"Violet, we really must talk business some time," said Barbara,

hesitating. "There are plans to be settled, you know--what Alex is going

to do next."

"She's going to play with Rosemary next. Don't worry, dear--we can talk

plans any time. There's really no hurry."

Alex dimly surmised that the words, and the indolent, _dégagée_ smile

accompanying them, might be characteristic of her new sister-in-law.

Violet took her upstairs.

"The nursery is just the same--we haven't changed a thing," she told

her.

Alex gave a cry of recognition at the top of the stairs. "Oh, the little

gate that fenced off the landing! It was put up when Cedric was a baby,

because he would run out and look through the balusters."

"Was it, really?" cried Violet delightedly. "Cedric didn't know that--he

told me that it had always been there. I shall love having you, Alex,

you'll be able to tell me such lots of things about Cedric, when he was

a little boy, that no one else knows. You see, there's so little

difference between him and Barbara, isn't there?"

"I am only three years older than Barbara."

"Then you're the same age--or a little older than I am. I am

twenty-nine--two whole years older than Cedric. Isn't it dreadful?"

She laughed gaily as she turned the handle of the nursery door.

"Baby, precious, where are you?"

Alex followed her into the big, sunny room.

A young nurse, in stiff white piqué, sat sewing in the window, and a

starched, blue-ribboned baby, with disordered, sunny curls, crawled

about the floor at her feet.

When she saw her mother she began to run towards her, with outstretched

hands and inarticulate coos of pleasure.

"Come along, then, and see your new Auntie." Violet caught her up and

lifted her into her arms.

"Isn't she rather a love, Alex? Shall we look after her for a little

while, while Nurse goes downstairs?"

Alex nodded. She felt as though she hardly dared speak, for fear of

frightening the pretty little laughing child. Besides, the constriction

was tightening in her throat.

Violet sank down into a low chair, with Rosemary still in her arms.

"I'll stay with her, Nurse, if you like to go downstairs for

half-an-hour."

"Thank you, my lady."

"Sit down and let's be comfy, Alex. Isn't this much nicer than being

downstairs?"

Alex looked round the nursery. As Violet had said, it had not been

altered. On the mantelpiece she suddenly saw the big white clock,

supported by stout Dresden-china cherubs, that had been there ever since

she could remember. It was ticking in a sedate, unalterable way.

Something in the sight of the clock, utterly familiar, and yet forgotten

altogether during all her years away from Clevedon Square, suddenly

caught at Alex. She made an involuntary, choking sound, and to her own

dismay, sobs suddenly overpowered her.

"My poor dear!" said Violet compassionately. "Do cry--it'll do you good,

and Baby and I won't mind, or ever tell a soul, will we, my Rosemary? I

knew you'd feel much better when you'd had it out, and nobody will

disturb us here."

Alex had sunk on to the floor, and was leaning her head against Violet's

chair.

The soft, murmuring voice went on above her:

"I never heard of such a thing in my life as Barbara's bringing you here

today--she never explained when she telephoned that you hadn't been in

England for goodness knows how many years, let alone to this house. And,

of course, I thought she'd settled it all with you, till I saw your face

when she brought you into the drawing-room, all full of tiresome people,

and brothers and sisters you hadn't set eyes on for _years_. Then I

knew, of course, and I could have smacked her. You poor child!"

"No, no," sobbed Alex incoherently. "It's only just at first, and coming

back and finding them all so changed, and not knowing what I am going to

do."

"Do! Why, you're coming here. Cedric and Rosemary and I want you, and

Barbara doesn't deserve to keep you after the way she's begun. I'll

settle it all with her."

"Oh, how _kind_ you are to me!" cried Alex.

Violet bent down and kissed her.

"Kind! Why, aren't I your sister, and Rosemary your one and only niece?

Look at her, Alex, and see if she's like any one. Cedric sometimes says

she's like your father."

"A little, perhaps. But she's very like you, I think."

"Oh, I never had those great, round, grey eyes! Those are Cedric's. And

perhaps yours--they're the same colour. Anyway, I believe she's really

very like what you must have been as a baby, Alex!"

It was evident that Violet was paying the highest compliment within her

power.

Alex put out her hand timidly to little Rosemary. She was not at all

shy, and seemed accustomed to being played with and admired, as she sat

on her mother's lap. Alex thought how pretty and happy she and Violet

looked together. She was emotionally too much worn-out, and had for too

many years felt herself to be completely and for ever outside the pale

of warm, human happiness, to feel any pang of envy.

Presently Violet reluctantly gave up Rosemary to the nurse again, and

said:

"I'm afraid we ought to go down. I don't like to leave Barbara any

longer. She never comes up here--hardly ever. Poor Barbara! I sometimes

think it's because she hasn't any babies of her own. Let's come down and

find her, Alex."

They found Barbara in the library, earnestly talking to Cedric, who was

leaning back, smoking and looking very much bored.

He sprang up when they entered, and from his relieved manner and from

Barbara's abrupt silence, Alex conjectured that they had been discussing

her own return.

She stood for a moment, forlorn and awkward, till Violet sank on to the

big red-leather sofa, and held out her hand in invitation to her.

"Give me a cigarette, Cedric. What have you and Barbara been

plotting--like two conspirators?"

Cedric laughed, looking at her with a sort of indulgent pride, but

Barbara said with determined rapidity:

"It's all very well, Violet, to laugh, but we've got to talk business.

After all, this unexpected step of Alex' has made a lot of difference.

One thought of her as absolutely settled--as father did, when he made

his will."

"You see, Alex," Cedric told his sister, "the share which should have

been yours was divided by father's will between Barbara and Pamela, and

there was no mention of you, except just for the fifty pounds a year

which my father thought would pay your actual living expenses in the

convent. He never thought of your coming away again."

"How could he, after all these years?" ejaculated Barbara.

"I know. But I couldn't have stayed on, Cedric, indeed I couldn't. I

know I ought to have found out sooner that I wasn't fitted for the

life--but if you knew what it's all been like--"

Her voice broke huskily, and despair overwhelmed her at the thought of

trying to explain what they would never understand.

"Poor little thing!" said Violet's compassionate voice. "Of course, you

couldn't stay on. They've nearly killed you, as it is--wretched people!"

"No--no. They were kind--"

"The point is, Alex," Barbara broke in, "that you've only got the

wretched fifty pounds a year. Of course, I'd be more than glad to let

you have what would naturally have been yours--but how on earth I'm to

manage it, I don't know. Cedric can tell you what a state poor Ralph

left his affairs in--you'd never believe how little I have to live on.

Of course, the money from father was a godsend, I don't deny it. But if

Cedric thinks it's justice to give it back to you--"

She looked terribly anxious, gazing at her brother.

"No, no, Barbara!" said Alex, horrified. "I don't want the money. Of

course, you must keep it--you and Pamela."

"That's all very well, my dear Alex," said Cedric sensibly, "but how do

you propose to live? You must look at it from a practical point of

view."

"Then you think--" broke from Barbara irrepressibly.

"No, my dear, I don't. One knows very well, as things are--as poor Ralph

left things--it would be almost out of the question to expect--"

He looked helplessly at his wife.

"Of course, dear," she said placidly. "But there's Pamela's share."

"Pamela will marry, of course. She's sure to marry, but until then--or

at least until she comes of age--I don't think--as her guardian--"

Cedric broke off, looking much harassed.

"If Pam married a rich man--which she probably will," said Violet, with

a low laugh.

"We can't take distant possibilities into consideration," Barbara

interposed sharply. "We're dealing with actual facts."

Alex looked from one to the other with bewilderment. She hardly

understood what they were all discussing. From the natural home of her

childhood and girlhood, where she had lived as unthinking of ways and

means as every other girl of her class and generation, she had passed

into the convent world, where all was communal, and the rights of the

individual a thing part shunned, part unknown. She could not, at first,

grasp that Cedric and Barbara and Violet, perhaps Pam and Archie, too,

were all wondering how she would be able to maintain herself on fifty

pounds a year.

"Of course," Barbara was saying, "Alex could come to me for a bit--I'd

love to have you, dear--but you saw for yourself what a tiny place mine

is--and there's only Ada. I don't quite know what she'd say to having

two people instead of one, I must say--"

"We want her, too," Violet exclaimed caressingly. "Let us have her for a

little while, Barbara,--while you're preparing Ada's mind for the

shock." She broke into her low, gurgling laugh again.

Barbara looked infinitely relieved.

"What do you think, Alex? It isn't that I wouldn't love to have you--but

there's no denying that ways and means _do_ count, and in a tiny

household like mine, every item adds up."

"Oh," said Alex desperately, "I know what you must feel--the difficulty

of--of knowing what to do with me. It's always been like that, ever

since I was a little girl. I've made a failure of everything. Don't you

remember--Barbara, _you_ must--old Nurse saying, 'Alex will never stick

to anything'? And I never have, I never shall. I can only make dreadful

muddles and failures, and upset you all. If only one could wreck one's

own life without interfering with other people's!"

There was a silence, which Alex, after her outburst, knew very well was

not one of comprehension. Then Cedric said gently:

"You mustn't let yourself exaggerate, my dear. We're very glad to have

you with us again, one only can't help wishing it had been rather

sooner. But there's no use in crying over spilt milk, and after all, as

Violet says, there's no hurry about anything. Come to us and have a good

long rest--you look as though you needed it--and get a little flesh on

your bones again. We can settle all the rest afterwards."

Alex saw Barbara looking at her with furtive eagerness. She turned to

her, with the utter dependence on another's judgment that had become

second nature to her.

"When shall I go?"

"My dear!" protested Barbara. "Of course, the longer you can stay with

me the better I shall be pleased. It's only that Ada--" She broke off at

the sound of Violet's irrepressible laugh.

"You must suit yourself absolutely, of course."

"Supposing you came to us at the end of the week?" Violet suggested.

"Say Saturday. Pamela is going away then to pay one or two visits--and I

shall have you all to myself."

Alex looked at her wonderingly.

It seemed to her incredible that Violet should actually want her, so

engrained was her sense of her own isolation of spirit. That terrible

isolation of those who have definitely, and for long past, lost all

self-confidence, and which can never be realized or penetrated by those

outside.

"That will be delightful," said Violet, seeming to take her acceptance

for granted.

Barbara got up, smoothing her skirt gently.

"We really ought to be going, Alex. I said we'd be in to tea, and it

takes such ages to get back."

Alex rose submissively. She marvelled at the assurance of Barbara, even

at the ease of her conventionally affectionate farewells.

"Well, good-bye, my dear. When are you coming out to the wilds to look

me up?"

Then, without giving her sister-in-law time to reply, she added gaily,

"You must ring me up and let me know, when you've a spare moment. You

know I'm always a fixture. What a blessing the telephone is!"

"Then we'll see you on Saturday, Alex," said her brother. "Good! Take

care of yourself, my dear." He looked after her with an expression of

concern, as the servant held open the door for her and Barbara and they

went into the street. Alex could not believe that this kindly, rather

pompous man was her younger brother.

"Cedric has grown very good-looking, but I didn't expect to see him

so--so _old_, somehow," she said.

Barbara laughed.

"Time hasn't stood still with any of us, you know. _I_ think Violet

looks older than he does--she is, of course. She'll be a mountain in a

few years' time, if she doesn't take care."

"Oh, Barbara! I think she's so pretty--and sweet."

Barbara shrugged her shoulders very slightly.

"She and I have never made particularly violent friends, though I like

her, of course. Pamela adores her--and I must say she's been good to

Pam. But her kindness doesn't cost her anything. She's always been rich,

and had everything she wanted--she was the only girl, and her people

adored her, and now Cedric lets her do everything she likes. She spends

any amount of money--look at her clothes, and the way she has little

Rosemary always dressed in white."

"Rosemary is lovely. It's so extraordinary to think of Cedric's child!"

Barbara tightened her lips.

"She ought to have been a boy, of course. Cedric pretended not to care,

but it must have been a disappointment--and goodness only knows if

Violet will ever--"

She stopped, throwing a quick glance out of the corners of her eyes at

her sister.

Alex wondered why she did not finish her sentence, and what she had been

about to say.

The constraint in her intercourse with Barbara was becoming more and

more evident to her perceptions. It was clear that her sister did not

intend to ask any questions as to the crisis through which Alex had

passed, and when she had once ascertained that Alex had not "seen

anybody" whilst in Rome, she did not refer to that either.

Alex wondered if Barbara would tell her anything of Ralph and their

married life, but the reserve which had always been characteristic of

Barbara since her nursery days, had hardened sensibly, and it was

obvious that she wished neither to give nor to receive confidences.

She was quite ready, however, to discuss her brother Cedric and his

wife, or the prospects of Pamela and Archie, and Alex listened all the

evening to Barbara's incisive little clear tones delivering shrewd

comments and judgments. She again suggested that Alex should go to bed

early, saying as she kissed her good-night:

"It's quite delightful to have some one to talk to, for me. I generally

read or sew all the evening."

"It must be lonely for you, Barbara."

"Oh, I don't mind quiet," she laughed, as though edging away from any

hint of emotional topic. "But, of course, it's nice to have some one for

a change. Good-night." She turned towards the door of the bedroom. "Oh,

Alex! there's just one thing--I know you'd rather I said it. If you

wouldn't mind, sometime--any time you think of it--just letting me have

the money for those clothes we bought for you today. The bills have come

in--I asked for them, as I don't have an account. I knew you'd rather be

reminded, knowing what pauper I am. I only wish I hadn't got to worry

you. Good-night, my dear. Sleep well."

XXV

Violet

For days and nights to come, the question of the money that Barbara had

paid for her clothes weighed upon Alex.

She had no idea how she was to repay her.

The money that had been given her in Rome for her journey to England had

only lasted her to Charing Cross, and even her cab fare to Hampstead had

been supplemented by Barbara. Alex remembered it with fresh dismay. Even

when she had left Downshire Hill and was in Clevedon Square again, the

thought lashed her with a secret terror, until one day she said to

Cedric:

"What ought I to do, Cedric, to get my fifty pounds a year? Who do I get

it from?"

"Don't Pumphrey and Scott send it half yearly? I thought that was the

arrangement. You gave them your change of address, I suppose."

"Oh, no," said Alex gently. "I've never written to them, except once,

just after father died, to ask them to make the cheques payable to to

the Superior."

"What on earth made you do that?"

"They thought it was best. You see, I had no banking account, so the

money was paid into the Community's account."

"I see," Cedric remarked drily. "Well, the sooner you write and revoke

that arrangement, the better. When did they last send you a cheque? In

June?"

"I don't know," Alex was forced to say, feeling all the time that Cedric

must be thinking her a helpless, unpractical fool.

"Write and find out. And meanwhile--I say, Alex, have you enough to go

on with?"

"I--I haven't any money, Cedric. In Rome they gave me enough for my

travelling expenses, but nothing is left of that."

"But what have you done all this time? I suppose you've wanted clothes

and things."

"I got some with Barbara, but they aren't paid for. And there are some

other things I need--you see, I haven't got anything at all--not even

stamps," said Alex forlornly. "Violet said something about taking me to

some shops with her, but I suppose all her places are very expensive."

"They are--dashed expensive," Cedric admitted, with a short laugh. "But

look here, Alex, will you let me advance you what you want? It couldn't

be helped, of course--but the whole arrangement comes rather hard on

you, as things are now. You see, poor Barbara is really as badly off as

she can be. Ralph was a most awful ass, between ourselves, and muddled

away the little he had, and she gets pretty nearly nothing, except a

widow's pension, which was very small, and the money father left. If

you'll believe me, Ralph didn't even insure his life, before going to

South Africa. Of course, he didn't go to fight, but on the staff of one

of the big papers, and it was supposed to be a very good thing, and then

what did he do but go and get dysentery before he'd been there a

fortnight!"

Cedric's voice held all the pitying scorn of the successful.

"Poor Barbara," said Alex.

"That's just what she is. Of course, I think myself that Pamela will

make your share over to you again when she marries. _She's_ not likely

to make a rotten bad match like Barbara--far from it. But until then she

can't do anything, you know--at least, not until she's of age, if then."

Cedric stopped, and his right hand tapped with his spectacles on his

left hand, in the little, characteristic trick that was so like Sir

Francis.

Alex had already heard him make much the same observations, but she

realized that Cedric had retained all his old knack of reiteration.

"I see," she said.

"Well, my dear, the long and the short of it is, that you must let me be

your banker for the time being. And--and, Alex," said Cedric, with a

most unwonted touch of embarrassment breaking into his kind, assured

manner, "you needn't mind taking it. There's--there's plenty of money

here--there is really--now-a-days."

Alex realized afterwards that it would hardly have occurred to her to

_mind_ taking the twenty pounds which Cedric offered her with such

patent diffidence. She had never known the want of money, either in her

Clevedon Square days or during her ten years of convent life. She did

not realize its value in the eyes of other people.

The isolation of her point of view on this and other kindred subjects

gradually became evident to her. Her scale of relative values had

remained that which had been set before her in the early days of her

novitiate. That held by her present surroundings differed from it in

almost every particular, and more especially in degree of concentration.

All Violet's warm, healthy affection for Rosemary did not prevent her

intense preoccupation with her own clothes and her own jewels, or her

innocently-assured conviction that no one was ever in London during the

month of August, and that to be so would constitute a calamity.

All Cedric's pride in his wife and love for her, in no way lessened his

manifest satisfaction at his own success in life and at the renovated

fortunes of the house of Clare.

Both he and Violet found their recreation in playing bridge, Cedric at

his club and Violet in her own house, or at the houses of what seemed to

Alex an infinite succession of elaborately-gowned friends, with all of

whom she seemed to be on exactly the same terms of an unintimate

affection.

Violet at night, when she dismissed her maid and begged Alex to stay and

talk to her until Cedric came upstairs, which he never did until past

twelve o'clock, was adorable.

She listened to Alex' incoherent, nervous outpourings, which Alex

herself knew to be vain and futile from the very longing which possessed

her to make herself clear, and said no word of condemnation or of

questioning.

At first the gentle pressure of Violet's soft hand on her hair, and her

low, sympathetic, murmuring voice, soothed Alex to a sort of worn-out,

tearful gratitude in which she would nightly cry herself to sleep.

It was only as she grew slowly physically stronger that the craving for

self-expression, which had tormented her all her life, woke again. Did

Violet understand?

She would reiterate her explanations and dissections of her own past

misery, with a growing consciousness of morbidity and a positive terror

lest Violet should at last repulse, however gently, the endless demand

for an understanding that Alex herself perpetually declared to be

impossible.

It now seemed to her that nothing mattered so long as Violet understood,

and by that understanding restored to Alex in some degree her utterly

shattered self-respect and self-confidence. This dependence grew the

more intense, as she became more aware how unstable was her foothold in

the world of normal life.

With the consciousness of an enormous and grotesque mistake behind her,

mingled all the convent tradition of sin and disgrace attached to broken

vows and the return to an abjured world. One night she said to Violet:

"I didn't do anything _wrong_ in entering the convent. It was a mistake,

and I'm bearing the consequence of the mistake. But it seems to me that

people find it much easier to overlook a sin than a mistake."

"Well, I'd rather ask a _divorcée_ to lunch than a woman who ate peas

off her knife," Violet admitted candidly.

"That's what I mean. There's really no place for people who've made bad

mistakes--anywhere."

"If you mean yourself, Alex, dear, you know there's always a place for

you here. Just as long as you're happy with us. Only I'm sometimes

afraid that it's not quite the sort of life--after all you've been

through, you poor dear. I know people do come in and out a good

deal--and it will be worse than ever when Pam is at home."

"Violet, you're very good to me. You're the only person who has seemed

at all to understand."

"My dear, I do understand. Really, I think I do. It's just as you

say--you made a mistake when you were very young--_much_ too young to be

allowed to take such a step, in my opinion--and you're suffering the

most bitter consequences. But no one in their senses could blame you,

either for going into that wretched place, or--still less--for coming

out of it."

"One is always blamed by some one, I think, for every mistake. People

would rather forgive one for murder, than for making a fool of oneself."

"Forgiveness," said Violet thoughtfully. "It's rather an overrated

virtue, in my opinion. I don't think it ought to be very hard to forgive

any one one loved, anything."

"Would _you_ forgive anything, Violet?"

"I think so," said Violet, looking rather surprised. "Unless I were

deliberately deceived by some one whom I trusted. That's different. Of

course, one might perhaps forgive even then in a way--but it wouldn't be

the same thing again, ever."

"No," said Alex. "No, of course not. Every one feels the same about

deceit."

In the depths of her own consciousness, Alex was groping dimly after

some other standard--some elusive certainty, that continually evaded

her. Were not those things which were hardest to forgive, the most in

need of forgiveness?

Alex, with the self-distrust engrained in the unstable, wondered if that

question were not born of the fundamental weakness in her own character,

which had led her all her life to evade or pervert the truth in a

passionate fear lest it should alienate from her the love and confidence

that she craved for from others.

Sometimes she thought, "Violet will find me out, and then she will stop

being fond of me."

And, knowing that her claim on Violet's compassion was the strongest

link that she could forge between them, she would dilate upon the mental

and physical misery of the last two years, telling herself all the time

that she was trading on her sister's pity.

Her days in Clevedon Square were singularly empty, after Violet had

tried the experiment of taking Alex about with her to the houses of one

or two old friends, and Alex had come back trembling and nearly crying,

and begging never to go again.

Her nerves were still utterly undependable, and her health had suffered

no less than her appearance. Violet would have taken her to see a

doctor, but Alex dreaded the questions that he would, of necessity, put

to her, and Cedric, who distrusted inherently the practice of any

science of which he himself knew nothing, declared that rest and good

food would be her best physicians.

Sometimes she went to see Barbara at Hampstead, but seldom willingly.

One of her visits there was the occasion for a stupid, childish lie, of

which the remembrance made her miserable.

Alex, amongst other unpractical disabilities, was as entirely devoid as

it is possible to be of any sense of direction. She had never known how

to find her way about, and would turn as blindly and instinctively in

the wrong direction as a Dartmoor pony turns tail to the wind.

For ten years she had never been outside the walls of the convent alone,

and when she had lived in London as a girl, she could not remember ever

having been out-of-doors by herself.

Violet, always driven everywhere in her own motor, and accustomed to

Pamela's modern resourcefulness and independence, never took so childish

an inability into serious consideration.

"Alex, dear, Barbara hoped you'd go down to her this afternoon. Will you

do that, or come to Ranelagh? The only thing is, if you wouldn't mind

going to Hampstead in a taxi? I shall have to use the Mercédès, and the

little car is being cleaned."

"Of course, I shouldn't mind. I'll go to Barbara, I think."

"Just whichever you like best. And you'll be back early, won't you?

because we're dining at seven, and you know how ridiculous Cedric is

about punctuality and the servants, and all that sort of thing."

After Violet had gone, in all her soft, elaborate laces and

flower-wreathed hat, Alex, with every instinct of her convent training

set against the extravagance of a taxi, started out on foot, rejoicing

that a sunny July day should give her the opportunity of enjoying

Pamela's boasted delight, the top of an omnibus.

She took the wrong one, discovered her mistake too late, and spent most

of the afternoon in bewilderedly retracing her own footsteps. Finally

she found a taxi, and arrived at Downshire Hill very tired, and after

five o'clock.

Barbara was shocked, as Alex had known she would be, at the taxi.

"Violet is so inconsiderate. Because she can afford taxis as a matter of

course herself, she never thinks that other people can't. I know myself

how every shilling mounts up. I'll see you into an omnibus when you go,

Alex. It takes just under an hour, and you need only change once."

But that change took place at the junction of four roads, all of them

seething with traffic.

And again Alex was hopelessly at sea, and boarded at last an omnibus

that conveyed her swiftly in the wrong direction.

She was late for dinner, and when Cedric inquired, with his assumption

of the householder whose domestic routine has been flung out of gear,

what had delayed her, she stammered and said that Barbara had kept

her--she hadn't let her start early enough--had mistaken the time.

It was just such a lie as a child might have told in the fear of

ridicule or blame, and she told it badly as a child might have told it,

stammering, with a frightened widening of her eyes, so that even

easy-going Violet looked momentarily puzzled.

Alex despised and hated herself.

She knew vaguely that her sense of proportion was disorganized. She was

a woman of thirty-one, and her faults, her judgments and appreciations,

even her mistakes, were those of an ill-regulated, unbalanced child of

morbid tendencies.

When Pamela came back to Clevedon Square, Alex was first of all afraid

of her, and then became jealous of her.

She was jealous of Pam's self-confidence, of her enormous security in

her own popularity and success, jealous even of the innumerable common

interests and the mutual love of enjoyment that bound her and Violet

together.

She was miserably ashamed of her feelings, and sought to conceal them,

none the less as she became aware of a certain shrewdness of judgment

underlying all Pamela's breezy vitality and _joie de vivre_. She and her

sister had nothing in common.

To Pamela, Alex evidently appeared far removed from herself as a being

of another generation, less of a contemporary than pretty, sought-after

Violet, or than little Rosemary in her joyous, healthy play. Pamela

could accompany Violet everywhere, always radiantly enjoying herself,

and receiving endless congratulations, thinly disguised as raillery, on

her universal popularity and the charm that she seemed to radiate at

will. She could play whole-heartedly with Rosemary, thoroughly enjoying

a romp for its own sake, and making even Cedric laugh at her complete

_abandon_.

"Don't you like children?" Pamela asked Alex, looking up from the

nursery floor where she was playing with her niece.

"Yes, I like them," said Alex sombrely.

She had been reflecting bitterly that she would have known how to play

with a baby of her own. But with Pamela and the nurse in the room, she

was afraid of picking up Rosemary and making a fuss with her as Pam was

doing, afraid with the terrible insecurity of the self-conscious.

And she never would have babies of her own now. The thought had

tormented her often of late, watching Violet with her child, and Pamela

with her own radiantly-secure future that would hold home and happiness

as her rights.

But Alex concealed her thoughts, even, as far as possible, from herself.

The married woman who is denied children may lament her deprivation and

receive compassion, but the spinster whose lot forbids her the hope,

must either conceal her regrets or know herself to be accounted morbid

and indelicate.

"I like babies while they're small," Pam remarked. "Don't I, you little

horror of a niece? Other people's, you know. I don't know that I should

want any of my own--they're all very well when they're tiny, but I can't

bear them at the tell-me-a-story stage. I make it a rule never to tell

the children stories at the houses where I stay. I always say, the very

first evening, that I don't know any. Then they know what to expect.

Some girls let themselves be regularly victimized, if they want to

please the children's mother, and get asked again. I must say I do hate

that sort of thing myself, and I don't believe it really does any good.

Men are generally frightfully bored by the sort of girl who's 'perfectly

wonderful with children.' They'd much rather have one who can play

tennis, or who's good at bridge."

Pamela laughed comfortably at her own cynicism. "I must say I do think

it pays one to be honest in the long run. I always say exactly what I

feel myself, and don't care what any one thinks of me."

Alex felt a dull anger at her sister's self-complacent statement of what

she knew to be the truth. Pamela could afford to be frank, and her boast

seemed to Alex to cast an oblique reflection on herself. She gazed at

her without speaking, wretchedly conscious of her own unreason.

"Look at Aunt Alex, Baby!" mischievously exclaimed Pam in a loud

whisper. "We're rather afraid of her when she pulls a long face like

that, aren't we? Have we been naughty, do you think?"

Alex tried to laugh, contorting her lips stiffly. Pamela jumped up from

the floor.

"Really and truly, you know, Alex," she gravely told her sister, "you

ought to try and make things less _au grand sérieux_. I think you'd be

much happier, if you'd only cultivate a sense of humour--we all think

so."

Then she ran out of the room.

Alex sat still.

So they all thought that she ought to cultivate a sense of humour. She

felt herself to be ridiculous in their eyes, with her eternal air of

tragedy, her sombre despair in the midst of their gay, good-humoured

conventions, that admitted of everything except of weighty, unseasonable

gloom.

Pamela's spontaneous and unwearied high spirits seemed to her to throw

her own dejection into greater relief; her own utter social

incompetence.

She began to long for the end of July, when the household in Clevedon

Square would be dispersed for the remainder of the summer.

Pamela talked incessantly of a yachting invitation which she had

received for August, and spoke of the difficulty of "sandwiching in"

country-house visits for autumn shooting-parties, and Alex knew that

Violet's people were taking a house in Scotland, and wanted her and

Cedric and the baby to make it their headquarters. She wondered, with a

sense of impending crisis, what would happen to her.

At last Cedric said to her:

"Have you any particular plans for August, Alex? I want to get Violet up

north as soon as possible, she's done so much rushing about lately. I

wish you could come with us, my dear, but we're going to the

Temples'--that's the worst of not having a place of one's own in the

country--"

"Oh," said Alex faintly, "don't bother about me, Cedric. I shall find

somewhere."

He looked dissatisfied, but said only:

"Well, you'll talk it over with Violet. I know she's been vexed at

seeing so little of you lately, but Pamela's an exacting young woman,

and chaperoning her is no joke. I wish she'd hurry up and get

settled--all this rushing about is too much for Violet."

"I thought she liked it."

"So she does. Anyhow," said Cedric, with an odd, shy laugh, "she'd like

anything that pleased somebody else. She's made like that. I've never

known her anything but happy--like sunshine." Then he flung a

half-smoked cigarette into the fireplace, looked awkward at his own

unusual expression of feeling, and abruptly asked Alex if she'd seen the

newspaper.

Alex crept away, wondering why happiness should be accounted a virtue.

She loved Violet with a jealous, exclusive affection and admiration, but

she thought enviously that she, too, could have been like sunshine if

she had received all that Violet received. She, too, would have liked to

be always happy.

She had her talk with Violet.

There was the slightest shade of wistfulness in Violet's gentleness.

"I wish we'd made you happier, but I really believe quiet is what you

want most, and things aren't ever very quiet here--especially with Pam.

I simply love having her, but I'm not sure she is the best person for

you, just now."

"I don't feel I know her very well. I mean, I'm not at all at home with

her. She makes me realize what a stranger I am to the younger ones,

after all these years."

"Poor Alex!"

"You're much more like my sister than she is, and yet a year ago I

didn't know you."

"Alex, dear, I'm so glad if I'm a comfort to you--but I wish you

wouldn't speak in that bitter way about poor little Pamela. It seems so

unnatural."

Violet's whole healthy instinct was always, Alex had already discovered,

to tend towards the normal--the outlook of well-balanced sanity. She was

instinctively distressed by abnormality of any kind.

"I didn't really mean it," said Alex hurriedly, with the old fatal

instinct of propitiation, and read dissent into the silence that

received her announcement.

It was the subconscious hope of rectifying herself in Violet's eyes that

made her add a moment later:

"Couldn't Barbara have me for a little while when you go up to Scotland?

I think she would be quite glad."

"Of course she would. She's often lonely, isn't she? And you think you'd

be happy with her?"

"Oh, yes," said Alex eagerly, bent on showing Violet that she had no

unnatural aversion from being with her own sister.

But Violet still looked rather troubled.

"You remember that you found it rather difficult there, when you first

got back. You said then that Barbara and you had never understood one

another even as children."

"Oh, but that will all be different now," said Alex, confused, and

knowing that her manner was giving an impression of shiftiness from her

very consciousness that she was contradicting herself.

As Pamela's claims and her own ceaseless fear of inadequacy made her

increasingly unsure of Violet, Alex became less and less at ease with

her.

The old familiar fear of being disbelieved gave uncertainty to every

word she uttered and she could not afford to laugh at Pam's merciless

amusement in pointing out the number of times that she contradicted

herself. Violet always hushed Pamela, but she looked puzzled and rather

distressed, and her manner towards Alex was more compassionate than

ever.

Alex, with the impetuous unwisdom of the weak, one day forced an issue.

"Violet, do you trust me?"

"My dear child, what _do_ you mean? Why shouldn't I trust you? Are you

thinking of stealing my pearls?"

But Alex could not smile.

"Do you believe everything that I say?"

Violet looked at her and asked very gently:

"What makes you ask, Alex? You're not unhappy about the nonsense that

child Pamela sometimes talks, are you?"

"No, not exactly. It's--it's just everything...." Alex looked miserable,

tongue-tied.

"Oh, Alex, do try and take things more lightly. You make yourself so

unhappy, poor child, with all this self-torment. Can't you take things

as they come, more?"

The counsel found unavailing echo in Alex' own mind. She knew that her

mental outlook was wrenched out of all gear, and she knew also, in some

dim, undefined way, that a worn-out physical frame was responsible for

much of her self-inflicted torment of mind. Sometimes she wondered

whether the impending solution to her whole destiny, still hanging over

her, would find her on the far side of the abyss which separates the

normal from the insane.

The days slipped by, and then, just before the general dispersal, Pamela

suddenly announced her engagement to Lord Richard Gunvale, the youngest

and by far the wealthiest of her many suitors.

"Oh, Pam, Pam!" cried Violet, laughing, "why couldn't you wait till

after we'd left town?"

But every one was delighted, and congratulations and letters and

presents and telegrams poured in.

Pamela declared that she would not be married until the winter, and

refused to break her yachting engagement. She was more popular than ever

now, and every one laughed at her delightful originality and gazed at

the magnificence of the emerald and diamond ring on her left hand.

And Alex began to hope faintly that perhaps when Pamela was married,

things might be different at Clevedon Square.

Then one night, just before she was to go to Hampstead, she overheard a

conversation between Cedric and his wife.

She was on the stairs in the dark, and they were in the lighted hall

below, and from the first instant that Cedric spoke, Alex lost all sense

of what she was doing, and listened.

"...they're wearing you out, Pam and Alex between them. I won't have any

more of it, I tell you."

"No, no, my dear old goose. Of course they're not." Violet's soft

laughter came up to Alex' ears with a muffled sound, as though her head

were resting against Cedric's shoulder. "Anyhow, it isn't Pam--I'm

_delighted_ about her, of course. Only Alex--I wish she was happier!"

"And why isn't she? You're a perfect angel to her," said Cedric

resentfully.

"I'm so _sorry_ for her--only it's difficult sometimes--a feeling like

shifting sands. One doesn't know what to be _at_ with her. If only she

said what she wanted or didn't want, right out, but it's that awful

anxiety to please--poor darling."

"She always was like that, from our nursery days. You never could get

the rights of a matter out of her--plain black or white--she'd say one

thing one day and another the next, always."

"That's what I find so difficult! It's impossible to do anything for a

person like that--it's the one thing I _can't_ understand."

"Pack her off to Hampstead tomorrow," Cedric observed gruffly. "I _will_

not have you bothered."

"Oh, Cedric! I'm not bothered--how can you? She'll be going next week,

anyway, poor dear, and it may be easier for her to be herself with

Barbara, who's her own sister, after all. But I don't know what about

afterwards--when we get back."

"You'll have quite enough to think about with Pam's wedding, without

Alex on your hands as well. Violet," said Cedric, with a note in his

voice that Alex had never heard there, "when I think of the way you've

behaved to all my wretched family--"

Alex did not hear Violet's answer, which was very softly spoken.

She had turned and gone away upstairs in the dark.

XXVI

August

Was it, after all, only for Cedric's sake that Violet had kept her at

Clevedon Square--had shown her such heavenly kindness and gentleness?

Alex asked herself the question all night long in utter misery of

spirit. She had craved all her life for an exclusive, personal

affection, and had been mocked with counterfeit again and again. She

knew now that it was only in despair at such cheating of fate that she

had flung herself rashly to the opposite end of the scale, and sought to

embrace a life that purported detachment from all earthly ties.

"_I will have all or none_" had been the inward cry of her bruised

spirit.

Fate had taken her at her word, this time, and she had not been strong

enough to endure, and had fled, cowering, from the consequence of her

own act.

Tortured, distraught, with self-confidence shattered to the earth, she

had turned once again, with hands that trembled as they pleaded, to ask

comfort of human love and companionship. Violet had not condemned her,

had pitied her, and had shown her untiring sympathy and affection--for

love of Cedric.

Alex rose haggard, in the morning. She wanted to be alone. The thought

of going to Barbara in Hampstead had become unendurable to her.

It was with a curious sense of inevitability that she found a letter

from Barbara asking her if she could put off her visit for the present.

The admirable Ada had developed measles.

"Good Lord, can't they send her to a hospital?" exclaimed Cedric, with

the irritability of a practical man who finds his well-ordered and

practical plans thrown out of gear by some eminently unpractical

intervention on the part of Providence.

"I'm sure Barbara never would," said Violet, laughing. "Poor dear, I

hope she won't catch it herself. It'll mean having the house

disinfected, too--what a nuisance for her. But, Alex, dear, you must

come with us! I'll send a wire today--mother will be perfectly

delighted."

"Couldn't I stay here?" asked Alex.

Cedric explained that the house would be partially shut up, with only

two of the servants left.

"I shouldn't give any trouble--I'd so much rather," Alex urged,

unusually persistent.

"My dear, it's out of the question. Not a soul in London--you forget

it's August."

"But, Cedric," said Violet, "I don't see why she shouldn't do as she

likes. It will be only till Barbara can have her, after all--I suppose

Ada will be moved as soon as she's better, and the disinfecting can't

take so very long. If she wants to stay here?"

"I do," said Alex, with sudden boldness.

"You don't think you'll be lonely?"

"No, no."

"After all," Violet considered, "it will be very good for Ellen and the

tweeny to have somebody to wait upon. I never do like leaving them here

on enormous board wages, to do nothing at all--though Cedric _will_

think it's the proper thing to do, because his father did it."

She laughed, and Cedric said, with an air of concession:

"Well, just till Barbara can take you in, perhaps--if you think London

won't be unbearable. But mind you, Alex, the minute you get tired of it,

or feel the heat too much for you, you're to make other arrangements."

Alex wondered dully what other arrangements Cedric supposed that she

could make. She had no money, and had never even roused herself to write

the letter he had recommended, asking to have her half-yearly allowance

sent to her own address and not to that of the Superior of the convent.

But on the day before Cedric and Violet, with Violet's maid, and

Rosemary, and her nurse, and her pram, all took their departure, Cedric

called Alex into the study.

She went to him feeling oddly as though she was the little girl again,

who had, on rare occasions, been sent for by Sir Francis, and had found

him standing just so, his back to the fireplace, spectacles in hand,

speaking in just the same measured, rather regretful tones of

kindliness.

"Alex, I've made out two cheques--one to cover the servants' board wages,

which I thought you would be good enough to give them at the end of the

month, and one for your own living expenses. You'd better cash that at

once, in case you want any ready money. Have you anywhere to keep it

under lock and key?"

Cedric, no more than Sir Francis, trusted to a woman's discretion in

matters of money.

"Yes, there's the drawer of the writing-table in my bedroom."

"That will be all right, then. The servants are perfectly trustworthy,

no doubt, but loose cash should never be left about in any case--if you

want more, write to me. And, Alex, I've seen old Pumphrey--father's man

of business. He will see that you get your fifty pounds. Here is the

first instalment."

Cedric gravely handed her a third cheque.

"Have you a banking account?"

"I don't think so."

"Then I'll arrange to open one for you at my bank today. You'd better

deposit this at once, hadn't you--unless you want anything?"

"No," faltered Alex, not altogether understanding.

"You will have no expenses while you're here, of course," said Cedric,

rather embarrassed. Alex looked bewildered. It had never occurred to her

to suggest paying for her own keep while she remained alone at Clevedon

Square. She gave back to her brother the cheque for twenty-five pounds,

and received his assurance that it would be banked in her name that

afternoon.

"They will send you a cheque-book, and you can draw out any small sum

you may need later on."

"I don't think I shall need any," said Alex, looking at the other two

cheques he had given her, made payable to herself, and thinking what a

lot of money they represented.

"You will have a thorough rest and change with Barbara," Cedric said,

still looking at her rather uneasily. "Then, when we meet again in

October, it will be time enough--"

He did not say what for, and Alex remembered the conversation that she

had overheard on the stair. With a feeling of cunning, she was conscious

of her own determination to take the initiative out of his hands,

without his knowledge.

They did not want her, and they would want her less than ever, with all

the approaching business connected with Pamela's wedding in December.

Barbara did not want her, self-absorbed, and unwearingly considering how

to cut down more and yet more expenses.

Alex had made up her mind to go and live alone. She would prove to them

that she could do it, though they thought fifty pounds a year was so

little money. She thought vaguely that perhaps she could earn something.

But she gave no hint of her plans to any one, knowing that Violet would

be remonstrant and Cedric derisive.

Obsessed by this new idea, she said good-bye to them with a sort of

furtive eagerness, and found herself alone in the house in Clevedon

Square.

At first the quiet and the solitude were pleasant to her. She crept

round the big, empty house like a spirit, feeling as though it presented

a more familiar aspect with its shrouded furniture and carefully shaded

windows, and the absence of most of Violet's expensive silver and china

ornaments. The library, which was always kept open for her, was one of

the least changed rooms in the house, and she spent hours crouched upon

the sofa there, only rousing herself to go to the solitary meals which

were punctiliously laid out for her in the big dining-room.

Presently she began to wonder if the elderly upper-housemaid, Ellen,

left in charge, resented her being there. She supposed that the presence

of some one who never went out, for whom meals had to be provided, who

must be called in the morning and supplied with hot water four times a

day, would interfere with the liberty of Ellen and the unseen tweeny

who, no doubt, cooked for them. They would be glad when she went away.

Never mind, she would go very soon. Alex felt that she was only waiting

for something to happen which should give her the necessary impetus to

carry out her vague design of finding a new, independent foothold for

herself.

A drowsy week of very hot weather slipped by, and then one morning Alex

received three letters.

Cedric's, short but affectionate, told her that Violet had reached

Scotland tired out, and had been ordered by the doctor to undergo

something as nearly approaching a rest-cure as possible. She was to stay

in bed all the morning, sit in the garden when it was fine, and do

nothing. She was to write no letters, but she sent Alex her love and

looked forward to hearing from her. Cedric added briefly that Alex was

not to be at all anxious. Violet only needed quiet and country air, and

no worries. She was looking better already.

Alex put the letter down reflectively. Evidently Cedric did not want his

wife disturbed by depressing correspondence, and she did not mean to

write to Violet of her new resolution. She even thought that perhaps she

would continue to let Violet believe her at Clevedon Square or with

Barbara.

Her second letter was from Barbara. It was quite a long letter, and said

that Barbara had decided to leave Ada at a convalescent home and take

her own much-needed summer holiday abroad. Would Alex join her in a

week's time?

"What do you think of some little, cheap seaside hole in Brittany, which

we could do for very little? I wish I could have you as my guest, dear,

but you'll understand that all the disinfecting of the house has cost

money, besides forcing me to go away, which I hadn't meant to do.

However, I'm sure I need the change, and I dare say it won't do you any

harm either. We ought to do the whole thing for about fifteen pounds

each, I think, which, I suppose, will be all right for you? Do ring me

up tonight, and let's exchange views. I shan't be free of a suspicion as

to these wretched measles till next week, but I don't think really

there's much danger, as I've had them already and am not in the least

nervous. Ring up between seven and eight tonight. I suppose Violet, as

usual, has kept on the telephone, even though they're away themselves?"

Alex knew that she did not want to go abroad with Barbara. She nervously

picked up her third letter, which bore a foreign post-mark. When she had

read the sheet of thin paper which was all the envelope contained, she

sat for a long while staring at it.

The nuns in Rome, with whom she had spent the few weeks previous to her

return to England, had sent in their account for her board and lodging,

for the few clothes she had purchased, and for the advance made her for

her travelling expenses. The sum total, in francs, looked enormous.

At last Alex, trembling, managed to arrive at the approximate amount in

English money.

Twenty pounds.

It seemed to her exorbitant, and she realized, with fresh dismay, that

she had never taken such a debt into consideration at all. How could she

tell Cedric?

She thought how angry he would be at her strange omission in never

mentioning it to him before, and how impossible it would be to explain

to him that she had, as usual, left all practical issues out of account.

Suddenly Alex remembered with enormous relief that twenty-five pounds

lay to her credit at the bank. She had received her new cheque-book only

two days ago. She would go to the bank today and make them show her how

she could send the money to Italy.

Then Cedric and Violet need never know. They need never blame her.

Full of relief, Alex took the cheque-book that morning to the bank. She

did not like having to display her ignorance, but she showed the bill to

the clerk, who was civil and helpful, and showed her how very simple a

matter it was to draw a cheque for twenty pounds odd. When it was done,

and safely posted, Alex trembled with thankfulness. It seemed to her

that it would have been a terrible thing for Cedric to know of the

expenses she had so ignorantly incurred, and of her incredible

simplicity in never having realized them before, and she was glad that

he need never know how almost the whole of her half-year's allowance of

money had vanished so soon after she had received it.

She telephoned to Barbara that night, and said that she could not go

abroad with her.

"Oh, very well, my dear, if you think it wiser not. Of course, if you

don't _mind_ London at this time of year, it's a tremendous economy to

stay where you are.... Are the servants looking after you properly?"

"Oh, yes."

"Well, do just as you like, of course. I think I shall get hold of some

friend to join forces with me, if you're sure you won't come...."

"Quite sure, Barbara," said Alex tremulously. She felt less afraid of

her sister at the other end of the telephone.

She went and saw Barbara off the following week, and Barbara said

carelessly:

"Good-bye, Alex. You look a shade better, I think. On the whole you're

wiser to stay where you are--I'm sure you need quiet, and when once the

rush begins for Pam's wedding, you'll never get a minute's peace. Are

you staying on when they get back?"

"I'm not sure," faltered Alex.

"You may be wise. Well, come down to my part of the world if you want

economy--and to feel as though you were out of London. Good-bye, dear."

Alex was surprised, and rather consoled, to hear Barbara alluding so

lightly to the possibility of her seeking fresh quarters for herself.

Perhaps, after all, they all thought it would be the best thing for her

to do. Perhaps there was no need to feel guilty and as though her

intentions must be concealed.

But Alex, dreading blame or disapproval, or even assurances that the

scheme was unpractical and foolish, continued to conceal it.

She wrote and told Violet that she had decided that it would be too

expensive to go abroad with Barbara. Might she stay on in Clevedon

Square for a little while?

But she had secretly made up her mind to go and look for rooms or a

boarding-house in Hampstead, as Barbara had suggested. As usual, it was

only by chance that Alex realized the practical difficulties blocking

her way.

She had now only five pounds.

On the following Saturday afternoon she found her way out by omnibus to

Hampstead. She alighted before the terminus was reached, from a nervous

dread of being taken on too far, although the streets in which she found

herself were not prepossessing.

For the first time Alex reflected that she had no definite idea as to

where she wanted to go in her search for lodgings. She walked timidly

along the road, which appeared to be interminably long and full of

second-hand furniture shops. Bamboo tables, and armchairs with defective

castors, were put out on the pavement in many instances, and there was

often a small crowd in front of the window gazing at the cheaply-framed

coloured supplements hung up within. The pavements and the road, even

the tram-lines, swarmed with untidy, clamouring children.

Alex supposed that she must be in the region vaguely known to her as the

slums.

Surely she could not live here?

Then the recollection of her solitary five pounds came to her with a

pang of alarm.

Of course, she must live wherever she could do so most cheaply. She had

no idea of what it would cost.

It was very hot, and the pavement began to burn her feet. She did not

dare to leave the main road, fearing that she should never find her way

to the 'bus route again, if once she left it, but she peeped down one or

two side-streets. They seemed quieter than Malden Road, but the

unpretentious little grey houses did not look as though lodgers were

expected in any of them. Alex wondered desperately how she was to find

out.

Presently she saw a policeman on the further side of the street.

She went up to him and asked:

"Can you tell me of anywhere near here where they let rooms--somewhere

cheap?"

The man looked down at her white, exhausted face, and at the well-cut

coat and skirt chosen by Barbara, which yet hung loosely and badly on

her stooping, shrunken figure.

"Somebody's poor relation," was his unspoken comment.

"Is it for yourself, Miss? You'd hardly care to be in this

neighbourhood, would you?"

"I want to be somewhere near Hampstead--and somewhere very, very cheap,"

Alex faltered, thinking of her five pounds, which lay at that moment in

the purse she was clasping.

"Well, you'll find as cheap here as anywhere, if you don't mind the

noise."

"Oh, no," said Alex--who had never slept within the sound of

traffic--surprised.

"Then if I was you, Miss, I'd try No. 252 Malden Road--just beyond the

_Gipsy Queen_, that is, or else two doors further up. I saw cards up in

both windows with 'apartments' inside the last week."

"Thank you," said Alex.

She wished that Malden Road had looked more like Downshire Hill, which

had trees and little tiny gardens in front of the houses, which almost

all resembled country cottages. But no doubt houses in Downshire Hill

did not let rooms, or if so they must be too expensive. Besides, Alex

felt almost sure that Barbara would not want her as a very near

neighbour.

She was very tired when she reached No. 252, and almost felt that she

would take the rooms, whatever they were like, to save herself further

search. After all, she could change later on, if she did not like them.

Like all weak people, Alex felt the urgent necessity of acting as

quickly as possible on her own impulses.

She looked distastefully at the dingy house, with its paint cracking

into hard flakes, and raised the knocker slowly. A jagged end of

protruding wire at the side of the door proclaimed that the bell was

broken.

Her timid knock was answered by a slatternly-looking young woman wearing

an apron, whom Alex took to be the servant.

"Can I see the--the landlady?"

"Is it about a room? I'm Mrs. 'Oxton." She spoke in the harshest

possible Cockney, but quite pleasantly.

"Oh," said Alex, still uncertain. "Yes, I want rooms, please."

The woman looked her swiftly up and down. "Only one bed-sittin'-room

vacant, Miss, and that's at the top of the 'ouse. Would you care to see

that?"

"Yes, please."

Mrs. Hoxton slammed the door and preceded Alex up a narrow staircase,

carpeted with oil-cloth. On the third floor she threw open the door of a

room considerably smaller than the bath-room at Clevedon Square,

containing a low iron bed, and an iron tripod bearing an enamel basin, a

chipped pitcher and a very small towel-rail. A looking-glass framed in

mottled yellow plush was hung crookedly on the wall, and beneath it

stood a wooden kitchen chair. There was a little table with two drawers

in it behind the door.

Alex looked round her with bewilderment. A convent cell was no smaller

than this, and presented a greater aspect of space from its bareness.

"Is there a sitting-room?" she inquired.

"Not separate to this--no, Miss. Bed-sitting-room, this is called.

Small, but then I suppose you'd be out all day."

For a moment Alex wondered why.

"But meals?" she asked feebly.

"Would it be more than just the breakfast and supper, and three meals on

Sunday?"

Alex did not know what to answer, and Mrs. Hoxton surveyed her.

"Where are you working, Miss? Anywhere near?"

"I'm not working anywhere--yet."

Mrs. Hoxton's manner changed a little.

"If you want two rooms, Miss, and full board, I could accommodate you

downstairs. The price is according, of course--a week in advance, and

pay by the week."

Alex followed the woman downstairs again. She was sure that this was not

the kind of place where she wanted to live.

Mrs. Hoxton showed her into a larger bedroom on the first floor, just

opening the door and giving Alex a glimpse of extreme untidiness and an

unmade bed.

"My gentleman got up late today--he don't go to 'is job Saturdays, so I

'aven't put the room to rights yet. But it's a nice room, Miss, and will

be vacant on Monday. It goes with the downstairs sitting-room in the

front, as a rule, but that's 'ad to be turned into a bedroom just

lately. I've been so crowded."

"Will that be empty on Monday, too?" asked Alex, for the sake of

answering something.

"Tonight, Miss. I let a coloured gentleman 'ave it--a student, you know;

a thing I've never done before, either. Other people don't like it, and

it gives a name, like, for not being particular who one takes. So he's

going, and I shan't be sorry. I don't 'old with making talk, and it

isn't as though the room wouldn't let easy. It's a beautiful room,

Miss."

The coloured gentleman's room was tidier than the one upstairs, but a

haze of stale tobacco fumes hung round it and obscured Alex' view of a

short leather sofa with horsehair breaking from it in patches, a small

round table in the middle of the room, and a tightly-closed window

looking on to the traffic of Malden Road.

"About terms, Miss," Mrs. Hoxton began suggestively in the passage.

"Oh, I couldn't afford much," Alex began, thinking that it was more

difficult than she had supposed to walk out again saying that she did

not, after all, want the rooms.

"I'd let you 'ave those two rooms, and full board, for two-ten a week!"

cried the landlady.

"Oh, I don't think--"

Mrs. Hoxton shrugged her shoulders, looked at the ceiling and said

resignedly:

"Then I suppose we must call it two guineas, though I ought to ask

double. But you can come in right away on Monday, Miss, and I think

you'll find it all comfortable."

"But--" said Alex faintly.

She felt very tired, and the thought of a further search for lodgings

wearied her and almost frightened her. Besides, the policeman had told

her that this was a cheap neighbourhood. Perhaps anywhere else they

would charge much more. Finally she temporized feebly with the

reflection that it need only be for a week--once the step of leaving

Clevedon Square had been definitely taken, she could feel herself free

to find a more congenial habitation at her leisure, and when she might

feel less desperately tired. She sighed, as she followed the line of

least resistance.

"Well, I'll come on Monday, then."

"Yes, Miss," the landlady answered promptly. "May I have your name,

Miss?--and the first week in advance my rule, as I think I mentioned."

"My name is Miss Clare."

Alex took two sovereigns and two shillings, fumbling, out of her purse

and handed them to the woman. It did not occur to her to ask for any

form of receipt.

"Will you be wanting anything on Monday, Miss?"

Alex looked uncomprehending, and the woman eyed her with scarcely veiled

contempt and added, "Supper, or anything?"

"Oh--yes. I'd better come in time for dinner--for supper, I mean."

"Yes, Miss. Seven o'clock will do you, I suppose?"

Alex thought it sounded very early, but she did not feel that she cared

at all, and said that seven would do quite well.

She wondered if there were any questions which she ought to ask, but

could think of none, and she was rather afraid of the strident-voiced,

hard-faced woman.

But Mrs. Hoxton seemed to be quite satisfied, and pulled open the door

as though it was obvious that the interview had come to an end.

"Good afternoon," said Alex.

"Afternoon," answered the landlady, as she slammed the door again,

almost before Alex was on the pavement of Malden Road. She went away

with a strangely sinking heart. To what had she committed herself?

All the arguments which Alex had been brooding over seemed to crumble

away from her now that she had taken definite action.

She repeated to herself again that Violet and Cedric did not want her,

that Barbara did not want her, that there was no place for her anywhere,

and that it was best for her to make her own arrangements and spare them

all the necessity of viewing her in the light of a problem.

But what would Cedric say to Malden Road? Inwardly Alex resolved that he

must never come there. If she said "Hampstead" he would think that she

was somewhere close to Barbara's pretty little house.

But Barbara?

Alex sank, utterly jaded, into the vacant space in a crowded omnibus. It

was full outside, and the atmosphere of heat and humanity inside made

her feel giddy. Arguments, self-justification and sick apprehensions,

surged in chaotic bewilderment through her mind.

XXVII

The Embezzlement

Alex, full of unreasoning panic, made her move to Malden Road.

She was afraid of the servants in Clevedon Square, all of them new since

she had left England, and only told Ellen, with ill-concealed confusion,

that she was leaving London for the present. She was unaccountably

relieved when Ellen only said, impassively, "Very good, Miss," and

packed her slender belongings without comment or question.

Suddenly she remembered the cheque which Cedric had given her for the

servants. She looked at it doubtfully. Her own money was already almost

exhausted, thanks to that unexpected claim from the convent in Rome, and

Alex supposed that the sum still in her purse, amounting to rather less

than three pounds, would only last her for about a fortnight in Malden

Road. She decided, with no sense of doubt, that she had better keep

Cedric's cheque. It was only a little sum to him, and he would send

money for the servants. He had said that he was ready to advance money

to his sister. Characteristically, Alex dismissed the matter from her

mind as unimportant. She had never learnt any accepted code in dealings

with money, and her own instinct led her to believe it an unessential

question. She judged only from her own feelings, which would have

remained quite unstirred by any emotions but those the most

matter-of-fact at any claim, direct or indirect, justifiable or not,

upon her purse.

She had never learnt the rudiments of pride, or of straight-dealing in

questions of finance. But in Malden Road Alex was, after all, to learn

many things.

There were material considerations equally unknown to Clevedon Square

and to the austere but systematic doling-out of convent necessities,

which were brought home to her with a startled sense of dismay from her

first evening at 252. She had never thought of bringing soap with her,

or boxes of matches, yet these commodities did not appear as a matter of

course, as they had always done elsewhere. There was gas in both the

rooms, but there were no candles. There was no hot water.

"You can boil your own kettle on the gas-ring on the landing," Mrs.

Hoxton said indifferently, and left her new lodger to the realization

that the purchase of a kettle had never occurred to her at all.

Buying the kettle, and a supply of candles and matches and soap, left

her with only just enough money in hand for her second week's rent, and

when she wanted notepaper and ink and stamps to write to Barbara, Alex

decided that she must appropriate Cedric's cheque for the servants'

wages to her own uses. She felt hardly any qualms.

This wasn't like that bill from Rome, which she would have been afraid

to let him see. He would have talked about the dishonesty of convents,

and asked why she had not told him sooner of their charges against her,

and have looked at her with that almost incredulous expression of amazed

disgust had she admitted her entire oblivion of the whole consideration.

But this cheque for the servants.

It would enable her to pay her own expenses until she could get the work

which she still vaguely anticipated, and the sum meant nothing to

Cedric. She would write and tell him that she had cashed the money, sure

that he would not mind, in fulfilment of his many requests to her to

look upon him as her banker.

But she did not write, though she cashed the cheque. The days slipped by

in a sort of monotonous discomfort, but it was very hot, and she learnt

to find her way to Hampstead Heath, where she could sit for hours, not

reading, for she had no books, but brooding in a sort of despairing

resignation over the past and the nightmare-seeming present. The

conviction remained with her ineradicably that the whole thing was a

dream--that she would wake up again to the London of the middle

'nineties and find herself a young girl again, healthy and eager, and

troubling Lady Isabel, and, more remotely, Sir Francis, with her modern

exigencies and demands to live her own life, the war-cry of those

clamorous 'eighties and 'nineties, of which the young new century had so

easily reaped the harvest. She could not bring herself to believe that

her own life had been lived, and that only this was left.

Alex sometimes felt that she was not alive at all--that she was only a

shade moving amongst the living, unable to get into real communication

with any of them.

She did not think of the future. There was no future for her. There was

only an irrevocable past and a sordid, yet dream-like present, that

clung round her spirit as a damp mist might have clung round her person,

intangible and yet penetrating and all-pervading, hampering and stifling

her.

The modicum of physical strength which she had regained in Clevedon

Square was ebbing imperceptibly from her. It was difficult to sleep very

well in Malden Road, where the trams and the omnibuses passed in

incessant, jerking succession, and the children screamed in the road

late at nights and incredibly early in the mornings. The food was

neither good nor well prepared, but Alex ate little in the heat, and

reflected that it was an economy not to be hungry.

The need for economy was being gradually borne in upon her, as her small

stock of money diminished and there came nothing to replace it.

Presently she exerted herself to find a registry office, where she gave

her name and address, and was contemptuously and suspiciously eyed by an

old lady with dyed red hair who sat at a writing-table, and asked her a

fee of half-a-crown for entering her name in a ledger.

"No diplomas and no certificate won't take you far in teaching

now-a-days," she said unpleasantly. "Languages?"

"French quite well and a little Italian. Enough to give conversation

lessons," Alex faltered.

"No demand for 'em whatever. I'll let you know, but don't expect

anything to turn up, especially at this time of year, with every one out

of town."

But by a miraculous stroke of fortune something did turn up. The woman

from the registry office sent Alex a laconic postcard, giving her the

address of "a lady singer in Camden Town" who was willing to pay two

shillings an hour in return for sufficient instruction in Italian to

enable her to sing Italian songs.

Elated, Alex looked out the conversation manual of her convent days, and

at three o'clock set out to find the address in Camden Town.

She discovered it with difficulty, and arrived late. The appointed hour

had been half-past three.

Shown into a small sitting-room, crowded with furniture and plastered

with signed photographs, she sank, breathless and heated, into a chair,

and waited.

The lady singer, when she came, was irate at the delay. Her manner

frightened Alex, who acquiesced in bewildered humiliation to a

stipulation that only half-fees must be charged for the curtailed hour.

She gave her lesson badly, imparting information with a hesitation that

even to her own ears sounded as though she were uncertain of her facts.

However, her pupil ungraciously drew out a shilling from a small

chain-purse and gave it to Alex when she left, and she bade her come

again in three days' time.

The lessons went on for three weeks. They tired Alex strangely, but she

felt glad that she could earn money, however little; and although the

shillings went almost at once in small necessities which she had somehow

never foreseen, it was not until the middle of September that she began

once more to reach the end of her resources.

Just as she had decided that it would be necessary for her to write to

Cedric, she received a letter from him, forwarded from her bank.

Alex turned white as she read it.

"MY DEAR ALEX,

"I am altogether at a loss to understand why Ellen (the

upper-housemaid at home) writes to Violet on Friday last, Sept. 12,

that you have left Clevedon Square, and that she and the other

servant have not yet received the money for their board and wages.

This last I take to be an oversight on your part, but you will

doubtless put it right at once, since you will remember that I

handed you a cheque for that purpose just before leaving London. As

to your own movements, I need hardly say, my dear Alex, that I do

not claim to have any sort of authority over them of whatever kind,

but both Violet and I cannot help feeling that it would have been

more friendly, to say the least of it, had you given us some hint

as to your intentions. Knowing that Barbara is already abroad, and

Pamela with her friends yachting, I can only hope that you have

received some unforeseen invitation which appealed to you more than

the prospect of solitude in Clevedon Square. It would have been

desirable had you left your address with the servants, but I

presume the matter escaped your memory, as they appear to be

completely in the dark as to your movements.

"Violet is looking quite herself again, and sends many affectionate

messages. She will doubtless write to you on receipt of a few lines

giving her your address. I am compelled to send this letter through

the care of Messrs. Williams, which you will agree with me is an

unnecessarily elaborate method of communication.

"Your affectionate brother,

"CEDRIC CLARE."

Alex was carried back through the years to the sense of remorse and

bewilderment with which she had listened to the measured, irrefutable

condemnations, expressed with the same unerring precision, of Sir

Francis Clare. She realized herself again, sick with crying and cold

with terror, standing shaking before his relentless justice, knowing

herself to be again, for ever and hopelessly, in the wrong. She would

never be anything else.

She knew it now.

Her sense of honour, of truth and justice, was perverted--in direct

disaccord with that of the world. What would her brother say to her

misuse of the money that he had entrusted to her? Alex knew now, with

sudden, terrifying certainty how he would view the transaction which had

seemed to her so simple an expedient. She knew that even were she able

to make the almost incredible plea of a sudden temptation, a desperate

need of money, that had led her voluntarily to commit an act of

dishonesty, it would stand her in better stead than a mere statement of

the terrible truth--that no voice within her had told her of dishonour,

that she had--outrageous paradox!--committed an act of dishonesty in

good faith.

To Cedric, the lack in her would seem so utterly perverted, so

incomprehensible, that there would appear to be no possibility of that

forgiveness which, as a Christian, he could consciously have extended to

any wilful breaking of the law. But there would be no question of

forgiveness for this. It was not the money, Alex knew that. It was her

own extraordinary moral deficiency that put her outside the pale.

Perhaps, thought Alex drearily, this was how criminals always felt. They

did the things for which they were punished because of some flaw in

their mental outlook--they didn't see that the things mattered, until it

was too late. They had to be saved from themselves by punishment or

removal, or sometimes by death; and for the protection of the rest of

the community, too, it was necessary to penalize those who could not or

would not conform to the standard. Alex saw it all.

But dimly, involuntarily almost, an echo from her childhood's days came

back to her, vaguely formulated into words:

"_Always take the part of the people in the wrong--they need it most._"

The only conviction to which she could lay claim was somehow embodied in

that sentiment.

XXVIII

Cedric

She wrote to Cedric, the sense of having put herself irrevocably in the

wrong by her own act making her explanation into an utterly bald,

lifeless statement of fact. She felt entirely unable to enter into any

analysis of her folly, and besides, it would have been of no use. Facts

were facts. She had taken Cedric's money, which he had given her for one

purpose, and used it for another. There had not even been any violent

struggle with temptation to palliate the act.

Alex felt a sort of dazed stupefaction at herself.

She was bad, she told herself, bad all through, and this was how bad

people felt. Sick with disappointment, and utterly unavailing remorse,

knowing all the time that there was no strength in them ever to resist

any temptation, however base.

She wondered if there was a hell, as the convent teaching had so

definitely told her. If so, Alex shudderingly contemplated her doom. But

she prayed desperately that there might be nothing after death but utter

oblivion. It was then that the thought of death first came to her, not

with the wild, impotent longing of her days of struggle, but with an

insidious suggestion of rest and escape.

She played with the idea, but for the most part her faculties were

absorbed in the increasing strain of waiting for Cedric's reply to her

confession.

It came in the shape of a telegram.

"Shall be in London Wednesday 24th. Will you lunch Clevedon Square 1.30.

Reply paid."

Alex felt an unreasonable relief, both at the postponement of an

immediate crisis, and at the reflection that, at all events, Cedric did

not mean to come to Malden Road. She did not want him to see those

strange, sordid surroundings to which she had fled from the shelter of

her old home.

Alex telegraphed an affirmative reply to her brother, and waited in

growing apathy for the interview, which she could now only dread in

theory. Her sense of feeling seemed numbed at last.

Something of the old terror, however, revived when she confronted Cedric

again in the library. He greeted her with a sort of kindly seriousness,

under which she wonderingly detected a certain nervousness. During lunch

they spoke of Violet, of the shooting that Cedric had been enjoying in

Scotland. The slight shade of pomposity which recalled Sir Francis was

always discernible in all Cedric's kindly courtesy as host. After lunch

he rather ceremoniously ushered his sister into the library again.

"Sit down, my dear--you look tired. You don't smoke, I know. D'you mind

if I--?"

He drew at his pipe once or twice, then carefully rammed the tobacco

more tightly into the bowl with a nicotine-stained finger. Still gazing

at the wedged black mass, he said in a voice of careful unconcern:

"About this move of yours, Alex. Violet and I couldn't altogether

understand--That's really what brought me down, and the question of that

cheque I gave you for the servants. I couldn't quite make out your

letter--"

He paused, as though to give her an opportunity for speech, still

looking away from her. But Alex remained silent, in a sort of paralysis.

"Suppose we take one question at a time," suggested Cedric pleasantly.

"The cheque affair is, of course, a very small one, and quite easily

cleared up. One only has to be scrupulous in money matters because they

_are_ money matters--you know father's way of thinking, and I must say I

entirely share it."

There was no need to tell Alex so.

"Have you got the cheque with you, Alex?"

"No," said Alex at last. "Didn't you understand my letter, then?"

Cedric's spectacles began to tap slowly against the back of his left

hand, held in the loose grasp of his right.

"You--er--cashed that cheque?"

"Yes."

Alex felt as though she were being put to the torture of the

Inquisition, but was utterly unable to do more than reply in

monosyllables to Cedric's level, judicial questions.

"May I ask to what purpose you applied the money?"

"Cedric, it's not fair!" broke from Alex. "I've written and told you

what I did--I needed money, and I--I thought you wouldn't mind. I used

it for myself--and I meant to write and tell you--"

"You thought I wouldn't mind!" repeated Cedric in tones of stupefaction.

"You said you would advance me money--I knew you could write another

cheque for the servants' wages. I--I didn't think of your minding."

"Mind!" said Cedric again, with reiteration worthy of his nursery days.

"My dear girl, you don't suppose it's the money I mind, do you?"

"No, no--I ought to have asked you first--but I didn't think--it seemed

a natural thing to do--"

"Good Lord, Alex!" cried Cedric, more moved than she had ever seen him.

"Do you understand what you're saying? A natural thing to do to

_embezzle money_?"

Tears of terror and of utter bewilderment seized on Alex' enfeebled

powers, and deprived her of utterance.

Cedric began to pace the library, speaking rapidly and without looking

at her.

"If you'd only written and told me what you'd done at once--though

Heaven knows that would have been bad enough but to do a thing like that

and then let it rest! Didn't you know that it _must_ be found out sooner

or later?"

He cast a fleeting glance at Alex, who sat with the tears pouring down

her quivering face, but she said nothing. It was of no use to explain to

Cedric that she had never thought of not being found out. She had meant

no concealment. She had thought her action so simple a one that it had

hardly needed explanation or justification. It had merely been not worth

while to write.

Cedric's voice went on, gradually gaining in power as the agitation that

had shaken him subsided under his own fluency.

"You know that it's a prosecutable offence, Alex? Of course, there's no

question of such a thing, but to trade on that certainty--"

Alex made an inarticulate sound.

"Violet says of course you didn't know what you were doing. That

wretched place--that convent--has played havoc with you altogether. When

I think of those people--!" Cedric's face darkened. "But hang it, Alex,

you were brought up like the rest of us. And on a question of

honour--think of father!"

Alex had stopped crying. She was about to make her last stand, with the

last strength that in her lay.

"Cedric--listen to me. You must! You don't understand. I didn't look at

it from your point of view--I didn't see it like that. There's something

wrong with me--there must be--but it didn't seem to me to matter. I know

you won't believe me--but I thought the money was quite a little,

unimportant thing, and that you'd understand, and say I'd done right to

take it for granted that I might have it."

"But it's _not_ the money!" groaned Cedric. "Though what on earth you

wanted it for, when you had no expenses and your allowance just paid

in--But that's not the point. Can't you see, Alex? It's not this

wretched cheque in itself; it's the principle of the thing."

Alex gazed at him quite hopelessly. The flickering spark of spirit died

out and left her soul in darkness.

Cedric faced her.

"I couldn't believe that your letter really meant what it seemed to

mean," he said slowly; "but if it does--as on your own showing it

does--then I understand your leaving us, needless to say. Where are you

living--what is this place, Malden Road?"

Characteristically, he drew out her letter, and referred to the address

carefully.

"Where is Malden Road?"

"In Hampstead--near Barbara."

"Are you in rooms?"

"Yes."

"How did you find them? Who recommended them?"

She made no answer, and Cedric gazed at her with an expression of

half-angry, half-compassionate perplexity.

"You are entitled to keep your own counsel, of course, and to make your

own arrangements, but I must say, Alex, that the thought of you disturbs

me very much. Your whole position is unusual--and your attitude makes it

almost impossible to--" He broke off. "Violet begged me--quite

unnecessarily, but you know what she is--not to let you feel as though

there were any estrangement--to say that whatever arrangement you

preferred should be made. Of course, Pamela's marriage will add to your

resources--you understand that? She is marrying an extremely wealthy

man, and I shall have not the slightest hesitation in allowing her to

make over her share of father's money to you as soon as it can be

arranged. She wishes it herself."

He paused, as though for some expression of gratitude from Alex, but she

made none. Pam had everything, and now she was to have the credit and

pleasure of a generosity which would cost her nothing as well. Alex

maintained a bitter silence.

"The obvious course is for you to join Barbara, paying your half of

expenses, as you will now be enabled to do."

"Barbara doesn't want me."

"It is the natural arrangement," repeated Cedric inflexibly. "And I must

add, Alex, that you seem to me to be terribly unfitted to manage your

own life in any way. If what you have told me is the case, I can only

infer that your moral sense is completely perverted. I couldn't have

believed it of one of us--of one of my father's children."

Alex knew that the bed-rock of Cedric's character was reached. She had

come to the point where, for Cedric, right and wrong began and

ended--honour.

They would never get any nearer to one another now. The fundamental

principle which governed life for Cedric was deficient in Alex.

She got up slowly and began to pull on her shabby gloves.

"Will you forgive me, Cedric?" she half sobbed.

"It isn't a question of forgiveness. Of course I will. But if you'd only

asked me for that wretched money, Alex! What you did was to embezzle

it--neither more nor less. Oh, good Lord!"

He looked at her with fresh despair and then rang the bell.

"You're going to have a taxi," he told her authoritatively. "You're not

fit to go any other way. Alex, my dear, I'd give my right hand for this

not to have happened--for Heaven's sake come to me if you want anything.

How much shall I give you now?"

He unlocked the writing-table drawer agitatedly. Alex thought to herself

hysterically, "He thinks I may _steal_ money, perhaps, from somebody

else, if I want it, and _perhaps I should_." And with a sense of

degradation that made her feel physically sick, she put into her purse

the gold and the pile of silver that he pushed into her hand.

Cedric straightened himself, and taking off his glasses, wiped them

carefully.

"Write to me, Alex, and let me know what you want to do. Barbara will be

back soon--you _must_ go to her--at any rate for a time--till after

Pamela's wedding. You know that's fixed for December now? And, my dear,

for Heaven's sake let's forget this ghastly business. No one on this

earth but you and I and Violet need ever know of it."

"No," said Alex.

She looked at him with despair invading her whole being.

"Good-bye, Cedric. You've been very, very kind to me."

"The taxi is at the door, sir."

"Thank you."

Cedric took his sister into the hall, and she gave a curious, fleeting

glance round her at the familiar surroundings, and at the broad

staircase where the Clare children had run up and down and played and

quarrelled together, in that other existence.

"Good-bye, dear. Write your plans, and come and see us as soon as we get

back. It won't be more than a week or two now."

Cedric put her into the waiting taxi, and stood on the steps looking

after her as the cab turned out of Clevedon Square. And Alex, crouched

into a corner of the swiftly-moving taxi, knew herself capable of any

treachery, any moral infamy to which she might be tempted, since Cedric

had been right when he said that her sense of honour, of fundamental

rectitude, was completely perverted.

XXIX

Forgiveness

The weather broke suddenly, and it became cold and rainy. For two or

three days Alex sat in her sitting-room at Malden Road and heard the

trams and the omnibuses clash past, and the children screaming to one

another in the street. She could hardly have said when she had first

realized that it was impossible for her to go on living. But the

determination, now that it was there, full-grown, had brought with it a

sense of utter finality.

For two or three days she felt stunned, and yet driven by a desperate

feeling that it was necessary for her to think, to make a plan. But she

could not think.

Then one evening Mrs. Hoxton, the landlady, said to her curiously:

"Wouldn't you like a fire, tonight?" She seldom said "Miss" in speaking

to Alex. "It's so chilly, all of a sudden, and you look ill, really,

now, you do."

Alex felt rather surprised. Perhaps she was ill, which would account for

the impossibility of consecutive thought. A fire would be very nice. She

shivered involuntarily, looking at her little empty grate crammed with

cut paper. She remembered that there was no need to consider expense any

more.

"Yes, I'd like a fire, please," she said gently. And that evening she

sat close to the pleasant blaze, flickering on the wall, and dimly

recalling to her the nursery at Clevedon Square in the old days, and the

power of thought came back to her.

It was as though the warmth and companionship of the flames had suddenly

unsealed something frozen up within her, and she became more herself

than she had been for many months. With the horrible, pressing dread of

an unbearable present and an unimaginable future lifted from her heart,

Alex felt a pervading lucidity of thought, to which she had for years

been a stranger, take possession of her. She knew suddenly that she was,

for a little while, to regain faculties that had been atrophied within

her since the far, free days of her girlhood. She began to reflect.

Why had life, to which she had looked forward so eagerly, with such

confident anticipation of some wonderful happiness, which should be in

proportion to the immense capacity for realizing it which she knew to

exist within her, have proved to be only a succession of defeats, of

receding hopes and of unfulfilled desires?

Alex did not question that the fault lay with herself. From her baby

days, under the unvarnished plain speaking of old Nurse, she had known

herself to be the black sheep of every flock. And she had not sinned

splendidly, dramatically, either. Her sins had been those of petty

meanness, of shirking and evading, of small self-indulgences and

childish tyranny at the expense of others, of vulgar lies and

half-truths.

Those sins which find little or no place in the decalogue, and which

stand lowest in the scale by which the opinion of others is meted out to

us.

Those are the things which are not forgiven. That was it, Alex told

herself, with a feeling of having suddenly struck the keynote.

Forgiveness.

Forgiveness was the key to everything. Alex, in the sudden surety of

vision that had come to her, did not doubt that her own interpretation

of the word was the right one. Forgiveness meant understanding--not

condemnation and subsequent pardon. It did not mean the bewildered,

scandalized, and yet regretful oblivion to which Cedric would consign

her memory and that of her many failings, it did not mean Barbara's

detached, indifferent kindness, carefully measured in terms of material

resources, nor Pamela's and Archie's good-natured patronage,

half-stifled in mirth, of which the very object was the gulf that

separated them from their sister. It did not even mean Violet's soft

pity and unresentful acceptance of facts that amazed her. Looking

further back, Alex knew that it did not mean either the serious,

perplexed pardon that Sir Francis had tendered to his troublesome

daughter, or Lady Isabel's half-complaining, half-affectionate

remonstrances.

It did not in any way occur to her to blame them for a lack of which she

had all her life been subconsciously aware in all their forbearance. She

told herself, with a fresh sense of enlightenment, that they had not

understood because it was in none of them to have yielded to those

temptations which had beset and mastered her so easily. Measuring her

frailty by their own strength, they had only seen her utter failure in

resistance, and been shamed and grieved by it. Alex knew that in herself

was another standard of forgiveness; she could never condemn, for the

simple reason that she herself had failed, in every sense of the word.

Unresentfully, she was able to sum it all up, as it were, when she told

herself, "People who would have resisted temptation themselves, can't

understand those who fall--so they can't really forgive. But the bad

ones, who know that they have given way all along the line, know that

any temptation would have been too strong for them--it's only chance

whether it comes their way or not--so they can understand."

She felt oddly contented, as at having reached a solution.

Later on, her thoughts turned to the past again, and to the childish

days when she had been the leading spirit in the Clevedon Square

nursery. But the memory of that past, incredible, security and

assurance, made her begin to cry, and she wiped away blinding tears and

told herself that she must not give way to them. She did not at first

quite know why she must reserve the tiny modicum of strength still left

her, but presently she realized that the end which had become inevitable

could not be reached without decisive action of her own.

Alex' logic was elementary, and its directness left her no loophole for

doubt.

She could endure the plane of existence on which she found herself no

longer. If she fled in search of other conditions, it was with full

certainty that these could not be less tolerable than those from which

she was flying, and at the back of her mind was a strange, growing hope

that perhaps that forgiveness of which her mind was full, might be found

beyond the veil.

"After all," thought Alex, "it's even chances. If religion is all true,

then I _must_ go to hell, whether I kill myself or not, and if it isn't,

then perhaps I shall just go out and know nothing more--ever--or perhaps

it will be really a new beginning, and there will be somebody or

something who will forgive me, and let me start over again."

She began to feel rather excited, as though she were about to try an

experiment that might best be described as a gamble.

Mrs. Hoxton, coming in with the small supper-tray, looked at her sharply

two or three times, and when she had gone away again, Alex, turning to

the glass, saw that her eyes were shining and looking enormously large

and wide-pupilled.

"I believe I am happy tonight," she thought wonderingly.

While she ate her supper she tried to make a plan, but the excitement

within her was growing steadily, and she could only think out eager

self-justification for her own decision.

"It won't hurt any one else--nobody will mind. In fact, when they've got

over the first shock, it will be a relief to them all. They've been very

kind--Violet and Cedric--Violet most of all--but they haven't

understood. They'd have understood better if I'd been a bad woman--lived

with wicked men, or things like that. I suppose I should have done that

too, if it had come my way--but then I never had the temptation. I had

only little, mean, horrible temptations--and I didn't resist any of

them. The other sort of sin would have made me happier--it would have

meant a sort of success in a way--but I have been a failure at

everything--always."

Her heart hammering against her side, Alex resolved that in this, her

last disgrace, she would not fail.

Making no preparations, no written farewells, she rose presently and

went to her room, where she put on her thickest coat and tied a woollen

scarf over her head.

Then she went out.

It had stopped raining, and the air was soft and moist. It was a

starless night, and when Alex got to the Heath and away from the lighted

streets, it was very dark. Underneath her sense of adventure she was

conscious of terror--sheer physical terror--and also of the deeper dread

that her resolution might fail her.

"I mustn't--I mustn't," she kept on muttering to herself.

Then, as though reassuring somebody else, "But it's only like going for

a journey--to a quite new place where everything may be different and

much, much better ... or else to sleep, and never any waking up to

misery again.... Just one dreadful minute or two, perhaps, and then it

will all be over ... only a question of a little physical courage ...

not to struggle ... like taking gas ... much easier if one doesn't

struggle...."

She was struck by a sudden thought and said aloud, triumphantly, as

though she were defeating by her inspiration some one who was urging

difficulties upon her:

"I won't give myself any chances. I'll put big stones in my pocket and

tie my scarf over my mouth. That'll make it quicker, too."

When she came to the part of the Heath where the water lay, Alex began

to stoop down and hunt for stones. She pounced on each one that seemed

larger than its fellows with a sense of pride at her own success, and

put them into the pockets of her coat. The moon appeared palely through

clouds and then disappeared again, but not before she had taken her

bearings.

She was on one of the many wide bridges that span the long pools dotted

over the Heath--pools shelving at the sides with an effect of

shallowness and deepening suddenly in the middle. Alex threw an

indifferent glance at the dark water, and only felt annoyance that so

few stones should be loose upon the pathway, and none of them very large

ones. When her pockets were filled, she did not think the weight very

noticeable.

Then came another evanescent gleam of moonlight, and Alex, still with

that sharpening of all her perceptions, noticed that there was a man's

figure at the far end of the bridge. He appeared to be stationary,

leaning on the parapet and gazing down at the almost invisible pond.

She was conscious of vexation. His presence would surely interfere with

her scheme.

For a moment she wondered, detachedly enough, whether she should go away

and come back the following evening. But the next instant she recoiled

from the thought, as though seeing in it the promptings of her own

weakness.

"I am not frightened tonight--at least, hardly at all. If I wait I may

never feel like this again. I shall make a failure of it all, and that

would be worse than anything. I must do it tonight, while I'm not

frightened."

She was not cold. Walking in her heavy coat had warmed her, and the

evening was mild as well as damp. So she waited quietly in the shadow,

hoping that the man would presently move away.

The thought crossed her mind, with a certain humour, that the situation

held possibilities of romance.

"If it were in a book, he would save me at the last minute and fall in

love with me and it would all end happily. Or he would see me now, and

perhaps speak to me, and he would understand all I told him, and

persuade me not to. Anyhow, it would all come right."

She smiled in the darkness.

"But that won't happen to _me_. There never was any one--and nobody

would love me now, especially when they knew all about me." She

remembered the haggard, distorted countenance that the looking-glass had

shown her--the great, starting eyes with discoloured circles beneath

them, and the blackened, prominent teeth, more salient than ever from

the thinness of her face.

She could almost have laughed, without any conscious bitterness, at the

idea of any romance in connection with her present self.

And yet the girl, Alex Clare, could have loved--had looked forward to

love and to happiness as her rights, just as Pamela Clare did now.

But Pamela was different. Every one was--No!

It was Alex that was different--that had always been different.

She began to feel less warm, and shivered a little as she waited.

It occurred to her, not with any sense of fear, but with vexation, that

her purpose would be far more difficult of achievement if she waited

until she was physically chilled.

She looked up at the bridge again, and the figure was still there, at

the furthest end. Alex measured the length of the bridge with her eyes.

It was doubtful if he would see her from the furthest end of it, but she

reflected matter-of-factly:

"If I jump there will be the noise of a splash--and he might do

something--he would try to save me, I suppose--or run for help. It

wouldn't be safe. If he would _only_ go."

She became irritated. With a sense of despair she determined to

circumvent the motionless, watchful figure.

Moving very quietly and almost soundlessly over the soft muddy ground,

Alex made her way from the path to the bank, and further and further

down it till only a short declivity of shelving mud lay between her and

the water.

She could feel the brambles catching in her thick coat as though pulling

her back, but she went on, cautiously and steadily. Once or twice she

pushed at the low, tangled bushes that impeded her progress, and paused

aghast at the rustling that ensued. But from the bridge above her there

came no sound.

Within a few steps of the dark water, her feet already sinking

ankle-deep into the wet, spongy ground, she stopped.

She realized with wondering joy that, after all, she was not very much

afraid. It was as though the self-confidence which had for so long

deserted her had come back now to carry her through the last need.

She felt proud, because she knew that for this once she was not going to

fail.

She talked to herself in a whisper:

"This one time--just a few minutes when it may be very bad--but remember

that it can't last long, and then it'll all be over. And perhaps

there'll never be anything more afterwards--like being always asleep,

and no one need be vexed or disappointed any more. But perhaps--"

She paused on the thought, and her heart began to beat faster with a

hopeful excitement such as she had not known for a very long while.

"Perhaps it will be much better than one imagines possible. Perhaps

there'll be real forgiveness and understanding--and then my having done

this won't matter. Anyway, I shall know very soon, if only I'm brave

just for a few minutes."

She drew a long breath, then, instinctively stretching her arms straight

out before her so as to balance herself, she began to move forward.

The first unmistakable touch of the water round her feet made her gasp

and stifle a scream, but she waded on, encouraging herself in a low

murmur, as though speaking to a child:

"It's only like going into the sea when one's bathing--pretend it's

that, then you won't be frightened. Just straight on--it will be over

quite soon--"

She was moving, slowly, but without pause, her hands held out in front

of her, the ground still beneath her slipping feet, which felt oddly

weighted. Once she began to pull the woollen scarf over her mouth, but

with the sense of breathlessness came the beginning of panic, and she

tore it away again.

"Go on--coward--coward," she urged herself. "Remember what it would mean

to make another muddle of this, and to fail."

The cold invaded her body and her teeth began to chatter.

For an instant she stood, surrounded by the silent water, cold and

terror and the weight of her now sodden clothing paralysing her, so that

she could move neither backwards to the shore nor forward into the

blackness in front of her.

"I must," muttered Alex, and wrenched one foot desperately out of the

mud below. With the forward movement, she lost her balance, and her

hands clutched instinctively at the water's level. Then the clogging

bottom of the pond sheered away suddenly from beneath her, and there was

only water, dark and icy and rushing, above and below and all round her.

XXX

Epitaph

They sat round, afterwards, in the Clevedon Square drawing-room--all the

people who had helped misguided, erring Alex, according to their lights,

or again, according to their limitations, and who had failed her so

completely in the ultimate essential.

Pamela and her lover whispered together in the window.

"After all, you know," hesitated the girl, "she had nothing much to live

for, poor Alex. She'd got out of touch with all of us--and she had no

one of her very own."

"Not like us."

His hand closed for an instant over hers.

"There was no reason why she should not have come to us if--if she was

in money difficulties," reiterated Cedric uneasily. He consciously

refrained from adding "again."

Violet was crying softly, lying back in the depths of a great arm-chair.

"Poor Alex! I never guessed Malden Road was like that. Why _did_ she go

there? Oh, poor Alex!"

"You were nicer to her than any of us, Violet," said Archie gruffly.

"She was awfully fond of you, wasn't she, and of the little kid?"

Barbara, hard and self-contained, gazed round the familiar room. For a

moment it seemed to her that they were all children again, sent down

from the nursery by old Nurse, on Lady Isabel's "At Home" afternoon.

Her eyes met those of Cedric, who had taken up his stand against the

mantelpiece, in his hand his glasses, which he was shaking with little,

judicial jerks.

"Oh, Cedric," said Barbara with a sudden catch in her voice.

"Don't you remember--Alex was such a _pretty_ little girl!"

London, 1917.

Bristol, 1918.

THE END