CHAPTER XXII

"Is there anywhere that I can take you, Miss Bishop?" Mrs. Durlacher

offered, as they stood by the side of the shivering taxi. "I'm going

out to Sloane Street."

"Oh no, thank you; it's very good of you. I'm going to catch a train

at Waterloo." She shook hands, then held out her hand quietly to

Traill.

"Good-bye, Mr. Traill."

He took her hand and held it with meaning. "Good-bye."

She turned away and walked down Waterloo Place, her head erect, her

steps firm, but the tears rolling from her eyes, and her breast

lifting with every sob that she stifled in her throat.

Mrs. Durlacher looked after her; then her eyes swept up to her

brother's face.

"Is she going to walk all the way to Waterloo Station?" she asked

incredulously.

"Expect so."

Mrs. Durlacher looked above her in a perfect simulation of amazement.

Then she stepped into the cab.

"Jack," she said, when she was seated.

"What?"

She prefaced her words with a little laugh. "I wouldn't be a little

milliner at your mercy for all I could see."

Traill snorted contemptuously. "She's not a little milliner," he

said, cutting each word clean with irony. "Neither in your sense,

nor in reality. Fortune has cursed her with being a lady and withheld

the necessary increment that would make such things obvious to you.

Good night."

He stood away, and told the chauffeur the address in Sloane Street.

They did not look at each other again, and the little vehicle pulled

away from the kerbstone without the final nod of the head or shaking

of the hand which usually terminated their meetings.

The last sight she had of him, was as he stood looking down Waterloo

Place, his eyes picking out the people one by one, as the miner sifts

the dross from the dust of gold. Then she leant back in the cab and

a low, sententious laugh lazily parted her lips.

For a moment, Traill stood there; but Sally was out of sight. It

crossed his mind to run down into Pall Mall--coatless, hatless, as

he was--in the hope of finding her; but an inner consciousness

convinced him that she would return, and he walked back into the house,

upstairs to his room to wait for her.

When the mind had been made up to a critical sacrifice, it hates to

be thwarted. The more difficult the sacrifice may be, the more the

mind is revolted by the hampering of circumstances. Having brought

herself through a thousand temptings to the determination that she

must not keep the bangle which Traill had given her, Sally felt

incensed with circumstances, incensed with everything, that she had

been hindered in the carrying out of her design. All that Janet had

said about her ultimate going back to him, she had wiped out with

a rough and unrelenting hand during that hour when she had been in

his sister's presence. But the sting of the other remained, while

she firmly believed that her desire to see him once more, herself

in the frail attitude of hope, had vanished--was dead, buried, almost

forgotten.

The working of the mind is so like that of the body, that comparisons

can be drawn at every point. When the body needs nourishment, or

exercise, or rest, and is denied all of these things, it circumvents

its own master and steals its needs with cunning. So is it precisely

with the mind. When the mind craves a certain expression of itself,

needs a certain relief, and is denied its craving, then it, too,

circumvents its own master, and, by the crafty displacement of ideas,

hoodwinking the very power that governs it, it attains its end.

Sally, yearning in her heart for one more sight of Traill, the putting

to the touch of her last hope, and then crushing out the desire into

an apparent oblivion, was trapped, deceived, outwitted by such

subtle suggestions as that she had been thwarted in her determination

of sacrifice.

At the bottom of Waterloo Place, she hesitated. He had said he would

wait half an hour. She would be back almost immediately if she

returned at once. Her steps took her onwards down Pall Mall, but they

were slower and more measured than before. At the Carlton Restaurant,

she stopped again. She wanted to give him back the bangle herself;

to tell him herself how utterly she knew it was at an end. She could

write, certainly; she could send the little box by post. She had said

she would. But a romance, the only romance she had ever had in her

life, to end through the tepid medium of the post--the letter dropped

in through the black and gaping slit--just the one moment's thrill

that now he must get it! Then, nothing; then, emptiness and the end.

She wanted more than that. She would cry, perhaps, break down when

she saw him put it aside where she could never touch it again. But

what were tears? They were better than nothing; better than the

hollowness of such an end as the writing of a letter would bring.

With half-formed decision, she turned up Haymarket instead of

crossing towards Trafalgar Square and so, slowly, by indecisive

steps, she found herself, some ten minutes later, once more knocking

gently upon Traill's door.

The sound from within, as he jumped to his feet, set her heart beating

through the blood, and though she steadied herself, her lips were

trembling as he opened and made way for her to enter.

She walked straight into the room, did not turn until she heard him

close the door; even then, she refused to let her eyes meet his in

a direct gaze. This was not easy for, having once shut the door, he

stood with his back to it, looking intently at her as if, securing

her at last, he would not willingly let her free.

"What made you come?" he asked, slowly--"and, having come--then, why

on earth did you go away? In the last few minutes before you arrived,

I almost began to think that you weren't coming back again."

She tried to hide her nervousness by taking off her gloves, but her

fingers fumbled at the buttons, and in her awkwardness the seam of

one of the fingers slit from top to bottom. She looked at it ruefully;

was about to make use of the incident to lessen the tension of the

moment when he came across to her. Standing in front of her, he looked

down at the broken glove, and her white skin laid bare by the rent

stitching.

"You'll let me get you a new pair," he said under his breath. In that

instant he wanted to give her the world. The proffer of the gloves

tried to express the sensation.

She looked up into his face with a very small smile--half refusal,

half gratitude. When her eyes met his, she realized that her senses

were swimming. She was standing on a giddy height, to throw herself

from which, became an almost imperative inclination. She felt that

she was losing her balance and in another moment would be pitching

forward into his arms. She wanted to tell him to kiss her, and words

of violent strength, which she had never dreamed of before, shouted

suggestions through her--even to her lips. He seemed to be waiting

for her to do all this, but made no move to accelerate it; then she

swung backwards--turned blindly to the table, laying down her gloves

and the little brown-paper parcel.

"You're going to take off your hat now," he said; "this room's too

hot for accessories."

She showed hesitation, was about to refuse, when he made it plain

to her that he would not have it otherwise.

"I've taken it off before, you know," he said with a smile. "I'm by

no means a novice at the art. You can't call me an amateur."

"When--?" she began; "oh, of course, I remember."

She did not consider her refusal now; she obeyed. He took the hat

from her and her feather boa. Then he insisted on the removal of the

little short-waisted coat. She demurred again, and again was

obedient. He laid them all down on the settle, then sat for a moment

and watched her while she poked her fingers into her hair and pulled

it lightly out where the hat had rested.

"Now you look as if you'd come to see me." he said.

"What did I look like before?"

"I don't know. As if you had been and were going away. But what _did_

you come for? What have you got to tell me? I assure you, when I opened

that door and found you standing there--"

"Yes, I'm sure you must have been surprised," she joined in.

"I was--considerably. What do you think of Dolly?"

"Your sister?"

"Yes."

"I know she doesn't like me," she answered evasively.

"What makes you think that? I don't think you're correct. She hasn't

got you right--that's all."

"No, she hasn't got me right. I know she thought I was quite a

different person to what I really am."

"But how do you know that? She didn't tell you so when I'd gone out

to get that taxi, did she? What did she say to you then?"

"Oh no, she didn't tell me what she thought. Under the circumstances,

I'm sure she really treated me very well."

"I don't know about that," said Traill. "You must admit she was a

bit icy at first. That's her social way--the way of the whole set

when they meet strangers. One ought to bring a blast furnace when

one goes calling at their houses, instead of a visiting card. My God,

I've been to them myself, and I'd sooner undertake a job as look-out

on a ship bound for the north pole. They'd freeze the very marrow

in your bones."

Sally smiled--pleased--at his violent antipathy. "Don't you think

you'll ever become one of them, then?" she asked. "I expect you will."

"No, not in fifty lifetimes. Did she say I would?"

"She said she expected it."

"Did she? Well, I wouldn't give a brass farthing for her expectations.

Just like her to say that. I wonder what her game was. I wonder did

she think you could persuade me to it."

He looked up at her; but Sally said nothing. She could have told

him--told him to the letter what he wanted to know--but she said

nothing. Then he asked her again why she had come that evening to

see him.

"Is it anything to do with that parcel?" he asked suspiciously.

Her eyes turned to the little box in its wrapping of brown paper.

She reached out her hand and took it from the table.

"Yes," she replied.

"Oh, the bracelet?"

"Yes."

Her fingers attacked the knots on the string with half-hearted

enthusiasm.

"Doesn't it fit?" he questioned.

"Oh yes; it isn't that."

"Then what is it? You don't like it. Here--" he was growing impatient

of her fingers' futile attempts; "cut the string. You'll never untie

those knots. Here's a knife." He handed her one from his pocket. "You

don't like it, eh?" he repeated.

She looked straightly at him, eyes unmoved by the steady gaze in his.

"Do you really think that?" she asked. "That I'm bringing it back

because I don't like it?"

"I don't know, I'm sure. But if not that, then why?"

There was irritation in his voice; he made little attempt to conceal

it. It was his imagination that he had come to dealings with the type

of feather-brained woman who knows least of all what she wants when

she gets it. It may be seen from this that his knowledge of Sally

was supremely slight. He had a broad judgment for all women, a

pigeon-hole in his mind into which he threw them without

discrimination. When, therefore, he came across the exception in

Sally, he did not recognize her, flung her in with the rest, folded

more carefully perhaps, tied even with a little distinguishing piece

of ribbon. But into that same receptacle in his mind she went,

nevertheless. Yet Traill was not without shrewdness in his wide

judgment of the sex. He could read his sister as you read a book in

which the pages only need cutting, and the glossary sometimes

referred to.

On this evening, certainly, he had failed to see the point towards

which she drove; but in her dealings with another of her sex, a woman

is most inexplicable of all to a man. For this edition de luxe, he

needs reference, dictionary, and magnifying glass, with a steady

finger always to keep his place on the line should his eyes for one

moment lift or wander from the print.

Sally, as yet, he had classified broadly. In the very next moment

he was to learn more of her, to take her down from that

indiscriminating file in his mind, and scrutinize her afresh.

She took the bangle out of its velvet case and clasped it--with pride

even then--upon her wrist.

"You see it fits--perfectly," she said, looking up pathetically.

"Then--Good Lord! why do you bring it back?"

She unclasped it, letting it lie in the palm of her hand,

half-stretched out towards him.

"Because I mustn't accept it--I can't. If, after the last time I was

here, when you said good-bye, you'd said to me you were going to buy

it, I should have told you that I would not take it."

He paid no attention to her outstretched hand. At her eyes he looked.

"Why not? Why particularly after I'd said good-bye?"

"Because you have no right to give it me, and I have less right to

accept it."

He half-laughed. "Isn't that rather childish?"

"I don't think so."

"But do you like it? Isn't it a sort of thing you'd like?"

"A sort of thing? I think it's beautiful. I've never had a present

like it in my life--never had anything that was so valuable."

"And you're going to refuse it?"

"I must."

He still made no offer to take it from her, but looked persistently

at her eyes.

"If I asked you quite straight," he said, "would you tell me quite

straight--why?"

Now it must be the truth or the lie. No silence, no half-measures

could answer here. She knew that he was at the very door of her heart,

when it must either be slammed, bolted, locked in his face with a

lie or flung, with the truth, wide open for him to enter if he chose.

She hesitated, it is true; but it was not the hesitation of indecision.

When, only a few moments before, her senses have been giddily

balancing upon a precipice, saved from the hopeless downfall, only

because the man put out no hand to pull her over, a woman is not likely

to delay in doubt when at last he offers his hands, his eyes and his

voice to drag her into the ultimate abyss of ecstasy.

Sally delayed, only with the natural instinct of reserve. Eventually,

she knew she must tell him; if not in words, then by actions,

looks--even by silence itself.

"I never thought you meant that bet," she began in timid

procrastination.

"No--probably you didn't--but I did. And that's not the reason why

you're returning it now. Supposing we sponge out the debt and I tell

you to look upon it as a gift--would you keep it then?"

"No."

"Well--it's the wherefore of that I want to know. Why wouldn't you?"

"Because you have no right, no cause, to make me presents. You

practically told me so yourself--you said good-bye."

"But don't you take all you can get?" he asked, almost with brutality.

So the passion was stirring in him. All that came to his lips found

utterance.

At any time, she would have resented that. Now she knew instinctively

what the brutality in it expressed.

"No," she replied under her breath--"you might know I don't."

"And so you're returning this because I said good-bye--you're

returning this because I said I was not the type of man who hugs the

idea of matrimony. How could you take a gift from such a man--eh?

I suppose to you it savours almost of an insult. Yet, have you any

conception what your returning it seems to me?"

She shook her head.

"It hurts. Do you think you'd feel inclined to believe that? You'd

scarcely think I was capable of a wound to sentiment, would you? I

am in this case. I gave you that, because I couldn't give you other

things. That bangle was a sort of consolation to my thwarted wish

to give. I'm quite aware that a woman gives most in a bargain; but

a man likes to do a little bit of it as well. Half the jewellers'

shops in London 'ud have to close if he didn't. Some of 'em 'ud keep

open I know for the women who are bought and prefer the bargain to

be settled in kind rather than in cash. And jewellery pretty nearly

always realizes its own value. But this was a gift--a substitute for

other things that I would rather have given you."

He paused and looked steadily at her, her head drooping, her fingers

idly, nervously bending the woven gold.

"Have you any idea what those other things were?" he asked suddenly.

"No," she said--but she did not offer her eyes to convince him of

her reply.

"They were the alteration of all your circumstances. The smashing

of the chains that gave you to that damned treadmill of a

typewriter--the unlocking of the door that keeps you mewed-up in that

little lodging-house in Kew--rubbing shoulders with bank-clerks,

being compelled to listen to their proposals of suburban marriage,

with the prospect of feeding your husband as the stable-boy feeds

the horse when it comes back to the manger. Those were the things

I wanted to free you from, and in their place, give you everything

you could ask, so far as my limited income permits. I only wanted

to give you the things you ought to have--the things you should have

by right--the things you were born to. Your father was a clergyman--a

rector. Why, down at Apsley, the rector comes and dines--for the sake

of God--and respectability--and brings his daughters, dressed in

their Sunday best--with low-necked frocks that make no pretence to

be puritanical. And you slave, day after day, because your father,

through no fault of yours, happened to come down in the world, while

they sit in a comfortable rectory accepting the invitations of the

county. I wanted to give you things that 'ud make your life

brighter--_wanted_ to give them--would have found intense pleasure

in seeing you take them from me."

Sally rose with a choking of breath to her feet. She could bear the

strain no longer. It was like an incessant hammer beating upon her

strength, shattering her resolve, until only the desire and the sense

were left. She crossed with unsteady steps to the mantelpiece. He

rose as well, and followed her.

"Oh--don't!" she moaned. But he took no notice. The impetus he had

gained, carried him on. She could not stop him now.

"They were not much, certainly," he went on; "not much compared with

what I wanted in return. What I wanted in return, was what no

gentleman has the right to expect from any woman who is straight

unless she willingly offers it--and you had called me a gentleman.

Do you remember that? I don't suppose you really knew when you said

it, how much you were saving yourself from me. I wouldn't suggest

that credit were due to me for a moment--it isn't. It was just the

same as telling a man to do a brave act, when only the doing of it

could save his life. I did it because I had to. To be a gentleman

is often one chance in a lifetime, and the man who doesn't take it

is not fit for hanging. Birth has nothing to do with it. You offered

me my chance--I took it--that's all. But now you want to deprive me

of my one consolation. You want to refuse that bangle. I refuse to

take it back."

Sally turned and faced him. Her lips were set--her eyes had strange

lights in them. She looked--as she felt--upon the scaffold of

indecision, with the noose of fate about her neck.

"Oh, it is so hard! Why is it so hard?" she whispered.

"Why is what so hard?"

"This--all this."

He laughed ironically. Either he would not see, or he could not see.

Men may not be so dense as they appear. Sometimes it is a subconscious

cunning that aids them in forcing half the initiative into the hands

of the woman.

"Surely, it can't be so difficult a job to just snap the catch of

that bracelet on your wrist, and forget all about whether I ought

to have given it you or not."

"Oh, I don't mean that," she exclaimed, "you must know I don't mean

that."

"Then what?" His whole manner changed. Now she had told him

definitely. Now he knew without a shadow of doubt. She cared. It was

even swaying in her mind whether she could bear to lose him,

notwithstanding all he had said. It did not seem to him that he had

worked her up to it. In that moment, he exonerated himself of all

blame. He had danced gentleman to the clapping of her hands and the

stamping of her foot; and if it came to this, that she cared for him

more than convention, more than any principle, then it was not in

his nature to force a part upon himself and play it, night after night,

to an empty gallery. His hands caught her shoulders, the fingers

gripping with passion to her flesh. "Then what?" he repeated. "Do

you mean you care for me? Do you mean that it's so hard to go--hard

to say good-bye because of that? Is that what you mean?"

She could not answer yet. Even then the rope was not drawn and she

could still faintly feel the scaffold boards beneath her feet.

"If I've made a rotten mistake," he went on, content on the moment

in her silence to misdoubt his own judgment. "If I've gone and jumped

to this conclusion out of sheer conceit--misreading all I see in your

eyes--translating all wrongly what I hear in your silence--you'll

have to forgive me. I'm not trying to rush you into any expression

of what you feel." He conscientiously thought he was not. "In fact,

to tell you the honest truth, to me it seems that you--bringing back

this bangle--holding from me your reason in doing so; you, stumbling

over everything you say, and looking at me as you have done in the

last few moments--that it's you who have dragged these things out

of me. All my attitude has been in trying to avoid them, because of

what I thought you expected me to be. And now I think differently.

Am I right? Am I?" He turned her face to meet his eyes. "Am I?"

She raised her eyes once--let his take them--hold them--keep them.

Then the boards of the scaffold slipped away from under her feet--one

instant the sensation of dropping--dropping; then oblivion--the

noose of Fate drawn tight--the account reckoned. She swayed into his

arms and he held her--kissing her hair, kissing her shoulders, her

cheeks, her eyes--then, gently putting his hand beneath her chin,

he lifted her face upwards, and crushed her lips against her teeth

with kisses.

END OF BOOK I

BOOK II

THE DESERTER

CHAPTER I

Apsley Manor was one of those residences to be found scattered over

the country, which are vaguely described as Tudor--memorials to the

cultured taste in England, before the restoration with its sponge

of Puritanical Piety wiped out the last traces of that refinement

which Normandy had lent. Britain was destined to be great in commerce,

and not even the inoculation of half the blood of France could ever

make her people great in art as well.

It would be difficult to say the exact date when Apsley Manor was

built. Certain it was that Elizabeth, in one of her progresses--the

resort of a clever woman to fill a needy purse--had stayed there on

her way to Oxford. The room, the bed even in which she was supposed

to have slept, still remain there. Each owner, as he parted with the

property, exacted a heavy premium upon that doubtful relic of history.

None of them wished to remove it from the room where it had so many

romantic associations; but they one and all had used it as a lever

to raise the price of the property--if only a hundred pounds--beyond

that which they had, in the first case, paid for it themselves. Once,

in fact, the hangings had been taken down and the bed itself lifted

from the ground before the very eyes of the intended purchaser; but

that had been too much for him. He had given in. There is England's

greatness! Can it be wondered--much as we pose to despise them--that

we are the only nation in Europe which has given shelter to the tribes

of Israel?

In spring-time, the Manor looked wonderful--the lawns cut for the

first time since the winter, the hedges of blackthorn splashed thick

with snow-blossom, and daffodils, as if sackfuls of new-minted gold

were emptied underneath the trees and elves had scattered pieces here

and there from out the mass. Birds were building in all the thickets,

and the young leaves--virgin green--shyly hid their love-making.

Everything alive was possessed with a new-found energy. The

sparrows--most ostentatious of any bird there is--flew about,

trailing long threads of hay, with an air as if they carried the

Golden Fleece in their beaks each time they returned to the apple

trees. But other creatures were as busy as they. Strange little brown

birds--whitethroats and linnets perhaps, if the eye could only have

followed them--flew in and out of the blackthorn hedges all day long.

Thrushes and blackbirds hopped pompously about the lawns, and the

starlings chattered like old women on the roofs of the red gables.

The house itself was modelled as are nearly all such residences of

the Tudor period, the gables at either end making, with the hall,

the formation of the letter E so characteristic of the architecture

of that time. Only two additions had been made, oriel windows to

enlarge the rooms at each end of the gables; but they had been

executed, some seventy years before Sir William Hewitt Traill's

occupation of the place, by a man who had respect for the days of

King Harry and they had long since toned into the atmosphere. A great

tree of wisteria lifted itself above one of the windows, and on the

other a clematis clung with its wiry, brittle shoots.

The huge cedars, holding out their black-green fans of foliage like

Eastern canopies--the high yew-trees, to whom only age could bring

such lofty dimensions, all surrounded the old, red building and

wrapped it in a velvet cloak of warm security. Tulips in long

beds--brilliant mosaics in a floor of green marble--were let into

the lawn that stretched down the drive. Away on the horizon, the

rising ground about Wycombe showed blue through the soft spring

atmosphere, and in the middle distance, the ploughed fields--freshly

turned--glowed with the rich, red blood of the earth's fulness. So

it presented itself to the eyes of Mrs. Durlacher, when, one morning

late in April, she drove up in her motor to the old iron-barred

oak-door which opened into the panelled hall of her country

residence.

She was alone. Her maid and another servant had come down by rail

to High Wycombe and were being driven over in one of the house

conveyances from the station, a distance of five miles. The chauffeur

descended from the seat, opened the door of the car, and when she

had passed into the house, beckoned a gardener who was at work on

one of the tulip beds, to help him in with some of the luggage which

Mrs. Durlacher had brought with her.

"She's coming to stay, then?" said the gardener.

"S'pose so," replied the chauffeur. "I'd understood yesterday as she

was going to the openin' of a bazaar this afternoon--openin' by

royalty; but I got my orders this morning to fill up the tank and

come along at once, 'cos she was going out into the country. 'Ow's

that ferret of mine going on?"

"First class," said the gardener.

"Well then, as soon as I get the car cleaned this afternoon, I'm going

to have some rattin'. Here--put 'em in the 'all--here."

The gardener struggled obediently. The chauffeur did most of the

looking on and practically all the talking.

From the mouths of babes and sucklings and from the lips of hired

servants one gets wisdom in the one case and information in the other.

All that the chauffeur had stated was quite true. Some five days

before--and we have now three years behind us since that night when

Sally Bishop tottered into Traill's arms--Mrs. Durlacher had

received a letter from her brother, of whom she had seen nothing for

almost six months, saying that he thought of going down to Apsley

for the day. "But I make sure first," his letter concluded, "that

the field is cleared. Down there, as you know, I prefer to be the

only starter."

She had written in reply that she had only been down to Apsley once

that year herself and, furthermore, on the day he mentioned, the

place would be as deserted of human beings as London is in the heart

of July--meaning thereby that any place is a wilderness which is

empty of one's self and one's associates. That she had written by

return of post; then, two days later, her mind had caught an

impression--a wandering insect that the flimsy web of a spider

clutches by chance. He had gone down to Apsley before this, many a

time. She knew that he had a lingering fondness for the place which

no amount of gluttony of Bohemianism could ever wipe out. But he had

never taken these precautions before. He had chanced his luck; if

he had found people there, then he had forced a retreat as soon as

possible. But now he was going out of his way--writing a letter, an

action foreign to the whole of his nature--to ensure that he should

be alone.

The circumstance--for circumstance there must be, just as there is

the puff of wind that drifts the wandering insect to the spider's

web--that brought the impression to her mind, was the brief report

of a cross-examination in the divorce courts, conducted by J.H.

Traill. She knew that in the last two years he had, in a desultory

way, been gleaning briefs from the great field where others reaped.

That had stood for little in her mind; for though she had always

realized that in temperament and intellect he would make an excellent

barrister, she had never believed that he would throw aside the

Bohemian side of his nature sufficiently to gain ambition. Now, in

this stray report, she beheld between the lines the successful man.

His cross-examination had won the case, for his side. Its ability

was undoubted, even to her untutored mind, and from this, in that

indirect method--taking no heed of the straight line--by which women

come leaping to their admirable conclusions, she received the

impression that when Traill came down to Apsley, he would not come

alone.

It is scarcely possible to see how this is arrived at; yet, to the

mind of a woman, it is simple enough. Her brother had, after all these

years, breasted his way out of the slow-moving tide of mental

indifference, into the rapid current of ambition. When a man does

that, her intuition prompted her to know that it is more than likely

that he brings a woman with him. It is always possible for a woman

to recognize--apart from her own identity--that her sex is an

encumbrance to most men which they cannot easily shake off. Witness

the generous criticism of a woman upon any husband but her own.

Combine with this intuitive knowledge the fact--hitherto unrecorded,

even by Traill to Sally--that when he handed over Apsley Manor to

his sister and took her ready money in exchange, Traill had made her

sign a document granting him the right to repurchase possession with

the same amount at any time that it might please him, and you have

the apprehension of the woman who knows that possession constitutes

but few points of the law when there is ink and parchment to nullify

the whole transaction.

Jack, with a woman at his heels; a woman, moreover, whom he had

probably brought with him out of that dark abyss of the past; might

quite easily be a crushing blow to all her social power. Five thousand

pounds perhaps would be a difficult sum for him to raise--certainly

to raise immediately--but she had the proof before her that he was

striding into eminence and, as has been mentioned before in this

chapter, England is the only country in Europe which is a safe harbour

for the Jews.

So then she leapt to the conclusion. He was bringing a woman with

him to see the place. She pictured the creature vividly in her mind--a

woman with a large hat, red lips, a woman with a bold figure who knew

how to dress it brazenly, with eyes that danced to the whip of his

remarks; a woman who as mistress of Apsley, would make it impossible

for her ever to go near the place again. There was only one way to

meet the situation--a situation it had definitely become in the

sudden workings of her mind--and that was face to face, at Apsley,

in possession, with the servants at her command and the most gracious

of speeches on her lips. Tramping through the house alone, that woman

would be assigning rooms to their different owners, as if she were

already in possession; but with Mrs. Durlacher, the perfect artist,

as Jack had called her--she laughed unfeelingly when that phrase came

back to her mind--with herself at the woman's heels, telling her what

they did with this room and how in the hunting season they used that,

there would be little scope for exhibition of the proprietary

sentiment and, whoever the person might be, Mrs. Durlacher

guaranteed she should not shine on that occasion before her brother.

For that day, then, she had cancelled all her engagements. The

opening of the bazaar, a function at which she had felt it her duty

to be present, she crossed out of her book. From the dinner, to which

she and her husband had been asked on the evening previous to Traill's

visit to Apsley, she wrote and excused herself, saying she had been

called out of Town; and on the next morning she had ordered the car

to be round at the house in Sloane Street punctually at a quarter

to ten.

"Can't see why you have to give up the dinner and drive me out of

it as well because you have to go down to Apsley to-morrow," her

husband had said when she had written to her hostess excusing their

presence at dinner.

"The reason's obvious," she replied equably. "I haven't had a good

night's rest for a week--I can't sleep after eight o'clock in the

morning like you do, and I've got a woman to deal with to-morrow.

You don't want to lose the shooting and the hunting down at Apsley,

do you?"

"No--rather not--of course I don't."

"Then let me get a good night's rest."

One admires the woman who sees her plan of action and takes it like

a sword in the hand. Certainly, there was a possibility that she might

be wrong. There well might be no woman. But in her mind, she was

confident, and this was the only method of defence. She did not

hesitate to accept it, difficult though it were. The woman might be

any one--a creature whose touch would be contamination. She placed

no trust in her brother where women were concerned. He would not

actually disgrace her; she could be certain of that. A calculation

on the presence of Mrs. Butterick, the housekeeper, who was always

left in charge of the Manor, would be bound to act as a certain

restraint. But what he expected to present a quotient of

respectability to Mrs. Butterick and the gardener if he happened to

be about the grounds, might well represent sordid vulgarity to her.

He had certainly taken every precaution to be alone. Yet having drawn

all these facts into consideration, she was undaunted. The whole way

down to Apsley, sitting comfortably in the corner of the car, her

eyes unseeingly fixed upon the back of the chauffeur's neck, she

rehearsed one scene after another with a precision of imagination

that was worthy of a greater cause. Yet what cause could be greater

to her? With the loss of Apsley, she fell irremediably in social power.

Five thousand pounds would purchase another residence in the country.

But what sort of a residence? She shuddered and, in a moment of

relaxation, became aware that the chauffeur was in need of a clean

collar.

The moment she arrived, she sent for Mrs. Butterick and went upstairs

to her bedroom. The good, fat, little woman--her face a full harvest

moon, to which the features adhered with regularity but no

expression--soon followed her. She stood at the door of the long,

lofty room with its three big, latticed windows and beamed upon her

mistress. She loved the quality--the quality, she always called them.

When the season of week-ends came round each year, she was the

proudest of women in the country-side. At that very moment, she was

wearing a silk petticoat, worth its weight in gold, five guineas at

the utmost for it seemed like froth in the hand--which a French lady's

maid had given her in exchange for silence over a little incident

that scarcely calls for mention. The first return of her mistress

to Apsley, then, was a sign of the nearing season--the lonely swallow

that is seen scudding through the first break in the year by some

enthusiastic ornithologist and recorded in the next morning's

edition of the _Times_. She kept a diary, in fact, did Mrs. Butterick,

and in about the middle of April of every year, might be noticed the

comment, "Madame arrived--first time this year--" and then, more

than probably the addition, "House-party on the ----" and thereafter

the date, whatever it may have been.

Now, on this occasion, as she always did, she beamed in silence and

waited.

"Good morning, Mrs. Butterick. You got my letter?"

"Yes, madam."

"These sheets are aired?"

"Dry as a bone, madam. I felt 'em myself."

"I shall only be staying the night," Mrs. Durlacher continued; "I

go back to Town to-morrow morning."

Mrs. Butterick made no reply, If her features could have fallen into

an expression of disappointment, they would willingly have done so;

but nature had taken no trouble with them. They were an afterthought.

It seemed as if they had been placed there at the last moment of birth,

with no inner mechanism to answer to sensation. She just said

nothing.

"To-morrow morning," Mrs. Durlacher repeated.

"Yes, madam."

"And now you can take the chintz covers off everything in this room

and the drawing-room as well. There's rather a snap in the air; I

think perhaps you might have the fire lighted in the dining-room.

And tell one of the gardeners to pick me plenty of daffodils--not

common ones--not those ordinary double ones, but the best he's got.

White petals with the yellow trumpets--you know the ones I mean. Also

some narcissi and a few tulips--pink ones for the drawing-room. They

must all be on the dining-room table when I come downstairs. I'll

arrange them myself. And get my trunks sent up to me at once--I want

to change my dress. Taylor and Mason are coming down by train; they'll

be here any minute now. The trap went for them--didn't it?"

"Yes, madam--at half-past ten."

"Well, then, that's all, Mrs. Butterick. What time is it?"

The housekeeper extracted a silver watch with its flowery,

ornamental dial from the recesses of an ample bosom. She drew it out

by the chain and, once free, it swung violently to and fro till she

caught it.

"A quarter past eleven, madam."

"Very well, there's not too much time. I expect my brother and

probably a lady down here to-day. Oh yes, and by the way--when they

come--well--I'll tell that to Taylor. You go and see about the

flowers and the chintz covers at once--and my trunks--immediately.

You'd better come up yourself and unpack for me until Mason arrives."

When once she heard the crunching wheels of the trap upon the drive,

she rang her bell. Mason entered almost immediately.

"Tell Taylor I want her here at once," said Mrs. Durlacher, "and come

and help me dress before you change your things."

The moment she had closed the door, her mistress called her back.

"And send Mrs. Butterick as well."

"Yes, madam."

Mason went downstairs with the report that something was in the air.

She had a feeling, she said.

The interview with Taylor was shorter--more to the point.

"I'm expecting my brother--Mr. Traill, and probably a lady," she said.

She laid no stress on the last word, much as the temptation assailed

her. "It's quite likely they may be down to lunch. When they come,

there is no need to say that I am here, unless, of course, Mr. Traill

asks you. You'd better go and change your dress at once."

Then she turned to Mrs. Butterick.

"You've taken off the chintz covers?" she said.

"Yes, madam."

"Ordered the flowers?"

"Yes, madam."

"Well, now, what have you got in for lunch?"

"There's some lamb, madam."

"Well--that's no good--I'd better tell you what I want. A heavy lunch

like that is impossible. I want all dainty little dishes--something

out of the common, I leave it entirely to you. Four courses will be

enough. And Sauterne and Burgundy. Tell Taylor we'll have coffee in

the dining-room. Now my hair, Mason."

So she marshalled forces, occupied positions and concentrated

artillery in preparation for the siege. The generalship of a woman

is never so keen, so instinct with strategy, as when she gives battle

against another of her sex. Her campaign against men, when once she

takes up arms, is mimic warfare--a sham fight--compared to this.

Against a man, she needs but a company of fascinations, and in one

attack his squares--the stern veterans of determination--are driven

to flight. But with a woman, whole regiments of cunning, whole

battalions of craft, with all the well-trained scouts of intuition

and all the dashing cavalries of charm, are needed to rout her

absolutely from the field.

Within an hour Mrs. Durlacher descended to the dining-room. The gown

she wore would not have pleased a man to infatuation; but a woman

would have realized its beauty, known its value. With deft fingers,

she arranged the flowers. In a chair by the fire, hiding herself from

view to any one outside the window, she sat and watched the table

being laid, giving orders how the vases were to be placed on the old

oak table.

"Lay two places--that's all," she said.

Taylor looked up. "I thought you said there would be a lady with Mr.

Traill, madam."

"I said--probably. You can lay another place if she comes." A vision

crossed her mind of making so small a point as that, a moment of

embarrassment for her unwelcome guest.

Then a sound reached her ears. Her eyes were arrested, fixed

unseeingly to a point before her as she listened.

"Is that a motor, Taylor?"

Taylor looked out of the window. "It's a taxi-cab, madam."

"Can you see who's inside?"

"I suppose it's Mr. Traill, madam. Yes--it is."

"Any one with him?"

"Yes, madam--a lady."

CHAPTER II

Circumstances will almost make a character in a day; in three years,

a character can be moulded, bent, twisted or straightened, in the

furnace of events; just as the potter, idling with the passive clay,

will shape it, heedlessly almost, as the fancy nerves his fingers.

But before he is aware, the time slips by, the clay gets set and there,

in front of his eyes, is the figure as his fancy made it--brittle,

easily broken into dust, but impossible of being moulded afresh until

it shall again go back into the water of oblivion and become the

shapeless mass that once it was.

So, in the three years that had passed since she had yielded body

and soul into the keeping of Jack Traill, had Sally's character

become set in the moulding of his influence. Happiness she had--that

to the full. He cared for her the more when once he had her gentle

nature under his touch; showed her all those little attentions of

which such a mind as his is capable of conceiving--teased her, petted

her, laughed like a schoolboy at her feminine whims and fancies.

For the first month of their relationship, they went abroad. He gave

her money, more money than she had ever had in absolute possession

before, wherewith to fit herself for the journey. She tried to refuse

half of it--told him the sum was preposterous, that less than half

of what he was giving would provide her with the most expensive of

frocks for the rest of her life.

"Sixty pounds?" he said. "My sister spends that in half an hour at

a dressmaker's in Dover Street."

"Ah, yes, but that's your sister," she had objected pathetically.

"And you?"

"But thirty pounds will really be more than enough."

It lay deep in her mind, never offering to rise to the surface, to

remind him that she was not his wife. But he would not give way. He

had said sixty pounds--sixty pounds it had to be. So he mastered her,

without effort, at every turn.

She went then with Janet to the shops--she, and her sixty pounds,

gripped tight in brittle ten-pound notes in her purse. At that time

she was still staying on at Kew, still attending her office in King

Street; but at both places she had given notice to leave, and in a

week's time would be free.

Her first intimation to Janet of all that had occurred and all that

was to follow, was made, as usual, one night, when the darkness hid

her face, and she could only tell by the sound of Janet's breathing

what effect her story might have.

When she had finished, Janet made use of that remark--justified in

her case--which every prophet, false or true, utters at one time or

another--

"Didn't I tell you so?"

But then she went on, and they had talked far into the night; and

at every moment, when doubt or regret seized and shook Sally with

a quivering remorse, Janet laughed at her fears.

"You've got the best bargain in the world," she exclaimed. "You want

a man's love--you've got it--haven't you? And yet you're free--as

free as air. If you should tire--"

Sally laughed bitterly.

"Very well, then, if he should tire, you're your own mistress. All

this caging of wild birds seems to me to be futile. Morals? Oh, morals

be hanged! Are you going to call yourself immoral because the man

has no great respect for matrimony?"

"Yes; but I have."

"You have! That's only because you were dragged up in a rectory, just

outside the church door. I can't understand you. You've shaken off

your belief in lots of things--you don't believe in the actual

divinity of Christ--yet you cling to an antiquated sacrament that

dates back long before the time of a man whose statement that he was

the actual Son of God you're prepared to doubt. It's only because

you labour under the misapprehension--as nearly everybody

does--that marriage is a convenience to a woman. It's the

inconvenience of the thing that makes the morality or the immorality

in your mind. You're only a conventionalist like everybody

else-you're not a moralist."

Yet, notwithstanding all these arguments of Janet's, there were dark

moments during that week before she left Kew, when all the force of

dogma, all the waves of conventionality, beat against her breast;

but it was her faith in love that held her to the end; just as his

faith in the dogma itself, had held the Rev. Samuel Bishop to the

teachings of his Church. Love, she made the high altar of her worship;

to that, unconsciously, she offered all prayers, made all sacrifice.

These dark moments hung heavy in her heart so long as they were

present; but one meeting with Traill was sufficient to drive them

in a body from her mind--gloomy phantoms of imagination which, in

the night, have vivid reality, and with the first welcome break of

morning are stricken out of sight.

When forty-five of the sixty pounds had been spent and she had bought

every conceivable thing that she required, purchasing from habit

where things were cheapest, she had brought the remainder back to

Traill.

He held her face, crumpling it, in his hands.

"What on earth sort of a child are you?" he asked.

"How do you mean?"

"Why--I give you a certain amount of money to spend on clothes and

you bring me back fifteen pounds like the little girl coming back

with change from the grocer's."

"But I've got everything I want," she replied, laughing.

"Have you got an opera cloak?"

"No, I don't want that."

"Have you got an umbrella?"

She laughed again--head thrown back, like a child at its father's

knee.

"No, I have one of my own already."

"Did you get a--get a--oh, I don't know--did you get boots for

tramping through the country with--boots for show, boots for wear,

boots for comfort? How many pair of boots _did_ you get?"

"Two."

"Well--go and get some more and an opera cloak--to-morrow evening,

we're going to sit in the Comedie Francais and not understand a word

that's said."

Then they had gone abroad, and life--wonderful--had passed from day

to day like a pageant before Sally's eyes. The dark moments came with

less frequency. After a time, they passed away altogether. She saw

no end to it; she saw no sin in it. What sin could there be? Janet's

arguments had penetrated more deeply into her mind than she had ever

imagined. When, on rare occasions, she was alone in the hotel where

they happened to be staying--and it was then that doubt, while there

was any, oppressed her--she hugged Janet's sayings to her mind,

forced them to support her. "You're only a conventionalist, like

everybody else--you're not a moralist."

Now she was a moralist, or nothing. She had cut the last link with

convention and, at a moment such as that, the realization that there

was no returning, no getting back, obsessed her with a shuddering

fear. She did not understand that she was conventionalist still at

heart; she did not divine that she was not the great woman, loving

greatly--only the lesser woman, loving, it is true, with all the

utmost of her personality, but loving less.

There is no conventionality in greatness. Great natures make laws

for lesser natures to obey; and, far though she had gone from the

broad path where the little people huddle on their way, the blood

of the little people was in her veins and conventionality still held

its claim upon her. She liked to think that she was married. It was

beyond the strength of her mind to look upon herself as the mistress

of the man she loved.

"It cannot end--it can never end," she told herself. "He loves me

too much and I love him better still. It's as good--quite as good,

as being married. The Church makes no difference." She thought of

her father, remembering how, through the very precepts of that very

Church, he had found retribution. So people, who married with the

Church's sanction, found retribution too. Some lives were miserable;

she had known them. What good had the blessing of the Church been

to them? None!

Then Traill would return to her and doubts would vanish like shadows

that a light disperses. They were happy. She had never conceived of

such happiness before. Her mood was one of continual gratitude. She

thanked him for everything--if not with lips, then with eyes.

"You remind me of a little starved gutter-arab, whenever I give you

anything," he once said, when he had brought her back from a theatre

in Rome and given her supper in the restaurant of the Quirinale.

"Not very complimentary," she replied without objection.

"Well--you look at me that way--as if I were giving you God's earth

for God's sake. Have you never been happy before in your life?"

"Never."

"I don't mean particularly like this. Like this, I know you haven't.

But any other way?"

"No, I don't think I ever have. I went away from home when I was

eighteen--I wasn't happy there. Then I had to work too hard."

"Then you are a little starved gutter-arab." He took her gently in

his arms. "And what do I seem to you--eh? Sort of fairy prince, I

suppose, in gold armour."

"You seem like God, sometimes," she whispered.

He put her away with a stab of conscience--seated her on a chair and

looked down at her.

"It's silly to talk like that," he said evenly. "If there is a

God--and I suppose there is--the world spends a heap of money in

fostering the idea--then He's certainly more consistent in His being

than I am--though consistency always seems to me His weak point. But

you've not got to idealize me, you know. You remember what I once

said to you--don't you?"

"What was that?"

"There's a beast in every man, thank God!"

"Yes--I don't think I shall ever forget that."

"Well--don't," he added.

But even this did not harbour in her mind. She wrote long, impulsive

letters to Janet, pouring out a flood of description of all the places

which they visited, opening her heart of its perfect happiness.

"You said he was hard once," she wrote from Florence. "You said you

knew he was hard. He's never said a hard thing to me the whole time

we've been away. He may be hard to other people. I've seen him awfully

bitter sometimes, but never to me. We are in love, you see. We shall

always be in love. Dear, dear old Janet, I wish you could be with

us."

Janet took a deep breath when she had finished the reading of that

letter, and when Mrs. Hewson pushed some shrimps on to her plate,

she pulled the shells from them with impatient energy.

And so--slowly, even in that month--some little of the change in her

character was wrought. Her nature began to set in the mould of luxury

in which he placed her. Not for one moment was she spoilt by it; not

for one moment made selfish. Whenever he gave her money for a definite

object, she still made her purchases as cheaply as possible, still

brought what was left over in the flat of an empty palm to him. But

the enfranchising influence of those two years of hard work began

to lose its effect. She lost independence at every turn and, by the

time they returned to London, was beginning to lean on Traill, rely

on him, submit subserviently to every wish he uttered.

Such had been her desertion from the cause, a conscript in which,

she had so ill-understood. The falling back into luxury, the

acceptance of those things which in her tentative, unrevolutionary

way she had always imagined to come into her right of possession,

had been very easy--very gentle--the drifting of a feather on an idle

summer wind. She had let herself be borne on it, using it, not as

an advantage, not as a step to lift her to a greater freedom and a

wider independence, but as a fit setting, a worthy environment to

this love which consumed the whole of her being and rode, the master,

with an unslacking rein, over all her actions.

If she had taken the situation as it was, faced the meaning of it

with firm lips and a steady eye, there would have been hope--more,

there would have been salvation for her. But frail, sensitive,

tender-hearted, little Sally Bishop was not of that blood, that

breeding was not in her bone. She took the threads, coloured them

one and all with that deceptive dye of the imagination, and wove a

romance out of the materials of a stern reality.

To every intent, to every purpose in her mind, she was a married woman.

The constant use of his name in the hotels where they stayed abroad

had fostered the delusion in her mind. That, in reality, she was still

Sally Bishop was a fact, obvious enough, patent enough, and one which

she was not so foolish as to try and force herself to forget; but

she was Sally Bishop only in name. So, in contrary comparison, other

women were wives only in name, yet had no husbands.

The true, logical state of the case never made its appeal to her.

She was too much of a romantic, living, as many women do, in a

cloudland of hallucination, until a lightning circumstance tears its

rent in the vaporous fabric and experience thunders in their ears.

Had she consented to the reasoning that she had but left the plying

of one trade in exchange for another; had she admitted the fact that

she had but abandoned one master for the service of another, there

would have been every chance that, if the end should come, she would

be able to take up the threads where they had broken off and wring

profit from the ultimate position. But no such thought entered her

mind. Emancipation was no goal for her ambitions. She sought for

chains to gyve about her soul and, in her relationship with Traill,

she fondly dreamed that she had found them. If the real aspect of

the case had forcibly made its way into her consideration, she would

never have accepted the situation, never have laid seal to the

compact.

All this delirium of reasoning, she showed in the first few moments

to Janet when she had returned to London. Down at Kew she spent an

evening, delighted, with a justifiable pride, to be seen in one of

the dainty frocks that Traill had bought her.

"So you're married now, I 'ear," said Mrs. Hewson.

"Yes." Sally beamed with her reply, and Janet watched her with

questioning eyes.

"I hope you're happy."

"I couldn't be happier," Sally answered; then she dragged Janet

upstairs to the room they had shared together for two years, and

throwing her parcels--presents that she had brought from abroad--on

to the bed, she twined her arms round Janet's slender neck and covered

the thin, drawn face with kisses.

One knows the endearments that such an occasion exacts. They come

out of a full heart and bear no repetition, for only a full heart

can understand them. They swept over Janet, for the moment blinding

her in her fondness for this child, full of swift impulse in her

gratitude, and drugged with romance in her mind. But once those

endearments had been spoken, when once the presents had been divested

of their paper wrappings--porcelain representations of the Bambinos

from Florence--a marble statue of the Venus de Milo from Pisa--an

ornament in mosaic from Rome--when once they had been set up, admired,

paid for in kisses of gratitude, then Janet gave words to the

questions that had been looking from her eyes.

"What sort of a settlement has he made on you?" she asked.

The inquiry, notwithstanding the fact that it had been spoken with

a gentle voice, tuned to consideration for her feelings, struck the

sensitiveness of Sally's mind, whipped the blood to her cheeks.

"There is no settlement. Why should there be?"

"Why? Well, for every reason in the world, I should think."

"There is none, then."

"You haven't even suggested it?"

"No!"

She rose, turning away from the bed where she had been sitting, with

the tears smarting in her eyes. Janet looked after her, an expression

of contemplation pursing her features, wrinkling her forehead.

"I think I'll go and see Mr. Traill," she said slowly.

Sally wheeled round, her heel a pivot to the motion.

"What for?" she asked.

"I think he'd better be told that he can't play indiscriminately with

women like you."

"He's not playing," Sally retorted violently. "You're cruel, Janet.

If you do go to him, I'll never speak to you again."

"That's quite possible; I should expect that," Janet replied

imperturbably. "Whenever one tries to arrange the affairs of people

who cannot arrange them themselves, one must anticipate that sort

of treatment."

"Ah, but you don't understand," Sally pleaded piteously. "He would

hate any interference of that sort. He would hate me through it. We

don't look at the thing in the same light that you do. You make a

business of it. Do you think if I had ever seen it in that light,

I could have done what I have done? You know I couldn't. I should

loathe myself too. I tell you, we love each other. There can be no

question of settlement in such a case as that."

Janet looked at her with pity. It was hard for her to say all that

she intended; but the mind of the revolutionary, however wasted its

cause, has kindred with the mind of God. Justice and truth before

all things is the cry of it, and let suffering be a means rather than

a hindrance to the end.

"Never drown sorrow," Janet had once said from her pinnacle of

enthusiasm, "the dripping ghost of it'll haunt you. Don't drown

it--save it, learn of it."

Now, with a steady hand, she carried that precept into practice. It

might make a rent in Sally's heart; it might bring separation between

them; but she did not hesitate at that. The cause of justice and the

desire for truth have no need of sentiment.

"And how long do you think that love is going to last?" she asked.

"Always; why not?"

"With you, perhaps; but with him?"

Sally looked out of the window across the river. The night that Mr.

Arthur had proposed to her--offering her marriage--danced

flauntingly across her memory. He had been ready to bind himself to

her for the rest of his life. She let the memory go on, with its

mincing steps, back into the dreary darkness of the river from whence

it had come; but she said nothing.

"You can't answer for him?" suggested Janet.

"Yes, I can," she replied impetuously. "Why not always with him?

He'll never marry. He's always said so."

"Yes, but you didn't answer at once. Sally--" Janet put a hand on

her shoulder, "I believe you think you're as good as married. The

way you answered Mrs. Thing-um-i-bob downstairs--Mrs. Hewson--when

she asked you, what we'd both agreed to tell her--that made me begin

to wonder. But you're not married, Sally. He's only your

master--that's all, and if I were you, I'd see that I got my

settlement. He might want to leave you any day."

Sally moved herself free of the detaining hand and laughed, with a

bitter absence of merriment.

"That shows how little you understand," she said. "He's told me over

and over again that he never thought he would find any one who fitted

in so perfectly to his life as I do."

"Most any pretty woman fits into a man's life when he wants, and so

long as he wants her," Janet remarked. "It's only women like

myself--ugly little devils like me--who have to meet the difficulty

of finding a niche that'll hold them for more than the latter part

of an afternoon before the lights are turned up. You fit into his

life--of course you do. I'm not suggesting that you don't. I'm only

questioning how long you're going to do it--only trying to remind

you that it won't be for always. Why will you insist on being so

romantic? Why can't you look at life through a plain sheet of

glass--if you must look at it through something--instead of choosing

the red and the yellow and the purples--anything but the plain, the

untinted reality. Go and get your settlement. Make him put it in black

and white, and shove his name down at the bottom. Then you can look

at it any way you like--forget about it--sit and nurse your romance

all day long if you want to; but make sure of the reality first. He'll

think twice as much of you if you do."

"You think that," said Sally. "You believe he'd think twice as much

of me if I came to him in a mercenary spirit like that? And I thought

you knew something about men."

"Mercenary!" Janet threw her head back and laughed. "You'd have to

ask for a good deal more than that to seem mercenary, my dear child.

You! Why, you've worked two years and you never knew your own value

all that time. I've seen your finger-nails worn square on that old

typewriter you used to pound; but you never dreamed of thinking that

you were worth more than your twenty-five or your twenty-seven

shillings a week, however much they made you stay at that office

overtime. Mercenary's about the last word that could be applied to

you. I don't want to worry the life out of you, or make you miserable,

but when I see you rushing along--giving, giving, always giving, with

both hands--"

"I'm not only giving," Sally exclaimed. "Do you think I get nothing

in return? I've never been made so happy in my life before--never!

Is that receiving nothing for what I give?"

Janet looked at her, steadying her eyes.

"You don't understand the proportion of things," she said slowly.

"You don't realize the comparative ratio of one thing to another.

Any man can give happiness to a woman who loves him--but that's no

bargain! He merely gives her happiness by taking his own. Do you call

that a fair exchange? To you, drunk with romance, perhaps it is. But

in reality it's robbery. He has to pay higher for his pleasures than

that. Why, even the women in the streets, he pays and takes all risks

inclusive? Then what do you think he owes a woman like you? Why, in

the name of God, can't you sweep all this mist away, that's in front

of your eyes, and see it as a transaction? Sign it, seal it, make

a deed of it, and then forget it if you like; but insure yourself

against the worst if it should ever come."

To suppose that this reasoning would appeal to Sally, to expect that

she would assimilate Janet's point of view, adopt Janet's attitude

of mind, is beyond all imagination. The whole aspect that Janet had

revealed, depressed her, weighed--a heavy drag--upon her spirits.

But she was not convinced.

To call things by their names--albeit that language has been evolved

these many thousands of years, and during all that time human beings

have sat in the dust and worked and played with its cunning

symbols--is no easy matter. For the evolution of language has

achieved two ends, and the perfection of it has accomplished the one

as thoroughly as it has the other. With language we give expression

of our feelings; but also with language we have learnt to hide

feelings, cloak thoughts, and dissemble before the very eyes that

know us best. Janet, demanding the truth in all things, seeking in

words the very highest aim of the words themselves, was a far higher

type than Sally.

To Sally, the only means by which she could follow the true bent of

her inclinations, was by wrapping up the matter in a cunning tissue

of words. Herein she is no great woman, loving greatly. She could

not bring herself to think of her position as that of a mistress.

To still love and do that, was beyond her. And so she persisted in

regarding herself as a woman who has faced-out conventionality,

dared the opinion of the world, and chosen to live with a man as his

wife without the condescending sanction of the Church.

It is all pardonable, all this. It is an occurrence as common in big

cities as are the lofty chimneys, and besmirching haze which, on the

horizon, herald the approach of a place where men and women are

gathered closely together. But it is a position which, with the

present conditions of tortured conventionality, is impossible,

untenable. Either a woman is the wife of a man, or his mistress; and

if the latter then, as Janet has said, she had better see to her

settlement first and build her romance, if so she chose, upon its

foundations. A man may keep closed the gates of matrimony until the

last moment, but when he finds that only through them can he gain

the woman he loves, then no amount of principle and no desire of

freedom will hinder him from swinging them wide and following her

through. On the other hand also, he will make but little attempt to

unlock those very gates, so long as there is a shadow of the prospect

within his mind that she will meet him outside.

To Sally, such reasoning as this would have robbed her of all

romance--the shattering siege gun that thunders through a town, and

tumbles the images from their altars in the little church.

Two ways there were in which to view the matter truly. If she were

the great woman, she would have loved for the love of love itself--let

it end where it might. If she were the revolutionary seeking truth,

demanding freedom, then she would have loved the transaction for the

transaction's sake--let it end to-morrow if it willed.

But Sally was neither. She took a middle course. She neither loved

wholly for the sake of love, nor could she make her transaction and

be proud of it. Like thousands of other women, she liked to think

that she was loved in return and that it would never end. Like

thousands of other women, she believed that what the man had taken,

that he would keep, because in the eyes of God and all the other

phrases of romantic sentimentalism, they were one.

But this is conventionality, and conventionality has to be thanked

for it. So women have been brought up; and until that army, of which

Sally now is a deserter, has forced its marches and driven its enemy

from the field, women will so continue to think, so continue to act,

so continue to be broken into dust, the grains of which any wind may

carry into the west where the sun sets in deep crimson.

That night when Sally returned from Kew, Traill had noticed her

depression.

"What's Miss Hallard been saying to you?" he asked. "Telling you that

you're leading a terrible life, I suppose."

"No, why should she? Do you think I am, Jack?"

"Me? I should hope not, since I'm the cause of it. Do you feel you're

doing anything very terrible? Here--put your arms round my

neck--kiss me--God bless your little heart--you couldn't do anything

terrible. Now, are we going to sit and mope, or shall we go out to

supper?"

That meant that they were going to supper, and in half an hour she

was as happy again as a child.

For the first of the three years they passed through an incessant

round of amusements, going abroad every few months, once bicycling

all through France from North to South and then returning by train,

spending a week in Paris. Their method of living was frugal, and

Sally's demands amounted practically to nothing. For the whole of

that year, Traill had sunned himself in the warm delight of her

simplicity. The years when he was alone had brought with them a

certain amount of cynicism, a definite trace of bitterness. But with

Sally, he forgot all that--threw from his shoulders the years that

solitude had added to his age and became the man of thirty-six who

still looks youth in the eyes without question.

Then he had shaken himself and awakened to the broad responsibilities

of life. A small case was offered him in the courts. Such cases he

had refused before; now Sally urged him to accept it and he obeyed,

looking rather to the future than her immediate prompting. So began

the seriousness of his career as a barrister. The second year only

brought one other small brief with it; but both cases were won. Then

he began to specialize in divorce and finally, contact with a

well-known solicitor which had come through the medium of journalism,

brought him his first brief in the probate and divorce division. The

case was rather a big one and he was not the leading counsel, but

the assistance he gave was deemed of such value, that the next brief

from the solicitor was given entirely to him.

Sally came down to the courts and listened to his cross-examination

of the woman who against a thousand incriminating circumstances was

fighting, with white lips and piteously hunted eyes, to keep her name

from the mud into which Traill was striving to drag it.

There she saw the cruelty in him again. It was impossible for her,

listening with every sense taut to the uttermost, to obliterate the

personal element, to think that he was merely a machine grinding,

in the course of his duty, as the implacable mills crush the yielding

grain into the listless powder of flour.

"Didn't it strike you at all," he asked the trembling woman, his voice

barren of all feeling and edged with biting incredulity. "Didn't it

strike you at all, when you kissed the co-respondent, that you were

betraying your husband's confidence in you?"

"No, not when I kissed him. We--we cared for each other--I admit to

that; but--but kissing did not seem wrong."

"You didn't consider kissing wrong?"

"No."

"At what point then in your intimate relations with a man--with the

co-respondent in particular--would you have considered that wrong

began and right ended?"

The wretched woman had looked pitiably at the judge. The judge looked

unseeingly before him into the well of the court.

"At what point?" Traill had insisted.

"I don't know how to say it," she pleaded feebly.

"Then can I assist you? Would you have considered it wrong--having

kissed you--for him to put his arms round you?"

"Yes, I think so."

"There is all the difference, then, in your mind between a man's

kissing you and putting his arms round you. All the difference

between right and wrong?"

"No, I suppose there isn't."

"Then you would not have considered that wrong?"

"No."

"Would you have considered it wrong to sit on his knee?"

Seeing how her case was weakening--realizing how he was belittling

her scruples--she had admitted that she would not think it wrong,

hoping that the ready admission of that would remedy the effect of

her previous indecision.

"Then am I to understand--" asked Traill with a voice stirred in

well-simulated anger, "am I to understand that because you loved the

co-respondent, you kissed him, thinking no wrong in it and yet,

thinking no wrong in sitting on his knee or having his arms about

you, you yet--loving him--refused these things in which you saw no

harm? Is that what you wish his lordship and the jury to understand?"

"I--I--may have let him put his arms round me--perhaps I did sit on

his knee--once or twice."

"Then why," shouted Traill, "when the last witness affirmed that she

had seen you sitting in the drawing-room with the co-respondent's

arm round your neck, did you so vehemently deny it?"

Into the trap she had fallen--into the trap which with his cold

cunning he had laid for her--and from that moment, rigidly denying

her misconduct on her oath before God, the wretched creature was

brought on the rack of his questioning to almost every admission but

that of adultery. At last Sally had left the court. She could bear

the strain of it no longer.

The thoughts which that incident had given rise to in her mind, had

thrown their shadows upon all her lightness of heart for many days

afterwards. There she had seen the keen acid of implacable justice

separating, with undeviating precision, the dross from the gold. She

had beheld the naked fact of adultery--stripped of all the silk of

glamour, all the velvet of romance which once it had worn--held in

its cringing shame before the unsympathetic eyes of twelve men in

a public court of law. And he who had done it, he who had wrenched

away the silken garments, torn off the folds of velvet and flung the

naked deed before their eyes, was the man into whose keeping she had

given her whole existence.

"You, who admittedly can play with passion at the fringe of

adultery," she heard him crying out as she stole from the court, "do

you expect a jury of men, who know the world, to believe that a mere

scruple has withheld you from giving yourself to the importunate

desires of this man--the co-respondent?"

Was that what he thought of her--was that what he thought she had

done to her shame with him? Sally had cried out these questions to

herself, as he had cried them to the woman; but when that evening,

he asked her in a quiet voice what she had thought of the case, she

had evaded any expression that would disclose the trouble of her

mind.

"I couldn't stay till the end, you know," she said. "I had to go before

the verdict. What happened?"

"Oh, we won--hands down; but upon my soul I'm not sure that she did

actually commit adultery. There are some women--men too, for that

matter--who'll play with fire till their hearts are burnt out--but

conventionality drags 'em back from the one deed that will absolutely

crush their conscience, and they think themselves confoundedly

ill-treated when they get their retribution. They whine, like that

woman did to-day; but I'm inclined to believe that on the vital clause

she was telling the truth."

Sally had looked at him, wondering and in amazement; but she had said

nothing, mistrusting herself to speak.

The effect of this incident upon her mind had softened with time--in

time she had practically forgotten about it. And then came round the

end of the third year. The previous year he had given up journalism

entirely, his time being fully occupied with legal business at the

courts. He took chambers to himself in the Temple. Sometimes Sally

came down there on a quiet day and they had tea together.

"We'll pretend," she would say, "that you've never met me before--and

it's awfully unwise for me to come and see you in chambers--but I

come and then perhaps--while I'm making the tea--you suddenly put

your arms round my waist, and of course I'm awfully offended. Then

you kiss me, and I begin to get fond of you--and then--" So she led

him through a child's game to the outburst of a man's passion and

he, amused with being the child, found in it all the burning zest

of being a man.

In the Spring that followed the conclusion of that third year, she

had reminded him of his promise to take her once to Apsley. He jumped

at it.

"A day in the country 'll do me all the good in the world!" he

exclaimed--"and you too. I'll write to Dolly at once and see that

no one's down there on Friday. If there isn't, we'll go."

CHAPTER III

They made a day of it. In Trafalgar Square at eleven o'clock the next

morning, they stepped into a taxi-cab--the same little vehicle that

Taylor, from the dining-room window, had seen spinning round the

curve of the drive. The hood was put down; the warm sunshine, just

touched with a light sting from the regions of cold air through which

it had passed, beat upon their faces. To such a day, from the grey

fogs and lightless hours of winter, one comes, finding life well

worth its while. Sally sat with her hand wrapped in Traill's, giving

vent to a thousand expressions of delight, drawing his sudden

attention to the thousand things that pleased her eye--the faint wash

of green from the buds upon the hedgerows, the bright clusters of

primroses that struck light through the shadows in the wood, forcing

life through the thick carpet of dead leaves that the trees had given

back to earth.

"Does it worry you--my keeping on pointing out things?" she asked

at last.

"Worry? Lord, no! Shout as much as you like. It reminds me of when

I was a kid, coming back from Harrow to Apsley for the holidays."

When they came in sight of the Manor, could perceive through rents

in the cloak of cedars that enveloped it, the high, graceful

Elizabethan chimneys and the points of the red gables on which the

starlings congregated, Traill half rose to his feet with a straining

of his neck--a light of excitement in his eyes.

"There it is!" he exclaimed. "That place through the dark trees there.

Jove, I haven't seen it for more than three years."

She followed the direction in which his extended finger pointed, and

her eyes took in, not only Apsley, but his life and the true gulf

that lay between them. As she saw it from there, she recognized it

as a place which, passing, even in those better days when her father

had lived in the quaint little rectory at Cailsham, she might have

exclaimed--"Oh, what a lovely place that is! I wonder who lives

there?" And it had belonged to him--this man who had taken her life

out of its dreary groove and placed it in a pleasure-garden of plenty;

but the garden gate was not locked and the key was not in her keeping.

This mood was momentary. It passed, scudding across her mind, a

fringe of rain cloud that the wind has caught hanging between the

hill-tops and driven at its will. When Traill leant out of the car

and gave peremptory orders of direction, she forgot about it. Then,

in his almost boyish excitement, she realized how much the place

really was to him; how much, notwithstanding all his Bohemianism,

it counted in his life.

"You love this place--don't you?" she said, when he dropped back

again into his seat.

"Yes--I should think so. I know every stick and stone for miles round

here. See that little lane up there?"

"Yes."

"Had a fight there once with a gamekeeper. Much more exciting, I can

tell you, than that show you saw that night."

"Were you hurt?" she asked, frowning.

"Oh, not much; not more than he was. It was stopped precipitously

by a stick, wielded by my governor. He'd got wind of it. We hadn't

much time to make a mess of each other."

"I suppose it must be full of memories," she said. "I can never

understand why you should have given it up."

"Oh, I was a fool, of course. I wanted ready money, and I didn't want

to sell the place--couldn't have sold it. So I let my sister take

it over for what the pater had left her. That suited me at the time.

I'm not sorry that I saw far enough to re-purchase if I wanted to."

"You can re-purchase?"

"Lord, yes!"

"But you did not tell me that."

"Didn't I? Oh yes, I can re-purchase; five thousand any day will make

this place my own again. That's the sum I took from my sister."

Sally inclined her head to show that she understood, but she made

no reply. The cloud had blown back again into her mind. She felt the

shadow of it, the chill of it, even in the warm sunshine. It took

no definite shape, it brought no definite warning; but she was

oppressively conscious of its presence and its weight upon all her

thoughts.

Then they entered the drive, swept up between the long beds of

brilliant tulips until the house came full in view, and from that

moment her little ejaculations of delight and admiration were a

pleasure to him and a distraction to her.

"It's a wonderful old place!" she exclaimed. "And doesn't it make

it twice as wonderful to think that Queen Elizabeth stayed here when

it was just like it is now!" This fact he had told her as they came

down, knowing that the childish enthusiasm of her mind would catch

hold of it, drive it deep into her imagination and hang thereon a

pretty raiment of romance.

"Does add a bit of colour," he admitted with a smile. "I expect she

made it pretty expensive for the old gentleman who entertained her.

He probably had to keep quiet for a few months after she'd gone, and

lay restrictions on the household expenditure."

Then they drew up before the hall door and Traill helped her to

alight.

"I guess we'll make old Mrs. Butterick give us some lunch first. Are

you hungry?" He opened the hall door and stood aside to let her enter.

"Yes, frightfully. I suppose it was the drive."

"All right, just a second; you go round there through the hall to

the left--fine old hall, isn't it?--and the first door on the left,

that's the dining-room. I shan't be long. I just want to see about

getting this filthy coloured taxi out of the light and tell the

gardener to get the chauffeur a meal--you wait in the dining-room."

He closed the door again. Sally stood for a moment looking about her.

The old square panelling of oak--black with age--the huge open grate

with its logs of wood ready for the burning, the ornaments of

pewter--old pewter jugs, old pewter plates with coats of arms

embossed upon their surface, all the perfection of it awed her and,

with a momentary wave of depression that beat over her feelings of

admiration, she felt an interloper in a place that was beyond her

wildest dreams of avarice. It was with no little sense of reluctance,

even though the anticipation of meeting any one never for the moment

entered her head, that she made her way slowly to the dining-room,

hoping every moment to hear his footsteps following her--giving her,

so it seemed, the right to her presence in so luxurious a place. No

wonder he loved it. And then, the thought struck at her, would it

be any wonder if he re-purchased, as he had said he had the right

to do? And if that were to happen--he was making his name now, and

it well might--would he bring her here to live with him? Would he

perhaps make her his wife? Or would they live, as they lived together

now? Or--and the thought drove blood that was cold and chilling

through her veins--would it be impossible for them to live so

publicly in such a way, and would he then live alone?

She tried to shake herself free of this mood of conjecture, took the

handle firmly within her fingers, opened the door, and walked into

the room.

The next moment her heart leapt, a live thing within her, then lay

still. Every action through her body seemed suspended. She scarcely

realized her physical existence at all. It was as though she were

conscious only of mind, mind that was filled with perplexity,

astonishment, consternation, a mind that was being buffeted by winds

from every quarter of the compass of sensation. And through it all,

she struggled to drive words together into sentences, words, that

like a flock of witless sheep upon open ground, would not be driven,

but ran this way and jumped that in a frolicsome imbecility of

purpose.

And there she stood, just within the room, while Mrs. Durlacher with

slowly uplifting eyebrows of amazement rose gradually from the

comfortable armchair to her feet.

"Aren't you Miss--Miss--?" She tried to catch the name in the air

with her fingers.

"Bishop," said Sally, with dry lips.

"Yes, of course, Bishop--Miss Bishop?"

Sally half inclined her head.

"But what--?" she hesitated, knowing that the rest of her sentence

must be obvious, yet gaining time to put the matter together--fit

it to the whole from its separate parts. This was the girl whom she

had met that night in Jack's room--the girl he had called a lady.

They were still acquainted, still friends--greater friends than ever,

since he had brought her down with him to Apsley. Were they married?

Married secretly? She was a thousand times better dressed than she

had been before. The thought tasted bitter. She swallowed the

possibility of it with undeniable courage.

"Have you come down here with my brother?" she asked, still in assumed

bewilderment.

"Yes," replied Sally. "We--we came down in a taxi-cab."

"But he never said he was bringing any one. He wrote. I--I thought

he was going to be alone."

Nothing could be said to this. To apologize for her presence there

would be ridiculous. Sally said nothing.

"Well," Mrs. Durlacher smiled, brushing away her surprise with that

half-breath of laughter which throws a thin wrapping of amusement

about a wealth of contemptuous resignation. "I'm afraid we haven't

got much of a lunch to offer you. I expect you'll be very discontented

with the slight fare I have provided for Jack and myself. He ought

to have told me. Do come into the room, won't you? Wouldn't you like

to take off your coat?"

So, with that ease of apparent hospitality, she made her guest as

uncomfortable as possible, a glutton for the slightest sign of

embarrassment from Sally. Her gluttony was well served. The poor

child pitiably looked once through the door, straining eager ears

for the sound of Traill's footsteps; then she closed it and came to

the fireplace, taking the first chair that offered.

The sense that she had fallen into a trap, notwithstanding all the

perfect simulation of Mrs. Durlacher's apparently genuine surprise,

swept chillingly through her blood. When once she became conscious

again of her bodily existence, felt the pulses throbbing in her

forehead, and knew that her heart was beating like the muffled

rattling of a kettledrum, she shuddered. Traill, she knew, had

nothing to do with it. If that thought, with the force of conviction

behind it, had entered her mind, she would have fled; driven with

the curling lash of fear--fear of life itself, fear of everything.

But she did not even contemplate it. It was the woman her instinct

mistrusted. She had realized her an enemy before; now, in the purring

tones of her tardy welcome, she recognized in her an enemy whose

aggressiveness is active, brought into definite play.

Where lay the trap and how it had been set, she could not conjecture;

but that a trap was there, she was convinced, and as she had walked

unthinkingly into that room, so she had unsuspiciously fallen into

the cruel iron jaws of the relentless machine. She sat in that chair

by the fire, gazing at the hissing logs as they spat at the flames

that licked them, and felt all the powerlessness, all the impotence,

that the frightened rabbit knows when it is caught in the device of

the snarer.

"Did you come down from Town?" said Mrs. Durlacher, presently.

"Yes."

"It's a nice drive, isn't it?"

"Oh yes, it's lovely."

"Let me see, how long is it since we met last?"

"Three years, I think, perhaps a little more."

"Of course--yes--of course it must be. What a good memory you have!

Would you care to see over the house before lunch? It's rather a

charming old place, don't you think so? But of course it's terribly

untidy now. I haven't started my house-parties yet, and everything's

generally more or less upside down till my husband and I begin to

come down regularly. Perhaps you'd prefer to wait till after lunch,

though?"

Sally rose willingly to her feet.

"Oh no. Not at all--I should like to see it immensely. I think the

hall is perfectly wonderful."

Mrs. Durlacher stood up, her eyes candidly criticizing Sally's

dress.

"Yes, it is rather quaint. We'll go through to the library first."

Then, but not until that moment, not until she had passed through

the white heat of the fire, and had felt her spirit charred, did any

help come to her. Traill opened the door abruptly and came into the

room. From the set line of his lips, both of them could see that his

temper was loose. His shutting of the door, every action, was an

expression of feeling to which an innate sense of politeness made

him deny speech. He crossed the room without hesitation to join them,

shaking hands with his sister.

"They told me you were here, Dolly," he said, all pleasure of meeting

her stamped utterly from his voice.

"Well, I suppose they did," she replied with a laugh. "Besides,

didn't you see the car? I motored over this morning. That reminds

me--" She played with self-possession, it came so easily to her.

"That reminds me. Garrett wants a clean collar. Did you see Garrett?"

"Yes."

"Well, did you ever see such a filthy collar as he's wearing in all

your life?"

"I don't know--" He crushed her flippancy with the tone in his voice,

the look in his eyes. "I don't go about looking at other people's

linen."

"No, but you'd have to if you sat behind Garrett as I did this morning

for something over an hour. You couldn't help noticing it."

"Well, you can't expect a servant to be clean, can you?" he retorted.

"If he hides his uncleanliness that's all you can demand of him."

She broke into a light, ringing laugh at his ironical humour; but

he took no notice of that.

"Where were you two going?" he added. He addressed the question to

Sally, turning his eyes to hers.

Mrs. Durlacher interposed the answer. "I was going to show Miss

Bishop round the house before lunch," she said. "I thought you might

show her the grounds afterwards."

"She's much too tired to go tramping round the place before lunch,"

said Traill, abruptly. "Remember we've just been bumped down from

Town--Trafalgar Square--in a jolting taxi. No, she's too tired.

She'd better go and take off her hat, I think. Where's Taylor?" He

moved towards the bell. "Taylor had better take her up to the

Elizabeth room, or your room if you don't mind."

The outline of Mrs. Durlacher's lips tightened; but Traill took no

notice. He turned to Sally. "Like to lay your hat on the spot where

her gracious Majesty was supposed to have rested a weary head, aching

with finance?" he asked.

Sally smiled. Admiration for him then was intense. Mrs. Durlacher

smiled as well; but for one instant, she winced first.

"Let me do the honours, Jack, _please_," she said sweetly, "at any

rate in my own house."

That was a foolish thing to have said--the first false step she had

taken. But so far in the encounter, she knew she was losing, and it

takes a greater woman than she to play a losing game. In the first

clash of weapons, she had been well-nigh disarmed, and the sting of

the steel in her loosened grip had touched her to that momentary loss

of control. It was not so much the fact that she had spoken of Apsley

as her house. That piece of boasting would have fallen from Traill's

shoulders, shaken off by the shrug with which he would have taken

it. It was the veiled insult to Sally, the ill-concealed suggestion

as to what their relations had been when she had met Sally at the

rooms in Regent Street, that whipped him to reply.

He rang the bell imperturbably. That little action, occupying the

brief moment that it did, gave him ease to temper his feelings; then

he turned.

"Don't let's worry about whose house it is," he said coldly. "Miss

Bishop's tired--that's our first consideration. A taxi's not got the

latest pattern of springs that your car has."

Taylor entered the room.

"Taylor," he added. "Show Miss Bishop up to the Elizabeth room."

He smiled at Sally as she departed; then, when the door had closed,

he turned back to his sister.

Now she was a lost woman, losing a losing game. Her eyes sparkled

with anger; she took her breath rapidly between her teeth.

"How dare you bring your mistresses down here and insult me in my

own house!" she said recklessly. So a woman, the best of them, strikes

when the points are turning against her. It is the rushing blow of

the losing man in the ring. Its comparison can be traced through all

sports--all games. There is always force at the back of the blow,

the brute force of desperation; but, with no head to guide it, it

wastes itself in air. Once delivered, striking nothing, with all the

weight of the body behind it, the body itself is unbalanced, loses

equilibrium, becomes a tottering mark for the answering fist.

The moment she had said it, seeing the flame that it lit in her

brother's eyes, Mrs. Durlacher wished it unsaid. For the instant he

gazed at her, then his anger was spent. Knowing how wasted that blow

was, he turned to the mantelpiece and laughed. It was the most bitter

retaliation he could have made. She heard it echoing through her

brain as the fallen man, dazed and helpless, just hears the seconds

being meted out, yet cannot rise, can lift no voice to stop them.

"What Miss Bishop is to me," he said quietly, "is neither here nor

there--only to be classed with one of those impulsive conjectures

of yours--just the same as when you said that she was a milliner.

You don't quite know what you're speaking about, and that gives you

confidence. You're a woman. But you'll have to forgive me if I correct

you when you talk about this house as yours--it's not--it's mine.

You've scarcely what constitutes a tenancy of it."

"Haven't you to put down the sum of five thousand pounds before you

can say that?" she asked, her voice steadied, her impulses all under

the curb now. She must step lightly if she were to win after this.

"Do you think that would be a very difficult matter?" he questioned

in return.

"Well, can you do it?"

"Oh no," he smiled. "As a matter of fact, I never carry more than

four or five pounds in loose cash about with me. Don't be a fool,

Dolly. Do you want to irritate me into doing something that you know

would put your nose out of joint for the rest of your natural life?

You know well enough, that I could find the money to-morrow if I

wanted to. You've irritated me quite enough already."

"How?"

"By coming down here."

"Why should that irritate you?"

"Because I guess pretty well your reasons. You were expecting a

lady--so Mrs. Butterick amiably told me." He turned and looked at

her fixedly. "You're as cute as ten, Dolly, but I'm hanged if you

know how to play with me."

"Mrs. Butterick told you that?" she said.

"Yes--she spoke like a book. Like the book of Revelations. Now, when

I'd expressly asked you if I should be alone when I came down, what

the deuce did you want to come for?"

"Don't you think you can speak a little more politely?" she

requested.

"That won't help the discussion from your side or mine," he replied

quietly. "But rather than give you cause for interruption--I'll do

so. Why did you come down here?"

The mind of a woman works with amazing rapidity, but it is impossible

to see the direction it will take. There are little insects known

to our childish days as skip-jacks. Scratch them with the end of a

piece of grass, and they reward you for your pains--they will

jump--bound with one spasmodic leap and vanish. So is the working

of a woman's mind. You can be almost certain of the jump--but of the

direction--never.

"Why?" Traill insisted, and then Mrs. Durlacher turned her gaze to

the window, looked far away across the stretch of fields ploughed

and green, beyond the blue, rising land that lifts above Wycombe,

into that distance which holds all the intricate mysteries of a

woman's being. When a woman looks like this, a man strains eyes to

follow her. He realizes all the distance, but cannot with his utmost

effort decipher what it contains. And that very inability in him is

the strongest weapon that she holds. He sees the distance, yet there

is none. No wonder that he cannot discern its contents. There is no

distance. She is looking inwards--not outwards; searching her own

mind, searching his, and only playing the game of contemplation to

hide what she has found.

When Traill saw that expression of her face, he dropped the note of

brass from his voice.

"Why?" he asked again, almost gently.

Her lips bound tight together as though she were keeping back her

confession; her nostrils dilated, checking tears.

"I wanted to see you--that's all."

She said it with a shrug of the shoulders--the motion with which you

shake an unwelcome thought from your mind.

He pressed her further. "But you apparently knew I was bringing some

one?" he said.

She still looked towards her invisible horizon. "I guessed

that--guessed that from your letter--the way you said you wanted to

find no one down here. I thought you wouldn't mind my

coming--besides--there was no one to order anything for you, and

then--as I said--I wanted to see you."

"Yes, but why?" He took her arm, held the elbow in the cup of his

hand.

She looked once more--looked long into her distance--then turned,

petulantly almost, with a smothered sigh to the fireplace, rested

her feet upon the fender, and redirected her gaze into the heart of

the fire.

"Oh, it's no good talking about it now," she said. "Miss Bishop '11

be down in a minute."

"Aren't you happy? That it?"

"Yes."

"You aren't happy?"

"No."

"Harold?"

"Yes."

On the fender she beat out her thoughts.

"All the things she wants to say and is too proud," he said to himself

as he watched the tapping of her dainty toe. That was precisely what

he was meant to think.

"What's he done?" he asked.

"Tisn't what he's done--I don't think he's done anything."

"Then what?" He put his hand on her shoulder. "Poor old Dolly," he

said softly. "But why did you say that about bringing mistresses down

here?"

She looked up frankly--generously into his eyes. "Jealousy," she

admitted.

He laughed lightly. It just caught the edge of his vanity to which

she played. Then, bending down, he kissed her, and as Sally entered

the room, she saw the kiss--to her, a kiss of Judas. In that instant,

the intuition that it was she who was betrayed, shot upwards like

a flame of fire, rushing the blood in a burning race to her temples.

CHAPTER IV

You may jeer at the instinct of a woman, plant the straight line of

logic beside it and ridicule the comparison as you choose, but it

is a sense, a subliminal sense, number it as you like, upon which

she can rely as surely as on touch or scent or sight.

"One of those impulsive conjectures of yours," Traill had said to

his sister in reply to her intuition of his relations with Sally.

"You don't quite know what you're speaking about, and that gives you

confidence. You're a woman." In the face of her accuracy he had said

that. It is only retaliation a man has when a woman betrays the

amazing abnormality of that sense which he can never hope to possess.

He resorts to one weapon, the scientific reliability of evidence.

"Where's your evidence?" he asks, and having none, he smiles at her.

But she knows; a knowledge that will sweep her into the fire of action,

whilst he is methodically buckling on his armour of conviction with

the straps of logical evidence.

It was this instinct, the sixth sense in Sally, that had cast her

mind forward, flung it beyond herself into the future, where she saw

the Tragedy that awaited her. From the moment she had seen that kiss,

she had known that she had an enemy whose weapons were sure, whose

wielding of them was quick and keen. From that moment, standing on

the rise of so small, so insignificant an incident, she had seen ahead

into the years and known what her end would be. With what evidence?

None! With what reason? Little indeed of that. That they were

standing with swords drawn when she had left the room and that when

she returned the swords were sleeping in their scabbards and they

were kissing to make friends--how much was there to be reasoned from

that? Were not such incidents common to the relationship between

brother and sister? Yet, beyond all that, Sally saw with a clearness

of vision that penetrated every obvious deduction; saw away into the

stretch of Time when his sister would have won him back to her side

where she could have no place, no existence.

It might have been wrong, quite easily could have been false a

thousand times, but it was knowledge to her, sure, fateful,

undeniable knowledge; and from that day her instinct was keyed to

find its proof. The cancerous disease of jealousy had dropped its

first seed in the blood of her, and the vulturous growth began to

spread its lean, clutching fingers about her heart.

"My sister's not hitting it off with her husband," Traill told her,

that afternoon as they drove back to London.

"Is that what she was telling you when I went upstairs to take off

my hat?" asked Sally.

"Yes."

"That was why you kissed her?"

"Exactly; did you see me kissing her?"

"Yes, when I came into the room."

"Yes; well, that's it. I always thought Durlacher was a fool," he

added meditatively. "Used to tell her so before she married him. What

in the name of God can you expect of a guardsman? He's one of those

men who just lives through life--taking all, giving nothing. I doubt

if the rotting of his body will be manure for the earth when he dies.

He'd sell it if it were."

Sally closed her eyes, then opened them suddenly to study his face.

Such stray phrases as these that fell from his lips always kept the

knowledge in her mind of how hard he was.

"Has he been unkind to her?" she hazarded. She forced a spurious

interest to please him.

"She says not--but then--she doesn't know. It's perhaps as well that

she doesn't. My experience of divorce leads me to see that it's a

dog's game; mountains are made out of molehills to weight the case

one way or another, and he could probably retaliate with a lot of

half-truths, quite unprovable; but the mere mentioning of them in

the courts would leave a stain on her. No, it's perhaps as well that

she doesn't know as much as I do. She just thinks they don't get on

and a patch can settle a thing like that. Lord! The number of people

nowadays who pull along all right, with marriage lines that are

unrecognizable from their original condition because of the patches

here and the patches there--why, they're legion!"

"Are you going to do anything about it?" she asked.

"Me? Oh, I suppose I shall have to be a sort of go-between. She's

my sister, and as far as I can see, she's pretty miserable."

On this account, then, began his first visits to Sloane Street. There,

the actors in this little play went through their parts--well trained,

well rehearsed. There was never a note of the prompter's voice to

reach the ears of Traill from the wings. He listened quietly,

sympathetically to her tardy admission of the state of affairs. Three

times he went to Sloane Street in the afternoon before he was placed

in possession of all the subtle details and never once did he meet

Durlacher. Durlacher, himself, was always away. It must be admitted

that Traill was interested in these intricate details. They gave him

insight into the vagaries, the pitfalls and the fallacies of the life

with which he had to deal in the divorce courts. Undoubtedly they

were of service to him; undoubtedly, moreover, blood is thicker than

water, and he thought, he imagined, that he would be able to save

his sister from an impending crisis.

On the third occasion, whilst they were sitting over tea in the

drawing-room, the door opened and the man-servant announced--Miss

Standish-Roe.

Traill stood up with a jerk and felt for his gloves.

Mrs. Durlacher's eyes lost no sight of that and she hurried quickly

forwards.

"My dear child, how sweet of you!" She kissed her cheek

affectionately. "Let me introduce you to my brother."

Traill turned and his mind was cast back to the night he had dined

with his sister at the restaurant. This was the girl he had noticed;

her father was the man who sat on boards in the city. He bowed with

his eyes on her face.

"Surely you're not going to go yet, Jack," said Mrs. Durlacher. Her

eyes were feverishly watching his hands as he began slowly to draw

on his gloves. He hesitated. Miss Standish-Roe took the seat he had

vacated and looked questioningly up into his face as though it were

she who had made the request.

"Very well," he said. "Then I'll have another cup of tea with you."

From that moment, and Mrs. Durlacher's heart had leaped with

exultation, she began to play for his humour, baiting the line that

she cast with those little turns of phrase, those little feathers

of speech which she knew would tempt him to rise to the surface of

his mood. In a few moments, he was entertaining them with his tirades

against conventional institutions.

"Conventionality," he exclaimed; "I'd sooner have the honest vice

of the man who pleads guilty; I'd a thousand times sooner defend his

case, than urge for a woman who just holds on to the virtue of

conventionality with the tips of her fingers."

"You gave that lady a bad time the other day, Mr. Traill," said Miss

Standish-Roe, admiringly.

"I did? Which one?"

"The lady who admitted to kissing the co-respondent."

"Why, you weren't in the court, were you?"

"No--but I read it in the paper--your sister told me about it."

Mrs. Durlacher looked apprehensively to her brother's eyes. From so

small a thing as that he might unearth suspicion. But a pardonable

vanity was touched in him. He turned no ground to find the intentions

that lay beneath.

"Well, _there_ was a case," he said. "I've no doubt the woman was

innocent of the worst; but that was an exact case of the virtue of

conventionality. She'd just hung on to it, scraping her nails. She

deserved all she got."

"And you persisted in trying to prove her guilty?" said Miss

Standish-Roe, in amazement. "When you thought her innocent?"

"Why not?" he retorted. "Society wants to be purged of that sort of

woman, and it's full of 'em."

Mrs. Durlacher deftly changed the subject.

"I've got a box to-morrow night, Jack, at some theatre or other,"

she said casually. "Harold's going out to dinner, will you dine with

us and drag us along there?"

"Who's us?"

"Miss Standish-Roe and myself. We shall be all alone if you don't."

Sally's face rose in Traill's mind. If he went, this would be the

first evening, except for those engagements which his profession

demanded, on which he would have left her to dine at a restaurant

by herself. But was he bound? Not in the least! The consideration

that it might even seem to an outsider, decided him.

"Yes, I'll come," he said. "What time dinner?"

Again there was exultation in the heart of Mrs. Durlacher.

"Better be seven-thirty," she said.

He agreed. It never suggested itself to him that he wanted to go.

He hated to seem bound. That was his reason. So he took it with an

open mind, questioning nothing.

When he had gone, Mrs. Durlacher turned to her friend.

"You can come--can't you?" she asked.

Miss Standish-Roe nodded her head.

CHAPTER V

That evening, Traill removed the first pillar in the structure which

Sally had built--the Temple of her security. Notwithstanding all

Janet's advice, heedless, utterly, of Janet's point of view which

had been held before her eyes on almost every occasion on which they

had met during the last three years, she persisted in believing more

surely in the mooring of her life to Traill's, so long as no mention

of settlement was ever suggested.

There was full reason on her side for this. Unable to accept

conditions as Janet would have had her take them--the abandoning of

one master for the service of another--she knew that so long as Traill

kept her by his side without a word of agreement, his honour as the

gentleman she always knew him to be would remain as binding as any

sanction of the Church.

On this evening, then, when he returned from his visit in Sloane

Street, they went together to the little restaurant in Soho where

they had taken their first dinner together.

There was Berthe and Marie--there was Madame--there was

Alexandre--all still working together with the precious regularity

of the Dutch clock.

"Bon soir, monsieur--bon soir, madame." Not an inflection was

changed, not a note was altered. The firm hand of necessity had wound

them up day after day, all those three years, and they had ticked

together and tocked together to the swing of the pendulum of fortune

ever since.

"I shall always love this place," said Sally cheerfully, as they sat

down at the same table--_sous l'escalier_.

"Why?"

"Because you first brought me here." She stretched her hand across

the table and lovingly touched his fingers. She was happy, then.

"You're not sorry that I did?" he asked seriously.

"Sorry--no! How could I be?" Trouble came too quickly into her eyes.

It left them slower than it came.

"Do you remember what you said to me"--he reminded her--"just before

we went on to my rooms?"

"I said so many things."

"No--oh, you didn't. You said so few; but you said one that struck

in--deep--straight home."

"What was that?"

"You said I was a gentleman."

"So I believed then, when I first saw you. So I know now, after these

three years and more."

"You know it--do you?"

"Yes."

"Yet I've never said anything to you about what I intend to give you

for yourself, in your own right."

Pain struck into Sally's eyes. Her lips parted in fear and

anticipation.

"Have you taken all that on trust?" he continued. "If I were to die,

suppose--death is a great deed that even the smallest of us are able

to accomplish--Berthe!" He turned to the attendant who was

waiting--"Consomme--Omelette aux fines herbes--et poulet roti aux

cressons."

"Oui, monsieur--Consomme--pour deux, monsieur?"

"The whole lot pour deux."

Berthe laughed with her little cooing sound in the throat.

"Omelette aux fines herbes, et poulet roti aux cresson--oui,

monsieur."

She departed and they listened to the repetition of it all--

"Deux consommes--deux--" as she shouted it through the little

doorway to the kitchen.

"Supposing I were to die," Traill repeated. He leant his elbows on

the table and gazed steadily into her eyes.

"Why should you talk like that?" she pleaded, and all the while

through her brain scampered the questions--"Does he mean if he were

to die? Doesn't he mean if he were to leave me?" They danced a mad

dance behind her eyes. Had he looked deep enough, he might have seen

their capers.

"Because that sort of thing has to be talked," he said gently. "You

haven't the faintest idea whether I've made any provision for you

or not. I've often wondered would you ask, but you've never said a

word. Aren't you rather foolish? Do you think you take enough care

for yourself? Do you think you look far enough into the future? Don't

you think you treat life too much in the same way as you did my offer

of the umbrella on the top of the Hammersmith 'bus?"

Many another woman would have had it out then; flung the questions

at him, preferring knowledge rather than torture of mind. To Sally

this was impossible. Again she showed those same characteristics of

her father. She hoped against almost all absence of promise; she had

faith in the face of the blackest doubt. He had said--if he

died--perhaps he meant that. Yet the kissing of his sister lifted

like the shadow in a dream before her eyes. She knew he had been with

Mrs. Durlacher that afternoon. Could she have won him still further?

Sally knew her own impotence--bowed under it, recognized fully how

powerless she was to hold him if once the links in the chain of their

caring began to lose their grip. And now, he was offering to make

provision for her. Inevitably that seemed to be the beginning of the

end. Before, she was his, with that emotional phrase in her mind--as

God had made them. Now she was to become his, because he had bought

her, paid for her. There lay in that the difference between two worlds

in her mind; and she fought against it with what strength she knew.

"I don't want to look into the future," she said bravely. "I hate

looking into the future. I'm happy in the present; why shouldn't I

remain so?"

"How will this prevent you? Doesn't it appeal to you at all, that

when we came to live together, I took up a certain responsibility

with you? I've got to fulfil that responsibility. This evening, when

we go back, I'm going to draw out some form of settlement which I

intend to place with you. I shall take it to my solicitor and get

it legalized to-morrow morning."

She leant forward across the table and touched his hand again. Her

lips were trembling; her whole face, which only a few moments before

was bright with cheerfulness, was now drawn, pinched with the

suffering and terror in her mind.

"Please don't," she said brokenly. "Please don't. I don't want any

settlement as long as you care for me. What is a settlement to me

if, as you say, you were to die? What good would it be to me then?

Do you think I could bear to go On living?"

He searched her face with amazement. "You mustn't talk foolishness

like this," he replied firmly, but not unkindly. "We've all got our

own lives to get through. We've all got to answer for them one by

one, and live them one by one as well. There's no condition of

relationship in existence, which can make a man and a woman one person

except in their imaginations and according to the fairy tales of the

Church. You're a dear, simple, little child to talk about not being

able to go on living if I were to peg out; but you would. You'd go

on living. There's no doubt in my mind, but that you'd love some one

else again."

"You little understand me," she exclaimed bitterly, "if you could

ever think that."

"Well--in that respect, at least, I believe I understand human

nature; and in that respect, too, I imagine it must be a surer

criterion from which to judge of such matters. I don't insist upon

it as a certainty--I only suppose it possible. But in any event you

would want money to live upon, and my mind is quite made up that I

ought to make a settlement on you. Why should you not want me to--eh?

Why?"

She hung her head. To tell him, when she had no definite proof that

he had thought of leaving her, might be to put the thought into his

mind. She could not tell him. But pride did not enter the matter in

the least. If it could have served her purpose in any way, she would

willingly have let him know that she counted it possible for him to

desert her. But the fear that it might create a suggestion to his

consciousness which hitherto had not existed, locked the words in

her lips. She would not have uttered them for a crown of wealth.

"Why?" he repeated. "Eh?"

"I'd rather you didn't," she said, with trouble in voice. "I'd rather

you didn't--that's all."

"Well--I'm afraid it's got to be," he replied finally. "In my mind

it's not fair to you, and I'm determined that where you're concerned,

I shall have nothing with which to reproach myself. I shall draw it

up this evening when we go back."

She looked pitiably about her. Now it seemed that the little Dutch

clock, which had been ticking so merrily, so much in unison with life,

all went out of time. It seemed a farce then, that little Dutch clock.

All the romance went out of it--it was only a trade--a trade machine

for the making of money, no longer the counting of happy hours.

Everything seemed a trade then--everything seemed a trade.

CHAPTER VI