BOOK II

IX

"BUT, Justine----"

Mrs. Harry Dressel, seated in the June freshness of her Oak Street

drawing-room, and harmonizing by her high lights and hard edges with the

white-and-gold angularities of the best furniture, cast a rebuking eye

on her friend Miss Brent, who stood arranging in a glass bowl the

handful of roses she had just brought in from the garden.

Mrs. Dressel's intonation made it clear that the entrance of Miss Brent

had been the signal for renewing an argument which the latter had

perhaps left the room to escape.

"When you were here three years ago, Justine, I could understand your

not wanting to go out, because you were in mourning for your mother--and

besides, you'd volunteered for that bad surgical case in the Hope

Hospital. But now that you've come back for a rest and a change I can't

imagine why you persist in shutting yourself up--unless, of course," she

concluded, in a higher key of reproach, "it's because you think so

little of Hanaford society----"

Justine Brent, putting the last rose in place, turned from her task with

a protesting gesture.

"My dear Effie, who am I to think little of any society, when I belong

to none?" She passed a last light touch over the flowers, and crossing

the room, brushed her friend's hand with the same caressing gesture.

Mrs. Dressel met it with an unrelenting turn of her plump shoulder,

murmuring: "Oh, if you take _that_ tone!" And on Miss Brent's gaily

rejoining: "Isn't it better than to have other people take it for me?"

she replied, with an air of affront that expressed itself in a ruffling

of her whole pretty person: "If you'll excuse my saying so, Justine, the

fact that you are staying with _me_ would be enough to make you welcome

anywhere in Hanaford!"

"I'm sure of it, dear; so sure that my horrid pride rather resents being

floated in on the high tide of such overwhelming credentials."

Mrs. Dressel glanced up doubtfully at the dark face laughing down on

her. Though she was president of the Maplewood Avenue Book-club, and

habitually figured in the society column of the "Banner" as one of the

intellectual leaders of Hanaford, there were moments when her

self-confidence trembled before Justine's light sallies. It was absurd,

of course, given the relative situations of the two; and Mrs. Dressel,

behind her friend's back, was quickly reassured by the thought that

Justine was only a hospital nurse, who had to work for her living, and

had really never "been anywhere"; but when Miss Brent's verbal arrows

were flying, it seemed somehow of more immediate consequence that she

was fairly well-connected, and lived in New York. No one placed a higher

value on the abstract qualities of wit and irony than Mrs. Dressel; the

difficulty was that she never quite knew when Justine's retorts were

loaded, or when her own susceptibilities were the target aimed at; and

between her desire to appear to take the joke, and the fear of being

ridiculed without knowing it, her pretty face often presented an

interesting study in perplexity. As usual, she now took refuge in

bringing the talk back to a personal issue.

"I can't imagine," she said, "why you won't go to the Gaines's

garden-party. It's always the most brilliant affair of the season; and

this year, with the John Amhersts here, and all their party--that

fascinating Mrs. Eustace Ansell, and Mrs. Amherst's father, old Mr.

Langhope, who is quite as quick and clever as _you_ are--you certainly

can't accuse us of being dull and provincial!"

Miss Brent smiled. "As far as I can remember, Effie, it is always you

who accuse others of bringing that charge against Hanaford. For my part,

I know too little of it to have formed any opinion; but whatever it may

have to offer me, I am painfully conscious of having, at present,

nothing but your kind commendation to give in return."

Mrs. Dressel rose impatiently. "How absurdly you talk! You're a little

thinner than usual, and I don't like those dark lines under your eyes;

but Westy Gaines told me yesterday that he thought you handsomer than

ever, and that it was intensely becoming to some women to look

over-tired."

"It's lucky I'm one of that kind," Miss Brent rejoined, between a sigh

and a laugh, "and there's every promise of my getting handsomer every

day if somebody doesn't soon arrest the geometrical progression of my

good looks by giving me the chance to take a year's rest!"

As she spoke, she stretched her arms above her head, with a gesture

revealing the suppleness of her slim young frame, but also its tenuity

of structure--the frailness of throat and shoulders, and the play of

bones in the delicate neck. Justine Brent had one of those imponderable

bodies that seem a mere pinch of matter shot through with light and

colour. Though she did not flush easily, auroral lights ran under her

clear skin, were lost in the shadows of her hair, and broke again in her

eyes; and her voice seemed to shoot light too, as though her smile

flashed back from her words as they fell--all her features being so

fluid and changeful that the one solid thing about her was the massing

of dense black hair which clasped her face like the noble metal of some

antique bust.

Mrs. Dressel's face softened at the note of weariness in the girl's

voice. "Are you very tired, dear?" she asked drawing her down to a seat

on the sofa.

"Yes, and no--not so much bodily, perhaps, as in spirit." Justine Brent

drew her brows together, and stared moodily at the thin brown hands

interwoven between Mrs. Dressel's plump fingers. Seated thus, with

hollowed shoulders and brooding head, she might have figured a young

sibyl bowed above some mystery of fate; but the next moment her face,

inclining toward her friend's, cast off its shadows and resumed the look

of a plaintive child.

"The worst of it is that I don't look forward with any interest to

taking up the old drudgery again. Of course that loss of interest may be

merely physical--I should call it so in a nervous patient, no doubt. But

in myself it seems different--it seems to go to the roots of the world.

You know it was always the imaginative side of my work that helped me

over the ugly details--the pity and beauty that disinfected the physical

horror; but now that feeling is lost, and only the mortal disgust

remains. Oh, Effie, I don't want to be a ministering angel any more--I

want to be uncertain, coy and hard to please. I want something dazzling

and unaccountable to happen to me--something new and unlived and

indescribable!"

She snatched herself with a laugh from the bewildered Effie, and

flinging up her arms again, spun on a light heel across the polished

floor.

"Well, then," murmured Mrs. Dressel with gentle obstinacy, "I can't see

why in the world you won't go to the Gaines's garden-party!" And caught

in the whirlwind of her friend's incomprehensible mirth, she still

persisted, as she ducked her blonde head to it: "If you'll only let me

lend you my dress with the Irish lace, you'll look smarter than anybody

there...."

* * * * *

Before her toilet mirror, an hour later, Justine Brent seemed in a way

to fulfill Mrs. Dressel's prediction. So mirror-like herself, she could

no more help reflecting the happy effect of a bow or a feather than the

subtler influence of word and look; and her face and figure were so new

to the advantages of dress that, at four-and-twenty, she still produced

the effect of a young girl in her first "good" frock. In Mrs. Dressel's

festal raiment, which her dark tints subdued to a quiet elegance, she

was like the golden core of a pale rose illuminating and scenting its

petals.

Three years of solitary life, following on a youth of confidential

intimacy with the mother she had lost, had produced in her the quaint

habit of half-loud soliloquy. "Fine feathers, Justine!" she laughed back

at her laughing image. "You look like a phoenix risen from your ashes.

But slip back into your own plumage, and you'll be no more than a little

brown bird without a song!"

The luxurious suggestions of her dress, and the way her warm youth

became it, drew her back to memories of a childhood nestled in beauty

and gentle ways, before her handsome prodigal father had died, and her

mother's face had grown pinched in the long struggle with poverty. But

those memories were after all less dear to Justine than the grey years

following, when, growing up, she had helped to clear a space in the

wilderness for their tiny hearth-fire, when her own efforts had fed the

flame and roofed it in from the weather. A great heat, kindled at that

hearth, had burned in her veins, making her devour her work, lighting

and warming the long cold days, and reddening the horizon through dark

passages of revolt and failure; and she felt all the more deeply the

chill of reaction that set in with her mother's death.

She thought she had chosen her work as a nurse in a spirit of high

disinterestedness; but in the first hours of her bereavement it seemed

as though only the personal aim had sustained her. For a while, after

this, her sick people became to her mere bundles of disintegrating

matter, and she shrank from physical pain with a distaste the deeper

because, mechanically, she could not help working on to relieve it.

Gradually her sound nature passed out of this morbid phase, and she took

up her task with deeper pity if less exalted ardour; glad to do her part

in the vast impersonal labour of easing the world's misery, but longing

with all the warm instincts of youth for a special load to lift, a

single hand to clasp.

Ah, it was cruel to be alive, to be young, to bubble with springs of

mirth and tenderness and folly, and to live in perpetual contact with

decay and pain--to look persistently into the grey face of death without

having lifted even a corner of life's veil! Now and then, when she felt

her youth flame through the sheath of dullness which was gradually

enclosing it, she rebelled at the conditions that tied a spirit like

hers to its monotonous task, while others, without a quiver of wings on

their dull shoulders, or a note of music in their hearts, had the whole

wide world to range through, and saw in it no more than a frightful

emptiness to be shut out with tight walls of habit....

* * * * *

A tap on the door announced Mrs. Dressel, garbed for conquest, and

bestowing on her brilliant person the last anxious touches of the artist

reluctant to part from a masterpiece.

"My dear, how well you look! I _knew_ that dress would be becoming!" she

exclaimed, generously transferring her self-approval to Justine; and

adding, as the latter moved toward her: "I wish Westy Gaines could see

you now!"

"Well, he will presently," Miss Brent rejoined, ignoring the slight

stress on the name.

Mrs. Dressel continued to brood on her maternally. "Justine--I wish

you'd tell me! You say you hate the life you're leading now--but isn't

there somebody who might----?"

"Give me another, with lace dresses in it?" Justine's slight shrug might

have seemed theatrical, had it not been a part of the ceaseless dramatic

play of her flexible person. "There might be, perhaps...only I'm not

sure--" She broke off whimsically.

"Not sure of what?"

"That this kind of dress might not always be a little tight on the

shoulders."

"Tight on the shoulders? What do you mean, Justine? My clothes simply

_hang_ on you!"

"Oh, Effie dear, don't you remember the fable of the wings under the

skin, that sprout when one meets a pair of kindred shoulders?" And, as

Mrs. Dressel bent on her a brow of unenlightenment--"Well, it doesn't

matter: I only meant that I've always been afraid good clothes might

keep my wings from sprouting!" She turned back to the glass, giving

herself a last light touch such as she had bestowed on the roses.

"And that reminds me," she continued--"how about Mr. Amherst's wings?"

"John Amherst?" Mrs. Dressel brightened into immediate attention. "Why,

do you know him?"

"Not as the owner of the Westmore Mills; but I came across him as their

assistant manager three years ago, at the Hope Hospital, and he was

starting a very promising pair then. I wonder if they're doing as well

under his new coat."

"I'm not sure that I understand you when you talk poetry," said Mrs.

Dressel with less interest; "but personally I can't say I like John

Amherst--and he is certainly not worthy of such a lovely woman as Mrs.

Westmore. Of course she would never let any one see that she's not

perfectly happy; but I'm told he has given them all a great deal of

trouble by interfering in the management of the mills, and his manner is

so cold and sarcastic--the truth is, I suppose he's never quite at ease

in society. _Her_ family have never been really reconciled to the

marriage; and Westy Gaines says----"

"Ah, Westy Gaines _would_," Justine interposed lightly. "But if Mrs.

Amherst is really the Bessy Langhope I used to know it must be rather a

struggle for the wings!"

Mrs. Dressel's flagging interest settled on the one glimpse of fact in

this statement. "It's such a coincidence that you should have known her

too! Was she always so perfectly fascinating? I wish I knew how she

gives that look to her hair!"

Justine gathered up the lace sunshade and long gloves which her friend

had lent her. "There was not much more that was genuine about her

character--that was her very own, I mean--than there is about my

appearance at this moment. She was always the dearest little chameleon

in the world, taking everybody's colour in the most flattering way, and

giving back, I must say, a most charming reflection--if you'll excuse

the mixed metaphor; but when one got her by herself, with no reflections

to catch, one found she hadn't any particular colour of her own. One of

the girls used to say she ought to wear a tag, because she was so easily

mislaid---- Now then, I'm ready!"

Justine advanced to the door, and Mrs. Dressel followed her downstairs,

reflecting with pardonable complacency that one of the disadvantages of

being clever was that it tempted one to say sarcastic things of other

women--than which she could imagine no more crying social error.

During the drive to the garden-party, Justine's thoughts, drawn to the

past by the mention of Bessy Langhope's name, reverted to the comic

inconsequences of her own lot--to that persistent irrelevance of

incident that had once made her compare herself to an actor always

playing his part before the wrong stage-setting. Was there not, for

instance, a mocking incongruity in the fact that a creature so leaping

with life should have, for chief outlet, the narrow mental channel of

the excellent couple between whom she was now being borne to the Gaines

garden-party? All her friendships were the result of propinquity or of

early association, and fate had held her imprisoned in a circle of

well-to-do mediocrity, peopled by just such figures as those of the

kindly and prosperous Dressels. Effie Dressel, the daughter of a cousin

of Mrs. Brent's, had obscurely but safely allied herself with the heavy

blond young man who was to succeed his father as President of the Union

Bank, and who was already regarded by the "solid business interests" of

Hanaford as possessing talents likely to carry him far in the

development of the paternal fortunes. Harry Dressel's honest countenance

gave no evidence of peculiar astuteness, and he was in fact rather the

product of special conditions than of an irresistible bent. He had the

sound Saxon love of games, and the most interesting game he had ever

been taught was "business." He was a simple domestic being, and

according to Hanaford standards the most obvious obligation of the

husband and father was to make his family richer. If Harry Dressel had

ever formulated his aims, he might have said that he wanted to be the

man whom Hanaford most respected, and that was only another way of

saying, the richest man in Hanaford. Effie embraced his creed with a

zeal facilitated by such evidence of its soundness as a growing income

and the early prospects of a carriage. Her mother-in-law, a kind old

lady with a simple unquestioning love of money, had told her on her

wedding day that Harry's one object would always be to make his family

proud of him; and the recent purchase of the victoria in which Justine

and the Dressels were now seated was regarded by the family as a

striking fulfillment of this prophecy.

In the course of her hospital work Justine had of necessity run across

far different types; but from the connections thus offered she was often

held back by the subtler shades of taste that civilize human

intercourse. Her world, in short, had been chiefly peopled by the dull

or the crude, and, hemmed in between the two, she had created for

herself an inner kingdom where the fastidiousness she had to set aside

in her outward relations recovered its full sway. There must be actual

beings worthy of admission to this secret precinct, but hitherto they

had not come her way; and the sense that they were somewhere just out of

reach still gave an edge of youthful curiosity to each encounter with a

new group of people.

Certainly, Mrs. Gaines's garden-party seemed an unlikely field for the

exercise of such curiosity: Justine's few glimpses of Hanaford society

had revealed it as rather a dull thick body, with a surface stimulated

only by ill-advised references to the life of larger capitals; and the

concentrated essence of social Hanaford was of course to be found at the

Gaines entertainments. It presented itself, however, in the rich June

afternoon, on the long shadows of the well-kept lawn, and among the

paths of the rose-garden, in its most amiable aspect; and to Justine,

wearied by habitual contact with ugliness and suffering, there was pure

delight in the verdant setting of the picture, and in the light

harmonious tints of the figures peopling it. If the company was dull, it

was at least decorative; and poverty, misery and dirt were shut out by

the placid unconsciousness of the guests as securely as by the leafy

barriers of the garden.

X

"AH, Mrs. Dressel, we were on the lookout for you--waiting for the

curtain to rise. Your friend Miss Brent? Juliana, Mrs. Dressel's friend

Miss Brent----"

Near the brilliantly-striped marquee that formed the axis of the Gaines

garden-parties, Mr. Halford Gaines, a few paces from his wife and

daughters, stood radiating a royal welcome on the stream of visitors

pouring across the lawn. It was only to eyes perverted by a different

social perspective that there could be any doubt as to the importance

of the Gaines entertainments. To Hanaford itself they were epoch-making;

and if any rebellious spirit had cherished a doubt of the fact, it would

have been quelled by the official majesty of Mr. Gaines's frock-coat and

the comprehensive cordiality of his manner.

There were moments when New York hung like a disquieting cloud on the

social horizon of Mrs. Gaines and her daughters; but to Halford Gaines

Hanaford was all in all. As an exponent of the popular and patriotic

"good-enough-for-me" theory he stood in high favour at the Hanaford

Club, where a too-keen consciousness of the metropolis was alternately

combated by easy allusion and studied omission, and where the unsettled

fancies of youth were chastened and steadied by the reflection that, if

Hanaford was good enough for Halford Gaines, it must offer opportunities

commensurate with the largest ideas of life.

Never did Mr. Gaines's manner bear richer witness to what could be

extracted from Hanaford than when he was in the act of applying to it

the powerful pressure of his hospitality. The resultant essence was so

bubbling with social exhilaration that, to its producer at any rate, its

somewhat mixed ingredients were lost in one highly flavoured draught.

Under ordinary circumstances no one discriminated more keenly than Mr.

Gaines between different shades of social importance; but any one who

was entertained by him was momentarily ennobled by the fact, and not all

the anxious telegraphy of his wife and daughters could, for instance,

recall to him that the striking young woman in Mrs. Dressel's wake was

only some obscure protegee, whom it was odd of Effie to have brought,

and whose presence was quite unnecessary to emphasize.

"Juliana, Miss Brent tells me she has never seen our roses. Oh, there

are other roses in Hanaford, Miss Brent; I don't mean to imply that no

one else attempts them; but unless you can afford to give _carte

blanche_ to your man--and mine happens to be something of a

specialist...well, if you'll come with me, I'll let them speak for

themselves. I always say that if people want to know what we can do they

must come and see--they'll never find out from _me_!"

A more emphatic signal from his wife arrested Mr. Gaines as he was in

the act of leading Miss Brent away.

"Eh?--What? The Amhersts and Mrs. Ansell? You must excuse me then, I'm

afraid--but Westy shall take you. Westy, my boy, it's an ill-wind.... I

want you to show this young lady our roses." And Mr. Gaines, with

mingled reluctance and satisfaction, turned away to receive the most

important guests of the day.

It had not needed his father's summons to draw the expert Westy to Miss

Brent: he was already gravitating toward her, with the nonchalance bred

of cosmopolitan successes, but with a directness of aim due also to his

larger opportunities of comparison.

"The roses will do," he explained, as he guided her through the

increasing circle of guests about his mother; and in answer to Justine's

glance of enquiry: "To get you away, I mean. They're not much in

themselves, you know; but everything of the governor's always begins

with a capital letter."

"Oh, but these roses deserve to," Justine exclaimed, as they paused

under the evergreen archway at the farther end of the lawn.

"I don't know--not if you've been in England," Westy murmured, watching

furtively for the impression produced, on one who had presumably not, by

the great blush of colour massed against its dusky background of clipped

evergreens.

Justine smiled. "I _have_ been--but I've been in the slums since; in

horrible places that the least of those flowers would have lighted up

like a lamp."

Westy's guarded glance imprudently softened. "It's the beastliest kind

of a shame, your ever having had to do such work----"

"Oh, _had_ to?" she flashed back at him disconcertingly. "It was my

choice, you know: there was a time when I couldn't live without it.

Philanthropy is one of the subtlest forms of self-indulgence."

Westy met this with a vague laugh. If a chap who was as knowing as the

devil _did_, once in a way, indulge himself in the luxury of talking

recklessly to a girl with exceptional eyes, it was rather upsetting to

discover in those eyes no consciousness of the risk he had taken!

"But I _am_ rather tired of it now," she continued, and his look grew

guarded again. After all, they were all the same--except in that

particular matter of the eyes. At the thought, he risked another look,

hung on the sharp edge of betrayal, and was snatched back, not by the

manly instinct of self-preservation, but by some imp of mockery lurking

in the depths that lured him.

He recovered his balance and took refuge in a tone of worldly ease. "I

saw a chap the other day who said he knew you when you were at Saint

Elizabeth's--wasn't that the name of your hospital?"

Justine assented. "One of the doctors, I suppose. Where did you meet

him?"

Ah, _now_ she should see! He summoned his utmost carelessness of tone.

"Down on Long Island last week--I was spending Sunday with the

Amhersts." He held up the glittering fact to her, and watched for the

least little blink of awe; but her lids never trembled. It was a

confession of social blindness which painfully negatived Mrs. Dressel's

hint that she knew the Amhersts; if she had even known _of_ them, she

could not so fatally have missed his point.

"Long Island?" She drew her brows together in puzzled retrospection. "I

wonder if it could have been Stephen Wyant? I heard he had taken over

his uncle's practice somewhere near New York."

"Wyant--that's the name. He's the doctor at Clifton, the nearest town to

the Amhersts' place. Little Cicely had a cold--Cicely Westmore, you

know--a small cousin of mine, by the way--" he switched a rose-branch

loftily out of her path, explaining, as she moved on, that Cicely was

the daughter of Mrs. Amherst's first marriage to Richard Westmore.

"That's the way I happened to see this Dr. Wyant. Bessy--Mrs.

Amherst--asked him to stop to luncheon, after he'd seen the kid. He

seems rather a discontented sort of a chap--grumbling at not having a

New York practice. I should have thought he had rather a snug berth,

down there at Lynbrook, with all those swells to dose."

Justine smiled. "Dr. Wyant is ambitious, and swells don't have as

interesting diseases as poor people. One gets tired of giving them bread

pills for imaginary ailments. But Dr. Wyant is not strong himself and I

fancy a country practice is better for him than hard work in town."

"You think him clever though, do you?" Westy enquired absently. He was

already bored with the subject of the Long Island doctor, and vexed at

the lack of perception that led his companion to show more concern in

the fortunes of a country practitioner than in the fact of his own visit

to the Amhersts; but the topic was a safe one, and it was agreeable to

see how her face kindled when she was interested.

Justine mused on his question. "I think he has very great promise--which

he is almost certain not to fulfill," she answered with a sigh which

seemed to Westy's anxious ear to betray a more than professional

interest in the person referred to.

"Oh, come now--why not? With the Amhersts to give him a start--I heard

my cousin recommending him to a lot of people the other day----"

"Oh, he may become a fashionable doctor," Justine assented

indifferently; to which her companion rejoined, with a puzzled stare:

"That's just what I mean--with Bessy backing him!"

"Has Mrs. Amherst become such a power, then?" Justine asked, taking up

the coveted theme just as he despaired of attracting her to it.

"My cousin?" he stretched the two syllables to the cracking-point.

"Well, she's awfully rich, you know; and there's nobody smarter. Don't

you think so?"

"I don't know; it's so long since I've seen her."

He brightened. "You _did_ know her, then?" But the discovery made her

obtuseness the more inexplicable!

"Oh, centuries ago: in another world."

"_Centuries_--I like that!" Westy gallantly protested, his ardour

kindling as she swam once more within his social ken. "And Amherst? You

know him too, I suppose? By Jove, here he is now----"

He signalled a tall figure strolling slowly toward them with bent head

and brooding gaze. Justine's eye had retained a vivid image of the man

with whom, scarcely three years earlier, she had lived through a moment

of such poignant intimacy, and she recognized at once his lean outline,

and the keen spring of his features, still veiled by the same look of

inward absorption. She noticed, as he raised his hat in response to

Westy Gaines's greeting, that the vertical lines between his brows had

deepened; and a moment later she was aware that this change was the

visible token of others which went deeper than the fact of his good

clothes and his general air of leisure and well-being--changes

perceptible to her only in the startled sense of how prosperity had aged

him.

"Hallo, Amherst--trying to get under cover?" Westy jovially accosted

him, with a significant gesture toward the crowded lawn from which the

new-comer had evidently fled. "I was just telling Miss Brent that this

is the safest place on these painful occasions--Oh, confound it, it's

not as safe as I thought! Here's one of my sisters making for me!"

There ensued a short conflict of words, before his feeble flutter of

resistance was borne down by a resolute Miss Gaines who, as she swept

him back to the marquee, cried out to Amherst that her mother was asking

for him too; and then Justine had time to observe that her remaining

companion had no intention of responding to his hostess's appeal.

Westy, in naming her, had laid just enough stress on the name to let it

serve as a reminder or an introduction, as circumstances might decide,

and she saw that Amherst, roused from his abstraction by the proffered

clue, was holding his hand out doubtfully.

"I think we haven't met for some years," he said.

Justine smiled. "I have a better reason than you for remembering the

exact date;" and in response to his look of surprise she added: "You

made me commit a professional breach of faith, and I've never known

since whether to be glad or sorry."

Amherst still bent on her the gaze which seemed to find in external

details an obstacle rather than a help to recognition; but suddenly his

face cleared. "It was you who told me the truth about poor Dillon! I

couldn't imagine why I seemed to see you in such a different

setting...."

"Oh, I'm disguised as a lady this afternoon," she said smiling. "But I'm

glad you saw through the disguise."

He smiled back at her. "Are you? Why?"

"It seems to make it--if it's so transparent--less of a sham, less of a

dishonesty," she began impulsively, and then paused again, a little

annoyed at the overemphasis of her words. Why was she explaining and

excusing herself to this stranger? Did she propose to tell him next that

she had borrowed her dress from Effie Dressel? To cover her confusion

she went on with a slight laugh: "But you haven't told me."

"What was I to tell you?"

"Whether to be glad or sorry that I broke my vow and told the truth

about Dillon."

They were standing face to face in the solitude of the garden-walk,

forgetful of everything but the sudden surprised sense of intimacy that

had marked their former brief communion. Justine had raised her eyes

half-laughingly to Amherst, but they dropped before the unexpected

seriousness of his.

"Why do you want to know?" he asked.

She made an effort to sustain the note of pleasantry.

"Well--it might, for instance, determine my future conduct. You see I'm

still a nurse, and such problems are always likely to present

themselves."

"Ah, then don't!"

"Don't?"

"I mean--" He hesitated a moment, reaching up to break a rose from the

branch that tapped his shoulder. "I was only thinking what risks we run

when we scramble into the chariot of the gods and try to do the driving.

Be passive--be passive, and you'll be happier!"

"Oh, as to that--!" She swept it aside with one of her airy motions.

"But Dillon, for instance--would _he_ have been happier if I'd been

passive?"

Amherst seemed to ponder. "There again--how can one tell?"

"And the risk's not worth taking?"

"No!"

She paused, and they looked at each other again. "Do you mean that

seriously, I wonder? Do you----"

"Act on it myself? God forbid! The gods drive so badly. There's poor

Dillon...he happened to be in their way...as we all are at times." He

pulled himself up, and went on in a matter-of-fact tone: "In Dillon's

case, however, my axioms don't apply. When my wife heard the truth she

was, of course, immensely kind to him; and if it hadn't been for you she

might never have known."

Justine smiled. "I think you would have found out--I was only the humble

instrument. But now--" she hesitated--"now you must be able to do so

much--"

Amherst lifted his head, and she saw the colour rise under his fair

skin. "Out at Westmore? You've never been there since? Yes--my wife has

made some changes; but it's all so problematic--and one would have to

live here...."

"You don't, then?"

He answered by an imperceptible shrug. "Of course I'm here often; and

she comes now and then. But the journey's tiresome, and it is not always

easy for her to get away." He checked himself, and Justine saw that he,

in turn, was suddenly conscious of the incongruity of explaining and

extenuating his personal situation to a stranger. "But then we're _not_

strangers!" a voice in her exulted, just as he added, with an

embarrassed attempt to efface and yet justify his moment of expansion:

"That reminds me--I think you know my wife. I heard her asking Mrs.

Dressel about you. She wants so much to see you."

The transition had been effected, at the expense of dramatic interest,

but to the obvious triumph of social observances; and to Justine, after

all, regaining at his side the group about the marquee, the interest was

not so much diminished as shifted to the no less suggestive problem of

studying the friend of her youth in the unexpected character of John

Amherst's wife.

Meanwhile, however, during the brief transit across the Gaines

greensward, her thoughts were still busy with Amherst. She had seen at

once that the peculiar sense of intimacy reawakened by their meeting had

been chilled and deflected by her first allusion to the topic which had

previously brought them together: Amherst had drawn back as soon as she

named the mills. What could be the cause of his reluctance? When they

had last met, the subject burned within him: her being in actual fact a

stranger had not, then, been an obstacle to his confidences. Now that he

was master at Westmore it was plain that another tone became him--that

his situation necessitated a greater reserve; but her enquiry did not

imply the least wish to overstep this restriction: it merely showed her

remembrance of his frankly-avowed interest in the operatives. Justine

was struck by the fact that so natural an allusion should put him on the

defensive. She did not for a moment believe that he had lost his

interest in the mills; and that his point of view should have shifted

with the fact of ownership she rejected as an equally superficial

reading of his character. The man with whom she had talked at Dillon's

bedside was one in whom the ruling purposes had already shaped

themselves, and to whom life, in whatever form it came, must henceforth

take their mould. As she reached this point in her analysis, it occurred

to her that his shrinking from the subject might well imply not

indifference, but a deeper preoccupation: a preoccupation for some

reason suppressed and almost disavowed, yet sustaining the more

intensely its painful hidden life. From this inference it was but a leap

of thought to the next--that the cause of the change must be sought

outside of himself, in some external influence strong enough to modify

the innate lines of his character. And where could such an influence be

more obviously sought than in the marriage which had transformed the

assistant manager of the Westmore Mills not, indeed, into their

owner--that would rather have tended to simplify the problem--but into

the husband of Mrs. Westmore? After all, the mills were Bessy's--and for

a farther understanding of the case it remained to find out what manner

of person Bessy had become.

Justine's first impression, as her friend's charming arms received

her--with an eagerness of welcome not lost on the suspended judgment of

feminine Hanaford--the immediate impression was of a gain of emphasis,

of individuality, as though the fluid creature she remembered had belied

her prediction, and run at last into a definite mould. Yes--Bessy had

acquired an outline: a graceful one, as became her early promise, though

with, perhaps, a little more sharpness of edge than her youthful texture

had promised. But the side she turned to her friend was still all

softness--had in it a hint of the old pliancy, the impulse to lean and

enlace, that at once woke in Justine the corresponding instinct of

guidance and protection, so that their first kiss, before a word was

spoken, carried the two back to the precise relation in which their

school-days had left them. So easy a reversion to the past left no room

for the sense of subsequent changes by which such reunions are sometimes

embarrassed. Justine's sympathies had, instinctively, and almost at

once, transferred themselves to Bessy's side--passing over at a leap

the pained recognition that there _were_ sides already--and Bessy had

gathered up Justine into the circle of gentle self-absorption which left

her very dimly aware of any distinctive characteristic in her friends

except that of their affection for herself--since she asked only, as she

appealingly put it, that they should all be "dreadfully fond" of her.

"And I've wanted you so often, Justine: you're the only clever person

I'm not afraid of, because your cleverness always used to make things

clear instead of confusing them. I've asked so many people about

you--but I never heard a word till just the other day--wasn't it

odd?--when our new doctor at Rushton happened to say that he knew you.

I've been rather unwell lately--nervous and tired, and sleeping

badly--and he told me I ought to keep perfectly quiet, and be under the

care of a nurse who could make me do as she chose: just such a nurse as

a wonderful Miss Brent he had known at St. Elizabeth's, whose patients

obeyed her as if she'd been the colonel of a regiment. His description

made me laugh, it reminded me so much of the way you used to make me do

what you wanted at the convent--and then it suddenly occurred to me that

I had heard of you having gone in for nursing, and we compared notes,

and I found it was really you! Wasn't it odd that we should discover

each other in that way? I daresay we might have passed in the street

and never known it--I'm sure I must be horribly changed...."

Thus Bessy discoursed, in the semi-isolation to which, under an

overarching beech-tree, the discretion of their hostess had allowed the

two friends to withdraw for the freer exchange of confidences. There

was, at first sight, nothing in her aspect to bear out Mrs. Amherst's

plaintive allusion to her health, but Justine, who knew that she had

lost a baby a few months previously, assumed that the effect of this

shock still lingered, though evidently mitigated by a reviving interest

in pretty clothes and the other ornamental accessories of life.

Certainly Bessy Amherst had grown into the full loveliness which her

childhood promised. She had the kind of finished prettiness that

declares itself early, holds its own through the awkward transitions of

girlhood, and resists the strain of all later vicissitudes, as though

miraculously preserved in some clear medium impenetrable to the wear and

tear of living.

"You absurd child! You've not changed a bit except to grow more so!"

Justine laughed, paying amused tribute to the childish craving for "a

compliment" that still betrayed itself in Bessy's eyes.

"Well, _you_ have, then, Justine--you've grown extraordinarily

handsome!"

"That _is_ extraordinary of me, certainly," the other acknowledged

gaily. "But then think what room for improvement there was--and how

much time I've had to improve in!"

"It is a long time, isn't it?" Bessy assented. "I feel so intimate,

still, with the old Justine of the convent, and I don't know the new one

a bit. Just think--I've a great girl of my own, almost as old as we were

when we went to the Sacred Heart: But perhaps you don't know anything

about me either. You see, I married again two years ago, and my poor

baby died last March...so I have only Cicely. It was such a

disappointment--I wanted a boy dreadfully, and I understand little

babies so much better than a big girl like Cicely.... Oh, dear, here is

Juliana Gaines bringing up some more tiresome people! It's such a bore,

but John says I must know them all. Well, thank goodness we've only one

more day in this dreadful place--and of course I shall see you, dear,

before we go...."

XI

AFTER conducting Miss Brent to his wife, John Amherst, by the exercise

of considerable strategic skill, had once more contrived to detach

himself from the throng on the lawn, and, regaining a path in the

shrubbery, had taken refuge on the verandah of the house.

Here, under the shade of the awning, two ladies were seated in a

seclusion agreeably tempered by the distant strains of the Hanaford

band, and by the shifting prospect of the groups below them.

"Ah, here he is now!" the younger of the two exclaimed, turning on

Amherst the smile of intelligence that Mrs. Eustace Ansell was in the

habit of substituting for the idle preliminaries of conversation. "We

were not talking of you, though," she added as Amherst took the seat to

which his mother beckoned him, "but of Bessy--which, I suppose, is

almost as indiscreet."

She added the last phrase after an imperceptible pause, and as if in

deprecation of the hardly more perceptible frown which, at the mention

of his wife's name, had deepened the lines between Amherst's brows.

"Indiscreet of his own mother and his wife's friend?" Mrs. Amherst

protested, laying her trimly-gloved hand on her son's arm; while the

latter, with his eyes on her companion, said slowly: "Mrs. Ansell knows

that indiscretion is the last fault of which her friends are likely to

accuse her."

"_Raison de plus_, you mean?" she laughed, meeting squarely the

challenge that passed between them under Mrs. Amherst's puzzled gaze.

"Well, if I take advantage of my reputation for discretion to meddle a

little now and then, at least I do so in a good cause. I was just saying

how much I wish that you would take Bessy to Europe; and I am so sure

of my cause, in this case, that I am going to leave it to your mother to

give you my reasons."

She rose as she spoke, not with any sign of haste or embarrassment, but

as if gracefully recognizing the desire of mother and son to be alone

together; but Amherst, rising also, made a motion to detain her.

"No one else will be able to put your reasons half so convincingly," he

said with a slight smile, "and I am sure my mother would much rather be

spared the attempt."

Mrs. Ansell met the smile as freely as she had met the challenge. "My

dear Lucy," she rejoined, laying, as she reseated herself, a light

caress on Mrs. Amherst's hand, "I'm sorry to be flattered at your

expense, but it's not in human nature to resist such an appeal. You

see," she added, raising her eyes to Amherst, "how sure I am of

myself--and of _you_, when you've heard me."

"Oh, John is always ready to hear one," his mother murmured innocently.

"Well, I don't know that I shall even ask him to do as much as that--I'm

so sure, after all, that my suggestion carries its explanation with it."

There was a moment's pause, during which Amherst let his eyes wander

absently over the dissolving groups on the lawn.

"The suggestion that I should take Bessy to Europe?" He paused again.

"When--next autumn?"

"No: now--at once. On a long honeymoon."

He frowned slightly at the last word, passing it by to revert to the

direct answer to his question.

"At once? No--I can't see that the suggestion carries its explanation

with it."

Mrs. Ansell looked at him hesitatingly. She was conscious of the

ill-chosen word that still reverberated between them, and the unwonted

sense of having blundered made her, for the moment, less completely

mistress of herself.

"Ah, you'll see farther presently--" She rose again, unfurling her lace

sunshade, as if to give a touch of definiteness to her action. "It's

not, after all," she added, with a sweet frankness, "a case for

argument, and still less for persuasion. My reasons are excellent--I

should insist on putting them to you myself if they were not! But

they're so good that I can leave you to find them out--and to back them

up with your own, which will probably be a great deal better."

She summed up with a light nod, which included both Amherst and his

mother, and turning to descend the verandah steps, waved a signal to Mr.

Langhope, who was limping disconsolately toward the house.

"What has she been saying to you, mother?" Amherst asked, returning to

his seat beside his mother.

Mrs. Amherst replied by a shake of her head and a raised forefinger of

reproval. "Now, Johnny, I won't answer a single question till you smooth

out those lines between your eyes."

Her son relaxed his frown to smile back at her. "Well, dear, there have

to be some wrinkles in every family, and as you absolutely refuse to

take your share--" His eyes rested affectionately on the frosty sparkle

of her charming old face, which had, in its setting of recovered

prosperity, the freshness of a sunny winter morning, when the very snow

gives out a suggestion of warmth.

He remembered how, on the evening of his dismissal from the mills, he

had paused on the threshold of their sitting-room to watch her a moment

in the lamplight, and had thought with bitter compunction of the fresh

wrinkle he was about to add to the lines about her eyes. The three years

which followed had effaced that wrinkle and veiled the others in a tardy

bloom of well-being. From the moment of turning her back on Westmore,

and establishing herself in the pretty little house at Hanaford which

her son's wife had placed at her disposal, Mrs. Amherst had shed all

traces of the difficult years; and the fact that his marriage had

enabled him to set free, before it was too late, the pent-up springs of

her youthfulness, sometimes seemed to Amherst the clearest gain in his

life's confused total of profit and loss. It was, at any rate, the sense

of Bessy's share in the change that softened his voice when he spoke of

her to his mother.

"Now, then, if I present a sufficiently unruffled surface, let us go

back to Mrs. Ansell--for I confess that her mysterious reasons are not

yet apparent to me."

Mrs. Amherst looked deprecatingly at her son. "Maria Ansell is devoted

to you too, John----"

"Of course she is! It's her _role_ to be devoted to

everybody--especially to her enemies."

"Her enemies?"

"Oh, I didn't intend any personal application. But why does she want me

to take Bessy abroad?"

"She and Mr. Langhope think that Bessy is not looking well."

Amherst paused, and the frown showed itself for a moment. "What do _you_

think, mother?"

"I hadn't noticed it myself: Bessy seems to me prettier than ever. But

perhaps she has less colour--and she complains of not sleeping. Maria

thinks she still frets over the baby."

Amherst made an impatient gesture. "Is Europe the only panacea?"

"You should consider, John, that Bessy is used to change and amusement.

I think you sometimes forget that other people haven't your faculty of

absorbing themselves in a single interest. And Maria says that the new

doctor at Clifton, whom they seem to think so clever, is very anxious

that Bessy should go to Europe this summer."

"No doubt; and so is every one else: I mean her father and old

Tredegar--and your friend Mrs. Ansell not least."

Mrs. Amherst lifted her bright black eyes to his. "Well, then--if they

all think she needs it----"

"Good heavens, if travel were what she needed!--Why, we've never stopped

travelling since we married. We've been everywhere on the globe except

at Hanaford--this is her second visit here in three years!" He rose and

took a rapid turn across the deserted verandah. "It's not because her

health requires it--it's to get me away from Westmore, to prevent things

being done there that ought to be done!" he broke out vehemently,

halting again before his mother.

The aged pink faded from Mrs. Amherst's face, but her eyes retained

their lively glitter. "To prevent things being done? What a strange

thing to say!"

"I shouldn't have said it if I hadn't seen you falling under Mrs.

Ansell's spell."

His mother had a gesture which showed from whom he had inherited his

impulsive movements. "Really, my son--!" She folded her hands, and added

after a pause of self-recovery: "If you mean that I have ever attempted

to interfere----"

"No, no: but when they pervert things so damnably----"

"John!"

He dropped into his chair again, and pushed the hair from his forehead

with a groan.

"Well, then--put it that they have as much right to their view as I

have: I only want you to see what it is. Whenever I try to do anything

at Westmore--to give a real start to the work that Bessy and I planned

together--some pretext is found to stop it: to pack us off to the ends

of the earth, to cry out against reducing her income, to encourage her

in some new extravagance to which the work at the mills must be

sacrificed!"

Mrs. Amherst, growing pale under this outbreak, assured herself by a

nervous backward glance that their privacy was still uninvaded; then her

eyes returned to her son's face.

"John--are you sure you're not sacrificing your wife to the mills?"

He grew pale in turn, and they looked at each other for a moment without

speaking.

"You see it as they do, then?" he rejoined with a discouraged sigh.

"I see it as any old woman would, who had my experiences to look back

to."

"Mother!" he exclaimed.

She smiled composedly. "Do you think I mean that as a reproach? That's

because men will never understand women--least of all, sons their

mothers. No real mother wants to come first; she puts her son's career

ahead of everything. But it's different with a wife--and a wife as much

in love as Bessy."

Amherst looked away. "I should have thought that was a reason----"

"That would reconcile her to being set aside, to counting only second in

your plans?"

"They were _her_ plans when we married!"

"Ah, my dear--!" She paused on that, letting her shrewd old glance, and

all the delicate lines of experience in her face, supply what farther

comment the ineptitude of his argument invited.

He took the full measure of her meaning, receiving it in a baffled

silence that continued as she rose and gathered her lace mantle about

her, as if to signify that their confidences could not, on such an

occasion, be farther prolonged without singularity. Then he stood up

also and joined her, resting his hand on hers while she leaned on the

verandah rail.

"Poor mother! And I've kept you to myself all this time, and spoiled

your good afternoon."

"No, dear; I was a little tired, and had slipped away to be quiet." She

paused, and then went on, persuasively giving back his pressure: "I know

how you feel about doing your duty, John; but now that things are so

comfortably settled, isn't it a pity to unsettle them?"

* * * * *

Amherst had intended, on leaving his mother, to rejoin Bessy, whom he

could still discern, on the lawn, in absorbed communion with Miss Brent;

but after what had passed it seemed impossible, for the moment, to

recover the garden-party tone, and he made his escape through the house

while a trio of Cuban singers, who formed the crowning number of the

entertainment, gathered the company in a denser circle about their

guitars.

As he walked on aimlessly under the deep June shadows of Maplewood

Avenue his mother's last words formed an ironical accompaniment to his

thoughts. "Now that things are comfortably settled--" he knew so well

what that elastic epithet covered! Himself, for instance, ensconced in

the impenetrable prosperity of his wonderful marriage; herself too

(unconsciously, dear soul!), so happily tucked away in a cranny of that

new and spacious life, and no more able to conceive why existing

conditions should be disturbed than the bird in the eaves understands

why the house should be torn down. Well--he had learned at last what his

experience with his poor, valiant, puzzled mother might have taught him:

that one must never ask from women any view but the personal one, any

measure of conduct but that of their own pains and pleasures. She,

indeed, had borne undauntedly enough the brunt of their earlier trials;

but that was merely because, as she said, the mother's instinct bade her

heap all her private hopes on the great devouring altar of her son's

ambition; it was not because she had ever, in the very least, understood

or sympathized with his aims.

And Bessy--? Perhaps if their little son had lived she might in turn

have obeyed the world-old instinct of self-effacement--but now! He

remembered with an intenser self-derision that, not even in the first

surprise of his passion, had he deluded himself with the idea that Bessy

Westmore was an exception to her sex. He had argued rather that, being

only a lovelier product of the common mould, she would abound in the

adaptabilities and pliancies which the lords of the earth have seen fit

to cultivate in their companions. She would care for his aims because

they were his. During their precipitate wooing, and through the first

brief months of marriage, this profound and original theory had been

gratifyingly confirmed; then its perfect surface had begun to show a

flaw. Amherst had always conveniently supposed that the poet's line

summed up the good woman's rule of ethics: _He for God only, she for God

in him._ It was for the god in him, surely, that she had loved him: for

that first glimpse of an "ampler ether, a diviner air" that he had

brought into her cramped and curtained life. He could never, now, evoke

that earlier delusion without feeling on its still-tender surface the

keen edge of Mrs. Ansell's smile. She, no doubt, could have told him at

any time why Bessy had married him: it was for his _beaux yeux_, as Mrs.

Ansell would have put it--because he was young, handsome, persecuted, an

ardent lover if not a subtle one--because Bessy had met him at the fatal

moment, because her family had opposed the marriage--because, in brief,

the gods, that day, may have been a little short of amusement. Well,

they were having their laugh out now--there were moments when high

heaven seemed to ring with it....

With these thoughts at his heels Amherst strode on, overtaken now and

again by the wheels of departing guests from the garden-party, and

knowing, as they passed him, what was in their minds--envy of his

success, admiration of his cleverness in achieving it, and a little

half-contemptuous pity for his wife, who, with her wealth and looks,

might have done so much better. Certainly, if the case could have been

put to Hanaford--the Hanaford of the Gaines garden-party--it would have

sided with Bessy to a voice. And how much justice was there in what he

felt would have been the unanimous verdict of her class? Was his mother

right in hinting that he was sacrificing Bessy to the mills? But the

mills _were_ Bessy--at least he had thought so when he married her!

They were her particular form of contact with life, the expression of

her relation to her fellow-men, her pretext, her opportunity--unless

they were merely a vast purse in which to plunge for her pin-money! He

had fancied it would rest with him to determine from which of these

stand-points she should view Westmore; and at the outset she had

enthusiastically viewed it from his. In her eager adoption of his ideas

she had made a pet of the mills, organizing the Mothers' Club, laying

out a recreation-ground on the Hopewood property, and playing with

pretty plans in water-colour for the Emergency Hospital and the building

which was to contain the night-schools, library and gymnasium; but even

these minor projects--which he had urged her to take up as a means of

learning their essential dependence on his larger scheme--were soon to

be set aside by obstacles of a material order. Bessy always wanted

money--not a great deal, but, as she reasonably put it, "enough"--and

who was to blame if her father and Mr. Tredegar, each in his different

capacity, felt obliged to point out that every philanthropic outlay at

Westmore must entail a corresponding reduction in her income? Perhaps if

she could have been oftener at Hanaford these arguments would have been

counteracted, for she was tender-hearted, and prompt to relieve such

suffering as she saw about her; but her imagination was not active, and

it was easy for her to forget painful sights when they were not under

her eye. This was perhaps--half-consciously--one of the reasons why she

avoided Hanaford; why, as Amherst exclaimed, they had been everywhere

since their marriage but to the place where their obligations called

them. There had, at any rate, always been some good excuse for not

returning there, and consequently for postponing the work of improvement

which, it was generally felt, her husband could not fitly begin till she

_had_ returned and gone over the ground with him. After their marriage,

and especially in view of the comment excited by that romantic incident,

it was impossible not to yield to her wish that they should go abroad

for a few months; then, before her confinement, the doctors had exacted

that she should be spared all fatigue and worry; and after the baby's

death Amherst had felt with her too tenderly to venture an immediate

return to unwelcome questions.

For by this time it had become clear to him that such questions were,

and always would be, unwelcome to her. As the easiest means of escaping

them, she had once more dismissed the whole problem to the vague and

tiresome sphere of "business," whence he had succeeded in detaching it

for a moment in the early days of their union. Her first husband--poor

unappreciated Westmore!--had always spared her the boredom of

"business," and Halford Gaines and Mr. Tredegar were ready to show her

the same consideration; it was part of the modern code of chivalry that

lovely woman should not be bothered about ways and means. But Bessy was

too much the wife--and the wife in love--to consent that her husband's

views on the management of the mills should be totally disregarded.

Precisely because her advisers looked unfavourably on his intervention,

she felt bound--if only in defense of her illusions--to maintain and

emphasize it. The mills were, in fact, the official "platform" on which

she had married: Amherst's devoted _role_ at Westmore had justified the

unconventionality of the step. And so she was committed--the more

helplessly for her dense misintelligence of both sides of the

question--to the policy of conciliating the opposing influences which

had so uncomfortably chosen to fight out their case on the field of her

poor little existence: theoretically siding with her husband, but

surreptitiously, as he well knew, giving aid and comfort to the enemy,

who were really defending her own cause.

All this Amherst saw with that cruel insight which had replaced his

former blindness. He was, in truth, more ashamed of the insight than of

the blindness: it seemed to him horribly cold-blooded to be thus

analyzing, after two years of marriage, the source of his wife's

inconsistencies. And, partly for this reason, he had put off from month

to month the final question of the future management of the mills, and

of the radical changes to be made there if his system were to prevail.

But the time had come when, if Bessy had to turn to Westmore for the

justification of her marriage, he had even more need of calling upon it

for the same service. He had not, assuredly, married her because of

Westmore; but he would scarcely have contemplated marriage with a rich

woman unless the source of her wealth had offered him some such

opportunity as Westmore presented. His special training, and the natural

bent of his mind, qualified him, in what had once seemed a predestined

manner, to help Bessy to use her power nobly, for her own uplifting as

well as for that of Westmore; and so the mills became, incongruously

enough, the plank of safety to which both clung in their sense of

impending disaster.

It was not that Amherst feared the temptation to idleness if this outlet

for his activity were cut off. He had long since found that the luxury

with which his wife surrounded him merely quickened his natural bent for

hard work and hard fare. He recalled with a touch of bitterness how he

had once regretted having separated himself from his mother's class, and

how seductive for a moment, to both mind and senses, that other life had

appeared. Well--he knew it now, and it had neither charm nor peril for

him. Capua must have been a dull place to one who had once drunk the joy

of battle. What he dreaded was not that he should learn to love the

life of ease, but that he should grow to loathe it uncontrollably, as

the symbol of his mental and spiritual bondage. And Westmore was his

safety-valve, his refuge--if he were cut off from Westmore what remained

to him? It was not only the work he had found to his hand, but the one

work for which his hand was fitted. It was his life that he was fighting

for in insisting that now at last, before the close of this

long-deferred visit to Hanaford, the question of the mills should be

faced and settled. He had made that clear to Bessy, in a scene he still

shrank from recalling; for it was of the essence of his somewhat

unbending integrity that he would not trick her into a confused

surrender to the personal influence he still possessed over her, but

must seek to convince her by the tedious process of argument and

exposition, against which she knew no defense but tears and petulance.

But he had, at any rate, gained her consent to his setting forth his

views at the meeting of directors the next morning; and meanwhile he had

meant to be extraordinarily patient and reasonable with her, till the

hint of Mrs. Ansell's stratagem produced in him a fresh reaction of

distrust.

XII

THAT evening when dinner ended, Mrs. Ansell, with a glance through the

tall dining-room windows, had suggested to Bessy that it would be

pleasanter to take coffee on the verandah; but Amherst detained his wife

with a glance.

"I should like Bessy to stay," he said.

The dining-room being on the cool side the house, with a refreshing

outlook on the garden, the men preferred to smoke there rather than in

the stuffily-draped Oriental apartment destined to such rites; and Bessy

Amherst, with a faint sigh, sank back into her seat, while Mrs. Ansell

drifted out through one of the open windows.

The men surrounding Richard Westmore's table were the same who nearly

three years earlier had gathered in his house for the same purpose: the

discussion of conditions at the mills. The only perceptible change in

the relation to each other of the persons composing this group was that

John Amherst was now the host of the other two, instead of being a

subordinate called in for cross-examination; but he was so indifferent,

or at least so heedless, a host--so forgetful, for instance, of Mr.

Tredegar's preference for a "light" cigar, and of Mr. Langhope's

feelings on the duty of making the Westmore madeira circulate with the

sun--that the change was manifest only in his evening-dress, and in the

fact of his sitting at the foot of the table.

If Amherst was conscious of the contrast thus implied, it was only as a

restriction on his freedom. As far as the welfare of Westmore was

concerned he would rather have stood before his companions as the

assistant manager of the mills than as the husband of their owner; and

it seemed to him, as he looked back, that he had done very little with

the opportunity which looked so great in the light of his present

restrictions. What he _had_ done with it--the use to which, as

unfriendly critics might insinuate, he had so adroitly put it--had

landed him, ironically enough, in the ugly _impasse_ of a situation from

which no issue seemed possible without some wasteful sacrifice of

feeling.

His wife's feelings, for example, were already revealing themselves in

an impatient play of her fan that made her father presently lean forward

to suggest: "If we men are to talk shop, is it necessary to keep Bessy

in this hot room?"

Amherst rose and opened the window behind his wife's chair.

"There's a breeze from the west--the room will be cooler now," he said,

returning to his seat.

"Oh, I don't mind--" Bessy murmured, in a tone intended to give her

companions the full measure of what she was being called on to endure.

Mr. Tredegar coughed slightly. "May I trouble you for that other box of

cigars, Amherst? No, _not_ the Cabanas." Bessy rose and handed him the

box on which his glance significantly rested. "Ah, thank you, my dear. I

was about to ask," he continued, looking about for the cigar-lighter,

which flamed unheeded at Amherst's elbow, "what special purpose will be

served by a preliminary review of the questions to be discussed

tomorrow."

"Ah--exactly," murmured Mr. Langhope. "The madeira, my dear John?

No--ah--_please_--to the left!"

Amherst impatiently reversed the direction in which he had set the

precious vessel moving, and turned to Mr. Tredegar, who was

conspicuously lighting his cigar with a match extracted from his

waist-coat pocket.

"The purpose is to define my position in the matter; and I prefer that

Bessy should do this with your help rather than with mine."

Mr. Tredegar surveyed his cigar through drooping lids, as though the

question propounded by Amherst were perched on its tip.

"Is not your position naturally involved in and defined by hers? You

will excuse my saying that--technically speaking, of course--I cannot

distinctly conceive of it as having any separate existence."

Mr. Tredegar spoke with the deliberate mildness that was regarded as his

most effective weapon at the bar, since it was likely to abash those

who were too intelligent to be propitiated by it.

"Certainly it is involved in hers," Amherst agreed; "but how far that

defines it is just what I have waited till now to find out."

Bessy at this point recalled her presence by a restless turn of her

graceful person, and her father, with an affectionate glance at her,

interposed amicably: "But surely--according to old-fashioned ideas--it

implies identity of interests?"

"Yes; but whose interests?" Amherst asked.

"Why--your wife's, man! She owns the mills."

Amherst hesitated. "I would rather talk of my wife's interest in the

mills than of her interests there; but we'll keep to the plural if you

prefer it. Personally, I believe the terms should be interchangeable in

the conduct of such a business."

"Ah--I'm glad to hear that," said Mr. Tredegar quickly, "since it's

precisely the view we all take."

Amherst's colour rose. "Definitions are ambiguous," he said. "Before you

adopt mine, perhaps I had better develop it a little farther. What I

mean is, that Bessy's interests in Westmore should be regulated by her

interest in it--in its welfare as a social body, aside from its success

as a commercial enterprise. If we agree on this definition, we are at

one as to the other: namely that my relation to the matter is defined by

hers."

He paused a moment, as if to give his wife time to contribute some sign

of assent and encouragement; but she maintained a puzzled silence and he

went on: "There is nothing new in this. I have tried to make Bessy

understand from the beginning what obligations I thought the ownership

of Westmore entailed, and how I hoped to help her fulfill them; but ever

since our marriage all definite discussion of the subject has been put

off for one cause or another, and that is my reason for urging that it

should be brought up at the directors' meeting tomorrow."

There was another pause, during which Bessy glanced tentatively at Mr.

Tredegar, and then said, with a lovely rise of colour: "But, John, I

sometimes think you forget how much has been done at Westmore--the

Mothers' Club, and the play-ground, and all--in the way of carrying out

your ideas."

Mr. Tredegar discreetly dropped his glance to his cigar, and Mr.

Langhope sounded an irrepressible note of approval and encouragement.

Amherst smiled. "No, I have not forgotten; and I am grateful to you for

giving my ideas a trial. But what has been done hitherto is purely

superficial." Bessy's eyes clouded, and he added hastily: "Don't think I

undervalue it for that reason--heaven knows the surface of life needs

improving! But it's like picking flowers and sticking them in the ground

to make a garden--unless you transplant the flower with its roots, and

prepare the soil to receive it, your garden will be faded tomorrow. No

radical changes have yet been made at Westmore; and it is of radical

changes that I want to speak."

Bessy's look grew more pained, and Mr. Langhope exclaimed with unwonted

irascibility: "Upon my soul, Amherst, the tone you take about what your

wife has done doesn't strike me as the likeliest way of encouraging her

to do more!"

"I don't want to encourage her to do more on such a basis--the sooner

she sees the futility of it the better for Westmore!"

"The futility--?" Bessy broke out, with a flutter of tears in her voice;

but before her father could intervene Mr. Tredegar had raised his hand

with the gesture of one accustomed to wield the gavel.

"My dear child, I see Amherst's point, and it is best, as he says, that

you should see it too. What he desires, as I understand it, is the

complete reconstruction of the present state of things at Westmore; and

he is right in saying that all your good works there--night-schools, and

nursery, and so forth--leave that issue untouched."

A smile quivered under Mr. Langhope's moustache. He and Amherst both

knew that Mr. Tredegar's feint of recognizing the justice of his

adversary's claim was merely the first step to annihilating it; but

Bessy could never be made to understand this, and always felt herself

deserted and betrayed when any side but her own was given a hearing.

"I'm sorry if all I have tried to do at Westmore is useless--but I

suppose I shall never understand business," she murmured, vainly seeking

consolation in her father's eye.

"This is not business," Amherst broke in. "It's the question of your

personal relation to the people there--the last thing that business

considers."

Mr. Langhope uttered an impatient exclamation. "I wish to heaven the

owner of the mills had made it clear just what that relation was to be!"

"I think he did, sir," Amherst answered steadily, "in leaving his wife

the unrestricted control of the property."

He had reddened under Mr. Langhope's thrust, but his voice betrayed no

irritation, and Bessy rewarded him with an unexpected beam of sympathy:

she was always up in arms at the least sign of his being treated as an

intruder.

"I am sure, papa," she said, a little tremulously, "that poor Richard,

though he knew I was not clever, felt he could trust me to take the best

advice----"

"Ah, that's all we ask of you, my child!" her father sighed, while Mr.

Tredegar drily interposed: "We are merely losing time by this

digression. Let me suggest that Amherst should give us an idea of the

changes he wishes to make at Westmore."

Amherst, as he turned to answer, remembered with what ardent faith in

his powers of persuasion he had responded to the same appeal three years

earlier. He had thought then that all his cause needed was a hearing;

now he knew that the practical man's readiness to let the idealist talk

corresponds with the busy parent's permission to destructive infancy to

"run out and play." They would let him state his case to the four

corners of the earth--if only he did not expect them to act on it! It

was their policy to let him exhaust himself in argument and exhortation,

to listen to him so politely and patiently that if he failed to enforce

his ideas it should not be for lack of opportunity to expound them....

And the alternative struck him as hardly less to be feared. Supposing

that the incredible happened, that his reasons prevailed with his wife,

and, through her, with the others--at what cost would the victory be

won? Would Bessy ever forgive him for winning it? And what would his

situation be, if it left him in control of Westmore but estranged from

his wife?

He recalled suddenly a phrase he had used that afternoon to the

dark-eyed girl at the garden-party: "What risks we run when we scramble

into the chariot of the gods!" And at the same instant he heard her

retort, and saw her fine gesture of defiance. How could he ever have

doubted that the thing was worth doing at whatever cost? Something in

him--some secret lurking element of weakness and evasion--shrank out of

sight in the light of her question: "Do _you_ act on that?" and the "God

forbid!" he had instantly flashed back to her. He turned to Mr. Tredegar

with his answer.

Amherst knew that any large theoretical exposition of the case would be

as much wasted on the two men as on his wife. To gain his point he must

take only one step at a time, and it seemed to him that the first thing

needed at Westmore was that the hands should work and live under

healthier conditions. To attain this, two important changes were

necessary: the floor-space of the mills must be enlarged, and the

company must cease to rent out tenements, and give the operatives the

opportunity to buy land for themselves. Both these changes involved the

upheaval of the existing order. Whenever the Westmore mills had been

enlarged, it had been for the sole purpose of increasing the revenues of

the company; and now Amherst asked that these revenues should be

materially and permanently reduced. As to the suppression of the company

tenement, such a measure struck at the roots of the baneful paternalism

which was choking out every germ of initiative in the workman. Once the

operatives had room to work in, and the hope of homes of their own to

go to when work was over, Amherst was willing to trust to time for the

satisfaction of their other needs. He believed that a sounder

understanding of these needs would develop on both sides the moment the

employers proved their good faith by the deliberate and permanent

sacrifice of excessive gain to the well-being of the employed; and once

the two had learned to regard each other not as antagonists but as

collaborators, a long step would have been taken toward a readjustment

of the whole industrial relation. In regard to general and distant

results, Amherst tried not to be too sanguine, even in his own thoughts.

His aim was to remedy the abuse nearest at hand, in the hope of thus

getting gradually closer to the central evil; and, had his action been

unhampered, he would still have preferred the longer and more circuitous

path of practical experiment to the sweeping adoption of a new

industrial system.

But his demands, moderate as they were, assumed in his hearers the

consciousness of a moral claim superior to the obligation of making

one's business "pay"; and it was the futility of this assumption that

chilled the arguments on his lips, since in the orthodox creed of the

business world it was a weakness and not a strength to be content with

five per cent where ten was obtainable. Business was one thing,

philanthropy another; and the enthusiasts who tried combining them were

usually reduced, after a brief flight, to paying fifty cents on the

dollar, and handing over their stock to a promoter presumably unhampered

by humanitarian ideals.

Amherst knew that this was the answer with which his plea would be met;

knew, moreover, that the plea was given a hearing simply because his

judges deemed it so pitiably easy to refute. But the knowledge, once he

had begun to speak, fanned his argument to a white heat of pleading,

since, with failure so plainly ahead, small concessions and compromises

were not worth making. Reason would be wasted on all; but eloquence

might at least prevail with Bessy....

* * * * *

When, late that night, he went upstairs after long pacings of the

garden, he was surprised to see a light in her room. She was not given

to midnight study, and fearing that she might be ill he knocked at her

door. There was no answer, and after a short pause he turned the handle

and entered.

In the great canopied Westmore couch, her arms flung upward and her

hands clasped beneath her head, she lay staring fretfully at the globe

of electric light which hung from the centre of the embossed and gilded

ceiling. Seen thus, with the soft curves of throat and arms revealed,

and her face childishly set in a cloud of loosened hair, she looked no

older than Cicely--and, like Cicely, inaccessible to grown-up arguments

and the stronger logic of experience.

It was a trick of hers, in such moods, to ignore any attempt to attract

her notice; and Amherst was prepared for her remaining motionless as he

paused on the threshold and then advanced toward the middle of the room.

There had been a time when he would have been exasperated by her

pretense of not seeing him, but a deep weariness of spirit now dulled

him to these surface pricks.

"I was afraid you were not well when I saw the light burning," he began.

"Thank you--I am quite well," she answered in a colourless voice,

without turning her head.

"Shall I put it out, then? You can't sleep with such a glare in your

eyes."

"I should not sleep at any rate; and I hate to lie awake in the dark."

"Why shouldn't you sleep?" He moved nearer, looking down compassionately

on her perturbed face and struggling lips.

She lay silent a moment; then she faltered out: "B--because I'm so

unhappy!"

The pretense of indifference was swept away by a gush of childish sobs

as she flung over on her side and buried her face in the embroidered

pillows.

Amherst, bending down, laid a quieting hand on her shoulder. "Bessy----"

She sobbed on.

He seated himself silently in the arm-chair beside the bed, and kept his

soothing hold on her shoulder. The time had come when he went through

all these accustomed acts of pacification as mechanically as a nurse

soothing a fretful child. And once he had thought her weeping eloquent!

He looked about him at the spacious room, with its heavy hangings of

damask and the thick velvet carpet which stifled his steps. Everywhere

were the graceful tokens of her presence--the vast lace-draped

toilet-table strewn with silver and crystal, the embroidered muslin

cushions heaped on the lounge, the little rose-lined slippers she had

just put off, the lace wrapper, with a scent of violets in its folds,

which he had pushed aside when he sat down beside her; and he remembered

how full of a mysterious and intimate charm these things had once

appeared to him. It was characteristic that the remembrance made him

more patient with her now. Perhaps, after all, it was his failure that

she was crying over....

"Don't be unhappy. You decided as seemed best to you," he said.

She pressed her handkerchief against her lips, still keeping her head

averted. "But I hate all these arguments and disputes. Why should you

unsettle everything?" she murmured.

His mother's words! Involuntarily he removed his hand from her

shoulder, though he still remained seated by the bed.

"You are right. I see the uselessness of it," he assented, with an

uncontrollable note of irony.

She turned her head at the tone, and fixed her plaintive brimming eyes

on him. "You _are_ angry with me!"

"Was that troubling you?" He leaned forward again, with compassion in

his face. _Sancta simplicitas!_ was the thought within him.

"I am not angry," he went on; "be reasonable and try to sleep."

She started upright, the light masses of her hair floating about her

like silken sea-weed lifted on an invisible tide. "Don't talk like that!

I can't endure to be humoured like a baby. I am unhappy because I can't

see why all these wretched questions should be dragged into our life. I

hate to have you always disagreeing with Mr. Tredegar, who is so clever

and has so much experience; and yet I hate to see you give way to him,

because that makes it appear as if...as if...."

"He didn't care a straw for my ideas?" Amherst smiled. "Well, he

doesn't--and I never dreamed of making him. So don't worry about that

either."

"You never dreamed of making him care for your ideas? But then why do

you----"

"Why do I go on setting them forth at such great length?" Amherst smiled

again. "To convince you--that's my only ambition."

She stared at him, shaking her head back to toss a loose lock from her

puzzled eyes. A tear still shone on her lashes, but with the motion it

fell and trembled down her cheek.

"To convince _me_? But you know I am so ignorant of such things."

"Most women are."

"I never pretended to understand anything about--economics, or whatever

you call it."

"No."

"Then how----"

He turned and looked at her gently. "I thought you might have begun to

understand something about _me_."

"About you?" The colour flowered softly under her clear skin.

"About what my ideas on such subjects were likely to be worth--judging

from what you know of me in other respects." He paused and glanced away

from her. "Well," he concluded deliberately, "I suppose I've had my

answer tonight."

"Oh, John----!"

He rose and wandered across the room, pausing a moment to finger

absently the trinkets on the dressing-table. The act recalled with a

curious vividness certain dulled sensations of their first days

together, when to handle and examine these frail little accessories of

her toilet had been part of the wonder and amusement of his new

existence. He could still hear her laugh as she leaned over him,

watching his mystified look in the glass, till their reflected eyes met

there and drew down her lips to his. He laid down the fragrant

powder-puff he had been turning slowly between his fingers, and moved

back toward the bed. In the interval he had reached a decision.

"Well--isn't it natural that I should think so?" he began again, as he

stood beside her. "When we married I never expected you to care or know

much about economics. It isn't a quality a man usually chooses his wife

for. But I had a fancy--perhaps it shows my conceit--that when we had

lived together a year or two, and you'd found out what kind of a fellow

I was in other ways--ways any woman can judge of--I had a fancy that you

might take my opinions on faith when it came to my own special

business--the thing I'm generally supposed to know about."

He knew that he was touching a sensitive chord, for Bessy had to the

full her sex's pride of possessorship. He was human and faulty till

others criticized him--then he became a god. But in this case a

conflicting influence restrained her from complete response to his

appeal.

"I _do_ feel sure you know--about the treatment of the hands and all

that; but you said yourself once--the first time we ever talked about

Westmore--that the business part was different----"

Here it was again, the ancient ineradicable belief in the separable body

and soul! Even an industrial organization was supposed to be subject to

the old theological distinction, and Bessy was ready to co-operate with

her husband in the emancipation of Westmore's spiritual part if only its

body remained under the law.

Amherst controlled his impatience, as it was always easy for him to do

when he had fixed on a definite line of conduct.

"It was my situation that was different; not what you call the business

part. That is inextricably bound up with the treatment of the hands. If

I am to have anything to do with the mills now I can deal with them only

as your representative; and as such I am bound to take in the whole

question."

Bessy's face clouded: was he going into it all again? But he read her

look and went on reassuringly: "That was what I meant by saying that I

hoped you would take me on faith. If I want the welfare of Westmore it's

above all, I believe, because I want Westmore to see you as _I_ do--as

the dispenser of happiness, who could not endure to benefit by any wrong

or injustice to others."

"Of course, of course I don't want to do them injustice!"

"Well, then----"

He had seated himself beside her again, clasping in his the hand with

which she was fretting the lace-edged sheet. He felt her restless

fingers surrender slowly, and her eyes turned to him in appeal.

"But I care for what people say of you too! And you know--it's horrid,

but one must consider it--if they say you're spending my money

imprudently...." The blood rose to her neck and face. "I don't mind for

myself...even if I have to give up as many things as papa and Mr.

Tredegar think...but there is Cicely...and if people said...."

"If people said I was spending Cicely's money on improving the condition

of the people to whose work she will some day owe all her wealth--"

Amherst paused: "Well, I would rather hear that said of me than any

other thing I can think of, except one."

"Except what?"

"That I was doing it with her mother's help and approval."

She drew a long tremulous sigh: he knew it was always a relief to her to

have him assert himself strongly. But a residue of resistance still

clouded her mind.

"I should always want to help you, of course; but if Mr. Tredegar and

Halford Gaines think your plan unbusinesslike----"

"Mr. Tredegar and Halford Gaines are certain to think it so. And that is

why I said, just now, that it comes, in the end, to your choosing

between us; taking them on experience or taking me on faith."

She looked at him wistfully. "Of course I should expect to give up

things.... You wouldn't want me to live here?"

"I should not ask you to," he said, half-smiling.

"I suppose there would be a good many things we couldn't do----"

"You would certainly have less money for a number of years; after that,

I believe you would have more rather than less; but I should not want

you to think that, beyond a reasonable point, the prosperity of the

mills was ever to be measured by your dividends."

"No." She leaned back wearily among the pillows. "I suppose, for

instance, we should have to give up Europe this summer----?"

Here at last was the bottom of her thought! It was always on the

immediate pleasure that her soul hung: she had not enough imagination to

look beyond, even in the projecting of her own desires. And it was on

his knowledge of this limitation that Amherst had deliberately built.

"I don't see how you could go to Europe," he said.

"The doctor thinks I need it," she faltered.

"In that case, of course--" He stood up, not abruptly, or with any show

of irritation, but as if accepting this as her final answer. "What you

need most, in the meantime, is a little sleep," he said. "I will tell

your maid not to disturb you in the morning." He had returned to his

soothing way of speech, as though definitely resigned to the inutility

of farther argument. "And I will say goodbye now," he continued,

"because I shall probably take an early train, before you wake----"

She sat up with a start. "An early train? Why, where are you going?"

"I must go to Chicago some time this month, and as I shall not be wanted

here tomorrow I might as well run out there at once, and join you next

week at Lynbrook."

Bessy had grown pale. "But I don't understand----"

Their eyes met. "Can't you understand that I am human enough to prefer,

under the circumstances, not being present at tomorrow's meeting?" he

said with a dry laugh.

She sank back with a moan of discouragement, turning her face away as he

began to move toward his room.

"Shall I put the light out?" he asked, pausing with his hand on the

electric button.

"Yes, please."

He pushed in the button and walked on, guided through the obscurity by

the line of light under his door. As he reached the threshold he heard a

little choking cry.

"John--oh, John!"

He paused.

"I can't _bear_ it!" The sobs increased.

"Bear what?"

"That you should hate me----"

"Don't be foolish," he said, groping for his door-handle.

"But you do hate me--and I deserve it!"

"Nonsense, dear. Try to sleep."

"I can't sleep till you've forgiven me. Say you don't hate me! I'll do

anything...only say you don't hate me!"

He stood still a moment, thinking; then he turned back, and made his way

across the room to her side. As he sat down beside her, he felt her arms

reach for his neck and her wet face press itself against his cheek.

"I'll do anything..." she sobbed; and in the darkness he held her to him

and hated his victory.

XIII

MRS. ANSELL was engaged in what she called picking up threads. She had

been abroad for the summer--had, in, fact, transferred herself but a few

hours earlier from her returning steamer to the little station at

Lynbrook--and was now, in the bright September afternoon, which left her

in sole possession of the terrace of Lynbrook House, using that pleasant

eminence as a point of observation from which to gather up some of the

loose ends of history dropped at her departure.

It might have been thought that the actual scene out-spread below

her--the descending gardens, the tennis-courts, the farm-lands sloping

away to the blue sea-like shimmer of the Hempstead plains--offered, at

the moment, little material for her purpose; but that was to view them

with a superficial eye. Mrs. Ansell's trained gaze was, for example,

greatly enlightened by the fact that the tennis-courts were fringed by a

group of people indolently watchful of the figures agitating themselves

about the nets; and that, as she turned her head toward the entrance

avenue, the receding view of a station omnibus, followed by a

luggage-cart, announced that more guests were to be added to those who

had almost taxed to its limits the expansibility of the luncheon-table.

All this, to the initiated eye, was full of suggestion; but its

significance was as nothing to that presented by the approach of two

figures which, as Mrs. Ansell watched, detached themselves from the

cluster about the tennis-ground and struck, obliquely and at a desultory

pace, across the lawn toward the terrace. The figures--those of a slight

young man with stooping shoulders, and of a lady equally youthful but

slenderly erect--moved forward in absorbed communion, as if unconscious

of their surroundings and indefinite as to their direction, till, on the

brink of the wide grass terrace just below their observer's parapet,

they paused a moment and faced each other in closer speech. This

interchange of words, though brief in measure of time, lasted long

enough to add a vivid strand to Mrs. Ansell's thickening skein; then, on

a gesture of the lady's, and without signs of formal leave-taking, the

young man struck into a path which regained the entrance avenue, while

his companion, quickening her pace, crossed the grass terrace and

mounted the wide stone steps sweeping up to the house.

These brought her out on the upper terrace a few yards from Mrs.

Ansell's post, and exposed her, unprepared, to the full beam of welcome

which that lady's rapid advance threw like a searchlight across her

path.

"Dear Miss Brent! I was just wondering how it was that I hadn't seen you

before." Mrs. Ansell, as she spoke, drew the girl's hand into a long

soft clasp which served to keep them confronted while she delicately

groped for whatever thread the encounter seemed to proffer.

Justine made no attempt to evade the scrutiny to which she found herself

exposed; she merely released her hand by a movement instinctively

evasive of the mechanical endearment, explaining, with a smile that

softened the gesture: "I was out with Cicely when you arrived. We've

just come in."

"The dear child! I haven't seen her either." Mrs. Ansell continued to

bestow upon the speaker's clear dark face an intensity of attention in

which, for the moment, Cicely had no perceptible share. "I hear you are

teaching her botany, and all kinds of wonderful things."

Justine smiled again. "I am trying to teach her to wonder: that is the

hardest faculty to cultivate in the modern child."

"Yes--I suppose so; in myself," Mrs. Ansell admitted with a responsive

brightness, "I find it develops with age. The world is a remarkable

place." She threw this off absently, as though leaving Miss Brent to

apply it either to the inorganic phenomena with which Cicely was

supposed to be occupied, or to those subtler manifestations that engaged

her own attention.

"It's a great thing," she continued, "for Bessy to have had your

help--for Cicely, and for herself too. There is so much that I want you

to tell me about her. As an old friend I want the benefit of your

fresher eye."

"About Bessy?" Justine hesitated, letting her glance drift to the

distant group still anchored about the tennis-nets. "Don't you find her

looking better?"

"Than when I left? So much so that I was unduly disturbed, just now, by

seeing that clever little doctor--it _was_ he, wasn't it, who came up

the lawn with you?"

"Dr. Wyant? Yes." Miss Brent hesitated again. "But he merely

called--with a message."

"Not professionally? _Tant mieux!_ The truth is, I was anxious about

Bessy when I left--I thought she ought to have gone abroad for a change.

But, as it turns out, her little excursion with you did as well."

"I think she only needed rest. Perhaps her six weeks in the Adirondacks

were better than Europe."

"Ah, under _your_ care--that made them better!" Mrs. Ansell in turn

hesitated, the lines of her face melting and changing as if a rapid

stage-hand had shifted them. When she spoke again they were as open as a

public square, but also as destitute of personal significance, as flat

and smooth as the painted drop before the real scene it hides.

"I have always thought that Bessy, for all her health and activity,

needs as much care as Cicely--the kind of care a clever friend can give.

She is so wasteful of her strength and her nerves, and so unwilling to

listen to reason. Poor Dick Westmore watched over her as if she were a

baby; but perhaps Mr. Amherst, who must have been used to such a

different type of woman, doesn't realize...and then he's so little

here...." The drop was lit up by a smile that seemed to make it more

impenetrable. "As an old friend I can't help telling you how much I hope

she is to have you with her for a long time--a long, long time."

Miss Brent bent her head in slight acknowledgment of the tribute. "Oh,

soon she will not need any care----"

"My dear Miss Brent, she will always need it!" Mrs. Ansell made a

movement inviting the young girl to share the bench from which, at the

latter's approach, she had risen. "But perhaps there is not enough in

such a life to satisfy your professional energies."

She seated herself, and after an imperceptible pause Justine sank into

the seat beside her. "I am very glad, just now, to give my energies a

holiday," she said, leaning back with a little sigh of retrospective

weariness.

"You are tired too? Bessy wrote me you had been quite used up by a

trying case after we saw you at Hanaford."

Miss Brent smiled. "When a nurse is fit for work she calls a trying case

a 'beautiful' one."

"But meanwhile--?" Mrs. Ansell shone on her with elder-sisterly

solicitude. "Meanwhile, why not stay on with Cicely--above all, with

Bessy? Surely she's a 'beautiful' case too."

"Isn't she?" Justine laughingly agreed.

"And if you want to be tried--" Mrs. Ansell swept the scene with a

slight lift of her philosophic shoulders--"you'll find there are trials

enough everywhere."

Her companion started up with a glance at the small watch on her breast.

"One of them is that it's already after four, and that I must see that

tea is sent down to the tennis-ground, and the new arrivals looked

after."

"I saw the omnibus on its way to the station. Are many more people

coming?"

"Five or six, I believe. The house is usually full for Sunday."

Mrs. Ansell made a slight motion to detain her. "And when is Mr. Amherst

expected?"

Miss Brent's pale cheek seemed to take on a darker tone of ivory, and

her glance dropped from her companion's face to the vivid stretch of

gardens at their feet. "Bessy has not told me," she said.

"Ah--" the older woman rejoined, looking also toward the gardens, as if

to intercept Miss Brent's glance in its flight. The latter stood still a

moment, with the appearance of not wishing to evade whatever else her

companion might have to say; then she moved away, entering the house by

one window just as Mr. Langhope emerged from it by another.

The sound of his stick tapping across the bricks roused Mrs. Ansell from

her musings, but she showed her sense of his presence simply by

returning to the bench she had just left; and accepting this mute

invitation, Mr. Langhope crossed the terrace and seated himself at her

side.

When he had done so they continued to look at each other without

speaking, after the manner of old friends possessed of occult means of

communication; and as the result of this inward colloquy Mr. Langhope at

length said: "Well, what do you make of it?"

"What do _you_?" she rejoined, turning full upon him a face so released

from its usual defences and disguises that it looked at once older and

more simple than the countenance she presented to the world.

Mr. Langhope waved a deprecating hand. "I want your fresher

impressions."

"That's what I just now said to Miss Brent."

"You've been talking to Miss Brent?"

"Only a flying word--she had to go and look after the new arrivals."

Mr. Langhope's attention deepened. "Well, what did you say to her?"

"Wouldn't you rather hear what she said to _me_?"

He smiled. "A good cross-examiner always gets the answers he wants. Let

me hear your side, and I shall know hers."

"I should say that applied only to stupid cross-examiners; or to those

who have stupid subjects to deal with. And Miss Brent is not stupid, you

know."

"Far from it! What else do you make out?"

"I make out that she's in possession."

"Here?"

"Don't look startled. Do you dislike her?"

"Heaven forbid--with those eyes! She has a wit of her own, too--and she

certainly makes things easier for Bessy."

"She guards her carefully, at any rate. I could find out nothing."

"About Bessy?"

"About the general situation."

"Including Miss Brent?"

Mrs. Ansell smiled faintly. "I made one little discovery about her."

"Well?"

"She's intimate with the new doctor."

"Wyant?" Mr. Langhope's interest dropped. "What of that? I believe she

knew him before."

"I daresay. It's of no special importance, except as giving us a

possible clue to her character. She strikes me as interesting and

mysterious."

Mr. Langhope smiled. "The things your imagination does for you!"

"It helps me to see that we may find Miss Brent useful as a friend."

"A friend?"