"An ally." She paused, as if searching for a word. "She may restore the

equilibrium."

Mr. Langhope's handsome face darkened. "Open Bessy's eyes to Amherst?

Damn him!" he said quietly.

Mrs. Ansell let the imprecation pass. "When was he last here?" she

asked.

"Five or six weeks ago--for one night. His only visit since she came

back from the Adirondacks."

"What do you think his motive is? He must know what he risks in losing

his hold on Bessy."

"His motive? With your eye for them, can you ask? A devouring ambition,

that's all! Haven't you noticed that, in all except the biggest minds,

ambition takes the form of wanting to command where one has had to obey?

Amherst has been made to toe the line at Westmore, and now he wants

Truscomb--yes, and Halford Gaines, too!--to do the same. That's the

secret of his servant-of-the-people pose--gad, I believe it's the whole

secret of his marriage! He's devouring my daughter's substance to pay

off an old score against the mills. He'll never rest till he has

Truscomb out, and some creature of his own in command--and then, _vogue

la galere_! If it were women, now," Mr. Langhope summed up impatiently,

"one could understand it, at his age, and with that damned romantic

head--but to be put aside for a lot of low mongrelly socialist

mill-hands--ah, my poor girl--my poor girl!"

Mrs. Ansell mused. "You didn't write me that things were so bad. There's

been no actual quarrel?" she asked.

"How can there be, when the poor child does all he wants? He's simply

too busy to come and thank her!"

"Too busy at Hanaford?"

"So he says. Introducing the golden age at Westmore--it's likely to be

the age of copper at Lynbrook."

Mrs. Ansell drew a meditative breath. "I was thinking of that. I

understood that Bessy would have to retrench while the changes at

Westmore were going on."

"Well--didn't she give up Europe, and cable over to countermand her new

motor?"

"But the life here! This mob of people! Miss Brent tells me the house is

full for every week-end."

"Would you have my daughter cut off from all her friends?"

Mrs. Ansell met this promptly. "From some of the new ones, at any rate!

Have you heard who has just arrived?"

Mr. Langhope's hesitation showed a tinge of embarrassment. "I'm not

sure--some one has always just arrived."

"Well, the Fenton Carburys, then!" Mrs. Ansell left it to her tone to

annotate the announcement.

Mr. Langhope raised his eyebrows slightly. "Are they likely to be an

exceptionally costly pleasure?"

"If you're trying to prove that I haven't kept to the point--I can

assure you that I'm well within it!"

"But since the good Blanche has got her divorce and married Carbury,

wherein do they differ from other week-end automata?"

"Because most divorced women marry again to be respectable."

Mr. Langhope smiled faintly. "Yes--that's their punishment. But it would

be too dull for Blanche."

"Precisely. _She_ married again to see Ned Bowfort!"

"Ah--that may yet be hers!"

Mrs. Ansell sighed at his perversity. "Meanwhile, she's brought him

here, and it is unnatural to see Bessy lending herself to such

combinations."

"You're corrupted by a glimpse of the old societies. Here Bowfort and

Carbury are simply hands at bridge."

"Old hands at it--yes! And the bridge is another point: Bessy never used

to play for money."

"Well, she may make something, and offset her husband's prodigalities."

"There again--with this _train de vie_, how on earth are both ends to

meet?"

Mr. Langhope grown suddenly grave, struck his cane resoundingly on the

terrace. "Westmore and Lynbrook? I don't want them to--I want them to

get farther and farther apart!"

She cast on him a look of startled divination. "You want Bessy to go on

spending too much money?"

"How can I help it if it costs?"

"If what costs--?" She stopped, her eyes still wide; then their glances

crossed, and she exclaimed: "If your scheme costs? It _is_ your scheme,

then?"

He shrugged his shoulders again. "It's a passive attitude----"

"Ah, the deepest plans are that!" Mr. Langhope uttered no protest, and

she continued to piece her conjectures together. "But you expect it to

lead up to something active. Do you want a rupture?"

"I want him brought back to his senses."

"Do you think that will bring him back to _her_?"

"Where the devil else will he have to go?"

Mrs. Ansell's eyes dropped toward the gardens, across which desultory

knots of people were straggling back from the ended tennis-match. "Ah,

here they all come," she said, rising with a half-sigh; and as she stood

watching the advance of the brightly-tinted groups she added slowly:

"It's ingenious--but you don't understand him."

Mr. Langhope stroked his moustache. "Perhaps not," he assented

thoughtfully. "But suppose we go in before they join us? I want to show

you a set of Ming I picked up the other day for Bessy. I flatter myself

I _do_ understand Ming."

XIV

JUSTINE BRENT, her household duties discharged, had gone upstairs to her

room, a little turret chamber projecting above the wide terrace below,

from which the sounds of lively intercourse now rose increasingly to her

window.

Bessy, she knew, would have preferred to have her remain with the party

from whom these evidences of gaiety proceeded. Mrs. Amherst had grown to

depend on her friend's nearness. She liked to feel that Justine's quick

hand and eye were always in waiting on her impulses, prompt to interpret

and execute them without any exertion of her own. Bessy combined great

zeal in the pursuit of sport--a tireless passion for the saddle, the

golf-course, the tennis-court--with an almost oriental inertia within

doors, an indolence of body and brain that made her shrink from the

active obligations of hospitality, though she had grown to depend more

and more on the distractions of a crowded house.

But Justine, though grateful, and anxious to show her gratitude, was

unwilling to add to her other duties that of joining in the amusements

of the house-party. She made no pretense of effacing herself when she

thought her presence might be useful--but, even if she had cared for the

diversions in favour at Lynbrook, a certain unavowed pride would have

kept her from participating in them on the same footing with Bessy's

guests. She was not in the least ashamed of her position in the

household, but she chose that every one else should be aware of it, that

she should not for an instant be taken for one of the nomadic damsels

who form the camp-followers of the great army of pleasure. Yet even on

this point her sensitiveness was not exaggerated. Adversity has a deft

hand at gathering loose strands of impulse into character, and Justine's

early contact with different phases of experience had given her a fairly

clear view of life in the round, what might be called a sound working

topography of its relative heights and depths. She was not seriously

afraid of being taken for anything but what she really was, and still

less did she fear to become, by force of propinquity and suggestion, the

kind of being for whom she might be temporarily taken.

When, at Bessy's summons, she had joined the latter at her camp in the

Adirondacks, the transition from a fatiguing "case" at Hanaford to a

life in which sylvan freedom was artfully blent with the most studied

personal luxury, had come as a delicious refreshment to body and brain.

She was weary, for the moment, of ugliness, pain and hard work, and life

seemed to recover its meaning under the aspect of a graceful leisure.

Lynbrook also, whither she had been persuaded to go with Bessy at the

end of their woodland cure, had at first amused and interested her. The

big house on its spreading terraces, with windows looking over bright

gardens to the hazy distances of the plains, seemed a haven of harmless

ease and gaiety. Justine was sensitive to the finer graces of luxurious

living, to the warm lights on old pictures and bronzes, the soft

mingling of tints in faded rugs and panellings of time-warmed oak. And

the existence to which this background formed a setting seemed at first

to have the same decorative qualities. It was pleasant, for once, to be

among people whose chief business was to look well and take life

lightly, and Justine's own buoyancy of nature won her immediate access

among the amiable persons who peopled Bessy's week-end parties. If they

had only abounded a little more in their own line she might have

succumbed to their spell. But it seemed to her that they missed the

poetry of their situation, transacting their pleasures with the dreary

method and shortness of view of a race tethered to the ledger. Even the

verbal flexibility which had made her feel that she was in a world of

freer ideas, soon revealed itself as a form of flight from them, in

which the race was distinctly to the swift; and Justine's phase of

passive enjoyment passed with the return of her physical and mental

activity. She was a creature tingling with energy, a little fleeting

particle of the power that moves the sun and the other stars, and the

deadening influences of the life at Lynbrook roused these tendencies to

greater intensity, as a suffocated person will suddenly develop abnormal

strength in the struggle for air.

She did not, indeed, regret having come. She was glad to be with Bessy,

partly because of the childish friendship which had left such deep

traces in her lonely heart, and partly because what she had seen of her

friend's situation stirred in her all the impulses of sympathy and

service; but the idea of continuing in such a life, of sinking into any

of the positions of semi-dependence that an adroit and handsome girl may

create for herself in a fashionable woman's train--this possibility

never presented itself to Justine till Mrs. Ansell, that afternoon, had

put it into words. And to hear it was to revolt from it with all the

strength of her inmost nature. The thought of the future troubled her,

not so much materially--for she had a light bird-like trust in the

morrow's fare--but because her own tendencies seemed to have grown less

clear, because she could not rest in them for guidance as she had once

done. The renewal of bodily activity had not brought back her faith in

her calling: her work had lost the light of consecration. She no longer

felt herself predestined to nurse the sick for the rest of her life, and

in her inexperience she reproached herself with this instability. Youth

and womanhood were in fact crying out in her for their individual

satisfaction; but instincts as deep-seated protected her from even a

momentary illusion as to the nature of this demand. She wanted

happiness, and a life of her own, as passionately as young

flesh-and-blood had ever wanted them; but they must come bathed in the

light of imagination and penetrated by the sense of larger affinities.

She could not conceive of shutting herself into a little citadel of

personal well-being while the great tides of existence rolled on

unheeded outside. Whether they swept treasure to her feet, or strewed

her life with wreckage, she felt, even now; that her place was there, on

the banks, in sound and sight of the great current; and just in

proportion as the scheme of life at Lynbrook succeeded in shutting out

all sense of that vaster human consciousness, so did its voice speak

more thrillingly within her.

Somewhere, she felt--but, alas! still out of reach--was the life she

longed for, a life in which high chances of doing should be mated with

the finer forms of enjoying. But what title had she to a share in such

an existence? Why, none but her sense of what it was worth--and what did

that count for, in a world which used all its resources to barricade

itself against all its opportunities? She knew there were girls who

sought, by what is called a "good" marriage, an escape into the outer

world, of doing and thinking--utilizing an empty brain and full pocket

as the key to these envied fields. Some such chance the life at Lynbrook

seemed likely enough to offer--one is not, at Justine's age and with her

penetration, any more blind to the poise of one's head than to the turn

of one's ideas; but here the subtler obstacles of taste and pride

intervened. Not even Bessy's transparent manoeuvrings, her tender

solicitude for her friend's happiness, could for a moment weaken

Justine's resistance. If she must marry without love--and this was

growing conceivable to her--she must at least merge her craving for

personal happiness in some view of life in harmony with hers.

A tap on her door interrupted these musings, to one aspect of which

Bessy Amherst's entrance seemed suddenly to give visible expression.

"Why did you run off, Justine? You promised to be down-stairs when I

came back from tennis."

"_Till_ you came back--wasn't it, dear?" Justine corrected with a smile,

pushing her arm-chair forward as Bessy continued to linger irresolutely

in the doorway. "I saw that there was a fresh supply of tea in the

drawing-room, and I knew you would be there before the omnibus came from

the station."

"Oh, I was there--but everybody was asking for you----"

"Everybody?" Justine gave a mocking lift to her dark eyebrows.

"Well--Westy Gaines, at any rate; the moment he set foot in the house!"

Bessy declared with a laugh as she dropped into the arm-chair.

Justine echoed the laugh, but offered no comment on the statement which

accompanied it, and for a moment both women were silent, Bessy tilting

her pretty discontented head against the back of the chair, so that her

eyes were on a level with those of her friend, who leaned near her in

the embrasure of the window.

"I can't understand you, Justine. You know well enough what he's come

back for."

"In order to dazzle Hanaford with the fact that he has been staying at

Lynbrook!"

"Nonsense--the novelty of that has worn off. He's been here three times

since we came back."

"You are admirably hospitable to your family----"

Bessy let her pretty ringed hands fall with a discouraged gesture. "Why

do you find him so much worse than--than other people?"

Justine's eye-brows rose again. "In the same capacity? You speak as if I

had boundless opportunities of comparison."

"Well, you've Dr. Wyant!" Mrs. Amherst suddenly flung back at her.

Justine coloured under the unexpected thrust, but met her friend's eyes

steadily. "As an alternative to Westy? Well, if I were on a desert

island--but I'm not!" she concluded with a careless laugh.

Bessy frowned and sighed. "You can't mean that, of the two--?" She

paused and then went on doubtfully: "It's because he's cleverer?"

"Dr. Wyant?" Justine smiled. "It's not making an enormous claim for

him!"

"Oh, I know Westy's not brilliant; but stupid men are not always the

hardest to live with." She sighed again, and turned on Justine a glance

charged with conjugal experience.

Justine had sunk into the window-seat, her thin hands clasping her knee,

in the attitude habitual to her meditative moments. "Perhaps not," she

assented; "but I don't know that I should care for a man who made life

easy; I should want some one who made it interesting."

Bessy met this with a pitying exclamation. "Don't imagine you invented

that! Every girl thinks it. Afterwards she finds out that it's much

pleasanter to be thought interesting herself."

She spoke with a bitterness that issued strangely from her lips. It was

this bitterness which gave her soft personality the sharp edge that

Justine had felt in it on the day of their meeting at Hanaford.

The girl, at first, had tried to defend herself from these

scarcely-veiled confidences, distasteful enough in themselves, and

placing her, if she listened, in an attitude of implied disloyalty to

the man under whose roof they were spoken. But a precocious experience

of life had taught her that emotions too strong for the nature

containing them turn, by some law of spiritual chemistry, into a

rankling poison; and she had therefore resigned herself to serving as a

kind of outlet for Bessy's pent-up discontent. It was not that her

friend's grievance appealed to her personal sympathies; she had learned

enough of the situation to give her moral assent unreservedly to the

other side. But it was characteristic of Justine that where she

sympathized least she sometimes pitied most. Like all quick spirits she

was often intolerant of dulness; yet when the intolerance passed it left

a residue of compassion for the very incapacity at which she chafed. It

seemed to her that the tragic crises in wedded life usually turned on

the stupidity of one of the two concerned; and of the two victims of

such a catastrophe she felt most for the one whose limitations had

probably brought it about. After all, there could be no imprisonment as

cruel as that of being bounded by a hard small nature. Not to be

penetrable at all points to the shifting lights, the wandering music of

the world--she could imagine no physical disability as cramping as that.

How the little parched soul, in solitary confinement for life, must pine

and dwindle in its blind cranny of self-love!

To be one's self wide open to the currents of life does not always

contribute to an understanding of narrower natures; but in Justine the

personal emotions were enriched and deepened by a sense of participation

in all that the world about her was doing, suffering and enjoying; and

this sense found expression in the instinct of ministry and solace. She

was by nature a redresser, a restorer; and in her work, as she had once

told Amherst, the longing to help and direct, to hasten on by personal

intervention time's slow and clumsy processes, had often been in

conflict with the restrictions imposed by her profession. But she had no

idle desire to probe the depths of other lives; and where there seemed

no hope of serving she shrank from fruitless confidences. She was

beginning to feel this to be the case with Bessy Amherst. To touch the

rock was not enough, if there were but a few drops within it; yet in

this barrenness lay the pathos of the situation--and after all, may not

the scanty spring be fed from a fuller current?

"I'm not sure about that," she said, answering her friend's last words

after a deep pause of deliberation. "I mean about its being so pleasant

to be found interesting. I'm sure the passive part is always the dull

one: life has been a great deal more thrilling since we found out that

we revolved about the sun, instead of sitting still and fancying that

all the planets were dancing attendance on us. After all, they were

_not_; and it's rather humiliating to think how the morning stars must

have laughed together about it!"

There was no self-complacency in Justine's eagerness to help. It was far

easier for her to express it in action than in counsel, to grope for the

path with her friend than to point the way to it; and when she had to

speak she took refuge in figures to escape the pedantry of appearing to

advise. But it was not only to Mrs. Dressel that her parables were dark,

and the blank look in Bessy's eyes soon snatched her down from the

height of metaphor.

"I mean," she continued with a smile, "that, as human nature is

constituted, it has got to find its real self--the self to be interested

in--outside of what we conventionally call 'self': the particular

Justine or Bessy who is clamouring for her particular morsel of life.

You see, self isn't a thing one can keep in a box--bits of it keep

escaping, and flying off to lodge in all sorts of unexpected crannies;

we come across scraps of ourselves in the most unlikely places--as I

believe you would in Westmore, if you'd only go back there and look for

them!"

Bessy's lip trembled and the colour sprang to her face; but she answered

with a flash of irritation: "Why doesn't _he_ look for me there,

then--if he still wants to find me?"

"Ah--it's for him to look here--to find himself _here_," Justine

murmured.

"Well, he never comes here! That's his answer."

"He will--he will! Only, when he does, let him find you."

"Find me? I don't understand. How can he, when he never sees me? I'm no

more to him than the carpet on the floor!"

Justine smiled again. "Well--be that then! The thing is to _be_."

"Under his feet? Thank you! Is that what you mean to marry for? It's not

what husbands admire in one, you know!"

"No." Justine stood up with a sense of stealing discouragement. "But I

don't think I want to be admired----"

"Ah, that's because you know you are!" broke from the depths of the

other's bitterness.

The tone smote Justine, and she dropped into the seat at her friend's

side, silently laying a hand on Bessy's feverishly-clasped fingers.

"Oh, don't let us talk about me," complained the latter, from whose lips

the subject was never long absent. "And you mustn't think I _want_ you

to marry, Justine; not for myself, I mean--I'd so much rather keep you

here. I feel much less lonely when you're with me. But you say you won't

stay--and it's too dreadful to think of your going back to that dreary

hospital."

"But you know the hospital's not dreary to me," Justine interposed;

"it's the most interesting place I've ever known."

Mrs. Amherst smiled indulgently on this extravagance. "A great many

people go through the craze for philanthropy--" she began in the tone of

mature experience; but Justine interrupted her with a laugh.

"Philanthropy? I'm not philanthropic. I don't think I ever felt inclined

to do good in the abstract--any more than to do ill! I can't remember

that I ever planned out a course of conduct in my life. It's only," she

went on, with a puzzled frown, as if honestly trying to analyze her

motives, "it's only that I'm so fatally interested in people that before

I know it I've slipped into their skins; and then, of course, if

anything goes wrong with them, it's just as if it had gone wrong with

me; and I can't help trying to rescue myself from _their_ troubles! I

suppose it's what you'd call meddling--and so should I, if I could only

remember that the other people were not myself!"

Bessy received this with the mild tolerance of superior wisdom. Once

safe on the tried ground of traditional authority, she always felt

herself Justine's superior. "That's all very well now--you see the

romantic side of it," she said, as if humouring her friend's vagaries.

"But in time you'll want something else; you'll want a husband and

children--a life of your own. And then you'll have to be more practical.

It's ridiculous to pretend that comfort and money don't make a

difference. And if you married a rich man, just think what a lot of good

you could do! Westy will be very well off--and I'm sure he'd let you

endow hospitals and things. Think how interesting it would be to build a

ward in the very hospital where you'd been a nurse! I read something

like that in a novel the other day--it was beautifully described. All

the nurses and doctors that the heroine had worked with were there to

receive her...and her little boy went about and gave toys to the

crippled children...."

If the speaker's concluding instance hardly produced the effect she had

intended, it was perhaps only because Justine's attention had been

arrested by the earlier part of the argument. It was strange to have

marriage urged on her by a woman who had twice failed to find happiness

in it--strange, and yet how vivid a sign that, even to a nature absorbed

in its personal demands, not happiness but completeness is the inmost

craving! "A life of your own"--that was what even Bessy, in her obscure

way, felt to be best worth suffering for. And how was a spirit like

Justine's, thrilling with youth and sympathy, to conceive of an isolated

existence as the final answer to that craving? A life circumscribed by

one's own poor personal consciousness would not be life at all--far

better the "adventure of the diver" than the shivering alone on the

bank! Bessy, reading encouragement in her silence, returned her

hand-clasp with an affectionate pressure.

"You _would_ like that, Justine?" she said, secretly proud of having hit

on the convincing argument.

"To endow hospitals with your cousin's money? No; I should want

something much more exciting!"

Bessy's face kindled. "You mean travelling abroad--and I suppose New

York in winter?"

Justine broke into a laugh. "I was thinking of your cousin himself when

I spoke." And to Bessy's disappointed cry--"Then it _is_ Dr. Wyant,

after all?" she answered lightly, and without resenting the challenge:

"I don't know. Suppose we leave it to the oracle."

"The oracle?"

"Time. His question-and-answer department is generally the most reliable

in the long run." She started up, gently drawing Bessy to her feet. "And

just at present he reminds me that it's nearly six, and that you

promised Cicely to go and see her before you dress for dinner."

Bessy rose obediently. "Does he remind you of _your_ promises too? You

said you'd come down to dinner tonight."

"Did I?" Justine hesitated. "Well, I'm coming," she said, smiling and

kissing her friend.

XV

WHEN the door closed on Mrs. Amherst a resolve which had taken shape in

Justine's mind during their talk together made her seat herself at her

writing-table, where, after a moment's musing over her suspended pen,

she wrote and addressed a hurried note. This business despatched, she

put on her hat and jacket, and letter in hand passed down the corridor

from her room, and descended to the entrance-hall below. She might have

consigned her missive to the post-box which conspicuously tendered its

services from a table near the door; but to do so would delay the

letter's despatch till morning, and she felt a sudden impatience to see

it start.

The tumult on the terrace had transferred itself within doors, and as

Justine went down the stairs she heard the click of cues from the

billiard-room, the talk and laughter of belated bridge-players, the

movement of servants gathering up tea-cups and mending fires. She had

hoped to find the hall empty, but the sight of Westy Gaines's figure

looming watchfully on the threshold of the smoking-room gave her, at the

last bend of the stairs, a little start of annoyance. He would want to

know where she was going, he would offer to go with her, and it would

take some time and not a little emphasis to make him understand that his

society was not desired.

This was the thought that flashed through Justine's mind as she reached

the landing; but the next moment it gave way to a contradictory feeling.

Westy Gaines was not alone in the hall. From under the stairway rose the

voices of a group ensconced in that popular retreat about a chess-board;

and as Justine reached the last turn of the stairs she perceived that

Mason Winch, an earnest youth with advanced views on political economy,

was engaged, to the diversion of a circle of spectators, in teaching the

Telfer girls chess. The futility of trying to fix the spasmodic

attention of this effervescent couple, and their instructor's grave

unconsciousness of the fact, constituted, for the lookers-on, the

peculiar diversion of the scene. It was of course inevitable that young

Winch, on his arrival at Lynbrook, should have succumbed at once to the

tumultuous charms of the Telfer manner, which was equally attractive to

inarticulate youth and to tired and talked-out middle-age; but that he

should have perceived no resistance in their minds to the deliberative

processes of the game of chess, was, even to the Telfers themselves, a

source of unmitigated gaiety. Nothing seemed to them funnier than that

any one should credit them with any mental capacity; and they had

inexhaustibly amusing ways of drawing out and showing off each other's

ignorance.

It was on this scene that Westy's appreciative eyes had been fixed till

Justine's appearance drew them to herself. He pronounced her name

joyfully, and moved forward to greet her; but as their hands met she

understood that he did not mean to press his company upon her. Under the

eye of the Lynbrook circle he was chary of marked demonstrations, and

even Mrs. Amherst's approval could not, at such moments, bridge over the

gap between himself and the object of his attentions. A Gaines was a

Gaines in the last analysis, and apart from any pleasing accident of

personality; but what was Miss Brent but the transient vehicle of those

graces which Providence has provided for the delectation of the

privileged sex?

These influences were visible in the temperate warmth of Westy's manner,

and in his way of keeping a backward eye on the mute interchange of

comment about the chess-board. At another time his embarrassment would

have amused Justine; but the feelings stirred by her talk with Bessy had

not subsided, and she recognized with a sting of mortification the

resemblance between her view of the Lynbrook set and its estimate of

herself. If Bessy's friends were negligible to her she was almost

non-existent to them; and, as against herself, they were overwhelmingly

provided with tangible means of proving their case.

Such considerations, at a given moment, may prevail decisively even with

a nature armed against them by insight and irony; and the mere fact that

Westy Gaines did not mean to join her, and that he was withheld from

doing so by the invisible pressure of the Lynbrook standards, had the

effect of precipitating Justine's floating intentions.

If anything farther had been needed to hasten this result, it would have

been accomplished by the sound of footsteps which, over-taking her a

dozen yards from the house, announced her admirer's impetuous if tardy

pursuit. The act of dismissing him, though it took but a word and was

effected with a laugh, left her pride quivering with a hurt the more

painful because she would not acknowledge it. That she should waste a

moment's resentment on the conduct of a person so unimportant as poor

Westy, showed her in a flash the intrinsic falseness of her position at

Lynbrook. She saw that to disdain the life about her had not kept her

intact from it; and the knowledge made her feel anew the need of some

strong decentralizing influence, some purifying influx of emotion and

activity.

She had walked on quickly through the clear October twilight, which was

still saturated with the after-glow of a vivid sunset; and a few minutes

brought her to the village stretching along the turnpike beyond the

Lynbrook gates. The new post-office dominated the row of shabby houses

and "stores" set disjointedly under reddening maples, and its arched

doorway formed the centre of Lynbrook's evening intercourse.

Justine, hastening toward the knot of loungers on the threshold, had no

consciousness of anything outside of her own thoughts; and as she

mounted the steps she was surprised to see Dr. Wyant detach himself from

the group and advance to meet her.

"May I post your letter?" he asked, lifting his hat.

His gesture uncovered the close-curling hair of a small

delicately-finished head just saved from effeminacy by the vigorous jut

of heavy eye-brows meeting above full grey eyes. The eyes again, at

first sight, might have struck one as too expressive, or as expressing

things too purely decorative for the purposes of a young country doctor

with a growing practice; but this estimate was corrected by an

unexpected abruptness in their owner's voice and manner. Perhaps the

final impression produced on a close observer by Dr. Stephen Wyant would

have been that the contradictory qualities of which he was compounded

had not yet been brought into equilibrium by the hand of time.

Justine, in reply to his question, had drawn back a step, slipping her

letter into the breast of her jacket.

"That is hardly worth while, since it was addressed to you," she

answered with a slight smile as she turned to descend the post-office

steps.

Wyant, still carrying his hat, and walking with quick uneven steps,

followed her in silence till they had passed beyond earshot of the

loiterers on the threshold; then, in the shade of the maple boughs, he

pulled up and faced her.

"You've written to say that I may come tomorrow?"

Justine hesitated. "Yes," she said at length.

"Good God! You give royally!" he broke out, pushing his hand with a

nervous gesture through the thin dark curls on his forehead.

Justine laughed, with a trace of nervousness in her own tone. "And you

talk--well, imperially! Aren't you afraid to bankrupt the language?"

"What do you mean?" he said, staring.

"What do _you_ mean? I have merely said that I would see you

tomorrow----"

"Well," he retorted, "that's enough for my happiness!"

She sounded her light laugh again. "I'm glad to know you're so easily

pleased."

"I'm not! But you couldn't have done a cruel thing without a struggle;

and since you're ready to give me my answer tomorrow, I know it can't

be a cruel one."

They had begun to walk onward as they talked, but at this she halted.

"Please don't take that tone. I dislike sentimentality!" she exclaimed,

with a tinge of imperiousness that was a surprise to her own ears.

It was not the first time in the course of her friendship with Stephen

Wyant that she had been startled by this intervention of something

within her that resisted and almost resented his homage. When they were

apart, she was conscious only of the community of interests and

sympathies that had first drawn them together. Why was it then--since

his looks were of the kind generally thought to stand a suitor in good

stead--that whenever they had met of late she had been subject to these

rushes of obscure hostility, the half-physical, half-moral shrinking

from some indefinable element in his nature against which she was

constrained to defend herself by perpetual pleasantry and evasion?

To Wyant, at any rate, the answer was not far to seek. His pale face

reflected the disdain in hers as he returned ironically: "A thousand

pardons; I know I'm not always in the key."

"The key?"

"I haven't yet acquired the Lynbrook tone. You must make allowances for

my lack of opportunity."

The retort on Justine's lips dropped to silence, as though his words

had in fact brought an answer to her inward questioning. Could it be

that he was right--that her shrinking from him was the result of an

increased sensitiveness to faults of taste that she would once have

despised herself for noticing? When she had first known him, in her work

at St. Elizabeth's some three years earlier, his excesses of manner had

seemed to her merely the boyish tokens of a richness of nature not yet

controlled by experience. Though Wyant was somewhat older than herself

there had always been an element of protection in her feeling for him,

and it was perhaps this element which formed the real ground of her

liking. It was, at any rate, uppermost as she returned, with a softened

gleam of mockery: "Since you are so sure of my answer I hardly know why

I should see you tomorrow."

"You mean me to take it now?" he exclaimed.

"I don't mean you to take it at all till it's given--above all not to

take it for granted!"

His jutting brows drew together again. "Ah, I can't split hairs with

you. Won't you put me out of my misery?"

She smiled, but not unkindly. "Do you want an anaesthetic?"

"No--a clean cut with the knife!"

"You forget that we're not allowed to despatch hopeless cases--more's

the pity!"

He flushed to the roots of his thin hair. "Hopeless cases? That's it,

then--that's my answer?"

They had reached the point where, at the farther edge of the straggling

settlement, the tiled roof of the railway-station fronted the

post-office cupola; and the shriek of a whistle now reminded Justine

that the spot was not propitious to private talk. She halted a moment

before speaking.

"I have no answer to give you now but the one in my note--that I'll see

you tomorrow."

"But if you're sure of knowing tomorrow you must know now!"

Their eyes met, his eloquently pleading, hers kind but still

impenetrable. "If I knew now, you should know too. Please be content

with that," she rejoined.

"How can I be, when a day may make such a difference? When I know that

every influence about you is fighting against me?"

The words flashed a refracted light far down into the causes of her own

uncertainty.

"Ah," she said, drawing a little away from him, "I'm not so sure that I

don't like a fight!"

"Is that why you won't give in?" He moved toward her with a despairing

gesture. "If I let you go now, you're lost to me!"

She stood her ground, facing him with a quick lift of the head. "If you

don't let me go I certainly am," she said; and he drew back, as if

conscious of the uselessness of the struggle. His submission, as usual,

had a disarming effect on her irritation, and she held out her hand.

"Come tomorrow at three," she said, her voice and manner suddenly

seeming to give back the hope she had withheld from him.

He seized on her hand with an inarticulate murmur; but at the same

moment a louder whistle and the thunder of an approaching train reminded

her of the impossibility of prolonging the scene. She was ordinarily

careless of appearances, but while she was Mrs. Amherst's guest she did

not care to be seen romantically loitering through the twilight with

Stephen Wyant; and she freed herself with a quick goodbye.

He gave her a last look, hesitating and imploring; then, in obedience to

her gesture, he turned away and strode off in the opposite direction.

As soon as he had left her she began to retrace her steps toward

Lynbrook House; but instead of traversing the whole length of the

village she passed through a turnstile in the park fencing, taking a

more circuitous but quieter way home.

She walked on slowly through the dusk, wishing to give herself time to

think over her conversation with Wyant. Now that she was alone again, it

seemed to her that the part she had played had been both inconsistent

and undignified. When she had written to Wyant that she would see him on

the morrow she had done so with the clear understanding that she was to

give, at that meeting, a definite answer to his offer of marriage; and

during her talk with Bessy she had suddenly, and, as it seemed to her,

irrevocably, decided that the answer should be favourable. From the

first days of her acquaintance with Wyant she had appreciated his

intelligence and had been stimulated by his zeal for his work. He had

remained only six months at Saint Elizabeth's, and though his feeling

for her had even then been manifest, it had been kept from expression by

the restraint of their professional relation, and by her absorption in

her duties. It was only when they had met again at Lynbrook that she had

begun to feel a personal interest in him. His youthful promise seemed

nearer fulfillment than she had once thought possible, and the contrast

he presented to the young men in Bessy's train was really all in his

favour. He had gained in strength and steadiness without losing his high

flashes of enthusiasm; and though, even now, she was not in love with

him, she began to feel that the union of their common interests might

create a life full and useful enough to preclude the possibility of

vague repinings. It would, at any rate, take her out of the stagnant

circle of her present existence, and restore her to contact with the

fruitful energies of life.

All this had seemed quite clear when she wrote her letter; why, then,

had she not made use of their chance encounter to give her answer,

instead of capriciously postponing it? The act might have been that of a

self-conscious girl in her teens; but neither inexperience nor coquetry

had prompted it. She had merely yielded to the spirit of resistance that

Wyant's presence had of late aroused in her; and the possibility that

this resistance might be due to some sense of his social defects, his

lack of measure and facility, was so humiliating that for a moment she

stood still in the path, half-meaning to turn back and overtake him----

As she paused she was surprised to hear a man's step behind her; and the

thought that it might be Wyant's brought about another revulsion of

feeling. What right had he to pursue her in this way, to dog her steps

even into the Lynbrook grounds? She was sure that his persistent

attentions had already attracted the notice of Bessy's visitors; and

that he should thus force himself on her after her dismissal seemed

suddenly to make their whole relation ridiculous.

She turned about to rebuke him, and found herself face to face with John

Amherst.

XVI

AMHERST, on leaving the train at Lynbrook, had paused in doubt on the

empty platform. His return was unexpected, and no carriage awaited him;

but he caught the signal of the village cab-driver's ready whip.

Amherst, however, felt a sudden desire to postpone the moment of

arrival, and consigning his luggage to the cab he walked away toward the

turnstile through which Justine had passed. In thus taking the longest

way home he was yielding another point to his reluctance. He knew that

at that hour his wife's visitors might still be assembled in the

drawing-room, and he wished to avoid making his unannounced entrance

among them.

It was not till now that he felt the embarrassment of such an arrival.

For some time past he had known that he ought to go back to Lynbrook,

but he had not known how to tell Bessy that he was coming. Lack of habit

made him inexpert in the art of easy transitions, and his inability to

bridge over awkward gaps had often put him at a disadvantage with his

wife and her friends. He had not yet learned the importance of observing

the forms which made up the daily ceremonial of their lives, and at

present there was just enough soreness between himself and Bessy to make

such observances more difficult than usual.

There had been no open estrangement, but peace had been preserved at the

cost of a slowly accumulated tale of grievances on both sides. Since

Amherst had won his point about the mills, the danger he had foreseen

had been realized: his victory at Westmore had been a defeat at

Lynbrook. It would be too crude to say that his wife had made him pay

for her public concession by the private disregard of his wishes; and if

something of this sort had actually resulted, his sense of fairness told

him that it was merely the natural reaction of a soft nature against the

momentary strain of self-denial. At first he had been hardly aware of

this consequence of his triumph. The joy of being able to work his will

at Westmore obscured all lesser emotions; and his sentiment for Bessy

had long since shrunk into one of those shallow pools of feeling which a

sudden tide might fill, but which could never again be the deep

perennial spring from which his life was fed.

The need of remaining continuously at Hanaford while the first changes

were making had increased the strain of the situation. He had never

expected that Bessy would stay there with him--had perhaps, at heart,

hardly wished it--and her plan of going to the Adirondacks with Miss

Brent seemed to him a satisfactory alternative to the European trip she

had renounced. He felt as relieved as though some one had taken off his

hands the task of amusing a restless child, and he let his wife go

without suspecting that the moment might be a decisive one between them.

But it had not occurred to Bessy that any one could regard six weeks in

the Adirondacks as an adequate substitute for a summer abroad. She felt

that her sacrifice deserved recognition, and personal devotion was the

only form of recognition which could satisfy her. She had expected

Amherst to join her at the camp, but he did not come; and when she went

back to Long Island she did not stop to see him, though Hanaford lay in

her way. At the moment of her return the work at the mills made it

impossible for him to go to Lynbrook; and thus the weeks drifted on

without their meeting.

At last, urged by his mother, he had gone down to Long Island for a

night; but though, on that occasion, he had announced his coming, he

found the house full, and the whole party except Mr. Langhope in the act

of starting off to a dinner in the neighbourhood. He was of course

expected to go too, and Bessy appeared hurt when he declared that he was

too tired and preferred to remain with Mr. Langhope; but she did not

suggest staying at home herself, and drove off in a mood of exuberant

gaiety. Amherst had been too busy all his life to know what intricacies

of perversion a sentimental grievance may develop in an unoccupied mind,

and he saw in Bessy's act only a sign of indifference. The next day she

complained to him of money difficulties, as though surprised that her

income had been suddenly cut down; and when he reminded her that she had

consented of her own will to this temporary reduction, she burst into

tears and accused him of caring only for Westmore.

He went away exasperated by her inconsequence, and bills from Lynbrook

continued to pour in on him. In the first days of their marriage, Bessy

had put him in charge of her exchequer, and she was too indolent--and at

heart perhaps too sensitive--to ask him to renounce the charge. It was

clear to him, therefore, how little she was observing the spirit of

their compact, and his mind was tormented by the anticipation of

financial embarrassments. He wrote her a letter of gentle expostulation,

but in her answer she ignored his remonstrance; and after that silence

fell between them.

The only way to break this silence was to return to Lynbrook; but now

that he had come back, he did not know what step to take next. Something

in the atmosphere of his wife's existence seemed to paralyze his

will-power. When all about her spoke a language so different from his

own, how could he hope to make himself heard? He knew that her family

and her immediate friends--Mr. Langhope, the Gaineses, Mrs. Ansell and

Mr. Tredegar--far from being means of communication, were so many

sentinels ready to raise the drawbridge and drop the portcullis at his

approach. They were all in league to stifle the incipient feelings he

had roused in Bessy, to push her back into the deadening routine of her

former life, and the only voice that might conceivably speak for him was

Miss Brent's.

The "case" which, unexpectedly presented to her by one of the Hope

Hospital physicians, had detained Justine at Hanaford during the month

of June, was the means of establishing a friendship between herself and

Amherst. They did not meet often, or get to know each other very well;

but he saw her occasionally at his mother's and at Mrs. Dressel's, and

once he took her out to Westmore, to consult her about the emergency

hospital which was to be included among the first improvements there.

The expedition had been memorable to both; and when, some two weeks

later, Bessy wrote suggesting that she should take Miss Brent to the

Adirondacks, it seemed to Amherst that there was no one whom he would

rather have his wife choose as her companion.

He was much too busy at the time to cultivate or analyze his feeling for

Miss Brent; he rested vaguely in the thought of her, as of the "nicest"

girl he had ever met, and was frankly pleased when accident brought them

together; but the seeds left in both their minds by these chance

encounters had not yet begun to germinate.

So unperceived had been their gradual growth in intimacy that it was a

surprise to Amherst to find himself suddenly thinking of her as a means

of communication with his wife; but the thought gave him such

encouragement that, when he saw Justine in the path before him he went

toward her with unusual eagerness.

Justine, on her part, felt an equal pleasure. She knew that Bessy did

not expect her husband, and that his prolonged absence had already been

the cause of malicious comment at Lynbrook; and she caught at the hope

that this sudden return might betoken a more favourable turn of affairs.

"Oh, I am so glad to see you!" she exclaimed; and her tone had the

effect of completing his reassurance, his happy sense that she would

understand and help him.

"I wanted to see you too," he began confusedly; then, conscious of the

intimacy of the phrase, he added with a slight laugh: "The fact is, I'm

a culprit looking for a peace-maker."

"A culprit?"

"I've been so tied down at the mills that I didn't know, till yesterday,

just when I could break away; and in the hurry of leaving--" He paused

again, checked by the impossibility of uttering, to the girl before him,

the little conventional falsehoods which formed the small currency of

Bessy's circle. Not that any scruple of probity restrained him: in

trifling matters he recognized the usefulness of such counters in the

social game; but when he was with Justine he always felt the obscure

need of letting his real self be seen.

"I was stupid enough not to telegraph," he said, "and I am afraid my

wife will think me negligent: she often has to reproach me for my sins

of omission, and this time I know they are many."

The girl received this in silence, less from embarrassment than from

surprise; for she had already guessed that it was as difficult for

Amherst to touch, even lightly, on his private affairs, as it was

instinctive with his wife to pour her grievances into any willing ear.

Justine's first thought was one of gratification that he should have

spoken, and of eagerness to facilitate the saying of whatever he wished

to say; but before she could answer he went on hastily: "The fact is,

Bessy does not know how complicated the work at Westmore is; and when I

caught sight of you just now I was thinking that you are the only one of

her friends who has any technical understanding of what I am trying to

do, and who might consequently help her to see how hard it is for me to

take my hand from the plough."

Justine listened gravely, longing to cry out her comprehension and

sympathy, but restrained by the sense that the moment was a critical

one, where impulse must not be trusted too far. It was quite possible

that a reaction of pride might cause Amherst to repent even so guarded

an avowal; and if that happened, he might never forgive her for having

encouraged him to speak. She looked up at him with a smile.

"Why not tell Bessy yourself? Your understanding of the case is a good

deal clearer than mine or any one else's."

"Oh, Bessy is tired of hearing about it from me; and besides--" She

detected a shade of disappointment in his tone, and was sorry she had

said anything which might seem meant to discourage his confidence. It

occurred to her also that she had been insincere in not telling him at

once that she had already been let into the secret of his domestic

differences: she felt the same craving as Amherst for absolute openness

between them.

"I know," she said, almost timidly, "that Bessy has not been quite

content of late to have you give so much time to Westmore, and perhaps

she herself thinks it is because the work there does not interest her;

but I believe it is for a different reason."

"What reason?" he asked with a look of surprise.

"Because Westmore takes you from her; because she thinks you are happier

there than at Lynbrook."

The day had faded so rapidly that it was no longer possible for the

speakers to see each other's faces, and it was easier for both to

communicate through the veil of deepening obscurity.

"But, good heavens, she might be there with me--she's as much needed

there as I am!" Amherst exclaimed.

"Yes; but you must remember that it's against all her habits--and

against the point of view of every one about her--that she should lead

that kind of life; and meanwhile----"

"Well?"

"Meanwhile, isn't it expedient that you should, a little more, lead

hers?"

Always the same answer to his restless questioning! His mother's answer,

the answer of Bessy and her friends. He had somehow hoped that the girl

at his side would find a different solution to the problem, and his

disappointment escaped in a bitter exclamation.

"But Westmore is my life--hers too, if she knew it! I can't desert it

now without being as false to her as to myself!"

As he spoke, he was overcome once more by the hopelessness of trying to

put his case clearly. How could Justine, for all her quickness and

sympathy, understand a situation of which the deeper elements were

necessarily unknown to her? The advice she gave him was natural enough,

and on her lips it seemed not the counsel of a shallow expediency, but

the plea of compassion and understanding. But she knew nothing of the

long struggle for mutual adjustment which had culminated in this crisis

between himself and his wife, and she could therefore not see that, if

he yielded his point, and gave up his work at Westmore, the concession

would mean not renewal but destruction. He felt that he should hate

Bessy if he won her back at that price; and the violence of his feeling

frightened him. It was, in truth, as he had said, his own life that he

was fighting for. If he gave up Westmore he could not fall back on the

futile activities of Lynbrook, and fate might yet have some lower

alternative to offer. He could trust to his own strength and

self-command while his energies had a normal outlet; but idleness and

self-indulgence might work in him like a dangerous drug.

Justine kept steadily to her point. "Westmore must be foremost to both

of you in time; I don't see how either of you can escape that. But the

realization of it must come to Bessy through _you_, and for that reason

I think that you ought to be more patient--that you ought even to put

the question aside for a time and enter a little more into her life

while she is learning to understand yours." As she ended, it seemed to

her that what she had said was trite and ineffectual, and yet that it

might have passed the measure of discretion; and, torn between two

doubts, she added hastily: "But you have done just that in coming back

now--that is the real solution of the problem."

While she spoke they passed out of the wood-path they had been

following, and rounding a mass of shrubbery emerged on the lawn below

the terraces. The long bulk of the house lay above them, dark against

the lingering gleam of the west, with brightly-lit windows marking its

irregular outline; and the sight produced in Amherst and Justine a vague

sense of helplessness and constraint. It was impossible to speak with

the same freedom, confronted by that substantial symbol of the accepted

order, which seemed to glare down on them in massive disdain of their

puny efforts to deflect the course of events: and Amherst, without

reverting to her last words, asked after a moment if his wife had many

guests.

He listened in silence while Justine ran over the list of names--the

Telfer girls and their brother, Mason Winch and Westy Gaines, a cluster

of young bridge-playing couples, and, among the last arrivals, the

Fenton Carburys and Ned Bowfort. The names were all familiar to

Amherst--he knew they represented the flower of week-end fashion; but he

did not remember having seen the Carburys among his wife's guests, and

his mind paused on the name, seeking to regain some lost impression

connected with it. But it evoked, like the others, merely the confused

sense of stridency and unrest which he had brought away from his last

Lynbrook visit; and this reminiscence made him ask Miss Brent, when her

list was ended, if she did not think that so continuous a succession of

visitors was too tiring for Bessy.

"I sometimes think it tires her more than she knows; but I hope she can

be persuaded to take better care of herself now that Mrs. Ansell has

come back."

Amherst halted abruptly. "Is Mrs. Ansell here?"

"She arrived from Europe today."

"And Mr. Langhope too, I suppose?"

"Yes. He came from Newport about ten days ago."

Amherst checked himself, conscious that his questions betrayed the fact

that he and his wife no longer wrote to each other. The same thought

appeared to strike Justine, and they walked across the lawn in silence,

hastening their steps involuntarily, as though to escape the oppressive

weight of the words which had passed between them. But Justine was

unwilling that this fruitless sense of oppression should be the final

outcome of their talk; and when they reached the upper terrace she

paused and turned impulsively to Amherst. As she did so, the light from

an uncurtained window fell on her face, which glowed with the inner

brightness kindled in it by moments of strong feeling.

"I am sure of one thing--Bessy will be very, very glad that you have

come," she exclaimed.

"Thank you," he answered.

Their hands met mechanically, and she turned away and entered the house.

XVII

BESSY had not seen her little girl that day, and filled with compunction

by Justine's reminder, she hastened directly to the school-room.

Of late, in certain moods, her maternal tenderness had been clouded by a

sense of uneasiness in the child's presence, for Cicely was the argument

most effectually used by Mr. Langhope and Mr. Tredegar in their efforts

to check the triumph of Amherst's ideas. Bessy, still unable to form an

independent opinion on the harassing question of the mills, continued to

oscillate between the views of the contending parties, now regarding

Cicely as an innocent victim and herself as an unnatural mother,

sacrificing her child's prospects to further Amherst's enterprise, and

now conscious of a vague animosity against the little girl, as the chief

cause of the dissensions which had so soon clouded the skies of her

second marriage. Then again, there were moments when Cicely's rosy bloom

reminded her bitterly of the child she had lost--the son on whom her

ambitions had been fixed. It seemed to her now that if their boy had

lived she might have kept Amherst's love and have played a more

important part in his life; and brooding on the tragedy of the child's

sickly existence she resented the contrast of Cicely's brightness and

vigour. The result was that in her treatment of her daughter she

alternated between moments of exaggerated devotion and days of neglect,

never long happy away from the little girl, yet restless and

self-tormenting in her presence.

After her talk with Justine she felt more than usually disturbed, as she

always did when her unprofitable impulses of self-exposure had subsided.

Bessy's mind was not made for introspection, and chance had burdened it

with unintelligible problems. She felt herself the victim of

circumstances to which her imagination attributed the deliberate malice

that children ascribe to the furniture they run against in playing. This

helped her to cultivate a sense of helpless injury and to disdain in

advance the advice she was perpetually seeking. How absurd it was, for

instance, to suppose that a girl could understand the feelings of a

married woman! Justine's suggestion that she should humble herself still

farther to Amherst merely left in Bessy's mind a rankling sense of being

misunderstood and undervalued by those to whom she turned in her

extremity, and she said to herself, in a phrase that sounded well in her

own ears, that sooner or later every woman must learn to fight her

battles alone.

In this mood she entered the room where Cicely was at supper with her

governess, and enveloped the child in a whirl of passionate caresses.

But Cicely had inherited the soberer Westmore temper, and her mother's

spasmodic endearments always had a repressive effect on her. She

dutifully returned a small fraction of Bessy's kisses, and then, with an

air of relief, addressed herself once more to her bread and marmalade.

"You don't seem a bit glad to see me!" Bessy exclaimed, while the little

governess made a nervous pretence of being greatly amused at this

prodigious paradox, and Cicely, setting down her silver mug, asked

judicially: "Why should I be gladder than other days? It isn't a

birthday."

This Cordelia-like answer cut Bessy to the quick. "You horrid child to

say such a cruel thing when you know I love you better and better every

minute! But you don't care for me any longer because Justine has taken

you away from me!"

This last charge had sprung into her mind in the act of uttering it, but

now that it was spoken it instantly assumed the proportions of a fact,

and seemed to furnish another justification for her wretchedness. Bessy

was not naturally jealous, but her imagination was thrall to the spoken

word, and it gave her a sudden incomprehensible relief to associate

Justine with the obscure causes of her suffering.

"I know she's cleverer than I am, and more amusing, and can tell you

about plants and animals and things...and I daresay she tells you how

tiresome and stupid I am...."

She sprang up suddenly, abashed by Cicely's astonished gaze, and by the

governess's tremulous attempt to continue to treat the scene as one of

"Mamma's" most successful pleasantries.

"Don't mind me--my head aches horribly. I think I'll rush off for a

gallop on Impulse before dinner. Miss Dill, Cicely's nails are a

sight--I suppose that comes of grubbing up wild-flowers."

And with this parting shot at Justine's pursuits she swept out of the

school-room, leaving pupil and teacher plunged in a stricken silence

from which Cicely at length emerged to say, with the candour that Miss

Dill dreaded more than any punishable offense: "Mother's prettiest--but

I do like Justine the best."

* * * * *

It was nearly dark when Bessy mounted the horse which had been hastily

saddled in response to her order; but it was her habit to ride out alone

at all hours, and of late nothing but a hard gallop had availed to quiet

her nerves. Her craving for occupation had increased as her life became

more dispersed and agitated, and the need to fill every hour drove her

to excesses of bodily exertion, since other forms of activity were

unknown to her.

As she cantered along under the twilight sky, with a strong sea-breeze

in her face, the rush of air and the effort of steadying her nervous

thoroughbred filled her with a glow of bodily energy from which her

thoughts emerged somewhat cleansed of their bitterness.

She had been odious to poor little Cicely, for whom she now felt a

sudden remorseful yearning which almost made her turn her horse's head

homeward, that she might dash upstairs and do penance beside the child's

bed. And that she should have accused Justine of taking Cicely from her!

It frightened her to find herself thinking evil of Justine. Bessy, whose

perceptions were keen enough in certain directions, knew that her second

marriage had changed her relation to all her former circle of friends.

Though they still rallied about her, keeping up the convenient habit of

familiar intercourse, she had begun to be aware that their view of her

had in it an element of criticism and compassion. She had once fancied

that Amherst's good looks, and the other qualities she had seen in him,

would immediately make him free of the charmed circle in which she

moved; but she was discouraged by his disregard of his opportunities,

and above all by the fundamental differences in his view of life. He was

never common or ridiculous, but she saw that he would never acquire the

small social facilities. He was fond of exercise, but it bored him to

talk of it. The men's smoking-room anecdotes did not amuse him, he was

unmoved by the fluctuations of the stock-market, he could not tell one

card from another, and his perfunctory attempts at billiards had once

caused Mr. Langhope to murmur, in his daughter's hearing: "Ah, that's

the test--I always said so!"

Thus debarred from what seemed to Bessy the chief points of contact with

life, how could Amherst hope to impose himself on minds versed in these

larger relations? As the sense of his social insufficiency grew on her,

Bessy became more sensitive to that latent criticism of her marriage

which--intolerable thought!--involved a judgment on herself. She was

increasingly eager for the approval and applause of her little audience,

yet increasingly distrustful of their sincerity, and more miserably

persuaded that she and her husband were the butt of some of their most

effective stories. She knew also that rumours of the disagreement about

Westmore were abroad, and the suspicion that Amherst's conduct was the

subject of unfriendly comment provoked in her a reaction of loyalty to

his ideas....

From this turmoil of conflicting influences only her friendship with

Justine Brent remained secure. Though Justine's adaptability made it

easy for her to fit into the Lynbrook life, Bessy knew that she stood as

much outside of it as Amherst. She could never, for instance, be

influenced by what Maria Ansell and the Gaineses and the Telfers

thought. She had her own criteria of conduct, unintelligible to Bessy,

but giving her an independence of mind on which her friend leaned in a

kind of blind security. And that even her faith in Justine should

suddenly be poisoned by a jealous thought seemed to prove that the

consequences of her marriage were gradually infecting her whole life.

Bessy could conceive of masculine devotion only as subservient to its

divinity's least wish, and she argued that if Amherst had really loved

her he could not so lightly have disturbed the foundations of her world.

And so her tormented thoughts, perpetually circling on themselves,

reverted once more to their central grievance--the failure of her

marriage. If her own love had died out it would have been much

simpler--she was surrounded by examples of the mutual evasion of a

troublesome tie. There was Blanche Carbury, for instance, with whom she

had lately struck up an absorbing friendship...it was perfectly clear

that Blanche Carbury wondered how much more she was going to stand! But

it was the torment of Bessy's situation that it involved a radical

contradiction, that she still loved Amherst though she could not forgive

him for having married her.

Perhaps what she most suffered from was his too-prompt acceptance of the

semi-estrangement between them. After nearly three years of marriage she

had still to learn that it was Amherst's way to wrestle with the angel

till dawn, and then to go about his other business. Her own mind could

revolve in the same grievance as interminably as a squirrel in its

wheel, and her husband's habit of casting off the accepted fact seemed

to betoken poverty of feeling. If only he had striven a little harder to

keep her--if, even now, he would come back to her, and make her feel

that she was more to him than those wretched mills!

When she turned her mare toward Lynbrook, the longing to see Amherst was

again uppermost. He had not written for weeks--she had been obliged to

tell Maria Ansell that she knew nothing of his plans, and it mortified

her to think that every one was aware of his neglect. Yet, even now, if

on reaching the house she should find a telegram to say that he was

coming, the weight of loneliness would be lifted, and everything in life

would seem different....

Her high-strung mare, scenting the homeward road, and excited by the

fantastic play of wayside lights and shadows, swept her along at a wild

gallop with which the fevered rush of her thoughts kept pace, and when

she reached the house she dropped from the saddle with aching wrists and

brain benumbed.

She entered by a side door, to avoid meeting any one, and ran upstairs

at once, knowing that she had barely time to dress for dinner. As she

opened the door of her sitting-room some one rose from the chair by the

fire, and she stood still, facing her husband....

It was the moment both had desired, yet when it came it found them

tongue-tied and helpless.

Bessy was the first to speak. "When did you get here? You never wrote me

you were coming!"

Amherst advanced toward her, holding out his hand. "No; you must forgive

me. I have been very busy," he said.

Always the same excuse! The same thrusting at her of the hateful fact

that Westmore came first, and that she must put up with whatever was

left of his time and thoughts!

"You are always too busy to let me hear from you," she said coldly, and

the hand which had sprung toward his fell back to her side.

Even then, if he had only said frankly: "It was too difficult--I didn't

know how," the note of truth would have reached and moved her; but he

had striven for the tone of ease and self-restraint that was habitual

among her friends, and as usual his attempt had been a failure.

"I am sorry--I'm a bad hand at writing," he rejoined; and his evil

genius prompted him to add: "I hope my coming is not inconvenient?"

The colour rose to Bessy's face. "Of course not. But it must seem rather

odd to our visitors that I should know so little of your plans."

At this he humbled himself still farther. "I know I don't think enough

about appearances--I'll try to do better the next time."

Appearances! He spoke as if she had been reproaching him for a breach of

etiquette...it never occurred to him that the cry came from her

humiliated heart! The tide of warmth that always enveloped her in his

presence was receding, and in its place a chill fluid seemed to creep up

slowly to her throat and lips.

In Amherst, meanwhile, the opposite process was taking place. His wife

was still to him the most beautiful woman in the world, or rather,

perhaps, the only woman to whose beauty his eyes had been opened. That

beauty could never again penetrate to his heart, but it still touched

his senses, not with passion but with a caressing kindliness, such as

one might feel for the bright movements of a bird or a kitten. It seemed

to plead with him not to ask of her more than she could give--to be

content with the outward grace and not seek in it an inner meaning. He

moved toward her again, and took her passive hands in his.

"You look tired. Why do you ride so late?"

"Oh, I just wanted to give Impulse a gallop. I hadn't time to take her

out earlier, and if I let the grooms exercise her they'll spoil her

mouth."

Amherst frowned. "You ought not to ride that mare alone at night. She

shies at everything after dark."

"She's the only horse I care for--the others are all cows," she

murmured, releasing her hands impatiently.

"Well, you must take me with you the next time you ride her."

She softened a little, in spite of herself. Riding was the only

amusement he cared to share with her, and the thought of a long gallop

across the plains at his side brought back the warmth to her veins.

"Yes, we'll go tomorrow. How long do you mean to stay?" she asked,

looking up at him eagerly.

He was pleased that she should wish to know, yet the question

embarrassed him, for it was necessary that he should be back at Westmore

within three days, and he could not put her off with an evasion.

Bessy saw his hesitation, and her colour rose again. "I only asked," she

explained, "because there is to be a fancy ball at the Hunt Club on the

twentieth, and I thought of giving a big dinner here first."

Amherst did not understand that she too had her inarticulate moments,

and that the allusion to the fancy ball was improvised to hide an

eagerness to which he had been too slow in responding. He thought she

had enquired about his plans only that he might not again interfere with

the arrangements of her dinner-table. If that was all she cared about,

it became suddenly easy to tell her that he could not stay, and he

answered lightly: "Fancy balls are a little out of my line; but at any

rate I shall have to be back at the mills the day after tomorrow."

The disappointment brought a rush of bitterness to her lips. "The day

after tomorrow? It seems hardly worth while to have come so far for two

days!"

"Oh, I don't mind the journey--and there are one or two matters I must

consult you about."

There could hardly have been a more ill-advised answer, but Amherst was

reckless now. If she cared for his coming only that he might fill a

place at a fancy-dress dinner, he would let her see that he had come

only because he had to go through the form of submitting to her certain

measures to be taken at Westmore.

Bessy was beginning to feel the physical reaction of her struggle with

the mare. The fatigue which at first had deadened her nerves now woke

them to acuter sensibility, and an appealing word from her husband would

have drawn her to his arms. But his answer seemed to drive all the blood

back to her heart.

"I don't see why you still go through the form of consulting me about

Westmore, when you have always done just as you pleased there, without

regard to me or Cicely."

Amherst made no answer, silenced by the discouragement of hearing the

same old grievance on her lips; and she too seemed struck, after she had

spoken, by the unprofitableness of such retorts.

"It doesn't matter--of course I'll do whatever you wish," she went on

listlessly. "But I could have sent my signature, if that is all you came

for----"

"Thanks," said Amherst coldly. "I shall remember that the next time."

They stood silent for a moment, he with his eyes fixed on her, she with

averted head, twisting her riding-whip between her fingers; then she

said suddenly: "We shall be late for dinner," and passing into her

dressing-room she closed the door.

Amherst roused himself as she disappeared.

"Bessy!" he exclaimed, moving toward her; but as he approached the door

he heard her maid's voice within, and turning away he went to his own

room.

* * * * *

Bessy came down late to dinner, with vivid cheeks and an air of

improvised ease; and the manner of her entrance, combined with her

husband's unannounced arrival, produced in their observant guests the

sense of latent complications. Mr. Langhope, though evidently unaware of

his son-in-law's return till they greeted each other in the

drawing-room, was too good a card-player to betray surprise, and Mrs.

Ansell outdid herself in the delicate art of taking everything for

granted; but these very dissimulations sharpened the perception of the

other guests, whom long practice had rendered expert in interpreting

such signs.

Of all this Justine Brent was aware; and conscious also that, by every

one but herself, the suspected estrangement between the Amhersts was

regarded as turning merely on the question of money. To the greater

number of persons present there was, in fact, no other conceivable

source of conjugal discord, since every known complication could be

adjusted by means of the universal lubricant. It was this unanimity of

view which bound together in the compactness of a new feudalism the

members of Bessy Amherst's world; which supplied them with their

pass-words and social tests, and defended them securely against the

insidious attack of ideas.

* * * * *

The Genius of History, capriciously directing the antics of its

marionettes, sometimes lets the drama languish through a series of

unrelated episodes, and then, suddenly quickening the pace, packs into

one scene the stuff of a dozen. The chance meeting of Amherst and

Justine, seemingly of no significance to either, contained the germ of

developments of which both had begun to be aware before the evening was

over. Their short talk--the first really intimate exchange of words

between them--had the effect of creating a sense of solidarity that grew

apace in the atmosphere of the Lynbrook dinner-table.

Justine was always reluctant to take part in Bessy's week-end dinners,

but as she descended the stairs that evening she did not regret having

promised to be present. She frankly wanted to see Amherst again--his

tone, his view of life, reinforced her own convictions, restored her

faith in the reality and importance of all that Lynbrook ignored and

excluded. Her extreme sensitiveness to surrounding vibrations of thought

and feeling told her, as she glanced at him between the flowers and

candles of the long dinner-table, that he too was obscurely aware of the

same effect; and it flashed across her that they were unconsciously

drawn together by the fact that they were the only two strangers in the

room. Every one else had the same standpoint, spoke the same language,

drew on the same stock of allusions, used the same weights and measures

in estimating persons and actions. Between Mr. Langhope's indolent

acuteness of mind and the rudimentary processes of the rosy Telfers

there was a difference of degree but not of kind. If Mr. Langhope viewed

the spectacle more objectively, it was not because he had outlived the

sense of its importance, but because years of experience had

familiarized him with its minutest details; and this familiarity with

the world he lived in had bred a profound contempt for any other.

In no way could the points of contact between Amherst and Justine Brent

have been more vividly brought out than by their tacit exclusion from

the currents of opinion about them. Amherst, seated in unsmiling

endurance at the foot of the table, between Mrs. Ansell, with her

carefully-distributed affabilities, and Blanche Carbury, with her

reckless hurling of conversational pebbles, seemed to Justine as much of

a stranger as herself among the people to whom his marriage had

introduced him. So strongly did she feel the sense of their common

isolation that it was no surprise to her, when the men reappeared in the

drawing-room after dinner, to have her host thread his way, between the

unfolding bridge-tables, straight to the corner where she sat. Amherst's

methods in the drawing-room were still as direct as in the cotton-mill.

He always went up at once to the person he sought, without preliminary

waste of tactics; and on this occasion Justine, without knowing what had

passed between himself and Bessy, suspected from the appearance of both

that their talk had resulted in increasing Amherst's desire to be with

some one to whom he could speak freely and naturally on the subject

nearest his heart.

She began at once to question him about Westmore, and the change in his

face showed that his work was still a refuge from all that made life

disheartening and unintelligible. Whatever convictions had been thwarted

or impaired in him, his faith in the importance of his task remained

unshaken; and the firmness with which he held to it filled Justine with

a sense of his strength. The feeling kindled her own desire to escape

again into the world of deeds, yet by a sudden reaction it checked the

growing inclination for Stephen Wyant that had resulted from her revolt

against Lynbrook. Here was a man as careless as Wyant of the minor

forms, yet her appreciation of him was not affected by the lack of

adaptability that she accused herself of criticizing in her suitor. She

began to see that it was not the sense of Wyant's social deficiencies

that had held her back; and the discovery at once set free her judgment

of him, enabling her to penetrate to the real causes of her reluctance.

She understood now that the flaw she felt was far deeper than any defect

of manner. It was the sense in him of something unstable and

incalculable, something at once weak and violent, that was brought to

light by the contrast of Amherst's quiet resolution. Here was a man whom

no gusts of chance could deflect from his purpose; while she felt that

the career to which Wyant had so ardently given himself would always be

at the mercy of his passing emotions.

As the distinction grew clearer, Justine trembled to think that she had

so nearly pledged herself, without the excuse of love, to a man whose

failings she could judge so lucidly.... But had she ever really thought

of marrying Wyant? While she continued to talk with Amherst such a

possibility became more and more remote, till she began to feel it was

no more than a haunting dream. But her promise to see Wyant the next

day reminded her of the nearness of her peril. How could she have played

with her fate so lightly--she, who held her life so dear because she

felt in it such untried powers of action and emotion? She continued to

listen to Amherst's account of his work, with enough outward

self-possession to place the right comment and put the right question,

yet conscious only of the quiet strength she was absorbing from his

presence, of the way in which his words, his voice, his mere nearness

were slowly steadying and clarifying her will.

In the smoking-room, after the ladies had gone upstairs, Amherst

continued to acquit himself mechanically of his duties, against the

incongruous back-ground of his predecessor's remarkable

sporting-prints--for it was characteristic of his relation to Lynbrook

that his life there was carried on in the setting of foils and

boxing-gloves, firearms and racing-trophies, which had expressed Dick

Westmore's ideals. Never very keenly alive to his material surroundings,

and quite unconscious of the irony of this proximity, Amherst had come

to accept his wife's guests as unquestioningly as their background, and

with the same sense of their being an inevitable part of his new life.

Their talk was no more intelligible to him than the red and yellow

hieroglyphics of the racing-prints, and he smoked in silence while Mr.

Langhope discoursed to Westy Gaines on the recent sale of Chinese

porcelains at which he had been lucky enough to pick up the set of Ming

for his daughter, and Mason Winch expounded to a group of languid

listeners the essential dependence of the labouring-man on the

prosperity of Wall Street. In a retired corner, Ned Bowfort was

imparting facts of a more personal nature to a chosen following who

hailed with suppressed enjoyment the murmured mention of proper names;

and now and then Amherst found himself obliged to say to Fenton Carbury,

who with one accord had been left on his hands, "Yes, I understand the

flat-tread tire is best," or, "There's a good deal to be said for the

low tension magneto----"

But all the while his conscious thoughts were absorbed in the

remembrance of his talk with Justine Brent. He had left his wife's

presence in that state of moral lassitude when the strongest hopes droop

under the infection of indifference and hostility, and the effort of

attainment seems out of all proportion to the end in view; but as he

listened to Justine all his energies sprang to life again. Here at last

was some one who felt the urgency of his task: her every word and look

confirmed her comment of the afternoon: "Westmore must be foremost to

you both in time--I don't see how either of you can escape it."

She saw it, as he did, to be the special outlet offered for the

expression of what he was worth to the world; and with the knowledge

that one other person recognized his call, it sounded again loudly in

his heart. Yes, he would go on, patiently and persistently, conquering

obstacles, suffering delay, enduring criticism--hardest of all, bearing

with his wife's deepening indifference and distrust. Justine had said

"Westmore must be foremost to you both," and he would prove that she was

right--spite of the powers leagued against him he would win over Bessy

in the end!

Those observers who had been struck by the length and animation of Miss

Brent's talk with her host--and among whom Mrs. Ansell and Westy Gaines

were foremost--would hardly have believed how small a part her personal

charms had played in attracting him. Amherst was still under the power

of the other kind of beauty--the soft graces personifying the first

triumph of sex in his heart--and Justine's dark slenderness could not at

once dispel the milder image. He watched her with pleasure while she

talked, but her face interested him only as the vehicle of her

ideas--she looked as a girl must look who felt and thought as she did.

He was aware that everything about her was quick and fine and supple,

and that the muscles of character lay close to the surface of feeling;

but the interpenetration of spirit and flesh that made her body seem

like the bright projection of her mind left him unconscious of anything

but the oneness of their thoughts.

So these two, in their hour of doubt, poured strength into each other's

hearts, each unconscious of what they gave, and of its hidden power of

renewing their own purposes.

XVIII

IF Mr. Langhope had ever stooped to such facile triumphs as that summed

up in the convenient "I told you so," he would have loosed the phrase on

Mrs. Ansell in the course of a colloquy which these two, the next

afternoon, were at some pains to defend from the incursions of the

Lynbrook house-party.

Mrs. Ansell was the kind of woman who could encircle herself with

privacy on an excursion-boat and create a nook in an hotel drawing-room,

but it taxed even her ingenuity to segregate herself from the Telfers.

When the feat was accomplished, and it became evident that Mr. Langhope

could yield himself securely to the joys of confidential discourse, he

paused on the brink of disclosure to say: "It's as well I saved that

Ming from the ruins."

"What ruins?" she exclaimed, her startled look giving him the full

benefit of the effect he was seeking to produce.

He addressed himself deliberately to the selecting and lighting of a

cigarette. "Truscomb is down and out--resigned, 'the wise it call.' And

the alterations at Westmore are going to cost a great deal more than my

experienced son-in-law expected. This is Westy's morning budget--he and

Amherst had it out last night. I tell my poor girl that at least she'll

lose nothing when the _bibelots_ I've bought for her go up the spout."

Mrs. Ansell received this with a troubled countenance. "What has become

of Bessy? I've not seen her since luncheon."

"No. She and Blanche Carbury have motored over to dine with the Nick

Ledgers at Islip."

"Did you see her before she left?"

"For a moment, but she said very little. Westy tells me that Amherst

hints at leasing the New York house. One can understand that she's left

speechless."

Mrs. Ansell, at this, sat bolt upright. "The New York house?" But she

broke off to add, with seeming irrelevance: "If you knew how I detest

Blanche Carbury!"

Mr. Langhope made a gesture of semi-acquiescence. "She is not the friend

I should have chosen for Bessy--but we know that Providence makes use of

strange instruments."

"Providence and Blanche Carbury?" She stared at him. "Ah, you are

profoundly corrupt!"

"I have the coarse masculine habit of looking facts in the face.

Woman-like, you prefer to make use of them privately, and cut them when

you meet in public."

"Blanche is not the kind of fact I should care to make use of under any

circumstances whatever!"

"No one asks you to. Simply regard her as a force of nature--let her

alone, and don't put up too many lightning-rods."

She raised her eyes to his face. "Do you really mean that you want Bessy

to get a divorce?"

"Your style is elliptical, dear Maria; but divorce does not frighten me

very much. It has grown almost as painless as modern dentistry."

"It's our odious insensibility that makes it so!"

Mr. Langhope received this with the mildness of suspended judgment. "How

else, then, do you propose that Bessy shall save what is left of her

money?"

"I would rather see her save what is left of her happiness. Bessy will

never be happy in the new way."

"What do you call the new way?"

"Launching one's boat over a human body--or several, as the case may

be!"

"But don't you see that, as an expedient to bring this madman to

reason----"

"I've told you that you don't understand him!"

Mr. Langhope turned on her with what would have been a show of temper in

any one less provided with shades of manner. "Well, then, explain him,

for God's sake!"

"I might explain him by saying that she's still in love with him."

"Ah, if you're still imprisoned in the old formulas!"

Mrs. Ansell confronted him with a grave face. "Isn't that precisely what

Bessy is? Isn't she one of the most harrowing victims of the plan of

bringing up our girls in the double bondage of expediency and unreality,

corrupting their bodies with luxury and their brains with sentiment, and

leaving them to reconcile the two as best they can, or lose their souls

in the attempt?"

Mr. Langhope smiled. "I may observe that, with my poor child so early

left alone to me, I supposed I was doing my best in committing her

guidance to some of the most admirable women I know."

"Of whom I was one--and not the least lamentable example of the system!

Of course the only thing that saves us from their vengeance," Mrs.

Ansell added, "is that so few of them ever stop to think...."

"And yet, as I make out, it's precisely what you would have Bessy do!"

"It's what neither you nor I can help her doing. You've given her just

acuteness enough to question, without consecutiveness enough to explain.

But if she must perish in the struggle--and I see no hope for her--"

cried Mrs. Ansell, starting suddenly and dramatically to her feet, "at

least let her perish defending her ideals and not denying them--even if

she has to sell the New York house and all your china pots into the

bargain!"

Mr. Langhope, rising also, deprecatingly lifted his hands, "If that's

what you call saving me from her vengeance--sending the crockery

crashing round my ears!" And, as she turned away without any pretense of

capping his pleasantry, he added, with a gleam of friendly malice: "I

suppose you're going to the Hunt ball as Cassandra?"

* * * * *

Amherst, that morning, had sought out his wife with the definite resolve

to efface the unhappy impression of their previous talk. He blamed

himself for having been too easily repelled by her impatience. As the

stronger of the two, with the power of a fixed purpose to sustain him,

he should have allowed for the instability of her impulses, and above

all for the automatic influences of habit.

Knowing that she did not keep early hours he delayed till ten o'clock to

present himself at her sitting-room door, but the maid who answered his

knock informed him that Mrs. Amherst was not yet up.

His reply that he would wait did not appear to hasten the leisurely

process of her toilet, and he had the room to himself for a full

half-hour. Many months had passed since he had spent so long a time in

it, and though habitually unobservant of external details, he now found

an outlet for his restlessness in mechanically noting the intimate

appurtenances of Bessy's life. He was at first merely conscious of a

soothing harmony of line and colour, extending from the blurred tints of

the rug to the subdued gleam of light on old picture-frames and on the

slender flanks of porcelain vases; but gradually he began to notice how

every chair and screen and cushion, and even every trifling utensil on

the inlaid writing-desk, had been chosen with reference to the whole

composition, and to the minutest requirements of a fastidious leisure. A

few months ago this studied setting, if he had thought of it at all,

would have justified itself as expressing the pretty woman's natural

affinity with pretty toys; but now it was the cost of it that struck

him. He was beginning to learn from Bessy's bills that no commodity is

taxed as high as beauty, and the beauty about him filled him with sudden

repugnance, as the disguise of the evil influences that were separating

his wife's life from his.

But with her entrance he dismissed the thought, and tried to meet her as

if nothing stood in the way of their full communion. Her hair, still wet

from the bath, broke from its dryad-like knot in dusky rings and spirals

threaded with gold, and from her loose flexible draperies, and her whole

person as she moved, there came a scent of youth and morning freshness.

Her beauty touched him, and made it easier for him to humble himself.

"I was stupid and disagreeable last night. I can never say what I want

when I have to count the minutes, and I've come back now for a quiet

talk," he began.

A shade of distrust passed over Bessy's face. "About business?" she

asked, pausing a few feet away from him.

"Don't let us give it that name!" He went up to her and drew her two

hands into his. "You used to call it our work--won't you go back to that

way of looking at it?"

Her hands resisted his pressure. "I didn't know, then, that it was going

to be the only thing you cared for----"

But for her own sake he would not let her go on. "Some day I shall make

you see how much my caring for it means my caring for you. But

meanwhile," he urged, "won't you overcome your aversion to the subject,

and bear with it as my work, if you no longer care to think of it as

yours?"

Bessy, freeing herself, sat down on the edge of the straight-backed

chair near the desk, as though to mark the parenthetical nature of the

interview.

"I know you think me stupid--but wives are not usually expected to go

into all the details of their husband's business. I have told you to do

whatever you wish at Westmore, and I can't see why that is not enough."

Amherst looked at her in surprise. Something in her quick mechanical

utterance suggested that not only the thought but the actual words she

spoke had been inspired, and he fancied he heard in them an echo of

Blanche Carbury's tones. Though Bessy's intimacy with Mrs. Carbury was

of such recent date, fragments of unheeded smoking-room gossip now

recurred to confirm the vague antipathy which Amherst had felt for her

the previous evening.

"I know that, among your friends, wives are not expected to interest

themselves in their husbands' work, and if the mills were mine I should

try to conform to the custom, though I should always think it a pity

that the questions that fill a man's thoughts should be ruled out of his

talk with his wife; but as it is, I am only your representative at

Westmore, and I don't see how we can help having the subject come up

between us."

Bessy remained silent, not as if acquiescing in his plea, but as though

her own small stock of arguments had temporarily failed her; and he went

on, enlarging on his theme with a careful avoidance of technical terms,

and with the constant effort to keep the human and personal side of the

question before her.

She listened without comment, her eyes fixed on a little jewelled

letter-opener which she had picked up from the writing-table, and which

she continued to turn in her fingers while he spoke.

The full development of Amherst's plans at Westmore, besides resulting,

as he had foreseen, in Truscomb's resignation, and in Halford Gaines's

outspoken resistance to the new policy, had necessitated a larger

immediate outlay of capital than the first estimates demanded, and

Amherst, in putting his case to Bessy, was prepared to have her meet it

on the old ground of the disapproval of all her advisers. But when he

had ended she merely said, without looking up from the toy in her hand:

"I always expected that you would need a great deal more money than you

thought."

The comment touched him at his most vulnerable point. "But you see why?

You understand how the work has gone on growing--?"

His wife lifted her head to glance at him for a moment. "I am not sure

that I understand," she said indifferently; "but if another loan is

necessary, of course I will sign the note for it."

The words checked his reply by bringing up, before he was prepared to

deal with it, the other and more embarrassing aspect of the question. He

had hoped to reawaken in Bessy some feeling for the urgency of his task

before having to take up the subject of its cost; but her cold

anticipation of his demands as part of a disagreeable business to be

despatched and put out of mind, doubled the difficulty of what he had

left to say; and it occurred to him that she had perhaps foreseen and

reckoned on this result.

He met her eyes gravely. "Another loan _is_ necessary; but if any proper

provision is to be made for paying it back, your expenses will have to

be cut down a good deal for the next few months."

The blood leapt to Bessy's face. "My expenses? You seem to forget how

much I've had to cut them down already."

"The household bills certainly don't show it. They are increasing

steadily, and there have been some very heavy incidental payments

lately."

"What do you mean by incidental payments?"

"Well, there was the pair of cobs you bought last month----"

She returned to a resigned contemplation of the letter-opener. "With

only one motor, one must have more horses, of course."

"The stables seemed to me fairly full before. But if you required more

horses, I don't see why, at this particular moment, it was also

necessary to buy a set of Chinese vases for twenty-five hundred

dollars."

Bessy, at this, lifted her head with an air of decision that surprised

him. Her blush had faded as quickly as it came, and he noticed that she

was pale to the lips.

"I know you don't care about such things; but I had an exceptional

chance of securing the vases at a low price--they are really worth

twice as much--and Dick always wanted a set of Ming for the drawing-room

mantelpiece."

Richard Westmore's name was always tacitly avoided between them, for in

Amherst's case the disagreeable sense of dependence on a dead man's

bounty increased that feeling of obscure constraint and repugnance which

any reminder of the first husband's existence is wont to produce in his

successor.

He reddened at the reply, and Bessy, profiting by an embarrassment which

she had perhaps consciously provoked, went on hastily, and as if by

rote: "I have left you perfectly free to do as you think best at the

mills, but this perpetual discussion of my personal expenses is very

unpleasant to me, as I am sure it must be to you, and in future I think

it would be much better for us to have separate accounts."

"Separate accounts?" Amherst echoed in genuine astonishment.

"I should like my personal expenses to be under my own control again--I

have never been used to accounting for every penny I spend."

The vertical lines deepened between Amherst's brows. "You are of course

free to spend your money as you like--and I thought you were doing so

when you authorized me, last spring, to begin the changes at Westmore."

Her lip trembled. "Do you reproach me for that? I didn't

understand...you took advantage...."

"Oh!" he exclaimed.

At his tone the blood rushed back to her face. "It was my fault, of

course--I only wanted to please you----"

Amherst was silent, confronted by the sudden sense of his own

responsibility. What she said was true--he had known, when he exacted

the sacrifice, that she made it only to please him, on an impulse of

reawakened feeling, and not from any real recognition of a larger duty.

The perception of this made him answer gently: "I am willing to take any

blame you think I deserve; but it won't help us now to go back to the

past. It is more important that we should come to an understanding about

the future. If by keeping your personal account separate, you mean that

you wish to resume control of your whole income, then you ought to

understand that the improvements at the mills will have to be dropped at

once, and things there go back to their old state."

She started up with an impatient gesture. "Oh, I should like never to

hear of the mills again!"

He looked at her a moment in silence. "Am I to take that as your

answer?"

She walked toward her door without returning his look. "Of course," she

murmured, "you will end by doing as you please."

The retort moved him, for he heard in it the cry of her wounded pride.

He longed to be able to cry out in return that Westmore was nothing to

him, that all he asked was to see her happy.... But it was not true, and

his manhood revolted from the deception. Besides, its effect would be

only temporary--would wear no better than her vain efforts to simulate

an interest in his work. Between them, forever, were the insurmountable

barriers of character, of education, of habit--and yet it was not in him

to believe that any barrier was insurmountable.

"Bessy," he exclaimed, following her, "don't let us part in this

way----"

She paused with her hand on her dressing-room door. "It is time to dress

for church," she objected, turning to glance at the little gilt clock on

the chimney-piece.

"For church?" Amherst stared, wondering that at such a crisis she should

have remained detached enough to take note of the hour.

"You forget," she replied, with an air of gentle reproof, "that before

we married I was in the habit of going to church every Sunday."

"Yes--to be sure. Would you not like me to go with you?" he rejoined

gently, as if roused to the consciousness of another omission in the

long list of his social shortcomings; for church-going, at Lynbrook, had

always struck him as a purely social observance.

But Bessy had opened the door of her dressing-room. "I much prefer that

you should do what you like," she said as she passed from the room.

Amherst made no farther attempt to detain her, and the door closed on

her as though it were closing on a chapter in their lives.

"That's the end of it!" he murmured, picking up the letter-opener she

had been playing with, and twirling it absently in his fingers. But

nothing in life ever ends, and the next moment a new question confronted

him--how was the next chapter to open?