Allida gazed at him. How should she evade him if he offered to come

back?

"I haven't had my walk yet. I came out for a little walk," she repeated.

By the blurred light of the street lamp he still looked at her, still

held her trembling hand. His face showed his perplexed indecision.

Suddenly he drew the hand within his arm.

"Let us have the little walk, then," he said, "only you must let me come

with you. You are in some great trouble. Don't bother to deny it. Don't

say anything. Your face showed me that something dreadful was happening

to you. Don't speak--I saw it as I was passing on the other side of the

street. The lamp was just lighted, else I shouldn't have recognised you.

Now walk quietly on like this. Don't even think. I'm not a meddling

idiot; I know I'm not. You are desperate about something, and anything,

any one, even a complete stranger, and I'm not that, who steps in

between desperation and an act is justified--perhaps a Godsend."

He was walking beside her, half leading her, talking quickly, as if to

give her time to recover, and glancing at her stricken, helpless face.

As they walked they heard behind them the rattling fall of letters into

a postman's bag; the pillar-box had been emptied.

The youth of the face, its essential childishness, the web of soft hair

that hung disarranged over her cheek, made her look like a very little

girl, and was in strange contrast with the look of terror.

They walked on and on, down streets, across wide, phantasmal squares.

Haldicott held the hand on his arm,--he did not speak,--and Allida felt

herself moving with him through the fog like an Eurydice led by Orpheus,

a shade among the shades. And all the while there hovered before her

thoughts the vision of that quiet room, that white bed, still waiting

for her. Suddenly she broke into sobs. She stopped. She leaned

helplessly against his arm.

"Good heavens! you will tell me now," Haldicott exclaimed. "Cross the

road here. Lean on me. We will go into the park. No one can see you."

She stumbled on blindly beside him, both hands clutching his arm.

All she knew was that she had left life behind her, and yet that she

must go back to that room, and that the room now was more horrible than

the pillar-box had been. She had left life behind her, and yet she

still clung to it--here beside her. Life! life! warm, kind life!

In the park he led her into a deserted path. A bench stood beneath a

tall, leafless tree, its branches stencilled flatly on the yellow-gray

fog. Haldicott and Allida sat down side by side.

"Now tell me. You can trust me utterly. Tell me everything," said

Haldicott.

His fine face, all competence and mastery, studied hers, its shattered

loveliness. She leaned her head back against the bench. Life was there,

and a great peace seemed to flow through her as the mere consciousness

of its presence filled her. As long as he held her hand she could not be

frightened; and since she was only a ghost, since all her past seemed to

have dropped from her, she could look at it with him, she could tell him

what he asked. As if exhausted, borne along by his will, she said, "I am

going to commit suicide."

Haldicott made no ejaculation and no movement. Her eyes were closed, and

he studied her face. Its innocent charm almost made him smile at her

words; and yet the expression he had seen from across the street, as she

dropped that letter into the box and stood frozen, had gone too well

with such words. He reflected silently. He had long known Allida Fraser,

never more than slightly; and yet from the frequency of slight knowledge

he found that he had accumulated, quite unconsciously, an impression of

her, distinct, sweet, appealing. He saw her, silent and gentle, in her

tawdry mother's tawdry house; he heard her grave quiet voice. He had

thought her, not knowing that he thought at all, charming. He had always

been glad to talk to her, to make her gravity, the little air of chill

composure that he had so understood, and liked, in the daughter of a

desperate, faded flirt, warm into confident interest and smiles.

Thinking of that quiet voice, that gentle smile, the poise and dignity

of all the little personality, he could not connect them with hysterical

shallowness. But he had, he now recognized, thought of her as older,

more tempered to reality. There was a revelation of desperate youth, and

youth's sense of the finality of desperation, on her face; and, with all

the rigid resolve he had seen, he could guess in it youth's essential

fluidity. She was resolved, and yet all resolves in a soul so young were

only moods, unless circumstances let them stand still, stagnate, and

finally freeze. She was not frozen yet. It was only a mood standing

still; shake it, and it would fluctuate into surprising changes. Allida

opened her eyes while he reflected, and many moments had gone by since

her words.

"How amazing that I should tell you, calmly tell you, isn't it?" she

said. "And yet I can't feel it as amazing. Nothing could amaze me. I

seem to have passed beyond any feeling of that sort. But since I am so

really dead already, that I can tell you, you must respect my confidence

in you. You must not try to prevent me. I trust you."

"I shan't prevent you," said Haldicott.

Again she closed her eyes. "Thanks. It is almost a comfort to be able to

tell some one. I know now how fearfully lonely I have been. And yet--I

wish I hadn't met you--or I will wish it. Now I can wish nothing, and

feel nothing--except that you are there, alive, and that I am going to

die. But it will be harder to do now. Everything seems so vague,

everything seems left behind. The very sorrow that makes me do it seems

so far away--like a dream. I can't go through all the realization again,

and when I do it now, it will seem to be for something unreal." Her

voice trailed off.

"Are you sure you are going to do it?" Haldicott asked presently.

They spoke very slowly, with long pauses, as though a monotony of

leisure were about them; as though, in some quiet, dim place of departed

spirits, time had ceased.

"Yes; quite sure. I have bought it--the poison--I had a doctor's

prescription--I have thought it all out carefully. It's in the top

drawer of my dressing-table."

She would, he saw, tell him everything.

Again he paused.

"Is it an irremediable sorrow that makes life impossible, or is it life

itself, in general, that you can't go on with?"

"Both--both," said Allida.

Again a long, long silence grew; every moment, Haldicott felt, a drop in

the deep cup of oblivion that, unconsciously, she was drinking, that

would make the past more and more unreal, until from oblivion she woke

into the sane world of struggle and life.

"Yet you are so young," he said at last, "with everything before

you--real joys as well as--forgive me!--realer sorrows; they would

balance better if you would live a little longer. You know, if you

waited for just one year, let us say, you would look back with wonder

at this, with thankfulness that you hadn't."

"Perhaps," she said. "Only I don't want to live that year."

"And when were--when are you going to do it?"

"This evening. I had meant to do it long before this. Mamma is away.

There could be no better time. Besides, it must be this evening. I've

written."

"To her? To tell her?"

"No," Allida answered; "not to her." And she added, "I don't love her."

"Your mother?"

"This is my dying confession, so I will say the truth. No, I don't love

her. She has made me so unhappy--made life so ugly."

"Then you wrote to some one whom you do love?"

"Yes," said Allida, after another pause. Her hat had loosened as she

leaned her head back, and her disordered hair was about her face; she

still kept her eyes closed with her expression of weary abandonment to

the peace of confession.

He looked at her keenly, with most intent interest, most intent pity,

and yet with a flicker of amusement in the look. She could do it. He

believed her. Yet it would be as absurd as it would be tragic if she

did. It wasn't a face made for tragedy; it had strayed into it by

mistake.

"This some one you love," he said gently, "will it not hurt them

terribly? Have you thought of that?"

He saw the tears come. They rolled slowly down her cheeks. She faintly

whispered:

"He doesn't love me."

Haldicott could feel no amusement now, the pity was too great. He put

his other hand on the hand he held.

"Used he to love you?" he asked.

"No," said Allida; "he never loved me."

For a moment Haldicott struggled with a half-nervous wish to laugh;

relief was in the wish.

"And he knows that you love him?" he controlled his voice to ask.

"He will--when he gets my letter."

"Poor devil!" ejaculated Haldicott.

"Oh, you don't understand!" cried Allida. She opened her eyes and sat

upright, drawing her hand from his. "How could you understand? You think

it's a sort of vengeance I'm taking--for his not loving me. I can't drag

myself through explanations, indeed I can't. Of course I see that my

tragedy to you must be almost farce. I must go. Why should I have told

you anything? I am desecrating it all, making it all grotesque, by being

still alive."

"No, no; you mustn't go yet," said Haldicott, seizing her hand firmly,

yet with not too obvious a restraint. "You mustn't go, not at peace with

me. You have all the evening still before you,--it's not six yet,--and

it doesn't take long to kill one's self with poison. Trust me. You must

trust me. Don't think about its being grotesque; most things are in

certain aspects. I think that we are both behaving very naturally,

considering the circumstances. The circumstances, I grant you, are a

little grotesque--not the circumstance of your being still alive, but of

your wishing to die. But, indeed, I shall understand, you poor child,

poor sweet child, if you will explain."

Again the mirage sense of compulsion, of peace in yielding to it, of

letting this ghost-like consciousness shut out the long past and the

short future, crept over her. She sank back again beside him.

"But how can I explain? Where shall I begin?"

"Listen to me now, dear Allida--we can use Christian names, I think, in

a case of last dying confession like this. I am not going to prevent

you, or put any constraint upon you; but I want you to explain as

clearly and fully as you can, so that, in trying to make me see, you may

see yourself, clearly and fully, what you are doing, where you are.

Probably you are in a condition of absolutely irrational despair. Let us

look at it together. I may be able to show you something else. Begin

with him. Who is he?"

Allida had leaned forward, her elbows on her knees. She dropped her face

into her hands as she answered:

"Oliver Ainslie."

"Yes; I know him."

"Yes; you know him."

"He is--a charming fellow," said Haldicott.

"I met him over a year ago," said Allida. "I am very miserable at home.

I have grown up alone. My mother and I have never been at all

sympathetic. I hardly saw her when I was growing up. She only wanted to

marry me off as soon as possible, and--she hasn't found it easy to marry

me off. I haven't money--or looks in particular--oh, but I can't go into

all that! You know mamma. I have hated my life with her."

"Yes, yes. I understand."

"Not that there is any harm in mamma," Allida amended, with a weary

exactitude; "everybody understands that, too. Only she is so utterly

silly, so utterly selfish. This all sounds horrible."

"I understand."

"I met him. I had never seen any one so dear, so sympathetic. I seemed

to breathe with happiness when he was there. It was like morning

sunlight after a hot, glaring ballroom, being with him. He never cared

one bit for me; but--the first time I saw him he smiled at me, and he

was kind and dear to me,--as he would be to any one,--and from that

first moment I loved him--oh, loved him!"

She paused, a sacred sweetness in the pause.

Haldicott, sitting beside her in the fog, felt the presence of something

radiant and snowy.

"And I sometimes thought and hoped--that he would care for me. I wrote

to him all the time, letters I never sent; but I wrote as if he were to

see them--some day. It's almost strange to me to think that such love

didn't bring him to me by its very force and yearning. One hears, you

know, of thoughts making themselves felt--becoming realities. I wonder

where all those thoughts of mine went!"

He saw them all--those white, innocent thoughts--flying out like birds,

like a flock of white birds, and disappearing in the darkness. How could

a soul not have felt them fluttering about it, crying vainly for

admittance? He almost shared Allida's wonder.

"And to-day, I sent all the letters with the last one telling of my

death. For--I saw it this morning--he is engaged. So I couldn't go on. I

could never love any one else; I shouldn't want to. My heart broke when

I read the paper; really it broke. And I explained it all to him, so

that it could not hurt him, that I was dying because life had become

worthless to me--and yet that there was joy in dying because I could, in

dying, tell him. There had been beauty and joy in loving him; he must

not be too sorry; and he must care for my love. It was a gift--a gift

that I could give him only in going away for ever myself."

She was silent. The evening was late by now, and the fog about them shut

them into a little space, a little island just large enough for their

bench, a bit of path, a dim border of railing opposite, and a branch of

tree overhead. The muffled sound of cautious traffic was far away. They

were wonderfully alone.

Haldicott took one of the hands on which she leaned, and raised it to

his lips.

"Sweet, foolish child!" he said.

She turned her head and looked at him; it was almost as if she saw him

for the first time--the man, not only Life's personification. They could

still see quite clearly each other's faces, and for a long time,

gravely, they looked into each other's eyes.

"Don't you see that it's all a dream?" said Haldicott.

"A dream?" Allida repeated. "The reality of a whole year?"

And yet it was a dream to her; even while she had told him of that year

it was as if she told of something far behind her, lived through long,

long ages ago, in another, a different life.

But she struggled to hold the vanishing pain and beauty of it all--the

reality that, unreal, would make her whole being seem like a little

handful of thin cloud dying away into emptiness.

"This is a dream," she said, still looking at him, "_this, this_. What

am I doing here?" She rose to her feet, gasping now. "Oh! he will get

the letter--and I shall not be dead! I must go at once--at once!"

"To save yourself from being ridiculous? You are going to kill yourself

so as to keep a tragic attitude that you've taken before this man who

doesn't care for you--an attitude that's really disarranged?

Dear--pitiful--enchanting little idiot!" said Haldicott.

He had risen too, and, holding her hands, he still, but not too

obviously, kept her near him.

His words were almost cruel in their lightness; his voice had a feeling

that, more than any words, any supplication or remonstrance, made her

past life seem illusory, and she herself, with it, disappearing into

pure nothingness. The world rocked with her. Only the feeling in that

voice seemed real.

"Are you sure, are you sure," he said, "that you can never love anybody

else? Won't you wait a year to find out? Won't you wait a month? Allida,

won't you wait a day?"

"Why do you try to humiliate me?" she gasped, and the tears fell down

her face. He almost feared that he had been brutal, that she was going

to faint.

"I am not trying to humiliate you. I am trying to wake you. Perhaps the

truth will wake you. Will you wait a day, an hour, Allida, and see?"

"See what?"

"That this is a dream; that you wove it out of nothing to fill the

emptiness of your sad life; that it would have gathered round the first

'dear sympathetic' person who smiled at you. And after you see that,

will you wait and see----" he paused.

"What?" she repeated.

"How much I can make you love me," said Haldicott.

"Why do you mock me?" Allida said. "Why, unless you think me mad?"

"Well, of course you _are_ mad, in a sense; any coroner's inquest would

say so. But _mock_ you! I love you, Allida."

Her face had now as wild, as frozen a look on it as the one he had seen,

not three hours before, after she had slipped the letter into the

pillar-box; but it was with another wildness--of wonder rather than of

despair.

"But how can you?" she faltered.

"I can tell you how, but you must wait an hour--more than an hour--to

hear. You will wait--Allida?"

"It is pity, to save me."

"To save you? Why, I'd hand you over to the nearest policeman if I only

wanted to save you. I _do_ want to save you--for myself."

There drifted through her mind a vision of her little room, where, by

this time, she might have been lying on the bed, the empty bottle of

poison near her. And that vision of death was now far away, across an

abyss, and she was in life, and life held her, claimed her.

"But I can't understand. How is it possible?" She closed her eyes. "My

letter," she whispered.

Haldicott put his arm around her and led her down the path.

"Ainslie is a dear fellow," he said. "We will write him another letter

as soon as we get in."

She was hardly aware of the walk back to the little house in Mayfair,

back to the doorstep where, such aeons ago, she had paused to look at

the crying cat. If she had not paused, if she had gone a little earlier

to the pillar-box, before the lamp was lighted----Her mind was blurred

again. All--all was dream, except that life, near her, was claiming her.

Now they were in the drawing-room, among the shaded lamps, the gilt, the

chintz and bric-a-brac.

Haldicott sent for wine and made her drink. He said to the maid that

Miss Fraser had felt faint during her walk. For a long time Allida

leaned back in the chair where he had put her, shading her eyes with her

hand.

"Can you write to Ainslie now?" Haldicott asked at last. "We will send

your letter by special messenger."

"Yes, yes; let me write." She drew off her gloves, and Haldicott put

paper and pen before her.

She looked up at him.

"What shall I say?" she asked.

This time, uncontrollably, he wanted to laugh; if he did not laugh he

must burst out crying; he leaned his elbows on the table as he sat

beside her, burying his face on his arms, his shoulders shaking.

Allida sat with the pen in her hand, gazing at him. The nightmare, after

all, was too near for her to share his dubious amusement; but that she

saw its point as well as he did was evinced in her next question, asked

in still the faltering voice:

"Shall I say that I've decided to wait a day?"

Haldicott looked up.

"Thank Heaven, you _have_ a sense of humour. It was my one anxiety about

you--all through. Say, dearest Allida, that you are awake."

She looked at him, and now, though she did not smile, her wan face was

touched by a pale, responsive radiance.

"It is so strange--to be awake," she murmured, bending to her paper.

But hardly had the first slow line been written when running steps were

heard outside, the door was flung open before the amazed maid could

reach it, and Oliver Ainslie, white and distraught, darted into the

room.

* * * * *

He did not glance at Haldicott. The distraction of his look had only

time to break into stupefied thanksgiving before the same rush that had

brought him in carried him to Allida. He fell on his knees before her.

Clasping her round the waist, he hid his face, crying, "Thank God!"

Allida sat, still holding her pen. She did not look at Ainslie, but

across the room at Haldicott, and again, before her look, as of one

confronted with her own utter inadequacy to deal with the situation,

Haldicott could almost have laughed. But the moment for light

interpretations had gone. Anything amusing in the present situation was

only grimly so for him. The fairy prince had turned up--a real fairy

prince, for a wonder, and three hours of everyday reality had no chance

of counting against a year of fairy-tale with such a lasting chapter.

After all, it was very beautiful; he was able to see that, thank

goodness! Yet Allida's perfectly blank look held him. She was evidently

unable to deal single-handed with her dilemma--to explain to her fairy

prince why he found her alive rather than dead. Haldicott turned to the

mantelpiece and moved, unseeingly, the idiotic silver ornaments upon it,

waiting for an opportunity to strike a blow for her deliverance.

Ainslie had lifted his face to hers.

"It was a mistake, that announcement: it's my cousin who is to be

married; we have the same name. Oh, Allida! darling Allida! if I had not

come in time! That I should have found you--_you_! And only just in

time!"

He became now, perhaps from the blankness of her face, aware more fully

of Haldicott's unobtrusive presence.

To the silent query of his eyes she answered:

"He knows--everything."

"He prevented you! He met you and prevented you! I see it all.

Haldicott, it _is_ you, isn't it----"

Haldicott reluctantly turned to him.

"My dear fellow, can I ever thank you enough? My dear Haldicott, it's

all too astonishing. You know? And _why_ she was going to? The poor,

darling child!" He had risen, and, with his arm around Allida's

shoulders, was gazing at her.

"I saw Miss Fraser posting her letter to you, and guessed from her

expression that something very bad was up," said Haldicott. "I forced

her to walk a little with me, and I made her tell me the story; and then

I made her see that the truer love for you would be shown in living. She

had just recognised that,"--Haldicott smiled at her,--"and she was going

to write, and see if she couldn't waylay that letter--spare you the pain

of it and, at all events, tell you that she wasn't going to burden you

with unfair remorse for the rest of your days. That's about the truth of

it all, isn't it?" And he so believed it to be, now, the only essential

truth, or, at least, the half-truth that she had better believe in, that

his smile had not a touch of bitterness.

Allida still held her pen and still gazed at him.

"Ah! thank God for it all--for the fact that the letter wasn't waylaid,

and for the fact that you _were_, Allida! When I think of it--that gift

coming to me--your gift, Allida--and not too late--not too late!"

The young man, in his rapturous thankfulness, indifferent to the

guardian presence, raised her hand to his lips, kissing it with a

fervour where tears struggled with smiles.

"I'll go now," Haldicott said gently. "I'm so--immensely glad for you

both."

But Allida, at this, started from her helpless apathy.

"No, no! Don't--don't go!" she cried. "I can't think. It's all so

impossible. Do you mean," and her eyes now went to Ainslie while she

drew her hand from his--"do you mean that you love me?"

"Love you, darling Allida? Don't you see it?"

"Because you got the letter," Allida said, as if linking in her mind a

chain of evidence. "If you hadn't got it--you would not love me now."

"Forgive me, dearest, for my blindness! I should not have known you if I

had not got it."

Allida still looked at him.

"You are just as dear--even dearer than I thought you; you are even more

worthy of any love than I dreamed," she said. Her face had lost all

apathy, all helplessness. It was with the stricken resolution that it

could so strangely show that she pushed back her chair and rose, moving

away from the young man, who, enchantingly a fairy prince, gazed at her

with adoring eyes.

"It was written in a dream," said Allida, clasping her hands and

returning his gaze. "It was written in a dream," she repeated. "It was

all--all the whole year--a dream--only a dream."

The trust of his gaze was too deep for understanding to sink through it.

"I am awake now," said Allida; "you are dearer than I ever dreamed, but

I am awake."

"When reality comes, the past always seems rather dream-like," Ainslie

said. He felt and understood as well, as truly as the other had done.

"Darling Allida, I can never be worthy of such a love as yours, but I

will try. And now that you are awake, you will find how much better

waking is than any dream."

She gasped at this, and retreated before him.

"But I am horrid; I am unbelievable. There isn't any reality. There

isn't any love to be worthy of," she cried, and covered her face with

her hands.

Ainslie, from her attitude of avowal and abasement, looked his

stupefaction at Haldicott, and, for all answer, got a stupefaction as

complete.

"What _does_ she mean?" the younger man at length inquired.

"I don't think she knows what she means," Haldicott answered. "I think

she is, naturally, overwrought. All feeling, all meaning, is paralyzed.

She probably won't mean anything worth listening to for a good while."

They were speaking quite as if Allida, standing there with her hidden

face, were a lunatic, the diagnosis of whose harmless case was as yet

impossible in the absence of fresh symptoms. But a symptom was

forthcoming.

"I mean _that_," she said. "I don't understand. I can't explain. It's as

if something were broken in me. There isn't any love; there never will

be. If you can ever forgive me, please tell me so--when you do. It

mustn't be more than a dream for you, too--a dream only an hour long."

The two men again exchanged glances, but now with more hesitation.

"But, Allida,"--Ainslie spoke with gentle pain--"I love you. I am not

dreaming. Do you mean to say that you can't love me? Do you mean to say

that if I had loved you, with no letter to awaken me, you would have

thought your love a dream, merely because it was answered?"

"It isn't that. I can't explain. Something broke. You came too late.

It's as if I had died--and become almost another person. I know it's

unbelievable; I don't understand it myself; but it is true. It is all

over, really."

"All over?" dazedly Ainslie repeated. "But why? After those letters?

After what you were going to do? Allida!"

She dropped her hands, and once more her eyes went to Haldicott in that

look--the appeal of incompetence. But there was more in it: suffering

and shame, and a strength that strove to hide them from him.

"Perhaps, my dear Ainslie, you had better go," said Haldicott, "for the

present at least." But, in its wonder, his answering look now appealed

and was helpless in its incomprehension.

Ainslie stared at her.

"Good-bye," he said at last.

"Oh, good-bye," said Allida, with a fervor of relief that all her

humility and pity could not dissemble.

"Good-bye," he repeated, holding her hand, "sweet, strange, cruel

Allida."

She put her hand over his and looked clearly at him.

"Remember," she said--"remember how absurd I am."

He was gone. Allida did not turn to Haldicott. She remained looking at

the door that had closed on the exit of her "best beloved."

"But _why_?" said Haldicott. He repeated Ainslie's broken words almost

faintly. "When the dream came true--why didn't you take it?"

She made no reply.

"I never meant that because it had been a dream it couldn't become a

reality," he went on.

She looked vaguely round the room. Indeed, things swam to her; the

nearest support was the mantelpiece. She leaned against it, looking

down.

"It's not anything I said--in my efforts to shake you awake? You _were_

in love with him, you know. Weren't you in love with him, Allida?"

"Yes; I suppose so. How can I tell you anything? All I know is that I

was dreaming."

"But--why did the dream go?"

"You killed it, perhaps," she said in a colourless voice, leaning her

forehead upon her hand, and still looking fixedly down.

"I--_I_ killed it? You mean--that any one who had come then--would have

stopped you--made you see your own folly--waked you?"

"They might have stopped me--they might have saved me," she said, and

she paused.

"But only I could wake you? Only I could prevent the coming true of your

dream?" Again in his wondering, groping voice was the feeling that, like

a torch, had led her up from Tartarus--up through blackness to the sweet

air again.

She still hid her eyes, not daring to look or trust.

"Allida!" he supplicated.

"Oh," she said in a voice so low that it did not shake--it was as if she

just dared to let it sound at all--"was your dream true, or was it only

the rope you threw out to me to drag me on shore with?"

Haldicott stretched out his hand to her.

"Do you mean that my three hours of reality count for more than

his--than his, backed by your whole year of dreaming? Allida, are you

really absurd enough to say that I count for more than Oliver Ainslie?"

She put her weary, ashamed head down on the arm that leaned upon the

mantelpiece. She did not take his hand.

"What can I say? Everything I say seems unbelievable. Can anything I say

be more absurd than anything else? Yes, you do count for more. You

count for everything. Did I love him--or did I only love love? I don't

know. I only know that what you said--and are--made it all a dream. And

now you will think that I am going to kill myself because _you_ don't

love me! But my absurdity is over, I promise you. Really, I am awake."

"Allida, darling," said Haldicott--he went to her and took both her

hands, so that she must raise her head and look at him--"if I've made

fun of you when I was feeling horribly frightened, and called you

ridiculous when I found you as tragic and adorable as you were

grotesque, _that_ was the rope. Now I will take an hour, or a day, or a

whole week, if necessary, to make you believe it; but _I_ could have

committed suicide--I assure you I could--when I saw Oliver Ainslie come

into the room."

A FORSAKEN TEMPLE

CHAPTER I

MILLY

"It is the emptiness, the loneliness, the lack of response and

understanding," said Milly. "It is as if I were always looking at a face

that never really saw me or spoke to me. Such a mistake as I have

made--or as others have made for me--is irretrievable. An unhappy

marriage seems to ruin everything in you and about you, and you have to

go on living among the ruins. You can't go away and leave them behind

you, as you can other calamities in life."

Milly Quentyn and Mrs. Drent were alone this afternoon in the

country-house where they had come really to know each other, and Milly,

acting hostess for her absent cousin, had poured out Mrs. Drent's tea

and then her own, leaving it untouched, however, while she spoke, her

hands falling, clasped together, in her lap, her eyes fixed on vacancy.

The contemplation of ruins for the last five years had filled these eyes

with a pensive resignation; but they showed no tearful repinings, no

fretful restlessness. They were clear eyes, large and luminous, and in

looking at them and at the wan, lovely little face where they bloomed

like melancholy flowers, Mrs. Drent's face, on the other side of the

tea-table, grew yet more sombre and more intent in its brooding

sympathy. "Why did you----" she began, and then changed the first

intention of her question to--"Why did you--love him?" This was more

penetrating than to ask Mrs. Quentyn why she had married him.

The extreme lowness of Mrs. Drent's voice muffled, as it were, its

essential harshness; one felt in it the effort to be soft, as in her one

felt effort, always, to quell some latent fierceness, an eager, almost

savage energy. She was thirty years old, six years older than Milly

Quentyn. Her skin was swarthy, her eyes, under broad, tragically bent

eyebrows, were impenetrably black. Her features, had they not been so

small, so finely finished, would have seemed too emphatic, significant

as they were of a race-horse nervousness and of something inflexible in

the midst of an expression all flexibility. Her hands were curiously

slight and small, and as she now, in looking at her companion and in

asking her question, locked them together with a force that made them

tremble, they showed the same combination of an excessive strength

informing an excessive fragility.

Milly Quentyn's gaze drifted to her and rested upon her in silence.

Presently she smiled.

"How kind you are to care so much, to care at all!"

"I do care."

"Are you, will you, be my friend, always?" asked Milly, leaning towards

her a little, and the smile seemed to flutter to the other woman like an

appealing and grateful kiss.

"I am your friend; I will be your friend, always," Mrs. Drent replied,

in an even lower tone than before.

The tears came softly into Milly's eyes while they looked at each other

she gently, Mrs. Drent still sombrely. Then leaning back again with a

sigh, she continued, "Why I loved him? I didn't love him. Isn't that the

almost invariable answer? I was nineteen; I had just left the

schoolroom; I was in love with my own ideal of love--you know, you must

know, the silly, pathetic, sentimental and selfish mixture one is at

nineteen;--and Mamma said that he was that ideal; and he said nothing;

so I believed her! Poor Dick! He was in love, I think, really, and not a

bit with himself, and with only enough articulateness to ask me to marry

him; and of course he was, and is, very good-looking. You know Mamma.

She has married us all off very well, they say; you know how they say

it. In her determination to ensconce the family type comfortably she is

as careless of the single life as nature itself. In this case what

appeared to be a very cosy niche offered itself for me and she shoved me

into it. I have grown up since then; that is all my story."

"They are terrible, terrible, such marriages," said Mrs. Drent, looking

away.

Her tone struck Milly, with all her consciousness of pathos, as perhaps

a little misplaced. "Terrible? No, hardly that, I think. I did believe

that I loved him. He did love me."

"You were a child who did not know herself, nor what she was doing."

"Yes; that is true."

"And it is terrible for him if he still loves you."

"Oh," said Milly, with another sigh, "if you can call it love. He is

rather dismayed by the situation; sorry that we don't hit it off better,

as he would express it; jocosely resigned to what he would call my

unkindness and queerness. But as for tragedy, suffering;--one can't

associate such perturbing things with imperturbable Dick. I haven't to

reproach myself with having hurt his life seriously, and, Heaven knows!

I don't reproach his simplicity and harmlessness for having broken mine.

Marriage and a wife were incidents--incidents only--to him, and if they

have failed to be satisfactory incidents, he has other far more

absorbing interests in his life to take his mind off the breakdown of

his domestic happiness. Indeed, domesticity, when he cares to avail

himself of it, is always there in its superficial forms and ceremonies.

I can't pretend to love him, but I take care of his money and his house,

I entertain his friends, I give him his tea at breakfast and a decorous

kiss when he comes back from shooting animals in some savage country.

One could hardly call us separated, so discreetly do I bridge the chasm

with all the conventional observances. Thank Heaven! the shooting is his

one great passion, so that he is usually wandering happily in distant

jungles and not requiring too many _tete-a-tetes_ at breakfast of me."

"He is probably very good and kind," said Mrs. Drent, "but it is

incredible that such a man should be married to such a woman as you."

Again Milly gazed for a moment, aware of inappropriateness. "You have a

very high ideal of marriage, haven't you?" she said. Mrs. Drent's

husband had died five years before, and her baby when it was born. She

wore black, exquisite and unobtrusive always, and, unobtrusively, she

was known to be inconsolable. Yet Milly had heard it whispered that

Gilbert Drent had married her for her money and that, charming person

though he had been, she had passionately idealized him. There was,

therefore, with these memories at the back of her mind, something

painful as well as pathetic to her in the voice in which Mrs. Drent,

crimsoning deeply, said: "My own marriage was ideal. I don't understand

marriage unless it is ideal."

There was a silence after that for a moment and then Milly said, "It

must be wonderful to have such a memory. All I know is that I wish with

all my heart I had never married Dick, and I believe with all my heart

that one shouldn't marry unless everything is there."

"That is it," said Mrs. Drent, "everything must be there for it to be

right;--affinity, and understanding, and devotion. Some women can find

enough in the mere fact of a home and a shared life to be satisfied

without them; but not a woman like you."

"I think you idealize me," Milly said smiling a little sadly; "but I

believe in that too. I don't claim at all any remarkable individuality;

but what I have Dick doesn't understand at all, doesn't even see. He

goes blundering about the dullest, most distant parks and preserves of a

castle; that is as near as he ever gets to the castle, such as it is, of

my personality. And he doesn't really care about the castle; it hardly

worries him that he can't find it. There might be wonderful pictures on

its walls, and jewels in its cabinets, and music in its chambers; but

even if he got inside and were able to see and hear, he wouldn't care a

bit about them; he would say: 'Awfully nice,' and look for the

smoking-room. And there," said Milly, pressing her hands together while

her eyes filled suddenly with tears, "there is the little tragedy. For

of course every woman thinks that she has pictures and jewels and music,

and longs--oh longs!--to show them to the one, the one person who will

love to see and hear. And when she finds that no one sees or hears, or

knows, even, that there is anything to look for, then the music dies,

and the pictures fade, and the jewels grow dim, and at last everything

magical vanishes from life and she sees herself, not as an enchanted

castle, but as a first-class house in Mayfair, with all the latest

improvements;--as much a matter of course, as much a convenience, as

unmysterious and as unalluring as the telephone, the hot water pipes and

the electric lighting. It is only as if in a dream--a far, far

dream--that she remembers the castle, and feels, sometimes, within her,

the ruins, the empty ruins."

"Oh--my dear!" breathed Mrs. Drent. It was as if she couldn't help it,

as if, shaken from her passionate reserve, she must show her very heart.

She leaned round the table and took one of Milly's hands. "Don't--don't

let the magic vanish! There's nothing else in life! All the rest is

death. It's only when we are in the castle--with our music and our

pictures and our jewels--that we are alive. You know it; you feel it;

it's what makes the difference between the real and the unreal people.

You are one of the real ones, I saw it at once; you aren't meant to

wither out and to become crisp and shallow. Don't cease to believe in

the pictures, the jewels, the music. They are there. _I_ see. _I_ hear."

"How--_sweet_ of you!" faltered Milly.

She was startled, she was touched, she, who rarely felt it, felt

shyness. She had known that this dark, still woman was observing her,

and had known, for all the other's reserve, that the observation was not

antagonistic. Something in Mrs. Drent had made her feel that it would be

easy, a relief, to talk to her about all one's miseries and desolations.

But the sudden leap of spiritual fire found her unprepared. She was a

little ashamed, as though her own reality were somewhat unreal beside

Mrs. Drent's belief in it. There had been something pleasant in the

tracing of her little tragedy, something sweet in the thought of that

sad castle of her soul, with its stilled music, its fading enchantments;

but Mrs. Drent had seen only the tragedy; and had felt the danger of

withering, of becoming acquiescent and commonplace, with an intensity of

which she herself was incapable. Such response, such understanding,

might well take one's breath away.

This scene was the beginning of their long friendship. It was a charming

friendship. Milly Quentyn, for all the clouds of her background, was a

creature of sunshine, of sunshine in a mist, a creature of endearing

fluctuations. Indeed, Christina told her afterwards, when they analyzed

the beginnings, it had been her childlike radiance, her smiles, her air

as of rifts of blue over a rainy landscape--(for everybody knew that

Dick and Milly Quentyn didn't hit it off)--it had been these sweet,

these doubly pathetic qualities that had first attracted her. "I am not

easily attracted," said Christina. "Had there been a languishing hint of

the _femme incomprise_ about you, any air of self-pity, I should never

have so longed to take care of you, to try to help to make you happier.

But you were made for happiness and beauty, and if you didn't succeed in

keeping them one saw that it would hurt you dreadfully. It was that that

so appealed."

And Milly confessed to Christina that she had been at first a good deal

afraid of her, as the distinguished young poetess, and had thought of

her as a sombre and humourless little personage, only reassuring in

being so enchantingly well-dressed.

In Christina Drent's poetry the numbness that had descended upon her

after her husband's death had found a partial awakening. The poems were

not great things, but they were written without a touch of artifice.

They were sudden, spontaneous and swift, and it was as if, in reading

them, one heard a distant wail or saw across a bleak sky the flight of

an unknown bird. In her own little world of fashion they had made her a

tolerably famous figure. But it was an echo only of her regrets and

longings that Christina was able to put into her poems, all perhaps that

she chose to put; they were never intimate or personal. The essence of

her was that passionate reserve and, with it, that passionate longing to

devote herself, lavishly, exclusively, upon one idolized and,

inevitably, idealized object. She was full of a fervour of faith, once

the reserve was broken down, and her idol, high on a pedestal in its

well-built temple, was secure henceforth from overthrow.

Such an idol her husband had been. Such an idol her child would have

been. The doors of that sanctuary were sealed for ever, the sacred

emptiness for ever empty; Christina could never have remarried. But

beside it rose a second temple, only less fair, and in it, lovingly

enshrined, stood Milly Quentyn.

Happily Milly was an idol worthy of idealization, perhaps even worthy of

temple-building. She was sweet and tender, in friendship most upright

and loyal. She loved to be loved, to see her own tenderness blossom

about her in responsive tenderness. She was not vain, but she loved

those she cared for to find her exquisite, and to show her that they

did. Like a frail flower, unvisited by sunlight, she could hardly live

without other lives about her, fortifying, expanding her own. Her

disappointment in her husband had turned to something like a wan

disgust. His crude appreciations of her, which, in the first girlish

trust of her married life, she had taken as warrant of all the subtle,

manifold appreciations that she needed, were now offences. Poor Dick

Quentyn blundered deeper and deeper into the quagmire of his wife's

disdain. His was a boyish, unexacting nature. He asked for no great

things, and the lack of even small mercies left him serene. As he had

never thought about himself at all, it did not surprise him that his

wife thought very little of him; he did not, because of it, think less

well of himself. Milly's indifference argued in her a difference from

most women, facilely contented as they usually seemed. It did not change

or harm him or make him either assertive or self-conscious.

He had soon discovered that the things he cared to talk about wearied

her--sport, the estate, very uncomplex politics or very uncomplex

books; and after a little while he discovered, further, that for him to

try to adapt himself to her, to try to talk about the things she cared

for, exasperated her. She listened, indeed, with a bleak patience, while

he admired, with a genial endeavour to do the right thing, all the wrong

pictures at the shows where they went together. She sat silent, her eyes

aloof, dimly smiling, while he tried to win her interest in a very jolly

book,--watered Dumas, as a rule, decantered into modern bottles. He saw

that she made an effort to care about the big game he shot--the hall and

dining-room bristled with trophies, one walked over them everywhere--and

she looked at pictures of them in the books of travel he eagerly put

before her; but it was as pictures that they interested her, remotely,

not as animals suitable for shooting.

Dick Quentyn, with an unmysterious, undifficult wife, could have been a

very gracefully affectionate husband; his manners were as charming as

his mind was blundering; but with this chill young nymph any attempt at

marital pettings and caressings seemed clumsy and grotesque. With Milly,

he soon felt it, the barrier between their minds was inevitably a

barrier shutting him out from even these manifestations of tenderness.

He was not at all dull in feeling that; not at all dull in his quick

withdrawal before her passive distaste; not dull in knowing that if he

were not to withdraw the distaste would become more than negative. He

had now, cheerfully, it seemed, recognized that his marriage was a

failure and, as Milly had said, it did not seem, after an unpleasant

wrench or two when he did show an uncontrollable grimace of pain, to

make very much difference to him. She endured him; she did not dislike

him at all--at a distance; and, very gaily, with a debonair manner of

perfect trust, he kept at a distance. He travelled constantly, and it

was rarely that he required her to pour out his tea for him.

Milly poured out his tea for a fortnight during Christina's first visit

to Chawlton House, the Quentyns' country-place. Christina looked forward

to meeting her friend's inappropriate husband almost with trembling. She

felt that she might be called to the great and happy mission of

reconciliation, that Milly might have been mistaken and Dick

undervalued. Milly's trust in her and dependence upon her had grown with

leaps and bounds, and she hoped that with tact and time she might do

much to rebuild the broken life, if there were materials with which to

build it. The first glance at Dick showed her the futility of such

hopes. He was a dear; that at once was obvious to her; and he was

delightful looking; his small head well set on broad shoulders, his

short nose expressive of courage and character; his grey eyes as free

from all malice and uncharitableness as they were from introspection.

But he was a boy, a kind, good boy, an ingenuous, well-mannered

materialist, living, as it were, by automatic functions, and as

incapable of spiritual initiative as he was of evil. What ground of

meeting could there be between him and her Milly, compact as she was of

subtleties, profundities and possibilities? No; Dick offered no

materials for the building of a shrine, and unless marriage was a shrine

Christina could not contemplate it. There had been a deep instinct, like

one of nature's cruel yet righteous laws, in Milly's withdrawal; to have

consented, to have compromised, would have been to stifle and stultify

herself.

Christina so justified her, and yet it pained her that Milly, in her

treatment of her husband, should be almost unbeautiful. The streak of

hardness, almost of cruelty, like nature's own, showing itself in her

darling, distressed her. She did not care so much about Dick's very

problematic discomfort. He showed none; he talked with great good

spirits, made cheerful, obvious jokes and looked eminently sane, fresh

and picturesque in his out-of-door attire. Yet even he must know that

every fibre of Milly's face, every tone of her voice, expressed her

indifference and her oppression. "Really, dear, you are not kind,"

Christina protested. Milly opened innocent eyes. "You think I'm wrong

about Dick?"

"Not wrong about him; wrong to him. Surely, just because you are so

right in what you feel to be impossibility, you can afford to be kind."

"You think I behave badly to Dick? Oh, Christina!--you are displeased

with me?"

They were very sincere with each other, these two, and bared their souls

to each other relentlessly.

"Only because you are so dear to me, Milly." Mrs. Drent flushed a little

as she looked tenderly at her friend. "Only because I want to see you

always right, exquisitely right. You make me uncomfortable when you are

not. He has done you no wrong. Why should you treat him as you did this

morning, using me as a foil to show him his own stupidity? Not that I

do find him stupid, Milly; only very, very simple."

"I know it! Oh, I know it!" Milly wailed. "If only he had done me a

wrong it would be so much easier! He irritates me so unspeakably, and I

seem to feel it more, now that I have you. That laboured chaffing of you

at breakfast--how could you have borne it? I can't pretend amusement,

and chaff is his only conception of human intercourse. I know I'm

horrid--I know it; but it is the long, long accumulations of repressed

exasperation that have made me so--worse than exasperations. I remember,

during the first months of our married life, when I was becoming

dreadfully frightened, catching glimpses on every side of my awful

mistake--I remember once kissing him and saying something playful that

hid an appeal for comfort, comprehension, reassurance. And do you know,

he answered me with a chaffing jest--a stupid, stupid jest--some piece

of would-be gallant folly. It was like a dagger!"

"Perhaps it pleased him so much, your kissing him, that it made him

shy," Christina suggested, but Milly said:--"Dick shy! Oh no, he is not

sensitive enough for shyness. He doesn't feel things at all as you, with

your exquisiteness, imagine. He isn't shy at all, and I'm afraid he is

sometimes immensely, hideously stupid."

After all, as Christina came to see, Dick's inevitable loss was her own

gain. Milly, who could not be her husband's, was hers, almost as a child

might have been. Christina, for the first time in her life, knew the

intoxicating experience of being sought out and needed. It was Milly who

turned to her; Milly who put out appealing hands, like a lonely child;

who nestled her head on her shoulder, contentedly sighing, as she begged

her please, please not to go until she had to--and couldn't she,

wouldn't she, stay on until the winter?

Why shouldn't she? Her own life was empty. It ended in her passing most

of the winter with Milly in the country after Dick had gone off to

India. It was a blissful winter, the happiest, in reality, that

Christina had ever known, though she was not aware of this nor aware

that it was the first time in her life that she was the recipient of as

much devotion as she gave. They read and rode and walked and talked and

carried on energetic reforms and charities in the village. Christina was

full of ardent enthusiasms which infected Milly. In spite of her

physical delicacy, for she had a weak heart, she showed an enterprise

and endurance that Milly was not capable of. The winter went by and life

was full of significance.

Then Christina asked Milly to come and stay with her in London for the

spring, and so, by degrees, they both came to think of home as the being

together. Christina's little house in Sloane Street became a centre of

discriminating hospitality; they had an equal talent for selection and

recognition, and Milly possessed the irradiating attractive qualities

that Christina lacked. Together they became something of a touchstone

for the finer, more recondite elements in the vortex of the larger

London life. All their people seemed to come to them through some

pleasant affinity, the people who had done clever things; the people

who, better still, shone only with latent possibilities and were the

richer for their reticences; and dear, comfortable, unexacting people

who were not particularly clever, but responsive, appreciative and

genuine.

Christina still wrote a little, but not so much. She and Milly studied

and travelled and, in the country, at the proper seasons, rusticated.

With all its harmony, their life did not want its more closely knitting

times of fear, as when Milly was dangerously ill and Christina nursed

her through the long crisis, or when Christina's heart showed alarming

symptoms and hurried them away to German specialists.

There were funny little quarrels, too, funny to look back upon, though

very painful at the moment; for Milly could be fretful, and Christina

violent in reproach. The swift reconciliations atoned for all, when,

holding each other's hands, they laughed at each other, each eager to

take the blame. Certain defects they came to recognize and to take into

account, tolerant, loving comprehension, the ripest stage of affection,

seeming achieved. Milly was capricious, had moods of gloom and

disconsolateness when nothing seemed to interest her, neither books nor

music nor people, not even Christina, and when, sunken in a deep

armchair, she would listlessly tap her fingers on the chair-arms, her

eyes empty of all but a monotonous melancholy. These moods always hurt

Christina,--Milly herself seemed hardly aware of them, certainly was not

aware of their hurting,--and she hid the hurt in a gentle sympathy that

averted tactful eyes from her friend's retirement. But she did not quite

understand; for she never wished to retire into herself and away from

Milly.

And Milly discovered that Christina could be unreasonable--so she

tolerantly termed a smouldering element in her friend's nature;

Christina, in fact, could be fiercely jealous. They shared all their

friends, many of them dear friends, but dear on a certain level, below

the illuminated solitude where they two stood in their precious

isolation. And Milly protested to herself that she was the last person

to wish that isolation disturbed. No one knew her, understood her,

helped and loved her as Christina did; there was no one like Christina,

no one so strong, so generous, so large-natured. Why then should

Christina, like a foolish school-girl, show unmistakably--her efforts to

hide it only making her look dim-eyed, white-lipped--a sombre misery if

Milly allowed anyone to absorb her? This really piteous infirmity was

latent in Christina; she did not show it at all during the first years

of their companionship; it grew with her growing devotion to Milly.

Milly discovered it when she asked little Joan Ashby to go to Italy with

them. Christina, at the proposal, had been all glad, frank acquiescence.

Unsuspectingly Milly petted and made much of the girl whose adoration

was sweet to her. She went about with her sight-seeing, when Christina

said that she was tired and did not care to see things, not remembering

that when they were alone together Christina had never seemed tired. She

laughed and talked till all hours of the night with Joan, when Christina

had gone to bed saying that she was sleepy. All had seemed peaceful and

normal. Milly was stupefied when, by degrees, a consciousness of a

difference in Christina crept upon her.

Christina smiled much, was alert, crisply responsive; but ice was in the

smile, the response was galvanized. She was suffering--the realization

rushed upon Milly once her innocent eyes were opened, and all her

strength went to hiding the suffering. Milly, watching, felt a helpless

alarm, really a shyness, gaining upon her in the face of this

development. She found Christina sobbing in her room one night when she

cut short her talk with Joan and came upon her unexpectedly.

Milly's tender heart rose at a bound over alarm and shyness. But when

she ran to her, Christina pushed her fiercely away. "You know! Of course

you know! Go back to her if you like her better!"

She was like a frantic child. Milly could have laughed, had not the

exhibition in her grave, staunch Christina frightened her too much,

made her too terribly sorry and almost ashamed for her.

Later, when Christina, laughing quiveringly at her own folly, yet

confessing her own powerlessness before it, put her arms around her neck

and begged for forgiveness, Milly in all her soft, humorous reproaches

daring now to tease and rally, had yet the chill of a new discovery to

reckon with. A weight seemed to have come upon her as she realised how

much Christina cared. It was as if Christina had confessed that she

cared so much more than she, Milly, could ever do. She had not before

thought of their friendship as a responsibility. It was too dear, and

silly and pathetic in Christina, but it seemed to manacle her.

She must be very careful to like no Joans too much in the future.

Christina protested passionately that she must talk to Joan and love

Joan--any number of Joans, young or old, male or female, as much as

before, more than before, since now her folly was dissipated by

confession; but Milly in her heart knew better than to believe her. She

filled Christina's life completely, to the exclusion of any other deep

affection, and Christina could never be happy unless her friend's life

were equally undivided.

CHAPTER II

DICK

Four years passed, and during them Dick Quentyn had wandered about the

world, not at all disconsolately. He spent several seasons with friends

in India; he went to Canada and to Japan; when he came home he filled

his time largely with shooting and hunting.

It was almost as a guest that, in the country and in his own house, he

passed a few weeks with Milly and Christina and entirely as a guest that

he dined now and then with them in London.

It was a rather ludicrous situation, but he did not seem depressed or

abashed by it. Christina always felt that by some boyish intuition he

recognized in her a friendly sympathy, a sympathy which he must

certainly see as terribly detached, since it was she who had now fixed

definitely Milly's removal from his life, made it permanent and given it

a meaning. But it was a sympathy very friendly, even slightly humorous.

He would catch her dark eyes sometimes as he sat, a guest at her

dinner-table--(he never took Milly in, all the negations of married life

were still his)--and in them he saw and responded to an almost

affectionate playfulness. He evidently saw the joke and it amused him.

Christina often reflected that Dick was a dear, in all his

impossibility, and that Milly was not nearly nice enough to him. But

Milly was nicer than she had been; the new effectiveness and happiness

of her own life made it less of an effort to be so. From her illumined

temple she smiled at him, a smile that gained in sweetness and lost its

chill. She handed on to him a little of the radiance.

"Since we can't hit it off together, Milly, I must say there is no one

you could have chosen for a friend that I could have liked so much as

Mrs. Drent," Dick said to his wife one evening in the drawing-room after

dinner. They often had an affable chat before the wondering eyes of the

world. Milly chatted with great affability. Dick, as Christina so often

reminded her, was a dear. No one could have less suggested shackles.

"Now, Dick," she said, smiling, "what do _you_ find to like in

Christina?" Even in her new tolerance there lurked touches of the old

irrepressible disdain.

Dick, twisting his moustache, contemplated her. "Do you mean that I'm

not capable of liking anything or anybody that you do?" he inquired.

Milly flushed, though the mildness of her husband's tone, one of purely

impersonal interest, suggested no conscious laying of a coal of fire

upon her head. It was what she had meant. That Dick should like

Christina, Christina Dick, was wholly delightful, but that Dick should

seem to like what she liked for the same reasons irked her a little. It

was rather as if he had expressed enthusiasms about her favourite Brahms

Rhapsody. She rather wanted to show him that any idea he might entertain

of a community of tastes was illusory. How could Dick like a Brahms

Rhapsody, he whose highest ideals of music were of something sedative

after a day's hard riding? And how could Dick really like Christina? If

he really did, and for any of her reasons, there must be between them

the link, if ever so small a one, of a community of taste--a link that

she had never recognized.

"I think that we could only like the same things in a very different

way," she confessed. "Why do you like Christina?"

He did not reply at once, and she went on, looking at him, smiling--they

were sitting side by side on a little sofa; "it isn't her charm, for

you think her ugly."

"Yes; she's ugly certainly," Dick assented, quite as dully as she had

hoped he would, "though her figure is rather neat."

Milly's smile shifted to its habitual kindly irony. "She is subtle and

delicate and sensitive," she said, rehearsing to herself as much as to

him all the reasons why Dick could not really like Christina. "Her

truths would never blunder and her silences never bore." "As Dick's

did," was in her mind. It was cruel to be so conscious of the contrast

when he looked at her with such unconsciousness; to reassure herself

with the expression of it was rather like mocking something blind and

deaf and trusting. A sudden pity confused her, and, with a little

artificiality of manner which masked the confusion, she went on: "One

could never be unhappy without her knowing it, and then one would be

glad she did know, for she can sympathise without hurting you with

sympathy. She feels everything that is beautiful and rare, everything

that is sad and tragic; she feels everything and sees everything, and

she sees and feels in order to act, to give, to help. Is it all this you

like in her?" Milly finished.

Dick Quentyn still looked mildly at his wife. "Yes; I suppose so," he

said.

"You see these things in Christina?"

"In a different way," he smiled. It was almost a very clever smile.

Milly might have felt startled at it had he not gone on very

simply:--"One sees that she is such a thoroughly good sort; so loyal;

she would go through thick and thin for anyone she cared about; and so

kind, as you say; she would talk as nicely to a dull person as to a

clever one; she'd never snub one or make one feel a duffer."

For a moment Milly was silent. "Do you mean that I used to snub you--and

make you feel a duffer?" she then asked.

"Oh, I say, Milly!" Dick, genuinely distressed, looked his negative.

"You didn't suppose?----"

"I know that I was often horrid."

"Well, if you were, you didn't suppose I'd tell you in that roundabout

fashion. Besides, all that's done with long ago." He looked away from

her now and down at the floor.

Again Milly was silent. Strangely to herself, she felt her eyes fill

with tears. She waited to conquer them before saying very gently:

"Dick, do forgive me for having been so horrid."

He stared up at her. "Forgive you, Milly?" The request seemed to leave

him speechless.

She was able to smile at him. "You do?"

"You never were. It's more to the point for me to ask you to forgive

me."

"For what, pray?" She had to control a quiver in her voice.

"Oh--for everything--for being so wrong, so altogether the wrong person,

you know," said Dick, smiling too. He again looked away from her, across

the room, now, at Christina; and, after a silence, filled for Milly with

perplexing impulses, he added: "But the real reason I like her so much

is that she is so tremendously fond of you."

Milly had to bring her thoughts back with an effort to Christina; she

must let his remark about being forgiven remain as casual as he had

evidently felt it; and it was something else that he had said which more

emphatically held her attention. She thought of it all the evening,

after he had gone; and, while her hair was being brushed, she looked at

her reflection in the mirror and saw herself in that time, "long ago."

It was as if Dick had shown her a dead thing, and had turned the key on

it with his quiet words of acquiescence.

She looked in the mirror. Surrounded by the softly falling radiance of

her hair, her face was still girlish in tint and outline; but already

her eyes had in them the depth of time lived through, her cheeks and

lips were differently sweet; and as the realization of time's swift

passage stole upon her, a vague, strong protest filled her, a sense of

deep, irremediable disappointment with life.

Dick Quentyn went that winter to Africa, and Milly gave her husband a

farewell all kindness and composure, when he came to bid Christina and

her good-bye. Composure was a habit, and she was unaware of a new

discontent and protest that stirred beneath it, though aware that the

kindness she felt for her husband was greater than what her words of

farewell expressed.

Dick always wrote punctually, once a fortnight, to his wife, short

bulletins, to which, as accurately and as laconically, she responded.

This winter the bulletins were often delayed, sometimes altogether

missing.

Dick had joined an exploring party, and his allusions, by the way, to

"Narrow shaves," "Nasty rows with natives," and "A rather beastly

fever," explained these irregularities.

"He really ought to write a book about it. They have evidently been in

danger, and had an heroic time of it altogether," Christina said, during

a sympathetic perusal of these documents which were always handed on to

her, as, for any intimacy they contained, they might have been handed on

to anybody. They began--"Dear Milly"; and ended--"Yours aff'ly, D. Q."

The "affectionately" was always abbreviated.

"I suppose they really are in a good deal of danger," said Milly,

nibbling at her toast,--they were at breakfast.

"That, I suppose, was what they went for," Christina replied, her eyes

passing over the letter.

Milly, leaning her elbow on the table, watched and read. "Poor Dick!"

she said presently.

Christina had laid down the letter and was going on with her coffee.

"Why poor, dear? It's what he enjoys."

"If he were killed to-morrow I suppose it would hardly affect us more

than the death of any of the men who had tea here yesterday."

"Milly!" said Christina. She put down her cup.

"Would it?" Milly insisted. "Would you really mind more?"

"Your husband--my child!" This elder-sister mode of address was often

Christina's.

"Why should a husband one hasn't been able to live with count for as

much as a friend one is glad to see?"

"Because he has counted for so much."

"But, Christina, you can't deny that you would hardly be sorry, and that

you would not expect me to be sorry--only solemn."

"I should expect you to be both."

"Sorry because a man I have no affection for--a man I have almost

hated--is dead?"

"Yes; if only for those reasons; and that it should be only for those

reasons is what you meant when you said: 'Poor Dick,'" Christina

demonstrated with an air of finality that showed her displeased with

what she felt to be an unbecoming levity.

Milly was thinner, paler; Christina noticed that, though she did not

notice how often she returned to the subject of her husband's danger and

the irony of her own indifference to it. And Milly's listless moods

followed one other so closely this winter as to become almost permanent.

She was evidently bored. More and more frequently, when they were

talking over their _tete-a-tete_ tea, the very dearest hour of the day,

Christina saw that Milly did not hear her. After these four years of

comprehension and mutual forbearance the apparent indifference or

preoccupation could not, at first, seriously disturb her; hurt her it

always did. Picking up a book she would read and cease to talk. The mood

always passed the sooner for not being recognised, and Milly would come

out of the cloud, unaware of it, sunnier, sweeter, more responsive than

before. But this winter she did not come out. That she should be so

bored, so apathetic, began to disturb as well as to hurt Christina.

There came a quick pulsing of fear; did some new attachment account for

it? Her mind, in a swift, flame-like running around the circle of

possibilities, saw them all as impossibilities, and put the fear away.

One day, taking Milly's face between her hands, yet feeling, strangely,

a sudden shyness that made the complete confession of her alarms too

difficult, she asked her if she were unhappy.

"Unhappy, dear Christina? Why should I be?" Milly put an affectionate

arm about her friend's neck.

"But are you? Is there anything you would like to do? Anywhere you

would like to go? I am sure that you are frightfully bored," Christina

smiled. "Confess that you are."

"Have I seemed bored? No. I can't think of anything that would interest

me. One comes on these Sahara-like times in life, you know--stretches of

dull sands. Or is it that I am getting old, Christina?"

"You old? You, child!"

"I feel old," said Milly. "Really old and tired."

Christina still smiled at her, but smiled over a sudden choking in her

throat. It was not sympathy for her friend's _Weltschmertz_; it was the

recognition of something in her eyes, her voice--something she could not

analyze, as if a faint barrier wavered, impalpable, formless, between

them, and as if, did she say that it was there, it would change suddenly

to stone and perhaps shut her out for ever.

What was it in Milly that made her afraid that to cry out her fears

might make them permanent? She battled with them all the winter. They

had arranged to go to Sicily and Greece for the spring, and Christina

looked forward to this trip as a definite goal. It would break the

spell, turn the difficult corner,--for all her fierce idealism she was

too wise a woman not to know that every human relation must have

corners; and, indeed, in talking over plans, getting up information,

burnishing historical memories, Milly showed some of her old girlish

eagerness. She and Christina even read the Greek tragedies over

together, in order, Milly said, that they should steep themselves in the

proper atmosphere. It was therefore with a shock of bitter surprise and

disappointment that Christina, only a fortnight before the time fixed

for their departure, heard Milly announce, with evident openness, though

she flushed slightly, that she thought she would rather put off the

trip; she would rather spend April at Chawlton; and, at once going on,

looking clearly at her friend: "You see, dear, I have just had a letter

from Dick. He gets back next week and is going down there. He says that

he wants to see the primroses after that horrid Africa;--quite a

poetical touch, isn't it,--for Dick! And I think it would be really a

little too brutal of me, wouldn't it, if I sailed off without seeing him

at all--without pouring out his tea for even one week."

Milly was smiling, really with her own soft gaiety; the flush had gone.

Christina was convinced of her own misinterpretation. Duty had called

Milly away from pleasure, and she had feared, for a moment, that her

friend would think too much sacrifice to it.

"Of course, dearest, of course we will put it off," she said. "And of

course we will go down to welcome home the wanderer. It is sweet of you

to have thought of it."

Milly kissed her. "You see I am becoming quite a virtuous woman," she

said. "And it is a pity to miss the primroses."

The packing projects turned topsy-turvy, servants to be redistributed,

Christina saw to all, while Milly, with still her new cheerfulness,

flitted in the spring sunshine from shop to shop, decking herself in

appropriate butterfly garments. They were to get to Chawlton only a day

or two before Dick's arrival.

The gardens, the lawns, the woods, were radiant, and Milly, in the

environment of jocund revival, shared the radiance. All barriers seemed

gone, were it not that Christina, full of strange presages, felt the

very radiance to make one.

Milly gathered primroses in the woods, hatless, her white dress and fair

head shining among the young greys and greens. She came in laden with

flowers, and the house smiled with their pale gold, their innocent and

fragile gaiety. "Isn't the country delicious?" she said to Christina.

"Much nicer than dreary Greece and tiresome ruins, isn't it?"

"Much," said Christina, who was finding the country, the spring, the

sunshine, the very primroses, full of a haunting melancholy.

"I have a thirst for simplicity and freshness and life," Milly went on,

looking at the sky, "and how one feels them all here. Oh, the cuckoo,

Christina, isn't it a sound that makes one think of tears and

happiness!"

Of tears only, not of happiness, thought Christina; of regret--regret

for something gone; lost for ever. The cuckoo's cry pierced her all day

long.

Simplicity and freshness and life; Christina did not recall the words

definitely when she saw Dick Quentyn spring up the steps to greet his

wife at the threshold of the house; but something unformulated echoed in

her mind with a deepened sense of presage.

Milly stretched out both her hands. "Welcome home, Dick," she said. And

she held her cheek to be kissed. There was no restraint or shyness in

her eyes. She looked at the bronzed, stalwart, smiling being with as

open and happy a gaze as though he had been an oak-tree. The happiness

of gaze was new; but then it was only part of Milly's revival; and

then, he had been in danger. Christina took comfort, she knew not for

what.

"It is good to be at home again," Dick asseverated more than once during

the day; and, "I say, how jolly those primroses look," he exclaimed in

the long drawing-room.

Milly, her arm in Christina's, stood beside him. "I gathered them, Dick,

all of them, and arranged them, in honour of your return."

"Oh, come now!" Dick Quentyn ejaculated with humorous incredulity.

Milly smiled, making no protest. He, she and Christina walked about the

grounds. Christina had felt a curious shrinking from joining them, a

shrinking, in any normal condition of things between husband and wife,

so natural that it was only with a shock of amazement that she

recognized its monstrousness as applied to the actual one. She leave

Milly alone with her husband! What a revolution in all their relations

would such a withdrawal have portended! To leave them would have been to

yield to morbid imaginations, to make them almost real; at all events to

make them visible to Milly; and Milly certainly did not see them. Milly,

indeed, seemed to see nothing.

She still held Christina's hand drawn through her arm while they walked

and listened to Dick's laconic and much prompted recital of his African

adventures.

"I do hope you won't go off on any more terrible expeditions of this

sort for a very long time, Dick," said Milly. "I expected every morning

to read in the newspaper that you'd been eaten by savages."

"Well, I wasn't among cannibals, you know," literal Dick objected, "and

I think I'll have to have another brush at it. Harvey is going out in a

month or so."

"And you are going with him?"

"Well, I rather think I shall," said Dick. "He is a splendid fellow, and

it seems my sort of thing."

Before dinner, in the drawing-room, he joined Christina, who was sitting

alone looking out at the evening. "As inseparable as ever, you and

Milly, aren't you?" he said, coming and standing over her, his genial

eyes upon her.

"Just as inseparable," she assented, looking up at him. She smiled with

an emphasis that was faintly defiant, though neither she nor Dick

recognized defiance.

"Milly is looking a little fagged, don't you think," he went on. "Has

she been doing too much this winter? You are frightfully busy, aren't

you? Milly always likes going at a great pace, I know."

"I should not have thought there was anything noticeable," said

Christina. "She was a little fagged, perhaps; but the country has

already refreshed her wonderfully."

"London always does pull one down, I hate the beastly place," said Dick.

And he went on: "She is being awfully nice to me. I don't remember her

ever having been so nice--since, I mean, we decided that we couldn't hit

it off. One would really say that she rather liked seeing me!" and Dick

smiled, as if the joke were very comical.

"You have been in such danger. Milly can but feel relief." Her voice was

full of an odd repression, discouragement, but Dick was altogether too

innocent of any hope to be aware of discouragement or repression.

"She was worried about me? Really? That was awfully good of her," he

said.

Christina was remembering that Milly had only expressed indifference as

to Dick's danger.

The ensuing evening was, to Christina, uncanny in its unapparent

strangeness. She and Dick were both aware of novelty and Milly was aware

of none. Her cheerful kindness was as natural and spontaneous as though

she had been a girl greeting a long absent brother. She questioned

Dick, and, as her questions showed interest--interest and a knowledge

horribly surprising to Christina--Dick talked with unusual fluency.

Christina looked at them and listened to them, while Milly, leaning an

arm on the table, gazed with gravely shining eyes at her husband. The

arm, the eyes, the lines of the throat, were very lovely. Christina's

mind fixed upon that beauty, and she wished that Milly would not lean so

and look so. Milly, again, was unaware. It was Christina who was aware;

Christina who was quivering with latent, unformulated consciousness.

After dinner, Milly and Dick still talked; she still listened. She knew

nothing about Africa.

For three or four days this was the situation; a reunited brother and

sister; a friend, for the time being, necessarily incidental. Then,

suddenly, the presages grew plainly ominous. Was it her own realization

of loneliness, of not being needed, that so overwhelmed her? or the

sense of some utter change in her darling--a change so gradual that

until its accomplishment it had seemed madness to recognize it? The

moment of recognition came one day, when, on going into the library,

she found Dick and Milly sitting side by side at the table, their heads

bent over a map; and they were not looking at the map; they were looking

at each other; still like brother and sister, but such fond brother and

sister, while they smiled and talked.

Milly turned her head and saw Christina, and Christina knew that some

evident adjustment went over her own face, for Milly jumped up, eagerly,

too eagerly, and pulled a chair back for her and said; "Sit down,

dearest. Dick is telling me adventures."

What was it that drove into Christina's heart like a knife? Milly smiled

at her, eagerly smiled; and yet she was miles and miles away; had she

been in the jungles of Africa with her husband she could not have been

further; and she was greeting her as though she were a guest, greeting

her with conventional warmth and courteous sweetness. Christina was not

wanted; through the warmth and sweetness she felt that.

Smiling, she said she had come for a book. Going to the book-cases she

sought for one accurately--why she should seek, as though she had come

in with the intention of finding it, a volume of frothy eighteenth

century French memoirs she could not have told--and, smiling again upon

them with unconstrained lightness, she left them. She walked steadily to

her room, locked the door, and, falling upon her knees beside the bed,

broke into an agony of tears.

* * * * *

The end had come; not of Christina's love, not of her need, but of

Milly's. At first her mind refused to face the full realization--groped

among the omens of the past, would not see in Dick, even now, the cause

of all. She could trace the gradual, the dreadful severance; Milly's

slow loss of interest in her and in their life together. It was at first

only for the fact of loss that she wept, that loss, only, she could look

at. But by degrees, as her stifled sobs grew quieter, she was able to

think, to think clearly, fiercely, with desperate snatchings at hope,

while she crouched by the bed; pushing back her hair from her forehead;

pressing her hot temples with icy hands.

Why should Milly lose interest? How could she? How could love and truest

sympathy, truest understanding--how could they fail?

"Love begets love. Love begets love," she whispered under her breath,

not knowing that she spoke, and, in this hour of shipwreck, clinging

unconsciously to such spars and fragments of childish, unreasoning trust

as her memory tossed her. No other friendship threatened hers; she was

first as friend, irrevocably, she knew it. First as friend did not mean

to Milly, could never mean, the deep-dwelling devotion that it meant to

her; but such affinity and attachment as Milly felt could not die

without some other cause than mere weariness. And the truth no longer to

be evaded broke over her. It was the simplest while the most absurd of

truths. Milly was falling in love; Milly was falling in love with Dick;

and she was frank and happy because she did not know it; and he did not

know it. Like two children with a fresh day of play and sunshine before

them, they were engaged in merry, trivial games, picnics, make-believes,

no thought of sentiment or emotion in them to account for the new

sympathy; but from these games they would return hand in hand, all in

all to each other, bound together in the lover's illusion and needing no

one else. Maps! Travels! Africa! Did they not see these things as silly

toys, as she did? What could Milly care for such toys? That she should

play with them, as if she placed tin soldiers and blew a tin trumpet,

showed the fatal glamour that was upon her; glamour only, a moonshine

mood of vague restlessness and craving. How dignify by the sacred name

of love this sentiment, all made of her weakness, her emotionalism, her

egotism, that swayed her now so ludicrously towards the man whom,

open-eyed, she had rejected and scorned for years?

Passionate repudiation of the debasement for Milly swept through the

stricken friend and mingled with the throes of her anguish for herself.

For how was she to live without Milly? How could she live as Milly's

formal friend, kept outside the circle of intimate affection, the circle

where, till now, she had reigned alone? Ah! she understood Milly's

nature too well; she saw that with all its sweetness it was slight.

Love, with her, would efface all friendships. Like a delicate, narrow

little vase, her heart could hold but one deep feeling. She would come,

simply, not to care for Christina at all. Would come? Had she not come

already? In her eyes, her smiles, the empty caressing of her voice, was

there not already the most profound indifference? And all the forces of

Christina's nature rose in rebellion. She felt the rebellion like the

onslaught of angels of light against powers of darkness; it was the

ideal doing battle with some primal, instinctive force. She must fight

for Milly and for herself. For she, too, had her claim. She measured

herself beside Dick Quentyn, her needs beside his. His life was

cheerful, contented, complete; hers without Milly would be a warped, a

meaningless, a broken life. Strangely, her thoughts, in all their

anguish, turned in not one reproach upon her friend; rather, her

comprehension, from maternal heights of love, sorrowed over her with

infinite tenderness. For, so she told herself, she could have resigned

her, in spite of her own bereavement, to true companionship, true

fulfilment. But Milly--her Milly--made hers by all these years--in love

with Dick Quentyn! It was a calamity, a disease which had befallen her

darling. Asking no heights, this love would lead her down to contented

levels, and Milly's life, too, in all true senses, would be warped and

meaningless and broken.

Meanwhile, in the library, Dick said to his wife: "An't I interrupting

you? Don't you read or talk or do something with Mrs. Drent at this time

of the day?"

And at the question alone, contentedly alone with him as she was, dimly

enlightened, too, by Christina's guarded glance, Milly made a swift,

surprised survey of the situation. She did not want to talk to

Christina; she wanted to go on talking to Dick. She had not as yet

realized that Christina's presence had become an interruption, a burden;

Christina's personality had seemed blurred, merely, and far away. She

was now aware of this, aware, for the first time, of something to hide

from Christina, and a sense of awkwardness and almost of confusion came

upon her.

"Oh no, you are not interrupting us. Christina and I will have heaps of

time for talking and reading when you are gone," she said, smiling and

blushing faintly.

Dick, even more unconscious than she of its meaning, gazed at the blush,

and then they went on with their talk about crocodiles.

When Christina saw Milly again that evening, it was evident to her that

Milly had at last become aware of something changed, and that her own

composure urged Milly into a self-protecting overdemonstrativeness. She

was completely composed. She stood aside, mild, unemphatic, unaware,

seeming not to see, making no effort to hold; and as her desperate dread

thus instinctively armed her, she saw that no other attitude could have

been so efficacious. When she stood aside, Milly was forced to draw her

in; when she pretended to see nothing, Milly must pretend--to her and to

Dick--that there was nothing to see. Milly was afraid of her; that

became apparent to her during the ensuing days, terrible, lovely days of

spring, when, as if with drawn breath and cold, measuring eye, she

crossed an abyss on a narrow plank laid above the emptiness. Milly was

afraid; of her scorn and incredulity, perhaps; perhaps only of her pain.

Milly was cowardly in her shrinking from giving pain; it would be

impossible for her to go to her friend and say:--"I have fallen in love

with my husband, and you and I must part." In that impossibility for

Milly lay her only hope. If Milly and Dick could be held apart, and by

Milly's own cowardice rather than by any word or gesture of her own, the

wretched interlude might pass and Milly come to look back upon it with

shame and amazement and to thank her friend for the strength and control

that had made escape possible.

And the first-fruits of her strategy were soon apparent. Milly saw less

and less of Dick. Dick, as of old, made no attempt to seek her out and,

obviously, it was now impossible for Milly, with Christina's quiet eyes

upon her, to seek him. Milly took up again the idea of Greece and said

that, after all, they must go that spring. They would all, she gaily

declared, go up to London and depart to their different quarters of the

globe at the same time, Dick to Africa and she and Christina to Greece.

This was said in Dick's presence and he cheerfully acquiesced. Christina

wondered if Milly had not hoped for some protest or suggestion from him.

In Dick's blindness lay, she began to see, an even greater hope than in

Milly's cowardice. Milly could not very well come to her and avow her

love for Dick when Dick, it was evident, did not dream of avowing his

for her. And Milly became aware of this as she did. Her manner towards

Dick changed. She rallied him with a touch of irritability; she scored

off him as she had used to do, by means of Christina; she put forward

Christina and her relation to Christina constantly, and seemed to taunt

him, as of old, with his own inadequacy. All her innocent gaiety was

gone; she hid her deep disquiet under an air of feverish brightness, and

poor stupid Dick, accepting Milly's alteration as he had always accepted

things from her, showed no hurt and no reproach; he merely effaced

himself, cheerfully, once more.

Christina understood it all and the breathless subterfuges in which

Milly's perturbation concealed itself. She was longing that Dick should

see what she could not show, and that he should break through the web

with an avowal. She was longing that Christina, if Dick remained blind,

should mercifully give Dick and her their chance. Christina knew the

horrible risk she ran in remaining blandly unaware, in continuing to

take Milly at her word, in keeping there, between her and Dick, where

Milly herself placed her. She might part them, but Milly might come to

hate her.