Judy laughingly got to her feet and went up to her room. She was very

tired; though she was tenacious of constitution, the first elasticity of

youth was gone from her, and she was glad of the warm water, the soft

bed, the light meal of eggs and cocoa that Mrs. Penticost brought her

when she was between the sheets. Ishmael was not the only one who felt a

deadening of the spirit that night, and even on awakening the following

morning. Judith had carried that about with her in her consciousness for

enough years now to recognise the old weight upon her thoughts on

awakening. But Georgie, triumphant, healthy, full of excitement at the

new world that lay beyond the low wall of Paradise Cottage, ran into

Judith's room, the "best" bedroom, the one Blanche Grey had had when the

childish Judy had been wont to come in as Georgie came in to the woman

Judy now. The turn of the wheel struck upon Miss Parminter's mind as she

lay and watched the slim, sturdy young thing perched upon the end of the

bed, her boyish head bare and a ray of morning sun tingeing its soft

brown to a brighter hue and showing up the clearness of her pale matt

skin.

"I don't think I much like your hero of romance," grumbled Georgie. "He

took precious little notice of either of us, and he looks so surly."

"He's not my hero," objected Judy, "he's Joe's; and I'm sure he isn't

really surly. I think he was disappointed at not seeing Joe."

"Well, it was very ungallant of him when we turned up all right. I have

a good mind to flirt outrageously with him to punish him. And when he's

deeply in love with me I shall say 'No, thank you, sir! I've no use for

surly squires, and I've a young man of my own at home.'"

"Georgie, you're to do nothing of the sort. You know I told you all

about him to make you careful. He was abominably treated by that cat

Blanche, and I won't have it happen again."

"Well, I don't suppose I shall have a chance. I don't suppose he'll look

at me. I don't think country bumpkins are educated up to my peculiar

style of beauty." And Georgie stroked her ridiculous little nose with an

affectation of content.

"Thank heaven you aren't a beauty, or there'd be no holding you at all!"

"That's just where you mistake. If I were really pretty, instead of

having a _petit minois chiffoné_ I should be able to sit placidly and

leave it all to my profile. As it is I have to exert myself to charm,

and everyone knows charm is far more fatal to man than mere looks. I am

rather fascinating, aren't I, in spite of my pudding face? What was

Blanche like, Judy? Didn't you see her the other day in town?"

"Yes, I met her at a Private View," admitted Judy. "She had sort of gone

to pieces, if you know what I mean. I don't suppose it was a sudden

process really, but it came on me suddenly."

"What did she look like?"

"As large as life and twice as unnatural. She had lost her 'eye' for

making up, as they say everyone does, and the rouge stood out on the

white powder so that you could see it a mile off. She gushed at me, and

I felt she wasn't meaning a single word she said. She had her husband

with her and introduced him. She even patronised me for not having one.

I didn't say I'd sooner not than have one like hers, because she

wouldn't have believed me, and it would have been rude. But he was a

little wisp of a man--a seedy little clerk. She knew she couldn't carry

off the idea of having made a good match from a worldly point of view,

so she murmured something to me about how beautiful true love was when

it was the 'real thing,' and how she had never known what the meaning of

life was till she met 'Teddie.' Do stop me; I'm being an awful cat! But

that woman aroused all the cat in me; she's such an awful liar, and a

liar is the worst of sinners, because he--or perhaps more generally

she--is so absolutely disintegrating to the whole social fabric."

"I suppose she must have been very fascinating once upon a time."

"She was, though, oddly enough, men either hated her or were deeply in

love with her, and as time went on the sort that were in love with her

grew more and more fearful. But it was young girls she attracted most. I

used to think her the most wonderful thing in the world, and I used to

be enraged if I introduced her to anyone and they hated her at sight. If

one's eye for making up gets out as one grows older, one's eye for life

gets a more and more deadly clearness--unless you're like Blanche, when

I suppose you grow more and more incapable of seeing the truth."

"You think an awful lot about truth, don't you, Judy?"

"Yes, I do, though I suppose if you knew all about me you'd think it

very inconsistent. Of course I don't mean just 'telling the truth,' as

children say, but the actual worship of truth in our relations with each

other and ourselves. But it's not a counsel of worldly wisdom, so don't

pay any attention to me."

"But I want to. I admire you ever so," said Georgie girlishly. "I know

that I'm an awful little beast in all sorts of ways, but I would love to

be like you if I could."

"Heaven forbid!" ejaculated Judy.

"Well, as much as would suit my style," laughed Georgie. "But tell me,

Judy, what sort of thing d'you call being badly untruthful--the sort

that matters? I'll tell you the sort of thing I do, and I can't help

myself. I hate myself, but I can't stop. You know just before I got

engaged to Val?"

"Yes?"

"Well, we were at that house on the river, and Val came down for the

day, and mother knew we were going to get engaged, I suppose; anyway,

she didn't make the usual fuss about being alone, and we went out in the

punt and took lunch to a backwater. I didn't even really think he cared

for me that kind of way; I was only wondering. I'd been washing my hair

when he arrived, and it wasn't quite dry. This was before I cut it off,

you know. And so--I thought I'd take it down and finish drying it...."

"Go on. I've done that myself," murmured Judith dryly.

"Well, I was sitting a little in front of him on the bank and a little

bit of my hair blew in his face. I manoeuvred so that it should. Beast

that I am! And later, when I was doing it up again, he handed me the

pins and said, 'Ripping stuff it is, Georgie!' It was the first day he

called me Georgie, and you can't think how often he did it. Why do men

always call hair 'stuff,' I wonder? Well--oh, where was I? Oh, I know.

And then he added, 'It was blowing across my face just now.' And I said,

'Oh, was it? I hope it didn't tickle. Why on earth didn't you tell me?'

And he said, 'I loved it' in a funny sort of fat voice. As though I

hadn't known, and hadn't planned for just that.... I think that's the

sort of thing that makes me hate myself, and yet I can't help it."

Judith lay silent. She was too used to playing every move in her power

with full knowledge of the effect to blame this child for tampering with

forces which she was blandly innocent of understanding.

"I don't think that 'mattered,' as you call it," she said at length.

"After all, you're honest with yourself, that's the chief thing. I admit

if you go on being dishonest with others in time it has a deadly

tendency to react on yourself and blur your vision, as it did with

Blanche, but then she was crooked anyway. I shouldn't worry about myself

if I were you, Georgie!"

"Well, it deceived Val, I suppose," remarked Georgie.

"Not about anything vital. He loved you already, and you were to find

you loved him. Besides ... with men ... it's not quite the same

thing...."

Georgie stared at her in round-eyed silence for a moment, struck by a

weary something that was no more old than young, that was eternal, in

Judith's voice. Suddenly the elder girl seemed so much woman as she lay

there--the everlasting feminine, the secret store of the knowledge of

the ages.... Georgie, for all she was newly engaged, felt somehow like a

little girl. Judith's long half-closed eyes met hers, but with no frank

giving in their depths at the moment. She was withdrawn and Georgie felt

it.

"Well, I must get up," said Judith suddenly. "Clear out and see if you

can hurry Mrs. Penticost over breakfast."

Georgie went, and Judith slipped out of bed, and going to the window,

examined her face in the clear morning light, lifting her hand-glass at

many angles.

After her bath she took up the glass again and began with infinite care

to rub in first rouge and then powder. Gradually she became a less

haggard-looking creature and the years seemed to fall away. When she

had done she examined herself anxiously. The dread that her eye would

get "out," as Blanche's had, was upon her.

Relieved by the scrutiny, she stepped into a soft rose cashmere frock

and buttoned up the long, close-fitting bodice, settled the little

ruffle at the throat, and adjusted with deft fingers the perky folds of

the bustle. "Making-up makes one look so much better that it makes one

feel better," she reflected. She took a final look at herself in the

dimpled glass that gave back her figure in a series of waves and angles,

and suddenly she gave a little half-rueful laugh. She was comparing

herself with the slangy fresh girl downstairs, that product of the new

decade, so different from the generation born only ten years before her.

Judith had spoken to this wholesome, adorably _gauche_ young creature of

truth, while, to maintain the thing that stood to her for light and food

and truth itself, she had, amongst other shifts, to resort even to this

daily paltering with the verities upon her face.

CHAPTER VIII

WHAT NICKY DID

Killigrew arrived a couple of days later, and Ishmael drove Georgie over

to meet him. Judith had refused to go and Georgie liked the idea of a

drive. Ishmael was still shy in Georgie's presence, simply because he

had never met anyone in the least like her. He was only a matter of some

thirteen or fourteen years her senior, but that made all the difference

at that period. Ishmael had been born in the midst of the dark,

benighted 'forties; Georgie at the beginning of the 'sixties. He had

grown up before any of the reforms which made modern England; she had

first become intelligently aware of the world at a time when nothing

else was in the air, when even woman was beginning to feel her wings and

be wishful to test them. She was alarmingly modern, the emancipated

young thing who began to blossom forth in the late 'seventies and early

'eighties; she studied painting at an art school, and had announced her

intention to her alarmed but admiring parents of "living her own life."

There was a horrid rumour that she had once been dared to smoke and had

done so. Her aggressively "arty" dress was only the temporary expression

of her fluid and receptive mind feeling and trying for itself. Her

frankness was disconcerting at first, yet somehow very delightful

too.... It made him feel young also; it was as though she were

perpetually telling him things that took him into a conspiracy with her.

Judy had made him feel old; all the time he was aware of things in her

life of which he was ignorant, and though he had never been intimate

enough with her to mind this, yet it did not tend towards intimacy now.

There was always the knowledge of Blanche and Phoebe between him and

any friendliness with Judith, knowledge of so much he had resolutely put

behind him. But with this careless girl, so untouched and confident, it

was as though it were possible to be the self he felt that he now was

without any drag from that old Ishmael. He knew vaguely that she was

engaged, and this seemed to make intercourse lighter and more jolly.

Every relationship is new, because to no two people is anyone quite the

same, but there was in the first tentative approaches of his

acquaintance with Georgie Barlow a novelty that struck him pleasantly.

He was shy of her only because he was still so ignorant, but he felt no

barriers, rather an overlapping of something they both had in common,

which is the surest herald sometimes of friendship, sometimes of other

things.

Killigrew arrived with a copy of "Richard Feverel" under one arm and the

first edition of Fitzgerald's "Omar Khayyam" under the other. He exuded

life and enjoyment, and Ishmael wondered what indigestion, mental or

physical could have had him in its grip when he felt that the power of

ecstasy was slipping. Certainly he seemed to bubble with it now, though

it remained to be seen whether what chiefly evoked it were the

impersonal things of life or not. It was impossible to feel any shyness

with him, and even Ishmael soon was talking and feeling curiously

unscathed when Killigrew unabashedly referred to old times, painful and

otherwise. "It is only Joe ..." Ishmael reflected, which was the fatal

leniency that had pursued Killigrew through life.

Georgie left the two men to spend the evening together and went back to

Paradise Cottage, but before she fell asleep that night she heard a low

murmur of voices outside. She jumped out of bed and ran to the window.

It was a night of bright moonlight, and under the shadow of the

tamarisk hedge she could see Killigrew's darker figure, with its

unmistakably raking poise. Another shadow had just parted from it and

was coming to the door--the figure of Judith. She had been out when

Georgie entered--out for a walk, Mrs. Penticost had said. Georgie

skipped back to bed full of excitement. She had guessed before that Judy

cared about Killigrew, and now, judging by that parting, they were

engaged and everything was to be all right. How thrilling!... She smiled

and dimpled as she met Judy's eye next morning, inviting the

announcement.

The days went on and Judy did not make it. Only as the lovely spring

days, pale with windy sunlight or soft with fuming mists, slipped by,

Judith blossomed as the rose. But it was a fierce blossoming, a fiery

happiness, that Georgie could not understand. It was not thus that the

nice jolly Val had made her feel. She wondered and she felt a little

hurt that Judy should not confide in her, but as the days went on her

own affairs began to engross her, and she shrugged her sturdy

self-reliant shoulders and told herself that Judy must after all manage

her own affairs.

It was a wonderful spring, the sweetest time of the year because the

period of promise and not of fulfilment. This spring, in its wine-pale

clarity, its swift shadows, its dewy brightness of flame-green leaf,

seemed to Ishmael to hold the quality of youth as none had done for

years. He and Nicky and Joe Killigrew and the two girls from Paradise

Cottage spent whole days together, for Joe and Judith, though obviously

very intimate, never seemed to wish for solitude. Together they fronted

the winds and the quick showers and the bright rays, saw the rainbow

lift over the dark sea, watched its passionate colour die and the

sunbright foam fade to pearly dimness or break over water turned to

vivid blue. They heard the first bird-notes begin to glorify the

evenings and saw each day the hedges grow richer with pink campion, with

pale drifts of primroses and the blue clusters of the dog-violets. The

blackthorn began to show a breaking of pale blossom upon its branches

and the hawthorn to vie with it.

Once upon the cliff, Ishmael, walking with Georgie, came on a patch of

the most exquisite of spring flowers, the vernal squill. Georgie clapped

her hands for joy at sight of the delicate blue blossoms, but Ishmael,

lying beside them, buried his face in their rain-washed petals and drew

a deep breath of that scent which is like the memory of may-blossom.

As he breathed in the fragrance it seemed to him for one flashing second

as though the years fell away, that he was again young in mind as he

still felt in body; and for a flash, as on that long-ago evening in

Cloom fields when they had cried the Neck and in the parlour that first

day at St. Renny, time stood still and everything around the one point

where consciousness was poised ceased to be. Youth, spring, and ecstasy

itself were in that breath. Ecstasy, the unphilosophic stone which alone

transmutes to the semblance of gold ... which alone does not ask what

will come next, what has led so far, or where lies actual worth; ecstasy

which is sufficient in itself.... Even thus had he felt when he had

known that Nicky was to come to him, only then the flood-tide of emotion

had been set outwards, while this seemed to beat back and intensify the

sense of self.

It was Nicky who broke through this moment now, clamouring in his turn

to be allowed access to the patch of blue that so excited the grown-ups,

and who then proceeded to rub his brown fists in it and tear the

delicate little flowers up before anyone could stop him. Indeed, after

the first moment Ishmael did not try. He sat watching until Nicky, with

all the uncontrolled excitement of highly-strung children who so often

lose their heads and do things for which they suffer agonies in the

watches of the night for long afterwards, was shouting and tearing at

the flowers and throwing them over Georgie and drawing attention to

himself by every extravagance his child's brain could light upon.

"Look at me, Georgie; look at me!" he cried, pulling a bunch of the

flowers through his buttonhole and jumping up on a boulder that thrust

itself through the turfy cliffside; "I'm the King of the Castle, I'm the

King of the Castle!..." Georgie threw a few bits of grass at him and

then turned to go on with an argument she had been having with Ishmael

when the sight of the vernal squills had distracted them. Nicky would

not leave them alone; determined not to be ignored, he went on pelting

her and kept up his monotonous chant: "I'm the King of the Castle, I'm

the King of the Castle...."

"Don't do that," said Ishmael sharply. "Do you hear me, Nicky? Leave

off!" But Nicky went on, and, finding no notice was being taken of him,

he flung a frond of bracken, then, losing his temper, a clod of earth

and turf he dug up from the ground. It hit Georgie on the cheek and

scattered against her; a tiny fragment of stone in it cut her skin

slightly, so that a thin thread of blood sprang out. Nicky felt suddenly

very frightened. He kept up his song, but his note had altered, and as

Ishmael got to his feet his voice died away.

"Don't be angry with him," said Georgie quickly. "He didn't do it on

purpose."

She felt the embarrassment one is apt to feel at a display of authority

over some third person. She looked at Ishmael as though it were she he

was angry with, and felt a ridiculous kinship with Nicky. The little boy

stood away from them both, defiant, scowling from below his fair brows,

his small chest heaving, his nervous eyes sidelong. He was frightened,

therefore all the more likely to make matters worse by rudeness. Ishmael

was, unreasonably, more annoyed than he had ever been with Nicky, who

had often been far more disobedient and in more of a temper. Ishmael

picked him up and held him firmly for all his wriggling. Nicky yelled

and screamed; his small face was scarlet with fear and passion; he

drummed with his heels against his father's legs and hit out with his

pathetically useless fists. Ishmael swung him under his arm.

"Please--" began Georgie.

"I am going to take him home," said Ishmael. "You had better not come.

You'll find the others at the foot of the cliff, you know." He went on

up over the brow of the cliff, carrying the screaming, struggling Nicky

with the terrible ease of a grown-up coping with a child. Georgie

remained sitting where she was for a few moments till the exhausted

screams of Nicky died in the distance.

Ishmael's annoyance had not abated when they reached Cloom, though by

now his arm had tired somewhat, and Nicky, sobbing angrily, walked

beside him, firmly led by the hand. Ishmael took him up to the little

room over the porch which was Nicky's own and there administered a

whipping for the first time. Nicky was too exhausted to scream by then,

but his anger grew deeper. He was aware that his father had often passed

over worse actions, and that it was not so much his, Nicky's,

disobedience in the matter of throwing things at Georgie which was the

trouble as some mood of his father's which he had come up against. He

resented the knowledge and burned with his resentment. When Ishmael,

suddenly sorry, stayed his by no means heavy hand and stood the child

between his knees, Nicky would not face his look, but stood with tightly

shut eyes and set mouth. Ishmael thought it was shame at his punishment

which sealed Nicky's eyes; he knew what agonies it would have occasioned

him at that age, and he felt sorrier still. But Nicky never felt shame;

he could extract a compensating excitement from every untoward event,

and at the present moment he was making a luxury of his rage.

Ishmael tried to get some expression of contrition from the child, but

vainly, and at length he left him, safely shut in. He was very puzzled

as he went and smoked in the garden below. He would not go out on to the

cliff again lest Nicky should be up to any dangerous pranks in his room

or have another screaming fit. For the first time it was brought home to

him how terribly children differ from the children that their parents

were.... Nothing he remembered, be it never so vivid, about himself,

helped him to follow Nicky. He would never have drawn attention to

himself as Nicky constantly did; he would not have dared--his

self-conscious diffidence would not have let him. He had had fits of

losing his head, but more quietly, often in his imagination alone. He

did not see that the self-consciousness of childhood was at the bottom

of both his youthful reserve and Nicky's ebullitions. That his own pride

had been his dominating factor, forbidding him to enter into contests

where he was bound to be worsted, and that for Nicky pride did not exist

in comparison with the luxury of spreading himself and his feelings over

the widest possible area with the greatest possible noise, made the

difference between them so marked that Ishmael could see nothing else.

Nicky had inherited from older sources, he reflected, a flamboyance such

as Vassie and Archelaus and, in his underhand way, even Tom possessed,

but that had missed himself.

Killigrew and the others were coming over to supper, and the Parson also

was expected. Ishmael judged that Nicky had had enough excitement for

one day, and so, though not as any further punishment, sent him to bed

with a supper-tray instead of letting him come down. He recounted the

afternoon's happenings at supper and confessed himself hopelessly

puzzled.

"I don't understand the workings of his mind," he admitted; "when I took

him up his supper he seemed quite different from the half-an-hour

earlier when I'd been up. He'd--it's difficult to describe it--but it

was as though he'd adjusted the whole incident in his own mind to what

he wanted it to be. He greeted me with a sort of forgiving and yet

chastened dignity that made me nearly howl with laughter. He sat up

there in his bed as though he were upon a throne and expecting me to beg

for pardon, or, rather, as though he knew I wouldn't, but he had the

happy consciousness that I ought to. It was confoundingly annoying. I

asked him whether he wanted to see Miss Barlow to say good-night--you

know the passionate devotion he's had for her of late--and all he said

was, 'No, thank you; he didn't think he could trust himself to speak to

her just yet!' I said, 'Don't be a little idiot,' and he only smiled in

a long-suffering manner, and I came away feeling squashed by my own

small son."

"He sounds as though he were going to suffer from what is called the

artistic temperament," observed the Parson.

"Let's hope not," chimed in Killigrew, "because the so-called artistic

temperament is never found among the people who do things, but only in

the lookers-on. The actual creators don't suffer from it."

"It depends what one means by the artistic temperament," said Judy

rather soberly. "If you mean the untidy emotional sort of people who

excuse everything by saying they have the artistic temperament, I agree

with you. That's what the Philistine thinks it is, of course."

"Oh, the real thing, the thing that creates, is nothing in the world but

a fusion of sex," said Killigrew swiftly. "It gives to the man intuition

and to the woman creativeness--it adds a sixth sense, feminising the

man and giving the woman what is generally a masculine attribute. But

that's not what the Padre means. He's using the word in its accepted

derogatory sense."

"I don't think he is quite, either," said Judy. "I think what you mean

is more the deadly literary sense, isn't it, Padre?--the thing some

people are cursed with, the voice that gets up and lies down with them,

that keeps up a running commentary on whatever they do. The creative

people can suffer from that."

"You mean the thing I always had as a youngster," said Killigrew. "If I

went fishing I used to hear something like this: 'The boy slipped to the

bank with the swift sureness of a young animal, and sat with long brown

legs in the water while his skilful fingers fixed the bait on the

hook.'"

"That's the sort of thing," said Judith. "It's deadly dangerous."

"Don't you think I've grown out of it, then?" asked Killigrew quickly,

but with a laugh. Judy did not reply, but turned to Ishmael.

"Don't you know at all what I mean?" she asked. "You must have had

moments like that--every child has. Some people let it grow into a

habit--that's what's fatal."

Ishmael thought it over. "Yes," he admitted. "I can remember whole

tracks of thought like that in my childhood, but I think I recognised

the danger and made myself alter."

"I'm sure you didn't suffer from it," declared Boase. "I knew you very

thoroughly, Ishmael, and you were reserved and inarticulate; you never

acted for effect." He felt startled, as though a sudden gap had yawned

in the dear past; it did not seem to him possible, or only as the

grotesque possibility of a nightmare, that the boy Ishmael should have

held tendencies, trends of thought, which he had not realised....

Later came a message from Nicky that he would like Miss Parminter to

come up and say good-night to him. They all laughed at the masculine

tactics adopted thus early, but Judith went upstairs.

Later, when the others were thinking of going, Ishmael went up for her.

She was kneeling by the bed, a dark figure in the dim room. Nicky was

asleep, one arm still flung round her shoulder: she held hers lightly

across him; her head was bowed upon the sheet. Ishmael hesitated a

moment, struck by something of abandon in her pose. Then he touched her

lightly on the shoulder. She started and looked up.

"Oh, it's you!" she said, peering at him through the darkness. "How you

startled me!"

"The others are going," said Ishmael. "It's been good of you to stay up

here. How long's the little chap been asleep?"

"Oh, ages! He's so sweet, I couldn't go downstairs to the lamp and all

of them somehow. So small and soft.... You are lucky, Ishmael."

"Am I?" said he, rather taken aback. "I hadn't thought of myself in that

light. But I know what you mean ... about Nicky."

They left the room together, but Judy cloaked herself in the passage and

would not go again into the brightly-lit room. The Parson and Killigrew

saw the two girls home, but Georgie and Boase reached the cottage first,

and Georgie fell asleep while she was sitting up in bed waiting,

scandalised, in spite of her modernity, for the return of Judith.

Nicky, sleeping peacefully in his little bed, had much to answer for

that day. He had shown the startled Ishmael the gap that lies between

two generations, whatever the tie of blood and affection; he had shown

him too, by his anger at being torn out of it, that he could still have

a mood of clamour for some thrill almost forgotten, some ecstasy he had

thought dead ... and he had sent Judy, trembling, eager, as not for many

months past, to the arms of the lover who could be so careless of her,

but whom, when she chose, she could still stir to a degree no other

woman had ever quite attained.

CHAPTER IX

JUDITH'S WHITE NIGHT

When Judith came in during the young dark hours of that morning, she

could not sleep, and for a time she busied herself trying to remove the

creases and dew-stains from her gown. Then she sat long by the window

before she went to bed and laid the head that a few hours ago had known

a sweet-smelling bracken pillow against the linen that could not cool

her burning cheek.

She was suffering as she invariably did every time she gave the lover's

gift to Killigrew; and always she paid for the joy of yielding with

hours of reaction. She was wont to live over again in the drear spaces

of time the history of her life since she had known him, and it was the

history of her love for him and of very little else. Now as she lay,

spent but wakeful, sick at heart and soul, she saw again the self that

had stayed in this house when first she grew to know him. How little she

had imagined then, in her pride and poise.... That was what stung her on

looking back--how little she had guessed. If before her then had been

flashed the vision of herself as his secret lover, how impossible she

would have thought it. Surely, having come to it, having lived in it now

for so long, she ought to be able to see how and exactly when the step

had been taken which had brought her to it, which had so altered herself

and her views as to make it possible? Yet, looking back, she could see

no such one point between the self to whom it would have been impossible

and the self to whom it was an acknowledged thing of long standing. If

life consisted of sudden steps, how easily could they be avoided, she

thought, as she went again through the bitter waters to which she had

never succeeded in growing indifferent. It was these gradual slopes....

She could not even say, "It was that moment I first knew I loved him."

She lay, her brow pressed against the pillow, and saw again the

Killigrew and the Judy of those early days at Cloom when she had been

staying with Blanche, taken down there almost unwillingly, certainly

against the wishes of her people, who had not shared her enthusiasm for

Miss Grey. She had liked Killigrew at once; his odd, whimsical, slanting

way of looking at life had appealed to the clever young girl whose

intellect had developed in front of her emotional capacities. It was her

brain that had charmed him, more than her uncertain beauty; in those

early days her personality had been so strong and her beauty still so

hidden beneath its eccentricities, which later had added to it. All the

time Ishmael had been so deeply in love with Blanche she and Killigrew

had been getting more intimate, and yet there was "nothing in it" then.

When had it begun? Surely on that long train journey up to town there had

been a new note, a feeling of something there had not been before ...

partly because Blanche had left them at Exeter to make a cross-country

connection, and she and he had had those first few hours of an enclosed

intimacy they had not had before--in the train. What a queer, stuffy

background ... hardly unromantic, though, when you thought of all trains

stood for and had seen! She had examined rather anxiously into her own

feelings that night at home, she remembered, because she knew Killigrew's

views on marriage as the most unsatisfactory and immoral of states, and

she did not wish to suffer. She was not given to self-pity, and it never

struck her that there was some pathos in that careful wish to avoid

suffering formed by one so young, who had already borne an unhappy

girlhood with a mother who drugged and a stepfather who dared not show

his affection for her for fear of his wife's jealousy. The kind, weak

little man had died and left her a few hundreds a year; she was always

grateful to him for that, and forgave him for not standing between her

and her mother as he might have done. Those hundreds had saved her from

any question of taking money from Killigrew. Her poems would not have

kept her--that she knew. Also she had never done as well as in that first

slim book when she had known nothing of life at all. Real experience had

bitten too deep for transmission to paper.

When he came back from Paris, a year after the time at Cloom, he had

written to her and she had met him. Then it had all come out--all about

her wretched home and her mother--and they had met again and again.

Killigrew could not bear the thought of suffering, and he had tried to

make up to her by taking her out as much as he could--not alone, for

that was impossible in those days, but always with such others as merely

formed a pleasant negative background. Between them from the first of

those days in London was a consciousness of being man and woman there

had not been for her at Cloom, though he now told her she had always

disturbed him, that there was for him a something profoundly troubling

in her slim sexless body, her burning mind, her quaint little sureness

of poise which never let her lose her sense of proportion. That had so

appealed to him ... never from her had he heard the talk of women, that

love was the greatest thing in the world, or that any one person could

matter more than all the many other things put together. She had thought

with him that life was far otherwise--made up of many things, a

pattern.... And yet it was she who, though in theory keeping all those

ideas, had lived and suffered only for the one thing, had her horizon

narrowed to his figure. All the time she told herself it was a distorted

view, but that did not prevent her suffering; it only enabled her to be

aware that it mattered very little whether she suffered or not.

They had gone on meeting, and soon it was a recognised thing that he

should kiss her who had never even let herself so much as be kissed at a

dance. But this was different, she told herself--he kissed her so

kindly. His kisses altered, but still she bore them, dimly aware of

portent in them, but trying, with a woman's guile, to laugh them off by

seeming to keep a child's uncomprehension of what they meant. Then she

had had a bad time to undergo during her mother's lingering illness and

death, before she could take her freedom. Her mother left her nothing,

but she had the kind little man's small income. She had been worn out by

the time everything was over; and owing to her mother's complaint, which

had made it impossible to have visitors at the house, and to her

jealousy, which had prevented Judy making many friends for herself

outside, she knew no one with whom she was intimate enough to ask for

advice and help. Killigrew had taken charge of her and been goodness

itself.

He kept clear always of the actual words and forms of love-making. He

was very fastidious and hated anything that went to vulgarise his

relationships, and would not spoil his genuine affection and intimacy

and passion for her or any other woman for whom he felt them by using

shibboleths that did not express what he really meant.

He took her away up to a quiet mountain country in Wales, and all the

weeks he looked after her there never showed any more passion than the

kisses and close embraces she was now used to, and those not often. He

was not only not ever an inconsiderate lover, but he was too much of an

epicure to take too much or too often even when he could. He left her

once or twice in those weeks to go to town, and she knew be saw other

women there, and the knowledge meant very little to her. Already she

was loving him more deeply than she knew and understanding him more

deeply still, and she knew jealousy would be the end of everything. If

she had begun to be jealous, it would have been so deadly, she would

have had so much to be jealous of, that she never dared let herself

indulge in it.

She had her reward when he once told her she was the only woman who had

never once asked him where he had been or whom he had been with. She was

so happy in the pain this self-repression gave her she hardly thought

how much happier she could have been had there been no need for it. If

that had been the case he would have been entirely different from what

he was, and then perhaps she would not have loved him at all.

The time in Wales was not spoilt by anything that made her unable to

face her own mind; never did his arms or lips encroach; she came back

still feeling she belonged to herself--still clinging to that physical

possession of self because she was now aware that her peace of soul was

gone into his keeping where it would have no rest again.

After that her true pain began. Sometimes on looking back she wondered

how she could have lived through it so often--for of course it was not

always at the same pitch. No pain or love or appreciation ever can be.

There were whole months when she managed to do very well without him,

when he was abroad and she too, perhaps, went on the Continent to some

other far-off place and found things in which to interest herself. She

belonged to the semi-artistic circle in which alone it was possible in

those days to have any liberty of action, and she had the artist's keen

appreciation of the externals of life; and when the personal failed her

there were always things. But when the pain was at its worst things

failed her.

Bad times when a letter from him, written because he happened to be in

the mood to write and wanted an answer which, though she knew his mood

would have passed by the time he received it, yet she would not be able

to prevent herself writing.... Times after he had been to see her,

either on a flying visit, or to be near her for several days, taking her

about and spoiling her delightfully.... After they were over came a

bitterness that would make her moan out loud to herself, "It isn't worth

it ... it isn't worth it...." And she would welcome the next few days

when they came as thirstily as she had the last.

Only the fact that she had a naturally strong will, made stronger by

youthful years of self-repression, and that he never wished from a woman

what she did not want to give, kept her so long not his lover in body as

she was in heart and mind. Looking back, she marvelled at the length of

time she had withstood her own heart. Not her senses; they had not

entered into the affair for her at that time. She actually loved him too

well, and was too unawakened physically, to feel the promptings of the

pulses. She felt in him, for him, by him, so intensely it sometimes

seemed to her she must be fused with him. She could have burned away

into his being and ceased to have a separate existence if the passionate

fusing of the mind could have accomplished it.

For three years she loved and suffered. She saw him always several times

a year, was with him during those times, and he never lied to her about

what he felt. He never told her she was the "only woman in the world for

him" and that he could not live without her. He never mentioned other

women to her, except such of his friends as she had met and of those she

never knew, except in so far as her own intuition told her, which were

only friends, which mingled the give and take of passion with the cooler

draught. On the other hand, he never hid his passion when he felt it for

her, and he always showed his affection and care of her when in the

pleasant spaces between passion. He could not but know she was aware

that he would be glad if one day she gave him more; meanwhile he did not

make her hate herself and him with actions that would have excited

without satisfying. He was the perfect companion, or would have been if

she had not loved him.

For three years she never told him that she did; she met his kisses only

with frank affection, and though she felt no urge of passion in herself

to teach her lips, yet she began to feel that which would have made her

more the eager one, and less the kissed, as she always sternly kept

herself. For these three years she did not imagine he lived a chaste

existence; there was no reason, with his pagan and quite genuine

convictions, why he should. Fidelity in so far as it meant keeping to

one person was to him foolishness. In so far as it meant loyalty of

affection and absolute honesty he was faithful to everyone.

At the end of the three years she had become aware that things were

different ... at first she could not say how. Then she slowly saw that

unless she gave more, made herself more to him, she would become less.

He made no demands on her; he would have resented the idea of possessing

a woman as much as that of any woman possessing him--freedom to him was

the salt of every dish. Judy told him sometimes that he made the

marriage service of too great importance, just as much as did the

advocates of it, though in a different way. They thought there ought to

be no love outside it; he thought there could be none within-it. To her

mind, which always went for the essentials and left the trappings alone,

the actual legal compact would not have mattered either way. That was

what her instinct, which in her was as nicely balanced as reason, told

her. But there was a side of her, as was inevitable, which was the child

of her period and upbringing, and that side had never been talked over

by Killigrew's philosophy, with the result that when she gave him

everything she suffered in her conscience as well as in her heart. She

had suffered ever since. Truth was with her a passion, and yet she had

to pretend to the world. She suffered acutely when with girls of her own

age, because she felt unfit to be with them. Often, with Georgie, who

had not half her fineness, she would feel she ought not to be sitting

talking to her or letting her come and stay in the same house. She

suffered sometimes from a morbid wish to tell the world what she really

was. And yet, as she told herself sometimes, if suffering can purge,

surely she was clean enough....

She had never breathed the word "marriage" to Killigrew, who had no

reason for knowing she was not as happy as himself in what was too

spontaneous and delightful even to be called an arrangement. It had been

a "success"; the life they had lived since Judy had let him know he

could take her as he wished. Killigrew would as soon have married as

have installed a woman as his mistress; the freedom of a _union libre_

held no illusions for him. Yet to do him justice it was even more that

he would have hated to have their relationship spoiled by anything so

hard-and-fast. They met as before, went for wonderful holidays together,

and if she knew he was "fitting her in," she was too wonderfully

poignantly happy when with him, too satisfied in every fibre of her

nature, to think of it; while afterwards, if she had allowed herself to

dwell on it--beyond the one or two days of acute suffering that would

follow upon every time--she would have died, in heart and mind, if not

in body, of the pain.

Sometimes, when she was either very happy with him or drowning in the

bitter aftermath, she would lie pretending to herself as a child does.

These imaginings always took the same form, and on this night at

Paradise she began the old childish-womanly game again when she saw

sleep would not come.

The pretence was that she was going to have a baby. In her heart of

hearts she knew she wanted Killigrew to marry her, or rather to want to

marry her. With all her knowledge of him she could not quite come to the

belief that she could not make him happy if he were married to her....

Perhaps if she were going to have a baby, he would want to. He would

not; but he would have done it as soon as he saw she really wanted it,

though without seeing the necessity, which would not have existed in a

world constructed on his plan. Still, she knew he would do it, given the

right circumstances; also she knew he had the deep love for children

derived from a Jewish strain in his family. With that baby he would come

to a fuller love of her than ever before; its advent would surely give

him what even she admitted he lacked.

She lay now, picturing it to herself and planning a cunningly-laid

deceit by which she should appear a lovely and noble figure in his eyes.

She would have a very "bad time," of course, or somehow the thing would

lose significance, and she would ask, nay implore, the doctor to promise

her, if he could only save either the child or herself, to let it be the

child. And Joe would hear of it and know that it was because he wanted a

child so much.... She might pretend to be delirious and murmur that he

wanted the child so much more than he did her.... He would be in the

room and hear her and she would pretend not to know it....

Thus Judy, luxuriating in the darkness, knowing in her clear brain that

looked on so unswayed by her passionate weary heart, that Killigrew, for

all his instinct for children, did not want them in the concrete, that

if she bore him one he would love her just as much as he did now and no

more. That he would love her as much even while she was carrying it she

believed, and rightly, for he was too natural a man himself ever to

think nature ugly.

Judy lay imagining ... imagining ... and she thought of Nicky's firm,

soft little body, and how it had felt to her hungry hands and tried to

feel it all over again in her bed and imagine it belonged to her and

Joe. And she saw the cold, pale dawn come in, and her dream shivered and

fled before it, and she was left with only her bitter knowledge that it

would never happen, and if it did, not that way. And she wished with a

futile frenzy of longing that she had never chosen to keep Killigrew by

giving him her whole self in fee, but by refusing herself to him had

been able to leave him and live down the hold he had on her soul and

mind which had grown to such strength in those first three years. Her

first fear when she gave him everything had been lest attainment should

dull even that want he had of her, but she found he had spoken truth

when he said that that was a quality which grew with having. For fewer

men are bored with satiety than kept by a custom that becomes necessity,

and his habit for her would in itself be an attraction for him. But

Killigrew, for all his cleverness, was not the man to know, if any could

have, how passionate her withholding had been, how passionless was her

surrender.

CHAPTER X

LONE TRAILS

So much of mental passion could be lived through upon one side of a wall

and on the other Georgie wake fresh and unknowing of it all, stretch a

moment, wonder as to what time Judy had come in, tip-toe to her room and

peep, to see a sleeping face so pale and haggard that she withdrew,

suddenly sorry, she did not quite know why. Judy could look old ... she

reflected. Georgie herself felt a lilting sense of interest in this day

which she had not hitherto during her stay at Paradise Cottage. Nothing

had happened, and yet somehow she felt different. It was not even that

she had had a letter from Val, for he had written two days ago, and so

she would not hear again for several days, a ready pen not being his.

And she was beginning to be guiltily conscious that she did not enjoy

getting his letters; they seemed somehow to disrupt atmosphere instead

of creating it. Everything was different from that day on the river when

Val had told her he loved her and it had all seemed so simple. She had

accepted him then because she was so fond of him, and she knew everyone

would be pleased, and also she was pleased herself. He was so young and

jolly, and they had always fitted so well, though in his music--he was

by way of being a young composer--he was out of her depth.

They fitted too well; since their engagement Georgie, feeling it lacked

excitement and being both very young and a woman, and therefore an

experimentalist, had tried to get up little scenes so as to have

quarrels and reconciliations. She would do things which she had first

got him to say he did not like; then she defied him, only to meet with

an ineffectual annoyance on his part. When after each scene she gave

way, as she had meant to do all along, she knew in her heart that it was

because she chose to submit, not because he had the strength to compel

her. He was too young and inexperienced to see that she was young enough

to be craving for a master, while at the same time he was old enough to

want peace and mutual consideration. He would have been shocked at the

idea of using brutality to her, and brutality was what Georgie, without

recognising it, wanted.

She shook herself impatiently now as the thought of Val came to her

when, turning over her handkerchiefs to choose a clean one, she came

upon his last letter. Dear old Val! ... but he had no part in this

clear, pale spring day and all it was going to hold.

She checked herself as she was bursting into song in her bath because

she thought of tired-looking Judy still asleep in the next room, but

something in her went on singing to meet this new fine day. She had her

breakfast in solitary state, because Mrs. Penticost would neither let

her wait nor Judy be disturbed, and then she flung a coat over her

"Fishwife" dress and went out into the morning. She went over to Cloom

to see whether Nicky had forgiven her and would sit for his portrait as

usual.

Thinking of Nicky made her think of Ishmael, and she went over again in

her mind what he had looked like when he had been so angry yesterday.

She had seen a new Ishmael then, a more interesting one; she was vaguely

aware of liking him better than before. Perhaps it might be rather fun

to see if she could make him angry. Probably he would only be really

angry with anyone he cared for, and of course he didn't care for her at

all. Georgie pondered that point as she went. She was honest and sweet,

but she was an arrant little flirt, and Val was not the first man who

had kissed her. She never pretended anything to herself, but she could

pretend things to other people. She was too vital to be vulgar, but she

was also too vital to be quite well-bred, and often her methods were

startling, as for her age and period she cared remarkably little what

she said. She would try and wake Ishmael up; it would do him good. For

all her plainness of actual feature, if that wonderful mouth were

excepted, no one knew better than Georgie that she had _beauté de

diable_, and the sheer impudent vitality of her swept nearly every man

off his feet if she wished it to. "Me, m'dear?" she would protest to

Judy or any friend who pointed this out to her. "Most hideous female,

m'dear. Face like a pudding." Here she would puff out her cheeks and

hold them distended till her soft infectious laughter made them

collapse. "Everyone's kind to me, because I'm so plain they're sorry for

me...."

Privately she considered she knew everything in the world there was to

know about men. In reality she knew very little, placing as much too

much importance on sex as Judy placed too little.

Arrived at the Manor, she found that Nicky had disappeared, after an

annoying and rather alarming habit of his, and was not expected back, by

those who knew his roving ways, till the evening. Ishmael informed her

of this with rather a rueful smile.

"He's always had these wild fits ever since he's been big enough to go

off on his own," he told her; "and he steals something out of the

larder, or if he can't do that he just trusts to his eyes and tongue

when he meets some kind good lady, and he scours the countryside till

late. The worst of it is I shan't be able to do anything to him when he

turns up this evening, because he'll pretend he ran away because he was

so afraid of me after yesterday."

"Are you so terrifying?" said Georgie, peeping up at him from under her

shady hat.

"Not at all. I am a very easily-led person."

Georgie considered this, her head on one side. Then she said briskly:

"Then will you please help me take my sketching things somewhere, as I

can't get on with the portrait? After all, it's a bit your fault, isn't

it? You should have brought your son up better."

"Of course, I'll take them anywhere you like," said Ishmael; "where

shall it be?"

Thus it came about that Killigrew and Judy, a couple of hours later,

coming to the plateau, found Georgie there, busy over a sketch of

Ishmael in profile, with his head telling dark against the grey sunlit

cliff wall, because Georgie said it was easier to paint dark against

light. She was really working in her vivid, effective way, and Killigrew

found little to criticise.

Judy was no longer looking tired. Joe had met her perfectly, holding her

away and looking into her eyes in the whimsical tender way he had as

though he were saying: "It's absurd, isn't it, to make out what we did

together is of any importance, and yet as long as we're human beings we

can't help feeling it's wonderful ..." and he had thanked her, hardly in

words, for the hours of the night before, though there had been words

too, as she had buried her head against him. With that and her usual

careful aids to beauty Judy was glowing, and though there was never a

shade of possessiveness in her manner towards Killigrew, yet this

morning there was so much of confidence and possession of herself that

it almost amounted to the same thing when she made her appearance by his

side.

Georgie declared a rest when the two of them appeared, and Ishmael also

came to look at what she had been doing. He was standing a little behind

her and looking down, not so much at the painting as at the back of her

bent neck, where the absurd little drake's tails curved against the

skin, so white in the sunshine. One ear was rosy where the light shone

through it, and behind it lay a soft blue crescent of shadow.

As he looked that odd something occurred to Ishmael which suddenly puts

a person in a new light--the slipping of the plane, the freakish turn of

the kaleidoscope which makes the new light strike at a fresh angle

something seen before and makes it different. He fell in love with

Georgie in that moment, staring at her bent neck and the curve of her

ear.

All day a delightful exaltation possessed him; he was not yet at the

stage when a man is plagued with doubts of success or advisability; he

was only tingling with a new delight. He helped her along any rough

place when they all walked over to the Vicarage to tea with a joy he had

not felt the day before, and he did not even know how irrational it all

was.

At tea the conversation turned on different types of men, and Killigrew

held forth on what he held to be the only true and vital classification.

"The only division in mankind is the same as the only division in the

animal world, of course," he said.

"What is that?" asked the Parson. "Wild and tame?"

"No; it is the division between the animal who goes with the pack and

him who hunts a solitary trail. The bee is kin to the wolf because both

are subject to a community-life with strict laws. The bee is nearer of

kin to the wolf than it is to the butterfly, which lives to itself

alone. The fox, who hunts and is harried as a solitary, is further

removed from his brother the wolf than he is from the wild cat, who has

like habits to himself. My natural history may be wrong, but you see the

theory!"

"And you carry that into the world of man?" said Judith lightly. In her

heart was a sick pain and anger, and the brightness of the day had fled

for her; with his few careless words Killigrew had re-created all the

old atmosphere of depression, of--"It's no good, I know he's as he is,

and that nothing I can do or that happens to me will ever make him any

different...."

"Certainly it is the great division. Between the born adventurer and the

community-man there is a far greater gulf fixed than between the former

and an eagle or the latter and a cony. Lone trail or circumscribed

hearth--between these lies the only incompatibility."

"There is a good deal in your theory," said Boase, "but it goes too much

for externals. The home-keeping man may be the one with the free spirit

and the wanderer the man who cannot get away from habits that tie him to

other people wherever he goes."

"Sounds like a perambulating bigamist," said Killigrew, laughing. "But

you're right as usual, Padre, and go to the heart of it while I'm being

merely superficial. According to my division your brother Archelaus is a

fox and an eagle and all the other lone things right enough, isn't he,

Ishmael?"

"Yes," said Ishmael slowly, "I think he is."

"Whereas you are the bee, the wolf, the cony," declared Killigrew.

"Isn't he, Padre?"

Boase smiled. "Shall I tell you what I think, Joe?" he answered, "It is

this. Ishmael is by circumstances and inclination a dweller in one spot,

and custom and humanity incline him to tie himself always more closely

to it and the people in it. But man is not as simple as your animals,

and in most of us is something alien, some strain of other instincts.

The man who lives intimately on one piece of earth may have a deep

instinct in spite, perhaps because, of it, to keep himself free and to

resent claims even while he acknowledges them. Just as a man who is free

to go where he likes, as you do, may carry his own chains with him. For

the only slavery is to oneself, and it is the man who flows inwards

instead of outwards who is not free."

"I wonder ..." said Killigrew.

"The real flaw in your argument, Joe," said Ishmael, "is that your lone

hunter in the animal world always has his mate and his young, whereas

when you make the division apply to mankind you class all that with the

herd and deny it to the man who would be free."

"Because that's how it translates into terms of humanity," said

Killigrew swiftly. "Civilisation has made the taking of a mate a bond as

firm as pack-law, and woe to him who, having yielded to it, transgresses

it. It is not I who have made that division, it is the world."

"He might have spared me this to-night ..." thought Judith.

Ishmael kept silence. He was thinking of the truth of what Killigrew had

been saying, and weighing it against this new flame that had sprung up

within him that day. Freedom--loneliness is the price paid for liberty,

he knew that. And he had found loneliness sweet, or, when not actually

that, at least very bearable. Yet even as he thought it he knew for him

there was, as ever, at any crisis of his life, only the one way. He had

that directness which, though seeing all ways--for it is not the same

thing as simplicity--yet never doubted as to the only one possible for

himself. On that long-ago day on the cliffs near St. Renny, when he had

played with the notion of running away to sea, he had known all along in

his heart that that way was not for him. When, to other natures, a

struggle might have arisen between staying on at Cloom, carrying out his

work there, and taking Blanche into the life she would have shared with

him, the point had not even arisen for him. During the turmoil of mind

and body that the break with her had left to him his victory over

himself had never really been in doubt. When the passion in him had

met, as he could now see it had, the same feeling in Phoebe and he had

been swept into that disaster, release had not appeared to him even a

possibility. The new duties that had devolved on him since he had been

free again all seemed to come quite naturally, without being sought by

him, or even imagined until they floated into his horizon. So now this

new thing had come upon him, and, wiser than he had been when he loved

Blanche, wiser than when he had married Phoebe, he saw it

glamour-enwrapped, yet he recognised the glamour. That he would marry

Georgie if he could he was fairly certain, but that there was, as ever,

the something in him which resented it, this mingling of himself with

another human being, this passionate inroad on spaces which can

otherwise be kept free even of self, he knew too. Acute personal

relationships with others makes for acute accentuation of self, and that

was what, at the root of the matter, Ishmael always resented and feared.

CHAPTER XI

WAYS OF LOVE

A week later Boase said Evensong, as far as he was aware, to the usual

emptiness, but when he went down the church afterwards to lock it up he

saw a kneeling figure crouching in a dim corner. He went closer and saw

that it was Judith--there was no mistaking that slim, graceful back and

the heavy knot of dark hair. Her shoulders were very still and she was

making no sound, so it was a shock to Boase when, on his touching her,

she glanced round and he saw her eyelids were red and swollen in the

haggard pallor of her face. She stared at him dully for a minute.

"What is it, my child?" asked Boase.

"I can't tell you," said Judith dully. "You wouldn't understand and

you'd be shocked."

Boase smiled as he sat down in the pew just in front of her. She leant

back against her seat and looked pitifully at his kind deeply-lined old

face.

"Besides, I'm not sorry!" she went on; "at least, not the sorry that

means to give it up, only the sorry that wishes I had never started...."

"Tell me about him, my child!" said Boase. And Judy did. It was the

first time she had ever spoken of him--what he was to her and what her

life had been--to anyone. She made no wail beyond once saying, "I did

not know it was possible that a person could make one suffer so...."

Gradually Boase drew what little story there was to tell from her, but

more than she told him he gathered for himself, from his watching of

her and his knowledge of Killigrew. He was an old man now and a wise

one. The priest in him yearned over her to wean her from her sin, but

the patient wisdom in him told him that not that way had she yet come.

He talked quietly to her, soothing her by his calmness, his lack of

reproaches or adjurations, and presently she was sitting forward in the

pew in the gathering dusk talking more normally.

"There are some sheep who are not only not of this fold," he said at

last, "but who seem as though they never could be on this side of the

grave. Joe has the odd quality of never having felt spiritual want, and

probably he never will."

"It is that uncertainty of edge about him that has always been the

difficulty," she said. "That--oh, it's so difficult to explain. I mean,

he has never seemed to realise the limits of individuality. Woman is

woman to him--not one woman. He's often said that the affinity

made-for-each-other theory must be pure nonsense; that you meet during

your little life hundreds of people who all have more or less of an

affinity for you--some more, some less--and that it's practically your

duty to fuse that alikeness wherever you meet it. Of course he agrees

that among the lot there's bound to be one with whom the overlap is

bigger than it is with any of the others, but then he looks on that as

no reason for thinking that person is the one person for you. There are

probably several more people knocking round with whom your overlap would

be still wider, only you never happen to meet them. And to bind yourself

irrevocably to one would be to prevent your fusing with them if you did

meet them. It works out at this--that the greatest giving and the

greatest taking is the ideal state of affairs. Give to everyone you meet

and take all you can from them. But, you see, my trouble is I have

nothing left to give anyone but him. I've always given him

everything--I want no one and nothing else. And he's wanted so many and

so much. I see the logic and admirable sense of his attitude so clearly

that even while a primitive root jealousy is eating me up I am so

infected by his theory that I don't blame him. I feel myself nebulous as

regards him, as blurred at edge as he is."

"Oh, my dear child!" said Boase, "this--this in a way bigness of his

view just makes him more of an individualist than anyone. He limits

himself nowhere, but simply because it's all gain to his individuality.

That it is gain to others too is neither here nor there."

"It can be loss to the others; there is such a thing as all taking and

no giving."

"Ah, now you're looking on it from the point of view of payment! Take

for a moment the truer view that sorrow is as much gain as pleasure. The

only gain on earth is experience, and both emotions go to feed that."

"And then," continued Judith, pursuing her own line of thought,

"something in me seems to say that that wide view, that merging of

individuality, has the right idea at the root of it. It's an old strain

of Puritanism in me, I suppose, that tells me anything is good which

implies a loosening of individualism."

"I don't agree with you," said Boase energetically. "The root of all

things good and great is personality. The success of any movement

depends on the individuality of the leader, just as the whole of

creation depends, whether it knows it or not, on the personality of

Christ. 'Be individual' is a counsel of perfection--that is the only

drawback to it. If the great mass of people were only nearer perfection

the rein could be given to individualism; as it is it's a dangerous

horse to drive--it so often runs away with its driver. Conceive now of

the immense advantage it would be if, instead of a criminal being tried

by the clumsy machinery of the law, the judge were to investigate the

case quietly and thoroughly himself, get to know the man, his belongings

and environment, and then deal with him as he saw fit. The thing's not

workable; the judge might have an attack of indigestion that would

jaundice his view, or be in a rosy glow of sentimentality after port.

But if the judge could be depended on for sympathy and intuitiveness,

half the crime in the world would be stamped out. It's the same

everywhere. If priests could be allowed to discriminate between divorced

persons they thought it fit and desirable to remarry and those they did

not, much sin might be avoided. But it wouldn't work, simply because the

individual can't yet be trusted, and so it is quite right that the law

should be as it is. But that doesn't prevent rank individualism from

being the counsel of perfection--in which, curiously enough, Joe would

agree with me more than Ishmael, who fights against the individual in

life to an extraordinary extent. I wish something would happen to make

him succumb to it again. I don't want him to grow inhuman...."

"I wish it were possible to grow inhuman," said Judy.

"If you knew," said Boase slowly, "that besides doing--as I must tell

you--a right action by leaving off all connection with Joe Killigrew,

you could also cease at once to feel anything for him, would you then

leave him?"

"Ah! not yet ..." said Judith. "I must have a little longer. Wait till

I'm older--till I can't make him want me...."

As she went home, comforted more than she could have thought possible by

the mere telling of what had accompanied her so long, she knew that she

had not been wholly disingenuous. That Killigrew would cease to want her

for at least a good while to come she did not believe, and it was not

that dread which had sent her shaking for the first time to the help

from which she had hitherto held proudly aloof. As a matter of fact she

kept up the illusion of youth better with Killigrew than with the rest

of the world, and she knew it. For one thing, he was never away from her

long enough at a time to get a thoroughly new vision of her on his

return, a vision apart from that which he was expecting to see. For

another, she took more care with him. Other people might see her

unpowdered, bleak--never he. And for this, too, she had paid the

penalty. Sometimes when he held her, gazing down into the face she had

prepared with so much skill to meet that look--counting half upon the

material aids upon her skin and half upon the state she should have

evoked in him before she courted that gaze--then she would think to

herself: "And if I were not 'tidied,' if I were 'endy,' looking greasy,

as I have all day, he would not be feeling like this...." Then with that

thought would flash into her aching heart: "On so frail a thread hangs

love...."

But it was not anything in Killigrew which had eaten into her

consciousness this past week--it was something in herself. Something

which had risen to its crest that night among the bracken had failed

ever since, was falling on deadness, and that something was her own

power to feel the love which had made her life for so long. There were

always periods of deadness--she knew that--but this held a quality none

of them had had. What if even she were subject to the inevitable law, if

for her too after the apex came the downward slope? That was the fear

that gnawed at her, that was what she dreaded when the Parson had held

out exactly that as a hope.

While she had been suffering and loving she had longed for the release

of cessation; now she dreaded it, for it undermined to her the whole of

the past. She was one of those women to whom faithfulness in herself was

a necessity of self-respect, and failure of love, without any deflection

of it, was to her a failure of faithfulness. She had nothing tangible to

go upon; it was only that she felt this deadness now upon her was not

the mere reaction of feeling, but an actual snapping of something in the

fabric of life. She told herself it was not possible, that not so could

she give the lie to all she had suffered.

As she went up the lane to Paradise she met Ishmael coming down it;

evidently he had been taking Georgie home. She stopped to speak to him,

and, feeling he was reluctant to pass on by himself yet awhile, she

leant over a gate and let him talk to her. For a minute or so he said

nothing that was not an ordinary commonplace of encounter, but after a

short silence had fallen between them he began abruptly on another note.

"Judy," he said, "do you believe in what is called 'falling in love'?"

"Do I believe in it?" echoed Judith. "It depends on how you mean that.

If you ask do I believe that there is such a phenomenon, I do, for the

simple reason that one sees it happening all around one and people doing

the maddest things under its influence. If you mean do I think it's a

good thing, or a pleasant thing, or a thing that lasts ...?"

"Yes, that's what I meant, I think."

"Falling in love is giving someone the power to hurt you.... I suppose

it depends on you, or rather on them, if it's worth it or not. But how

can one say anything of any value about a thing unless one has first

clearly defined what that thing is? And love is like religion, like the

vision of truth itself--it means something different to every man."

"I thought women were always supposed to love in much the same way,"

said Ishmael vaguely--"better than we do. They always say so."

"Oh, it depends on the individual, as always. Chiefly it depends on

whether you're the sort of person that loves 'in spite of' or 'because

of.' If you're the 'because of' kind, all sorts of things, external

drawbacks and disappointments in character, put you off. If you're the

'in spite of,' they don't. I think the only difference between men and

women is that as a rule men love because of and women in spite of."

"I'm afraid I should be the 'because of.'"

"Yes, I think perhaps you would. If a woman loves 'in spite of,' all the

little external things that at the beginning might have shocked her only

make her care more."

"Like eating with one's knife, you mean?"

"Yes, even that. Or the person having a cold in his head or a spot on

the end of his nose! She notices whatever it happens to be and has a

little shock of surprise at finding it makes no difference. And that

makes her feel how strong her love must be; and pouf! it gets stronger

than ever."

"And the underneath things, like finding out little insincerities,

little meannesses even?"

"The same plan works there--if you're the 'in spite of' lover."

"Tell me," said Ishmael suddenly, "do you--does any woman--have moments

when the very word 'love' is an insufferable intrusion, when it all

seems petty and of no account, a tiresome thing in whose presence it

suddenly doesn't seem possible to breathe?"

"When one is sick of the whole question, and the way life is supposed to

be built round it? Yes; but when a woman feels like that it generally is

in reaction from too much of it. She doesn't feel it purely

academically, so to speak, as a man can." Judy's voice was suddenly very

weary. Her eyes met Ishmael's, and in that look a comprehension was born

between them that was never quite to fail, that was, in its best

moments, to mean true intimacy. Judy blinked at him with her sad

monkey-eyes, smiled a little, and held out her hand in farewell. He

took it--suddenly ejaculated a "Good-night" accompanied by a "Thank

you" which he felt, though he could not quite have told why. He went off

down the lane without seeing her back to the cottage, and she stayed

awhile, grateful in her turn that meeting him had taken the keen edge

off her own problems. She went in to supper and bed feeling very tired,

a tiredness that was in her mind and soul, but that had the pleasantness

of a healthy physical exhaustion. Georgie showed a disposition to come

into her room and ask her her opinion of "falling in love" over mutual

hair-brushes, but Judith evaded the tentative suggestion. By then she

was feeling that the word was a meaningless string of four letters, and

the thing she supposed it stood for as fantastic and far-off as the

recurring fragment of a dream, which seems so vivid in the dreaming and

is a broken kaleidoscope of ill-fitting colours on awaking. She went to

bed and slept soundly, better than she had done for months.

She was to wake to the old weight, half-joy, half-pain, but more and

more she was to feel the new dread that she was growing out even of

that, left in a dryness that belittled the past; but the periods of

numbness once begun had to go on in spite of her, and with their

bitterness was mingled at least the negative healing of indifference.

CHAPTER XII

GEORGIE

Georgie had been up to the village to post a very important letter--so

important that her hand stayed hesitant over the slit in the box for a

moment or two while she made up her mind all over again. Then, with a

gasp, she pushed the letter through and heard it fall with a faint thud

to the bottom of the box. The last chance was still not gone, for the

friendly old postmaster would have given it back to her if she had asked

for it, but the mere noise it made in falling--one of the most

distinctive and irrevocable sounding in the world--caused her to feel a

lightening of the heart that meant satisfaction. She turned and went

away down the bare village street, past the last row of whitewashed

slate-roofed cottages, with the dark clumps of myrtle or tamarisk by

their doors, and then she struck off the hard, bleak road, where the

wind sang mournfully in the insulators at every telegraph post, and made

for the open moor.

It was one of those mood-ridden days of spring when the whole

countryside changes in the passing of a cloud from pearly grey to a pale

brightness unmarred by any dark note. Even the cloud-shadows were no

deeper than wine-stains as they trailed over the slopes; against the

cold, clear blue of the sky the branches of the thorns seemed of

pencilled silver--their leaves were a rich green amid the colder verdure

of the elders and the soft hue of the breaking ash leaves. Ploughed

lands were a delicate purple, and the pastures still held the pure

emerald of the rainy winter, though paled by the quality of the light to

a tone no deeper than that of the delicate young bracken fronds which

were uncurling upon the moor. Everywhere was lightness--in all colour,

in the wandering airs, in the texture of leaf and blade--in Georgie's

soul as she went over the soft turf and hummed little tunes to herself.

She ran up a grassy peak crested with grey boulders and flung herself

against them, half-leaning, half-standing, over a rough cool curve of

grey granite, arms outstretched, eyes closed.

She was conscious of the fabric of her body as never before. She felt

her heart beating as a thing heavier and more powerful than the rest of

her frame; she was aware of the breath passing through the delicate skin

of her nostrils, of a faint, sweet aching in her thighs, of the

tenderness of her breast crushed against the rock, of the acuteness of

life beating in her outspread finger-tips against the rough granite and

in her toes pressed against the turf. She dropped to the ground and,

rolling over, stretched to utmost tension, then relaxed to limpness,

eyelids closed and the hair blowing upon them the only moving thing

about her. Then she scrambled to her feet again and set off towards

Cloom.

As she neared it she saw on the far slope a plough at work, looking like

a tiny toy, the horses a rich bright brown in the sunlight. Her strong

young eyes could see the darker blown mesh of their manes and the long

hair about their fetlocks; she could see, too, that the man in a faded

blue shirt and earth-coloured trousers driving them was John-James, for

even at that distance his sturdy build and the copper red of his broad

neck were unmistakable. She saw that the man standing talking by the

gate was Ishmael, and she stayed still, wondering if he would see and

recognise her. The tiny figure turned, stood staring, and then waved its

hat above its head; Georgie fluttered her handkerchief and turned off

down towards the stream at the bottom of the moor while Ishmael was

still watching.

It was warmer down by the stream than on the crest above, and the air

was as though filled with a bright sparkle with the refractions of the

sun from ripple and eddy. The stream was a mere thread of water, but

broken by stone and drooping bough to the semblance of urgency, and with

its mazy lights went a clear murmur of sound. Georgie took off her

little cloth jacket and threw herself down on the grassy slope that,

amidst a tangle of hemlock, edged the purling water. Between her and the

sunlight drooped an alder; she saw against the sun the showers of yellow

catkins all gleaming transparent, like sunlit raindrops caught at the

moment when they lengthen.... She lay under the glory of this Danaëan

shower and half-closed her eyes to stare up at the wonder of it.

Presently she heard the sound of twigs and leaves being crushed under

advancing feet, but she did not look up, only started to hum a little

tune, though she could not hear it for the rising beat of her own heart

in her ears.

When Ishmael merely dropped down beside her and, asking if he might

smoke, proceeded to light his pipe, she calmed a trifle--a sick dread

that she dismissed as impossible flashed through her; she peeped at him

from her tilted hat brim, and saw his hands were trembling slightly as

he struck the match. In a moment she had caught back her own poise; she

watched sidelong, noting with an odd precision exactly how he looked,

how his brown skin glistened a little in the sun, so close to her that

she could see the infinitesimal criss-cross of lines upon the backs of

his hands and the stronger seams upon his reddened neck. She saw the

glisten of a few grey hairs in the dark thick patch above his ear; she

could see the texture of his lip as it pouted beneath the sideways hang

of his pipe. She wondered why anyone ever really loved someone else;

looked at like that, and thought of clearly, reasonably, they did not

look very wonderful, but only obvious flesh and blood, enclosing

something that, try as one might, must always remain alien, cut off. Yet

she knew that, reason as she might, this particular piece of flesh and

blood, animated by this particular soul, had power over hers that her

leaping pulses at the very sound of his footfalls, that her eager

planning mind at night in her bed, would not let her deny. Suddenly she

looked away from him, and, twisting her hands in the dew-wet grass,

spoke. "I've written to Val," she said.

Ishmael did not answer, and she went on:

"You don't seem very interested, but I'm so full of it I must tell

someone. After all one doesn't break off an engagement every day...."

He turned towards her then, dropped his pipe, and looked full at her.

"You mean that? You have definitely done it?"

"Undone it," she said cheerfully; "it would never have answered. I've

known that for ages. He's so much cleverer than I am, but so much less

wise! He's just a nice boy who would be the ordinary simple kind if it

weren't for his music. And even there we can't agree, you see."

"I'm not clever--not the kind that can do clever things," said Ishmael.

"It's not the doing clever things that matters, I've come to the

conclusion, though Val would think that was heresy. Being things matters

more, somehow. He knows all about music, and they say he's going to be

the great English composer, and I only know that even a barrel-organ in

the street has always made me feel what I used to call when I was small

all 'live-y and love-y.'"

"There is nothing one can get drunk on like music and poetry," said

Ishmael slowly. "Pictures one needs to understand before they can

intoxicate, and prose can fill and satisfy you, but it's only the other

two one can go mad on, and this--"

He pulled her to him, a hand beneath her chin, his other arm round her

sturdy, soft little body, and she met his eyes bravely for a moment.

Then hers closed, but he still paused before he kissed her.

"Georgie, are you sure?" he asked. "Have you thought over all the

drawbacks?"

"Such as--?"

"My brothers ... even my son, who will have to come before any we may

have.... I don't want any more bad blood over this heritage, Georgie!

And I--I'm a good many years older than you--"

"And terribly sot in your ways, as Mrs. Penticost says ..." murmured

Georgie. "Ishmael, aren't you going to ...?"

Then he did, and Georgie nestled close to him with a sigh of

satisfaction. After a little while her indefatigable tongue began again.

"Ishmael, isn't it funny to think it might never have happened? Just

suppose I had been actually married to Val instead of only sort of

engaged.... I might have been, you know."

"If you didn't care about him," began Ishmael, then stopped, feeling he

was a poor advocate of a simple and unmistakable method of loving.

"Well, it's very difficult for a girl," explained Georgie. "Even when I

was getting fond of him I knew it wasn't what I'd imagined falling in

love to be like, but I thought it might be all I could manage. You see,

in real life, the second-best has such a disconcerting habit of coming

along first. You know all the time that it is only the second-best, but

you think to yourself, 'Suppose the first-best never comes along for me,

and I have said No to this, then there'll be nothing but a third-best

to fall back on.' That's why so many women marry just not the right

man."

"And I--am I the first-best ...?" asked Ishmael in a low voice.

Georgie nodded.

"Ah!" she said; "you need never be jealous of poor Val. If anyone has

anything to be jealous over, it's me--not that I'm going to be. After

all, one can't be a man's first love and his last, and it's more

important to be his last! What's the matter ...? You look funny,

somehow...."

"Nothing," said Ishmael; "I was only thinking what a dear you are.

You're so sporting about everything. And I--sometimes in the middle of

being happy everything seems suddenly empty and stupid to me, and I

dread your finding that out. Arid spaces.... I don't know how to explain

it. They'll come even in my love for you."

Georgie nodded again, like a wise baby mandarin, as she sat there with

her feet tucked up under her. She stared ahead, and slowly a change came

over her face, a change like the suffusion of dawn. She caught his head

to her and drew it to her breast.

"I've had nothing to make me tired yet, not like you. I almost want you

to feel tired and sad and lost if it'll make you come to me, like

this...." She stroked his hair gently, holding his head very lightly. He

pressed it hard against her; he could feel her heart beating at his ear;

he rubbed his cheek against her breast. "You make me feel like a child

again," he said. "No one has ever done, that...."

"Do you know," said Georgie, still stroking rhythmically, "that every

woman wants her husband to be four things--her lover, her comrade, her

child, and her master? Did you know that?"

"No; I think I thought it was only the lover they cared about. I'm very

ignorant, Georgie! Have I to be all that? D'you think I can?"

"Which of them do you doubt?" asked Georgie slyly.

"Sometimes the lover, sometimes the comrade, sometimes the child, and

always the master, though I'll play at even that if you want me to. But

the other three--I shall always be all of them underneath, even in the

dry spaces."

Georgie slowly kissed his ruffled head, and then started to try and tie

the longer hairs on the crown into tight knots. He twisted his head away

and sat up, laughing. "If that's how you're going to treat me when I'm

being your child," he threatened, "I'll--"

"You'll what?" asked Georgie.

Ishmael did precisely what every other lover in the world would have

done in answer to that question at that moment. Later, when the sun had

moved high and they scrambled up to go home, Georgie was the laughing

child again; only for a second, as they stood on the ridge above and

looked down to the silvery patch where the bright grass was flattened

where they had lain, she wore the look that had transfigured her before.

In the early autumn Ishmael married, and a new phase began for him at

Cloom. For the first years his precision of them held very true, except

that, though they held more of deep and actual satisfaction than he had

imagined, the moments of rapture were less glamorous.

Ishmael was one of those unlucky and rare people to whom everything has

lost poignancy when it is occurring not for the first time. He knew how

far dearer to him was Georgie than Blanche had ever been--how far more

lovable she was. But his love had not the keenness, the exquisite

sharpness, of the earlier love, because that first time had taken from

him what in spite of himself he could not give again. If Georgie had

left him he would not have suffered the agonies he had lived down after

Blanche had gone.

In the same way he loved Georgie incomparably more than Phoebe, and

between them passion was a deeper though not a sweeter thing; yet never

again was he to feel the abandon that had delighted and finally satiated

him with Phoebe. His relation towards any other human being could

never now stretch from rim to rim of the world for him as had so nearly

been the case when he loved Blanche. No one thing could seem to him to

overtop all others as he had tried to make it in the first months with

Phoebe.

As time went on there came about many measures of which he was as keen

an advocate as he had been of school reform and the ballot, yet never

did he recapture that first fine glow which had fired him at his entry

into the world of men who worked at these things. He believed as time

went on, more firmly, because more vitally, in God and the future of the

soul than ever he had in his fervid schooldays, yet these beliefs

aroused less enthusiasm of response within him.

He could still feel as strongly in body, soul or mind, but never did he

have those flashing periods when all three are fused together in that

one white passion of feeling which is the genius of youth. Always one of

the three stood aloof, the jarring spectator in the trinity, and

affected the quality of what the other two might feel. Life, as he went

through its midway, seemed to him to disintegrate, not to move

inevitably towards any one culmination of its varied pattern. When he

had been young he lived by what might happen any golden to-morrow; now

he lived by what did happen day by day.

BOOK IV

THE SHADOW OF THE SCYTHE

CHAPTER I

QUESTIONS OF VISION

"I am getting on, you know," said Nicky Ruan. "At twenty-two--nearly

twenty-three--a fellow isn't as young as he was. And I don't want to

stick here till I'm too old to enjoy seeing the world."

"What should you consider too old, Nicky?" asked Ishmael.

Nicky hesitated; he made a rapid calculation in his head, and arriving

at the fact that his father must be quite forty-six or seven, and being

always averse to hurting anyone's feelings unless it was very worth

while, he temporised.

"Oh, well! it depends on the fellow, doesn't it? I expect, for instance,

you weren't nearly as old as me when you were my age, because you didn't

go to the 'Varsity, and of course that makes a difference...."

Ishmael sat smoking and looking at the boy in silence. He felt he knew

what the old Bible phrase meant when it spoke of yearning over a child.

He felt the helpless desire to protect, to stand between this golden boy

and all that must come to him, and he knew that not only can no one live

for anyone else, but that youth would refuse the gift were it possible

to make it.

Nicky, about whom he knew so little, about whom he realised he had

always known so little.... What did he really know about Nicky's life,

his doings up at Oxford, his thoughts? Roughly he was aware of his

tastes, his habits at home, his affections; but of the other Nicky, the

individual that stood towards life, not the boy who stood in his

relation of son towards him, he knew nothing. Women, now ... what lay

behind that smooth lean young face--what of knowledge about women?

Ishmael had no means of telling. Whether Nicky were still as pure as his

two little sisters, whether he had the technical purity that may for

some time go with a certain amount of curiosity and corruption of the

mind, whether he had already had his "adventures," or whether he were

still too undeveloped, too immersed in sports and himself to have

bothered about women, Ishmael could not really tell, any more than could

any other parent.

The only thing in which Ishmael differed from the average parent was in

acknowledging his ignorance to himself. But then Nicky had always had

that curious intangible quality, that mental slipping-away from all

grip, which had made it especially difficult ever really to know what

his thoughts were and what he really knew. Not that there was any

reserve about Nicky--he was not at all averse to talking freely about

himself; but it seemed as though either there were in him a hollow where

most people keep the root of self, or else that a very deep-seated

personality held court there. Whichever it was, the effect was the same,

the effect as of a sealed place.

Father and son sat looking at each other, and there was something

inimical in the eyes of both. Nicky sat thinking: "Of course father's a

brick in all sorts of ways, and there isn't anybody quite like him, but

he doesn't understand. He never was young like me...." Thus Nicky, and

saw no inconsistency with his statement of a minute earlier that his

father had been so much younger than he at the same age. And Ishmael

thought: "He has the only thing that matters in the world.... _And I was

like that once_...." And almost, for a moment, hated him that he should

have the youth which slipped so fast. The moment died, and with it his

bitterness, merged in the pity of youth which welled up in him as he

sat fronting Nicky's superb confidence, his health, his swelling

appetite for life.

"But why Canada?" asked Ishmael at last, temporising in his turn.

"Because I'm sure it's the country of the future; you should hear Uncle

Dan about it!... And of course he knows so many people there, so I

should have introductions and all that. You know you believe in Uncle

Dan!"

"Yes, I believe, as you call it, in your Uncle Dan's sincerity, if only

because he's done so many inconsistent and apparently contradictory

things in his life. But that doesn't make me see any real reason why you

should go to Canada."

Nicky's bright face took on a sulky expression, he swung a foot, and his

jaw stood out as it did when he was angry, thickening his whole aspect.

"Because, if you want to know, I'm not going to be content to spend my

whole life in an obscure farm in Cornwall, as you've done!" he burst

out. "There's the whole world to see and I want to see it. There's--oh,

a thousand and one things to do and feel one could never get down here,

things I want to do and feel. You can't understand."

That was true, and Ishmael knew it. What human being, he reflected,

marooned as each of us is on the island of individuality, can understand

another even when there is no barrier of a generation between, that

barrier which only the element of sexual interest can overleap? There

had been moments when he had wished that his destiny had not tied him

quite so much, but on the whole he had loved that to which he was tied

too dearly to resent it. He could see that Nicky thought his life had

been very wasted; he allowed himself a little smile as he thought of

what Cloom would have been like as a heritage for Nicky if he had not

taken the view of his destiny that he had. What would Nicky's own

position in life have been? Probably no better than that of his

grandfather, old James Ruan. Ishmael laughed outright, much to Nicky's

indignation, but when he spoke again his voice was gentler.

"I'll think it over," he promised, "and I'll write to your uncle and ask

him what he thinks. I don't want to clip your wings, Nicky, Heaven

forbid! I mayn't always have enjoyed having my own flights so

circumscribed, you know."

Into Nicky's generous young heart rushed a flood of sympathy on the

instant. "It must have been rotten for you," he said eagerly. "I know

the old Parson's always saying how splendid you've been about this place

and all that; you mustn't think I don't realise."

Ishmael, aware that he had not really wished his flights to be wider,

that his nature had been satisfied, as far as satisfaction lay in his

power, by Cloom, by the soil which was the fabric of life to him, felt

he was obtaining sympathy and approbation on false pretences--indeed, he

had deliberately angled for them. They were too sweet to refuse, however

come by. Nicky, the young and splendid, whom he loved so dearly in spite

of--or could it be because of?--his elusiveness, did not so often warm

his heart that he could spurn this. He crossed over to where Nicky sat

on the edge of the table and allowed himself one of his rare caresses,

slipping his arm about the boy's shoulders. "We'll see, Nicky!" he said.