She spoke of her musical career, of the bright student days at Vienna;

the hard work of them, the anguish, the struggle, the joy. Then of the

death of her mother, and the falling of all her high hopes under the

crushing will of Sir Arthur, her appointed guardian.

"When mother went," said Aspasia, "everything went." As she spoke two

tears leaped out of her eyes, and hung poised on the short, thick

eyelashes. "The Runkle thinks it's a disgrace for a lady to do anything

in life. 'And, besides,' he says, 'she can't, and she'd better not

attempt it.' But wait till I'm twenty-one," cried the girl,

vindictively, "and I'll show him what his 'dear Raspasia's' got in her!"

She smiled in her young consciousness of power, and the big tears,

detaching themselves, ran into her dimples. Raymond, looking at her

with all the experience of his hard life behind him, and all the

disillusion of his five-and-thirty years, felt so sudden a movement at

once of pity and tenderness that he had to stiffen himself in his seat

not to catch her in his arms and kiss her on those wet dimples as he

would have kissed a child.

"Oh, you'll do great things," said he, in the tone in which one praises

the little one's sand castle on the beach, or tin soldier strategy.

"And may I come with a great big laurel crown, tied with gold ribbons,

when you give your first concert in the Albert Hall?"

"Albert Hall," mocked she, "the very place for a piano recital!" Then

she let her eyes roam out across the heaving space. Once more she saw

herself the centre of an applauding multitude; but, in the foremost

rank, there was the lean, brown face, and it was moved to enthusiasm,

too. And, somehow, from that evening forth, the dream-visions of her

future glory were never to be quite complete without it.

* * * * *

A mist-enwrapped, rain-swept shore, parting the dim grey sea and sky in

twain, was their first glimpse of England after years of exile.

"Ugh," said Aspasia, shivering, "isn't it just like England to go and be

damp and horrid for us!"

Lady Gerardine, looking out with eager straining gaze towards the

weeping land, turned with one of her sudden, unexpected movements of

passion upon the girl.

"I'm glad it's raining," she said. "I'm glad it's cold, and bleak, and

grey. I'm glad to feel the raindrops beating on nay face. I'm sick of

hard blue skies and fierce sunshine.... And the trees at Saltwoods will

be all bent one way by the blowing of the wet sea wind. It's England,

it's home; and, oh, I'm glad to be home!"

*BOOK II*

*CHAPTER I*

Rosamond Gerardine and Aspasia Cuningham lay back, silent, each in her

corner of the railway carriage, while the English landscape flew by

them, wet and green and autumn brown, gleaming in a fugitive yellow

sunlight.

Aspasia still felt the pressure of Bethune's unconsciously hard

hand-grip. His image, as he had stood bareheaded looking after the

moving train, was still vivid before her eyes. His last words: "It is

not good-bye," were ringing in her ears. His face had looked wistful,

she thought; his cold glance had taken that warm good look she claimed

as her own. She was glad it was not good-bye. And yet, as they steamed

away, she, watching him as long as she could, saw, and could not hide it

from herself, that it was upon Lady Gerardine his eyes were fixed at the

last--fixed with an expression which had already become familiar to her.

"One would think he hated her--sometimes," said shrewd Baby to herself,

"and yet, when she's there, he forgets me. I might as well be dead, or

a fright."

This puzzled her and troubled her, too, a little. She glanced across now

at her aunt's abstracted countenance. "I am sure," she thought, in

loyal admiration, "if he were madly in love with her, it would be only

natural. But it's not love--it's more like hate and a sort of pain."

With all her sageness, Baby was only eighteen.

How completely had Raymond Bethune passed from Lady Gerardine's

mind--even before he had passed from her sight!

She had nearly reached the end of her journey. The burning land she had

left behind her--once the land of her desire--seemed now but a place

visited in long evil dreams, where she had undergone unimaginable

sufferings during the bondage of sleep. The humid air of England beat

upon her face through the open window with a comforting assurance as of

waking reality.

She had told herself she was travelling with her dead. Never for one

hour of her long journey had she forgotten the meaning of that box under

Jani's care. But, with every sunrise that marked a wider distance

between her and India, she drew a freer breath. With every stage she

felt herself less Lady Gerardine, wife; and more Mrs. English, widow.

There was beginning to be an extraordinary restfulness in the sensation.

They sped through the New Forest glades, sodden after the rain, now

flashing gold-brown with that shaft of sun; now black-green, cavernous,

mysterious, where the pines grow close. And then came the moorland

stretches, reaching up to a pale-blue cleft in the storm-weighted

clouds. How cool it all was! How soft the colours! How benign the wet

sky, how different from the metal glare of the land that had betrayed

her!

And, by-and-by, white gleams of sunshine began to deepen into primroses

and ambers; towards the west the sky grew ever clearer, and the leaden

wrack, parting, showed an horizon like to a honey sea against the rising

mists of evening. How beautiful was England!

When they got out at the little country station, in the rural heart of

Dorset, the day was closing in. The vault of the heavens brooded over

the earth with a cup-like closeness. November though it was, the air

struck upon their cheeks as gently as a caress, all impregnated with the

fragrance of wet green indefinably touched with the tart accent of

decay.

Rosamond drew a long deep breath; it had a poignant pleasure in it;

tears sprang to her eyes, but, for the first time in God knew how many

years, there was a sweetness in them. Jani at her elbow shivered with

an aguish chatter of teeth. With one hand she clutched her shawls

across her little lean figure; with the other she held on fiercely to a

battered tin box.

"Oh, Aunt Rosamond," cried Aspasia, ecstatically, as they got into the

vehicle awaiting them, "it's a fly, it's a fly! Aren't you glad? Do

you smell the musty straw? Oh! doesn't it bring back good old times?

Don't you wish you may never sit in a state carriage again?"

It was a long drive, through winding lanes. Sometimes they strained

uphill, sometimes they skirted the flat down; sometimes the branches of

the overhanging trees beat against the roof of the carriage or in at the

open window. At first the whole land was wonderfully still. They could

hear the moisture drip from the leaves when the horses were at the walk.

And, by-and-by, there grew out of the distance the faint yet mighty

rumour of the sea. Within such short measure, then, this small, great

England was meeting her salt limits! Across the upland down, presently,

even on this silent evening, there rose a wind to sing of the surf. The

trees by the roadside, in the copses amid fields, on the crest, etched

against the glimmer of the sky, had all that regular inland bent that

tells of salt winds.

At last the rickety fly began to jingle and jolt along a road that was

hardly more than a track. The way dipped down an abrupt slope and then

branched off unexpectedly into a side lane. Rosamond leaned out of the

window; she felt they were drawing near her unknown home.

"Are we there?" cried Aspasia, entering into a violent state of

excitement as they came to a halt before a swing gate.

Rosamond did not answer. She was looking with all her eyes, with all

her heart. Sudden memories awoke within her--words, never even noted to

be forgotten, began to whisper in her ears: "You never saw such a place,

love. It isn't a place, it's a queer old house dumped down in a hollow

of the downs. And the avenue--there isn't an avenue, it's a road through

the orchard, and the orchard comes right up to the house--and you never

saw such a bunch of chimney-stacks in your life. But such as it is, I

love it. And some day we'll go and live there, you and I...." Here,

then, were the orchard trees, twisted shapes, stretching out unpruned

branches to them as they passed!

"I almost plucked an apple," cried Aspasia, from her side, with a

childish scream.

The sky was rift just about the horizon--the afterglow primrose against

the sullen gloom of the cloud banks. Cut into sharp silhouette against

this pallid translucence, rose the black outline of the house and right

across it the fantastic old-time chimney-stack, at sight of which

Rosamond laughed low to herself as one who recognises the face of a

friend. "You never saw such a bunch of chimney-stacks in your life!..."

A faint column of smoke ascended pale against the gloom where the

chimneys lost themselves in the skies. As Rosamond noted it, her heart

stirred; all was not dead then--the old house, his house, was alive and

waiting for her!

They drew up close to the stone porch, open to the night, flush with the

level of the out-jutting gables, and the driver, plunging into the black

recess, sent the jangle of a bell ringing through inner spaces. In the

waiting pause all was very silent, save the stealthy patter from the

overgrown ivy clumps that hung across the entrance. There was a rustle,

the hop of an awakened bird, quite close to Rosamond's ear, as she

leaned out with the eagerness that had been growing upon her ever since

her landing.

Then came steps within: the door was opened first but a little space,

with the habitual precaution of the lowly caretaker, then suddenly drawn

wide. A square of light that seemed golden was cut out of the darkness,

and:

"You're welcome, ma'am," cried old Mary, tremulously smoothing her

apron.

Lady Gerardine passed with fixed eyes and straight steps into the hall,

but she turned quickly as the words struck her ear. Aspasia, following,

saw her face illumined by a smile that was almost joy. And the girl

became secretly a little alarmed; her aunt's ways had been all

inexplicable to her of late.

Rosamond's heart was crying out within her, and it was with actual joy.

"Welcome, ma'am," had said his servant--to old Mary the mistress of

Saltwoods was Captain English's widow--even to herself might she not now

cease to be Lady Gerardine for a brief respite? Oh, then would the

manor-house be home indeed!

A great sense of peace, accompanied by a sudden lassitude, fell upon

her; she sank into an armchair, flinging her arms wide with a gesture of

relief. Opposite to her was a sturdy oaken table, upon which the

housekeeper had just placed a hand-lamp. The light fell full upon a

rack displaying a hunting-crop, a couple of rough walking-sticks; above,

there was the sketch of a boy's face. Her gaze wandered, without at

first taking in the meaning of what it saw.

Noise resounded from the porch; it was Jani, struggling with the

coachman for the possession of the old regimental case.

Rosamond looked quickly up again at the bright living presentment on the

wall; then she rose to her feet and staggered blindly through the

nearest door. There, in sheltering darkness, Aspasia promptly overtook

her, and was terrified, as she clasped her warm young arms round her

aunt's figure, to find it torn by sobs.

"Let me be, let me be!" exclaimed Lady Gerardine, pushing the girl from

her, "it is good to give way at last."

And Aspasia, pressing her face in wordless attempt at consolation

against her aunt's cheek, found it streaming with a very torrent of

tears.

* * * * *

"Ah," said old Mary, shaking her head, as Miss Cuningham presently

besought her for the feminine panacea of tea, "poor lady, it's no

wonder: he was a grand young gentleman!"

It was, indeed, evident that here Lady Gerardine could never be anything

but Captain English's widow.

*CHAPTER II*

The manor-house was very old and very solid. It held nothing of any

high value, perhaps, but it held nothing cheap or weak. It was complete

before the days of machine-made furniture and of so-called æsthetic art,

and those that had ruled over it since had been withheld by innate taste

or a happy lack of means from adding to it either within or without.

Thus it had remained at a standstill through an extraordinary lapse of

years, and all was now beautifully, frankly old; it stood in its

simplicity, perfect in antique shabbiness. Only without, the creepers

flung ever new shoots about the sturdy strength of the stones. Only

within, it was haunted by a memory, by a presence; and this presence was

young even to boyhood. And the young ghost harmonised with the aged

house, seemed to belong to it as surely as--year by year--the spirit of

spring to the ancient garden.

Rosamond, whose life purpose had so long been to avoid the haunting of

the past, awoke in the dawn of her first day at Saltwoods to find

herself in a very habitation of memories; nay, more, to feel, in some

inexplicable manner, that the dead were more alive in this house than

the quick, and yet--strange mystery of the heart--that she was glad of

it. She watched the dawn wax as on one memorable morning in her far-off

Indian palace; not here on beetle's-wing green and eastern glow of

carmine and purple, but upon brown of wainscot oak and dim rosebud of

faded chintz. And, as the lights spread between the gaps of the

shutters, there grew upon her from the panelled wall a strong young face

with bold wide-open eyes--eyes very young, set under brows already

thoughtful. A very English face, despite the olive of the cheek, the

darkness of the hair, close-cut, that still had a crisp wave under the

cock of the Sandhurst cap.

"I felt I was not alone," said Rosamond, half in dream, supporting

herself on her elbow to look more nearly, "and so it was you!"

But the eyes were gazing past her, out on life, full of eagerness. And

the close lips were set with a noble determination. What great things

this boy soldier was going to make of his future!

Rosamond let herself fall back upon her pillows, something like a sob in

her throat. Then, opposite to her, between the windows, she met full

the glance of the same eyes that had but now avoided hers. They were

child's eyes this time, gazing, full of soft wonder, out of a serious

child's face, framed by an aureole of copper curls--the wonderful tint

that is destined to turn to densest black.

Rosamond stretched at ease, resting her eyes on those of the lovely

child's--childless woman, who had never desired children, began to

picture to herself how proud a mother would be of such a little son as

this. And then her mind wandered to the mother, who, lying where she now

lay, had feasted her waking heart and gratified her maternal pride, so

many mornings with this vision.

Then something began to stir in her that had not yet stirred before; an

inchoate desire, an ache, a jealousy; yes, a jealousy of the dead woman

who had borne such a child! She turned restlessly from the sight of the

two pictures, flung herself to the far side of the bed, and sent her

glance and thought determinedly wandering into the recess of an alcove

where night still kept the growing light at bay.

A drowsiness fell over her mind again; with vague interest she found

herself speculating what might the different objects be that the

darkness still enwrapt partly from her sight.

Here was a high chair of unusual shape--a _Prie-Dieu_? Here was a gothic

bracket, jutting from the wall above; thereon something glimmered palely

forth; a statuette perchance, or alabaster vase of special slender art?

Nay, not so, for now she could distinguish the wide-stretched arms, the

pendant form; it was the carven ivory of a crucifix. The late Mrs.

English's shrine, her altar? Rosamond's interest quickened--she had

heard of this unknown relative's goodness from the son's lips, but had

never heard this goodness specified as regarded religion. His mother,

then, had been High Church ... Roman Catholic perhaps? Rosamond was

almost amused, with the detached amusement of one to whom religion means

little personal.

Under this impulse of curiosity she rose from her bed, pulled the window

shutters aside to let in the day, and then went back to examine the

alcove.

It held a shrine indeed, an altar to inevitable sacrifice, to the most

sacred relics. Beneath the pallid symbol, figure of the Great

Renunciation, was placed a closed frame. And all around and about, in

ordered array, the records of a boy's life: medals for prowess in

different sports; a cup or two; a framed certificate of merit; in front

of the frame, a case bulging with letters. Upon each side of the altar

hung shelves filled with books, some in the handsome livery of school

prizes, some in the battered covers of the much-perused playroom

favourite.

Rosamond stood and looked. A moment or two she hesitated, then she

began to tremble. There was within her the old desire of flight, the

old sick longing to hide away, to bury, to ignore. But something

stronger than herself held her. The day was past when she could deny

herself to sorrow. The cup was at her lips and she knew that she must

drink.

She would open that letter-case, she would gaze at the face in the

closed frame; her coward heart was to be spared no longer.

She took up a volume. As it fell apart she saw the full-page book-plate

engraved with the arms of Winchester School and the fine copperplate

inscription:

Anno Sæculari 1884

Præmium in re Mathematica

Meritus et consecutus est _Henricus English_.

(Hæc olim meminisse juvabit).

The life of Christopher Columbus.... It was bound in crimson calf, and

the gilt edges of its unopened pages clung crisply together.

She replaced it on the shelf and, with the same dreary mechanical

determination, drew forth another. The "Boy's own Book"; a veteran,

this; from too much loving usage, dogs'-eared, scored with small grimy

finger-prints; its quaint woodcuts highly coloured here and there by a

very juvenile artist.

"To Henry English, on his ninth birthday, from his affectionate mother,"

ran the dedication, in a flowing Italian hand. A gift that had made a

little lad very happy, some twenty-five years ago.

And now Rosamond's fingers hovered over the case of letters. Well did

her heart forebode whose missives lay treasured there. Nevertheless,

the sight of the handwriting struck her like a stab. Not yet could she

summon strength to read those close-marked pages. Nay--were they even

hers to read?

"Darling old Mammy--" this was not for her.

Yet she turned the sheets over and over, lingering upon them. Here was

an envelope, endorsed in the same fair running hand as the book: "My

beloved son's last letter." And here, on a card, was gummed a piece of

white heather--memorial of God knows what pretty coquetry between the

stalwart soldier and his "darling old Mammy."

What things must people live through--people who dare to love!

Rosamond had never loved. Had she not done well? When love offered

itself to her she had been too young to know its face. And now.... She

dropped the case from her hands as if it burnt her, and stood, poised

for flight; then, as if driven by an invincible force, seized upon the

closed frame, almost with anger. Fate held her, she could not escape.

Harry English, looking at her! Not the child, not the adolescent, but

Harry the man as she, his wife, had known him. Even through the

incomplete medium of a photograph, the strong black and white of his

colouring, the bold line of his features, the concentrated purposeful

expression, was reproduced with an effect of extraordinary vitality.

It seemed almost impossible to think of him as dead who could look at

her so livingly from this little portrait.

* * * * *

Old Mary came in hurriedly.

"Here I am, ma'am, here I am! I heard you call."

Rosamond lifted dazed eyes. It took a perceptible space of time for the

meaning of the words to filter to her brain. Then she said with vague

impatience:

"I did not call."

"But you wanted me, surely," said the woman. Her glance wandered from

the portrait in her new mistress's hand to the disorder on her old

mistress's altar. "Surely you wanted me, ma'am."

She took a warm wrapper from the bed and folded it round Lady Gerardine.

She supported her to an armchair and placed a cushion to her feet. The

ministering hands were warm and strong; and Rosamond felt suddenly that

in truth she was cold and weak, and that these attentions were grateful

to her. She looked up again at the withered face, ethereally aged, at

the blue eyes that seemed illumined from some source not of this world.

"Perhaps I did want you," she said.

A thin, self-absorbed, silent woman was old Mary. She regarded the world

as with the gaze of the seer and moved within the small circlet of her

duty wrapped in a mystic dignity of her own. Some held her in contempt,

as madwoman; others in awe, as having "seen things."

If the manor-house had the reputation of being haunted, it was doubtless

due to Mary's ways. No one from the neighbourhood would have consented

to inhabit the ancient place with her. But fortunately Mary had a stout

niece of her own, who averred that ghosts were indigestion, and who

slept the sleep of the scrubber and the just, no matter what else might

walk.

The housekeeper's strange eyes softened as she looked down into the fair

pale face of her young master's widow.

"My dear lady that's gone," she said, "must be glad to know that there

is another heart keeping watch here."

Her voice was soft and had a muffled sound as of one used to long

silence. The tone seemed to harmonise with the singularity of the

words. A small cold shiver ran over Rosamond; she stared without

replying.

"The day the news came," proceeded the housekeeper, dreamily, "she set

up that altar to him. And there she found peace."

As old Mary spoke, the habit of the trained servant was still strong

upon her. She stooped to tuck in the fold of Rosamond's dressing-gown

closer round her feet.

"There she prayed," she went on, as she straightened herself again, "and

then, he came back to her in peace."

Rosamond closed the frame in her hands with a snap. She felt every

impulse within her strike out against the mystic atmosphere that seemed

to be closing round her.

"What are you saying?" she cried sharply. "In Heaven's name what do you

mean? Who came back--the dead?"

Old Mary smiled again. She bent over the chair.

"Why, ma'am," she said, as if speaking to a frightened child, "you don't

need to be told, a good lady like you: to those that have faith, there

is no death."

"No death!" echoed Rosamond. "All life is death. Everything is full of

death."

There was a strangling bitterness in her throat that broke forth in a

harsh laugh. The placid room seemed to swim round with her; when she

came to herself the servant was holding her hands once more. Her voice

was falling into her ears with a measured soothing cadence:

"Not here. There is no death in this house. Don't you feel it, ma'am?

It's not death that is here. Why, her that is gone, she passed from me

there, in that bed, as the night passes into day. That is not death.

Not an hour before the summons came for her she was wandering--as the

doctor called it. I knew better. She saw him and was speaking to him.

'Ah, Harry,' she says, joyful, 'I knew you were not dead.' And then she

turns to me. 'He is not dead, Mary,' she says, 'it was all a mistake.'"

Rosamond listened, her pale lips apart, her gaze dark and wondering.

"Why, ma'am," went on old Mary. "Haven't you felt it yourself, this

night; didn't you feel his sweet company the minute you set foot in the

house? I think it was my lady's great love that brought him back here.

And now that she is gone, he's still here. And it's strange, he's here

more than she is. She does not come as he does."

Her eyes became fixed on far-off things. Still clasping Rosamond's hand

she seemed to transmit a glow, a warmth that reached to the heart.

Rosamond's sick and cowering soul felt at rest as upon a strength

greater than her own.

His company! Was that not what she had felt? Was it not that to which

she had awakened? Ay, the old woman was right: it was sweet!

"There is no death," asserted old Mary, once again, "no death unless we

make it. It's our fault if our dead do not live for us; it's our

earthly bodies that won't acknowledge the spirit. It's we who make our

dead dead, who bury them, who make corpses of them and coffins for them,

to hide them away in the cold earth."

Rosamond wrenched her hands from the wrinkled grasp. She sprang to her

feet, seized by a sudden anguish that was actual physical pain.

"Go, go!" she cried wildly. She was caught up as in a whirlwind of

unimaginable terror. What had she done? Had she laid Harry English in

the grave? Was he dead to her through her own deed, he that had lived on

for his mother? Had she in her cowardice hammered him into his coffin,

and would he always be a corpse to her because she had made him dead?

Through the inarticulate voices of her torment, she heard the door close

and felt she was alone. And then she found herself upon her knees

before the shrine, the photograph case still clenched between her

fingers, praying blindly, madly, inarticulately--to what? she knew not.

To the white Christ on the cross, who had risen from the dead? Or to

the strong soldier whose image she held, and for whom there could be no

rising again?

When the storm passed at length she was broken, chilled, and unconsoled.

Old Mary's words came back to her: "She prayed there and she got peace."

Well, the mother may have found peace in prayer. But for the wife,

there was none! "He came back in peace"; he had not come back to

her--to Rosamond, his wife!

A wave of revolt broke over her; against the God who had invented death

for his creatures, or against stupid blind fate disposing of those human

lives that have no God.

She rose slowly to her feet; her glance swept the homely room--the bed

where the mother had died--to end once again upon the altar. What right

had she, the old woman, to lay claim to Rosamond English's husband? The

babe, the boy, may have been hers, let her have him! But the man--the

man belonged to the wife. "And ye shall leave father and mother and

cleave to one." "There is authority for it in your very scriptures,"

cried Rosamond, aloud. And, with fingers trembling with passionate

eagerness she set to work to rob the frame of its treasure, the shrine

of its chief relic.

Soon it lay in her hand, the clipped photograph. She carried it away,

from the altar to the window, and stood a long, long while, devouring it

with her gaze. So had he looked. No man had ever bolder, truer eyes.

Ah, and no woman but Rosamond had seen them flame into passion--passion

that yet then had had no meaning for her who saw! And those lips,

folded into sternness, had any one known them to break into lines of

tenderness as they were used for her? None at least, not even his

mother, had heard them whisper what they had whispered to the wife--to

the wife whose ears had been deaf, then, as a child's, because of her

uncomprehending heart!

What was it old Mary had said? "It is we who make our dead dead." And

had he lived on in this house because of the love of a withered heart,

and should he not live again for her, his wife who was young and

strong--and still virgin to love?

What she had buried she would dig out of the earth again, were it with

bleeding fingers. That voice should speak once more, were each accent

to stab her with its poignancy of loss. He should live, were it to be

her death.

With dilated nostrils, panting for breath, her hair floating behind her,

beautiful in her thrall of passion like some Valkyrie rising over blood

and death, she rushed to the door and summoned Jani with ringing call.

There is an exaltation of spirit to which pain is highest joy, and

Rosamond ran now to her sorrow as the mystic to his cross.

"Jani!" she called. "Bring me Captain English's box."

*CHAPTER III*

The days dropped into the cup of time; measures of light and shade, of

waxing and waning, ushered in with pale winter dawns, huddled away in

rapid gloomy twilights, according to the precise yearly formula.

But to Rosamond these hours in the forgotten old manor-house on the

moorlands, where the winds were the only visitors, brought so great a

change that it was as if a gate had been shut upon her former road.

A common prate is that Time works the changes in us. And when we look

from the child to the man, it would seem absurd even to raise the

question. Yet it is not time that works the mightiest changes. Nay, in

the world of the soul time but emphasises. The great upheavals that

obliterate in our lives all familiar landmarks--that do alter everything

down to our most intimate capacity of feeling, are sometimes but the

work of one instant. It is not time that ravages, it is not time that

draws the wrinkle seared into the heart; not to time do we owe the

spread of the grey, instead of the gold that used to colour the web of

existence. A man may carry the singing soul of his April to the

death-bed of his old body. Yet again the heart may wither in a span so

short as scarce to be measured.

And sometimes a change, so complete that even within our own soul we

find ourselves suddenly on foreign ground, will come without any

striking external event, without any apparent outside reason. In the

life of the soul a crisis has occurred--and lo! the very world of God is

different. Nay, God himself is another to us.

During these short wind-swept November days in the green and brown

manor-house, there, amid the solitary downs, did such a change come to

Rosamond. Had she tried, she could scarce have found her old self again.

But she did not try; for this new self was at peace, was wrapped in

dreams of great sweetness, and yet awake to a life hitherto not even

guessed at.

* * * * *

In the attic room that had been Harry's own, she sat alone. A furious

shower was pattering on the tiles close over her head, a drenched ivy

spray was beating against the gable window like a frantic thing that

wanted shelter, a pair of sparrows were answering each other with

defiant chirrup. Far below in the house, Aspasia was lustily calling

upon a recreant kitten. In the moorland silence these few trivial

sounds became insistent, and yet seemed but to assert the silence

itself.

She was seated at the wide battered old writing-table which schoolboy

Harry English had scored with penknife and chisel, burned and

inkstained. Before her a small writing-desk was spread open, and two or

three letters lay loosely under her clasped hands. Her eyes were

musingly fixed upon the rain-beaten pane with the knocking ivy branch;

her lips were parted by a vaguely recurrent smile. And, as the smile

came and went, a transient red glowed faintly upon her cheeks.... The

world for her now was not upon the edge of winter: it was spring. She

was not Rosamond Gerardine, out of touch with life, she was not Rosamond

English, widow--she was Rosamond Tempest, maid once more, on the

threshold of her life, at the April of the year. And Harry English was

her lover. And yet she was a Rosamond Tempest such as he had never

known--such a Rosamond Tempest as had never yet existed.

She took the letter that lay uppermost to her hand. It was dated

Saltwoods. Written here--at this very desk, no doubt. Perhaps with

this very ivory penholder, fluted, yellow, stained, while he sat in this

same Windsor chair.... Unconsciously she caressed the worn wooden arms

whereon his arms must have rested. Then again she set herself to read:--

"Saltwoods, 19th April."

On that April 19, all those years ago, he was thinking of her, writing

to her! And she--so many miles away, shut in by the dreariest prison

walls fate had ever built round a young impatient soul--had then not the

faintest hint of her deliverer's approach.

DEAR MISS TEMPEST,--I dare say you have quite forgotten me. I

was the youngest griffin, just before the old Colonel's death.

I hope you will not think it a great impertinence in me to write

like this to you; but my leave is up in a week or so, and I

don't like to leave England without having seen your father's

daughter again. I can never forget how kind he was to me--and

your mother too. It made all the difference to me; such a young

fool as I was, and so new to India and everything. I find I

know some of the fellows at Fort Monkton, and I'm going to stop

there a few days. May I call--and if so, when? Yours sincerely,

HARRY ENGLISH. P.S.--I've only just found out where you are.

To Rosamond--most unwilling inmate in a household where, if she was not

actually a burden, the smallness of her pittance rendered her certainly

no material gain--this letter had brought a sort of vision of the past,

a gleam of bygone light which made the present even more intolerable by

contrast. It had been something to her to think that she should meet

some one at last belonging to her old life, some one who had known her

in those glamorous years of her happiness, some one straight from the

magic shores that had held her in her happy years.

From eight to sixteen had Rosamond Tempest spent her life between the

little hill station, the refuge of their hot season, and the historic

old northern town where her father's duty lay--a sort of little Princess

Royal, with a hundred devoted slaves and a score of gallant young

courtiers, the imperious favourite of the whole station, native and

white alike.... Oh the rides in the dawn! oh the picnics by moonlight!

the many-coloured, vivid days that went with such swing, where every man

almost was a hero, where the very air seemed full of the romance of

frontier fights, of raids, and big game hunts, of "Tiger, tiger, burning

bright" in jungle haunts! ... It had been surely the cruellest stroke of

fate that had thrust the little spoilt girl, the beloved only child,

from this pinnacle of bliss and importance!

Between one day and another Rosamond had become the penniless orphan,

whom nobody wanted ... whom it was so kind of Major and Mrs. Carter to

escort back to England, whom it was almost superhumanly good of Uncle

and Aunt Baynes to admit into their family.

"A self-centered child," said Mrs. "General Baynes." "A cold-blooded

little wretch," opined her cousins. Well, it was a fact that, during

the four years that elapsed between her departure from India and the

receipt of Captain English's letter, Rosamond had not given a human

being one word, one look in confidence....

Late April on the Hampshire coast, with the gorse breaking into gorgeous

yellow flame, honey-sweet in the sunshine; with the white clouds

scurrying across a blue sky, chased by the merriest madcap wind that

ever scampered; with the waves breaking from afar off, dashing up a

thousand diamonds falling over and over each other in their race for the

beach, roaring on the shingle in clamorous good-fellowship, the foam

creaming in ever wider circles. And, across the leaping belt of waters,

green and amber and white, the island, flashing too: the windows and

roofs of the happy-looking town throwing back the sun glances, set in

smooth slopes, mildly radiating green, like chrysoprase and peridot....

* * * * *

Rosamond had dropped the letter from her hand; again she was dreaming.

Not the plaint of the November wind round the gable roof of Saltwoods in

her ears, but the chant of this April chorus on Alverstoke beach. Not

the monotonous ting of Aspasia's finger exercise from the room below,

but the irregular boom and thud of gun practice far out at sea, brought

in by the gust. And the voice that fell into silence so far away

between the wild Indian hills was speaking to her again. And she heard,

heard for the first time....

Rosamond Gerardine, virgin of heart through her two marriages, was being

wooed! And the virgin in her was trembling and troubled, as womanhood

awoke.... He held her hands and looked into her eyes. His cheeks were

pale under their bronze, his lips trembled--"Could you trust me? Do you

think me mad? I've only known you four days, but I've dreamt of you,

all my life.... Rosamond!"

The sea wind was eddying round them, the grasses at Rosamond's feet were

nodding like mad things in the gusts. Her hair was whipped against her

face. So, on this English shore, with the taste of the salt in their

mouths, with the wild salt moist winds all about them--this Englishman

wooed this English girl, to come away and be his love in the burning

East. Yes, she could trust him. Who could look into his true eyes and

not trust him? But then it was the thought of the East, the East of her

lost childhood's joy, that won her. Now, back in England's heart, from

an East abhorred, to the loathing as of blood and cruelty, it was the

lover, it was the love!

Again she felt the touch of his first kiss. He had sought her lips, but

she had turned her cheek. Now--the blood rushed up into her face; her

heart beat faster, almost a faintness crept over her. She dropped her

head upon her outstretched arms, her burning cheek upon his letter ...

again his strong arms held her.

* * * * *

Once more they parted at the gate of the house that was her prison. He

was going back to India in ten days, and she would go with him,

confidently, gladly!

She walked up the path between the straggling wallflowers, the pungent

marigolds, into the mean narrow hall. Then her only thought had been of

sailing away from that sordid genteel abode, back to fair India, the

land of her dreams. Now--now, as across these years she re-lived that

great day of her youth, her heart was swooning over the memory of his

kiss; her brain was filled with a vision of his tender trembling lips;

of the light in his eyes as he looked back at her, of the swing of his

broad shoulders as he rounded the crescent towards the fort.

* * * * *

Miss Aspasia Cuningham was in a decidedly bad temper. To be home again,

in England, to have unlimited opportunity of working out the Leschetizky

method on a superfine Steinway piano, the most complete immunity from

interfering uncles, from social duties, philistine secretaries and

attaches, appeared a most delightful existence--in theory. But, in

practice it was dull. Yes, dull was the word.

With four fingers pressing four consecutive notes while the remaining

digit hammered away, vindictively, at the fifth; with pouting lip

out-thrust, she had reached the point of telling herself that even India

was better than this.

"Horrid place," ran Baby's angry cogitation, while the finger

conscientiously drummed, "nothing but those stupid trees and that deadly

moor, and the birds' chirp, chirp, and not a neighbour within miles; or

if there were, with Aunt Rosamond not wanting to see a soul; not even

the curate--and he's got eyes like marbles!"

Aspasia gave a little titter and changed the drumming finger from the

third to the fourth. This was a less elastic member; and she grew pink

with unconscious energy, while pursuing the inner monologue.

"I do think that disgusting Major Bethune might have given us some sign

of life. People have no business to look into people's eyes like that,

and press people's hands, and then go off and mean nothing at all.

Not," said Baby, blowing out her nostrils with a fine breath of scorn,

"that one ever thought of him in that way. But he--oh, he's just a

horrid wretch like the rest! All the nice ones die, I think. At least,

I've never met any."

She brought down the left hand in its turn, with a crash, on the five

notes; and the fine discord seemed to have relieving effect. The

reflections proceeded in a softer vein.

"Harry English--he must have been a dear." She turned her head to look

for the inevitable portrait. There was scarce a room in Saltwoods that

did not hold two or three presentments of him; sketches, most of them,

by the faithful, forcible hand of the artist mother; photographs, too,

in well-nigh every stage of the boy's development. Even Aspasia,

positive, practical, unimaginative, could not but have fallen under the

influence of the haunting presence. And in her actual mood of

disillusion with Raymond Bethune, the ante-room of her girl's heart,

that airy space open to all the winds, where so many come, pause, and

go, was now, half in idleness, half in contradiction, consecrate to the

image of gallant Harry English.

"How Aunt Rosamond could!" she thought, as she dreamily fixed her eyes

upon that charcoal sketch which held one panel of the drawing-room, and

which had been Mrs. English's last work. It was a much enlarged copy of

the photograph on the shrine, and, whether by some unconscious

transcription of her own sorrow, or whether her mother eyes had

discovered in the little picture some stern premonition of his own

approaching fate, the artist had given the strong bold face an

expression that was almost bitter in its melancholy.

"How Aunt Rosamond could----" thought the girl, "when she had been loved

by such a man, ever, ever have looked at any one else? Fancy--the

Runkle!" Ah, if Aspasia had been loved by English, how nobly she would

have borne her widowhood! Her heart, of course, would have been

absolutely, completely broken; she would have gone about in deep, deep

widow's weeds. And strangers, looking after her, noticing the sweet

pale face amid the crape, would ask who she was and would be told in

whispers: the widow of the hero of the Baroghil expedition. "Ah, it

would have been sweet to have been loved by you, Harry English!"

Her hands fell from the piano; her soul was away upon a dream as vague

and innocent as it was absorbing. Too often did the Leschetizky method

end in this manner. The while Rosamond, high in her attic, dreamed that

she was a girl once more, and that she had just been told that Harry

English loved her.

*CHAPTER IV*

There was sunshine enough without to have tempted the most obstinate

recluse into the fields. But as little as she had heeded November rain

did Rosamond now heed the brightness of this opening December. While the

old attic room held her bodily presence, her soul was once again back in

the past. The past ... where, after all, she had not lived, and which

(strange poignant lesson of fate!) was now to become to her more living

than the present.

Those letters, those early memorials, the very thought of which had once

inspired dread, now drew her like a magnet. Scarcely could she give

herself to the necessary facts of life, so impatiently did she long for

those solitary hours in his room, with him!

Every trifling note of his was pored over, dreamt upon in its turn. She

had it in her to have lingered days upon a single line. Yet there was

the sweetness of a tender surprise in every fresh sheet she took into

her hands. And now it was her first "love letter" that she held.

It had come to her in the morning after their meeting in the salt wind,

amid the gorse; had been brought to her--in the ugly top bedroom--on a

basket brimming over with flowers. She could see them again, breathe

them again: hot-house roses, languid-white and heavy-headed yellow, a

huge clump of heliotrope, lily of the valley bound by its pale green

sheaths, sharp-scented, waxen ... then the narcissus, the jonquil, the

darling commoner herd of spring things that had pushed their way in the

open gardens! All this to Rosamond, starved of beauty, Rosamond who was

wont to fill her vases with the budding boughs that the hedges give the

gardenless! She had buried her face in the velvet coolness, drawn in the

perfume as if she was drawing in the loveliness to her soul. Through

the waste of those ten years she could again feel the touch of the

petals on her cheek--she was back again, back again in her maidenhood

and held her first love letter between her hands. Was it possible that

the faded nondescript leaf that fell from between its pages had once

been part of that exquisite basketful that could still bloom for her?

DARLING (wrote Harry English)--these are all I can send you. I

wanted to send you roses, love, worthy of my Rose, the only

Rose, of Rosamond, Rose of the World! I half dreamed of them

last night, red, red, glowing, deep-scented like my love for

you. I can find nothing but these pale mawkish things, far

though I have hunted this morning! ...

This morning--and it was now but nine o'clock. How early he must have

risen! It was not the Rosamond, the hard young untouched Rosamond of

those old days, who thought thus with a mist before the eyes; it was the

new Rosamond whose heart was beginning to teach her so many things.

Early had the lover risen indeed!

I could not sleep (went on the letter) for sheer tumult of

happiness. I saw the dawn break over the water out on the sea

bastion of this old fort. The sea was quite wrapt in mist, and I

and my heart seemed first alone high up in the air, with the

wash of the invisible waters below and the restless tapping of

the flag line on the staff over my head. And then the dawn

came. It seemed to me the first dawn I had ever beheld, I, who

have marched through many an Indian night and seen such fires as

England never dreams of. But I look upon the world with new

eyes. The meaning of things has become clear to me. I never

saw beauty before I saw you; and through you, all other beauty

is fulfilled to me. Grey and dove-coloured and pearl, faint

roses and yellows and opals--the mists first became impregnated

with all lovely tints and then rolled away. Then there was a

straight ray of sun across the sea at my feet, and the water was

gold and green. Glorious! Why do I write all this to you? I

have never even thought of such things before. Will you laugh at

me? I, who have known you for such a little while? But I have

waited for you all the years of my manhood--this much I know at

least. And you, who are the meaning of everything to me now,

you will know the meaning of my heart.

All the meaning of her lover to Rosamond Tempest, in the top room over

the straggling back garden, had been that he was her deliverer from an

existence of utter negation. She had read his words with the same

pleasure with which she had gazed upon his flowers, inhaled their

fragrance: it had represented a new atmosphere of colour and beauty!

But now, as she bent over that faded leaf and read those vivid words

from a hand long dust, her whole being gave itself responsive to the

love that still spoke.

* * * * *

In the garden below, under the nipped frost-bitten leaves, Aspasia poked

about for hidden violets. From its bare brown stalks she had already

culled the last dwindled chrysanthemum. When Rosamond and she, in the

marshalled palace of Sir Arthur, had planned this homely occupation, it

had seemed an almost deliriously joyful prospect of freedom. Now, such

is the futility of the granted wish, Aspasia, as she flicked with

impatient fingers among the wet foliage, was a prey to that abandonment

of melancholy which is rarely known in its perfection after twenty.

Indeed, poor Baby's outlook upon the world that December noon was a

pitiable one. The only man she could have loved was dead before she had

even known him! Another man, whom she was certain she could never have

cared for, displayed the most reprehensible indifference as to whether

he were as much as remembered. And those wonderful piano recitals of

the gifted young genius, Miss Aspasia Cuningham, seemed hopelessly

remote.

She could not even muster a smile for the kitten as it suddenly cantered

across the path, every individual hair bristling, body contorted, and

legs stiffened, to box a hanging leaf and fall prone on its back with

four paws wildly beating the air. The very kitten was part of the

general unsatisfactoriness of things. When she did have the heart to

play with it, it was never to be found: but it had a Puck-like knowledge

of the ripe moment when to mock her misery.

Indeed, the claims of the eager young life were somewhat neglected in

this old home of dreams.

Aspasia walked, in royal dignity of dolour, back to the house, set the

violets in two shallow vases, and the chrysanthemum in a high narrow

one. She placed the portable easel upon the open leaf of the grand

piano; she detached from its panel the portrait of Captain English with

the sad stern face, propped it on the easel, arranged her flowers round

it, all with the solemn air of one going through a religious rite. Then

she sat down, heaved a noisy sigh from the depth of her little round

chest, and began to play those throbbing strains of passion, yearning

disappointment, and sorrow that, the legend says, came to Chopin one

day, through the beat of raindrops against his window panes, as he

waited for her who failed him.

Baby had begun to find out that even in so serious an art as music those

paltry things, the emotions, will insist on finding expression. She was

in a very pretty state of artistic woe when, with a sudden discord, the

love notes fell mute. From the shadowy window-seat a tall figure had

risen and come forward: eyes, ablaze with anger, were fixed upon her

from a white and threatening face.

"Aunt Rosamond! ..." stammered the girl, too much startled to do

anything but sit and stare.

"How dare you?" said Lady Gerardine, in a low voice, hardly above a

whisper indeed, but charged with intense anger. She walked up to the

piano and stood looking a second at the altar-like arrangement; then her

eyes returned to Aspasia, who now blushed violently, guiltily, in spite

of an irrepressible childish desire to giggle.

"You shameless girl!" said Rosamond. "How dare you! What have you to

do with him?" She took up the picture. "He is mine," she said, "mine

only!" Then, holding it clasped to her breast, she swept from the room.

"Upon my word!" said Miss Aspasia. "Good gracious goodness me!"

Resentment got the better of amusement; her cheeks were flaming scarlet,

she struck a series of defiant chords, as a sort of war cry in pursuit

of the retreating figure. "Shameless girl, indeed; I've as much right

to him, by this time, as anybody else, I should think. In heaven

there's no marriage or giving in marriage ... and, if it comes to that,

what about Runkle then?"

She plunged into the noisiest, most dishevelled Wagner-Liszt piece of

her repertory; crashed, banged, and pounded till the staid old

manor-house seemed to ring with amazement, and the exasperated player,

with flying hands, loosened hair, empurpled countenance, and panting

breath, could hardly keep her seat in the midst of her own gymnastics.

Henceforth there was one room in the manor-house without its presiding

picture. And, opposite Rosamond's bed, where the tender child's face

had once watched the mother's slumbers, the soldier now looked down

sternly and sadly upon the wife.

*CHAPTER V*

"Will you answer this for me, Baby?--Tell Major Bethune that we shall be

glad to see him here this week, and for as long as he cares to stay."

Aspasia took the letter between disdainful finger and thumb, and turned

it over to peruse. Rosamond, leaning her chin on her hand, looked away

from the breakfast-table through the small-paned windows into the wintry

garden, and was lost in some dream again.

Miss Cuningham's nostrils dilated with indignation as she read the brief

dry lines in which Major Bethune informed Lady Gerardine that he would

be glad if she could now furnish him with some of the promised material

for his work, as he was at a stand-still. He could run down for the

day, if it suited, and with kind regards to her niece--begged to remain,

and so forth.

"Kind regards to her niece," repeated that young lady to herself with an

ominous tightness of expression. "Yes, Aunt," she said aloud, with some

alacrity. "Leave it to me; I shall write to Major Bethune."

She finished her tea with a gulp and hurried to the corner of the

drawing-room, where she had established her Lares and Penates, to

undertake the congenial task.

Her dimples pointed deep satisfaction as she wrote. "Kind regards,"

indeed! This Major of Guides should be taught his proper place in the

estimation of Miss Aspasia Cuningham.

DEAR MAJOR BETHUNE (she wrote)--My aunt bids me to say that she

will be charmed if you can arrange your promised visit for next

week. You did promise to come here, did not you? I positively

forget. It seems such ages since that dreadful, dreary sea

journey, that it was quite a surprise to hear from you this

morning. We are having such a happy time here that India and

all the rest of it seem never to have existed. We do enjoy

being by ourselves. Kind regards from my Aunt,

Yours very truly,

concluded Miss Aspasia with a vindictive flourish.

Having despatched this epistle in triumph, it was astonishing how much

brighter became Miss Cuningham's outlook upon the world at large and the

manor-house in particular. She developed a renewed interest in

housekeeping details; not, as she was careful to explain, that it

mattered really what they gave this gentleman to eat or to drink, only

Aunt Rosamond was so fastidious.

She discovered that it was absolutely necessary for the entertainment of

any visitor that a pony and cart should immediately be added to the

establishment, and spent an exciting afternoon in scouring the

countryside for the same.

It was, of course, the sense of duty well accomplished that gave such a

sparkle to her eye and such an irrepressible tilt to the corners of her

lips, as she sat waiting for the return of the above-mentioned vehicle

from the station the day of Major Bethune's arrival. It had not been

her intention to gratify him with a sight of her countenance so soon;

but Lady Gerardine, after faithfully promising to be in attendance at

the appointed time, had wandered off, in the vague way of which Aspasia

was becoming resignedly tolerant, for one of her long solitary rambles;

and the girl could not, for the credit of the house, but take on herself

the neglected hospitable duty.

Alas for all the resolves of a noble pride! She had hardly been ten

minutes in the company of the newly arrived guest before she had fallen

into the old terms of confidential intimacy.

Afterwards she could not quite tell herself how it had happened; whether

because of the good softening of his harsh face as he looked down at

her, or of the warm close grasp of his hand which drove away at once the

forlorn feeling which had possessed her poor little gregarious soul all

these days; or whether it were the mollifying influence of old Mary's

scones, the cosiness of the fragrant tea and the leaping fire in

contrast to the dreary dusk gathering outside. Perhaps it was merely

that her healthy nature could harbour no resentment, albeit the most

justifiable. However it may have been, Major Bethune found his welcome

at the manor-house sweet. Even the maidenly coldness of her first

greeting pleased his fastidious old-fashioned notions; and the

subsequent thawing of this delicate rime came upon him with something of

the balm of sunshine on a frosty morning.

His face stiffened, however, at Aspasia's first confidence about her

aunt, into which she plunged, after her usual manner, without the

slightest preamble.

"She's awfully good to me, always; sweeter to me than ever, these last

few days--when we meet! But I scarcely see her, except at meals. And

then we don't seem to be living in the same world. It's like talking

through the telephone," cried the girl. "Of course, I am quite aware,"

she went on, "that the poor darling is suffering from

neu--neurasth--well, whatever they call it; that her nerves are all

wrong. 'Tisn't anything so very new either," she giggled, "'tis just too

much Runkle--Runkleitis.... I know myself, even I, at times, have felt

as if I could scream and tear out his hair by the roots. What must it

have been for her! She kept up, you see; that's her way. And now that

she's free of him for a bit, it's the reaction, I suppose."

He drank his tea in sips, listening to her, his head bent. The

firelight leaped and cast changing lights upon his countenance. Baby

thought he looked thinner, older, sterner; yet she could never be afraid

of him. There was something extraordinarily pleasant in having him

there. The very loneliness of the Old Ancient House added a zest. The

unsubstantial image of Harry English faded like a ghost before the dawn

in the strong man's presence. She edged her chair an inch closer.

"I am sorry Lady Gerardine is no better," said he, formally, into the

silence.

"Oh, better!" answered Aspasia. "Will you have another cup?" ("That

makes the third." She was pleased; here was a tribute to her capacity.)

"Better?--that's what is so funny, she's as well as possible. She looks

young, young, with a bloom on her cheeks, and sometimes she walks about

smiling to herself. It makes me creep. I can't think what she's smiling

at. She comes down, singing softly to herself. Why, there are times

when she looks just like a girl. No one could ever believe she's had

two husbands," cried terrible Baby.

Major Bethune put down his cup, untouched. ("He didn't want it after

all," commented she.) "It is rather strange," she went on aloud; "she's

simply bloomed since she came here, and the whole house is full of Harry

English. And she's shut up half the time, in his old rooms under the

roof, routing among those old letters, you know--those letters there was

all the fuss about. I thought we'd killed her over them between us,"

said Baby, with her little nervous laugh. "And now, I don't know, but I

almost think I would rather see her cry and look pale as before. It

would seem more natural. Really, I'm frightened sometimes."

Her pretty face, with its wide open eyes, took a piteous look in the

firelight.

"You don't think it means anything?" she resumed. And the tears suddenly

welled, the corners of her mouth drooped: she seemed no more than a

child. He stretched out his arm and took her hand.

"Mean?" he said. "Why, Miss Aspasia, what should it mean? Something

perhaps that your kind heart would find hard to understand. But it

means, after all, nothing so very unusual. Lady Gerardine, and it is

all the better for her, is of those who are quickly consoled. The

country air is doing her good, and the old letters----" he dropped her

hand, his tones grew incisive. "It is only when the past is more

satisfactory than the present that memories are disagreeable."

"Oh," cried Aspasia. She started to her feet. "What a funny way you

have of saying that!" And as the meaning of his words forced itself

upon her, "How unkind! I think you hate Aunt Rosamond."

"I?" said he, startled. He rose in his turn. "What an absurd idea!" He

laughed, but his lips seemed stiff. "I?--I would not presume, how could

I? to have any feeling for Lady Gerardine but that of distant respect."

The door opened and in came Rosamond.

"In the dark!" she said, looking upon them unseeingly after the light of

the hall. "Is that Major Bethune?"

She came forward, while Aspasia, on her knees, violently poked the fire

into a blaze.

"Rose of the World," thought Bethune, as the ruddy glow fell upon the

figure of his friend's widow. It was true she looked like a girl. Her

cheek was rose-red from the cold wind. Her shadowed eyes brilliant.

The light tendrils of her hair floated back from her white forehead.

"You are welcome," she said, and mingled with her grace and sweetness

there was a timidity which was as exquisite and as indescribable an

addition to her beauty as the bloom to the purple of the grape or the

mist to the line of the hills at dawn. He bowed over her hand. He felt

angry with himself that he had no word to say.

"Tea?" said Aspasia. As he took the cup from her to pass it to Lady

Gerardine, he heard the spoon clink against the saucer with the

trembling of his own hand.

*CHAPTER VI*

"It is the post, Aunt," said Aspasia; "and a letter from Runkle."

She stood at the door of the attic, looking in upon them with something

unfriendly in the expression of her eyes. The tone in which she

announced Lady Gerardine's correspondent was not without a shade of

malicious triumph.

Rosamond and Major Bethune were sitting one at each end of the old

writing-table that had been Harry English's. Between them lay a pile of

papers. From the landing, Baby had heard Bethune's voice uplifted in

unwonted animation, and then the ring of her aunt's laugh.

As she entered, the man rose. But Lady Gerardine merely turned her head

towards the intruder with an involuntary contraction of the eyebrows.

"Dear child," she said, and Aspasia felt the impatience of interruption

under the gentleness of the tone, "we are at work."

"At work! It had sounded like it," thought the girl, ironically.

"Runkle writes from Brindisi," she said, turning over in her hand the

thin envelope with the foreign stamp. "We shall have him home

directly."

If she had hoped to create a sensation with her news, here was a

failure. Bethune stood impassive. Lady Gerardine had all the air of one

to whom Sir Arthur's movements were the least of concerns. She turned

with a little impatient gesture to Major Bethune!

"Do sit down again," she said, "and go on. You have not told me whether

Harry won the race. Oh, he must have won. I never saw any one ride as

he did."

Aspasia's pretty, defiant countenance changed. Of late she had

occasionally known an undefined lurking anxiety about her aunt--it now

sprang out of ambush and seized her again. She put one hand over

Rosamond's clasped fingers, and with the other held the letter before

the abstracted eyes.

"But you must read it," she said, half tenderly, half authoritatively.

"Presently," said Lady Gerardine. And then, as if irritated by the

disturbing document, seized it and laid it on one side. "Here, Baby,"

said she, "come and take your favourite place on the floor, and Major

Bethune will begin his story again. You will like to hear how Harry

took the conceit out of these Lancers who thought that nobody could ride

a horse but themselves."

Baby flung a swift look at Bethune, half appeal, half fright. He was

gnawing the corner of his moustache and staring under his heavy brows at

Rosamond's lace--beautiful, unconscious, eager. He seemed perplexed.

"But, my goodness," cried Aspasia, and for very little more she would

have burst into tears, "you know what the Runkle is, both of you. Don't

you see this is perfectly idiotic? Some one will have to read his

letter and see what he's got to say."

"Read it you, then," retorted Lady Gerardine, with sudden heat. Her

eyes flashed, the blood rushed into her cheeks. She was as angry as the

sleeper who is shaken from some fair dream that he would fain hold fast.

Thereupon Baby's temper flamed likewise. She shrugged her shoulders,

snapped the letter from the table, tore it open. Lady Gerardine began

to sort the papers before her, once more determinedly abstracted from

the situation. The girl flung herself down on the window-seat below the

dormer, and, with pouting lips and scornfully uplifted eyebrows, set to

work to peruse the marital document.

"Poor Runkle hopes," she cried sarcastically, "that you have not been

making yourself ill again with anxiety about him because he missed the

last mail. (Fancy, if we'd only known dear Runkle missed the last mail!)

You must forgive him, Aunt. Lady Aspasia insisted on being taken to

Agra, to see the Taj.... Runkle will be in England almost as soon as

this letter. (Oh, joy!) Lady Aspasia has insisted on his going to stay

at Melbury Towers first. She is having all sorts of interesting people

to meet him. (Aren't you jealous, Aunt?) When once she's got him, she

doesn't mean to let him go--(Fancy, the Runkle!)--Oh----" She dropped

her hands with the crinkling thin sheet and surveyed Lady Gerardine with

some gravity: "He wants us to join him there!"

"Who--where?"

"Us--you and me, Aunt Rosamond, at Melbury. We're to meet him there, he

says, immediately, and stay over Christmas. Lady Aspasia will write."

"I cannot go," said Rosamond, quietly, as if that decided the question.

Once again Aspasia hesitated in distress between the advisability of

discussion with any one so unreasonable, and the danger of exciting a

highly nervous patient. With a despairing shake of her fluffy head, she

finally returned to the letter and read on in a voice from which all the

angry zest had departed.

"'I shall spend a couple of days in Paris. Lady Aspasia has implored me

to give her my opinion upon some old furniture. I propose, however, to

send Muhammed Saif-u-din--my native secretary, you remember--straight to

you at Saltwoods. He has some important work to finish for me, and Jani

will know how to look after him. He will arrive about the evening of

the tenth.' That's to-morrow," said the girl, breaking off. "Lord, I'm

glad you're here, Major Bethune! Gracious! This old place is creepy

enough without having a black man wandering about the passages and the

orchards.... Fancy us, all alone in the middle of the downs! He might

cut all our throats, and nobody know anything, till the baker came. I

do think our Runkle might keep his own blackamoors to himself."

Rosamond looked indifferent. She drummed the table softly with her

fingers, as if in protest against the waste of time. Bethune still

stood without speaking. His attitude had not changed a fraction, neither

had his brooding face. Aspasia thought that she could have flung the

inkpot at him with much satisfaction.

"That's all," she concluded drily; "Runkle is his dear wife's devoted

husband." She threw a hard emphasis on the words. Rosamond suddenly

paled and set her lips close.

"Oh yes! there's a postscript; he wants an answer immediately to

Claridge's--and who do you think was their fellow traveller? Dr.

Châtelard--he's to be at Melbury, too. It's all fish that comes to Lady

Aspasia's net--evidently. Well?"

Still there was silence.

It was a clear day. A shaft of wintry sunshine pierced in between the

ivy sprays, and caught the girl as she sat; her crisp aureole of hair

seemed palely afire; sparks of the same faint yellow flame enkindled her

eyes, and even the ends of her long eyelashes. She sat stiff and stern,

her face was somewhat pallid. Bethune glanced at her suddenly. The sky

was blue through the little panes beyond: he thought she made a quaintly

pretty picture.

"Well!" repeated Miss Cuningham, "you had better wire to Runkle, I

think."

Lady Gerardine rose from her seat with so swift a movement that,

startled, Baby jumped from her perch. The elder woman was passion white;

her nostrils were dilated.

"Leave me, Aspasia," she said, pointing to the door with a gesture at

once dignified and incensed. "You disturb me."

"Well, I never!" exclaimed the ill-used girl. She checked herself

suddenly and made a rush for the passage; if she spoke another word the

tears would certainly come, and that (she thought) would be the last

straw.

Quick as she was, Bethune was before her. He opened the door for her to

pass. His air of detachment, the banality of the courtesy, seemed to

her an insult; she flung a look of scathing reproach at him as she

flounced by.

With Sir Arthur's letter clutched in her hand she sought refuge in her

own room; and there on the small white bed shed some of the bitterest

and angriest tears she had ever known. The thought of the two in the

attic room galled her beyond endurance.

"Hasn't she had two husbands already?" sobbed she to herself, catching

at the crudest conclusions with all the inconsequence of her years, "and

couldn't she leave just this one man alone? ... 'You disturb me'--oh!"

Yet Bethune had remained in the attic scarcely a minute after Aspasia

herself had left it. When he had returned to the table, Lady Gerardine

had gazed at him a span or two with vague eyes--then she had passed her

hand over her forehead, sighed wearily, and fallen into her seat.

"I can do no more to-day!" she had said. "Take those papers. You see I

have copied out all in sequence, even the most trivial detail, till the

Sandhurst examination. Make what use of them you like. I--forgive me,

it is very stupid--but I feel troubled. And please--do not talk to me

about this any more until I ask you to."

So she had dismissed him. And, dismissed, he returned to the study,

which had been allotted for his use, and placed her voluminous notes

with his own typewritten manuscript, pending the task of collation. Then

he fell into a long reverie, and his thoughts were neither of Harry

English nor of Miss Aspasia Cuningham.

* * * * *

But even in anger Baby was loyal; some instinct, rather than any

positive train of reasoning, told her that Sir Arthur's arrival at the

present juncture would inevitably precipitate matters to a most

undesirable climax. On the other hand: how keep him away if his wife

persisted in her attitude of indifference and silence? ...

"Good gracious, we'll have Runkle turning up in a special train before

the week's out!" How to prevent it?

With much labour she finally concocted and despatched a telegram of

Machiavellian artfulness to await arrival at Claridge's, taking further

upon herself to sign it in Lady Gerardine's name:

Just received letter. Overjoyed return, trust you can make

arrangements to join me here at once; unfortunate presence of

guest prevents my leaving. Otherwise would meet you London

before Melbury.

"That will do it, I think," said the astute young lady. "If Runkle

thinks that any one is trying to dictate to him or to interfere with his

own sacred arrangements--the trick is done."

*CHAPTER VII*

Before the two women met again, it was evening--the debatable hour,

between light and darkness, which falls so quickly upon the December

day. Rosamond had come in, wet and weary, from a walk alone on the

downs; caught by reverie, she sat before the fire in her dressing-gown,

her change of garb unfinished, her hair still loosened, gazing through

those unsubstantial misty recent years to the past, which had grown so

vivid.

Aspasia peeped in, half drew back, hesitated; then, as Lady Gerardine

held out her left hand, without a word, the girl flew to her side and

nestled down on the hearthrug at her feet, seizing the white hand with

the unexpressed joy of tacit reconciliation. For a little while there

was silence between them. Baby's eyes roved about the room; within her

sunny head a host of new thoughts were humming like a hive of bees. All

at once something unfamiliar to her touch about the fingers she was

fondling drew her gaze with surprise.

"Why, Aunt Rosamond?"

"Yes, Baby."

Lady Gerardine answered from the past, her voice far away and dreamy.

"Why." The girl turned the inert hand now to the faint grey light of

the waning day, now to the fireglow. "You have changed your rings.

This is a new one I never saw before," and her plump fingertips felt the

plain circle, so much rounder and narrower than that pompous gold band

with which the great Sir Arthur had plighted his nuptial vow. The cry

had almost escaped her lips: "You've never taken off Runkle's

wedding-ring!" but she checked it with that new prudence circumstances

were forcing upon her. She wished now she had not spoken at all. But

Lady Gerardine was smiling.

"Yes," said she, tenderly, looking down at her hand where the leaping

wood flame flashed back from the narrow gold circlet and the tiny

coloured gems of an antique ring that surmounted it. "I have changed my

rings--this one was given me the night before my marriage. It all went

so quickly, you see, Baby, that my engagement ring came only the day

before the wedding-ring. It was hers," said Rosamond, looking over her

shoulder at the bed where Mrs. English had died. "'Tis a very old

trinket, you see. Red roses of rubies, green leaves of emerald, and a

diamond heart. He said it was my heart--I said it was his."

She smiled again into space. Aspasia clasped her and kissed her. It

was the first time since the voyage her aunt had spoken to her openly of

her hidden thoughts. And now she spoke as if confidence had always

existed between them, as if she were merely continuing the thread of an

interrupted discourse.

Baby's heart began to sink with an uneasy sense of awe as before

something unnatural, and of her own incapacity for meeting it. She

wished her kiss could stop the lovely smiling lips from further speech.

But Lady Gerardine went on:

"We were married quite early, in the little Alverstoke church. I used

to hate it when I went there Sunday after Sunday; but it was a new place

to me that morning, holy and beautiful, all in the dewy freshness, grey

amid the green, with stripes of sunlight yellow upon it, and the dancing

shadows of the trees. The whole church was full of the smell of white

narcissus; it was like incense. When I came up the nave, he turned

where he stood at the altar rail, and looked at me. I can see him now,

just as he looked; his eyes dark, dark, and his face quite pale for all

it was so bronzed. Baby, I can smell the narcissus now, as I stood

beside him and he put this on my finger."

She raised her hand and kissed the ring.

"I shall never take it off," she said, as if to herself. And unhappy,

practical Baby, could have laughed and cried together with the

despairing ejaculation: "Poor Runkle!"

The night was pressing up against the windows; only the firelight now

fought the darkness in the wainscoted room. Upon the panel opposite the

bed, the life-size portrait of Captain English, in its strong relief of

black and white, began to assume a ruddy tint; in the shifting of the

shadows the expression of the face seemed to change. It assumed

startling airs of life. Baby caught sight of this and gave a faint

scream.

"Oh, oh," she said, burrowing her face against Rosamond's neck, "he

almost looks alive!"

Lady Gerardine had seen, too; but there was no terror in her soul.

"Why should he not look alive?" said she, in a soft confidential

whisper, "he's not really dead, you know."

The astounding words had scarcely fallen upon Baby's alarmed

consciousness, when there was a crunching of wheels below the window, as

if the night without had suddenly engendered some ghostly visitor in

state. A violent peal rang through the silent house; a new but very

tangible fear was upon Aspasia. With a shriek she sprang to her feet.

"As sure as eggs is eggs, it's Runkle!"

She rushed helter-skelter to the door, while Rosamond sat still,

clasping her ringed finger.

A minute later Aspasia burst into the room again. She was laughing

violently in reaction, and brought a breath as of wet woods and winter

winds into the warm room.

"It's all right," she gasped. "It isn't Runkle, aunt, it's only----"

with a fresh irrepressible gust, "it's only the 'native spring,' you

know, the black man--the secretary who's writing up Runkle's monument!"

She leaned against the bed-post, puffing and fanning herself with her

handkerchief.

"What a turn he's given me--poor thing! I'm glad we've got Jani for

him. He looked so forlorn, standing in the hall, staring about him with

great sad eyes, like something pitchforked into a different world."

* * * * *

Jani carried a lamp into the small bare chamber allotted to Muhammed

Saif-u-din, and set it on the table at which he was seated.

She turned up the wick, and was straightening herself from her task when

her glance fell upon the man's hands and became riveted there. Even in

their attitude of repose, folded one over the other in the oriental

fashion, these dusky hands had a singular suggestion of strength and

energy about them. They were larger, too, than might have been expected

in a babu; but then was he not of the virile northern breed?

After a while, slowly, the woman's gaze travelled up to the broad

breast, where it rested once more. Then, upon a sudden impulse, she

tilted the green shade so as to throw the full light upon the bearded

countenance. The secretary smiled and raised his eyes to look at her in

return; but her action had cast her face into profound shadow.

"So," said he, in her own tongue, "here we meet, children of the sun in

the land of the mist. So far from home we should be friends."

"I make no friend of your blood-stained race," said Jani, harshly.

"Why, what harm have we done thee or thine, mother?" asked Muhammed, his

easy good-humoured tone contradicted by the relentless keenness of the

gaze that still strove to pierce the gloom in her direction.

"What harm, Pathan?" shrieked Jani, suddenly, trembling with a sort of

monkey fury. She flung out her hands as if waving off some threatening

vision. "What harm, do you ask, have you done, you and your brothers of

the mountain? Harm enough. See that ye do no more. Cross not my

mistress's path."

Muhammed put his hand over his mouth, as if to conceal a yawn. Then,

with an air of weary curiosity:

"Your mistress?" he echoed. "Nay, mother, my business is with your

noble lord. How should even my shadow ever come between your lady and

the sun?"

"I will tell you," said Jani. She came closer to him, though still

keeping in the darkness, and laid her fingers on his sleeve. "Your

mountains once brought her great sorrow. She has forgotten, she is

consoled. I would not that she remembered again. Why did you come

here?" she cried, breaking into a wail. "My heart trembles. It is for

no good!"

The man shrugged his shoulders, but she repeated in a sort of frenzy:

"Keep out of the Mem Sahib's way. Waï, that you should have come here

to remind her! Her tears are dry."

Muhammed smiled again, a smile full of secret yet fierce irony.

"I am here," said he, "upon the bidding of my most noble lord and

master, the Governor Sahib, of splendid fame."

"Great be his shadow!" ejaculated the woman, with Eastern gesture of

reverence. "Oh, you speak the truth; that is a noble and magnificent

lord!"

"Ay," quoth the secretary. Then, with a movement as sudden as her own

had been, he lifted the shade altogether from the lamp. Jani again

flung out both her hands.

"Stay," he commanded, as she huddled towards the door; and she stayed,

glancing at him with furtive, furious eyes like a frightened wild thing.

"You love your lady then so deeply?" he queried, studying her dark face

in the revealing glare.

The ayah's lips moved. She looked askance at her questioner, dropped

her gaze upon his hands again, hesitated, and at last spoke:

"I--I suckled her at this breast," she beat her withered bosom. "She is

more beloved to me than the child of my flesh. When she weeps, it is as

if my blood fell. She is happy, she is great, she is the lady of a high

and magnificent lord. She reigns as a queen, she has jewels--oh,

jewels--all her heart can wish."

"What then?" cried Muhammed, laughing loudly.

"The sons of the mountain have made her weep enough," cried Jani,

hoarsely. She was trembling as between a terror of pleading and an

impotence of anger. "Woe to you if your shadow come between her and the

sunshine! The dead are dead, past and done with; but the living she

shall keep--and her greatness."

"You speak in riddles," said the Pathan, coldly. "But doubtless you are

a faithful servant. Faithful, but also foolish. I will not harm your

mistress!"

"Who harms my lord harms her," retorted the woman, sullenly.

Muhammed's eyes flashed.

"And who would harm so just, so great, so beloved a master? You weary

me, mother; begone."

He did not raise his voice, but there was that in it before which she

shrank; creeping from the room thereafter stealthily, like a threatened

dog.

Muhammed, his hands folded once more, remained seated long into the

night, with the merciless light of the unshaded lamp upon his brooding

countenance.

*CHAPTER VIII*

The law of change, of passage--the pressure of time, in fact--is so

strong upon everything that comes under its law at all, that not even in

memory can we remain stationary. Fain, fain, would Rosamond have

lingered upon the first stage of that journey into the past she had so

singularly engaged upon. But, in spite of herself, the wheels were

turning, the moments dropping; from within as well as from without, she

was forced on and on, and she knew that in a little while she must reach

the parting of the ways.

It having been ruled for us that life is almost all change, and that

change is mostly sorrow, it is a dispensation of mercy that we should be

blind travellers along the road, and never know what lies beyond. But

Rosamond, who had rebelled against the natural law, was now, with eyes

unsealed, advancing fatally towards the way of sorrows she had already

once traversed, refusing to mourn at her appointed hour.

Fain would she have walked in the sheltered valley, fain even called

back the old sleep of coldness. In vain. Time was marching, and she

must march. And two there were that drove her forward, besides the

relentless invisible power--Bethune, with his expectant close presence,

and Sir Arthur, unbearable menace from the distance.

* * * * *

"And then, you know, the summons came," said she.

"I know," he answered. Then there was silence between them.

Lady Gerardine had come to Major Bethune in the little library where he

spent some hours each morning over his work. These last days she had

shown an unaccountable distaste to his presence in the attic room. And

he, studying her now, thought that, in this short week of his visit, she

had altered and wasted; that the bloom had faded on her cheek, and that

cheek itself was faintly hollowed. He had been poring over some old

maps of the Baroghil district, pipe in mouth, when she entered upon him.

And at sight of her, he had risen to his feet, putting aside the briar

with a muttered apology. But she, arrested in her advance, had stood

inhaling the vapour of his tobacco, her lips parted with a quivering

that was half smile, half pain.

"I like it," she had said dreamily. "It brings me back."

Awkward he nearly always felt himself before her, never more so than at

these moments of self-betrayal on her part, when every glimpse of her

innermost feeling contradicted the hard facts of her life. He stood

stiffly, not taking up his pipe at her bidding. Then, pulling herself

together, she had advanced again, ceremoniously requesting him to be

seated. She had only come to bring him another note, which she had

omitted to join to those annals of Harry English's life up to their

marriage, already in his hands.

He had just glanced at it and flicked it on one side, and then at the

expectancy of his silence, she had grown pale. There could be no

turning back, she did not ask it, scarcely hoped for it. But, O God, if

she might wait a little longer!

She sank into the worn leather armchair. It was a small room, lined

with volumes, and the air was full of the smell of ancient bindings,

ancient paper and print; that good smell of books, so grateful to the

nostrils of one who loves them, mingled with the pungency of Bethune's

tobacco.

The wild orchard came quite close to the window and across the panes,

under an impatient wind, the empty boughs went ceaselessly up and down

like withered arms upon some perpetual useless signalling. To Rosamond

they seemed spectres of past summers, waving her back from their own

hopeless winter. The room was warm and rosy with firelight, but in her

heart she felt cold. And Major Bethune sat waiting.

"I only had one or two letters from him," she faltered at last; "and

then came the silence." Her lovely mouth twitched with pain; Raymond

Bethune turned his eyes away from her face.

"He joined us at Gilgit," he said, staring out at the frantic boughs.

"I remember how he looked, as he jogged in, towards evening, with his

fellows--white with dust, his very hair powdered."

She clasped her hands; the tension slightly relaxed.

"You all loved him?" she said softly.

"Loved him!" he gave a short laugh. "Well, he was a sort of god to me,

and to the men too. Some of the subs thought him hard on them--so he

was, hard as nails."

Astonishment filled her gaze.

"Gad," said the man, "I remember poor little Fane--he went during the

siege, fever--I remember the little fellow saying, half crying: 'I think

English is made of stone.' But it was before he had seen him at the

fighting. That was a leader of men!"

"Hard!" said Lady Gerardine. "Harry made of stone!" she gave a low

laugh, half indignant.

"Don't you know," said Bethune, "that here"--he tapped the jagged lines

of the mountain maps--"you can't do anything if you're not harder than

the rocks? And with those devils of ours," his own face softened oddly

as he spoke; "they're hard enough--they're devils, I tell you--to lead

them right, you've got to be more than devil yourself--you've got to

be--an archangel."

Some vision of a glorious fighting Michael, with a stern serene face of

immutable justice, featured with the beauty of the dead, rose before

Rosamond. She flushed and trembled; then she thought back again and

with anger.

"Ah, but his heart," she said; "ah, you did not know him!"

He wheeled round upon her and gazed at her, his cold eyes singularly

enkindled.

"You forget," said he, and quoted "that every man 'boasts two soul

sides, one to face the world with, one to show a woman when he loves

her.'"

"Ah!" said Rosamond.--It was a tender cry, as if she had taken something

very lovely to her heart and was holding it close. With an abrupt

movement Bethune turned back to his table; his harsh face looked harsher

and more unemotional than usual, and he began folding up his papers as

if he thought the conversation had lasted long enough.

"Perhaps to-morrow," he said, "you will be able to give me the beginning

of the siege papers."

"I will try," said Rosamond, catching her breath. And then, after a

moment, she rose and left him without another word.

* * * * *

Rosamond felt restless; the walls of the house oppressed her; the sound

of the piano in the drawing-room was maddening; she wanted to be out in

the wide spaces with her overwhelming thoughts. She caught up a cape,

drew the hood over her head, and went quickly forth to meet the December

wind.

Down the grass-grown avenues, under the bereft and complaining orchard

trees, she went, making for the downs. At the boundary gate she met the

old one-armed postman toiling with his burden. He thrust a letter into

her hand and passed on. She saw that it was addressed in Sir Arthur's

writing, and bore the stamp of Melbury. She broke it open and read

impatiently, eager to be back with her absorbing dream. Her husband was

urgently summoning her to join him at once, under Lady Aspasia's roof.

He expressed surprise, tinged with dissatisfaction, that Lady Aspasia's

kind letter of invitation to her should have remained unanswered.

"No doubt, dear," Sir Arthur wrote, "you are waiting until you can

ascertain the date of your visitor's departure, but this must not be

allowed to interfere." Here was a command. Rosamond gave a vague

laugh.

"Who is the guest, by the way? I am expecting a letter from you,

forwarded from London. Probably you have written to Claridge's. I

would gladly accede to your request and come at once to the

manor-house...." She stared, as the phrase caught her eyes, then

laughed again: "Poor man--what was he thinking of?"

She crumpled the sheet in her hand and walked on. The wind blew

fiercely across the downs, every leaf and spray, every dry gorse-bush,

every blade of rank grass was writhen and bent in the same direction.

She struggled to the shelter of a hazel copse and sat her down.

Before her stretched the moorland, dun-grey and yellow, dipping to the

horizon; above her head the sky was leaden grey, charged with cloud

wrack--a huge bowl of storm. She thought of that glowing Indian

morning, when he had told her he must leave her, and of the twenty-four

hours that had elapsed between that moment and their parting. What

tenderness, gentler than a woman's, had he not revealed to her

then--Harry English, the hard man, fierce angel-leader of devils! And

the words of Browning rushed back upon her, once again as a message of

balm--

... two soul sides, one to face the world with,

One to show a woman when he loves her.

Ah, nothing could rob her of that! She had been the woman he had loved,

and the soul side he had shown to her, most generous, most sacred, most

beautiful, was what no other being in the Universe could have from him,

not even his God!

They had parted in the dawn, the Indian dawn, all shot with flame. Not

once had he faltered in his resolute cheerfulness. He had kissed her

and blessed her as she lay in bed. But at the door he had halted to

look upon her a last time; and she was weeping. Then he had flung

himself back beside her ... and now she closed her eyes and shuddered on

the memory of his last kisses.

With the chill barren earth beneath her, the lowering winter sky above,

the sun-warmth of his love again enfolded her. It was as if his

presence brooded upon her. Oh, could she but die and be with him!

"Harry, I am yours," she called to him in the passion of her soul,

"yours only--love, take me!"

So strong seemed the atmosphere of his spirit about her, that she looked

round wildly, almost feeling as if her soul-cry must have called back

the dead. There stretched the iron earth, there hung the relentless

skies--the world was empty.

The copse where she had chosen to rest was on the higher downs, and

before her the land fell away gently yet so surely that the high

chimney-stack of the Old Ancient House would scarcely have caught the

eye against the opposite slope, save for its rising smoke columns, which

the wind seized and tore to flakes.

As she gazed, unseeing, upon the desolate spectacle, a gleam of

something unwonted, something like a huge crimson bird, moved vaguely

tropical in all the duns and greys. She wondered awhile, and then

realised: realised with a sudden sick spasm.

It was the red turban of Muhammed Saif-u-din. How sinister it looked,

how unnatural a bloodstain under this pale English sky! Yonder son of

the treacherous race that she could not banish from her life, even in

this peaceful abode of her widowhood--Sir Arthur's secretary.... Sir

Arthur! Her husband! The man to whom she had given the claim of what

was left of her life! ... Thought followed on thought up to this

culminating point. And then it was to Lady Gerardine as if some veil

was rent before her mental vision, and she saw--saw at last--with that

agony to the sight of sudden glare in the darkness, what she had done.

These last weeks she had lived in a dream, and every aspiration of her

soul, every tendency of her life, had drifted always further away from

the existence she and fate had chosen for herself. Now there was a gulf

between Rosamond English and Rosamond Gerardine; and by the hot recoil

of her blood she knew that it was unsurmountable. How could she ever go

back; again be wife of the man she loved not, she who was widow of the

man she loved!

She looked for the letter in her hand to cast it from her, and found

that it had already escaped her careless hold. Upon the yellow grass at

her feet the wind was chasing it; turning it mockingly over and over, a

contemptible foolish thing, meanly out of place among the withered

leaves, the naturally dying things of the fields.

So little place had Sir Arthur Gerardine in the life of

Rosamond--Rosamond, the widow of Harry English!

*CHAPTER IX*

Full winter seemed to have come in a night; everywhere rime lay white

upon the land, every blade was a frosted silver spear. Not a leaf yet

kept the summer green; shrunken, brown and yellow, they hung by their

brittle stems; it was a still morning, and he who had ears to listen to

nature sounds, all through the woods could have heard ever and anon the

sigh of one, falling here and there. A dim blue winter sky held the

world; the sunshine was serene and faintly warm, like the heart of a

good old man. The air was like iced wine to drink, invigorating,

tingling through the veins. It painted Aspasia's cheeks a splendid

scarlet. It filled her with the spirits of all young things, foals and

kittens and cubs; so that she could hardly keep from prancing down the

iron path, from cutting steps on the stiff grass to hear it crackle

beneath her feet.

As Bethune looked at her, he thought she was as pretty as a winter robin

in her brown furs. Her eyes glistened as she flung quick glances at

him; her dimples came and went; her teeth flashed as she chattered at

headlong speed. They were going to Sunday service at the village

church, a couple of miles away, and Baby was setting forth with a

delightful sense of vigour and freedom.

Those whose fate binds them to cities can have no idea of the delicate

joys of the country walk, with the beloved one--him or her--who fills

the thoughts. Alas! for the poor wench that has no better pleasure than

to tramp along the crowded street. What does she know of the loveliness

of "solitude for two," of the dear sympathy of nature, perfect in every

season with the heart that is of her clay?

Not, indeed, that Miss Cuningham acknowledged even to herself that

Raymond Bethune was the present lord of her mind, much less her beloved.

Nevertheless, the glamour of that hour that strikes but once in a

lifetime was upon her. Love, first love, the only love, comparable but

to the most exquisite mystery of the dawn, of the spring; happiness so

evanescent that a touch will destroy it, so delicate that the scent of

it is obliterated by fulfilment; so utterly made of anticipation, of

unrealised, unformed desire, that to shape it, to seize it, is to lose

it--is it not strange that we, to whom such a gift is granted, receive

it, nearly all of us, not as we should, on our knees, but grossly,

greedily, impatiently, ungratefully, hurrying through the golden

moments, tearing apart the gossamer veil, grasping the flower from the

stem before its unfolding? No wonder that to most the day that follows

on this dawn should be so full of heat and burden; the fruit of this

blossom so sour to the parent that the children's teeth are set on edge;

that, behind the veil, the vision should prove dull, flat, and

unprofitable!

Now Aspasia, though a very creature of earth and one that knew no

transcendental longings, had kept the pure heart of her childhood; and

therefore this hour of her first love, all vague, all unacknowledged,

was wholly sweet.

They knelt, Bethune and she, side by side, in the small bare church.

She flung him a look of comical anguish over the grunting of the

harmonium and the unmelodious chants of the village choir. She struck

into a hymn herself, in a high clear pipe, as true as a robin's song. A

pale young clergyman, with protruding eyeballs, led the service with a

sort of anæmic piety; grand old Bible words were gabbled or droned;

grand old Church prayers, with the dignity of an antique faith still

resounding in them--who, that heard, seemed to care? It was the Sunday

routine, and that was all.

Bethune saw the girl's fingers unconsciously practising musical

exercises on the ledge of the pew; when their eyes met once, she made a

childish grimace. She, for one, was frankly bored. As for him, had he

any faith? He had hardly ever thought even of putting the question. He

went to the Church service of his country as a matter of course, as his

grandfathers had done before him. It was part of the etiquette of his

military life. Now and again he had been moved to a solemn stir of the

feelings during some brief soldier's ceremony: the hurried funeral

perhaps of an English lad far away from homeland. But so had he been

moved by the bugle-call, by the hurrah on the field. Life and death,

love and religion, what did they mean? What are we, when all is said

and done, but the toys of a blind fate?

There is but one thing sure in the uncertainty, he told himself, but one

staff in the wilderness, one anchor in the turmoil--duty.

The damp-stained wall at his side was starred with memorials. He began

to contemplate them, idly at first, then with an enkindling interest.

Here was an old stone slab commemorating, in half-obliterated words,

some son of a Dorset house who had died for the country in far

Peninsular days. "In the twentieth year of his age." A young

existence, to be thus cut short! Yet, had he lived, and given life, his

own sons would now be well-nigh forgotten.

Under this was a black marble tablet. The blood rushed to his face as

he read, and then ebbed, leaving him cold:

To THE MEMORY OF

CAPTAIN HENRY ENGLISH,

OF HER MAJESTY'S INDIAN STAFF CORPS,

KILLED ON SERVICE IN THE PAMIRS. AGED 28.

Thus ran the sober inscription; followed the text, more triumphant than

sorrowful:

He that loseth his life shall find it.

And then the words: