"No," he said, "suffering does not bore; discomfort does not bore;

knowledge of your fellow-creatures does not bore. But, of course, I am

tasting the pleasures of novelty. And I have not disappeared yet. I

think a boarding-house in Bloomsbury may prove boring. How prettily our

hostess will pity me, then. But I don't think I shall meet you here at

dinner, and have the comfort of seeing for myself that you, too, are

bored."

Molly felt that he was putting her hopelessly in the wrong. She was the

one bitterly aggrieved and deeply injured. But he made her feel as if

coldness on her part would be just the conduct of any rich heartless

woman to a ruined man.

"I calculate," he said, "on about fifty more good dinners which I shall

not pay for, and then, of course, I shall think myself well fed at my

own expense in an Italian café somewhere. I think Italian, don't you?

Dinner at two shillings! There is an air of _spagghetti_ and onions that

conceals the nature or age of the meat; and the coffee is amazingly

good. One might be able to find one with a clean cloth."

Most of these remarks were made almost to himself.

"You know it isn't true," Molly said angrily; "you know you will get a

good post. Men like you are always given things."

Edmund helped himself very carefully to exactly the right amount of

melted butter. "Don't you eat asparagus?" he interjected, and, without

waiting for an answer, went on:

"I thought so too, but I can't hear of a job. There are too many of the

unemployed just now. However, no doubt, as you say, I shall soon be

made absolute ruler of some province twice the size of England."

He laughed and smoothed his moustache with one hand.

"Down with dull care, Miss Dexter; let us make a pact never to be

bored--in Bloomsbury, or West Africa, or Park Lane. I suppose you found

a great deal to do to that dear old house?"

After that their other neighbours claimed them both; but during dessert

Molly, against her will, lost hold of the talk on her right, and had to

listen to Edmund again.

"I hear that you have got the old Florentine looking-glasses from my

sale."

"I don't think they were from your sale," said Molly hastily.

"Well, Perks told me so."

"Perks never told me," muttered Molly.

"I should think they must suit the house to perfection. Where have you

put them?"

"In the small dining-room."

"Yes; they must do admirably there. I should like to see them again." He

looked at her with a faintly sarcastic smile. She knew what he intended

her to say, and, against her will, she said hastily:

"Won't you come and see them?"

"With great pleasure."

Molly saw that Adela had risen, and sprang up and turned away in one

sudden movement. She was very angry with him for forcing her to say

that, and she could not conceive what had made her yield.

"'The teeth that bite; the claws that scratch,'" he thought to himself,

"but safely chained up--and the movements are beautiful." He stood

looking after her.

"I did as you told me," said the hostess, pausing for a moment as she

followed her guests to the door. "If Molly blames me, shall I say that

you asked to take her in?"

"Say just what you like; I trust you entirely." He did not attempt to

speak to Molly after dinner, or when they met again at a ball that same

night. All her burning wish to snub him could not be gratified. He

seemed not to know shat she was still in the room. But she knew

instinctively that he watched her, and she was not sorry he should see

her in the crowd, and be witness, however unwillingly, to her position

in the world he knew so well. It added to the sense of intoxication that

often possessed her now. "Be drunken," says Baudelaire, "be drunken with

wine, with poetry, with virtue, with what you will, only be drunken."

And that Molly could be drunken with flattery, with luxury, with

movement, with music, with a sense of danger that gave a strong and

subtle flavour to her pleasures, was the explanation (and the only one)

of how she bore the hours of reaction, of the nausea experienced by that

spiritual nature of hers which she had been so surprised to discover. It

was not the half-shrinking, half-defiant Molly Edmund had talked to in

the woods of Groombridge, whom he watched now. That Molly was gone, and

he regretted her.

CHAPTER XXVII

MOLLY'S APPEAL

Edmund, it seemed, was in no hurry to see his Florentine looking-glasses

again. Ten days passed before he called on Molly, and on the eleventh

day Mr. Murray, Junior, wrote to say that he had some fresh and

important intelligence to give him, and asked if Sir Edmund would call,

not at his office, but at his own house.

Edmund flung the letter down impatiently. The situation was really a

very trying one. He did not believe--he could not and would not

believe--that Molly was carrying on a gigantic fraud. Murray was a

lawyer, and did not know Miss Dexter; his suspicions were inhuman and

absurd. From the day on which she had spoken to him about her mother's

reply to her offer to go to Florence, Edmund had in his masculine way

ranged her once for all among good and nice women. He had felt touched

and guilty at a suspicion that he had been to blame in playing his

paternal _rôle_ too zealously. Until then he had at times had hard

thoughts of her; after that time he was a little ashamed of himself, and

he believed in her simplicity and goodness. He was sorry and

disappointed now that she was making quite so much effect in this London

world. There was something disquieting in Molly's success, and he could

appraise better than any one what a remarkable success it was. But he

felt that she was going the pace, and he would not have liked his

daughter to go the pace, unmarried and at twenty-two. She needed

friendship and advice. But the pinch came from the fact that the wealth

he could have advised her to use wisely ought to be Rose's, and that he

was resolved, in the depths of his soul, to regain that wealth for his

cousin--for that "_belle dame sans merci_" who wrote him such pretty

letters about his troubles.

Edmund put Murray's letter in his pocket, and immediately went out. He

was living in a small, but clean, lodging in Fulham, kept by a former

housemaid and a former footman of his own, now Mr. and Mrs. Tart, kindly

souls who were proud to receive him. He gave no trouble, and the

preparation of his coffee and boiled egg was all the cooking he had done

for him. Mrs. Tart would have felt strangely upset had she known that

the said coffee and egg were, on some days, his only food till tea-time;

she was under the impression that he lunched at his club when not

engaged to friends. Both she and Mr. Tart took immense pains with his

clothes, and he would rather have been well valeted than eat luxurious

luncheons every day.

He went out at once after getting Murray's letter, because he wanted to

call on Molly before he heard any more of the important intelligence.

Molly was alone when he was announced. She had told the butler she was

"not at home," but somehow the man decided to show Sir Edmund up because

he saw that he wished to be shown up. Edmund had always had an odd

influence below stairs, partly because he never forgot a servant's

face.

Molly coloured deeply when she saw her visitor. She was annoyed to think

that he would make her talk against her will--and they would not be

interrupted. She could have used strong language to the butler, but she

did not dare tell him that she would now see visitors. It would look to

Edmund as if she were afraid of a _tête-à-tête_.

Almost as soon as he was in the room she had an impression that he was

quite at home, curiously at his ease.

"I am glad the house is so little changed. I came to my first dance

here. You have done wonderfully well, and all on the old lines. A friend

told me it was the hugest success."

A remembrance of past jokes as to Edmund's second-hand compliments and

his friend "Mr. Harris" came into Molly's mind, but she only felt angry

at the remembrance.

He talked on about the pictures and the furniture until she became more

natural. It was impossible not to be interested in her work, and the

decoration and furnishing of the whole house was her own doing, not that

of any hireling adviser. Then, too, he knew its history, and she became

keenly interested. She had at times a strong feeling of the past life

still in possession of the house, into which her own strangely fated

life had intruded. She wanted, half-consciously, to know if her guilty

secret was a desecration or only a continuance of something that had

gone before.

Suddenly she leant forward with the crude simplicity he was glad to see

again.

"Have there been any wicked people here?" Her voice was low and young.

"'All houses in which men have lived and died are haunted houses,'" he

quoted. "It's not very cynical to suppose that there has been sin and

sorrow here before now."

"I think," said Molly quickly, "there was a wicked woman who used the

little dining-room; perhaps she was only a guest. I don't think she went

upstairs often."

"Perhaps she came in with my looking-glasses," suggested Edmund. "I have

often wished I could see what they have seen."

Molly was now quite off her guard.

Edmund rose and examined some china on a table near him.

"Why are you so displeased with me?" he said, without any change of

voice.

Molly sprang to her feet, careless whether her unguarded vehemence might

betray her to his observation.

"I shall not answer that question," she said; but he knew that she would

answer it.

"You cut me at the Court; you were displeased at having to sit by me at

dinner; you have pretended not to see me at least four times since then,

and your butler showed me up by mistake."

Molly had moved away from him to the window. She knew she must speak or

her conduct would look too like wounded love--a thing quite unbearable.

She knew, too, that his influence would make her speak, and, besides

that, something in her cried for the relief of speech. She needed a

fight although she did not know it; an open fight with an enemy she

could see would distract her from the incessant fight with an enemy she

did not see.

"You are a strange man!" she cried, holding the curtain behind her

lightly as she turned towards him. "You could make friends with me so

that all the world might see you, and meanwhile, at the very same time,

you were paying a low Italian scoundrel to produce lies against my sick

and lonely mother! You could watch me and get out of me all you wanted

to know because I was ignorant of the world. You could use the horrible

influence you had gained over me by your experience of many women, to

manage me as you liked. You told me not to marry Edgar Tonmore for some

reason of your own; you told me to go and stay with my aunt; you came to

see me one night in London, and wormed out of me my relations with my

unfortunate mother. With all your knowledge of the world, with all your

experience, did you never think I might come to find you out?"

Molly paused for a moment. She held herself erect, her white gown

crushed against the rich, dark curtain, her great eyes searching the

trees in the park below as if she sought there for the soul of her

enemy. She did not know that she pulled hard at the curtain behind her

with both hands; it could not have held out much longer, strong though

it was.

"No; you knew life too well not to know that you might be found out, but

the truth was that you did not care. It was so little a thing to you

that, when you saw that I knew the truth, you could go on just the same,

quite unabashed. You could force yourself on me by playing on your

poverty; you, who had tried to ruin my mother! Well, she is out of your

reach, and perhaps you have shifted your foul suspicions on to me.

Perhaps it is from me you hope to get the fortune that you mean to

share. You drive me mad! I say things I don't want to say; you force me

to lower myself, but----" She turned now and faced Edmund, who watched

her, himself absolutely motionless. "Now that you have forced yourself

on me again you shall answer me. Do you believe that I, Molly Dexter,

have concealed or abetted in concealing or destroying any will in favour

of Lady Rose Bright?"

There is a moment when passion is astonishingly inventive. Molly had had

no intention of saying anything of the kind, but the heat of passion had

produced a stroke of policy that no colder moment could have produced.

She was suddenly dumb with astonishment at her own words, and she dimly

recognised that this represented a distinct crisis in her own mind.

Passion and excitement had dissipated the last mists of self-deception.

Edmund waited till there could be no faint suspicion of his trying to

interrupt her, and then said from his heart, in a voice she had never

heard from him before:

"No, I swear to you I don't."

Molly had been deeply flushed. At these words she turned very white, and

her hands let go the curtains. She put them out before her and seemed to

grope her way to a stiff, high-backed chair near to her. She sat down in

it and clasped her hands to her forehead.

"Now you must hear me," said Edmund. "I don't say I am blameless: in

part of this I have done wrong, but not as wrong as you think. I must

tell you my story; although perhaps it may seem blacker as I tell it,

even to myself."

He sat down and bent forward a little.

"When I was young I fell in love with my cousin. She has been and always

will be the one woman in the world to me. She did not, does not, never

will, return my feelings. She married, and before very long I was

convinced she was not happy, although she only half realised it herself.

She is capable of stifling her powers of perception. Then David Bright

died and left her in poverty. His will was a scandal, and the horror did

not only smirch his good name, it reached to hers. I can't and won't try

to tell you what I suffered, or how I determined to fight this hideous

wrong. I went to Florence; I tried to see Madame Danterre; I engaged the

detective--all before I knew of your existence. I came back to London

and discovered that your father, John Dexter, had divorced his wife on

account of David Bright. Still I did not know anything of you. Then,

through Lady Dawning I found you out, and I made friends with Mrs.

Delaport Green in order to see more of you. Was there anything wrong in

that? You did not know your mother; you did not, presumably, care very

deeply about her. It was doubtful if you knew of her existence. Soon the

detective in Florence faded in my mind; he discovered nothing, but I

retained him in case of any change. Was I obliged, because I liked you,

to give up the cause? I never found out, I never tried to find out from

you anything that bore on the case. You must remember that I stopped you

once in the wood at Groombridge when you wanted to tell me more about

yourself, and that I again warned you when you wished to tell me about

your mother's letter to you. As to Edgar Tonmore, I knew that he was

penniless, and I thought it quite possible that you might, in the end,

be penniless too. It was for your own sake I wished you to make a richer

marriage. For I believed--I still believe--that David Bright made a last

will when going out to Africa; I believed, and still believe, that by an

accident that will was not sent to Lady Rose. I thought then that your

mother had, in some way, become possessed of the will, and I thought it

more than likely that, when dying, she would make reparation by leaving

the money where it ought to be. I meant--may I say so?--to prove myself

your friend, then, if you should allow it. I know I kept in touch with

you partly from curiosity as well as from natural attraction. But, if I

acted for the sake of another, I acted for you also. Would it have been

better or worse for you to have been friends with us if my suspicions of

your mother's conduct had proved true? But believe me, Miss Dexter, I

never for one moment could have thought of you with any taint of

suspicion. It is horrible to me to have it suggested."

He rose as he finished speaking, and came nearer to her.

"That you, with your youth and your innocence and your candour!--child,

the very idea is impossible. I have known men and women too well to fall

into such an absurdity. Send me away, if you like; I won't intrude my

friendship upon you, but look up now and let me see that you do not

think this gross thing of me."

Molly raised a white face and looked into his--looked into eyes that had

not at all times and in all places been sincere, but were sincere now. A

great rush of warm feeling came over her; a great sore seemed healed,

and then she looked at him with hungry entreaty, as if a soul, shorn of

all beauty, hungry, ragged, filthy, were asking help from another. But

the moment of danger, the moment of salvation passed away.

We confess our sins to God because He knows them already, and we ask for

forgiveness where we know we shall be forgiven.

Indeed, Molly knew almost at once that she had gained another motive for

silence. She could not risk the loss of Edmund's good thought of her;

she cared for him too much--he had defended himself too well.

Edmund saw that she could not speak. He left her, let himself out of the

house, and, forgetful of the fact that he could not possibly afford a

hansom, jumped into one and drove to Mr. Murray's house.

He had recovered his usual calmness by the time he had to speak.

"I have your note," he said, "and I came in consequence."

"Yes," said the lawyer; "I wanted to tell you----"

"Wait a moment. Do you think you need tell me? You see, my share in the

thing really came to an end when I could not finance it. I have several

reasons now why I should like to let it alone."

Murray was astonished. It was Sir Edmund who had started the whole

thing, whose wild guess at the outset was becoming more and more likely

to be proved true. It was he who had spent a quantity of money over the

investigation for years past. The man of business knew how to provoke

speech by silence, and so he remained silent.

"Does further action depend in any way on me?" asked Edmund at last,

without, however, offering the explanation the other wanted.

"No," said Murray quite civilly, but his manner was dry. "I don't see

that it does. I think we can get on for the present."

As he spoke the door opened, and the parlourmaid showed in a tall,

handsome woman in a nurse's dress.

Murray looked from her to Sir Edmund.

"I had wanted you to hear what Nurse Edith had to tell us, but after

what you have said----"

"Yes," said Edmund; "I will leave you and I will write to you

to-night."

CHAPTER XXVIII

DINNER AT TWO SHILLINGS

Edmund Grosse was in great moral and great physical discomfort that

evening. He dined, actually for the first time, in just such an Italian

café as he had described to Molly. After climbing up a very narrow,

dirty staircase, the hot air heavy with smells, he had emerged into a

small back and front room holding some half-dozen tables, at each of

which four people could be seated. Through the open windows the noises

of the street below came into collision with the clatter of plates and

knives and forks. The heat was intense, the cloths were not clean,

neither were the hands of the two waiters who rushed about with a

certain litheness and facility of motion unlike any Englishman.

Edmund sat down wearily at a table as near the window as possible, and

at which several people had been dining, perhaps well, but certainly not

tidily.

"Hunger alone," he thought, "could make this possible," when, looking

up, he caught the face of a young man at a further table, full of

enjoyment, ordering "spargetty" and half a bottle of "grayves," with a

cockney twang, and an unutterable air of latter-day culture.

"Mutton chops, cheese, and ale fed your forefathers," reflected Grosse.

"What will you have, sir?" in a foreign accent.

"Oh! anything; just what comes for the two shilling dinner--no, not

_hors d'oeuvres_; yes, soup."

Edmund had turned with ill-restrained disgust from the sardines,

tomatoes, and other oily horrors. But there was no denying the qualities

of the soup: the most experienced and cultivated palate and stomach must

be soothed by it, and in a moment of greater cheerfulness Edmund turned

his attention to three young men close to him who were talking French.

Their hands were clean and their collars, but poverty was writ large on

their spare faces and well-brushed clothes. One was olive-complexioned,

one quite fair, but with olive tints in the shadows round the eyes, and

the third grey, old, and purple-cheeked from shaving. They ate little,

but they talked much. The talked of literature and art with fierce

dogmatism, and they seemed frequently on the verge of a quarrel, but the

storm each time sank quite suddenly without the least consciousness of

the danger passed. They looked at the food as critics, and acknowledged

it to be eatable, with the faint air of an exile's sadness.

Edmund wished to think that he was amused by their talk, but the

distraction did not last. His thoughts would have their way, and he was

soon trying to defend his defence of himself to Molly. All he said had

seemed so obviously true as the words poured out, but there had been

fatal reservations. He had spoken as if all suspicions, all proceedings

as to discovering the will were past. He had felt he had no right to

give away secrets that were not his own. But had he not produced a false

impression? What would Molly have thought of him as he passionately

rejected the notion of suspecting her if she had seen the letter from

Murray in his pocket? It was true that he no longer financed any of the

proceedings against her, but they had all been set on foot by him. He

was in the plot that was thickening, and he had won the confidence of

the victim! He had no doubt that Molly was innocent, and he was ashamed

of the pitiful confidence he had read in her eyes when he left her. But

he still believed that her mother had been guilty, and that Molly's

wealth was the result of that guilt. It was true that he wanted to be

her friend, but it was also true that he would rejoice if Rose came into

her own and the gross injustice were righted. But, after all, what

absolute evidence had they got, as yet, as to the contents of this last

will, or what proof even of its existence? He felt almost glad for the

fraction of a moment that Molly might remain the gorgeous mistress of

the old house in Park Lane uninjured by anything he had done against

her. "How absurd," he thought, "how drivelling! The fact is that girl

impressed me enough to-day, to make me see myself from her point of

view, or what would be her point of view if she knew all!"

He refused coffee--the cab fare had prevented that. He quite emptied his

pocket, gave the waiter sixpence, and, rising, strolled across the floor

of the small room exactly the same man to the outward eye he had been

for years past. But before he reached the door he caught the glance of a

little, round, elderly woman at a table close to him, and he stopped.

She had a faded, showy bonnet, and she carried her worn clothes with an

air. He recognised the companion and friend of a famous prima donna

whom he had not seen for years.

"You've forgotten me, but I've not forgotten you."

It was a cherry, Irish voice.

"I get coffee and a roll, and you have the _diner à prix fixe_. And you

have given me a champagne supper in your day! Well! and how are you?"

"Nicely, thank you, Miss O'Meara; you see I have not forgotten!" Then in

a lower voice, "But I thought the Signora left you money?"

"She did, bless her; but it was here one day and gone the next!

Good-night, and good luck to you," she laughed.

The little duenna of a dead genius evidently did not want him to stay,

and he felt his way down the pitch dark stairs, and emerged on the

street. A very small, brown hand was held out for a penny, and for the

first time in his life he refused a street beggar with real regret.

"'Here one moment, and gone the next,'" he muttered, looking down the

brilliantly lighted street to where the motors, carriages, and cabs

crowded round the doors of a great theatre. "It's the history of the

whole show in a nutshell."

If Sir Edmund was troubled at the thought that Molly believed in him,

Molly was infinitely more troubled at his belief in her.

After he left her she went to her room. She had to dine out and she must

get some rest first. As in most of the late eighteenth century houses in

London, the bedrooms had been sacrificed to the rooms below. But Molly

had the one very large room that looked over the park. She threw

herself down on a wide sofa close to the silk-curtained bed. The sun

glinted still on the silver backs of the brushes and teased her eyes,

and she got up and drew down the blinds. The dressing-table was large

and its glass top was covered with a great weight of old gilt bottles

and boxes.

Miss Carew had once been amused by the comment of a young manicurist

who, after expressing enthusiastic admiration of the table, had

concluded with the words:

"But what I often say to myself is that it's only so much more to leave

in the end."

But Molly had not laughed when the words were repeated; they gave

expression to a feeling with which she sometimes looked at many things

besides her dressing-table--they might all prove only so much more to

leave in the end!

She sank exhausted again onto the sofa. Why had he come? Why could he

not leave her alone? Did she want his friendship, his pity, his

confidence? Why look at her so kindly when he must know how he hurt her?

She had felt such joy when she saw that he believed in her. The idea

that she was still innocent and unblemished in his eyes was just for the

moment an unutterable relief. An unutterable relief, too, it had felt at

the moment, to be able to accept his defence of himself. That he was

still lovable, and that he had no dark thoughts of her, had been such

joy, but only a passing joy. Had he not told her in horribly plain

speech that he loved Lady Rose, and would love her to the end? All this,

which was so vital to Molly, was but an episode in a friendship that was

a detail in his life!

But now, alone, trying to see clearly through the confusion, how

unbearable it had been to hear him say, "That you with your youth and

your innocence and your candour...." He had thought it too horrible to

suspect her, and by that confidence he made her load of guilt almost

unendurable.

She could not go on like this, could not live like this. The silence was

far more unbearable now that a human voice had broken into it, a voice

she loved repudiating with indignant scorn the possibility of suspecting

her! She must go somewhere, she must speak to some one. But at this

moment it was also evident that she must dress for dinner.

CHAPTER XXIX

THE RELIEF OF SPEECH

There is quite commonly a peculiar glow of sunshine just before a storm,

a brightness so obviously unreliable that we are torn between enjoyment

and anxiety. I have known no greater revelation of Nature's glories,

even in a sunset hour, than in one of these moments of glow before the

darkness of storm. And in a man's life there is sometimes an episode so

bright, so full of promise, that we feel its perfection to be the

measure of its instability.

Such a moment had come to Mark Molyneux. The time of depression and

trial, the time when a vague sense of danger and a vague sense of

aspiration had made him turn his eyes towards the cloister, had ended in

his taking his work more and more earnestly and becoming surprisingly

successful in his dealings with both rich and poor.

It seemed during the past winter that Mark would carry all before him;

he had come into close contact with the poor, and in the circle in which

his personal influence could be felt there was a real movement of

religious earnestness and moral reform. There was a noticeable glow of

zeal in the other curates and in the parish workers, who, with one or

two exceptions, were enthusiastic in their devotion to him personally

and to his notions of work. Even after Easter several of the

recently-cured drunkards were persevering, and other notoriously bad

characters seemed determined to show that the first shoots of their

awakened moral life were not merely what gardeners call "flowering

shoots," but steady growths giving promise of sound wood.

Mark's sermons were becoming more and more the rage, and people were

heard to say that he was the only Catholic preacher in London, excepting

perhaps one or two Jesuit Fathers; while he had also the tribute of

attention from the press, which he particularly disliked.

Meanwhile, the old rector was still gruff and still proffered snubs

which were gratefully received, for Mark was genuinely anxious not to be

misled by the atmosphere of praise and affection in which he was living.

Nothing warned him of impending danger (to use a phrase of old-fashioned

romance) when he was told that Miss Dexter was asking to see him. He had

not seen her for a long time, and was quite glad that she should come.

He looked young, eager, and happy as he came quickly into the parlour,

but after a few minutes the simple warmth of his manner changed into a

more negative politeness. There was something so gorgeous in Molly's

appearance, and so very strange in her face, that even a man who had

seen less of the world than is obtained in a year on the mission in

London, could not fail to be somewhat puzzled.

Molly hardly spoke for some moments, and silence was apparently

inevitable. Then she burst out, without preparation, in a wild,

incoherent way, with her whole life's story. The story of a child

deserted by her mother, neglected by her father, taken from the ayah who

was the only person who had ever loved her, and sent like a parcel to

the care of a hard and selfish aunt who was ashamed of her. It might

have been horribly pathetic only that it was impossible that so much

egotism and bitterness should not choke the sympathy of the listener.

But as the story came to Molly's twenty-first year, the strange, bitter

self-defence (she had not yet explained why she should defend herself at

all to Father Molyneux), all the unpleasing moral side of the story

became merged in the sense of its dramatic qualities.

Molly had never told it to anyone before now, and, indeed, she had not

realised several features of the case until quite lately. She told well

the disillusion as to her mother, her own single-handed fight with life,

the double sense of shame as to her mother's past, and her own ambiguous

position. She told him how she felt at first meeting Rose Bright, of her

own sense of sailing under false colours, and she actually explained, in

her strange pleading for a favourable judgment, how everything that

happened had naturally hardened her heart and made her feel as if she

had been born an outcast. Lastly, she told how Sir Edmund Grosse had

pursued her mother with detectives, and, as she had for a time believed,

had pursued herself with the hypocritical appearance of friendship. She

had been wrong, it seemed now, in judging him so harshly, but it had

hurt terribly at the time.

Through all this Mark was struggling against the repulsion that

threatened to drown the sympathy he wanted to give her. But he had,

naturally, not the faintest suspicion as to what was coming or that

Molly was confiding in him a story of her own wrong-doing. He was

absolutely confounded when she went on, still in the tone of passionate

self-defence, to tell how she had found the will leaving the whole of

Sir David's fortune to Lady Rose. He simply stared at Molly when she

said:

"Who could suppose for a single moment that I should be obliged, on

account of a scrap of paper which was evidently sent to my mother for

her to dispose of as she liked, to become a pauper and to give a fortune

to Lady Rose Bright?"

But although he was too astounded for speech, and his face showed

strange, stern lines, it was now that there awoke in his heart the

passionate longing to help her; he saw now her whole story in the most

pathetic light, from the little child deserted by her mother, to the

woman scorned and suffering, left by the same mother in such a gruesome

temptation. The greatness of the sin provoked the passionate longing to

save her. The man who had given up Groombridge Castle and all it

entailed had not one harsh thought for the woman who had fallen into

crime to avoid the poverty he had chosen for his own portion.

"It's a hard, hard case," he murmured, to Molly's surprise.

She had been so occupied in her own outpouring that she had hardly

thought of him at first, except as a human outlet for her story made

safe by the fact that he was a priest. But when he had betrayed his

silent but most eloquent amazement, she had suddenly realised what the

effect of her confidences might be on such a man, and half expected

anathemas to thunder over her head.

Then he tried to find out whether there was any kind of hope that the

will had, in fact, been sent to her mother to be at her disposal. But

suddenly Molly, who had herself suggested this idea, rent it to pieces

and brought out the whole case against her mother (and, consequently,

against herself) with a fierce logic of attack.

This was more like the Molly whom he had known before, and Mark felt the

atmosphere a little clearer. Having left not the faintest shadow of a

defence for her own action, she suddenly became silent. After some

moments she leant forward.

"Do you know," she said, in a tone so low that he only just caught the

words, "I see now what must have happened. It is strange that I never

thought of it before. I see it now quite clearly. Of course the will and

the letter were wrongly addressed, and probably some letter to my mother

was sent to Lady Rose."

"That does not follow," said Father Molyneux.

"But it's not unlikely," argued Molly. "It is more probable that the two

letters should be put into the wrong envelopes than that one should be

addressed to the wrong person. It's a mistake that is made every day,

only the results are usually of less consequence. It must have been

curious reading for my mother--that letter about herself to Lady Rose

Bright."

"It is so difficult," said Mark, feeling his way cautiously, "to be sure

of not acting on fancied facts when there are so few to go upon. Do you

suppose that the detective in Florence had any definite plan of action

given to him by his employer? For just supposing that your guess is

right, they may have got some clue to what happened in the letter that

was sent by mistake to Lady Rose. Have you no notion at all whether

they may not now have got some evidence to prove that there was another

will?"

Molly shook her head.

"Do you think," she said, "they would have been quiet all this time if

there had been any real evidence at all? It is three years since Sir

David died, and six months since my mother died."

She did not notice how Mark started at this information. Had Miss

Dexter, then, been in possession of this letter to Lady Rose and the

last will for six months?

"You were not sent these papers at once?" he ventured to ask.

"Yes; Dr. Larrone, who attended my mother, brought them to me. He left

Florence two hours after she died."

Another silence followed.

"It seems to me that a great deal might be done by a private

arrangement. Probably their case is not strong enough, or likely to be

strong enough, for them to push it through. It should be arranged that

you should receive the £1000 a year that Sir David intended to give your

mother."

Molly laughed scornfully.

"I'd rather beg my bread than be their pensioner. No, no; you entirely

mistake the situation. I shall have no dealings with them at all--no

nonsense about arbitration or private arrangements. I won't give them

any opportunity of feeling generous. It must"--she spoke very slowly and

looked at him fiercely--"with me it must be all or nothing, and"--she

got up suddenly and began smoothing her gloves over her wrists--"and as

I don't choose to starve it must be all. But if I can't go through with

it (which is quite possible) I shall throw up the sponge and get out of

this world as quickly as possible."

"If you have made up your mind," said Mark sternly, "to defy God, in

Whom I know that you believe, to defy the laws of man, whose punishment

_may_ come, whereas His punishment must come, why have you told me all

this?"

"I had to tell some one; I was suffocating. You don't know"--she stood

looking out of the window a strange expression of hunger and loneliness

succeeding the fierceness of a few moments before--"you don't know what

it is to have in your own mind a long, long story about yourself that

has never been told. To have been lonely and hardly treated and deceived

and spurned, and never to have put your own case to any one human being!

To have cried from childhood till twenty-two, knowing that nobody really

cared! There comes a time when you would rather say the worst of

yourself than keep silence. To accuse yourself is the natural thing;

silence is the unnatural thing."

"Good God!" said Mark, rising, "don't stop there. If you must accuse

yourself, pass judgment also. Class yourself where you have chosen with

your eyes open to stand. Would you allow any amount of provocation and

unhappiness to excuse a systematic fraud? Do you think that the thief

brought up to sin has less or more excuse than you have? Are you the

only person who has known a lonely childhood? Can you tell me here in

this room that God never showed you what love really is? He has never

left you alone, and you wish in vain now that He would leave you alone.

For your present life is so unbearable that you feel that you may

choose death rather than go on with it."

"I shall pay heavily for the relief of speech if I am to have a sermon

preached all to myself," said Molly insolently. "I was speaking of the

need of human love; I was speaking of all I had suffered, and it is easy

for you to retort upon me that I might have had Divine Love only that I

chose to reject it. Tell me, were you brought up without a mother's

love?"

"No; I had--I have a mother who loves me almost too much."

"Have you known real loneliness?"

"I believe every man and woman has known that the soul is alone."

Molly shook her head.

"That is a mood; mine was a permanent state. Have you ever known what it

is to see God's will on one side, and all possibilities of human

happiness, glory, success, and pleasure, opposed to it?"

The young man blushed deeply.

"Yes, I have."

Molly was checked.

"I forgot," she answered; "but still you don't understand. You were an

intimate friend of God when He asked you for the sacrifice, whereas I--I

had only an inkling, a suspicion of that Love. Besides, you were not

asked to give all your possessions to your enemies! No; too much has

been asked of me."

"Can too much be asked where all has been given?" asked Father Molyneux.

"That is an old point for a sermon," said Molly wearily. "You don't

understand; you are of no use to me. Good-bye! I don't think I shall

come again."

CHAPTER XXX

THE BIRTH OF A SLANDER

After that visit to Father Molyneux the devil seems to have entered into

Molly. It was a devil of fear and, consequently, of cruelty. What she

did to harm him was at first unpremeditated, and it must be allowed that

she had not at the moment the means of knowing how fearful a harm such

words as hers could do. She said them too when terror had driven her to

any distraction, and when wine had further excited her imagination.

Still it would not be surprising to find that many who might have

forgiven her for a long, protracted fraud, would blot her out of their

own private book of life for the mean cruelty of one sentence.

Not many hours had passed after the visit before Molly was furious with

herself for her consummate folly in giving herself away to the young

priest, who might even think it a duty to reveal what she said.

She had once told Mark that she might soon come to hate him, as hatred

came most easily to her. There was now quite cause enough for this

hatred to come into being. Molly had two chief reasons for it. First,

she was in his power to a dangerous extent and he might ruin her if he

chose; secondly, she was afraid of his influence--chiefly of the

influence of his prayers--and she dreaded still more that he should

persuade her to ruin herself.

One evening Molly had been with Mrs. Delaport Green and two young men to

a play. It was a play that represented a kind of female "Raffles"--a

thief in the highest ranks of society, and the lady Raffles had black

hair. The lady stole diamonds, and fascinated detectives, and even

beguiled the ruffianly burglar who had wanted the diamonds for himself.

It was a far-fetched comparison indeed, but it worried and excited Molly

to the last degree. They went back to supper at Miss Dexter's house, and

there one more lady and another man joined them. They sat at a gorgeous

little supper at a round table in the small dining-room, Mrs. Delaport

Green opposite Molly, and Lady Sophia Snaggs, a spirited, cheery

Irishwoman, separated from the hostess by Billy, with whom the latter

had always, in the past weeks, been ready to discuss the poverty and the

failings of Sir Edmund Grosse. Of the other two men, one was elderly,

bald, greedy, fat and witty, and the other was a soldier, spare, red and

rather silent but extremely popular for some happy combination of

qualities and excellent manners. It would seem hardly worth while to say

even this little about them, only that it proved of some importance that

the few people who heard Molly's words that night, and certainly

repeated them afterwards, had unfortunately rather different and rather

wide opportunities of making them known.

The Florentine looking-glasses that once belonged to Sir Edmund Grosse,

with their wondrous wreaths of painted flowers, looked down from three

sides of the room and reflected the pretty women and their gowns, the

old silver, the rare glass, and the flowers. They were probably

refreshed by the exquisite taste of the little banquet that might recall

the first reflection of their youth. Morally there was a rift within the

lute among the guests, for Molly betrayed that Adela had got on her

nerves. Lady Sophia Snaggs poured easy conversation on the troubled

waters, but at last the catastrophe could not be averted.

At a moment when the others were silent Adela was talking.

"Yes; I went to hear him preach, and it is so beautiful, you know.

Crowds; the church was packed, and many people cried. You _should_ go.

And then one feels how real it is for him to preach against the world,

because he gave up so much."

Molly drained her glass of champagne and leant across.

"Whom are you talking about?"

"Father Molyneux."

"I thought so."

"Have you heard him preach?" asked Lady Sophy.

"I used to, but I never go now." She again leant forward and spoke this

time with unconcealed irritation. "Adela, I don't go now because I know

too much about him."

There was immediate sensation.

Molly slowly lit a cigarette. Even then she did not know what she was

going to say, but she had determined on the spur of the moment, and

chiefly from sheer terror, to put Mark out of court if she possibly

could.

"He is a humbug," she proclaimed in her low, incisive tone.

"Oh! come now," said Billy. "A man who gave up

Groombridge--extraordinary silly thing to do, but he is not a humbug!"

Molly turned on him.

"Yes, he is. He knows he made a great mistake and he would undo it if he

could."

"Molly, it can't be true!" cried Adela almost tearfully. "If you had

only heard him preach last Sunday you couldn't say such hasty, unkind,

horrid things!"

"It is true," said Molly.

"Our hostess is pleased to be mysterious," said the fat man, and "you

know," turning to Mrs. Delaport Green, "it's very likely that he is

sorry he made such a sacrifice, but I don't think that prevents its

having been a noble action at the time."

"Or makes him a humbug now," said the soldier. "I believe he is an

uncommonly nice fellow."

"Oh! she means something else," said Lady Sophia, looking at Molly with

curiosity. "What is it you have against him?"

Molly felt the table to be against her, and it added to her nervous

irritability. She was not in any sense drunk, and the drugs she took

were in safe doses at present; yet she was to a certain degree

influenced both by the champagne she had just taken, and the injection

she had given herself when she came in from the theatre.

"You will none of you repeat what I am going to say?"

"I probably shall," said the big guest, "unless it is excessively

interesting; otherwise I never remember what is a secret and what

isn't."

But Molly did not heed him.

"Well," she said, "it is a fact that Father Molyneux would give up the

Roman Church to-morrow if a very intimate friend of mine, who could

give him as much wealth as he has lost, would agree to marry him after

he ceased to be a priest!"

"Oh! how dreadfully disappointing!" cried Adela.

"Why shouldn't he?" said Billy.

"It seems a come-down," said the fat man; and the soldier said nothing.

"Stuff and nonsense," said Lady Sophia firmly. "Somebody has been

humbugging you, Molly."

But being a lady who liked peace better than warfare, she now went on to

say that she had had no notion how late it was until this moment, and

that she really must be off. Her farewell was quite friendly, but

Molly's was cold.

The departure of Lady Sophia made a welcome break, and, in spite of the

hostess being silent and out of temper, the men managed to divert the

conversation into less serious topics. But they were not likely to

forget what Molly had impressed upon their minds by the strange

vehemence with which she had emphasised her accusations.

"She meant herself, I suppose?" asked Billy, when leaving the house with

his stout fellow guest. "Do you believe it?"

"It was very curious, very curious indeed. Do you know I rather doubt if

she wholly and entirely believed it herself."

Billy was puzzled for a moment, thinking that some difficult mental

problem had been offered for his digestion.

"Oh, I see," he said, as he opened his own door with his latch-key. "He

only meant that she was telling a lie; I suspect he is right too."

CHAPTER XXXI

THE NURSING OF A SLANDER

Meanwhile, in shadowy corners of Westmoreland House, Miss Carew lived a

monotonous but anxious life. For days together she hardly saw Molly, and

then perhaps she would be called into the big bed-room for a long talk,

or rather, to listen to a long monologue in which Molly gave vent to

views and feelings on men and things.

Molly's cynicism was increasing constantly, and she now hardly ever

allowed that anybody did anything for a good motive. She had moods in

which she poured scandal into Miss Carew's half excited and curious

mind, piling on her account of the wickedness and the baseness of the

people she knew intimately, of the sharks who pursued her money, and,

most of all, she showered her scorn on the men who wanted to marry her.

Listening to her Miss Carew almost believed that all the men Molly met

were _divorcés_, or notoriously lived bad lives, and hardly veiled their

intention to continue to do the same after obtaining her hand and her

money.

Molly would lie on a sofa, in a gorgeous kind of _déshabille_ which cost

almost as much as Miss Carew spent on her clothes in the whole year, and

apparently take delight in scaring her by these hideous revelations.

She was so strange in her wild kind of eloquence, and it was so

impossible to believe all she said, that the doubt more than once

occurred to Miss Carew whether it might be a case of the use of drugs.

The extraordinary personal indulgence of luxury was unlike anything the

older woman had ever come across. Then there was no system, nothing

business-like about Molly as there often is in women of the modern

world. Miss Carew dimly suspected that any society of human beings

expects some self-discipline, and some sacrifice to ordinary rules. As

it was she wondered how long Molly's neglect of small duties and her

frequent insolence would be condoned.

All this, which had been coming on gradually, was positively nauseous to

the middle-aged Englishwoman whose nerves were suffering from the

strain, and she came to feel that it would be impossible to endure it

much longer. It would be easier to drudge and trudge with girls in the

schoolroom for a smaller salary than to endure life with Molly if she

were to develop further this kind of temper.

For months now Miss Carew had lived under a great strain. From the

evening when she had found Molly sitting on the floor with the tin box

open before her, and old, yellow letters lying on the ground about it,

she had been almost constantly uneasy. She could not forget the sight of

Molly crouching like a tramp in the midst of the warm, comfortable room,

biting her right hand in a horrible physical convulsion. It was of no

use to try to think that Molly's condition that night was entirely the

result of illness, or that the loss of her unknown mother had upset her

to that degree or at all in that way. The character of Molly's mental

state was quite, quite different from the qualities that come of grief

or sickness. Then had followed the very anxious nursing, during which

all other thoughts had been swallowed up in immediate anxiety and

responsibility.

During Molly's convalescence, in the quiet days by the sea-side, Miss

Carew began to reflect on a kind of coherent unity in the delirious talk

she had listened to during the worst days of the illness. And she also

noticed that Molly, by furtive little jokes and sudden, irrelevant

questions, was trying to find out what Miss Carew had heard her say.

Then it became evident that Molly attributed all the excitement of that

night to her subsequent illness--only once, and that very calmly,

alluding to the fact of her mother's death.

Miss Carew had no wish to penetrate the mystery of the black box and the

faded letters. She had a sort of instinctive horror of the subject, but

she could not but watch the fate of the box when they came back to the

flat. Molly paid no attention to it whatever, and said in a natural

tone:

"I shall send my father's dispatch box and sword-case and my own

dispatch boxes in a cab. Would you mind taking them and having them put

in the little room next to my bed-room?"

But in the end Molly had taken them herself, as she thought Miss Carew

had a slight cold. Miss Carew always had a certain dislike to the door

of the little room next to Molly's, which had evidently been once used

for a powder closet. She did not even know if the door were locked or

not, and she never touched the handle. She had an uncanny horror of

passing the door, at least so she said afterwards; probably in

retrospect she came to exaggerate her feelings as to these things.

She was puzzled and confused: her health was not good, and her faculties

were dimmed. It was probably the strain of living with Molly whom she

could no longer control or guide, and who was so evidently in dire need

of some one to do both. She felt dreadfully burdened with

responsibility, both as to the things she did understand and the things

she did not understand. What she could not understand was a sense of

moral darkness, like a great, looming grey cloud, sometimes simply dark

and heavy, and at other times a cloud electric with coming danger. She

felt as if burdened with a secret which she longed to impart, only that

she did not know what it was. At times it was as if she carried some

monstrous thing on her back, whilst she could only see its dark,

shapeless shadow. Her self-confidence was going, and her culture was so

useless. What good was it to her now to know really well the writings of

Burke, or Macaulay--nay, of Racine and Pascal? She had never been

religious since her childhood, but in these long, solitary days in the

great house that grew more and more gloomy as she passed about it when

Molly was out, she began to feel new needs and to seek for old helps.

Molly was sometimes struck by the change in her companion. Miss Carew

seemed to have grown so futile, so incoherent and funny, unlike the Miss

Carew who had been her finishing governess not many years ago.

The sight of Carey's troubled, mottled face began to irritate Molly to

an unbearable degree.

"Why not have a treatment for eczema and have done with it? You used to

have quite a clear skin," she cried, in brutal irritation one morning.

"Oh! it's nerves--merely nerves," said poor Miss Carew apologetically.

"Then have a treatment for nerves," cried Molly furiously. "It is too

ridiculous to have blotches on your face because I have a bad temper!"

It was the night after the little supper party at which the slander was

born that Molly said this rude thing, and then abruptly left the

drawing-room to join a hairdresser who was waiting upstairs. Almost

immediately afterwards Adela Delaport Green was standing over the stiff

chair on which Miss Carew was sitting, very limp in figure, and holding

a damp handkerchief to her face.

"How d'ye do? They told me Molly was here," she said in a disappointed

voice, and her eyes ranged round the room with the alertness of a

sportswoman.

Adela had come with a purpose; she had come there to right the wrong and

to force Molly to tell the truth.

"She was here a moment ago. She has just gone up to the hairdresser,"

said Miss Carew as she got up, quickly restoring the damp handkerchief

to her pocket and composing her countenance, not without a certain

dignity. She liked Adela, who was always friendly and civil whenever

they met.

That little lady threw herself pettishly into a deep chair.

"So tiresome when I haven't a minute to spare, and I suppose he will

keep her nearly an hour?"

"Can I take a message?"

"Oh! no, thanks, dear Miss Carew, don't go up all those horrid steep

steps. Do rest and entertain me a little. I am sure you feel these hot

days terribly."

"I find it very cool and quiet here," said Miss Carew, a little sadly.

"I'm afraid it's lonely," cried Adela.

"Well! I oughtn't to grumble about that."

"No, you never do grumble, I know; but I feel sometimes that you must be

tired and anxious, placed, as you are, as the only thing instead of a

mother to poor, dear Molly!"

The fierce, quick envy betrayed in that "poor, dear Molly" did not reach

Miss Carew's brain, and a little sympathy was very soothing.

"Now, could any fortune stand this sort of thing?" asked Adela.

The companion shook her head sadly, but would not speak.

"You know that she has bought Sir Edmund Grosse's old yacht? And that

she is taking one of the best deer forests in the Highlands? And is it

true that she is thinking of buying Portlands?"

"Oh, yes!" sighed Miss Carew. "There is some new scheme every day."

"She has everything the world can give," said Adela sharply. "But, you

know," she went on, "people won't go on standing her manners as they do

now, even if she can pay her amazing way! Do you know that her cousin,

Lady Dawning, declares she won't have anything more to do with her? Not

that that matters very much; old Lady Dawning hardly counts, now that

Molly has really great people as her friends, only little leaks let in

the water by degrees."

A pause, and then suddenly:

"Do you know Father Molyneux?"

"Yes," said Miss Carew, who was glad to change the subject. "He is very

charming."

"I didn't know he was a friend of Molly's."

"Oh! didn't you? She took a great fancy to him last autumn; he used to

come to luncheon."

"Did he come often?"

"Oh! I think so, but I don't remember exactly."

"And has he been coming here lately?"

"I really don't know. I have my meals by myself now; the hours were so

irregular, and I am too old and dull for Molly's friends. I know she

went to see him a few days ago, and she came back looking agitated. I

was rather glad--I thought it would be good for her, but I fear it was

not. She has been more excited, I think, these two or three days. Her

nerves are really quite overwrought; she allows herself no quiet. Yes;

she was very much excited after seeing Father Molyneux."

Miss Carew was talking more to herself than to Adela.

"I thought perhaps he had pressed her to become a Roman Catholic;

certainly he upset her in some way."

Adela's small eyes were like sharp points as she looked at the older

woman.

Then was it really true? Oh! no; surely not. But then, what else could

he have said to upset Molly?

At that moment Molly's maid came into the room.

"Miss Dexter has only just heard that you were here, madam. She is very

sorry you have been waiting. She wished me to say that she is obliged to

go immediately to a sale at Christie's, and would you be able to go with

her?"

Adela declined, perceiving that Molly was in no mind for a private talk,

and having parted affectionately from Miss Carew, went her way to have

a chat with Lady Dawning.

In the afternoon she met several of her Roman Catholic acquaintances at

a charity performance in a well-known garden, and she pumped all those

she could decoy in turn into a _tête-à-tête_ as to Father Molyneux. She

was in reality devoured with the wish to know the truth. She had her own

thin but genuine share of ideality, and she had been more impressed by

Mark's renouncement of Groombridge Castle than by anything she had met

with before.

But gradually, as she hunted the story, she gave him up, not because of

any evidence of any kind, but because she did not find him regarded as

anything very wonderful. She had need of the enthusiasms of others to

make an atmosphere for her own ideals, and almost by chance she had not

met anyone much interested in the young preacher. Then she had dim

backwaters of anti-Popery in her mind, and they helped the reaction. She

had come out, lance in rest, to defend the victim of calumny; in a very

few days she had thrown him over, and was explaining pathetically to

anybody who would listen that she had had a shock to her faith in

humanity. And the story, starting by describing her own state of mind

and being almost entirely subjective, ended in bringing home to her

listeners with peculiar force the objective facts as asserted by Molly.

Catholics, she found, when she came to this advanced state of

propagation, were aghast at her story. They did not believe it, but they

were excessively annoyed, and were, for the most part, inclined to think

that Mark could not have been entirely prudent. But non-Catholics were,

naturally, more credulous.

A calumny is a quick and gross feeder. It has a thousand different ways

of assimilating things "light as air," or things dull from the ennui

which produced them, or things prickly with envy, or slushy, green

things born of unconscious jealousy, or unpleasant things born of false

pieties, or hard views born of tired experience, or worldly products of

incredulity, or directly evil suggestions, or the repulsions of satiated

sensuality, or the bitter fruits of melancholia, or the foreshadowings

of insanity, or the mere dislike of the lower moralities for the higher,

or the uneasiness felt by the ordinary in the presence of the rare, or

the revolt felt by the conventional against holier bonds, or the prattle

of curiosity, or the roughness of mere vitality, or the fusion of minds

at a low level.

This particular calumny was well watered and manured with all these

by-products of human life, and it grew to full size and height with a

rapidity that could not have been attained under less favourable

conditions.

BOOK IV

CHAPTER XXXII

ROSE SUMMONED TO LONDON

Rose was back in London the second week in July, summoned back rather

imperiously by Mr. Murray, Junior. The house had been shut up since the

departure of her tenants at Whitsuntide, and she had hoped not to reopen

it until the autumn. She had intended to go directly to her mother's

home in the country as soon as they could leave Paris. It was becoming a

question whether it would be a greater risk for Lady Charlton to endure

the heat in Paris or the fatigues of the long journey. Mr. Murray's

letter decided them to move. Rose must go, and her mother would not stay

behind alone. Lady Charlton decided to pay a month's visit to her

youngest daughter in Scotland, as Rose might be kept in London.

It was a disappointment. The house in London would be nearly as stuffy

as Paris. Rose disliked the season and was in no mood for the stale

echoes of its dying excitements. She would not tell her friends that she

was back; she would keep as quiet as she had been in Paris.

The first morning, after early service and breakfast, she went to the

library to wait for the lawyer's visit. It was the only room in which

to receive him; the dining-room, and drawing-room, and the little

boudoir upstairs, were not opened. Rose was inclined to leave them as

they were, with the furniture in brown wrappers, for the present; but

she would rather have seen Mr. Murray in any room but the library.

The morning sun was full on the windows that opened to the rather dreary

garden at the back. She wondered why Mr. Murray had written so urgently,

and why Edmund Grosse had not written for several weeks. Up to now they

had done all this horrid business between them, and she had only had

occasional reports from her cousin. Now she must face the subject with

the lawyer himself. She was puzzled to account for the change in the

situation.

At the exact moment he had mentioned, Mr. Murray's tall person with its

heavy, bent head appeared in the library. As they greeted they were both

conscious that it was in this same room, seated at the wide

writing-table still in the same place, and still bearing the large

photograph of Sir David Bright, where he had first told her of the

strange dispositions of her husband's will. He remembered vividly her

look then--undaunted and confident--as she had gently but firmly

asserted that there must be another will. But had she not also said it

would never be found?

But the present occupied the lawyer much more than the past. He was

eager and a little triumphant in his story of the progress of the case,

and did not notice that the sweet face opposite to him became more and

more white as he went on. He told her all he had told Sir Edmund when he

first got back from the yacht; he told of the mysterious visit he had

received from Dr. Larrone, and how he could prove from the letters of

the Florentine detective that Madame Danterre had sent the doctor to

England to take a certain small, black box to Miss Dexter.

Then he paused.

"I told Sir Edmund how our Florentine detective, Pietrino, had made

friends with one of the nurses, and that she described Madame Danterre

ordering the box to be opened and having a seizure--a heart

attack--while the letters were spread out on her bed. Nurse Edith said

then that she had put them back in a hurry and locked the box, and that

it had not been reopened by Madame Danterre. Some weeks later when she

was near her end, Madame Danterre had a scene with Dr. Larrone which

ended in his consenting to take the box to London as soon as she was

dead, but the nurse was sure that the doctor was told nothing as to the

contents of the box. That was as much as we knew up to Easter, and while

waiting for the arrival of Akers, and Stock, the other private who had

witnessed the signature. They got here in Easter week, and I saw them

with Sir Edmund, and we both cross-questioned them closely. Akers's

evidence is beyond suspicion, and is perfectly supported by that of

Stock. He described all that happened at the witnessing of the General's

signature most circumstantially, but, of course, he knew nothing of the

contents of the paper. But now I have more important evidence than any

we have had so far, and the extraordinary thing is that Sir Edmund does

not wish to hear it. I cannot understand why!"

Rose remained silent. She was looking fixedly at a paper-knife which she

held in her hand.

It suddenly struck the lawyer as a flash of most embarrassing light

that possibly there was some complication of a dangerous and tender kind

between Sir Edmund and his cousin. He could not dwell on such a notion

now--it might be absolute nonsense, but it made him go on hastily:

"I have had a visit from Nurse Edith, and as Pietrino suspected, she

knows much more than she would allow to him. I think she was waiting to

see if money would be offered for her information, but Pietrino would

not fall into the risk of buying evidence. He waited; she was watched

until she came to London, and she had not been here twenty-four hours

before she came to me. She declares now that, as she was gathering up

the papers, she had seen that the long letter Madame Danterre had been

reading when she had the attack of faintness was written to some one

called Rose. She knew it was that letter which had done the mischief.

She slipped it into her pocket when she put the rest away. I believe it

was naughty curiosity, but she wishes us to think that she knew the

whole scandal about the General's will, and did what she did from a

sense of justice. When off duty she took the paper to her room, and when

she opened it she found the will inside it. In her excitement she called

the housemaid, an Englishwoman with whom she had made friends, and she

copied the will while they were together, and the names of Akers and

Stock--of whom she could not possibly have heard--are in her copy. I

have seen that copy, Lady Rose, and----" He paused and glanced at her

for a moment, and then his eyes sought the trees in the garden even as

they had done when he had made that other and awful announcement on the

day of the memorial service to Sir David. Rose flushed a little, and

her breathing came quickly, but she made no sign of impatience.

"Sir David left the whole of his fortune to you subject to an annual

payment of a thousand a-year to Madame Danterre during her lifetime."

Complete silence followed. Lady Rose either could not or would not

speak. Out of the pale, distinguished slightly worn face the eyes looked

at Mr. Murray with no surprise. Had she not always said that she did not

believe the iniquitous will Mr. Murray had brought her to be the true

one, but had she not also maintained that the true will would never be

found? She did not say so to Mr. Murray, but in fact she shrank from

making too sure of Nurse Edith's evidence. She had so long forbidden

herself to believe in the return of worldly fortune or to wish for it.

Mr. Murray coughed. No words of congratulation seemed available. At last

he went on:

"Nurse Edith says she did not read the letter which was with the will.

Directly she went on duty in the morning, and while Madame Danterre was

asleep she put the papers back in the black box and the key of the box

in its usual place in a little bag on a table standing close by the head

of the bed. It was, as I have said, this same box which was put into Dr.

Larrone's care before he started on his mysterious journey to see Miss

Dexter. Now our position is very strong. We have evidence of the

witnessing of a paper by two men. We have the copy of the will made by

the nurse and witnessed by the housemaid, and it bears the signatures of

those two men. Then you must remember that, in a case of this kind, the

court is much more likely to set aside a will leaving property away from

the family than if the will in dispute had been an ordinary one in

favour of his relations."

"Oh! it is horrible--too horrible!" cried Rose. "There must be some

mistake. That young girl I met at Groombridge! Even if the poor mother

were really wicked, that girl cannot have carried it on!"

Rose had leant her elbows on the table, and clasped her white hands

tightly and then covered her face with them for a moment.

"I can't believe it. I feel there is some terrible mistake, and we might

ruin this girl's life. It would be ill-gotten, unblest wealth."

The lawyer noted with surprise that these two--Sir Edmund and Lady

Rose--were not more anxious for wealth, rather less so, since both had

known comparative poverty.

"I don't believe anyone is the better for living on fraud, Lady Rose,

and I don't believe you have any right to drop the case. You have to

think of Sir David's good name and of his wishes. The will you are

suffering from was a portentous wrong."

Rose trembled. Had she not felt it the most awful, the most portentous

wrong? Had it not burnt deep miserable wounds in her soul? The whole

horror of the desecration of her married life had been revealed to her

in this room by this man. Did she need that he should tell her what that

misery had been? The words he had used then were as well known to her as

the words he had used to-day.

Rose said after a longer pause, and with slight hesitation:

"And Sir Edmund does not know what Nurse Edith told you? He has not seen

the copy of the will?"

"No; I wanted him to, but he refused to hear any more on the subject. I

cannot understand it at all." He spoke with considerable irritation, his

big forehead contracted with a deep frown. "Sir Edmund, after making the

guess on which the whole thing has turned, after discovering Akers and

Stock, after spending large sums in the necessary work----"

"Has he spent much money?" Rose flushed deeply.

But Mr. Murray, who usually had more tact, was now too full of his

grievance to pause.

"He spent money as long as he could, and now takes no more interest in

the matter on the ground that he can no longer be of any use. Why, it

was his judgment we wanted, his perceptions; no one could be of more use

than Sir Edmund!"

"And who is paying the expenses now?"

"Ah! that is the reason why I wished to see you as soon as possible. I

felt that I could not, without your approval, continue as we are now.

The last cheque from Sir Edmund covered all expenses to the end of the

year. I have advanced what has been necessary since then, and if you

really wish the thing dropped, that is entirely my own affair. But I do

most earnestly hope that you will not do anything so wrong. I feel very

strongly my responsibility towards Sir David's memory in this matter."

"I feel," said Rose, but her manner was irresolute, "that the scandal

has been forgotten by now; things come and go so fast. He will be

remembered only as a great soldier who died for his country."

"It may be forgotten," said Mr. Murray in a stern voice she had never

heard before. "It may be forgotten in a society which is always needing

some new sensation and is always well supplied. But there is a less

fluctuating public opinion. We men of business keep a clearer view of

character, and we know better how through all classes there is a verdict

passed on men that does not pass away in a season. Do you think, madam,

that when men treasure a good name it is the gossip of a London season

they regard? No; it is the thoughts of other good men in which they wish

to live. It is the sympathy of the good that a good man has a right to.

I believe in a future life, but I don't imagine I know whether in

another world they rejoice or suffer pain by anything that affects their

good name here. But I do know, Lady Rose, that deep in our nature is the

sense of duty to their memory, and I cannot believe that such an

instinct is without meaning or without some actual bearing on departed

souls. I don't expect Sir David to visit me in dreams, but I do expect

to feel a deep and reasonable self-reproach if I do not try to clear his

name."

The heavy features of the solicitor had worked with a good deal of

emotion. The thought, the words "departed souls," were no mere words to

him in these summer days while Mrs. Murray, Junior, was supposed to be

doing well after an operation in a nursing home, and the doctors were

inclined to speak of next month's progress and on that of the month

after that, and to be silent as to any dates far ahead. In his

professional hours he did not dwell on these things, but it was the

actual spiritual conditions of the life he and his wife were leading

that gave a strange force to his words.

"She never loved him," thought Mr. Murray as he looked out of the

window. He was on the same side of the writing-table that he had been on

when he had first told her of the deep insult offered to her by Sir

David. He did not realise now the intensity of the contempt he had felt

then for the departed General as he looked at his photograph. It was

intolerable, he had thought then, that a man should have those large,

full eyes, that straight, manly look and bearing, who had gone to his

grave having deliberately planned that his dead hand should so deeply

wound a defenceless woman, and that woman his sweet, young wife.

Murray's mind was so full now of relief at the idea that Sir David had

done his best at the last, that in his relief he almost forgot that, in

a woman's mind the main fact might still be that there had been a Madame

Danterre in the case!

But Rose now, as when he had first told her of Madame Danterre's

existence, was seeking with a single eye to find the truth. It had

seemed to her then a moral impossibility to believe that her husband had

meant to leave this horrible insult to their married life. David had

been incapable of anything so monstrous; he had not in his character

even the courage of such a crime.

But now the key to the situation, according to Mr. Murray, was Molly;

and Rose again brought to bear all that she had of perception, of

experience, of instinct, to see her way clearly. She was silent; then at

last she looked up.

"Mr. Murray, Miss Dexter could not commit such a crime. Why, I know her;

I spent some days in a country house with her. I know her quite well,

and I don't like her very much, but she really can't have done anything

of the kind, and therefore, the case won't be proved. I am sure it

won't. And if it fails only harm will be done to David's memory, not

good."

"That is what Sir Edmund said, but believe me, Lady Rose, you have

neither of you anything to go upon. You think it impossible, but you

don't either of you see the immense force of the temptation. Some crimes

may need a villainous nature. This, if you could see it truly, only

needs one that is human under temptation, ignorant of danger, and

ambitious."

"But then, was that why Edmund would have nothing more to do with the

case?" thought Rose.

The look of clear, earnest, searching in Rose's eyes was clouded by a

frown.

The clock struck twelve. Mr. Murray rose.

"I am half an hour late for an appointment. Lady Rose, forgive me; I am

an old man, and maybe I take a harsh view of what passes before me. But

there is nothing, let me tell you, that alarms me more in the present

day than the way in which men and women lose their sense of duty in

their sense of sentimental sympathy."

CHAPTER XXXIII

BROWN HOLLAND COVERS

That afternoon Rose was standing by the window in the drawing-room when

she became conscious that her gown was quite hot in the burning sun,

and, undoubtedly, its soft, grey tone would fade. She drew back and

pulled down the blinds.

It was not the first time she had put off her black, for, in the Paris

heat, it had become intolerable, and she had certainly enjoyed her visit

to an inexpensive but excellent dressmaker, who had produced this grey

gown with all its determined simplicity.

Rose looked round at the drawing-room now. The furniture in holland

covers was stacked in the middle of the room; the pictures were wrapped

in brown paper with large and rather unnecessary white labels printed

with "Glass" in red letters. The fire-irons were dressed in something

that looked like Jaeger and the tassels of the blinds hung in yellow

cambric bags. Rose smiled a little as she recalled how strange and

strong an impression a room in such a state had made on her in her

childhood. The drawing-room in her London home had seemed incomparably

more attractive then than at any other time. Lady Charlton had once

brought Rose up to see a dentist on a bright, autumn day. She had not

been much hurt, but it was a great comfort when the visit was over. She

and her mother had dinner on two large mutton chops, and some apricot

tartlets from a pastry-cook, things ordered by Lady Charlton with a view

to giving as little trouble as possible to two able-bodied women who

were living on board wages, and both of whom were, in private life,

excellent cooks. Lady Charlton was anxious, too, not to give trouble by

sending messages, having quite forgotten that there was also a boy who

lived in the house. So, after lunch, she had gone out to find a cab for

herself, and had left Rose to rest with a book on the big morocco sofa

in the dining-room.

Rose had found her way to the drawing-room, and she could see now the

half-open shutter and the rich light of the autumn sun turning all the

dust of the air to gold in one big shaft of light. The child had never

seen the house when the family was away before, and with awestruck,

mysterious joy, she had lifted corners of covers and peered under chairs

and recognised legs of tables and footstools. Then she had stood up and

taken a comprehensive view of the whole of this world of mountains and

valleys, precipices and familiar little home corners, all covered in

brown holland, like sand instead of grass, all golden lights and soft

shadows.

What had there been so very exciting in it--an excitement she could

still recall as keenly now? Was it the greatness of the revolution, or

surprise at the new order of things? It was such a startling

interruption of all the usual relations between the furniture of the

house and its human beings. A great London house wrapped up in the old

way spoke more of the old order its influence, its importance, than did

the house when inhabited, and out of its curl papers. Nothing could

speak more of law and order and care, and the "proper" condition of

things, and the self-respect of housemaids, the passing effectiveness of

sweeps, and the unobtrusive attentiveness of carpenters! But to the

child there had been a glorious sense of loneliness and licence as she

danced up and down the broad vacant spaces and jumped over the rolls of

Turkey carpets.

Rose envied that child now, with an envy that she hoped was not bitter.

It is not because we knew no sorrows in our childhood that we would fain

recall it. It is because we now so seldom know one whole hour of its

licensed freedom, its absolute liberty in spite of bonds.

A loud door-bell, as it seemed to Rose, sounded through the house as she

closed the shutter she had opened when she came in. She knew whose ring

it must be, and came quietly downstairs with a little frown.

Edmund Grosse had been shown into the library. The room looked east, and

was now deliciously cool after the street. The dark blinds were half-way

down, and a little pretence at a breeze was coming in over the burnt

turf of the back garden.

Edmund's manner as he met her was as usual, but tinged perhaps with a

little irony--very little, but just a flavour of it mingled with the

immense friendliness and the wish to serve and help her.

Rose was, to his surprise, almost shy as she came into the room, but in

another moment she was herself.

"Mamma has borne the journey splendidly. I've had an excellent account

in a long telegram this morning."

But while she told him of their journey and of their life in Paris, a

rather piteous look came into the blue eyes. Was she not to hear any of

Edmund's own news? Was she not to be allowed to show any sympathy? She

might not say how she had been thinking of him, dreaming of how nobly he

had met his troubles, praying for him in Notre Dame des Victories. She

saw at once that she must not; there was something changed. It was too

odd, but she was afraid of him. She shook herself and determined not to

be silly. She would venture to say what she wished.

"Are things----" she began, but her voice trembled a little as, raising

her head, she saw that he was watching her. "Are things as bad as you

feared?"

He at once looked out of the window.

"Quite as bad as possible. I am just holding out till I can get some

work. Long ago, soon after I left the Foreign Office, I was asked to do

some informal work in Egypt; they wanted a semi-official go-between for

a time. I wish I had not refused then; I have been an ass throughout. If

I had even done occasional jobs they would have had some excuses for

putting me in somewhere now on the ground of my having had experience. I

have just written two articles on an Indian question, for I know that

part of the world as well as anybody over here, and they may lead to

something. Meanwhile, I am very well, so don't waste sympathy on me, I

am lodging with the Tarts, where everything is in apple-pie order."

"Oh, I am glad you are with those nice Tarts!" cried Rose, with genuine

womanly relief, that in another class of life would have found form and

expression in some such remark as that she knew Mary Tart would keep

things clean and comfortable, and would do the airing thoroughly.

Edmund's voice alone had made sympathy impossible, but he was a little

annoyed at the cheerful tone of Rose's words about the Tarts. It was

unlikely that she could have satisfied him in any way by speech or by

silence as to his own affairs. But why was she so very well dressed? He

had got so accustomed to her in soft, shabby black that he was not sure

if he liked this Paris frock; the simplicity of it was too clever.

There was silence, and Rose rearranged a bowl of roses her sister had

sent her from the country. She chose out a copper-coloured bud and held

it towards him, and a certain pleading would creep into her manner as

she did so.

Edmund smiled. She was really always the same quite hopeless mixture of

soft and hard elements.

"Have you seen Mr. Murray, Junior?" he asked.

"Yes; he came this morning, and I can't conceive what to do. At last I

got so dazed with thinking that this afternoon I have tried to forget

all about it."

"That will hardly get things settled," said Edmund, rather drily.

Tears came into her eyes, and were forced back by an effort of will.

Then she told him quite quietly of Nurse Edith's evidence.

"You mean," he explained, "that there is a copy of the real will leaving

everything to you. I can hardly believe it. In fact, I find it harder to

believe than when I first guessed at the truth. I suppose it is an

effect on the nerves, but now that we are actually proved right I am

simply bewildered. It seems almost too good to be true."

Rose was also, it seemed, more dazed than triumphant. He felt it very

strange that she had not told him the great news as soon as he came

into the room.

"What made you say that you could not conceive what to do? There can be

no doubt now." He spoke quickly and incisively.

"I cannot see," she said at last, "what is right. Mr. Murray is very

positive, and absolutely insists that it is my duty to allow the thing

to go on."

"Of course," Edmund interjected.

"But then, if he is mistaken! He really believes that Miss Dexter

received the will from Dr. Larrone and has suppressed it."

Edmund got up suddenly, and looked down on her with what she felt to be

a stern attention.

"And that," she concluded, looking bravely into the grave eyes bent on

her, "I absolutely decline to believe!"

"Of course," said Grosse abruptly, "it's out of the question. It's just

like a solicitor--fits his puzzle neatly together and is quite satisfied

without seeing the gross absurdity of supposing that such a girl could

carry on a huge fraud. A perfectly innocent, fresh, candid girl, brought

up in a respectable English country house--the thing is ridiculous!"

He spoke with great feeling; he was more moved than she had seen him for

a long time past, perhaps that was why she felt her own enthusiasm for

Molly's innocence just a little damped. He sat down again as abruptly as

he had risen.

"But it would be madness to drop the whole affair. This evidence of

Nurse Edith's is really conclusive; and the only thing I can see to be

said on the other side would be that David might have sent the will to

Madame Danterre to give her the option of destroying it. But there is

just another possibility, which Murray won't even consider, that Larrone

destroyed the will on the journey."

"Do you know," said Rose, with a smile, "I believe it's conceivable that

it is in the box, but that she has never opened the box at all! I

believe a girl might shrink so much from reading that woman's papers

that she might not even open the box."

"No one but a woman would have thought of such a possibility, but I

daresay you are right."

He looked at her more gently, with more pleasure, and she instantly felt

brighter.

"Then don't you think it would be possible to get at some plan, some

arrangement with her? It seems to me," she went on earnestly, "that we

ought to try to do it privately. Perhaps we might offer her the

allowance that would have been made to her mother. If she could be

convinced herself that the fortune is not really hers she might give it

up without all the horrid shame and publicity of a trial."

"Yes, but the scandal was public, and you have to think of David's good

name."

"Yes; but then you see, Edmund, the true will would be proved publicly,

and the explanation of the delay would be that it had not been found

before."

"She would have to expose her wretched mother."

"Not more than the trial would expose her; whether we won the case or

lost it, Madame Danterre must be exposed. But if I am right how could it

be done?"

"I think I had better do it myself," said Edmund. "I could see Miss

Dexter. I really think I could do it, feeling my way, of course."

Rose did not answer. She locked her fingers tightly together as

something inarticulate and shapeless struggled in her mind and in her

heart. She had no right, no claim, she thought earnestly, trying to keep

calm and at peace in her innermost soul. But she did not then or

afterwards allow to herself what she meant by "right" or by "claim."

She looked up a moment later with a bright smile.

"Yes," she said, "you would be the best--far the best. Miss Dexter would

feel more at her ease with you than with me or anyone I can think of."

"Of course, I must consult Murray first," said Edmund, absorbed in the

thought of the proposed interview. "I ought to go now; I have an

appointment at the Foreign Office--probably as futile as any of my

efforts hitherto when looking for work."

He spoke the last words rather to himself than to his cousin, and then

left her alone. He did not question as he walked through the streets

across the park whether he had been as full of sympathy to Rose as he

had ever been; he was far too much accustomed to his own constancy to

question it now. But somehow his consciousness of Rose's presence had

not been as apparent as usual. No half ironic, half tender comments on

her attitude at this crisis had escaped him. He had been more

business-like than usual, and, man-like, he did not know it.

CHAPTER XXXIV

THE WRATH OF A FRIEND

Canon Nicholls had had a hard fight with a naturally hot temper, and his

servant would have given him a very fair character on that point if he

had been applied to. But there came a stifling July morning when nothing

could please him. He had been out to dinner the night before, and it was

the man's opinion that he had "eaten something too good for him." He had

been to church early, and had come back without the light in his face he

usually brought with him, as if the radiance from the sanctuary lamp

loved to linger on the blind face. He was difficult all the rest of the

morning, and the kind, patient woman who read aloud to him and wrote his

letters became nervous and diffident, thinking it was her own fault.

In the afternoon he usually took a stroll with his servant for guide,

and then had a doze, after which he went to Benediction at a

neighbouring convent. But to-day he settled into his arm-chair, and said

he meant to stay there, and that he wanted nothing, and (with more

emphasis) nobody.

He was, in truth, greatly disturbed in his mind. He had heard things he

did not like to hear of Mark Molyneux. He had been quite prepared for

some jealousy and some criticism of the young man he loved. Nobody

charms everybody, and if anybody charms many bodies, then the rest of

the bodies, who are not charmed, become surprised and critical, if not

hostile. It is so among all sets of human beings: the Canon was no acrid

critic of religious persons, only he had always found them to be quite

human.

The immediate cause of the acute trouble the Canon was going through

to-day had been a visit of the day before from Mrs. Delaport Green.

Adela, who, as he had once told Mark, sometimes looked in for a few

minutes, was under the impression that she very often called on the old

blind priest, and often mentioned her little attempts to cheer him up

with great complacence, especially to her Roman Catholic friends, as if

she were a constant ray of light in his darkness. She had not seen him

since her return from Cairo, but her first words were:

"I was so sorry not to be able to come last week," spoken with the air

of a weekly visitor.

But the Canon thought it so kind of her to come at all that he was no

critic of details in her regard.

She had cantered with a light hand over all sorts of

subjects,--Westminster Cathedral, the reunion of Churches, her own

Catholic tendencies, her charities, the newest play (which she described

well), and her anxiety because her husband ate too much. Then, at last,

she lighted on Mark's sermons.

Canon Nicholls spoke with reserve of Mark; he was shy of betraying his

own affection for him.

"Yes; it is young eloquence, fresh and quite genuine," he said in

response to Adela's enthusiasm.

"It sounds so very real," said Adela, with a sigh. "One couldn't

imagine, you know, that he could have any doubts, or that he could be

sorry, or disappointed, or anything of that sort--and yet----"

"And yet, what?" asked the Canon.

"And yet--well, I know I am foolish, and I do idealise people and make

up heroes--I know I do! It is such a pleasure to admire people, isn't

it? And after he gave up being heir to Groombridge Castle! I was staying

there when poor, dear Lord Groombridge got the news of his ordination,

and it was all so sad and so beautiful, and now I can't bear to think

that Father Molyneux is sorry already that he gave it all up."

"Sorry that he gave it up--!"

Adela gave a little jump in her chair. It made her so nervous to see a

blind man excited. But curiosity was strong within her.

"I am afraid it is quite true; a friend of mine who knows him quite

well, told me."

"Told you _what_?"

"That he was unhappy, and has doubts or troubles of some kind. I didn't

understand what exactly, but she knows that he will give it all up--the

vows and all that, I mean--if----"

"If what?"

Adela was not really wanting in courage.

"If a certain very rich woman would marry him. It seems such a

come-down, so very dull and dreadful, doesn't it?"

"You know all that's a lie!"

"Well, it was all told to me."

"But you knew there was not a word of truth in it, only you wanted to

see how I would take it. And I thought you were a kind-hearted woman!

How blind I am!"

Adela was galled to the quick. A quarrel, a scolding, would have been

tolerable, and perhaps exciting, but this naïve disappointment in

herself, this judgment from the man to whom she had been so good, was

too much!

"I thought it was much more kind to let you know what everybody is

saying, that you might help him. I am very sorry I have made a mistake,

and that I must be going now. It is much later than I thought."

"Must you?" There was the faintest sarcasm in the very polite tone of

the Canon's voice.

Nor had this conversation been all; for out at dinner that night the

Canon had been worried with much the same story from a totally different

quarter. It was after the ladies had left the dining-room, and the

gossip had been rougher.

He gave all his thoughts to brooding over the matter next day. Mark

could not have managed well--must have done or said something stupid,

and made enemies, he reflected gloomily.

Canon Nicholls had been young once, and almost as popular a preacher as

Mark, and he did not underrate the difficulties. But it was his firm

persuasion that, with tact and common-sense they were by no means

insurmountable. What really distressed the old man was that perhaps Mark

had been right in thinking that he personally could not surmount them.

And it was Canon Nicholls's doing that he was not by this time a novice

in a Carthusian Monastery! Therefore the Canon's soul was heavy with

anxiety as to whether he had made a great mistake.