the lacquer box, and her face, rosy, crisp, decisive, and

showing, like her voice, a marred gaiety, expressed her reluctant

relinquishment and her strong desire. Owen had seen a child look at a

forbidden fruit with just such an expression and he suddenly wished that

he could give the box to her rather than to Gwendolen, to whom five

pounds was a matter of small moment.

"I think I mustn't," she repeated, after a further hesitation, and

setting the box down with cherishing care. "Not to-day. And I have so

much red lacquer. It's like dram-drinking."

Mr. Glazebrook smiled affably. He was evidently on old-established terms

with his customer. "Perhaps you'd like to look round a bit, Mrs.

Waterlow," he suggested. "There are some nice pieces of old glass in the

inner room, quite cheap, some of them--a set of old champagne glasses."

Mrs. Waterlow, saying that she wanted some old champagne glasses, moved

away.

"Do you think the lady has given up that box?" Owen asked. "I don't want

to buy it if there's a chance of her changing her mind."

Mr. Glazebrook said that there was no such chance, the lady being one

who knew her own mind; so the box was bought and Owen ordered it to be

sent to Gwendolen. He said then that he would like to have a look round,

too. He really wanted to have another look at the lady with the rosy

face and the small gray hat trimmed with violets. He peered into

cabinets ranged thickly with old glass and china, examined the Worcester

tea-set disposed upon a table and the case of Chinese tear-bottles and

Japanese netzukes, and presently made his way into the smaller, dimmer

room at the back.

"Oh, Mr. Glazebrook," said the lady in gray. She had heard his step, but

had not turned. She was kneeling before an open packing-case and holding

an object that she had drawn from it. Owen suddenly recognised the case.

It was the one that Gwendolen yesterday had sent down to Mr. Glazebrook.

He called this person, raising his hat, and the lady looked round at

him, too preoccupied to express her recognition of her mistake by more

than a vague murmur of thanks. "Mr. Glazebrook," she said, holding up a

whitish object, "may I have this? Is it expensive?"

"Well, really, I only glanced over the box. A customer sent it down to

me to dispose of, and I didn't think there was anything in it worth

much. Let me see, Mrs. Waterlow; it's a pagoda, I take it, a Chinese

pagoda. We've had them from time to time, in ivory and smaller than

this."

"This is in porcelain," said the lady, "and beautifully moulded."

"I see, I see," said Mr. Glazebrook, taking the fragile top segment of

the disjointed pagoda in his hand, and rather at a loss; "and it's

slightly damaged."

The lady in gray evidently was not a shrewd bargainer. "Only a little,"

she said. "One or two bits have been chipped out of the roofs, and it's

lost one or two of its little crystal rings; but I think it's in quite

good condition, and I have it all here." She was placing one segment

upon the other. "They are all made to fit, you see, with the little

openings in each story."

She had built it up beside her as she knelt on the floor, and it stood

like a fragile, fantastic ghost, with the upward tilt of its tiled

roofs, its embossed patterns, and the crystal rings trembling from each

angle of the roofs like raindrops. "What a darling!" said Mrs. Waterlow.

"How much do you ask for it, Mr. Glazebrook?"

Mr. Glazebrook, adjusting his knowledge of the limitations of Mrs.

Waterlow's purse to his present appreciation of the pagoda and of her

desire for it, said genially, after a moment, that from an old customer

like herself he would ask only forty-five shillings.

"Well, I think it's a great bargain, Mr. Glazebrook," said Mrs.

Waterlow. "And I'll have it."

"Shall I send it round?" Mr. Glazebrook asked.

"Yes, please; or, no, it isn't heavy,"--she lifted it with both hands,

rising with it and looking like a Saint Barbara holding her tower,--"I

can manage it to just round the corner. Wrap it up for me, and I'll

carry it off myself."

When Owen saw his cousin again at lunch, the red lacquer box had not yet

arrived, and, with a touch of friendly mockery, he said:

"Well, you have been unlucky, my dear Gwen. There was the most charming

piece of old Chinese porcelain in that scorned Cheltenham box, and I saw

Mr. Glazebrook sell it this morning to a lady who wasn't to be put off

by dust and newspapers and plush-framed plaques. She carried it off in

triumph, saying that it was a great bargain. And so it was; but she

might have had it for half the money if she hadn't informed Mr.

Glazebrook of its probable value."

Gwendolen fixed her mild, violet eyes upon him. "A piece of old Chinese

porcelain? Do you mean that silly white pagoda?"

"You did see it, then?"

"See it? Haven't I seen it all my life? It stood on a purple worsted mat

on a little bamboo table between the Nottingham lace curtains in one of

Aunt Pickthorne's drawing-room windows, and looked like some piece of

childish gimcrackery bought at a bazaar, where, I'll wager, she did buy

it."

"Well, Mrs. Waterlow evidently didn't think it gimcrackery, or, if she

did, she didn't mind. It looked to me, I confess, an exquisite thing.

But her admiration may have lent it its enchantment."

Gwendolen's eyes now fixed themselves more searchingly than before.

"Mrs. Waterlow? Did Mrs. Waterlow buy it? How did you know it was Mrs.

Waterlow? I thought you'd never met her."

"I haven't; but I heard Mr. Glazebrook call her by her name. She'd

wanted to buy a red lacquer box that I spotted in the window and had

gone in to get for you, my dear Gwen. It was too expensive for her,--so

that it is yours,--and she went rummaging into the back shop and found

your box with the things just as you and Mr. Glazebrook had left them,

and in no time she'd disinterred the pagoda."

Gwendolen apparently was so arrested by his story that she forgot for

the moment to thank him for the lacquer box.

"Do you know her?" he asked.

"Know her? Know Cicely Waterlow? Why, I've known her since she first

came to live here, years ago. She's a very dear friend of mine,"

Gwendolen said, adding: "How much did she pay for it? That wretched man

gave me only fifteen shillings for the lot."

"He made her pay forty-five shillings for the pagoda. I suspect myself

that it's worth ten times as much. Does she care for things,

too--lacquer and engraved glass?"

Gwendolen still showed preoccupation and, he fancied, a touch of

vexation.

"Care for them? Yes; who with any taste doesn't care for them? Cicely

has very good taste, too, in her little way. She doesn't know anything,

but she picks up ideas and puts them together very cleverly. I can't

help thinking that she'd never have given the pagoda a thought if my

white porcelain hadn't educated her. I really can't believe that it's

good, Owen."

Owen waived the point.

"Who is Mr. Waterlow?" he asked.

"He has been dead for fifteen or sixteen years. He died only a year

after their marriage. A very delightful man, so people say who knew him.

And Cicely lost her little girl, to whom she was passionately devoted,

five years ago; she has never really recovered from that. She used to be

so pretty, poor Cicely! She's lost it all now. She cried her very eyes

out. She has a little money and lives with her mother-in-law, old Mrs.

Waterlow, who is very fond of her. They don't entertain except in the

quietest way, or go out much, and I do what I can to give Cicely a good

time. I often have her here to tea when I have interesting people

staying."

"Oh, that's good. Do count me as interesting enough and ask her while

I'm here."

"Interesting enough, my dear Owen! I don't suppose that Cicely often has

a chance of meeting such an interesting man as you. Of course I'll ask

her," said Gwendolen. Then, remembering his gift: "It _was_ nice of you

to get me a red lacquer box, Owen. I adore red lacquer, and I'm quite

sure, whatever you and Cicely Waterlow may say, that it's worth a

hundred of your white pagodas."

Mrs. Waterlow came to tea next afternoon, the last of Owen's stay. The

drawing-room was crowded, and Owen, when she was announced, was enjoying

a talk with a dismal-looking old philosopher who had plaintive, white

hairs on his nose and trousers that bagged irremediably at the knees.

"Yes, indeed, I know her well," said Professor Selden, as Owen

questioned him. "I play chess with her once a week. Her little girl was

a great pet of mine. You never saw the little girl?"

"Never, and I've not yet met Mrs. Waterlow. She is most

charming-looking."

"The little girl was so much like her," said Professor Selden, sadly.

"Yes, she is a charming woman. Don't let me keep you from meeting her. I

am going to sit down here while our young friend Dawkins plays. You

know Dawkins? Between ourselves, Mrs. Conyers thinks too highly of

him."

Mrs. Waterlow's eyes turned upon him as he limped up to her and

Gwendolen, and smiling, she said, "Why, I saw you yesterday in Mr.

Glazebrook's shop."

"Yes," said Owen, "and there is the red lacquer box."

"And you, Cicely, bought my pagoda," said Gwendolen.

"Your pagoda?" Mrs. Waterlow questioned, her eyes, that seemed to open

with a little difficulty, resting on her hostess with some surprise.

"Was the pagoda yours?"

"Yes, mine," said Gwendolen. "It came in a box of rubbish,--you saw the

kind of rubbish,--a legacy from an old aunt, and I bundled it off to

Glazebrook. Owen says it is really good. Is it?"

"I'm sure I don't know," said Mrs. Waterlow.

"I'm sure it is," said Owen, "and I liked the accuracy with which you

fell in love with it at first sight."

"I did fall in love with it, good or bad," said Mrs. Waterlow. "Don't

tell me that you want it back again, Gwendolen. But if it was a mistake,

of course----"

He recognised in her the note of guilelessness and, with some decision,

for he actually perceived an eagerness in Gwendolen's glance, interposed

with, "But Gwendolen thinks it gimcrackery, and wouldn't have it at any

price. Isn't it so, Gwendolen?"

Poor Gwendolen was looking a little glum; but she was the most

unresentful of creatures.

"Indeed, it is," she said. "I did think it gimcrackery; but, to tell the

truth, I never really saw it at all. I can't believe you'd have seen it,

Cicely, standing on its worsted mat in my Aunt Pickthorne's

drawing-room. But I wouldn't dream, of course, of taking it back; and if

it's really good, I'm more glad than I can say that my loss should be

your gain. Now, won't you and Owen sit down here and listen to my

wonderful Perceval Dawkins? Oh, he is going to astonish the world some

day."

Mrs. Waterlow and Owen, in the intervals of the ensuing music, talked

together. Seen more closely, he found that her face, though not

beautiful, was even more singularly delightful than he had thought it.

She had eyes merry, yet tired, like those of a sleepy child, and sweet,

small, firm lips and a glance and smile at once very frank and very

remote. There was about her none of that aroma of sorrow that some

women distil from the tragedies of their lives, and wear, even if

unconsciously, like an allurement. He felt that in Mrs. Waterlow sorrow

had been an isolating, a bewildering, a devastating experience, making

her at once more ready to take refuge in the trivialities of life and

more unable to admit an intimacy into the essentials. Yet the spring of

vitality and mirth was so strong in her that in all she said he felt a

quality restorative, aromatic, fragrant, as if he were walking in spring

woods and smelt everywhere the rising sap and the breath of violets. She

was remote, blighted, yet buoyant. When she rose to go, he realised with

sudden dismay that to-day was his last in Chislebridge and that he

should not see her again for who knew how long.

"Is the pagoda placed?" he asked her. "Does it fulfil your

expectations?"

"Yes, indeed," she said. "I spent two hours yesterday in washing and

mending it. It is immaculate now, as lovely as a pearl."

"I wish I could see it," said Owen.

"Why, pray, then, come and see it. Can you come to tea with me and my

mother-in-law to-morrow?"

"I'm going away to-morrow," said Owen, dismally. And then he bethought

him. "Can't I walk back with you now? Is it too late? Only

five-thirty."

"Not in the least too late. Mamma will still be having tea, and she

loves people to drop in. But ought you to come away?" Mrs. Waterlow

glanced round the crowded room.

"I'll not be missed," he assured her with some conscious speciousness.

Gwendolen, indeed, had time only for a little stare of surprise when he

told her that he was going to look at the pagoda with Mrs. Waterlow. She

was receiving new guests, richly furred and motor-veiled ladies who had

come in from the country and were expatiating over the beauties of the

red lacquer cabinets, Gwendolen's latest acquisitions.

"That will be delightful," she said; "and now Owen will see that sweet

drawing-room of yours, dearest. You have made it so pretty!"

Owen observed that Mrs. Waterlow, while maintaining all the suavities of

intercourse, did not address Gwendolen as dearest.

It was not far to Mrs. Waterlow's, and he said, in reply to her

question, that he liked walking, if she didn't mind going slowly on his

account. He found himself telling her, then, about his lameness. A bad

fall while skating in boyhood had handicapped him for life. The lamps

had just been lighted and the evening of early spring was blurred with

mist. Catkins hung against a faintly rosy sky, and in the gardens that

they passed the crocuses stood thickly. Owen had a sense of adventure

poignant in its reminiscent magic. Not for years had he so felt the

savour of youth. He realised, with a deep happiness, that Mrs. Waterlow

liked him; sometimes she laughed at things he said, and once or twice

when her eyes turned on him he fancied in them the same expression of

happy discovery with which she had looked at the pagoda. Well, he

reflected, if she thought him delightful, too, she had had to get

through a great many dusty newspapers to find him.

Mrs. Waterlow lived, away from the gardened houses of Chislebridge, in a

small but rather stately house with a Georgian facade which stood on one

of the narrower, older streets. They went up two or three stone steps

from the pavement and knocked at a very bright and massive knocker, and

the door was opened by a middle-aged Quakerish maid. The drawing-room

was on the ground floor, and Mrs. Waterlow led him in.

Owen's astonishment, when he entered, prompted him to stand still and

to gaze about him; but luckily he could not yield to the impulse, for he

had to cross to the fire, near which, behind her tea-table, old Mrs.

Waterlow sat, and had to be presented to her and to the middle-aged,

academic-looking lady who was having tea with her. He was glad of the

respite, for he had received a shock.

Old Mrs. Waterlow had dark, authoritative eyes and white hair much

dressed under black lace, and the finest of hands, decorated with old

seals and old diamonds. She must, he felt, be a companion at once

inspiriting and disquieting, for she had the demeanour of a naughty,

haughty child, and, as she held Owen in talk for some moments, he

perceived that her conversation was of a sort to cause alarm and

amusement in her listeners. Poor old Professor Selden, who was

mentioned, offered her an opportunity for the frankest witticisms,

and,--when her daughter-in-law protested,--"Yes, dear, I know you are

fond of him," the old lady replied, "and so am I; but he is, all the

same, very like a damp potato that has begun to sprout."

"Now look at my pagoda, Mr. Stacpole," said young Mrs. Waterlow,

laughing, yet, he saw, not pleased, and turning from the fire where she

had been standing with her foot on the fender.

"Does Mr. Stacpole care for bric-a-brac, too?" old Mrs. Waterlow

inquired. "Cicely came home with this last treasure in as much triumph

as if some one had left her a fortune. I resent the pagoda because it

means that she will go without a spring hat. She is always coming home

in triumph and always doing without hats; and I sit here without an atom

of taste, and get the credit for hers. Frankly, Sybilla, my dear," she

addressed the academic lady, "I'd be quite content to sit upon red reps

and to cover my tea-pot with a pink satin cosy with apple-blossoms

painted on it. I had such a cosy given to me this Christmas; but Cicely

wouldn't let me use it."

Owen had risen to face his ordeal. Mrs. Waterlow, he had seen it in the

first astonished glance, had, like everybody else in Chislebridge, been

imitating Gwendolen, and his whole conception of her was undergoing a

reconstruction. He followed her to the table on which the white pagoda

stood, glancing about him and taking in deep drafts of disillusion. Red

lacquer and Japanese prints, white porcelain and dimly shining jars of

old Venetian glass--it was a replica, even to its white walls, of

Gwendolen's drawing-room, but hushed and saddened, as it were, humbly

smiling, with folded hands and no attempt at emulation. And in the

midst, beautifully in place on its little black lacquer table, was the

pagoda, offering him not a hint of help, but seeming rather, to smile at

him with a fantastic and malicious mirth. He was aware, as from the

pagoda he brought his eyes back to young Mrs. Waterlow, that he was

dreadfully sorry. In another woman he would not have given the naive

derivativeness a thought; but in her, whom he had felt so full of savour

and independence? One thing only helped him, beside the effortless

atmosphere of the room, and that was the fact--he clung to it--that the

glasses set everywhere among the red and black and white were filled

not, thank goodness! with pink roses, but with poppy anemones, white and

purple and rose. And the first thing he found to say of the pagoda to

Mrs. Waterlow was, "It looks lovely in here," and then, turning to the

nearest bowl of delicate colour, he added, "and how beautifully these

flowers go with your room!"

He wondered, as their eyes met over the anemones, whether Mrs. Waterlow

guessed his discomfiture.

When he saw Gwendolen that evening she asked him at once whether he

liked old Mrs. Waterlow. She did not ask him how he liked young Mrs.

Waterlow's drawing-room, and he reflected that this was really very

magnanimous of her.

"She seems a witty old lady," he said. "Her daughter-in-law can't be

dull with her."

"She's witty, but I always feel her a little spiteful, too," said

Gwendolen. "We never get on, she and I. I hate hearing my neighbours

scored off, and she has such an eye for people's foibles. I don't think

that Cicely always quite likes it, either; but they are devoted to each

other. If it weren't for old Mrs. Waterlow, I'd try to see a great deal

more of Cicely; I'm really fond of her."

* * * * *

He did not go to Chislebridge for another six months. Gwendolen asked

him very pressingly on various occasions, but twice he was engaged and

once ill and too depressed and jaded to make the effort. It was the time

of all others when Gwendolen and her ministrations would have been most

acceptable, but he shrank from submitting himself to their influences,

feeling that in his very need he might find too great a compulsion. The

thought of Gwendolen and of her possible place in his life must be

adjourned--adjourned until she was well out of her mourning and he was

able to meet it more impartially.

He saw Gwendolen in London and gave her and her boys tea at his rooms,

the dingily comfortable rooms near Manchester Square from which for many

years he had not had the initiative to move. There was more potency, he

found, in the imaginary Gwendolen than in the real one. The sight of her

brought back vividly the thought of Mrs. Waterlow. Curiously, they

seemed to have spoiled each other. Gwendolen had all the ethical

advantages and even, if it came to that, all the aesthetic ones; yet,

ambiguous as the image of the other had become, its charm challenged

Gwendolen's virtues and Gwendolen's achievements. He even felt that he

could be sure of nothing until he next stayed with Gwendolen, when he

must see Mrs. Waterlow and weigh the possible friendship with her,

tarnished though it were, against the comfortable solutions that

Gwendolen held out to him. Again, curiously, he knew that the two could

not be combined.

Gwendolen, however, was gone away to the south of France when he wrote

to her in November and asked if he might stop a day and night on his way

through Chislebridge to a country week-end. But he had a two-hours'

wait at the station, and he suddenly determined, when he found himself

on the platform, to go and have tea with Mrs. Waterlow.

He drove up to the peaceful street where, above the college wall that

ran along its upper end, a close tracery of branches showed against the

sky, and he found that a welcoming firelight shone in the spacious

windows of the Georgian house. His dismay, therefore, was the more

untempered when the mildly austere maid told him that Mrs. Waterlow was

away. His pause there on the threshold expressed his condition, and the

maid suggested that he might care to come in and see old Mrs. Waterlow.

This, he felt, was indeed better than not to go in at all. So he was led

for a second time into the drawing-room.

He had been obliged on the former visit to conceal astonishment; but now

he found himself alone, and no concealment was needed. And the former

astonishment was slight compared with this one. He felt almost giddy as

he gazed about him. Nothing was the same. Everything was fantastically,

incredibly different, except--his eye caught it with a sharpened pang of

wonder--the white pagoda; for there, in the centre of the room, upon a

round, mahogany table, with heavily bowed and richly carven legs, the

white pagoda stood, and under it an old bead mat,--a mat of faded, old

blue beads,--his eyes were riveted on the pagoda and its setting,--of

white and gray and blue beads dotted with pink rosebuds. At regular

intervals, raying out from the centre, books were placed upon the

table--small, sober books bound in calf.

So the pagoda stood, the pivot of an incredible room; yet, inconceivable

as it seemed, as right there, all its exquisite absurdity revealed, as

it had been right in the other. It was the one link that joined them,

the one thread in the labyrinth of his astonishment; and it seemed, with

its ambiguous, fantastic smile, to symbolize its absent owner. Was it an

exquisite, extravagant, elaborate joke that she and the pagoda were

having together?

For the whole room was now a joke. It was furnished with a suite of

black satin--sofas, easy-chairs, little chairs with carved, excruciating

backs, all densely buttoned and richly fringed. Over the backs of the

easy-chairs were laid antimacassars of finely crocheted white lace. Upon

two tall pieces of mahogany, ranged up and down with knobbed drawers and

recalling in their decorous solidity the buttoned bodices of

mid-Victorian matrons, stood high-handled, white marble urns. An oval

gilt mirror hung above the mantelpiece, and upon it stood two lustres

ringed with prisms of glass and a little clock of gilt and marble,

ornamented with two marble doves hovering over a gilt nest wherein lay

marble eggs. Between the clock and the lustres, on either side, was a

vase of Bohemian glass, each holding a small nosegay of red and white

roses. Mahogany footstools with bead-worked tops stood before the fire,

and upon the walls hung, exquisite in their absurdity, like the pagoda,

a whole botanical series of flat, feeble old flower-pieces, neatly

coloured drawings, as accurate and as lifeless as vigilant, uninspired

labour could make them.

No, it was a dream, an insane, delightful dream; for, with it all, above

it all, how and why he could not say, the room was delightful. It seemed

to set one free from some burden of appreciation that all unconsciously

one had been carrying and had been finding heavy. One could live in it,

laughing at and with it. For it all laughed--surely yes; and the elfish

chorus was led by the white pagoda, standing like a Chinese Pierrot, at

the centre of the revels.

Old Mrs. Waterlow at last came sailing in, and her black lace shawl and

lace-draped head looked as appropriate in the room as everything else

seemed to do. Her eyes dwelt on him with a certain fixity, and in them

he seemed to read further significances. They held an intention, gay,

precise, such as he had felt in the room; and they held, too, it might

be, a touch of light-hearted cruelty.

"Yes, isn't it changed?" she said, and he knew that his state of

astonishment had spoken from his face.

He stared round him again, smiling.

"It makes me feel," he said, "like the old woman in the nursery rhyme

whose skirts were cut up to her knees while she was asleep. One says,

'If I be I.'"

"And I'm the little dog," said Mrs. Waterlow; "but one who doesn't bark

at you, so that you can be assured of your identity. I am really more

aware of my own in this room than in any I've lived in for years. It is

like one of the rooms of my girlhood. Rooms weren't so important then as

they are now, and the people who lived in them, I sometimes think, were

more so. It amuses me nowadays," said the old lady moving to her

tea-table and seating herself, "to observe the way in which people are

assessed by their tastes and their belongings. You say of some one that

she is a dull or a disagreeable woman, and the answer and rebuke you

receive is, 'Oh, but she has such wonderful Chinese screens!' Sit down

here, Mr. Stacpole. It is very nice to see you again."

"But tell me, where is the other room?" Owen asked, drawing his chair to

the table, "Is it disbanded, dissolved, gone for ever?"

Mrs. Waterlow looked at him with an air of half-malicious mystery.

"That is a secret, my own little secret, just as this room is, in a way,

a little joke which, for my sake, Cicely has made for me. It was

finished last week, by the way, and you are the first person to see it.

Your cousin is in the south of France, isn't she?" said Mrs. Waterlow,

with bland inconsequence.

"Yes; I'm only passing through. Gwendolen's been gone for nearly a

month."

"Yes; I know," Mrs. Waterlow pursued, still with the genial blandness.

"And as to our little joke, Mr. Stacpole, this room, in fact, is in many

ways a room of my girlhood. The furniture was my mother's, and Cicely,

when the idea struck her, had it brought from the garret of my old home,

where it has stood in disgrace for many a year. She has been clever

about it, hasn't she?"

"It's genius," said Owen, "What made her think of it?" And then, with a

pang, he wondered whether Gwendolen had thought of it first. Was it

imaginable that Gwendolen could have turned away from beauty and plunged

herself into such gay austerities of ugliness?

"Well, things are in the air, you know," said Mrs. Waterlow, pouring out

the tea,--"that's what Cicely always says, at all events,--reactions,

repulsions, wearinesses. This room is, she says, a discipline."

"Things in the air": had Gwendolen felt them first, and Mrs. Waterlow

felt them after her? This question of priority became of burning

interest for him.

"The trouble is that one may get too much of any discipline," he

commented, "if it ceases to be self-inflicted and is imposed upon us.

How would your daughter like it if all Chislebridge took to buttoned

black satin and old flower-pieces? It's as an exception that it has its

charm and its meaning. But if it became a commonplace?"

"Well, that's the point," said old Mrs. Waterlow. "Will it? It has very

much vexed me for years to watch Chislebridge picking Cicely's brains.

And I said to her that I wondered whether it would be possible for her

to make a room that wouldn't be copied, and she said that she believed

she could. If she could achieve ugliness, she said--downright ugliness,

she believed they would fall back. The room is a sort of wager between

us, for I am not at all convinced that she will succeed. Sheep, you

know, will leap into the ditch if they see their leader land there."

Owen's head was whirling. It was as though suddenly the little crystal

rings of the pagoda had given out a sportive, significant tinkle. This,

then, was what it meant? It was a jest, a game; but it was also a trap.

For whom? Chislebridge, on old Mrs. Waterlow's lips, could mean only

Gwendolen. He did not know quite what he hoped or feared, but he knew

that he must conceal from old Mrs. Waterlow his recognition of her

meaning.

"I felt from the first moment that I saw her in the curiosity-shop that

Mrs. Waterlow was the sort of person who would always find the white

pagodas," he said, smiling above his perturbation; "but I shouldn't have

supposed that Chislebridge was intelligent enough, let us put it, to

realise it, too, and to follow her lead."

"It's not that they realise it," the old lady interpreted, salting her

scone; "it's something deeper than realisation. It's instinct--the

instinct of the insignificant for aping the significant. They would

probably be annoyed if they were told that they aped Cicely. They hardly

know they do it, I will say that for them, if it's anything to their

credit. And then since she is poor and they--some of them--rich, their

copies are seen by a hundred to the one who sees her original, and

Cicely, to some people, I've no doubt of it, seems the ape. It has very

much vexed me," Mrs. Waterlow repeated.

Owen, for all his loyal feint of unconsciousness, was growing rather

angry with Gwendolen.

"I don't wonder that it should," he said. "It vexes me to hear about it.

Has it gone on for long?"

"Ever since we came to live here after my son's death. People at that

time had draped, crowded drawing-rooms,--you remember the dreadful

epoch. The more pots and pans and patterns and palms they could squeeze

into them, the better they were pleased. Cicely had simple furniture and

quiet spaces and plain green wall-paper when no one else in

Chislebridge had. She fell in love with Japanese prints in Paris and

bought them when no one else in Chislebridge thought of doing so.--It's

wrong, now, I hear, to like them. Chinese paintings are the correct

thing.--Chislebridge stared at them and at her empty room, and wondered

how she could care for those hideous women. They stared only for a year

or two. When they saw that she was quite indifferent to their opinion

and intended to remain in the ditch, they jumped in after her. I was

amused when I first saw Japanese prints on some one else's green walls

and heard the Goncourts and Whistler being quoted to Cicely. Then by

degrees Cicely got tired of green paper, especially since everybody in

Chislebridge by then had it, and she put, with her white walls, the red

lacquer and the glass and that beautiful old set of cane-seated

furniture that you saw; and no one else in Chislebridge at that time had

white walls or a scrap of lacquer. She shifted and rearranged like a

bird building its nest, and Chislebridge stared again and said that the

white walls were like a workhouse; and then they began to look for

lacquer and to put up white paper. Her very grouping has been copied,

the smallest points of adjustment. It's not," Mrs. Waterlow pursued,

"that I mind people imitating, if they do it frankly and own themselves

plagiarists. We must all see the things we like for the first time. But

it's not because they like the things that they have them; they have

them because some one else likes them. They dress themselves in other

people's tastes and make a fine figure as originators." The vexation of

years was crystallized in the lightness and crispness of her voice.

Poor, stupid Gwendolen! After all, one must not be too hard on her. He

felt Mrs. Waterlow to be so hard that he reacted to something

approaching pitying tolerance, Gwendolen could be stupid in such good

faith. There was nothing, when he came to think of it, surprising in

this revelation of her stupidity, nothing painful, as there had been in

suspecting Cicely Waterlow of stupidity. Gwendolen was so sincerely

unaware of having no ideas of her own. He wondered, as he said good-bye

to old Mrs. Waterlow and told her that he felt convinced that she had at

last reached a haven, whether she guessed that she had made him happy

rather than unhappy.

She had made him so happy, with his recovered ideal, that as he drove

away it was with a definite thrust of fear that he suddenly remembered

Gwendolen's kindly criticism of old Mrs. Waterlow. Was it not possible,

after all, that she had been indulging in sheer malice at Gwendolen's

expense? Wasn't it possible that Gwendolen and Cicely Waterlow had had

the same inspirations independently? But no two people could stumble at

once on such a drawing-room as that he had just left. Horrid

thought--what if Gwendolen's drawing-room at this moment showed just

such a singular reversion to ugliness? After his delicious relief, he

could not bear the doubt.

He drove to Gwendolen's. Yes, the old housekeeper, who knew him, said he

could of course go up and look at the red lacquer. The red lacquer! He

could almost have embraced her for the joy her words gave him. Gwendolen

would not have retained red lacquer with a black satin suite. And on the

threshold of Gwendolen's drawing-room he received full reassurance. The

lovely room was intact. The blacks and whites and reds and golds were

all there, unchanged, not a breath of the ambiguous discipline upon

them. And in the midst of them all it was not Gwendolen, but Cicely

Waterlow, whom he seemed to see smiling upon him, merry, tired, and

tolerant. She had, as it were, demonstrated her claim not only to her

present, but to her past. For if she had not copied Gwendolen in the

mid-Victorian backwater, why should she have copied her in this? She had

been first in both, and in her backwater she was now safe.

* * * * *

Many months passed before he saw Gwendolen's drawing-room again. He was

felled early in the winter by a long and dangerous illness. When he was

able to crawl about, he went to the south of France and stayed there for

over a year. He was so ill, so tired, and so weak that, if Gwendolen and

the boys hadn't joined him, if she hadn't nursed and amused and

encouraged him from day to day, he felt that he should probably have

died and made an end of it. Gwendolen was more than kind. She was at

once tender and tactful, and the only claim she made was that of her

long-standing solicitude on his account. Upon this, as upon a

comfortable, impersonal cushion that she adjusted for his weary head,

she invited him to lean, and upon it for months of dazed invalidism and

dubious convalescence he did lean. Lapped round by this fundamental

kindness, the flaws and absurdities of Gwendolen's character

disappeared. The long pearl ear-rings dangled now over the most

delicious beef-teas, which she herself made for him; the graceful hands

could perform efficient tasks. Of how very little importance it was that

a woman should not show originality in her drawing-room when she could

show in taxing daily intercourse such wisdom and resource and sweetness!

Life had contracted about them, and on these simple and elementary terms

he found that Gwendolen neither bored nor ruffled him. When she at last

left him he knew that the bond between them, unspoken as it remained,

was stronger than it had ever yet been, and that when he next saw her he

would probably find it the most natural of things to ask her to marry

him, and to take care of him for ever. Poor, good, kind Gwendolen! It

was with a pensive humility and mirth that he resigned himself to the

thought of the bad bargain she would make.

He came back to England in the spring following that in which he had

left it, and went at once to Chislebridge. It was late afternoon when he

drove, in a twilight like his own mood of meditative acceptance, to the

well-known house. Ample and benignant it stood behind its walls and

lawns and trees, and seemed to look upon him with eyes of unresentful

patience.

He limped in and Gwendolen met him in the hall.

"My dear, dear Owen, how are you? Yes, I had your wire this morning.

Good; I see that the journey has done you no harm. But you are tired,

aren't you? Will you go to your own room or have tea with me at once?

It's just been brought in."

He said that he would have tea with her. She did not actually help him

up the stairs, but as, with skill impaired, he swung himself from step

to step, the touch of her tactful and ready hand was upon his arm, a

caress rather than a sustainment. Passing the hand through his arm, she

led him into the drawing-room.

Owen looked about him. He stood for a long moment in the door and

looked. He then allowed himself a cautious, side-long glance at

Gwendolen. Her eyes, unaware in their bland complacency, had followed

his and rested upon her room.

"Oh, yes, I'd forgotten that you hadn't seen my new drawing-room," she

said. "We've had great changes."

Even in his horror, for it was hardly less, he was touched to realize

that Gwendolen was thinking far less of her drawing-room than of him.

She might have forgotten that it had changed, had he not so helplessly

displayed his amazement.

"Yes, indeed," he said. He limped to the fire and sank heavily into the

deep, black satin easy-chair drawn before it. He leaned his elbow on his

knee and rested his head on his hand, and as he did so he observed that

before the fire stood a mahogany footstool with a bead-worked top.

"You are tired, dear Owen. Do you feel ill?" Gwendolen hovered above his

chair.

"I do feel a little giddy," he confessed. "I'm not all right yet, I

see."

He raised his head. It was to face the mantelpiece, with its oval, gilt

mirror and crystal lustres and gilt-and-marble clock. No, there were not

doves and a nest upon it. This was a finer clock than the one with the

doves, and the lustres were larger, and the flowers that stood between

were mauve orchids. Gwendolen always went astray over her flowers.

"Here is tea," she said, seating herself at a little mahogany table with

bowed and decorated legs. "Of course you're bound to feel tired, dear

Owen, after your journey. Tea will be the very thing for you."

He turned now a furtive eye along the wall. Flower-pieces, dim, flat,

old flower-pieces and arid steel-engravings and tall pieces of mahogany

furniture with marble vases upon them--no mistakes had been made here,

for if the vases were not urns, they were of marble and in their places.

"How do you like it in this phase?" Gwendolen asked him, tactfully

turning from the question of his weakness. "I love it myself, I own,

though of course Chislebridge thinks I've lost my wits. To tell you the

truth, Owen, I was tired of beauty. One may come to that. One may feel,"

said Gwendolen, pouring out the tea, "that one needs a discipline. This

room is my discipline, and after it I know that I shall find

self-indulgence almost vulgar."

No; his mind was working to and fro between the present and the past

with the rapidity and accuracy of a shuttle threading an intricate

pattern--no, he had never mentioned to Gwendolen that late autumnal

visit of his to Chislebridge eighteen months ago. Had that been because

to mention it and the transformation he had been the first to witness in

Mrs. Waterlow's drawing-room would have been, in a sense, to give

Gwendolen a warning? And had he not, in his deepening affection for her,

conceived her to be above the need of such warnings? Yes; for though he

had been glad to recover his ideal of young Mrs. Waterlow, though he had

been more than willing that Gwendolen should occupy the slightly

ridiculous and humiliating position that he had imagined to be Mrs.

Waterlow's, he had never for a moment imagined that Gwendolen's

disingenuous docility would go as far as this. So many people might love

red lacquer and old glass with a clear conscience, once they had been

brought to see them; but who, with a clear conscience, could love black

satin furniture and marble vases?

"It is a very singular room," he found at last, in comment upon her

information. "How--and when--did you come to think of it?" He heard the

hollow sound of his own voice; but Gwendolen remained unaware. The fact

of her stupidity cast a merciful veil of pitifulness over her.

"I hardly know," she said, handing him his tea and happy in her theme.

"These things are in the air at a given time--reactions, repulsions,

wearinesses--I think. It grew bit by bit; I've brought it to this state

only since my return from the Riviera. The idea came to me, oh, long

ago--long before your illness. Alec Chambers is perfectly entranced with

it, and vows it is the most beautiful--yes, beautiful--room in

existence. It is witty as well as beautiful, he says, and he is going to

paint it for the New English Art Club. Rooms have a curious influence

upon me, you know, Owen. I really do feel," said Gwendolen busying

herself hospitably with his little plate and hot, buttered toast, "that

I've grown cleverer since living in this one."

Owen, while she talked and while he drank his tea, had been more frankly

looking about him. Flagrant as was the plagiarism, Gwendolen, as before,

had protected herself by a more illustrious achievement. It was a

stately, not a staid room; it carried the idea higher, and thereby

missed it. It was not an amusing room, nor witty, to any one who had

seen the original. It was impressive, oppressive, almost forbidding.

Gwendolen, for one thing, had had more space to fill. The naivete of

mere flower-pieces would not furnish her walls, and she had lapsed into

sheer ugliness with the large and admirably accurate steel-engravings.

Caution, too, had been mistakenly exercised here and there; the black

satin furniture had no antimacassars and the centre-table no ornament

except a vase of orchids and calf-bound books.

Owen felt no indignation; he would always remain too fond of Gwendolen,

too tolerant of her folly, to feel indignant with her; it was with a

mild but final irony that he brought his eyes back at last to his

unconscious and hapless cousin. And he wondered how far Gwendolen had

gone, how far she could be made to go. "There's only one thing that it

lacks," he said. "Shall I tell you?"

"Oh, _do_" she urged, beaming over her tea. "You know how much I value

your taste."

"Oh, I haven't much taste," said Owen, "I've never gone in for having

taste. And doesn't your room prove that taste is a mistake if indulged

too far? It's more a sense of literary fitness I allude to. Yours is

meant to be a soulless room, isn't it? That's your intention?"

"Exactly," said Gwendolen, with eager apprehension; "that is just it--a

soulless room. One is sick of souls, just as one is sick of beauty."

"Exactly," Owen echoed her. "But, since you have here a travesty of

beauty, what you need to complete your idea is a travesty of soul. You

need a centre that draws it all into focus. You need something that,

alas! you might have had, and have lost for ever. The white pagoda,

Gwendolen, that Mrs. Waterlow found. Your room needs that, and only

that, to make it perfect."

He spoke in his flat, weak invalid's voice, but he was wondering, almost

with ardour, if Gwendolen, this touchstone applied, would suspect or

remember and, from penitence or caution, redeem herself by a confession.

For a moment, only a moment, she looked at him very earnestly; and he

was aware that he hoped that she was going to redeem herself--hoped it

almost ardently, not for his own sake--those sober hopes were dead for

ever--but for the sake of the past and what it had really held of

fondness and sympathy and essential respect.

Gwendolen looked at him earnestly; it was as though a dim suspicion

crossed her; and then, poor thing! she put it aside. Yes, he was very

sorry for her as he listened to her.

"Owen, that is clever of you," she said, "but very, very clever. That is

precisely what I've been saying to myself ever since the idea came to

me. I can't forgive myself for that piece of stupidity--my only one, I

will say, in regard to such recognitions and perceptions. I may be a

stupid woman about a great many things, but I'm not stupid about rooms.

The horror of Aunt Pickthorne's room dulled my eyes so that in all truth

I can say that I never saw that pagoda. And from the moment I've had my

idea I've moaned--but literally moaned--over having lost it. Of course

it is what the room needs, and all that it needs--the travesty of a soul

standing on that mahogany table."

"Yes, the centre-table is the place for it," said Owen.

"It _is_ clever of you to feel it just as I do, Owen, dear," she went

on. "The pagoda was meant for this room and for this room only; for, you

know, I didn't think Cicely Waterlow at all happily inspired in placing

it as she had."

"As she had?" He rapped the question out with irrepressible quickness.

"Yes, among all that rather trashy lacquer and glass in that rather

gimcrackery little drawing-room of hers. The pagoda looked there, what

it had always looked in Aunt Pickthorne's room--a gimcrack itself."

"Looked?" he repeated. "How does it look now? How has she placed it

now?"

And, for the first time in all their intercourse, he saw that Gwendolen

was suddenly confused. He had hardly trapped her. She had set the trap

herself, and inadvertently had walked into it. A faint colour rose to

her cheek. She dropped for a moment her eyes upon the fire. Then,

covering her self-consciousness with a show of smiling vivacity, she

knelt to poke the logs, saying:

"I don't know, I really don't know, Owen. Cicely is always changing her

room, you know. She is very quick at feeling what's in the air--as quick

as I am really--and I haven't seen her for ages. She has gone to live in

London--oh, yes, didn't you know? Yes, she came into a little money over

a year ago, and she and old Mrs. Waterlow have taken a house in Chelsea,

and are coming back to Chislebridge only for two or three months in

every year. They are very fond of Chislebridge. So I haven't an idea of

what her drawing-room is like now."

"Perhaps it's like yours," Owen suggested. "The one I saw was rather

like yours, I remember."

Gwendolen opened kind and repudiating eyes.

"Do you think so, Owen? Like mine? Oh, only in one or two superficial

little things. She hadn't a Chinese screen or a lacquer cabinet or a

piece of Chinese painting to bless herself with, poor little Cicely! No,

indeed, Owen; I don't think it would be at all fair to say that Cicely

copied me. These things are in the air."

* * * * *

Before he left Chislebridge he asked Gwendolen for Mrs. Waterlow's

London address, and observed that she did not flinch in giving it to

him. He inferred from this that Mrs. Waterlow's black satin suite had

not left Chislebridge and that Gwendolen knew that she had nothing to

fear from a London visit. Would she indeed fear anything from any visit?

Her placid self-deception was so profound that it would be difficult to

draw a line fairly between skilful fraud and instinctive

self-protection. Gwendolen, without doubt, conceived herself completely

protected. She would never suspect him of suspecting her.

He felt, when he got back to London, a certain reluctance in going to

see Mrs. Waterlow. It was not only that he shrank from reading in old

Mrs. Waterlow's malicious eyes the recognition of his discovery; in

regard to young Mrs. Waterlow there was another shrinking that was

almost one of shyness. She had been wronged, grossly wronged, by some

one to whom he must show the semblance of loyalty, and the consciousness

of her wrongs affected him deeply. A fortnight passed before he made his

way one afternoon to Chelsea, a fortnight in which the main

consciousness that filled his sense of renewal was that of his merciful

escape. Mrs. Waterlow's house was in St. Leonard's Terrace, one of the

narrow, old houses that face the expanse of the Royal Hospital Gardens.

The spring sun, as he limped along, was shining upon their

facades--dull, old brick and dim, white paint-like slabs of ancient

wedding-cake with frosted edging.

After all the expense of his illness, he was very poor in these days,

and had come with difficulty in a 'bus. As he opened the gate and went

into the flagged garden, where white tulips grew, he glanced up and saw

young Mrs. Waterlow standing looking out at the drawing-room window. Her

eyes met his in surprise, they had not seen each other for so long a

time; then, as lifting his hat he smiled at her, he thought he saw in

them a sudden pity and gravity. He did of course look so much more

battered than when she had last seen him. The nice, middle-aged maid let

him in--he was glad of that--and, as he followed her up the narrow

staircase, with its white, panelled walls, he wondered which

drawing-room it was to be, and felt his heart sink strangely at the

thought that perhaps, after all, Mrs. Waterlow had transplanted her

discipline to London.

But, no; like a soft gush of sunlight, like bells and clear, running

water, the first room greeted him in a medley of untraceable

associations. It was the first room, with the delicate cane-seated

chairs and settees, the red lacquer and the glass, all looking lovelier

than ever against the panelled white, all brighter, sweeter, happier

than in the rather dim room on the ground floor in Chislebridge. And

touches of green, like tiny flakes of vivid flame, went through it in

the leaves of the white azaleas that filled the jars and vases. He saw

it all, and he saw, as Mrs. Waterlow came toward him, that the white

pagoda stood on its former little black lacquer table in one of the

windows.

Mrs. Waterlow shook his hand and her eyes examined him.

"You have been ill. I was so sorry to hear," she said.

"Yes, I've been wretchedly ill; for years now, it seems," he replied.

They sat down before the fire. Old Mrs. Waterlow, she told him, was away

on a visit to Chislebridge, from which she was to return that evening at

six o'clock. It was only four. He had two hours before him, and he felt

that in them he was to be very happy. They talked and talked. He saw

that she liked him and expected him to stay on and talk. All the magic

and elation and sense of discovery and adventure was with him as on

their first encounter. She knew him, he found, so much better than he

could have guessed. She had read everything he had written. She

appreciated so finely; she even, with a further advance to acknowledged

friendship, criticized, with the precision and delicacy expressed in all

that she did. And the fact that she liked him so much, that she was

already so much his friend, gave him his right to let her see how much

he liked her. The two hours were not only happy; they were the happiest

he had ever known.

The clock had hardly struck six when old Mrs. Waterlow's cab drove up.

"Don't go; mamma will so like to see you," said Mrs. Waterlow. "She so

enjoyed that little visit you paid her over a year ago, you know."

This was the first reference that had been made to the visit. He

wondered if she guessed what it had done for their friendship.

Old Mrs. Waterlow came in, wearing just such a delightful, flowing black

satin cloak and deep black satin bonnet as he would have expected her to

wear. And seeing him there with her daughter-in-law, she paused, as if

arrested, on the threshold. Then, her eyes passing from the tea-table

and its intimacy of grouping with the two chairs they had risen from,

and resting brightly on her daughter's face, where she must read the

reflection of his happiness, Owen saw that she cast off a scruple, came

to a decision, and renewed the impulse that had brought her up the

stairs, he now realised, at an uncharacteristic speed.

"My dear Cicely," she exclaimed, after she had greeted him, "you've lost

your wager!"

Cicely Waterlow gazed at her for a moment and then she flushed deeply.

"Have I, mamma?" she said, busying herself with the kettle. "Well, that

pleases you, and doesn't displease me. You'll want some tea, won't you?"

"Yes, indeed, I want some tea. But you'll not put me off with tea, my

dear. I want to talk about my wager, too; and Mr. Stacpole will want to

hear about it, for it was his wager as well. You did say that you felt

convinced that I was safe in my haven, didn't you, Mr. Stacpole? Well,

I've lost it, and I'm not at all pleased to have lost it. I'm

triumphant, if you will, but savage, too. You'll forgive me, I know, Mr.

Stacpole, if I'm savage with your cousin when I tell you that she has

been inspired with a black satin suite and mahogany furniture and

bead-work since seeing Cicely's new drawing-room in Chislebridge."

"Mamma!" Cicely protested. "Two people can perfectly well have the same

idea at the same time! There's no reason in the world why Gwendolen

shouldn't feel just my fancy for funny, old, ugly things."

"She didn't show any fancy for them when she saw them a year ago, did

she, dear?" said the intractable old lady, seating herself at the

tea-table. "She was very guarded, very mute, though very observant. Yes;

people may have the same idea, but they'll hardly have the same black

satin furniture and the same beaded footstools, will they?"

Seeing the deep embarrassment in which his friend was plunged, Owen now

interposed.

"Don't try to defend Gwendolen on my account," he said. "She really

can't be defended. I know it, for I've seen her drawing-room."

"You have seen it? And what do you think of it?" asked old Mrs.

Waterlow.

"I thought, as I told her," said Owen, "that it lacked but one thing,

and that was the travesty of a soul. It lacked the white pagoda."

"You told her that? It was what she told me. She told me that she could

not forgive herself for having parted with the pagoda, for it was the

travesty of a soul that her room still needed. 'You mean,' I said, 'the

pagoda placed as Cicely placed it on the centre-table in her new room?'

She gazed at me and laid her hand on my arm and asked: 'But, dear Mrs.

Waterlow, how had Cicely placed the pagoda? I really don't remember. I

really don't remember at all what Cicely's new room was like, except

that it was mid-Victorian, and had old water-colours on the walls.

Surely you don't think that I've copied Cicely?'

"'My dear Mrs. Conyers,' I said to her, 'I don't think, but know, that

you've done nothing else since you came to Chislebridge. But in this

case you are farther from success than usual, for Cicely's drawing-room

is gay, and yours is _grand serieux_.'"

Mrs. Waterlow's bomb seemed to fill the air with a silvery explosion,

and, as its echoes died, in the ensuing stillness, the eyes of Cicely

and Owen met beneath the triumphant gaze of the merciless old lady. It

was from his eyes that hers caught the infection. To remain grave now

was to be _grand serieux_, and helpless gaiety was in the air. Owen

broke into peals of laughter.

"Oh--but--" Cicely Waterlow protested, laughing, too, but still flushed

and almost tearful--"it isn't fair. It's as if we had taken her in. She

doesn't know she does it, really she doesn't; she is so well-meaning--so

kind."

"She knows now," said old Mrs. Waterlow, who remained unsmiling, but

with a placidity full of satisfaction; "and she'll hardly be able to

forget."

"I'm quite sure," said Cicely, "that she really believes that she cares

for the new drawing-room. People can persuade themselves so easily of

new tastes. And why shouldn't they have them? I believe that Gwendolen

does like it."

"Yes, she does indeed," said old Mrs. Waterlow. "She says so. She says

she never cared for any room so much and that she intends to live and

die with it. Her only refuge now is to go on faithfully loving it. So

there she is, buttoned into her black satin for ever!"

* * * * *

Until now Mrs. Conyers has remained faithful, and her consistency is

still made good to her; for none of her drawing-rooms has brought her

such appreciation. Chislebridge has never dared to emulate it; Mr.

Chambers and his friends have often painted it, and Mrs. Waterlow's

original, like a gay jest, uttered and then gone for ever, is no longer

in existence to vex and perplex her with its mocking smile. Moreover,

her own drawing-room no longer lacks its travesty of a soul. Owen

married Cicely Waterlow in the autumn, and Gwendolen, magnanimous, and

burning her bridges behind her, sent them for their wedding-present her

two lovely and unique red lacquer cabinets. One stands in the front, and

one in the back drawing-room in the little house in St. Leonard's

Terrace, and Cicely said to Owen on the day they arrived that any wrong

of the past, if wrong there had been, was now atoned for. And when they

married and went round the world for their wedding-trip, they found in

China a white pagoda, unflawed, larger, more sublimely elegant than the

old one. This they brought back to Gwendolen, and with unfaltering

courage she has placed it upon her mahogany centre table.

THE SUICIDE

A COMEDY

She took the bottle from its wrappings and looked at it--at its apparent

insignificance and the huge significance of the glaring word "Poison"

printed across it. She looked resolutely, and as resolutely went with it

to the other side of the room, and locked it away in the drawer of her

dressing-table. She paused here, and her eyes met her mirrored eyes. The

expression of her face arrested her attention. Did people who were going

to die usually look so calm, so placid? Really, it was a sort of

placidity that gazed back at her, so unlike the disfigured, tear-blinded

reflection that had been there that morning--when she had read the

paper. After the tempest of despair, the frozen decision, the nightmare

securing of the means of death (if any one should guess! stop her!) it

was indeed a sort of apathy that drenched her being, as if already the

drug had gone through it. The face in the mirror was very young and

very helpless and very charming. It was like the face of a little

wind-blown ghost, with its tossed-back hair and wide, empty, gazing

eyes. The sweetness of the wasted cheeks and soft, parted lips suddenly

smote on the apathy, and tears came. She pressed her hands over her

eyes, struggled, and mastered herself again. Her own pathos must not

unnerve, and her unbearable sorrow must nerve, her.

She looked at the clock on the mantelpiece. Just three. She could give

herself ample time for writing the letter; then she must go and post it.

Before five she would be back here--locked in her room. Before six--

She went to the writing-table, unlocked a drawer,--the key hung on a

ribbon around her neck, under her bodice,--and took out a thick packet

of closely written papers. Sitting there, hesitating a moment, she

wondered if she would look back at those records of hope and

suffering--more than a whole year of beautiful suffering, beautiful

hope. The rising of tears again warned her that such a retrospect would

make her more unfit for writing the last letter as it must be

written--with full possession of her best and deepest meaning. She must

be her most courageous self to write now. The writer of those past

records seemed a little sister half playing with her grief, beside the

self that sat here now, stricken and determined.

Drawing pen and paper to her, she wrote:

MY DEAREST--MY BEST BELOVED: This is the last of the letters. I

am going to send them all to you now, so that you may know all.

I read this morning in the paper that you were to be married.

And now there is nothing left for me but to die. When you read

this I shall be dead.

You must not blame me, or think me too cowardly. I am a fragile

person, I know, and my life hung on you. Without hope it can't

go on; it's too feeble to find anything else to live for. And

you could never, never blame yourself. How could you have

helped it? How could you have dreamed that I loved you? If you

had you could have done nothing but be sorry--and irked. But it

comforts me in dying to let you know how I have loved you; it

is like a dying gift I make you,--do you see?--all the love

that I have hidden. If I had lived I could never have made the

gift. Had you guessed, or had I told you, it would have been a

burden, a ludicrous burden. But as you read this, knowing that

I am dead, my love must come to you as a blessing; you must

feel it as something, in its little way beautiful, and care for

it; for any love that only gives and makes no claim is

beautiful, is it not? I think I find dying so much easier than

living because in dying I can give you the gift.

All these letters, written from the first day I met you, almost

a year and a half ago, will tell you step by step what I have

felt. Don't let the hopes that flickered up sometimes hurt you;

the strength of my feeling made the flame, nothing that you

ever said or did.

How I remember that first day, in the country, at the

Ashwells', when mamma and I came on to the lawn where you were

all sitting, and mamma laughed at me for stumbling over a

chair--and you smiled at me. From the moment I saw you then, I

loved you. You were like some dream come true. You never knew

what joy it gave me (only joy; the pain was in not being with

you) when we walked together and talked; the letters will tell

you that. But to-day it all comes back, even the little things

that I hardly knew I was seeing or hearing--the late white

roses in the garden; and the robin sitting on the garden wall

(we stopped to look at it, and it sat still, looking at us: I

wonder if you remember the robin); and the distant song some

labourers were singing in the fields far away.

And here in London, the dinners we met at, the teas you came

to, the one or two books you gave me and that we wrote

about--what I felt about it all, these meteors through my gray

life, I have written it all down. Did I not act well? You could

never have guessed, under my composure and cheerfulness, could

you? I am a little proud of myself when I think of it.

And that this is no sudden rocking of my reason you will see,

too, from the growing hopelessness, of emptiness in the last

months, when I have not seen you. In the bottom of my heart I

had always the little hope that some day I might give you these

myself, that we might read them together, you and I, smiling

over my past sorrow. And if I had died, and you had not loved

me, you were to have had them, as I told you, for I wanted to

give you my love; I could not bear that it should go out and

that you should never know.

I wish that I could have died, and need not have killed myself;

I am so afraid that that may give you pain, though it ought not

to, if you think justly of it all.

Of course you will be sorry for me--I am afraid that I want you

to be _sorry_; but don't be too sad. I am so much happier in

dying than I could have been in living; and in loving you I

have felt so much, I have lived so much--more perhaps than many

people in a whole lifetime.

See the gift you have given _me_, dearest one. Good-bye.

Good-bye.

ALLIDA.

It was over,--the last link with life, her last word spoken or

written,--and the echo of it seemed to come to her already as across a

great abyss that separated her from the world of the living.

With the signing of her name she had drawn the shroud over her face.

Only the mechanical things now remained to be done: dying was really

over; she really was dead.

She wrapped this last letter around all the others, kissed it, and

sealed it in a large envelope; then, putting on her hat and coat and

holding the letter in her ulster pocket, she left her room and went down

the stairs.

The house was a typically smart, flimsy London house, of the cheaper

Mayfair sort--a narrow box set on end and fitted with chintz and gilt

and white mouldings; a trap to Allida's imagination--an imagination that

no longer shrank from the contemplation of the facts of her life; for

they, too, were seen from across that abyss.

In the drawing-room, among shaded lamps, cushions, and swarming

bric-a-brac, her mother had flirted and allured--unsuccessfully--for how

many years? She had felt, since the time when, as a very little girl,

she had gone by the room every day coming in from her walk at tea-time

with her governess, and heard inside the high, smiling, artificial

voice, with its odd appealing quality, its vague, waiting pauses, the

shrinking from her mother and her mother's aims. Later on the aims had

been for her, too, and their determination had been partly, Allida felt,

hardened by the fact of a grown-up daughter being such a deterrent--so

in the way of a desperate, fading beauty who had never made the

brilliant match she hoped for. That she had never, either, made even a

moderate match for her, Allida, the girl felt, with a firmer closing of

her hand on the letter, she perhaps owed to _him_. What might her

weakness and her hatred of her home not have urged her into had not that

ideal--that seen and recognized ideal--armed her? The vision of old

Captain Defflin, his bruised-plum face and tight, pale eyes, rose before

her, and the vacuous, unwholesome countenance of young Sir Alfred Cutts.

How often had she been dexterously left alone with them in the

drawing-room! Thank God! all that was far, far behind her. Death was

dignified, sweet-smelling in its peace, when she thought of all that the

gilt-and-chintz drawing-room stood for in her memories. Death was sweet

when life was so ugly.

Now she was in the street, the door closed behind her, and no servant

had seen her.

It was a foggy afternoon, and the soiled white houses opposite were

dim. A thin, stray cat rubbed against the area railings and mewed as

Allida stood, pausing for a moment, on the steps.

Which was the nearest pillar-box? At the end of the street, just round

the corner. The plaintive, nasal cry of the cat caught her attention.

Poor creature! She ought to spare some poison for it. The irony of the

idea almost made her smile as she stooped and patted the dingy head. The

cat, leaning like a ship in a stiff wind, walked to and fro across her

dress, looking up at her as it still plaintively, interrogatively mewed.

Its appeal put aside for a moment the decision as to which pillar-box.

She picked up the cat and returned to the door. The maid answered her

ring.

Allida was a little sorry that she must speak once more, after all, on

this mundane plane. The finish of her tragedy seemed slightly marred by

this episode. But she heard her calm voice telling the maid to feed the

cat--"And keep it until you can find a home for it. Cook won't mind,

will she?"

"Oh, no, miss; cook is fond of cats. Poor thing, then," said the maid,

who was tender of heart.

Again the door was shut, and again the pillar-box was the last act but

one of her drama.

She walked swiftly down the street, thinking, oddly, more about the cat

than about her destination or the letter she held clutched in her

pocket. The stripes on the cat's head, its rough, sooty fur, the sharp

projection of its backbone and the grotesque grimace of its mew--her

mind dwelt on these trivial details; and under all was a funny added

contentment at this further proof of the mercilessness and ugliness of

the world she was leaving.

The corner of the street was reached and turned. There, in the fog,

stood the red shaft of the pillar-box. Beyond it a street lamp, already

lighted, made a blur of light in the thick air and cast upward a long

cone of shadow.

Allida's heart suddenly shrank and shuddered.

The lamp and the pillar-box looked horrible. Death was horrible. To see

him no more was horrible. She felt only horror as mechanically she took

out the letter and dropped it into the box.

The heavy sound of its fall turned her shuddering heart to ice.

She had felt horror, she had been prepared for horror, but not for such

horror as this. It would all be like this now, she knew, until the end.

Let her hurry through it, then; let her escape quickly; and, at all

events, her own room, her familiar little room, with its fire, its

books, its quiet white bed, would be a refuge after this terrible, empty

street. She thought only of her room,--the thought blotting out what

would happen in it,--knowing only that she longed to be there, with a

longing like a wounded child's for its mother's arms. And yet she still

stood staring at the slit in the pillar-box.

"Miss Fraser," a voice said beside her.

It was a voice of carefully quiet greeting, guarded interrogation,

guarded expostulation.

She looked up, feeling something shatter in her, fearing that she was

going to faint. It was almost like the crash of death and like a

swooning into a new consciousness. She only dimly, through the swooning

sense of change, recognized the face that looked at her, smiling, but so

puzzled, so pained--so pained that she guessed that her own face must

show some strange terror.

She had seen the face, in the chintz-and-gilt drawing-room,--it had

seemed out of place there,--she had seen it often; but memory was

blurred. Had he not taken her down to dinner somewhere only the other

day? Yes; she knew him well; only she was dead, a ghost, and reality,

familiar reality, looked different.

"Mr. Haldicott," she said, putting out her hand. Her voice was

normal--she heard that; she felt that she could almost have smiled. Yet

something was fearfully shattered, some power in herself that had

directed her so resolutely till now. The cat had been disconcerting, but

the appearance of this man, whom she knew quite well, who might talk,

might question her, might walk back beside her, seemed fatally

disconcerting. For could she act? Could she still speak on normally? And

further delay, now that every link was broken, now that to all real

intents and purposes she was dead, was a torture too fearful to be

contemplated. Yet how evade it? She felt that her hand, which he still

held, held very tightly, was trembling.

"You are ill," he said.

She shook her head.

"No; not at all. I only came out for a little walk. And I must go back

to tea."

"Your mother is at home?"

"No; she is out of town. She doesn't get back till to-morrow."

"You are going to have tea all alone?"