CHAPTER XVII

And Angela? This was Maurice's first waking thought. In the bewildered

joy and gratitude of the night before he had put Angela aside with the

thankful reflection that Lord Glaston's opportune entrance had saved him

from actually proposing or actually being accepted. In this fact lay his

escape--and hers. But with the day Angela's personality unpleasantly

reasserted its claim. His pity could but turn from Felicia, who no

longer needed it, to Angela, an even greater pity, since the humiliation

of her position was incomparably greater than Felicia's had been.

Indeed, for Felicia there had been no real humiliation; she had always

had his heart, and only his poverty had prevented him from claiming her;

but the unhappy Angela had been more wooer than wooed and he must leave

her from motives infinitely more heart-rending to her than those of

material necessity. What he should say to her was the thought that now

harassed him; how tell her that for all his dallying he did not intend

to marry her? How tell her that, when, in reality, he had intended

marrying her, and she must have felt that he so intended? Above all,

how was he to add that he was going to marry the woman he had loved

since first seeing her? It was with a sickness of pity that he asked

himself these questions. His cheek burned when he thought of the figure

he would cut in Angela's eyes, for she would see too clearly that if he

loved Felicia he had behaved outrageously, only yesterday, to herself,

in kissing her, accepting her avowal.

By the time that he went to Geoffrey's he had decided in a definite

recoil from the pain and humiliation--for both of them--that he simply

could not see Angela. He was, in reality, going to jilt her, and he must

not see her face to face when she learned the fact--this despite an

undefined resolution at the back of his mind that she must not know that

he had jilted her. She must be spared as much as possible.

He clung now to the thought of her idealism and magnanimity; they had

never been very convincing qualities to him before, but he found himself

insisting upon them now; they would surely shield him from too much

scorn; she would understand and forgive. But what was she to understand?

The hour with Geoffrey was like a poultice on his wound--so mild and

unemphatic was it. He left it with his prostrate fortunes set upon their

feet, and the assurance of a very small but secure income irradiating

the future. He suspected that Geoffrey's future, in consequence, had

become uncertain, but under the circumstances submission only was open

to him; besides, the Government was securely seated in the saddle; there

was no danger of Geoffrey's losing office.

When Maurice was on the point of leaving--he had been slightly ill at

ease during the interview, and Geoffrey's calm perhaps a little

forced--the latter said, detaining him with a hand on his arm, "I wrote

to her last night. I wanted to make things easy for all of us. Here is

the copy."

Maurice, flushing deeply, read--

"MY DEAR MISS MERRICK,--

"I have seen Maurice. His affairs have suddenly taken the happiest

turn, and your days of misfortune are over. I told him of my

interview with you, as reticence on the subject might have been

awkward for all of us; we are all to be the best of friends, you

know. Everything, now, is all right.

"Yours devotedly,

"G. DAUNT."

"I'll go at once," Maurice murmured, tears in his eyes. "My dear old

Geoff."

"You mustn't make me ridiculous by your gratitude," said Geoffrey. "And,

my dear Maurice, I'm not altogether selfish. Your happiness does make me

happy." He looked at him as he spoke with the boyish, older-brother look

of affection that Maurice knew so well.

But before he could go he must write to Angela. Yes, there was the wound

opening again as he drove away from Geoffrey's, and on reaching his

rooms he found himself confronted by an envelope, a familiar, small,

pale grey envelope, addressed in a familiar hand--Angela's oddly large

and demonstrative hand, that seemed to flourish banners of welcome or

appeal. Maurice looked at it as though it had been a viper coiled on his

mantelpiece. Its contents must, however, point out some decisive

attitude for him; he must bear the venom. He tore it open and read,

while a faint fragrance, like a sigh, rose from the delicate sheet--

"DEAREST, DEAREST MAURICE (can one say

more than dearest?)--

"Will you not come to me this evening? Papa is going out, and you

and I will be quite alone together and talk of so much. I find now

how much I needed happiness.

"Your ANGELA."

Maurice stood stonily while reading this, and for some moments after its

quick perusal. Then he rang for a district messenger--for even in the

extremity of his difficulties, Maurice found these luxuries necessities,

and sat down to his loathsome task. In his blinding self-disgust, his

mind confused with pity for her and for himself, he almost wished that

Geoffrey had not been so generous nor Felicia so loveable, so loving.

He took up the pen, feeling that no further delay was possible; at all

events he would not see her face; and--

"My dear Angela," he wrote; then, hesitating, thinking of the pathetic

trust of her "dearest," tore the sheet across, took another and began

again with--

"Dearest Angela, I cannot come to-night. I am sure of your sympathy and

comprehension in all things, and I must show what I feel for you by my

utter frankness with you. I am going to marry Felicia Merrick." Maurice

paused when he had written this, and the vision of yesterday

morning--Angela's tears, the kiss, the embrace--surged over him. "I did

not know this yesterday," he went on, writing rapidly. "We must forget

yesterday. You remember last autumn, at Trensome Hall, how immensely she

fascinated me. You know, alas! since you have watched my weaknesses for

so many years, my miserable impressionability. I find that I took my

irresponsible love-making more lightly than she did. I find that where I

thought I was behaving frivolously I was behaving abominably. She

doesn't take things lightly; she is a dear, simple little girl, and half

serious trifling is not to her what it is to us."

Maurice's forehead burned as he wrote this. He was still thinking of

Angela. She, though not a "dear, simple little girl," did not take

things lightly either, transcending the worldly, the frivolous standard

by knowledge, not by ignorance; he knew that, and she knew that he knew

it. But she would accept the escape his dexterity offered her, would

see at once that in such acceptance lay the only escape from

humiliation; and that all she could do was to own that she, unlike

Felicia, had known half-serious trifling at its own worth and had known

that Maurice was incapable of more than momentary seriousness. But

having so smoothed her way--and at Felicia's expense--stabbed Maurice

with an intolerable sense of baseness. He stared for some moments at the

page, then took it, again to tear it. At the same moment he heard the

messenger's ring. The sound brought cold reason once more to the

surface. After all, Angela was the real sufferer. He laid down the sheet

and thought. What could he say? Would it be even true brutally to tell

her that he had loved Felicia all this time? Wasn't what he had said

really truer than that? Had not Felicia's dear image grown dim? Was it

not Felicia's feeling (darling Felicia!) that took him from Angela? Did

he not, after all, accept dependence and poverty for Felicia's sake?

Yes, it was ugly to think it, and only true on the surface, but if one

went below the surface, where indeed in life was any truth to be found?

He must face the ugliness of his own situation; and if in it he himself

were ugly, it was the situation that had rubbed off on him. When one was

in a sooty atmosphere one couldn't escape smudges. By degrees the deeper

truth would come to Angela; she would feel that his greatest love was,

had always been, for Felicia; but the realization would come quietly,

endurably; not in a hideous shock of awakening. And, for Felicia's sake,

he would be brutal enough, yes, he would--to intimate this even now.

He took up his pen and went on doggedly, though his hand trembled. "You

must know that I should have allowed myself to be altogether serious had

she not been penniless, and I, a sorry beggar. But in looking back it is

difficult to see what one would have felt in different circumstances; I

judged her from my own trivial standard and did not know her capable of

a strength and gravity of feeling before which I am abashed. It is

Geoffrey who has revealed the truth to me, and Geoffrey who has removed

the obstacle of poverty that stood between us. Geoffrey has been

wonderful. He loves her, and has made her happiness his object, and I am

necessary to her happiness--perhaps to her very life. Geoffrey tells me

that she seems to him almost dying. I never dreamed she cared so much. I

am ashamed, bitterly ashamed, I am cured of triviality for ever.

"Dear friend, you will read between these lines, and, with all your

goodness and understanding, feel for me, and know my sincerity when I

call myself

"Ever your devoted friend,

"M. WYNNE.

"PS.--Your sympathy for my hateful position will make you, I know, at

once destroy this record of it."

Five hours afterwards he was walking up the hill that led to Felicia.

The journey had been a lethargy, and now, under the sweet spring sky, he

felt his spirits rise at every stride. He paused, with an almost

tremulous smile, at that turning in the lane where first they had met.

How he had hungered for a sight of her in all these months of parting;

he realized that now. After all, he could claim a little heroism for the

self-control that had kept him from her. Smudges and heroism!--how oddly

things got mixed in life! But smudges must be resolutely forgotten; he

would live them down; he had already lived them down in the very

determination never again to get smudged. In this environment that spoke

only of Felicia, the thought of Angela was far away. When it drew near

he turned from it with impatience--almost with resentment.

In Felicia's garden the trees showed a frail web of green against the

sky. A slender almond tree, in bloom, looked to Maurice like a little

angel at the gates of Paradise. Life had exquisite, atoning moments; the

joy of this one in its poignancy seized his throat in a choking sob so

that he could scarcely breathe, and there was pain in the rapture.

The maid told him that Miss Merrick was in the sitting-room. Maurice

pushed before her and entered, closing the door behind him.

Felicia sat near the window. She had changed terribly; yet she was more

beautiful than ever. He understood her look of blankness; the greatness

of her emotion drew all expression from her face.

A wave of adoration swept over him, and with it the thought of smudges,

of his unworthiness, of her love and suffering struck through him,

shattering his baser self. He stumbled forward and fell at her knees.

They were together, and for her--for him--the past was forgotten. Yet as

Felicia leaned to him, happy with a gladness too deep for tears or

smiles, dimly there drifted over her that sense of a dream, and in it,

like a vivid start that comes in sleep, the thought of Geoffrey. It hurt

her, and, again like the striving in a dream to recall, to grasp at, a

meaning that sinks from us, she felt, dimly, for the hurt; was it for

him?--for herself? The love in Maurice's eyes drew her from dreams; yet

in clasping him, loving him, she seemed to clasp and love some other

cherished being; as a mother, holding her living child, feels in her

heart an aching, shrouded love for the child that died before it

breathed.

PART II

CHAPTER I

Mrs. Cuthbert Merrick looked about the little room with a scrutiny

cautious and acute. Almost a year had passed since Felicia's marriage,

but the summer and winter had been a prolonged honeymoon abroad, and the

young couple were only just installed in their new home. This was a

small, high flat in Chelsea, overlooking the river, and the smallness of

the flat, its height, and the rather sullen aspect of the farther shore

it overlooked satisfied Mrs. Merrick of a very limited income. Mr.

Wynne's income seemed wrapped in a Bohemian mystery; but the

drawing-room offended her, as Felicia's garden had done. She could

sympathize with a limited income, but to forgive the graceful ease

derived from it was, once more, a difficult task, so difficult that Mrs.

Merrick felt shrewd suspicions as to extravagance. An interior, fresh

and spotless as a white sea-shell, the austere suavity of

eighteenth-century furniture, old prints and old porcelain, were perhaps

Bohemian, but they were not economical. The drawing-room was crowded

with people too, and a further offence lay in the fact that Mrs. Merrick

surmised in the crowd a latent distinction. There was only a dubious

consolation in the dowdiness of some of Felicia's guests; Mrs. Merrick

knew that duchesses had disconcerting capacities for dowdiness; but at

all events, with one or two exceptions, the crowd could hardly be called

"smart." It was a word holding for Mrs. Merrick a significance at once

distressing and alluring, and she ate her sandwich with more

gratification after deciding that it did not apply here.

Familiarity entered in the person of Geoffrey Daunt, who, after a pause

beside Maurice, made his way directly to Felicia's tea-table, and Mrs.

Merrick was glad to see that Felicia had at all events the good grace to

flush slightly as she greeted him. That Felicia had in all probability

been indifferent to this brilliant match was as much of an affront as

her furniture. Mrs. Merrick's brain had bubbled with conjecture during

those winter visits; she had found herself regarding Felicia with almost

a sense of awe, and springs of eager affection had sprung up to welcome

Geoffrey Daunt's potential bride. A certain contempt had replaced the

awe; only sheer love-sickness could have led to a refusal; a refusal

perhaps to be regretted when love-sickness wore off and reality grew

plain again; yet Mrs. Merrick felt herself at a disadvantage before the

bewildering indifference. At all events Felicia did flush.

Shortly following Geoffrey, Lady Angela came, with her soft

unobtrusiveness that yet drew all eyes upon her, and, almost

over-setting her tea-cup in her eagerness to greet and claim her friend,

Mrs. Merrick sprang to meet her.

"Yes, this is my first sight of them. Isn't it very charming, very

exquisite?" said Angela, looking vaguely about her. She had not flushed

in greeting Maurice; a smile, a clasp of the hand, and she had glided

past him. "Are they not a most fortunate young couple? I am so thankful

to have my dear Maurice so happily settled. His roving irresolutions

were a pain to me. Ah! Geoffrey is here already, I see. I had hoped, in

coming late, to find them alone; people are going. Are you for long in

London, dear Mrs. Merrick? Will you come and see me soon?" She detached

herself suavely, and Mrs. Merrick was presently joined by a dull country

neighbour who pinned her in a corner with tiresome church talk.

People were going--only a group remained about Maurice at the other end

of the room, and in the midst of farewells to them, Geoffrey and

Felicia's first meeting since her marriage took place as episodically as

the departure of the least significant of guests. He was rather glad

that it should be so bulwarked by conventionality. He stood beside her

and watched her in her new character of wife and hostess. She was both

very girlishly; indeed she was little changed, though changed from the

death-like Felicia of the walk that seemed so long ago. She was the girl

he had first known, her face expressing only with more emphasis both its

old gaiety and a deeper gravity. She was the same, emphasized rather

than changed, and that her old air of easy indolence was touched now, as

she smiled and talked, and shook hands, by a little awkwardness and

abruptness was due, Geoffrey guessed, to her wish to have people gone,

really to see and speak to him.

When Angela, among departing guests, appeared, Felicia had another, a

deeper flush.

"Is this your first meeting, too?" asked Angela, looking from Geoffrey

to Felicia, as she held the latter's hand. "Geoffrey has become a

greater man than ever while you have been away, Mrs. Wynne; but you are

no doubt _au courant_ of all his news?"

"Yes; he kept us posted," said Felicia. She and Geoffrey had written

regularly and a little perfunctorily, letters of pleasant friendliness,

making no allusion to depths.

"He hasn't kept _me_ posted," said Angela, taking a chair beside

Felicia, and leaning forward over her tea-cup, her arm on her knee, in

an attitude habitual with her--an attitude at once sibylline and

saint-like. "I have seen so little of you, Geoffrey--only heard of you.

How are you?"

"All right. And you?"

"Wearing out my scabbard," she said with a fatigue that made no attempt

at lightness. "That is the fate of all of us who dedicate our lives to

anything, isn't it? It does one good to see these young people, doesn't

it, Geoffrey? Life smiles on them, doesn't it? It does one good," she

repeated, while her eyes went from him to Felicia.

Angela always bored her cousin; to-day she irritated him, especially

when she took a chair and the sibylline attitude. His talk with Felicia

was obviously and indefinitely postponed. If not the irritation, the

boredom, at all events, showed itself in his "To be with people who

aren't wearing out their scabbards."

"Yes,"--Angela did not look up from her tea-cup--"people who have in

their lives what one longs to put into everybody's life."

"You mean that we are dedicated merely to happiness?" Felicia smiled, a

little disturbed, as she remembered she had long ago been, by Geoffrey's

manner of mild ridicule.

"No, no; only that it has dedicated itself to you. You must let me come

often and look at you. You must let an old friendship like mine and

Maurice's be included in the new relationship. I am included, am I not?

just as Geoffrey, I feel sure, is. You, too, must think of me as an old

friend, Mrs. Wynne. You must make use of me if there are any things you

want to do, any people you want to meet. You must let me help you in

your quest. I can hand on to you a good many of the toys that make a

London season enjoyable."

Felicia felt her old hostility rising; for the sake of a pathos she

surmised in Angela, she controlled it, asking, still lightly, as she

arranged her tea-cups, "What quest do you mean?"

"Why, the quest of youth and happiness--success in life. It is a pity

that it should be seen as a toy before the time comes for a sad seeing

of things. I always think of you as the lover of life personified,

always see you crowned with roses and walking under sunny skies."

Felicia, re-filling Geoffrey's cup and helping herself to a slice of

bread and butter, made no comment on this vision. But Geoffrey did not

let it pass. "What do you mean by life?" he asked.

Angela still seemed to muse. "Oh, in this instance, I don't mean life in

its sense of expansion through self-sacrifice, of self-achievement

through renunciation, but in the happy, finite sense, the illusion

through which we must rise to reality, the rose and sunlight sense, the

bread-and-butter sense, in fact," she added, raising her eyes to Felicia

and smiling.

"Why not _pâté de foie gras_ sandwiches?" asked Felicia; "they are even

happier. Do have one."

"Yes, the _pâté de foie gras_ sense, too. My first impression of you was

that--None for me, thanks. Do you remember, Geoffrey, we first saw Mrs.

Wynne eating sandwiches?--five, I think you made the number--and isn't

it right and fitting that she should have sandwiches and roses? I want

her to let me give her all I may."

Felicia now leaned back in her chair, folded her arms, and fixed on

Angela a look both firm and gay. "Why do you think such things of me?"

she asked.

"Things?--what things?" Angela's smile was neither firm nor gay. She

felt suddenly confronted, before a witness, too, and she remembered

Felicia's crude disposition for forcing issues just when one most

intended avoiding them. Geoffrey's cold, unvarying eye was upon her. It

was a married hostility she had before her, and, in the little moment of

confusion, she saw clearly her hatred of Maurice's wife. Yes, she was

again face to face with hate; but they pushed her to it; for she had

come as love personified, as a most magnanimous angel, and she had the

right to scorn both Maurice and his wife if Maurice's letter had spoken

the truth--if Felicia's love and Geoffrey's charity had forced him into

marriage. But had it spoken the truth? Had it? That question had beaten

in her brain for months. And the suspicion that Maurice, still talking

in his group at the other side of the room, avoided her, filled her with

an added bitterness which only an exaggeration of her outward self

enabled her to hide.

"What things?" she repeated, conscious that she seemed to blink before

something blinding.

"Horrid things!" Felicia decisively, though still gaily, answered.

"My dear child!" Angela breathed with a long sigh. "What have you been

thinking of _me_? What do _you_ mean?"

"I haven't set out on a quest for roses and sandwiches. I don't ask for

either. You don't really know me at all, so please don't talk about me

as if you did."

Her manner, that put the episode on a half-playful footing, completed

Angela's discomfiture. Unless she showed her hate, what should she say?

Flight was safer than possibility of shameful exposure. She rose to go,

murmuring, as she took Felicia's hand: "I am sorry--sorry. You have not

understood."

"It seemed to me that you did not."

Maurice was approaching them at last, and, the impulse of flight

arrested, Angela rejoined: "I am afraid that you hardly want me to

understand." Maurice was beside her; she could safely say it, sheltered

from rejoinder by his eagerness.

"You are not going, my dear Angela?" He took her hand, speaking very

quickly. "I haven't seen you. Do stay." Meeting his eyes where a shallow

sincerity seemed to glitter over depths he could not show, Angela

recovered herself and could again take up a weapon.

"I am afraid that I am not really wanted, my dear Maurice," she said,

standing between husband and wife, still holding Felicia's hand as he

held hers, smiling from one to the other, a brave, kind smile. "I am

afraid that I am a quite unnecessary fourth here. Our old trio has

another head. I had hoped that I might, as a friendly hangeron, not be

in the way; but I am. I feel that I am."

"Trio? Oh, you mean Geoffrey?" Maurice was perplexed, yet spoke with a

gallant lightness--the concealing glitter emphasized, while Geoffrey,

all placidity, queried--

"Was I ever one of a trio? That's news to me."

Angela turned her head to glance at him.

"So you will forsake me--even in the past? Well, I abdicate all claims."

"But we don't--we don't, my dear Angela! We don't abdicate our claims to

you. It's not a trio," said Maurice, "it's a circle--isn't it, Felicia?

Let us all join hands. Come in, Geoffrey."

"No, no," Angela softly echoed his laugh. "I will come again--and look

at you all. But indeed I abdicate all my tiny claims. Remember me, my

dear Mrs. Wynne, if I can ever be of any use." She pressed Felicia's

hand and turned away. Maurice went with her into the hall. Her wrap lay

there and he held it for her.

"You may trust me, Maurice, for ever," she whispered, as she slid into

it. She did not meet his glance of helpless confusion; but she knew that

all glitter had left him.

Driving away in her carriage, she leaned her head back in the corner,

where she shrank and burst into tears.

In the drawing-room the last people were going, Mrs. Cuthbert among

them. "I hear your father is coming to live with you, Felicia," she

said.

"Yes. It is too lonely for him now."

"He won't be able to let the house, I fear."

"For the present the house is to be shut up, and we may go down to it

for week-ends."

"It is always a rather dangerous experiment, you know, Felicia, a third

person between a young couple."

"We must risk it," Felicia laughed.

When, after this final grunt, her aunt had gone, she and Geoffrey were

alone.

He was standing at the window, and she joined him there and looked out

at the silver river with a slow russet sail upon it. The sense of peace

and confidence, felt on the day of their last meeting, was with her; but

it was more easy to speak with perfect openness since she need not speak

of themselves.

She repressed the impulsive "How she dislikes me!" that might seem to

claim his sympathy for her painful part in the recent little drama; she

need never claim his sympathy; and a curious sense of loyalty to Angela

made her substitute, "How I dislike her. You must know it, so I may as

well say it."

"That explains her unpleasantness, you think?" Geoffrey's voice was as

detached and impartial as if he were questioning the validity of a

dubious clause in a dubious bill.

"Yes, if she feels my dislike even when I try not to show it. Perhaps

she didn't mean to be unpleasant."

"Perhaps she didn't know that she meant it."

"But it's pitiful--if she thinks she has lost friends."

"Pretty brazen of Angela--that assumption."

"But aren't you rather cruel?" She tried to smile, but a glance at her

face showed him how hurt, how tossed by conjecture and regret she was.

Geoffrey did not speak his own crueller thought, a thought in which he

recognized a complacent vindictiveness--"She is furiously jealous of

you." Accepting her reproach he merely said, "Angela makes me cruel. I

enjoy showing her her own real meaning."

"That is indeed cruel--to enjoy it. I hate showing her, and yet I feel

forced to let her know what her meaning seems to me. But I'm more sorry

than I can say for it all--for her being in my life in any way. Yet she

is in it. She is the centre of Maurice's old life. Most of his friends

are hers, and she was his nearest friend--next to you. She blights

everything." Her voice had a tremor.

"That is tremendously exaggerating her importance. I shouldn't have

suspected you of such weakness. She doesn't really make you sad?"

"She does, rather."

"Only on her own account then--not on your own."

Felicia again recognized the acuteness in him that she had at first been

so blind to. Yet even to him she must pass in silence over Angela's

deepest pathos. "Oh, on my own, too," she said. "I am quite weak enough

for that." She added: "You always make me show my weakness. I seem to

find strength in showing it to you--your strength, I suppose."

"Do you? Thanks." Geoffrey looked at her. "You do remember, then, that

I'm always there?"

"Always." She looked back at him.

Nothing had changed between them since, in that long, still, strange

moment, he had kissed her good-bye.

The little silence that followed her "always," was unbroken when Maurice

entered. Maurice, since making automatic farewells to his last guests,

had stood perfectly still in the hall where Angela had left him, looking

down.

Her words, spoken before Geoffrey and Felicia, had impressed him but

lightly, unable as he was to grasp their context, in comparison with the

words she had said to him at the door--words how well left unspoken!

Their apparent magnanimity had been almost ignoble; he felt it, and the

recognition of ignobility in her roused in him a sudden tempest of fear

and self-reproach.

For, actually, during the last wonderful months, he had forgotten

Angela. Hardly had she done more than hover in his thoughts once or

twice, a memory at once pathetic and poisonous. It had always vanished,

like a dark alien bird, fading in the depths of a noonday sky. He was no

longer the hunted, unstable--yes, the base man who had written that

letter. He was Felicia's husband. He was in a new life, clear, fresh,

radiant, and the old one was a strange, soiled dream.

When Angela had entered the room it had been like seeing a ghost arise.

He had felt a throb almost of terror. The sweet and new actuality

enabled him to master it, to glance at the past and accept the fact that

he still was slightly linked to it, in Angela's consciousness if not in

his own. The acceptation enabled him to look at the link with more

equanimity. After all, Angela's very coming proved how such fruitless

episodes dropped away from people; she, too, accepted the comfortable,

everyday interpretation, that of a half-emotional trifling that had come

to nothing and was, by now, nothing to either of them. But all the same

he had, at first, found it really impossible to go and talk to her. He

had not seen her since that morning in the music-room, since he had seen

tears in her eyes and kissed her--it had not been then, with her at all

events, a half-emotional trifling. The realization, like a physical

sensation, still trembled, startled, under all his coerced confidence,

while he had talked and laughed. He had glanced constantly at Felicia

while he talked, Felicia sitting between Geoffrey and Angela; his

Felicia! A creature so free from any smudge. And he had smudged her--for

Angela's sake, and for his own. The cowardly letter was an eternal

barrier between him and Angela. And now her reassuring words fastened

his fear and self-disgust upon him. Not fear of Angela betraying him,

Angela was not base; besides, she could gain nothing by betraying him;

besides, the letter was destroyed: it was a vague ominous fear of

something indefinable and dangerous.

He stood in the little hall, and the thought of the last year's sunshine

almost smote tears to his eyes, looked back at from this sudden

blackness. He threw back his head and shoulders, seeming with the

physical gesture to shake it off, defined it as one of his moods, rose

defiantly above it, and, when in the drawing-room he joined his wife and

friend, came between them, putting a hand on the shoulder of each,

returning peace, a sense of protection and happy certitude, made him

take a long breath.

"How good this is!" he said.

They both smiled at him.

Dear, best old Geoffrey. He stepped perfectly into his place, neither

holding back from it nor making it over-significant. The thought of his

astonishing debt to Geoffrey brought no heartache; gratitude was for

Felicia as well as for himself, for Felicia, too, was so happy. To show

Geoffrey the happiness he had created was the only return he could make

him; to show it frankly could give no pain to such magnanimity. That the

magnanimity had its tragic element a soul quick to divine and sympathize

like Maurice's felt; but all he could do, now, was to keep his friend's

tragedy beautiful. And he vowed he would. Geoffrey should never regret,

for Felicia would never regret. There was almost a sob of thankfulness

in him as with this welling up again of strength and confidence he stood

between them, leaning on them, and looked out at the shining river.

CHAPTER II

Felicia did not regret; she accepted the fact of an achieved happiness

almost as unquestioningly as Maurice; but there had been for her a phase

of questioning and readjustment, a phase of acute loneliness when, with

stupefaction, she realized that she had married a man whom she hardly

knew.

It had been a strange, and for a time a disintegrating experience to see

on what slight bases she had built the fabric of her devotion--to see

that she had loved his love for her and that him she had hardly seen at

all. Afterwards, with a tender sanity and wisdom, she had pushed new

foundations under the edifice of their common life, new and stronger,

surer props, no longer relying upon her need of him but upon his of her.

She had the faculty for holding happiness, and, with something of the

serenity and strength of nature, for making it over again when the first

hold proved to be on something illusory. And, in this re-making, what

had seemed illusion became real, once more, with a deeper reality.

Understanding him, and loving him for himself, his love for her regained

its value. But from the readjustment to life a new sense of gravity, of

the risks one ran, had come to her. In looking back on her despair when

she had almost lost him, she saw the something passionate and reckless,

the quality of desperateness that must always make danger. Had Maurice

not proved loveable her own vehemence would have been the cause of

disaster, and since that fatal disaster was escaped, she felt herself

strong enough to face any others, to adjust herself to any painful

requirements of life.

The clear-sighted seeing of her husband had in it this element of pain.

It was as if in all the outer courts of life she had found indeed the

happiest companionship, but in the inmost temple a deeper loneliness, a

loneliness that now--and this was the secret of achievement--meant

strength and not weakness.

In all the tests of life he depended upon her, and his setting of his

clock by her time frightened her sometimes, lest that inner strength

should fail them both. She was the upholder; Maurice responded; he never

inspired. She had moments--and in them the loneliness was ghastly--of

seeing him as unsubstantial, elusive, almost parasitical in his charm;

but the charm itself, his clasping and exquisite response, was too near

and dear for these moments to be more than mere flashes. She brought

from them a maternal gentleness of tolerance, and her own joy in being

loved was still too deep for her to feel weariness. She had not yet

clearly seen, with all her understanding, that beyond this sunny domain

of his adoration she would always be alone.

A dissatisfaction that was hardly a pain was the purposelessness of

their lives; it was a life of appreciation merely, appreciation of

themselves, their friends, books, music, pictures.

"Darling, we have heaps and heaps of time for doing things; let's just

enjoy them now--while we are young and can. You don't want me to be a

County Councillor, do you? You don't want, yourself, to sit on

committees and be useful--like Angela, do you? There are such quantities

of useful people in the world."

Felicia had not suggested County Councils or committees, though she did

attack his laziness, for Maurice had never been more lazy.

The goad was gone--the goad of obvious and pressing need, and, as if on

a summer day of rowing, another hand had taken the sculls, he lay back

in the boat and looked happily, thankfully, at the sky and woods and

water.

"_I_ shall work, then," Felicia declared; "it's only fair that I should.

You have a right to lounge, but I, who have lounged all my life, must

prove to you that I meant what I said--do you remember?"

Their tiny income just sufficed. "If a pinch comes I'll set to," Maurice

affirmed. But Felicia said that she didn't need to be pinched; she

wanted to set to as a preventive to pinches. She was a good linguist and

she found some translating to do. Through Maurice's numerous literary

relations there was quite a nice little field of endeavour open to her,

and she persisted in ploughing it. Maurice laughed at the determination

with which she shut herself up every morning.

"You must wait for inspiration," she retorted; "but there is no reason

why this hack-work of mine shouldn't keep off a pinch for ever."

Adjustment to a constant and growing anxiety was necessary when her

father arrived for his long visit, a visit whose length, Maurice eagerly

insisted, must be indefinite. He saw that his insistence, generous as

she must feel it in a lover, gave pleasure to Felicia, and he pressed

Mr. Merrick for a promise of indefiniteness.

But Felicia felt at once that her father, as usual, jarred. She had no

need to explain her father to Maurice; understanding was Maurice's

strong point; very cheerfully he found her father a bore. Unfortunately,

though quick, Mr. Merrick could not be expected to grasp the

unflattering impression nor to suspect from Maurice's attitude of bright

acquiescence that Maurice found in acquiescence the easiest way of

getting rid of him. Mr. Merrick's dogmatic intolerance could only weary

or amuse a mind so fundamentally sceptical. Felicia realized that it was

for her sake that Maurice smiled and acquiesced, but she felt it, in

consequence, incumbent on her to be very exact in acquiescence, with the

really funny result that it was, at first, more and more upon Maurice

that Mr. Merrick counted. It was the knowledge that he counted upon an

unreality that made the anxiety, the pain, for Felicia. The little

tangles of silent misconceptions on one side, of discernments on the

other, drew constantly into knots, and Felicia found herself

contemplating such a knot with discomfort one day after a talk with her

father.

She went into Maurice's studio at the back of the flat, finding, in his

ease over a volume of French verse, an added cause for irritation.

"Maurice, have you encouraged papa to publish that article on

'Credulity'?" she asked.

"It is _vieux jeu_, you know," Maurice confessed, glad of the occasion

for frankness, and putting his arm around her as she stood beside his

deep chair.

"_Do_ I know?" said Felicia, smiling irrepressibly, though unwillingly,

as she met the limpid blue of his eyes.

"It is all true enough, as far as it goes," said Maurice, hardly

recognizing her vexation and wishing to be consolatory. "Sit down on the

arm of the chair, dear, and don't stand so still, so stiff, so

disapproving."

"All that is true in it has been said a hundred times; the rest is as

shallow, as trivial as possible."

She yielded to his pull and sat down on the chair-arm.

"He takes a very crude view of religion," Maurice owned. "One doesn't

approach it from that point of view nowadays; the whole ground of

contest has been shifted."

"Exactly. Why didn't you tell him so?"

"Tell him, dearest? Hurt him? How could I be so brutal? Wouldn't that

have hurt you?"

"Not so much as your encouraging him to do a thing that you know to be

foolish," said Felicia, looking over Maurice's head and feeling that

vexation could easily express itself in tears. With a quick change of

tone, looking up in sudden alarm at the eyes that had not met his, he

said: "You are displeased with me?"

Alarm was such a new note that Felicia's breast echoed it, transforming

it to instant compunction. Her eyes dropped to his.

"Have I been horrid? I think I was displeased."

"Please forgive me," said Maurice gently, a smile of relief answering

her smile and irradiating his face; "I thought you would like me to

please him, to encourage him; upon my word I did."

"I know. I know you did it for me. But I don't like you to do anything

that isn't absolutely----"

She hesitated, still smiling compunction upon him, and, still gently, as

if with a little humorousness for the trite virtue of the word, Maurice

supplied "True?"

"Well, yes; to yourself I mean. I mustn't be your standard. You must

have your own."

"Ah, you mustn't ask that of me. I loved you, you know, for what I

lacked."

"But I do ask it of you," said Felicia, and, leaning against his

shoulder, glad to have him look with her at the well-unravelled little

knot, she went on: "You see, in your kindness you aren't really fair to

him--nor to me either! He was quite cross with me just now when I tried

to dissuade him--quoted your opinion of the article. And he has sent it

to the magazine you recommended--oh, Maurice, I _was_ displeased!"

She put her cheek against his head. To confess her displeasure seemed to

efface its cause; especially when Maurice kissed her hand and repeated,

with touching surrender to her fastidiousness, "Please forgive me. I'll

never do it any more."

Perhaps, because of a certain individuality in its violence, the essay

on "Credulity" was accepted, and Mr. Merrick's assurance, which had been

rather pricked and ruffled since his arrival in London, was restored to

its unstable placidity.

Felicia was conscious of a consequent triumph in his manner towards

herself.

"The old sword isn't rusty yet," said Mr. Merrick; "it can still do

execution. I fancy it has lopped the heads off a few more falsehoods."

Felicia was silent; she understood that Maurice perforce must smile; and

with these necessary smiles, hostages to the past, went Maurice's new

endeavour "not to do it again," that by degrees revealed to Mr. Merrick

that Maurice, no more than Felicia, was to be counted upon.

Maurice's geniality deserted him one day when Mr. Merrick made an

assault upon the non-rational elements in the faith of a Roman Catholic

friend, and next morning Felicia, arranging some books in the studio,

heard in the adjacent dining-room her father's pugnacious tones: "The

fellow is merely an ass; I wonder you can tolerate him. I pinned him

with his winking virgin!"

"My dear father," Maurice's voice returned, and she wondered whether her

father felt to the full its cutting quality, "we are all of us asses to

one another, so that the one virtue we should strive for is tolerance. I

hope that in the future you will exercise it towards my guests and in my

house."

"Oh, very well; by all means," said Mr. Merrick, resentful, but

hesitating to express his full resentment. "I will merely vacate your

drawing-room on such occasions, since I am not apt at falsity." The

words were sunk in the large rustling of his newspaper.

"I should, if I were you, merely avoid taking a bludgeon to other

people's beliefs; it's not a seemly thing--a bludgeon in a

drawing-room."

Maurice, when Felicia entered, was cheerfully pouring his coffee after

the cheerful remark, though there was in his eyes as he looked up at

her, and then at Mr. Merrick, flushed and silent behind his newspaper, a

touch of anxiety.

"Did you hear, darling?" he asked her, when, after breakfast, they were

alone.

"Yes. I am so sorry. You will be patient, Maurice. He has got the habit

of bludgeoning--he thinks it right."

"Patient, my sweetheart! Did I seem impatient? It was really for his

sake I spoke. He gets himself so misjudged."

"Yes, yes. It was right of you to speak."

"Only I did not intend you to hear."

"Why not? You must always intend me to hear anything you say." She

smiled at him, really happier in this more accurately seen situation

than she had been for some time. It was easy to bear with slight

discords if their own harmony were perfect.

But in consequence Mr. Merrick assumed his manner of the sulky child,

and Felicia felt her husband's eye upon her as, in all his encounters

with his father-in-law, he adjusted his attitude to what he imagined she

desired of him.

CHAPTER III

"What ages it is, Maurice, since we have really talked together!" said

Angela. Maurice, indeed, had avoided meetings all the spring, and

Felicia's unexpressed reluctance had made much adroitness in evasion

unnecessary. His world was drifting away from Angela's world, and in the

consequent shrinking he perhaps recognized how large a background she

had put into his life; but a background with Angela standing out upon it

was well lost; Maurice did not regret it.

But they had met at last, and he had taken her down to dinner, and she

sat beside him now, her long eyes, steady, enigmatical, upon him, her

mouth, stiffened a little with its smile; her white garments, as usual,

seeming to slide away from her thin, white shoulders. That the shoulders

were very thin, Maurice noticed, and then, on looking into her face,

that it was almost haggard. The hint of delicate wrinklings was upon it,

like a pool of wintry water when some desolate wind breathes over its

first thin veil of ice.

For really the first time since he had put her out of his life with the

letter, a swift, poignant pity went through him, followed by an eager

clutch at the hope that pity, by now, was pure impertinence. And the

letter, with all the sacrifices that it had made to her, had given him

the right to put her out of his life. Following the short ease of the

hope that she had ceased to love him was the thought that she might

still believe that he loved her. With an ugly vividness some phrases of

the letter flashed into his mind, and suddenly, under her steady eyes,

he felt himself growing hot.

"No," he said, beginning to eat his soup, "we have both been busy,

haven't we?"

"Have you, Maurice?" Angela also bent her head to a delicately raised

spoon--eating seemed always a graceful concession in her, a charitable

keeping in countenance of the grosser needs of others. "I haven't seen

the great picture or the great book yet."

Though feeling that indolence in artistic production was not to be

struggled against, the fact, freshly remembered, that Angela knew how

that indolence had been made facile, gave Maurice a hotter sense of

burning cheeks. "Not as I should have been," he confessed. His confusion

was so apparent to himself that after a slight pause it seemed only

natural to hear Angela say, in a low, unemphatic voice, as she played

with her fork, "Do you mind this--so much? Don't on my account. I am

completely seared, Maurice."

And as he could find no answer: "We must meet, you know. Can't you

pretend calm, as I do?"

She had not accepted then the way of escape; the way of escape would

have meant a miserable crouching. She would never pretend that it had

been a trifling. She had loved him, and she would crouch to no

pretence. She took for granted the bond of a mutual understanding

between them.

"You make me feel like a felon," Maurice murmured.

"It must be, then, some wrong in yourself to make you feel that," Angela

returned quietly; "the retaliating attitude is not mine, Maurice." Then,

as the talk about them cloaked them less, "What have you and Mrs. Wynne

been doing lately? I have been so sorry to have seen so little of

her--so sorry that you could never come when I asked you. I have asked

you twice this spring, you know. She is prettier than ever"--Angela

leaned forward to look down the table--"and so Geoffrey evidently finds

her. Is Geoffrey more fortunate than I? Does he see much of her?"

Though knowing Angela well, Maurice was not capable of suspecting her of

treacherous little hints and warnings. "Not much," he answered; "he

drops in to tea now and then. He really is busy, you know," Maurice

added, "so we are not very fortunate in seeing him often, either."

"Geoffrey, without knowing it, is becoming more anxious for place than

for power," said Angela, "and not only as a means to power but as an end

in itself. It would be a rather black outlook for him, wouldn't it, if

the Government were to go out? I suppose he could fall back on the Bar."

She spoke with a musing vagueness. Maurice was not looking at her, and

her eyes were on his charming profile, on the quick colour that flamed

again in his cheek. She suspected herself now of cruelty, knowing that

her love sought ease in cruelty. His dear, enchanting profile! She

looked at it with a turn of her sick heart, even while speaking the

cruel, vague words.

"Dear Maurice!" she murmured, "I didn't mean that! Indeed, I forgot for

a moment why office must be so important to him. There need be no pain

in it for you--beyond the blundering frankness of my reference to what

you let me know;--I can't get over that habit of frankness with you. But

Geoffrey chose to so shackle his career."

"He knows," Maurice stammered, "that if he were to feel a shackle I

would abandon----."

"Ah, but would you?" said Angela as he paused. "Though that is why, for

your sake, more than his--I know your sensitiveness--that is why, dear

friend, I had hoped that this year would be for you an incentive to

energy rather than lethargy. You are more shackled than he is--I want to

see you free. I wish--I wish," she smiled with quite her old sweet

lightness now, "you would let me try to help you. Can I inspire no

longer?"

But Maurice could feel no sweetness, or, if sweetness there were, it was

to him poisonous. Had he, indeed, opened himself to this? He could find

no words.

"Dear Maurice, how you distrust me," she murmured, "how you forget that

such a friend as I know myself to be takes it too much for granted,

perhaps, that she has all her old rights; the right to be true; the

right to help. Forgive me, I have hurt you, I see. I couldn't hurt you

if you trusted me. Is Mr. Merrick, here, too? Ah, yes, I see. I read

to-day his article on 'Credulity.'"

In the turmoil of his feeling, helpless astonishment, distrust indeed,

yet a self-reproachful pity pervading it, Maurice almost gasped with

relief at the change of topic. She was speaking on normal levels where

he could breathe; she was smiling kindly, no longer with that

over-significant sweetness that stung and bewildered, and with a

comprehension of his pain, she had turned from it.

"Isn't it appalling!" he laughed--he would have laughed at anything said

in that normal voice--"it's unfortunate weakness of his, that beating of

dead lions, to which Felicia and I have to yield." Angela also laughed.

"My dear Maurice! I see it all. It is rather pretty. There's a pathos in

it, so far as you and she are concerned."

"Of course, we were done with all that crude naturalism in the

eighties," Maurice said. "I am afraid Felicia and I find the

grotesqueness of his attack painful rather than pretty or pathetic;" and

with the relieved sense of respite, of free breathing, he humorously

enlarged upon this grotesque side of the situation.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the table, Geoffrey and Felicia talked

with their sense of peaceful confidence. That she made the music of his

life, the sad yet stirring music, she could but know: how much she was

its object she had not guessed. But the time seemed far away when she

had seen his object as a rather pompous ambition, symbolized in her

roguish imagination by a statesman statue with roll of papers in hand,

and commanding brow, set high and overlooking conquered territory.

She had become rather indifferent to his objects, the man himself was so

staunch, so living, so moving onward.

They talked now of slightest things, the slightness proving how far

intimacy had travelled, comparing childish memories. It was pretty to

glance down these innocent vistas in each other's lives. Felicia told of

the day when she had locked herself in the attic, intending to starve

herself to death, in passionate resentment at some fancied wrong, and of

how, unable to turn the key again when her fear overcame her longing for

vengeance, too proud, in spite of fear to call for rescue, she had

remained there through a night of lonely horror.

Geoffrey's reminiscences of naughtiness were more staid. He had never

been very passionate or resentful. "I was a conceited little beggar and

always kept cool." At a very early age, after a whipping from his

mother, he had looked up at her, laughed and said, "Do you want to go

on?" "I knew nothing would make her angrier: I must have been an

exceedingly disagreeable child."

Both Maurice and Angela, during pauses in the dinner-table talk, were

conscious of this happy rivulet, Maurice listening and finding some of

its peace, until, seeing that Angela also listened, his peace was jarred

upon.

After dinner, in the drawing-room, Geoffrey again joined Felicia, and

Maurice, making his way half automatically to Angela, who sat turning

pages in a corner, felt a sharper pang of shame. That Angela should know

Geoffrey's secret was, in some inexplicable way, a baleful fact. He was

conscious of a wish to ward off balefulness as he sat down beside her,

and an impulse better than the merely self-protecting desire brought

sudden, sincere words to his lips. "Angela, you have really forgiven me,

haven't you?" he said. If she had really forgiven him he was safe,

Felicia and Geoffrey were safe; Angela herself was freed of that baleful

aura which his own sick conscience cast around her. She had put away her

book. The light was dim and her face in shadow. He could not see the

expression upon it as she sat silent for some moments, her hands

turning, mechanically and quickly, the fan upon her knee; suddenly they

were quiet and she said: "I have forgiven you--if what you said was

true."

"True? How could it not be?" Maurice stammered, conscious at once that

his impulse had been unwise.

"It could not be if you loved her most." He was silent, struggling with

his thoughts.

"You love her most--now," Angela said with a distant, a tragic touch of

questioning.

"She is--my wife."

"And therefore you love her most: for the past--loyalty to your wife

must seal your lips. If it were so! Yet it is hard--hard to forgive,

Maurice, not the pain, not the bewildered pain, but the crippling of my

life, the blotting out--for a time--of my heaven. And how could I

forgive if you robbed me of even my right to a memory? Of even my dead

joy?"

"But--I told you--that I was unworthy--that I was undependable; that I

couldn't depend on my own feeling----" Maurice stammered on.

"You tried to help me so," said Angela quickly, "and it was that that I

could not forgive--your smirching of it all; but you told me, too, to

read between the lines. I did; I believed what I read there."

Even there she had only read that he loved her; not that he loved her

most. There was the intolerable, the unforgiveable. She rose, feeling

that she must leave him or burst into sobs. "I understand," she said.

"You must, for her sake, be loyal to the past. I won't ask further. Now

I will go and talk to her." She went across the room to Geoffrey and

Felicia, leaving Maurice in a miserable perplexity.

Should he have been bravely brutal? Told her that the first truth, of

past and present, was his love for Felicia? Yet the minor truth was

there--the truth Angela clung to as her right--that he had loved her,

too, if only for the moment; could he, in the name of the larger truth,

rob her of it? He was not able clearly to see what he most wished or

regretted--that he might never see Angela again, that he had ever seen

her, were perhaps the clearest wish and regret.

Angela sank into a seat beside Felicia. She had still that sense of a

strangled sob in her throat. A spiteful little comment floated,

strawlike, upon the passionate sea of her thoughts; she grasped it,

repeating to herself, "Cheap, alluring little creature." It helped her

to evade the sob and to bear the contemplation of Felicia's beauty. Oh,

yes, she had a certain beauty, a creamy childishness, the obvious charm

of soft white and cloudy ambers that had brought Geoffrey to her and won

her husband's shallow heart to constancy. Creaminess, childishness,

cheapness would always count for most in this strange world of irony and

pain.

"At last I can escape to you," she said. "You have been so surrounded

all the evening, and Maurice and I have been reminiscing; I can never,

it seems, find you quite alone"--she smiled at Geoffrey--"but Geoffrey

hardly counts, does he? Isn't it odd--have you noticed it--that I have

hardly spoken with you except before Geoffrey, and perhaps, with me,

Geoffrey does count--a little uncomfortably? I seem to arouse all his

cynicism, and it's difficult to be quite oneself in the face of even a

friendly cynicism. I always fancy that we could really get at one

another, Mrs. Wynne, if we could achieve a _tête-à-tête_."

"How selfish, my dear Angela." Geoffrey, stretching his long legs in a

low chair, did not even offer to accept the open hint. "You don't get

rid of me like that. I refuse to miss you."

"Isn't that a palpable evasion?" Angela turned her smile from him; "we

must play Pyramus and Thisbe to his determined wall. Only please make

allowances for acoustic disturbances; a voice heard through a wall may

be misinterpreted."

Felicia, ready to be amused and to make things easy, laughed at the

wall's stubborn presence. "I can't urge him to miss you. If he is

cynical we will simply leave him--_planté là_. He is more the schoolboy,

though, than the cynic."

"You find the kindest interpreter, Geoffrey. Well, as a schoolboy then,

don't let him pull off my legs and wings for love of mischief. What have

you been doing all this time?"

"Simply jogging on," said Felicia, finding in Angela's application of

her simile a certain justice. There was, indeed, in Geoffrey's

ruthlessness an element of cruel glee.

"Maurice tells me that he has been lazy. You must whip him up; you must

spur him; it's fatal to Maurice to be allowed to jog. He must race

neck-to-neck with some incentive or he soon falls to mere grazing. He is

the racer type. But your father hasn't been jogging," Angela continued,

telling herself before Felicia's not very responsive look that she must

try some other interest--any allusion to Maurice would rouse the

hostility of this jealous little wife. "What a gallop, indeed, his

article on 'Credulity'!--Maurice and I have been talking about it."

Felicia's eyes turned on her father, who was standing in isolation and

assumed indifference before the fire-place. She felt, in seeing him,

that familiar throb of indignant pity. No one could realize more acutely

than she the qualities in him that made for unpopularity; but it was his

ineffectiveness more than his vanity, his lack of power more than his

assumption of it, that made the world fall away from him. Her judgement

of her father always passed, with a swift self-condemnation, into a

judgement of human unkindness. She brought her eyes back to Angela, her

good temper chilled; there was sudden hardness in her look as she said:

"Have you?"

"Yes,"--Angela smiled tender comprehension upon her--"I do understand.

Only I don't feel quite as you and Maurice do about it. I don't feel it

either so grotesque or so painful. I like the combativeness of it, the

way he hurls himself at windmills. You take it too seriously. It's a

thing to smile over, not a thing to be distressed about."

Felicia's stare had become frozen, and before it she faltered, suddenly

and gently.

"As an old friend of Maurice's--as a friend of yours--you allow me to

understand--and be sorry for the pain, don't you?"

Felicia had risen, an instinctive recoil from something snake-like.

"No, I don't allow any pity that divides me from my father," she said.

"You misunderstand my husband--and the privileges of your friendship for

him."

She had not known what her intention was in rising; but now, looking at

her father, she turned and went across the room to him.

Angela watched her in silence. With an effort she brought her eyes back

to Geoffrey, who, still stretched out in his chair, met them with a

sardonic smile. She felt as if Felicia had put a gash across her face

and as if he were pitilessly jibing at it. Her hand, again turning her

fan, trembled as she said, "Mrs. Wynne has a talent for _coups de

théâtre_."

"And you for carrying daggers up your sleeve, Angela. I perceive that

walls might be useful."

"You are blinded, I know, to her cruelty. It is she who uses daggers. My

sympathy was real--a sympathy that any friend might have expressed--I

supposed, of course, that she felt with her husband. Her bitter

misconception of me distorts every effort I make to touch her." The

pathos and nobility of her words seemed to Angela her own nobility and

pathos. Her eyes filled with sincerest tears.

"Dropping dramatic metaphors, Angela, I certainly think that since you

can't speak to Mrs. Wynne without making yourself highly disagreeable,

you'd better give up trying to speak at all."

Geoffrey rose. With something of the cheerful and inflexible mien of an

Apollo, turning, bow-in-hand, from the slaughtered children of Niobe, he

walked away.

CHAPTER IV

"WHAT did you and Angela have to say to one another?" Maurice asked. He

and Felicia were driving down the polished sweep of Piccadilly alone,

for Mr. Merrick disliked crowded hansoms, and the long silence had been

unbroken. Leaning back in her corner, her cloak folded tightly around

her, Felicia had gazed blankly at the powdery blue of the sky, the

thickly sprinkled lights beneath it, her heart a chamber of angry

misery. Maurice's question, its light curiosity like the aimless

fumbling of a key, suddenly unlocked and threw open the door.

"Maurice--Maurice," she said under her breath, yet it was like a cry,

"why did you talk to her about papa's essay?" Maurice's curiosity, had

been a little less aimless than its lightness implied, but he felt now

as if she had fired a pistol at his head.

"What did she say?" he asked quickly and sharply, revealing his fear.

"She said that she was sorry for us, and understood it--that you had

told her we disliked the article."

"We did--you know," said Maurice after a moment, and, as he saw the

pale oval of his wife's face turn upon him: "She spoke of it; I didn't

think of concealing what we felt. I can't think that she meant to be

impertinent." It struck him, even now, as odd that he should be

venturing an excuse for Angela at the moment that his thoughts were

assailing her with a passionate vindictiveness.

"Maurice, Maurice," Felicia repeated, in a voice empty now even of

reproach. It was a deep, a weary astonishment.

"Dearest, don't misjudge me; don't make a mountain out of a mole-hill.

You know how one slips into such things." He leaned forward on the apron

of the cab to look his insistent supplication into her eyes, but hers

refused to meet them. "And she is an old--old friend, my precious

Felicia; one can't mistrust one's friends. It seemed perfectly natural

to talk it over."

"Oh, Maurice, how miserable you have made me!" They were in the smaller

streets nearing Chelsea, and she covered her face with her hands. In an

agony of remorse he put an arm around her shoulders, beginning now to

see his culpability with her eyes, exaggerating it with his magnified

imagination of her contempt. He--who had encouraged his father-in-law to

publish the wretched thing--he to jest about it with a woman whom he

fundamentally distrusted! He could find no further words. They reached

the house in silence. Mr. Merrick, who had arrived just before them, was

inclined to talk, but, kissing him good-night with a certain vehemence,

Felicia went at once to her own room and after a few moments Maurice

followed her.

She had already taken off her dress, and, in a white dressing-gown, was

hastily unpinning her wreath of hair. Maurice, in the mirror, met the

deep look of her eyes. His face was pallid as he stood hesitatingly near

the door, not guessing that anger was already gone and that the anguish

at her heart was dread of loss of love for him, dread of some

insurmountable barrier--would treacherous weakness be such a

barrier?--coming between them. Now she turned, and seeing him standing

there, white, not daring to supplicate, she stretched out her arms to

him. He sprang to her.

"Oh, Maurice, don't--don't--don't," she stammered incoherently, not

clearly knowing what she wished him not to do. She dropped her face upon

his shoulder. "Don't let me ever--not love you. Hold me always."

"Felicia, you almost kill me."

His pallor, indeed, as she looked at him, shocked her. In the sudden

realization of the torture he had suffered the thought of its cause grew

dim and even trivial. What barrier could ever come between such a need,

such love, and her?

"My poor Maurice, how unjust I have been. How hasty, how cruel. I do

understand. With her one can't be straight. She led, you followed; how

could you not? How could any one dear and trusting evade her? I do see

it all. You are not to blame. Oh, Maurice, how pale you are!"

She sank into a chair, her arms around him, and he knelt beside her,

leaning like a little child his head upon her breast.

"It is one of my horrors," he said. "For a moment I saw myself as you

might see me. For a moment I thought I might lose you."

"Darling Maurice--never, never. I hated her so--that blinded me. I hate

so to think that she was ever near you--has any claim. Perhaps it is

almost a mean jealousy. Forgive me. Kiss me. Let us laugh at it."

In his mind a thought, almost an inarticulate sob of terror and longing,

rose--rose and shook him. "Tell her now, tell her all." Terror quenched

longing. How explain? How seem anything to her but unutterably base? He

could never show her that craven spectre of the past. The real self that

clung to her could not risk losing her. He could not smile. He kissed

her, his eyes still closed, saying, "Don't take your arms away until the

horror is quite passed."

CHAPTER V

The spring and summer were over and autumn already growing bleak when

Geoffrey one afternoon drove to Chelsea. He drove there often, on his

free Wednesdays and Saturdays, since the Wynnes, after their round of

country visits, had returned to London, usually finding Felicia alone,

for Maurice was really working at a portrait, and Mr. Merrick spent most

of his time at his club, watching life from its windows with an ironic

eye. At tea-time Maurice would appear, tired yet merry, from the studio;

friends came in, the quiet shining hour broke into sparkling facets; but

the hours alone with her were personal possessions to Geoffrey, jewels

that strung themselves in a rosary through his weeks and months. They

talked, or Felicia played to him, declaring that his taste for music

grew; they often sat silent, she sewing and he watching her. The

thickets had been thorny of late, he had discovered that a curtailed and

uncertain income could make life curiously nagging and difficult, but

from these brambles it was comforting to look at the atoning cause of

them. The hours with her so justified his first groping simile of the

sunny opening among trees, grass, clouds and sky. His confidence in her

happiness irradiated his own problems.

This afternoon the confidence received a little shock. He came late,

after tea-time, and walking before the maid into the drawing-room had

time, before Felicia saw him, to grasp the disturbing significance of

her attitude. She was sitting alone near the window, her elbows on her

knees, her face in her hands. For a moment he thought that she was

crying, and, like a pang, the memory of sunlight among young birches,

snowdrops, a distant bird-song, went through him.

Felicia, however, was not crying; and as she looked round at him, he saw

that the attitude might have been one of merely momentary weariness.

"I was almost asleep," she said.

Taking up a bit of sewing she began to talk about the political

prospects. "I hear that you are not altogether in sympathy with the

Government," she said.

"I'm not--not altogether."

"I even hear that you may resign."

"Perhaps I would," said Geoffrey, leaning back and smoothing his hand

over his hair, "if I could afford it. I serve my own purposes better by

remaining in office."

"Do you mean that you can't afford--financially--to risk failure?"

Felicia asked. "I never associated you with compromise."

"It's not my own failure, but the failure of the policy I believe in

that I might risk by refusing to compromise. One fights for one's cause

in politics with all sorts of weapons. As for personal failure, I may

not be put to too stringent a test; I may make enough money to float me

to absolute independence. Did you know that I was a ferocious

gambler--and not only on the Stock Exchange, but with cards?"

The placidity with which he showed her his faults always amused Felicia,

even when she could not share it. He made no effort to win good

opinion--not even hers.

"I have heard, and to tell you the truth I am sorry about the cards."

"Why?"

"I don't like the idea of a pastime becoming so significant. To say the

least of it--it's not fitting."

"Well," said Geoffrey, laughing, "I won't do it any more. You are quite

right."

"Oh, not on account of what I say, please," she protested, slightly

flushing; "you must judge for yourself."

"So I do. I have judged. You may be sure I would never yield anything I

believed in--even to please you. I have always disliked the significance

cards might come to assume, so I yield, and gladly, since it does please

you."

"That is a relief. I could not bear to be a standard. And I can't

believe," she added, "that your winnings at cards can have any

significance for your career."

"Ah, any stick counts in the raft that keeps one floated. But as for my

career, if I've an object, you mustn't think it a career. I don't

bother much about my career. I'm a converted character, you see."

"Converted! You? From what and to what?"

Felicia's face, on its background of sky and river, turned on him the

look he loved--fond and mocking. He returned it, smiling, but gravely.

"It is quite true. It's not that I care less for my ambitions, but

differently. My goal has shifted, and everything is at once more simple

and more complex; the aims are bigger and far simpler; the fight is

bigger, too, but more complex than when the fight was personal. I

shouldn't mind failure, really, or beginning over again. You converted

me, you see."

"I?" said Felicia, with more sadness than surprise.

"Yes, you. Your courage, your sincerity, your faith, that wasn't the

least blind but counted the costs and took the risk every time. Oh,

don't protest; indeed, I hardly know how or why I felt it of you; merely

my whole interpretation of things began to twirl on another axis. The

idealistic philosophies of my college days came back to me--with all

sorts of personal meanings in them. I began to trust life and its

significance, since I trusted you so utterly."

"You almost terrify me," said Felicia; "would the world turn round the

other way again if I proved horrid?"

"Oh, no, that is done with. If you proved horrid I would suffer, but the

world would continue to turn in the right direction--despite your

wrongness."

"Ah, that's a real conversion then." Felicia rose, laying down her work.

She was touched, near tears. Standing beside him and looking down at him

she said, "Shall I play to you?"

"Do," said Geoffrey, but taking her hand he held it for a moment, adding

quietly, in almost a matter-of-fact voice, "Dear."

He had let go her hand as quietly when Angela was ushered in.

Angela and Felicia had not met since that night of the past spring, and

the parting then made future meetings improbable.

Felicia had put Angela and Angela's meaning behind her, and had not

doubted that Angela would acquiesce in mutual forgetfulness. It was

astonishing and very disconcerting to see again this spectre rise, and

rise, as always it seemed, in Geoffrey's presence.

She advanced into the room, smiling vaguely--vaguely hesitating, an

intentness under the hesitation.

Felicia still stood beside Geoffrey, and before he, too, rose, and faced

the unwelcome guest, their attitude almost implied the clasp of hands

that Angela had not seen.

Her eyes fluttered quickly from one to the other and then fixed in a

long gaze on Felicia.

"Dear Mrs. Wynne, I wanted to see you alone," she said.

Geoffrey, at this, turning his back, strolled to the window.

Angela's purpose swiftly put him aside, would not linger; "I won't

wrangle with Geoffrey; besides, he really makes no difference," she

said. "For such a long time I have wanted to see you--ever since that

night--but you have been away, and so have I. I have been wretched about

that night. I could not bear to think that you misunderstood me so

cruelly. I have come to beg you to forgive me. It was presumptuous of me

to think for a moment that you would care for what I thought or felt, or

that my sympathy could be anything but indifferent to you. It was only a

blunder. I did not realize that you disliked me so much."

Felicia's amazement struggled between a dim belief and a vivid

disbelief. The uppermost feeling came out, but in a dismayed voice, for

that half-belief plucked at her--"I think that you have always disliked

me--really I do."

"I have longed to love you!" cried Angela; "longed to love you--if you

would let me;" and, as she heard the intolerable beauty of these words,

she burst into tears.

Felicia turned her eyes on Geoffrey; his back to the window, he leaned

on the window-sill, folding his arms. Stupefied, Felicia's eyes

questioned him, "Shall I believe her? Shall I put my arms around her?"

It was her impulse, the quick response of her tenderness to suffering.

But under the impulse something strong held her back, something that

made it a false one, partaking of the falseness that aroused it; and

Geoffrey's sombre look at her seconded the distrust. She stood silent

and helpless.

Angela uncovered her eyes. "Don't you believe me?" she asked.

"I will try to," Felicia stammered, "if you will give me time--help me

to----"

"You are very pitiless," said Angela in a voice that had caught back its

full self-control. "Very hard and pitiless."

"What can I do? I cannot trust your affection; really I cannot. That is

the truth."

"It is that that is hard and pitiless--to think of one's truth more than

of another's pain."

"You always say the right thing," Felicia answered gravely; she could

but recognize the other's seeming right; there was no irony in the

words.

"I have come to you with love," said Angela, controlling an anger that

made her voice tremble slightly, "and you have rejected me. I have given

you my best. But sincerity and love shrivel before such cruel scepticism

as yours. I am sad, sad for you, because to the sceptic all life must

turn to ashes. You are the spirit that denies: I don't distrust my own

flowers because when you look at them they die. I am sorry for you. You

live in a world where I cannot breathe. Good-bye."

She had turned away, thrilling with her spiritual splendour. From

apparent failure she sprang to triumph. And, with a final flashing

vision of a Pilgrim's Chorus marching past Venusburg to a kingdom of the

sky, she added, resting eyes of saintly solemnity on her antagonist:

"God bless you."

She was gone; and not moving, not looking at Geoffrey, Felicia said, "I

have been horrible. I could not help it."

"You are all right," said Geoffrey, coming from the window, "you seemed

pretty horrible, and that gave her one of the best times of her life.

You positively buckled the wings on her shoulders. But she knows you're

right, and she won't forgive you for it, either."

"To have a person who hates you say 'God bless you'--it frightens me."

"Nonsense. It was an ugly missile, I own; but it's the worst she can shy

at you. Now come and play for me," said Geoffrey.

CHAPTER VI

Angela walked away breathing quickly. Her exaltation still floated her

above her anger, but through the anger and through the exaltation a deep

sense of injury and humiliation rose again and again, bringing tears to

her eyes. And under what circumstances had Felicia rejected her

outstretched hand, striking down its patient pitifulness? The suspicions

of her first entrance into the room gathered around her, cloaked her

warmly; there was a shiver in that sense of humiliation. Exaltation,

too, was a cold thing if one suspected that others did not see one as

exalted. Angela hardly knew that the hot currents of feeling that poured

through her heart were those of hatred.

And hardly had she walked five minutes than she met Mr. Merrick,

strolling in all his handsome dignity down the street.

There was no project in Angela; only the blind instinct to seize him, to

use him; a weapon, perhaps an avenging weapon.

A fire was blazing in her, and by its glare through darkness she saw

only fitfully her own desires. She held out her hand with a quick smile.

"Dear Mr. Merrick, I had hoped to see you to-day. Will you walk back

with me a little?"

She realized that Mr. Merrick's slight knowledge of her could not be a

very friendly one, but she guessed him to be susceptible to atonement.

Firmly and quickly she went on, "I have always wanted to talk to you and

always missed the chance. We disagree, I think, about many things--and

disagreement always attracts me. I long at once to get the larger sight,

to test my truths by other's truths. I so respect honesty, conviction,

talent, even when used for purposes that oppose my own."

Mr. Merrick, feeling a deep surprise and, perhaps, a touch of suspicion,

bowed gravely and turned to walk beside her.

"I have so wanted to ask you about your life, about the steps of thought

that have led you to your present position; for you must recognize that

it is a position--and that to have achieved it implies responsibilities."

Still with large gravity Mr. Merrick inclined his head, finding no ready

words in answer to such comprehensive interest.

Angela was not wanting in humour, and a malicious thought of _Maître

Corbeau, sur un arbre perchê_, flashed through her mind. He evidently

accepted her implied homage as a making of amends fully due to his

distinction.

"I have tried so often to really know you," Angela said, smiling

plaintively, though lightly; "especially since reading your essay on

'Credulity' last spring. But I can never find you."

"Ah, yet I am often at home at this hour."

The touch of surprised suspicion was gone; Mr. Merrick spoke with

benignity.

"Ah, but it's difficult, you see." Angela's smile gained at once in

gaiety and plaintiveness. "I had so hoped to see more of you all; I

hoped when your daughter came to London that as an old friend of her

husband's--he is like a brother to me--was, I perhaps should say--she

would let me be her friend too. London is a big, ugly place for a fresh

young creature. I know it so well. I should have liked to hold her hand

as it were, while she made her first steps in the muddy, slippery

world."

Mr. Merrick looked now a trifle perplexed, and Angela felt that she had

gone a little too fast as he said, "I have been with Felicia from almost

the beginning of her London life; and since I fancy that I know the

world better than any young woman can know it"--he inclined himself to

Angela with a slight, paternal irony of manner--"she has had her hand

held. I have watched over my young nestlings," Mr. Merrick added,

smiling kindly upon her.

"Yes, yes," she hurried to say, "a man knows more, of course--can guard

from anything obvious; but the things to be guarded against in our

complex modern life are not the obvious things; they are breaths,

whispers, vague touches in the dark. Dear Mr. Merrick,"--her gentle look

had now its rallying touch of boldness--"men do not hear or feel the

things I mean. And, again, you are a man of the world, but your daughter

is not a woman of the world. I know what you have wished for her--to

keep your rose-bud sheltered, the dew still upon it; so often the ideal

of the father when he has seen life in all its dangerous reality. You

have succeeded; she is a rose-bud with the dew on it. Dear Mr. Merrick,

keep it dewy." Her smile straight into his eyes was grave, steady.

Maître Corbeau was flattered by her words, her look. The vague

self-distrust that often fluttered in him, that fear of perhaps lacking

what she so delightfully saw in him, was still. He had hardly grasped

the significance of her allusions.

"You see," Angela went on quietly,--she was by now quite sincerely in

the very frame of mind her words fitted, warning, protective, benignant,

exalted in his eyes so that the mood of that final "God bless you" was

with her again, a mist that shut out flames,--"You see, your daughter is

younger than I am. In one sense--it may sound odd, but I am very

clear-sighted in all matters of sympathy--in one sense I doubt whether

she could understand you as I do."

Angela's voice was as mild and smooth as milk and honey as she glided to

another turn of her labyrinth. "There is an inevitable narrowness,

intolerance, in youth; something cruel in the clearness of young minds,

unable to see beyond their own acuteness. It didn't surprise me that

neither she nor Maurice appreciated your essay. I disagreed with it, but

I saw the bigness of my opponent, saw all the thought and life and

suffering that underlay every sentence; and when I realized that they

saw only the little superficial things, that they laughed at the shrubs

and thickets and didn't even look up at the mountain, I felt all the

strange situation, all the pain it must be to you; felt, forgive me if I

say too much, your loneliness."

Mr. Merrick was amazed, perhaps more amazed by this revelation of some

unkind disloyalty in his children, than gratified by Angela's sympathy.

But though he could feel little gratitude he felt no distrust; and his

injuries suddenly lowered, even larger than he had fancied. Maurice too!

There was treachery then as well as disloyalty. The sudden grievance

could not be kept down.

"I am surprised at Maurice. He urged me to publish, seemed to see

nothing but the mountain," he said.

Angela felt a hasty recoil from this false step; she had imagined the

dissuasions both Felicia's and Maurice's.

"Oh, about Maurice I don't know," she said quickly; "it was in my talk

with her about it that I saw her dislike--and only inferred his." She

felt that she had dogged all sorts of funny, half-hidden little

dangers--Maurice's aroused enmity was the plainest of them--and what was

she racing towards? what her object? She could not see. Felicia took all

from her, would share not a jot or tittle of her rich possessions; well

then, she would keep what came. Besides, Felicia was in peril. Yes,

there was the object. She heaved a sigh as it emerged once more before

her.

Mr. Merrick, after a silence not without its dignity, forbearing

further comment on the revelation, went on: "Yes, loneliness is the lot

of age. Youth is narrow. I don't complain; one can't when one

understands. Before her marriage Felicia was my complaisant little echo.

I filled her mind with all it owns. Now other interests have pushed me

out."

The object, the beneficent object, was now so clear, that the dubious

meaning of that sudden dodge was comfortably obscured; with one's eye on

a beacon one could no longer glance at these wayside mishaps. She had a

look of quiet homage for his generosity, as she said, "As to interests

that push you out I hardly care for one. Your daughter's feeling about

your essay could hardly have been spontaneous in your complaisant echo;

it's the rarest women, the strongest only, who do not echo some one; I

imagined that in this case she echoed her husband, but I see the larger

influence. My Cousin Geoffrey was with your daughter when I came this

afternoon. I hoped to see her alone--to see you; but I felt that I was

interrupting. He admires your daughter greatly. The dewy rose attracts

after dusty, practical life; it's pleasant, after turmoil, to inhale the

perfume. As I say, frankly, it is an influence that I regret."

"He is Maurice's most intimate friend," said Mr. Merrick quickly.

She felt his involuntary clutch at the answer to an intimation he hardly

recognized.

"Yes, he is," she assented, "but not the friend I would have chosen for

Maurice either. Maurice wants an ideal in life, an impetus away from

dreams and dilettante dawdling into noble action. Geoffrey is pinned to

activity, indeed, but hardly in its noble forms; pinned rather to the

practical, the expedient, the continual compromise of political life

that tends, I think, to eat away all sense of moral responsibility. Not

a good influence for either of your nestlings. I am very frank, Mr.

Merrick, but I have known both these men so well, since boyhood.

Geoffrey is strong, and Maurice, with all his charm, is weak; the

contrast must tell. Geoffrey predominates over Maurice and will, I fear,

over your daughter. Already we have found his influence working. Women

echo the strongest. Here I am, at home. It was so good of you to come

with me. I am so glad of our talk. Won't you lunch with me and my father

on Friday? Lord Challoner is to be with us--a clever man; he will be

delighted to meet you. You and he will talk while papa and I listen. I

love to watch minds striking sparks. You will come?"

"With pleasure." Mr. Merrick's varying emotions culminated for the

moment in gratification. Lord Challoner was a very clever man; Lady

Angela well known as a very clever woman. The responsibilities of his

recognized worth wrought in him as he walked homeward.

CHAPTER VII

The talk had been as suave as the ascent of a rocket; and once its

destined height attained its transformation into successive explosive

shocks swiftly followed. Felicia, shortly after her father's return,

burst into Maurice's dressing-room. She had known a tormenting doubt of

her own distrust; now her indignation was sure of itself, her distrust

was justified; there was almost a relief in the fulness of her anger.

"Maurice, what do you think has happened?" she demanded.

Maurice was just finishing his dressing. He looked round at her

inquiringly, laying down his brushes. Felicia's indignations were rare,

and therefore rather alarming; but seeing that this indignation was in

no way connected with himself--Felicia's whole aspect irradiated a sense

of union, a conviction that he was to second her in her indignation--he

took up the brushes again and put a finishing touch to his hair. "What

is it?" he asked, wondering if Mr. Merrick had suddenly become

insufferable, and rather hoping that such was the case and that Felicia

would initiate a movement to get rid of him. "Nothing to bother you

about your father, dear?" he added.

"Exactly. You remember last summer--Lady Angela and papa's article? She

came here this afternoon and asked me to forgive her. I couldn't; it

seemed cruel, I know; but I felt through and through me that I must not

trust her. She went away, forgiving me, and now papa tells me that she

met him and has been talking with him, and that he finds her charming,

and that he is going to lunch with her! Imagine the audacity!"

Maurice, looking at her in the mirror, had turned white, feeling

serpent-coils tightening about him again.

"How astonishing!" he ejaculated. But more than astonishment, he felt a

sickening fear. What had Angela intended? What did she now intend?

"We must prevent it," said Felicia. "I hate, dear, to bring you into it,

but you must see as I do that it's impossible. Try to explain it to

papa; try to make him feel that she cannot be trusted, that she will

poison everything; that in trusting her he divides himself from me."

Maurice had begun to tie his white cravat, but his fingers fumbled with

it, and he realized that they were trembling. Uppermost in his mind was

a hope, clutched at, that Angela's proffered friendship had been

sincere, a dread lest Felicia's rejection of it should call down upon

her Angela's revenge; for after all had not Angela, under the

circumstances, behaved with extraordinary generosity? And what a weapon

she held--and withheld--the weapon he himself had put into her hands. It

was the thought of this weapon, turned against his wife's breast, and

murdering there her love for him, that made him white.

"I will tell him, dear, anything you like," he said, in a voice she

recognized as strange. "And she was here, you say, this afternoon?

Felicia, dearest"--he had managed now to draw through the loop of the

white tie--"weren't you a trifle hard on her?--a trifle cruel, as you

say? She is a visionary creature. She probably came to you with a real

longing for reconciliation; and if she had offended you it had been

unconsciously--through taking too much for granted. You know you

misjudged her last summer. You remember, darling, you said you did."

Something like terror was freezing Felicia's anger. She steadied herself

with the effort to look at and to understand Maurice's point of view. "I

said so because I wanted to make it easy for you; because I longed to

believe myself in the wrong. Even now, I long to believe it. Perhaps I

am unjust; perhaps she is right in what she said of me--that I am hard,

cynical; perhaps she has really always wanted to be my friend. I can't

think it out; I only feel that I cannot trust her, that she is false,

and that she is getting power over papa. Why, I don't know, except that

she loves power, and that through him she may strike at me; for what I

feel most of all, and I have always felt it, Maurice, is that she hates

me."

"Dearest,"--Maurice searched a drawer for a handkerchief--"I know all

you feel; but you do grant, don't you, that your dislike of her,

instinctive from the first, may blind you to some real sincerity in her?

I don't think she hates you; she is jealous. I am afraid, though it's

caddish to say it, that she did care a good deal about me, and that

that's the root of it. Her impulse is really kind, but your instinct

makes you feel the pain and bitterness under it. Understanding it all,

as we do, it seems really cruel to push her away, to break with her

utterly."

"We must, we must," said Felicia, "for her sake as well as ours, we

must."

"Why, dearest?" Maurice tipped some perfume on the handkerchief.

"It can only be more pain and more bitterness for her if we don't. What

can I mean to her? What can you mean to her? And I have broken with her.

Oh, Maurice, surely you see that it must be."

He turned to her now, and saw that tears were running down her cheeks.

Caution left him. "Dearest!" he exclaimed, his arms about her in a

moment, "rather than hurt you I would walk over ten thousand Angelas.

Dearest, don't cry; I will do my best. I'll try and dissuade your

father--an ugly task for me. Poor Angela was my friend."

"Oh, Maurice, say that I do not come between you and anything real."

Hiding her face on his shoulder, it comforted her to think herself weak,

and he, with his larger, kinder comprehension, strong.

"You are the only real thing," Maurice answered. He felt that he forced

her to imply herself wilful in wrongness; and his fear lest she were

more right than she guessed made his triumph seem dangerous.

* * * * *

Felicia said that she would not come in to dinner, and Maurice walked

slowly to the drawing-room, pausing for a moment over his thoughts in

the little hall. Felicia's parting kiss had quieted his worst fear--the

fear lest her love suspected past wrongs in him, a baseless fear he now

saw, and with this steadying of the nerves he could see the other fear

as baseless too. Angela would never turn despicably on him; besides,

even if she did, Felicia would never believe her, her jealousy would

piteously interpret her desperation. There was further relief in

thinking Felicia unjust. The thing must be patched up, and Felicia

brought to see that common fairness demanded a certain toleration of

Angela.

Mr. Merrick was reading a paper with a pretence at absorption, and

Maurice guessed that he was very angry. Neither commented on Felicia's

absence, and they went in silence into the little dining-room.

"So you are going to make friends with Angela," Maurice observed

lightly, when the servant had gone.

"Felicia has spoken to you, I infer," said Mr. Merrick, sipping his soup

in slow and regular spoonfuls. His father-in-law's aggressively noisy

manner of imbibing soup had long been a thorn in the flesh to Maurice.

It was peculiarly irritating to-night. He could but hold Mr. Merrick

responsible for all the vexatious situation. Silly, gullible old fool!

He could almost have uttered the words as the sibilant mouthfuls

succeeded one another. How obvious, in looking at him, that Angela could

only have captured him as a tool. To think that, again cast the

danger-signal on the situation, made it more than vexatious. Maurice

forcibly quieted his mental comments, since to think his father-in-law a

silly old fool roused again his worst suspicions of Angela.

"Naturally, she has spoken to me," he said.

"I trust that you do not share her morbid hatred."

"I don't know about a morbid hatred," Maurice answered, controlling his

impatience with the more success now that the soup was done. "I see a

very normal antagonism of temperament. Angela is all artificiality, and

Felicia all reality; but I do think," he added, "that Felicia has the

defects of her qualities. She scorns artificiality too quickly. Her

scorns outshoot the mark. I don't think that poor Angela, with all her

attitudinising, meant any harm this afternoon. Why should she? It was, I

own, rather hard on her to come to beg for forgiveness, and to have

Felicia refuse to forgive her."

Mr. Merrick had not dared openly to express his angers and grievances,

for then he must reveal their source, and that he felt to be

inadvisable; but the latent angers only awaited their opportunity.

"Upon my word! Forgiveness for what?" he demanded.

Maurice recoiled as Angela that afternoon had recoiled. He had intended

a cheery, mending talk, and he had not intended that it should lead him

to this. He could not tell Mr. Merrick the cause of Angela's visit--that

he had jested with her over the very article he had urged him to

publish.

"I don't quite know what happened," he said, searching his mind for a

safe clue. "Felicia, as you know, didn't like that article of yours;

Angela spoke to her about it--it was in the summer--there was some

misunderstanding; Felicia resented her sympathy."

Matters were becoming clear, luridly clear, to Mr. Merrick's mind, and

Angela gained all that Felicia lost. "Indeed," he said, ominously, "she

criticizes her own father and resents the frank and more intelligent

criticism of a friend."

"No, no!" Maurice was feeling a rush of stupefaction. What had he done?

This was not the clue. "Felicia, as far as I understand, didn't initiate

the criticism--resented Angela's."

"I see; I understand. It is the proffered friendship she rejects; the

community, not the criticism." Mr. Merrick felt that in Angela's

interpretation of the scene he held a touchstone of its real

significance, invisible to Maurice. And how noble had been her further

reticence. His anger rose with redoubled vigour over the slight obstacle

Maurice had thrown before it. "I see it all," he repeated; "the quixotic

generosity of Lady Angela's seeking for reconciliation, and Felicia's

rejection of her. As I say, a morbid hatred, and that only, explains

it, and it explains it all."

Maurice was silent, with a sort of despair he felt that so, in its false

truth, the situation must rest.

"At all events," he said, "I don't suppose that under the circumstances

you will really care to accept this invitation of Angela's."

"I have accepted it."

"Grant that it's a bit indelicate of her to steal such a march on

Felicia. It looks like retaliation, you know."

Mr. Merrick flushed. "I do myself and her the honour to think that it

looks like friendship for myself." Fresh lights were breaking on him

every moment. Dewy roses in danger; perilous influences. "I do her the

further honour," he went on, "to believe that Felicia's rejection of her

does not alter her wish to do well by Felicia. For my part I will do my

best to atone to her for the cruel affront that she has received at my

daughter's hands."

Maurice, after the uncomfortable meal was over, almost feared to go to

Felicia's room with his news of defeat. He feared, too, with this new

weakness born of his new self-disgust, that her love already had taken

on that shadow of suspicion and distrust that he dreaded. He was feeling

a sort of giddiness from the hateful pettiness of complexity that

enmeshed him. He even imagined he might find her crying in bed, and

dinnerless, a horribly effective form of feminine pathos that he had

never yet had to face in her. The sight of a tray outside her door

reassured him as to the dinner, and it was with a sense of exquisite

relief, a sense of dear, sane, commonplace effacing silly doubts that he

found her engaged in the very feminine but very unpathetic occupation of

tidying her drawers.

She sat--her lap filled with gloves, ribbons and handkerchiefs, and was

folding and rearranging, apparently intent on her occupation. Her eyes,

as she looked round at him, gave him once more that sense of quiet

security. She had faced the situation, seen its triviality, recovered

her humour and her calm. Maurice at once saw the situation as only

trivial too.

"Well?" Felicia asked, laying a lawn collar in its place.

"Well, dear, I'm afraid he is unmalleable. He is going."

Felicia's face hardened a little, but not, he knew, towards himself.

"He sees the strain, the unnaturalness he makes?"

"Try not to mind, dear. You'll find that it will adjust itself."

Maurice had not guessed, nor had Felicia herself even, the almost panic

sense of dismay and danger that underlay her determined activity, her

determined cheerfulness. Angela seemed to threaten all her life. Worst

of all, though Felicia clung blindly to her instinct, she seemed to

threaten her very power of judging, feeling clearly. Darts of

self-distrust went through her, and following them, strange

disintegrating longings to justify Angela by that self-distrust, to own

herself hard, cruel, and to find peace. Her mind played her these

will-of-the-wisp tricks, tempting her--to what bogs and quicksands?

Under the shifting torment only the instinct held firm, and with shut

eyes it clung to courage as her only safeguard; courage to face the

tangled life, and the greater courage needed to face the tangled

thoughts and conscience. It kept the quiet in her voice, her eyes, as

she answered now.

"I mind, of course; but I believe that with time he will come back to

me. I shan't oppose him. As long, dear, as she doesn't come between you

and me, it's really all right."

CHAPTER VIII

"Yes, it had become impossible," said Geoffrey. He was standing before

her in the little room overlooking the river where they so often talked.

"I couldn't submit to being dragged helplessly at the wheels of a

chariot that I would have driven in precisely the opposite direction."

He smiled a little as he added, "So you see before you a ruined man. Are

you pleased with me that I've embraced failure?" Lightness of voice went

with the smile, and, superficially, the old manner of holding out a

sugar-plum to a child.

Felicia, knowing what his resignation of office meant to him, was too

much distressed by what she felt beneath the lightness to respond in the

playful key.

"You are not a ruined man," she said; "I'm not pleased that you should

call yourself that. You really can't afford to re-enter the House as an

independent member?"

"No," said Geoffrey, shortly; "I can afford nothing but drudgery."

"Drudging with you will only be a stepping-stone back to power."

He was studying her as he stood before her, seeing suddenly after his

momentary self-absorption, her pallor and thinness. She almost reminded

him of the ghostly Felicia, the Felicia of tears and helpless grief;

the Felicia of that distant day among the birch-woods. This Felicia was

not helpless, not weeping, not quite so wan, but her looks made an

ominous echo. He took a seat beside her. "Your father still goes

constantly to Angela?" he asked.

Felicia nodded gravely, yet without plaintiveness. Geoffrey made no

comment on the affirmation. In silence for some moments, he told himself

that this daily growing alienation accounted for the air of pain and

tension.

"I must actually seem to you to whine over myself," he said, presently.

"Of course, I know that the drudgery is only a stepping-stone. I must

fill my pockets with ammunition; find the pebble for my sling before I

confront Goliath again. But tell me something.... I may ask it?" He

hesitated. Under his light firmness he knew a shattered, groping mood.

He could not think with clearness either for her or himself, and only

felt that he must ask.

"Anything you like," Felicia answered gravely.

"Are you happy?"

He had never come so near as in asking the question; they both felt it.

Some barrier was gone; the barrier of her happiness, perhaps. Felicia

knew that the little moment suddenly trembled for her with that sense of

nearness; in another she felt that her sadness would be a stronger

barrier.

She looked up from her sewing.

"You know what I feel about papa and Lady Angela. I feel it foolishly

perhaps."

"Apart from that, it's a pain, I know, but one can adjust oneself to

pain."

"Apart from that, am I happy? What do you mean by happiness?"

"Are you satisfied? Is your life growing? Is it glad?" Each question was

a stone thrown into a deep, deep well of sadness, but she answered with

serenity over these shaken depths, even smiling at him with a flicker of

the old malice. "It would not grow if I were satisfied, nor, perhaps, if

I were altogether glad."

She saw by the look of accepted gloom that came to his face that he knew

himself banished from that moment of nearness, and over the barrier felt

herself putting out a hand of tender compunction and comradeship, as she

went on more gravely, "I think I am happy, but happiness is not a thing

one can look at. It's like a bird singing in a tree--one parts the

branches to see it and it is silent."

"You hear it singing, then, when I don't ask you questions?" He had

grasped the metaphorical hand, understanding and grateful;

understanding, at all events, as much as she herself did.

"Yes; and when I don't stop to listen for it."

They talked on again: of his situation, his projects, but these things

were now far from their minds. The fact of his broken life no longer

held Geoffrey's thoughts; they were in a chaos of doubts and surmises.

He had ruined himself, then, that she might hear the bird sing, and it

was silent; and was it only silent? Had it flown? For the first time

since he had played the part of a happy fate in her life he knew a

passionate regret for what he had done. No doubt, no surmise, touched

her love for her husband. The regret was for the chance he had

lost--that other chance of making her happy. Why hadn't he ruthlessly

held on to the advantage circumstance gave him, the advantage not only

over Maurice's poverty, but over Maurice's weakness? A lurid thought

went over that weakness. Would he, Geoffrey, whatever his poverty, have

given her up? The "no" that thrilled sternly through his blood told him

that to his strength the triumph might have come. He only quelled the

tumult by remembering her strength. Dubious peace--to think that her

strength would never have let him hope; her strength was great, no

doubt, but was it as great as he had imagined? And would it have held

her faithful to a finally fickle Maurice? Above all, would it have

outmatched his own through years? The tumult was rising again, and he

saw that the sudden, wild regret had been like the opening of a

flood-gate to such tumults. He must endure them with as much composure

as he could muster from contemplation of the fact that the past was

irrevocable, that he had given her to her husband, and that she loved

her husband; the last fact in particular laid a chill, sane hand on

retrospect.

He and Felicia were still talking when Mr. Merrick entered.

Far from assuming a culprit's humility, Mr. Merrick's demeanour of late

showed, towards Maurice and Felicia, an aggressive indifference, and

towards Geoffrey a portentous gravity. He had made a habit of coming in

upon _tête-à-têtes_, taking up a book, and seating himself, with a

frosty nod and air of remonstrant determination that was more than a

hint for Geoffrey's departure.

Geoffrey had ignored the hint on several recent occasions, continuing to

talk until Maurice's appearance seemed to relieve Mr. Merrick from some

sense of grim obligation; he would then arise, with no word, and stalk

away. Geoffrey felt amusement in watching these manoeuvres, giving very

little thought to their significance, and finding a schoolboy fun in the

conviction that he annoyed Mr. Merrick very much by outsitting him. But

to-day he was in no mood for annoying Mr. Merrick; Mr. Merrick's

appearance, indeed, annoyed him too vividly for him to feel the fun of

retaliation. He got up at once, and before the other had taken his place

near the window.

"Good-bye," he said, taking Felicia's hand; his eyes lingered on her

pallor, her wanness. "I won't silence the bird any more. I'll see you

soon again. Tell Maurice I'm sorry to miss him."

He departed, and Mr. Merrick, arrested in his usual routine, paused,

book in hand, on his way to his chair.

His frustrated passive energy took form in speech. He sat down and

opened the book, observing, "I am sorry, Felicia, to be obliged to send

any of your guests away."

Felicia had noticed and wondered at the interruptions, hardly suspecting

them of purpose, but now all manner of latent irritations leaped up in

her. To-day, especially, she had resented her father's appearance. She

had needed Geoffrey, the haven of his silence and his strength. After

that one strange moment of inner trembling, the old sense of quiet skies

and an encircling shore had returned, and she had rested in it.

Now, looking up, her face sharpened with quick suspicion and quick

resentment, she asked, "Obliged? Send my guests away? Indeed, papa, you

could not do that."

Her voice rather alarmed Mr. Merrick; it revealed a more resolute

hostility than he had suspected; and real hostility, final or open

hostility between him and his child, Mr. Merrick, in his heart of

hearts, feared more than any calamity. Flattered vanity, injured trust,

real anxiety for her welfare, had all helped to float his new

independence, but he never contemplated really sailing away from her. He

nerved himself now with the thought of his duty. Swinging his foot,

speaking with measured definiteness, his eyes on his book, he said, "I

shall at all events do my utmost to protect you from an undesirable

intimacy."

Felicia's quick heart guessed at the alarm that nerved itself, and now,

after the moment in which her anger rose, her sense of the ludicrous

shook the anger to sudden laughter.

"Papa! how ridiculous!" she exclaimed. "Really, your prejudices

shouldn't make you say and do such foolish and such futile things. Mr.

Daunt is my dearest friend--Maurice's dearest friend."

"It is a friendship I regret for both of you. Maurice is weak, Mr. Daunt

is strong; he dominates you both."

"What folly, my dear father!"

"Very well, Felicia, folly be it. I can only say that your conduct in

this, as in other respects, deeply distresses me. You are altogether

changed."

"I changed? In what respect?"

Mr. Merrick paused to review swiftly all the respects, before saying,

"You have become cynical, ungenerous, disloyal."

Felicia's amusement hardened to stern gravity. She grew even paler,

laying down her sewing as she said, "Ungenerous? Disloyal? I?"

"You, Felicia. It has given me the very greatest pain."

"How have I been ungenerous? disloyal?"

Her father did not meet her eyes.

"You have been ungenerous to a very noble woman, who only asked to be

your friend. You have been disloyal to me."

"To you!" Her interjections were like swift knives, cutting at his

careful deliberateness. "What do you mean?"

"You thought fit, moved by this influence that I deplore--quite apart

from its open antagonism to my claims on you--to scoff and jeer at my

essay. It would have been enough to have expressed your dislike to me

alone." His eyes now turned to her.

She gazed at him with an almost stupid astonishment. Suddenly she rose.

As if some hateful revelation had torn stupefaction from her,--"That

horrible woman!" she cried.

"It was your husband who told me," said Mr. Merrick quickly.

"Maurice told you that I had scoffed at your essay with that woman?"

Her eyes now had a corpse-like vacancy, very unpleasant to meet; only

his consciousness of integrity enabled Mr. Merrick to keep his own

steady.

"Scoff is perhaps too strong a word. You allowed her to see to the full

your dislike, your scorn, and then repulsed her sympathy. That is what

Maurice gave me to understand, and that, I don't fancy you can deny, is

the truth."

Felicia, looking now about her vaguely, sank again in her chair. Her

silence, her dazed helplessness, tinged Mr. Merrick's displeasure with a

slight compunction.

"There, child," he said, rising as he spoke, "don't feel like that about

it. Any injury that I may have received is fully forgiven. The only real

harm is your irrational hatred,--don't stare like that, Felicia--your

irrational hatred, as I say, and the influence that I protest against

and must always protest against."

Still she was silent, though her gaze had dropped from him. Her

silence, her look of disproportionate dismay, perturbed and rather

embarrassed him. He yielded to the magnanimity of a pat on the head as

he passed her on his way out of the room, saying, "Think it all over;

think better of it all." Pausing at the door, he added, "_She_ bears no

grudge, not the faintest; understands you better than you do yourself,

my poor child." She still sat, lying back in her chair, her eyes cast

down, her hands intertwisted in her lap. It was uncomfortable to leave

her so, but after all, the punishment was deserved, her very silence

proved as much; and he had done his duty.

Felicia was hardly conscious of his presence, his voice or his going;

the words went over her head like the silly cries of a flight of cranes;

when the door was closed it was as if the cranes had passed. She was

alone on a great empty moor, it seemed, an empty, lowering sky above

her.

This, then, was the truth. Her husband was a false, a craven man.

Fiercely, yet with a languid fierceness, as of slow flames, feeling an

immense fatigue, as though she had been beaten with scourges, her

thoughts stripped him of all her sweet seeings of him. Shallow,

impressionable, weak, his love for her the only steady thing in him; his

loyalty to her as unsteady as a flame in the wind; his love, perhaps,

steady only because she was strong. She could feel no pity; rather she

felt that she spurned him from her. In her weariness it seemed to her

that for a long time she had been trying to love him, and that now the

effort was snapped. And her scorn of him passed into self-scorn. Fatal

weakness and blindness not to have seen him truly from the first, not to

have felt that her craving for love, her love for his love, had been

more than any love for him. In her deep repulsion from him and all he

signified, his individuality and its fears, its sadness, its devotion,

were unreal to her, blotted out in scorn--scorn, the distorter of all

truth--as unreal as her love for it had been. And with her recognized

weakness and despair came, with the memory of that trembling nearness,

the thought of Geoffrey, and her heart suddenly cried out for him, for

his strength, his unwavering truth. She closed her eyes, holding the

thought close.

Some one entered, and she opened her eyes on Maurice. He had worked all

the afternoon. The sitter was gone. He beamed with conscious merit,

deserving her approbation, quite like a child let loose from school;

smiling and radiant.

He came to her as she lay sunken in the chair, leaned to her for a kiss,

and paused, meeting the hard fixed look of her eyes.

"What is the matter, dearest?" he asked, and his heart began to shake.

"Why did you tell papa that lie?"

He hardly understood the question, but her tone struck through him like

a knife. "What lie?"

"You told him that I talked to Lady Angela of my dislike for his

article."

"Didn't you?" Maurice asked feebly, for his brain was whirling. The

added baseness did not urge her voice from its horrible, icy calm.

"I, Maurice? When you--you only talked to her of it?"

"Felicia, I swear you have mistaken it. Don't kill me in looking like

that. Let me think. I told him--yes--I had to explain how it

happened--your anger towards Angela, your sending her away. I muddled

into the whole thing. I suppose I let him think that you had talked. How

could I tell him that it was I? For Heaven's sake, be merely just,

darling,--Felicia,--how could I tell him that, when I am half

responsible for his publishing it? You remember the mess I got into to

please you?"

"To please me? You are a coward, Maurice." She turned her eyes from him.

Maurice stood before her, miserably, abjectly silent. Moments went by,

and still she sat with stern, averted eyes that seemed to look away from

him for ever. It was not even as if she paused to give a final verdict;

it was as though in her last words she had condemned him, and as if,

now, he were a thing put by and forgotten.

But though, her brow on her clenched hand, her eyes fixed, half looking

down, she seemed a figure of stony immutability, more than if she looked

at him, she was aware of his misery, his abjectness, his piteous loss of

all smiles and happy radiance. Her own words--"a lie," "a coward,"

echoed. Insufferable shocks of feeling, indistinguishable, immense, went

through her; and suddenly the surging sense of her own cruelty, his

piteousness, made a long cry within her. She could not bear to be so

cruel; she could not bear to have him suffer. The inner cry came in a

stifled moan to her lips. "Maurice!" She covered her face with her

hands. He fell on his knees beside her, his heart almost broken by

sudden hope. They clung together like two children. "Forgive me; forgive

me," she repeated. "Forgive me. Nothing--nothing could deserve such

cruelty. My poor, poor Maurice; I didn't love you. I was so cruel that I

didn't love you any longer."

She looked into his blue eyes, his face, quivering with sincerity. With

the confession, the awful moments of hatred drifted into nightmare

unreality. His need of her, his love for her, were the only realities;

they engulfed the vision of herself--dry, bitter, bereft of her love for

him. It flitted away--a bat--in the sad, white dawn. It was she, who,

holding him to her, explained, to herself as well as to him, how it all

happened; an involved, sudden twist of circumstance before which he had

been bewildered, weak. "And weakness is more forgiveable--so far more

forgiveable than cruelty, dear--dear," she said. "Horrible I! to have

had such thoughts." She could forgive him. She could not forgive herself

for having hated him. The very memory trembled in her like a living

thing. No tenderness was great enough to atone.

Later on, when Mr. Merrick appeared, Maurice rose, and with unflinching

distinctness put the whole piece of comic tragedy before him, sparing

himself in nothing. After the searing torture he had undergone, he felt

no pain in the avowal. Mr. Merrick's red displeasure rather amused him,

so delicious was the sense of utterly redeeming himself in Felicia's

eyes. It was Felicia who felt the pang for her father's wounded vanity

and for the ugly picture that Maurice must present to him.

"You have behaved in a way I don't care to characterize," Mr. Merrick

remarked, when Maurice had finished with "If I had only had Felicia's

courage at the beginning--only frankly told you that I didn't like the

article--if I hadn't been over-anxious to please you and her, I wouldn't

have got myself into such a series of messes."

And now Maurice, his head held high, his thumbs in his pockets, looking

as if, with gallant indifference, he were facing cannon that he scorned,

replied that he deserved any reproach.

"Maurice has been weak, too complaisant," said Felicia, "but there has

been a half-truth in all he said; he kept back the whole for fear of

hurting you. Forgive us both."

"You have nothing to forgive in Felicia," said Maurice; "she has been

the target, I think, for all our egotisms to stab."

"Indeed, Maurice, indeed. I am not in any way aware of having wounded my

child except where your tergiversation opened her to my just reproach.

If she has been a target you have hidden behind it."

"Exactly." Maurice received the raking fire with undisturbed equanimity.

"In future you'll remember that whatever I say she can never deserve

reproach."

Felicia was protesting against this too sweeping defence, when Mr.

Merrick interrupted her with "I only beg that in the future you will not

whet your consciences on my feelings. Pray consider me, if only

slightly."

Felicia looked, when her father went out, too dejected as a result of

this scene of dauntless penance.

"Smile, smile, darling," Maurice begged, raising her hand to his lips,

and feeling like a knight returned to his lady, shrived of misdeed by

peril bravely fronted.

"Tell me it really is all over. Tell me that I pleased you--that it was

what you would have hoped of me."

"Yes; you were all that I wished. It is only that I am sorry for him. He

is like a hurt child, Maurice."

"He will forget and forgive in a day or two. We will pet him; make much

of him. Can I do anything more to feel that I am fully loved again?"

She leaned her forehead against his arm, tired with a spiritual and

bodily fatigue that made her voice dim and slumberous as she answered,

"Don't ever remind me that you were not."

CHAPTER IX

The news of Geoffrey's resignation of office was a tonic to Maurice's

new energy. It spurred him to fuller deserving of such sacrifice. He

finished the portrait over which he had been loitering, with a sudden

vigour that seemed in its auspicious result to promise more originality

than he had ever shown, and in pursuance of the new resolution, he

accepted another order--a dull and wealthy old ecclesiastic in a

cathedral town--an order, in spite of remunerativeness, that he would

certainly have refused a month before, as absolutely clogging to all

inspiration.

"I shall have to leave Felicia to you for perhaps over a fortnight," he

said to Mr. Merrick, as, in a hansom they drove to an evening party.

Felicia preceded them with the friend at whose house they had dined.

Maurice had carried out his project of "petting" his father-in-law, but

in spite of his butterfly manner of gaiety Mr. Merrick's mood showed

little relaxation; his wounds were deep; they rankled; and now he

received the news of guardianship, which Maurice imparted with an air of

generous self-sacrifice, gravely.

"It's our first separation," Maurice added. "You will have her all to

yourself. My loss will be your gain."

His smile left Mr. Merrick's gravity unchanged. The opportunity seemed

to have come for the discharge of a painful duty.

"That I am to have Felicia all to myself, I question," he said, looking

ahead at the swift lights of the moving town; for he did not care to

meet his son-in-law's eyes while he seized the opportunity.

"Well,"--Maurice good-humouredly yielded to his funny exactitude--"not

altogether; her friends will relieve guard now and then."

It was wiser to reach his purpose by slow approaches; Mr. Merrick evenly

remarked, "My guard shall be unbroken," adding, "It will be doubly

necessary."

He was rewarded by a light note of wonder in Maurice's voice. "You seem

to take it very seriously, my dear father."

"I take it seriously, Maurice."

Even from Mr. Merrick's complacency such magnified significance was

perplexing; Maurice turned an inquiring gaze upon him.

"What are you talking about?" he asked.

"I regret this departure of yours, Maurice. I beg you to reconsider it."

"My dear father, what _are_ you talking about?"

"You should not leave Felicia. She is exposed to certain influences--to

a certain influence--that I deeply disapprove. She is unruly, reckless.

I pretend to no further authority. She defies me."

"Will you explain yourself?" The patience of Maurice's tone was ironic.

"I will speak plainly, since you force it. Mr. Daunt is too much with

Felicia."

"Geoffrey! He can't be too much with her."

Maurice's nerves, since the last scene with Felicia, had been on edge.

Only a contemptuous amusement steadied them now. Mr. Merrick's paternal

anxiety, alloyed though it was with the latent desire to hit back, was

sincere; Maurice saw in it only a pompous, an idiotic impertinence.

Mr. Merrick's voice hardened to as open an hostility as his

son-in-law's.

"People notice it. There is talk about it. I will not stand by and see

my child's name become the plaything of malicious gossip."

"Who notices it? Who talks about it? What utter and damnable folly!"

"I decline to enter into an unbefitting altercation with you, Maurice.

Your friend is obviously in love with your wife, and Felicia allows him

to be too much with her."

"Is this pure imagination on your part? I know, of course, that there's

never been any love lost between you and Geoffrey."

"I have been warned," said Mr. Merrick, reluctant, yet with redoubled

dignity.

Maurice's smouldering nerves struck to flame, and an ugly illumination

glared at him. "This can be no one but Angela," he said.

It was difficult to keep dignity under eyes that seemed to take him by

the throat; in the struggle to look firmly back Mr. Merrick was silent.

"Come. Own to it. The venomous liar!" Maurice added in a low voice,

studying the revelations of the other's wrathful helplessness.

"I have no wish to deny it, and I must forbid you to speak in that

manner of a woman who honours you by calling you her friend."

"I know Angela better than you do," Maurice laughed. His fury almost

passed away from its derivative object.

"The fact remains that people talk, and that truest kindness warned me

of it."

"If people talk it's she who makes them. I've known--ever since I

married her--that Geoffrey loved Felicia." Maurice flung him the truth

scornfully.

"Yet you speak of lies!"

"I know my friend, and honour him, as you don't seem to know or honour

your daughter."

"I know human nature as you don't seem to know it. It's a dangerous

intimacy. I insist on my right to protect my daughter."

"You insult her by claiming such a right. Don't speak to me of this

again." Maurice, as he said it, grew suddenly white with a new thought.

"And never dare," he added, turning eyes that quelled even Mr. Merrick's

fully-armed championship, "never dare tell Felicia that you have

discussed her with that woman."

"You may be sure that I would not expose Lady Angela to Felicia's

misconception."

Mr. Merrick, in his realized helplessness, cast about him for some

retaliatory weapon. He seized the first that offered itself. "And since

my meaning as Felicia's father seems gone, I had better go myself. I am

not needed, since you say so, by either of you."

It was the idlest threat. In utter astonishment he heard Maurice

answering, "I've thought more than once of suggesting it. By all means."

"I will remain with Felicia while you are away."

"As you please."

"I will leave directly after your return."

"When you will." Maurice's voice was quieter. The unexpected prospect of

relief mollified him. "It's a pity, for Felicia will suffer, but she

herself must see that it doesn't do. You have made life too

uncomfortable for both of us. And after this! Well, you've made things

impossible. For a time you had better realize what your daughter is away

from her, realize how little she needs any one's protection. It's

settled then; you go, on my return."

Mr. Merrick bowed. He was aghast, outraged, more than all, wounded. The

hurt child whimpered and then fairly howled within him, while, in

silence, he smiled ironically. They reached their destination, Maurice

in a growing rage that for once obliterated his fears. It was like

strong wine that uplifted, made him almost glad.

He left his father-in-law and made his way through the crowded rooms in

search of Felicia. He needed to look into her limpid eyes after this

hissing of serpents. But instead of Felicia he found Angela.

For the distasteful monotony of these assemblies Angela had always an

air of patient disdain; and to-night, under a high wreath of white

flowers, her face more than ever wore its mask of languid martyrdom. She

was in white, perfumed like a lily.

Maurice felt a keener gladness on seeing her. His wrath, running new

currents of vigour through him, carried him past any hesitation. At last

he would have it out with Angela.

"I want to speak to you," he said. "Is there any place where one can get

out of this crowd?"

Angela saw in a flash that a crisis had arrived; and in another that she

had been working towards such a crisis, living for it, since Maurice had

cast her off. For a moment, beneath the rigour of his eyes--to see

Maurice unflinching was a new experience--her spirit quailed, then

soared, exulting in the thought of final contest. Since he wished

it--yes, they would speak openly. He should at last hear all--her hate,

her love, her supplication. She was an intimate in the house where

Maurice and Felicia were formal guests; her quick mind seized all

possibilities. "Yes," she said, "there is a little room--a little

boudoir. No one ever goes there on nights like these." Her self-mastery

was all with her as she moved beside him through the crowd. She was

able, over the tumult of hope and fear, to speak calmly, to smile at

friends her weary, fragile smile.

"Aren't these scenes flimsy and sad?" she said. "How much happiness, how

much reality do they express, do you think?"

Maurice forced himself to reply. "They express a lot of greediness and

falseness; those are real enough."

"That is true, Maurice," she said gently; "so true that I sometimes

think I would rather be a washerwoman bending in honest work over my

tubs; one would be nearer the realities one cares for."

They left the reception-rooms, and she was silent when faces were no

longer about them. She led him down a passage, across a book-filled

room, a student's lamp its only light, and softly turning the handle of

a further door, opened it on the quiet of a little room, discreetly

frivolous with the light gaiety of Louis XV decorations, empty of all

significance but that of smiling background for gay confidences or

pouting coquettries. Not exactly the background for such a scene as she

and Maurice must enact, yet Angela triumphed in the contrast. Tragic

desolation, splendid sincerities would gain value from their trivial

setting. Her passion, her misery, would menace more strangely, implore

more piteously among nymphs and garlands.

She dropped into a chair, and put out her hand to a jar of white

azaleas. She asked no question, but she looked at him steadily. Maurice

had closed the door and stood near it, his back to it, at a distance

from her. The sound of the world outside--the world that smiled and

pouted--was like the faint hum of a top.

"How have you dared warn my father-in-law against Geoffrey?" asked

Maurice. He was nerved to any truth.

Angela made no reply, her long, deep eyes on him while, automatically,

her hand passed over the azaleas.

"How could you betray my confidence in you? What a fool I was to trust

you!"

"Betray you?" she murmured.

"You pursue me and my happiness!" Maurice cried, and hot tears of

self-pity started to his eyes. Her eyes dropped. That his hand should

deal this blow!

"I pursue you?--and your happiness, Maurice?" she repeated.

"Can you deny it? Since we came back to England you have been a poison

in our lives."

She was struggling with the moment's dreadful bitterness. Over the

bleeding pain of it her sense of his cruel injustice sustained her to a

retort: "I have betrayed nothing. You are the only betrayer, Maurice.

You betrayed my love; you betrayed your wife to me."

"Great heavens!" Maurice dropped his forehead on clenched hands, "it was

to spare you!"

"I guessed it," said Angela, while her hand still passed lightly over

the azaleas.