The Sentimental Adventures of Jimmy Bulstrode

by Marie Van Vorst

THE SEVENTH ADVENTURE

VII

IN WHICH HE BECOMES THE POSSESSOR OF A CERTAIN PIECE OF PROPERTY

As Bulstrode stood in the window of his room at Westboro' Castle, his face turned toward the country, it seemed to beckon him. It called him from the park's end where suave and smooth the curving downs met the preciser contour of the eastern field; from hedges holding snugly in the roadways, the roads themselves running off on pleasant excursions to townships whose names are suggestive of romance, whose gentle beauties have mellowed with the ages which give them value and leave them perfect.

With the sweetness of a bell, with the invitingness of a beckoning hand, the English countryside summoned the gentleman to come out to it, to explore and penetrate for himself. He gazed charmed and entranced at the expanse of rippling meadow where, enclosed by the curtains of soft old trees, the thatch of the eaves lifted their breast to the sun and mist, and chimneys black with immemorial fires indicated the farms of Westboro', rich, homely and respectable, as they left upon the landscape harmonious color and history of thrift. To the east was the dim suggestion of the little town, and some few miles in a hollow lay the farmlands known as The Dials, and each second growing more distinctly visible in the deepening light rose the towers of Penhaven Abbey.

At the Duke's urging, Bulstrode had been led to stop on at Westboro' Castle after the house party had dissolved at the end of their week's sojourn; and there had since been many long tramps across country, with the dogs at his heels and by his side the Duke, for the time diverted from his semi-melancholy, semi-egotistical cynicism, and transformed into an enthusiastic sport.

The Duke of Westboro' was a désenchanté, more truly speaking a victim of other peoples' temperaments. There were, however, not a few little scores in the character of moral delinquencies which at least, so he felt, he had been called upon quite fully to discharge.

The American man gave himself over to his host, and from the time Westboro' put out a bait of "Oh, you're decidedly not turning in at this hour, old man?" he flanked the Duke on the opposite side of the fireplace in the East Library, there after coffee to wear away half the night. During the following fortnight, Bulstrode found that he had tallied up with his friend very closely the scores of the last few miserable years.

Westboro's friendship with him dated back some ten years. Bulstrode had first known the Englishman at Newport where, then not a young man, he had come obviously and frankly in search of an American wife. The search was unusual in that it was not for money, but, as Westboro' put it, for type and race. His mother had been an American. He had adored her, and wanted an American mother for his children. The woman herself—and how Bulstrode saw it as he followed the deserted husband's narrative—the woman had been a secondary thing. He recalled easily the summary and conventional courtship and the vulgar brilliance of the wedding. He had been one of Westboro's ushers, and his smaller part of the affair left him with the distressing idea that he had assisted at a sacrifice.

It would be euphemistic to say that Westboro' poured out his heart to Bulstrode; Englishmen do not have such refreshments. Little by little, rather in short curt phrases, a cynical word whose mocking fellow only followed after some moments' silence—little by little, whilst the smoky wreaths of the men's cigars veiled their confidences, the Duke slowly told the story of ten years of married life. In this intimacy he disclosed the history of the separation which formed at the moment the subject of general public comment. Jimmy was relieved when the moment came that the Duke thought opportune to say:

"There, old chap, you have the whole story! It's this cursed tradition of marriage, and you're a lucky fellow to be free. I have never spoken to any one before—you know it. I don't need to tell you so, but you were in, as it were, at the start, and what do you think of the finish?"

Bulstrode reserved his opinion.

Westboro' Castle had been built in the sixteenth century by a lover of the Virgin Queen. The stones were paved with memories. In the Picture Hall the ardent gentleman three hundred years before had for one sole hour entertained Elizabeth at a feast. She left him, obdurate and unyielding, and he went crazy and followed the royal coach to the park gate, weeping, his hands before his face; and there on the ground, his fair curls torn, and the dust from the departing vehicles alone of the glory that touched him, his people found him.

"How they prate of inequality, and of the crime of grafting the American rose on these old stalks," Bulstrode mused. The beauty of Frances, Duchess of Westboro', he had himself been one of the first to concede; a portrait of her by Lehnbach did not to his eyes do her justice. The fresh purity of her type had not been seized by the German. She would be an ideal Duchess, he had said of her when the mission of Westboro' to America had been bruited, and Westboro' had thought: "She's a strong, fine woman, and will bear me beautiful children."

She had borne him two. Bulstrode, in passing through the house, had seen the low gates at the doors of two sunny rooms, the toys spread as they had been lain. His own were the only apartments in that wing of the castle, and the silence at the end of the hall was never broken. When Westboro' had come to this part of his narrative, he had waited quiet so long that his companion had naturally taken the evening to be at its end. The Duke had thrown his cigar away, and lifting from the table near him a leather case, opened it and handed over to Bulstrode the photograph of two little bare-legged boys in sailor clothes. They stood hand in hand, a pretty pair. Looking at it, and gently turning it over on the other side, Bulstrode read:

"Frederick Cecil John Edward, Marquis of Wotherington, three years old. Guy Perceval, Lord Feversham, aged two years."

Westboro's voice had a dull sound as he took the case from his friend's hand.

"They are Westboro's I think, neck and crop. Scarlet fever—in three days, Bulstrode—both in three days."

And that had been all.

Bulstrode had left the Duke and gone up-stairs. On the other side of his cheerful rooms the empty nurseries in the ghostly moonlight held their doors wide open as if to welcome at the low gates those bright heads if they should come.

Jimmy, whose sentimentality consisted in his acting immediately when anything was to be done, mixed a whiskey and soda from the array of drinks that always exists at an Anglo-Saxon's elbow, and after a turn or two in his dressing-room brought practically out:

"It's ridiculous! Sheer nonsense. There should be children here. The woman is selfish and puritanical, and the man is no lover—that's what's the matter! But Westboro' certainly loves her in his big, cold, affectionate way." Jimmy smiled at his own fashion of putting it. And how any woman, with a mind and common-sense, could help loving Westboro' Castle and countryside, as well as Cecil, tenth Duke of the line, the American visitor failed to see.

As the Duke of Westboro' thought of the members of his recent house party—the women of it passed before his mental mirror. There were several images of an American lady whose frocks and hats, whose wit and grace, whose dark beauty had made her stay at Westboro' brilliant and memorable. Possibly the remembrance of Mrs. Falconer, one night at dinner, was what most persistently lingered in the Duke's mind. She had sat on his left in a gown he remembered as becoming, and her jewels had shone like fire on her bosom. He had particularly remarked them in thinking of the idle jewels of his own house, left behind by the flight of the Duchess. Mary Falconer had been more brilliant than her ornaments, and Westboro' had thoroughly enjoyed his guest. He had asked this woman especially because she charmed him; without forming the reason he had a latent hope that she might do more than charm. He wanted to forget and to be eased from the haunting memory that stung and never soothed. From his first tête-a-tête with Mrs. Falconer he had at once seen that there was nothing there for him.

Bulstrode had said that Westboro' was not a lover. Reserved as far as all feeling was concerned, he had made no advances to the beautiful American, but contented himself with watching her. She could not be in love with her brutish husband who, out of the week spent at Westboro' was visible only two days. Then Bulstrode had come. Pictures of the two talking in the long twilights, riding together, walking on the terrace side by side, came vividly to Westboro's recollection.

"That," he decided, "is a real flesh-and-blood woman, the kind of woman I should have married. Bulstrode is a lucky devil."

"A chap," Westboro' said to Jimmy in a mild unpretentious mood of philosophy, "is, of course, a husband; more naturally than people give him credit for, a father; but first of all—and that's what so few women take into consideration—he is a man."

The Duke had fallen into the habit of breaking through the silences when each man, following his own thoughts, would forget the other. And remarks such as these his companion knew, referred in sense and detail to the long talks whose intenser personalities had ceased.

This day Westboro' brought out his little paragraph as, between the hedges of a lowland lane, the two rode at a walk after a long hard canter from Penhaven, some eight miles behind them on the hill. On either side the top of the thorn was veiled with rime. Down the hedge's thickness from his seat on his horse, Bulstrode could look into the dark tangled interstices of the thicket and its delicious browns and greens. Into the thorns here and there dried leaves had fallen, and from the hedge as well as from the country, clouded and gray with mist, came a sharpened sweetness; a blended smell of fields over which early winter had passed; a smell of woods over which the fires cast smoky veils. In the freshness and with the eager exercise, Bulstrode's cheeks had reddened. He sat his horse well, and his enjoyment of life, his ease with it, his charming spirit, shone in the face he turned to the Duke. For some miles given over to the sympathetic task of managing his horse, he had enjoyed like a boy, and during the ride had thought of nothing but the physical delight of the open air and the motion.

"Yes," he returned to his friend's remark, "as far as any point of interest goes, we may grant you that we began as men. I mean to say that monkeys aren't useful in one's deductions for emotional hypotheses, at any rate. I'll grant you for our use that we were men to begin with."

"Damn it all," said his host, "aren't we just as much so to-day, for all our civilization?"

"Well, we don't primarily knock on the head a woman whose physique has pleased us, and carry her off while she's unconscious."

"It might in some cases be a good thing if we did," Westboro' growled.

Bulstrode ran his hand along the silky neck of his horse, from whose nostrils smoke came in little puffs that met the moisture of the air.

"Oh, we're not, you know, so awfully far away from our instincts in anything, old man! There isn't any cast-iron rule about feelings. They depend on the individual."

"Oh, you've never married," Westboro' tried frankly to irritate him, "and you can't, you know——"

The sweet temper of the other accepted the Duke's scorn. "I'm not married, or very theoretical about it, either. One can only, after all, have his own point of view."

"We're not, I expect, fair to the women," the Duke generously acknowledged. "We look for so much in them. We expect them to be so much."

"A wife," Bulstrode completed for him, "a mother, a friend."

And Westboro' finished it. "For them and for other men. And a mistress."

And here Bulstrode took him up for the first time with a note of challenge in his voice.

"And what, my dear man, did you intend that the Duchess should take you for? No, I mean to say, quite man to man, given that any woman could or does contain all the qualities you so temperately ask?"

Westboro' smiled at the first curtness he had ever heard in his friend's voice.

"Oh, you know, we men don't fuss about ourselves."

"You married her at eighteen," Bulstrode said. "You made her a Duchess. You had already lived a life and she was a child beside you in experience. You required motherhood of her, and in return...."

"Well," Westboro' turned about in his saddle and faced his earnest friend. "What then, in your opinion, might I have been?"

"You might have been from the start," Bulstrode said it shortly, "a lover. It's not a bad rôle. We Anglo-Saxons have no sentimental education. Our puritanism makes us half the time timid at courtship and love."

The gentlemen rode a little on with slackened rein. Westboro's eyeglass cord was almost motionless as he stared out between his horse's ears down the lane.

"Perhaps, after all," he fetched it out slowly, "there's something in what you say."

Whether or not there was any truth in Bulstrode's commonplace remark, it lingered in his host's mind all day. It gave him, for the first time, a link to follow—an idea—and the Duke, entirely unused to analysis, accustomed to act if not on impulse, certainly according to his will and pleasure without concession, harked back in a groping, touching fashion like an awkward boy looking for a lost treasure, upsetting, as he went, old haunts, turning over things for years not brought to the light of day. And it took him all the afternoon and a good part of the evening to reach the place where he thought he had lost originally his joy. Unlike the happier boy, he could not seize his bliss once recovered, and stow it away; it was only remembrance that brought him back, and with a tightening heart as he realized once more the form and quality of his lost happiness—there he must leave it and see it fade again into the past.

Jimmy gave his host a chance to follow his absorbed reflections. He effaced himself, and behind a book whose lightness of touch made him agreeably forget the heavier hand of current and daily events, he sat in his dressing-room reading "The Vicar of Wakefield."

When Westboro' came in to him Jimmy looked up and quoted aloud: "When lovely woman stoops to folly and finds at length that men betray...."

"Oh, they console themselves quickly," Westboro' finished. "Don't fancy anything else, my dear fellow, they console themselves."

"They may pretend to do so."

"They succeed."

Westboro' took the little book from his friend's hand and shut it firmly as if afraid that the rest of the verse might slip out and refute him.

"Bulstrode, she consoles herself, she is perfectly happy."

"How are you then so sure?"

"Oh, I hear of her in Paris." The Duke's features contracted. "She's contriving to pass her time—to pass her time."

Bulstrode leaned over towards his friend and, for Westboro' sat opposite him, he put his hand on the Duke's knee.

"You must certainly go to her."

Westboro' stroked his moustache before he answered:

"Not if I never see her again."

"You should decidedly go to her."

The other shook his head. "Not if it meant twice the hell it is now."

"Why not?"

"I went to her once. I may say twice," he slowly said, "since we separated." And as he stopped speaking Bulstrode could only imagine what the result had been.

"I don't think I'm a Westboro' really, for I couldn't follow any woman's carriage puling like a schoolboy as my ancestor did. There's a great deal of my mother's blood in me, and it's a different blend."

Bulstrode's eyes were on the little book between the Duke's aristocratic hands.

"She has, I grant you, a lot to forgive; but she quite well knows all the blame I acknowledge, quite well. I don't believe I'm any worse than the run of mankind, and whether I am or not, I've made all the amends I can and I have nothing more to say."

His eyeglass had dropped; his face looked worn; he showed his age more than a happier man would have done at his years His mood of thinking it out by himself continued for so long that Bulstrode finally asked:

"What, if I may be so near you as to question, do you mean, old chap, to do?"

Westboro' had it all laid out for himself—his ready answer showed it.

"You say I'm not a lover," he reminded his friend; "no doubt you're right, but I'm an affectionate chap, at any rate, I can't bear this—" He looked about hopelessly. The words were forced out by the high mark of his unhappiness: "—this infernal solitude. Even when a good comrade like yourself is in it, the house seems to speak to me from the empty rooms in this wing." (Bulstrode knew he was thinking of the nurseries with the low latches and little gates.) "I can't stand it. When I get out of England and abroad the place fetches me back again like a magnet. I'm a home-keeping sort of man, and I want my home."

His friend gently urged in the silence: "Well?"

"I shall wait," the Duke went on with the plan he had been forced to make out for himself. "I shall hold on, keep along a bit, and then—I shall go to the other woman." And the Duke, as he raised his eyes to his companion, fixed his glass firmly and felt that he challenged in every way Bulstrode's disapproval. "The Duchess will get her divorce—it goes without saying—will get her divorce. Why she has not already done so I can't imagine."

As Westboro' appeared inclined to leave the subject there, Bulstrode pressed him further: "And then?"

"I fancy I shall marry the other woman."

Bulstrode started. The complexion of the idea was so foreign to him that he could not for a moment let himself think that he understood it.

"You will," he said, "marry one woman whilst you distinctly love another?"

The Duke nodded. "Love," he reflected, "I begin to believe I don't know anything about. It must, of course, suppose some sort of return. If, as you say, I love another woman, I'm not made of the stuff that can go along doing so without anything on her side."

The dressing clock at the bedside on the little stand chimed the hour. It was two o'clock. The Duke of Westboro' rose.

"You must think me a colossal ass, my dear friend, but if it had not been for your awfully good companionship and your kindness, I dare say that by now I should have already made some sort of fatal blunder."

At the door Bulstrode put his hand on his friend's arm, and, as though nothing in the conversation apart from the Duchess had any real significance, he said simply:

"You are then, in sum, simply waiting...?"

"Oh, yes," agreed the other rather blankly. And the other man knew that he had been told only half the thought in his friend's mind.

"She may get a divorce at any time, you know, quite easily, without my taking any further steps."

"Oh, I see perfectly," Jimmy accepted; and as the door closed after his host, he said, almost aloud: "He thinks, then, there is half a chance that the Duchess will return." And wondering very much how far a woman is willing to sacrifice herself for a man, granted that she loves him, he did not finish his phrase.

The next day Bulstrode, no longer able to resist the beckoning country, went out, as it were, to it as if he said "Here I am—what will you do with me?"

If Glousceshire could, for a while, make him forget the problems he had been housed with, brush him up a bit, he thought it would be a good thing. Therefore, when his horse came up to the door he threw himself on the animal in a nervous haste to be gone, and setting off in the direction of Penhaven, obeyed its summons at last.

Westboro' had run up to London for overnight, and Bulstrode, at the Duke's something more than invitation, a sort of appeal, was to stay indefinitely on. It must be confessed that he rather selfishly looked forward to the course of an untroubled afternoon, to an evening amongst the books whose files had tempted him for days.

But the pity of all he had sympathetically been closeted with was great in his mind. Whereas his native delicacy and slow judgment had led him to keep silent until now towards his host, it was in no wise because Jimmy had not quite made up his mind that he would not spare Westboro' at all when the moment, if it ever came, should present itself for him to speak.

As he rode along he thought of the Duchess naturally in Paris, surrounded by a train of ardent admirers; she had them always, everywhere. She was disillusioned, of course, probably angry, piqued, and unfortunately she had been betrayed; and he shrugged with a gentle desperation as he made a mental picture of the last scene: the inevitable divorce, the wrecking of another household, unless—unless—one of them loved sufficiently to save the situation.

His thoughts came to a standstill as his horse stopped short before a gate: his riding had fetched him up before it. The mare stretched out her long neck, set free by a relaxing rein; she sniffed the latch and put her head over the wicket, and the rider saw that they had come across fields, and were at the entrance of a deserted property. The gate gave access to a forest road where the thick underbrush was untidy, and on whose walk the piles of leaves lay as they had fallen. He could see no farther in, and thinking to come at the end upon a forsaken garden, the precincts of an untenanted country house, he leaned down, tried the gate which fairly swung into his hand, and the mare passed through. There was the delicious intimacy about the woods which the sense of coming alone and unexpectedly upon the old and forsaken gives the traveller. He is a discoverer of secrets, a legitimate spy upon stories which he flatters himself he is the first to read. He becomes intimate with another man's past, and as he must necessarily, in all ignorance, tell himself his own tales, indiscretion may be said to be a doubtful quantity.

A bit back in the bare brown woods he saw the flash of a marble pillar; it shone white and clear in the setting of russet and against the boles of the trees. A little farther away gleamed another figure on its base of fluted marble, and still farther along, leaf-overlaid and thus effaced, he could discern the contour of a sunken garden. The place grew more pretentious as he slowly picked his way, and he was unprepared for coming suddenly onto a gravel path from which he thought the leaves had been blown away. Here Bulstrode dismounted, and, with the bridle over his arm, walked towards the path's end, pleasantly interested, and now, as he thought it should by this do, the house struck on him through an archway contrived by the training of old trees over a circle of stone. The house broke on him in the shape of an Elizabethan manse; long and old with soft rose-color of brick in places, and the color of a faded leaf in others where the dampness had soaked in and had, through countless mid-summer suns, been burned out again. Before the windows flashed the red of bright curtains. The house was distinctly, and he thought it seemed happily, occupied. He stopped where he stood by the arch, a little confused and a little balked in his romantic treat, and not the less feeling himself an intruder. But before he could turn his horse and unobtrusively lead her back the way they had come, the house's occupant, no doubt she who gave it the air of being so happily tenanted, had come out with a garden hat on her head, a pair of garden shears in her hands, and with the precision of intention, turned sharply towards the arched forest walk, and in this way squarely upon Bulstrode.

The surprise to him was, without doubt, the greater, for she knew him at once, and he for a second did not recognize her. Her extreme English air—the straw hat tied under her chin and the face it framed, so decidedly altered, bewildered him. His first greeting, mentally, before he spoke aloud to her, was masculine. "Why, her beauty! What in heaven's name had she done with it?"

"What are you doing here?"

They both asked it at once, and the lady having lived so long in an insular country was adept in its possibilities of great hospitality as well as of freezing out an unwelcome visitor. She froze the poor gentleman and then, touched by his utter bewilderment and his innocence of wilful intrusion, she smiled more humanly.

"Won't you, since you are here, Mr. Bulstrode, come in and have a cup of tea?"

She at once followed their mutual question by saying: "As for being here, you will admit that given the part of the country it is, no one has a better right!"

"Oh, I'll admit anything you like," he laughed, "if you'll only admit us. You see we are two."

The lady came up to him in a more friendly manner; she gave him her hand and she really smiled beautifully. Then she put her hand on the nose of the horse, with the touch one has for familiar things.

"She's a perfect dear, isn't she—a dear. So you are riding her then? Well, you'll find her easy to tie, she stands well. There's nothing she can spoil, that's the charm of such an old, tumble-down place."

As Bulstrode followed after the trailing dress just touching the gravel with a rustling sound, he had the feeling of being suddenly, willy-nilly, taken and put into the heart of a story book. He smiled. "Well, I've done the first chapter and now I've got to go on in the book, I suppose, whether I want to be here or not, to the end."

"I thought I was making a voyage of discovery," he told her as they sat in the low room before a fire and before her table and tea cups. "I fancied I was the only person within miles round. I expect no one has a right to be so bold, but I really didn't dream the place was lived in, as, of course, you know."

"Drink your tea," she bade, "and eat your toast before I make you tell me if you have come to see me as a messenger."

"And if I have?"

It was delicious tea, and the American of her had somehow found cream for it, which, un-English luxury, the American in him fully appreciated. The liquid in the blue-and-white cups was pale as saffron and the toast was a feather.

"At five o'clock there's nothing like it in the world," he breathed. "I didn't hope for this to-day. I had recklessly thrown five o'clock over, for I'm alone at the castle." He drank his tea, finished, and with a sigh. Then he said: "I can actually venture to ask you for another cup, for I am nobody's messenger or envoy, my dear, nobody's. I'm just an indiscreet, humdrum individual who has been too charmingly rewarded for an intrusion. You saw my surprise, didn't you? And I'm not very clever at putting on things."

The Duchess tacitly accepted, it is to be supposed, for she made him a second cup of tea, slowly.

"You don't know that I've been thinking about you all day," he said, "and I can frankly say that I've been making a very different picture of you indeed."

She took no notice whatsoever of his personality.

"You are in England, then," she said rather formally. "I never think of my own country people as being here. I always think of Americans as being in the States, men above all, for they fit so badly in the English atmosphere, don't they? It's always incongruous to me to hear their "r's" and "a's" rattling about in this soft language. It's horrid of me to speak so. You, of course, are out of the category. But as you stood there, with Banshee's nose over your shoulder you fitted quite beautifully in with everything. I don't believe I should mind you, ever, anywhere, and yet I more naturally think of you at Newport, don't you see?"

Her companion cried: "Oh, no, I'm in England, and you can't alter the fact, at least if you can, please don't; for Newport on the fifteenth of December, and with no such tea or fire——"

"Oh," she permitted, "you may stay. I said you fitted—only——"

Bulstrode interposed: "Don't at least for a few moments entertain any 'buts' and 'onlys'—they are nearly as bad as those magical travelling trunks that would transport me to the United States. It is so—let me say—neutral in this place, I should think I might remain. I don't know why you are here or with whom, nor for how long, or for how deep, but it is singularly perfect to have found you."

His hostess had left her seat behind the table, and taking a chair by the fireside where Bulstrode was sitting, undid the ribbons of her garden hat and let the basket-like object fall on the floor.

"You must promise me, first of all, that you will not say you have seen me. Otherwise I shall leave here to-morrow and nobody shall ever again know where I am."

However her command might conflict with what was in his mind, he was obliged to give her his word. He had no right not to do so.

"And nothing," she said, "must make you break this promise, Mr. Bulstrode. I know how good you are, and how you do all sorts of Quixotic funny things, but in this case please—please——"

"Mind my own business?" he nodded. "I will, Duchess, I will."

She looked at him steadily a moment and seemed satisfied, for she relaxed the tensity of her manner, which was the first Americanism she had displayed, and in her pretty soft drawl asked him, with less perfunctory interest than her words implied: "You are at Westboro'?"

"Yes, since the twenty-fifth."

"And you're staying on?"

"I seem to be more or less of a fixture—until the holidays, I expect."

"Lucky you," she breathed, and at his expression of candid surprise she half laughed. "Oh, I mean as far as the castle goes—isn't it really too delightful?"

He was able to say honestly: "Quite the most beautiful house I have ever seen."

"Yes, I think so too," she nodded. "It's not so important as many others but it's more perfect, more like a home."

Bulstrode sat back in his chair and tried to make her forget him. Between the fire and the shadow he wanted to watch her face from which he now saw that the beauty he remembered had not faded but had been transformed. She was beautiful in another way: the brilliant, blooming girl, fully blown at eighteen, with the dazzling charm of health, no longer existed in the Duchess of Westboro'. She had refined very much indeed. The aggressive bearing of the American princess had been replaced by the colder, more serene hauteur of the English Duchess. She was evidently a very proud woman, the arch of her brows said so, and the line of her lips. All her lines were sharper and finer. Her color, and he could not, as he studied her, quite regret it; her color was quite gone. Her pallor made her more delicate, and her eyes—it was in them that Bulstrode thought he saw the greatest change of all; they were now fixed upon him, there was something melancholy in their profound and deeply circled gray.

"What rooms will they have given you?" she asked after a moment. Then—"Wait," she commanded, "I know. The south wing, the Henry IV. rooms that look into the gardens. I always gave those to the men. There's something extremely homelike about them, don't you think so? And have you ever seen anything like those winter roses in that court? Did any bloom this year? The trellis runs up along the terrace balustrade—or possibly you don't care for flowers? Of course you wouldn't as a girl does."

A girl—with that face and those eyes? Why, she must have been talking back ten years. Bulstrode drew a breath.

"I know the roses you mean. It would be difficult to forget them. Your gardener takes such pride in them. For some reason they are never gathered; they fall as they hang. The gardener, it so happened, told me so."

She was looking at him with an intensity almost painful, but she said nothing further, and after a moment more Bulstrode replied to another question.

"As it happens I don't occupy the Henry IV. rooms. I have mine quite on the other side of the castle. Don't they call them the 'West Rooms'?"

She caught her breath a little, but she was in splendid training with all her years of English life behind her. Her face, nevertheless, showed how well she knew those rooms, without the added note in her voice as she said:

"Oh, those West Rooms—you have those."

And in the quiet that fell as her eyes sought the fire, he quite knew how her thoughts travelled down the hall to the open nursery doors with their waiting gates. Whatever were her reasons for being here, Bulstrode saw that he had surprised her in a moment of sadness, and that his visit in spite of his indiscretion, was not wholly unwelcome. But in the sudden way coming upon some one connected with her own life, she had been completely taken unawares, and her lapse into something like sentiment was short. Even as he looked at her she hardened.

"You have naturally not asked me anything, Mr. Bulstrode," she said, coldly enough now, "and more naturally still I have no explanations to give. By to-morrow I may be gone. I may live here for the rest of my life. I never leave my garden, I am quite unknown to the people about. If any one in Westboro' learns that I am here I shall leave at once. You will not come again. It is discourteous to say so—to ask it."

He had risen from his chair.

"Oh, but it's quite, quite dark. However will you manage?"

"We'll pick our way back well enough," he assured her. "The distance to the road is nothing, and from here on it runs straight to the abbey."

The Duchess followed him slowly to the door, and there she asked abruptly: "Is Westboro' to be down all winter? I didn't know it. I thought he was out of England or I should not have come here at all."

"Oh," Bulstrode answered, "he's too restless to be long anywhere. I expect he'll pack up and be off before we know it. He's away just now at any rate, and I'm kicking my heels up there quite alone. I'm not to return—ever?" he ventured. "You may so fully trust me that—" and he saw that she hesitated and pursued, "I shall ride up to the little gate again, and if it is unlatched...."

"Oh, don't count on it," she advised him, "don't—it's against all my plans."

Somebody in the shape of a lad had unfastened the mare, and preceded Bulstrode on foot with a lantern, by whose flicker, with much delicate caution and pretended shyness, Banshee picked her way to the road, through the woods which Bulstrode an hour before had fancied led into a deserted garden.

"You see," he put it to her delicacy to understand, "it's scarcely, in a way, fair to him—I feel it so at least. It gives me the sensation of knowing more than he does in his own house about that which presumably should be Westboro's secret."

"You mean to say,"—the Duchess pinned him down, "that you'll give me away because of one of those peculiar crises of honor that makes a person betray a trust in order to salve his conscience?"

Bulstrode had come again faithfully, making the pilgrimage to the forest road, and he was not surprised that it should have finally turned out so that one day the gate yielded to his touch, and he found the Duchess if not waiting for him, distinctly there. During their delightful little talks—and they had been so—not once had the name of Bulstrode's host been mentioned; and if the lady had a curiosity concerning her lord and once master, she did not display it to the visitor.

"I mean to say," Bulstrode replied in answer to her challenge which was fiery, "that I really don't want to play false to Westboro', more false than I shall in the course of events be forced to be. Of course, your secret—I need not say so—is entirely safe. But the Duke comes back in a day or two, and rather than face him with this silence which you have imposed upon me I am going back to London before he returns."

The sewing she had chosen to finger—a Duchess, and an American one at that, is not expected to do more—lay at her feet. By her side was a basket of considerable proportions, and it was full to the brim with linen: the very fine white stuff overflowed from the basket like snow. The Duchess of Westboro's handiwork had already caught the eye of her guest. And now, as her long hands and her long finger, tipped by its golden thimble, handled her sewing, Bulstrode watched her interestedly and found great loveliness in her bending face.

"I didn't think any of you knew how to sew," he mused aloud.

"Any of us!" she smiled. "Do you, by that, mean American Duchesses? Or do you mean women who have left their husbands? Or in just what class do you think of me, regarding your last remark?"

She folded up her work and dropped her thimble in the nest of snow. Bulstrode acknowledged that his conclusion, whatever it had been, was wrong.

"When I married," the Duchess said, "I was the best four-in-hand whip for a woman in my set. I don't think I am a keen needlewoman, really, and I know then I didn't recognize a needle by sight. When my little boys were born I sent to Paris for everything they wore, and I can remember that I didn't even know for what the little clothes were intended, many of them, when they came home in my first son's layette. I have learned to sew since I came here to The Dials. I've been three months here, now, and I really must have proved a clever pupil, for I assure you that they tell me I have made some pretty things." As she spoke she held up the seam she ran, and Bulstrode, who himself confessed to not knowing a needle by sight, was forced to peer over the seam and endeavor to find her tiny stitches. He exclaimed:

"Three months! You must have been terribly dull!"

"No."

"You are known," he said, "throughout the countryside—not that I've been making inquiries, but in spite of myself I have heard—as a stranger, presumably a Frenchwoman, a widow who will probably buy The Dials."

"Oh, I shall never buy the place," she assured him, and then abruptly: "Had you been free to speak of me, what would you have told Westboro'?"

He waited a second, then answered her lightly, but with a feeling which she did not mistake: "I should have asked him to come and see you run up that seam."

"He would not have come."

Remembering very clearly how determined Westboro's decision had been, he did not affirm to the lady his belief that Westboro' would in reality have flown to her.

At the door, later, she bade him good-bye and appeared to gather her courage together, and, with a lapse into a simplicity so entire that she seemed only Frances Denby and to possess no more of title or distinction than any lovely woman, she said to him:

"Mr. Bulstrode, please don't leave the castle."

"Oh, I couldn't sit opposite my friend at dinner, I couldn't meet his eyes now, my dear child."

The Duchess touched his arm. "It's sweet of you to call me so. You are really as young as I am, and certainly I feel an age beyond you. Please stay."

The pleasure which his visits had been to her had brought something of an animation and interest to her cold face. Dressed in a dark and simple gown, her fur stole about her neck, she had this afternoon followed him out of the house into the garden and walked slowly along by his side towards the gate.

"Of all the people in the world one would choose you, I think, to be the friend of..." She caught herself up. "I mean to say, can't you forget those stupid little ideas of honor and friendship and all that?" She put it beautifully. "I, of course, will give up seeing you," she renounced, "but it will be a world of comfort just to feel that you are there."

As he did not at once succumb to her blandishments, she asked point blank:

"Promise me to stop on."

"I at least won't go without letting you know of it."

"Without my permission?"

"I won't say that."

"But I'm sure that you mean it," she nodded happily, "and you're such a help."

She was so affectionate as she bade him good-bye, that only at the little road did he begin to wonder just what help he was. Was he aiding her to detective poor Westboro'? Was he adding an air of protection to some feminine treachery?

"Oh, no," he decided; "she's incapable of any thing of the sort. But I must clear out;" and he decided that at once, so soon as Westboro' should be at home, he would take himself to ground still more neutral than The Dials had proved to be. But Westboro' showed no intention of coming immediately home. Instead, with a droll egoism, as if the fact that he had made poor Bulstrode a party to his unhappiness gave him thereafter a right to the other's time even in absence, he laid a firm hold on Jimmy. Westboro' finally put pen to paper, and the scrappy letter touched the deserted visitor; it proved to have been written at a bureau de poste in Paris:

"Don't, for God's sake, go off, old man. Keep up your end." (His end!) "Stop on at Westboro'—Use the place as if it were all put up for your amusement. Just live there so I may feel it's alive. Let me find a human being at home when I turn up. I'll wire in a day or so."

"So he is in Paris, then." Bulstrode had supposed so, and did not doubt that the Duke had gone there to find news of his wife, possibly as well to see Madame de Bassevigne.

Poor fellow, if he were searching for the Duchess! Well, Bulstrode would keep up his end, he had nothing else for the time being to do but to mind other people's business. He put it so to himself. Indeed he could not but believe it was fortunate for more than one person that something could keep him from minding his own.

An undefined discretion kept him from going to the Moated Grange, as to himself he styled the retreat the Duchess had made of The Dials. And, in spite of the absolute freedom now given him to prowl about amongst the books, in spite of his "evenings out" as he called them, Jimmy found the time at Westboro' to drag lamentably. His own affairs, which he so faithlessly denied, came to him in batches of letters whose questions could not be solved by return mail. He became over his own thoughts restless, and he sent a telegram to his host: "Better have a look at things here yourself. Can't possibly stop on longer than...." And he set a day.

"If Westboro', poor devil, has to look forward to a life of this unaccompanied grandeur," he pitied him. The lines and files of soft-footed, impersonal servants, the perfect stilted attention, the silence, and the inhumanness of a man's lonely life, became intolerable to Jimmy Bulstrode. Even though Frances, Duchess of Westboro', had truly said that the castle was a delightful home, Bulstrode began to wonder what that word comprised or meant: certainly nothing like his occupation of another man's house or like any life that is lived alone.

At the end of the week that the American spent at Westboro' he had condensed the castle, as he said to himself, as far as possible, to the proportions of a Harlem flat, and he lived in it. In the almost small breakfast room whose windows gave on the terrace, and where all the December sun that was visible came to find him, he took his meals; each of them but dinner, which was determinedly and imperially served by five men in one of the dining-rooms, and at which function, as he expressed it, he shut his eyes and just ate blindly through. He lived out of doors all day, took his tea in his dressing-room, and read and smoked until the august dinner hour called him down to dress and dine alone. For a week he lived "without sight of a human being," so he said, for the domestics were only machines. And, towards the end of the week, he would have gone to see any one: an enemy would have been too easy, and the only person within range was, of course, the Duchess of Westboro'.

Westboro' had made a confidant of Bulstrode, and the woman had not. Bulstrode liked it in her. To be sure, the cases were quite different: there was no reason why the man deserted and bruised in his pride and in his heart, should not have talked to his old friend. Westboro' accused himself of weakness.

"I've blabbed like a woman," he acknowledged ruefully.

The Duchess had not spoken nor had she, on the other hand, with the fine courage of the true woman, been in any eager haste to discover what her husband had said of her, nor had she asked if he had spoken at all. On the other hand, aided by an extreme patience and with still greater delicacy, she had waited, understanding that her guest, whose mettle and character she knew would not permit him to betray a trust, might, however naïvely, disclose what he knew without being conscious of it.

But if Bulstrode gave himself or his host away, the Duchess made no sign that she had profited by indiscretions. The impersonality of their conversations was indeed a relief to Bulstrode, and it made it possible for him to feel himself less a traitor at the Duke's hearth. But she talked very sweetly, too, of her children. She had the second picture to the Duke's of the little boys, a picture like the one Bulstrode had seen at the castle, and showed it to him as the father had done.

"Westboro' has the companion to this," he had not minded telling her as they sat together in the small room he had grown to know as well as the larger rooms of the castle. And at the end of a few moments Bulstrode quite blurted out: "Why, in Heaven's name do you women make men suffer so?"

The Duchess, who had been working, dropped her bit of muslin and looked, with her cherry lips parted and her great serious eyes, for all the world like a lady in a gift book. Her face was eighteenth century and child-like.

Bulstrode nodded. "Oh, yes, you've got so easily the upper hand, the very least of you, you know, over the best of us. It's such an unfair supremacy. You've got such a clever knowledge of little things, such a sense of the scale of the feelings, and you certainly make the very most of your power over us all. Can't you—" and his eyes, half serious and half reproachful, seemed, as he looked at her, to question all the womankind he knew—"Can't you ever love us well enough just quite simply to make us happy?"

The Duchess had taken up her sewing again, and her eyes were upon it. Bulstrode waited for a little, following her stitches through the muslin and the flash of her thimble in the light.

"Can't you?" he softly repeated. "Isn't it, after all, a good sort of way of spending one's life, this making another happy?"

"American women aren't taught so, you know," she said. "It isn't taught us that the end and aim of our existence is to make a man happy."

Her companion didn't seem at all surprised.

"And so you see," she went on, "those of us that do learn that after all there may be something in what you say—those of us that learn, only find it out after a lot of hard experiences, and it is sometimes too late!"

She seemed to think his direct question called for a distinct answer, for she admitted: "Oh, yes, of course there are some of us who would give a great deal to try. And you see, moreover," she went on with her subject as she turned the corner of her square, "you put it well when you said 'love enough.' You see that's the whole thing, Mr. Bulstrode, to love enough. One can, of course, in that case, do nearly all there is to do, can't one?"

"Nearly all," he had smiled, and added: "And a great deal more."

The household gods, whose dignity and harmony had not been disturbed during the absence of the master of Westboro', were unable, however, to give him very much comfort on his return. The Duke's motor cut quickly up the long drive and severed—clove, as it were—a way through the frosty air and let him into the park. The poor man had only a sense of wretchedness on coming home—"coming back," he now put it. Huddled down deep in his fur coat, its collar hunched round his ears, his face was as gloomy as that of a man dispossessed of all his goods; doors thrown open into the fragrant and agreeably warmed halls fetched him further home. But the knowledge that the house had been lived in during his absence was not ungrateful. He sniffed the odor of a familiar brand of cigar, and before he had quite plumbed the melancholy of the place to its depths, Jimmy Bulstrode had sunned out of one of the inner rooms, and the grasp of the friendly hand and the sound of the cheerful voice struck a chord in Westboro' that shook him.

"I've been like a fiend possessed," he said to Jimmy, in the evening when they found themselves once more before the fire. "I've scarcely known what I've been doing, or why; but I know one thing, and that is that I'm the most wretched man alive."

Bulstrode nodded. "You did go to Paris, then!"

"Yes," said the Duke, "and what I've found out there has driven me insane."

Although ignorant of the variations of his friend's discovery, Bulstrode was pretty certain of one that had not been made.

"You may, old chap," he said smoothly, "not have found out all the truth, you know."

Westboro' raised his hand. "Come," he said, "no palliations; you can't smooth over the facts. Frances is not in Paris. She has not been in Paris for several months." He paused.

"In itself not a tragedy," murmured his friend. "Paris is considered at times a place as well not to be in."

But Bulstrode's remark did not distract his friend from his narrative.

"She has not been in Paris since I saw her twelve months ago, and she has left no sign or trace of where she has gone. There is no address, no way that I can find her. Not that a discovery is not of course ultimately possible, but what, in the interval, if I should wish to write to her? What if I should need to see her? What if I should die?"

"Would you, in any of those cases, send for her?"

"I don't know," the Duke admitted.

"But," Jimmy asked him, "did you go to Paris this time to see the Duchess?"

"Since you ask me frankly," the Duke admitted, "I don't think that I did."

"At all events," the other said, "you surely did not go to spy on her, Westboro'?"

The Duke was silent, then answered quietly:

"I should never ask a question—not if it meant a certain discovery of something that I feared or suspected. I don't think I should ever seek to find out something she didn't want me to know."

Bulstrode, at the blindness of a man regarding his own intentions, smiled behind his cigar. "Well?" he helped.

"I went over to France," said the Duke—"and I suppose you'll scarcely believe a man who you say is not a lover to be capable of such sentimentality—simply, if possible, to have a sight of my wife, to see her go out of the door, or to see her go in, to see her possibly get into a carriage; and how did I know that it would not be with another man?"

"How did you find out that she had left?"

"I asked for her at her hôtel."

"The first question, then," Jimmy smiled.

"A fair one?"

"Oh, perfectly."

"I was told that the Duchess had left Paris months before."

"And then?" the other man's voice was placid as he spoke for the Duke. "Then you went to her bankers, her bakers and candlestick makers; in short, you asked all over the place, didn't you?"

The Duke swore gently. "Well, what would you have a man do?"

"Why I would have him do that," nodded Jimmy, "by all means. Any man would have done so."

In the half second of interval whilst the Duke was obliged to swallow his friend's sarcasm, Bulstrode had time to think: "Here I am, once more in the heart of an intrigue. Its fetters are all about me and I am wretchedly bound by honor not to do the simple, natural thing." Then he asked boldly: "Well, what do you think about it, Westboro'?"

"Think?" Westboro' repeated, "why, that she has deliberately escaped from me, put herself out of any possible reach; she doesn't want a reconciliation and she has gone away. She may have gone away alone and she may not, that I don't know, and I don't believe I want to know."

"Oh, you'll find her." It was with the most delightful security and contentment that his friend was able to tell the Duke this. But the cheerful note struck the poor husband the disagreeablest of blows.

"Gad!" he laughed, "what a cold brand of creature a bachelor is! 'Find her!' as one might speak of finding an umbrella that you've left by mistake at your club. Of course she can be found. There are not many mysteries that search can't solve in these days. And Duchesses don't drop off the face of the earth. I could no doubt have found her in twenty-four hours, but I didn't try to. I don't know that I want to find her. It isn't the fact of where she's gone that counts—that she wanted to go—that she has voluntarily made the separation final and complete."

"Then," persisted the bachelor, "you don't really want to find her?"

"Jove!" the Duke turned on him. "You don't know what it is to love a woman! You've got some imagination—try to use it, can't you? Can't you?"

He met the American's handsome eyes. A flush rose under Bulstrode's cheek. Westboro' put his hand on his friend's shoulder. "I beg your pardon, dear old chap."

"Oh, that's all right, old chap," Bulstrode assured cheerfully.

"My dear Duchess, it seems an unconscionable waste of time and life for any one to ignore the inevitable! It's such a prodigal throwing out of the window of riches!"

Bulstrode took her hands, both of them, in his as she stood in the winter sunshine, the open house door behind her, the terrace and its broken stairs of crumbling stone before her.

"Why, my dear lady, if I kept a diary of daily events I couldn't write down one page of good reasons why you should be living here and Westboro' up there, and I a comic go-between, in the secret of both and the confidence of one."

"Oh," she interrupted, "then you're in the confidence...?"

"Of your husband, yes," Bulstrode found himself startled into betrayal.

She drew her hands from him and walked on a little in the sunshine, and he followed by her side.

"I don't mind," she permitted, "you're such a perfect dear. I shouldn't mind at all if I thought that the confidence were a good one."

Her tone was light and cool, but the gentleman never failed to notice when the Duchess spoke of the Duke that there was a tremor under her words, a warmth, an agitation, which she vainly tried to control.

"Confidences," she said, "are very rarely just, you know, and les absents ont toujours tort."

"Oh, you don't mean...?" Jimmy emphasized.

"It was a confidence, wasn't it?"

"A real one," she was assured.

"Well then, you'll keep it, of course."

She drew the stole up round her long fair neck; her delicate head came out of the soft fur like a flower. But before she could follow up her words Bulstrode said:

"You, of course, then know how he loves you."

He felt more than knew that she trembled, and he saw an instinctive gesture which he understood meant that he should be silent.

"You and I put it quite clearly, Mr. Bulstrode, the other day." Her voice was serene again. "If only one cares enough—that's the necessary thing for every question."

"Well?"

She half shrugged, made a little motion with her white hands, and this answer said for her: "That is indeed the question, and I haven't solved it."

They stopped at the terraced walk. The low stones, dark and black, were filled in their interstices with fine lines of greenish moss. On the sunny corner the dial's shadow fell across the noon. The Duchess put her hand on the warmed stones.

"It's a heavenly day," she said, "I don't believe that the Riviera is warmer. I never have seen such an English December."

Her eyes, which had been fixed on the woods below the garden, now turned towards the house and rested on one of the upper windows where the sun fell on the little panes. The Duchess remained looking up a few seconds, then she came back to her guest.

"I started, you know, to tell you something," Bulstrode smiled at her. "I once served on a jury in the West, and although the case was a miserably sad one in every way, I suppose, I couldn't take it as seriously as I should have done, for from the first the whole thing seemed so unnecessary, and the crisis could so easily have been avoided."

"I know," she interrupted him, "but you're rather wrong. Not from the first."

He capitulated. "Well, grant it so if you like, only agree with me when I say from my own—" he put his hand down on the dial's edge. "From this lovely noon-time on, every hour you waste is clear loss. The Duke loves you as women are rarely loved, and after all," he said with something like passion in his agreeable voice "what do you all expect? Love doesn't hang on every tree for a woman to pluck at will, and you have the great luck, my dear Duchess, to be loved by your own husband. Why don't you go to him?"

"Go to him?" she echoed.

He curtly replied: "Why not?"

"My dear friend!"

"Why, didn't you forbid him to go to you?"

"Ah," she nodded, "the confidence, it was intimate indeed. But since you have got it, won't you agree that any man, if he loved a woman, would disobey her?"

"Westboro' would not."

The Duchess said coldly: "Pride is not love."

"You didn't mean him, then, to keep his vow?"

"Yes," she slowly thought out, "I did indeed, with all my heart."

"And now?"

She turned towards the house again, and as she walked back, said: "I don't quite know."

And Bulstrode asked her: "That is why you are here, to find out?"

"Partly."

Her companion's face grew stern. The Duchess did not see it for her eyes had again swept the upper window. At her side Bulstrode went on: "You have taken ten years to discover that you did not love your husband. You have taken one year to begin to wonder, to doubt, to suspect, to half think that you do; it's an unstable state of heart, Duchess, terribly unstable."

The woman stopped short at his side, and now as she lifted up her eyes and saw him, was a little startled if not frightened at his expression.

"Unstable," she repeated, with a world of scorn in her voice. "How can you use that word to me, knowing the facts of the case?"

"Oh, a man," said Bulstrode rather impatiently, "is a worthless, wretched piece of mechanism altogether. I grant you that—utterly unworthy the love and confidence of any good woman. He is capable of all the vagaries and infidelities possible. We'll judge him so. But," he continued, "these wandering, vagrant derelicts have been known to tie fast, to find port, to drop anchor. They have even brought great riches and important treasure into harbor, fetched a world of good luck home. There's only one thing in the universe that can keep a man, Duchess, only one."

"Well?" she encouraged him.

"A woman's heart," he said deeply, "a woman's true tenderness; and it needs all that heart, all its love, all its patience and sacrifice to keep that man—all and forever."

He saw her bosom heave; she had thrown her fur off, as if its warmth stifled her. Vivid color had come into her face. Her pallor for the time was destroyed, and as she flashed a rebellious look at him, a look of revolt and selfhood, he seemed to see again the American girl—wilful, egotistical, spoiled—an imperious creature whose caprices had been opposed to the Duke's Anglo-Saxon temperament and national egoism.

At this moment, the window the Duchess looked towards opened part way: it was under the eaves and there must have been a dovecote near, for there came the soft sound of cooing like the call of a young bird. Possibly the gentle note reached the woman's hearing as well, for her face transcendently softened.

"I think," she said with evident effort to speak in a commonplace tone, "it would be quite futile to urge Cecil to come."

"Oh, I shan't advise him so."

Bulstrode's quick answer made her look at him in so much surprise that he went on to say: "I would not, in justice to him, in justice to the great love I have been permitted to see, advise him to come."

The Duchess, during the months of analysis, suffering and experience, had not admitted to herself that should her husband return she would receive him, nor had she decided as to quite how obdurate she would be, and she was curious at the attitude of this gentle friend. She naïvely asked:

"Why would you not advise him so?"

Bulstrode said, still continuing his pleasant sententiousness, "The woman's heart must be as stable as the man's is uncertain, and the man who comes back after such a separation must not find a woman who does not know her own mind. He must, on the contrary, find one who has no mind or will or life but his."

As he looked at the person to whom he spoke he was somewhat struck by the maternal look in her: he had never clearly discovered it before. Her breast from which the fur had fallen, as it rose and fell under her soft gown, was full, generous, and beautiful; even as he spoke in a certain accusation against her, she seemed to have altered.

"Westboro'," he said a little confused, "must come back to a woman, Duchess, to a woman—to a consoler. I wish I could express myself—almost to a mother—as well as to a wife."

The ardent color dyed her face again; her lips moved. She put out her hand towards him, and as he took it he understood that she wished him to bid her good-by and to leave her alone. He heard what she struggled to say:

"He must not come, he must not come."

"No," he accepted sadly for his friend, "No, he must not come."

Bulstrode had chosen those times for going to The Dials when his host was least likely to take note of his absence; but it happened that more than once the Duke missed him at just the wrong moment, and more than once had been given the direction in which Bulstrode's footsteps had turned.

One morning, during a talk with his agent, Westboro'—the map of the district before him—enquired what had ever been done with the property known as The Dials, and into whose hands the old place had fallen. It seemed that it had been let for some months to a foreigner, a widow, who lived there, and alone.

Westboro' considered the farms and forests, as they lay mapped out before him, at the extreme foot of the castle's parks. It was a little square of some fifty acres by itself; it had never interested him before.

How long did the lease run on? Did the agent know? He believed for another year.

The Duke gave instructions to have the property looked into, with a view to purchase. And as the man put up his papers, he vouchsafed to his employer:

"The present tenant is very exclusive; she sees nobody, has never, I believe, even been to the Abbey. An old gardener who has been kept on says the servants are all foreign."

The Duke gave only a tepid interest to the information which would have passed entirely from his mind had it not been for his next meeting with Jimmy Bulstrode.

As much to shake off the impression his last talk with the Duchess had left on his mind, as to prolong his exercise, Jimmy had gone down out of the garden and across the place on foot over the rough winter fields with their rimy furrows and their barren floors. As he made his way towards the bottom hedge, looking for a stile he knew would be there a little farther on, cutting an entrance out through the thorn to the road, he met Westboro', like himself, on foot, and with his hand upon the stile. The presence of the Duke where Bulstrode knew he was least thought to be, and where he was now sadly sure he was not opportune, made Jimmy stop short, troubled, and, not for a moment thinking that the fact of his being there himself was singular, he made his way determinedly through the stile. As he greeted his friend, his own demeanor was decidedly one which said: "Don't go on in that direction, follow rather out of the turnstile with me." And he led his friend rather brusquely down the bank, hitching his arm in Westboro's, forced him along with him into the road.

"I ran down here to look over these meadows," said Westboro.' "You seem yourself, in a way, to be pacing the land off!"

"Oh, I love cross-country walking," said Bulstrode warmly.

"You must," smiled the Duke, "to have cut off into those barren fields. Were you lost?" Westboro' stopped and looked back. "You must have come directly down through The Dials."

"The Dials?" the American helplessly repeated. "Do you mean the old house and garden?"

Bulstrode's manner and speech were rarely curt and evasive, but he seemed this time embarrassed and taken unawares. As the two men sat in the motor which waited for the Duke down the road, Westboro' fixed his glass in his eye and looked hard for a second at his friend. Bulstrode's cheerful face was distinctly disturbed.

"I'm thinking something of buying The Dials," Westboro', after a moment, said against the wind.

Poor Jimmy. If the house had not sufficiently up till now materialized out of his fancy as a possession, it declared itself at once, without doubt, as something he must look after. It was only a little bit of England, luckily——

"Well," he exclaimed, "to be frank, old man, I've, too, been thinking I should like to buy that property. You could surely spare me this little corner of Glousceshire."

"Spare it!" cried Westboro', "my dear chap, fancy how ripping to have you a landlord here! To catch and hold you so! We'll go over the whole place together. My agent shall put the matter through for you."

"Good God, no!" said Bulstrode, "don't let your man have wind of any such a deal. The place would go up like a rocket in price. If you really yourself care to withdraw as much as possible, that's the most you can do. But for God's sake keep off the place, like a good fellow."

Behind his long moustaches the Duke covered a smile, but he conciliated his agitated friend.

"I'll keep off the grass until the turf is all your own, my dear Bulstrode."

"Thanks!" said the other cordially, and sat back with a sigh of relief. "There," he reflected peacefully, "my presence is explained—it's quite perfect. I shall be a landowner in England. At all events, it's lucky the property is sympathetic. I'm glad I didn't get balled up in this affair in, let us say, New Jersey, and find myself forced to purchase the Hackensack Meadows.

"Did the old house look deserted?" asked the Duke wickedly.

"Oh, rather!" replied the other gentleman.

"Really!" wondered Westboro'. "Why, they tell me that it is let to a Donna Incognita—a foreign lady."

Bulstrode, whether at his own lie or at the shock of his companion's knowledge, blushed, and his friend saw him redden. And the Duke, in whom candor was a charm, stared at his friend, half-opened his mouth, and then sat speechless. The suggestiveness of the whole affair rushed over him so rapidly that he had not time to ask himself whether he credited his suspicions or not.

"Good heavens! Jimmy carrying on a vulgar intrigue in a simple country village!" He looked at the face of the man by his side, but Jimmy, leaning forwards, addressed some remark to the chauffeur, and showed no intention of meeting the Duke's eyes. If it were not a vulgar intrigue, what could it be? How difficult it grew to connect such a liason with his friend. But as he thought on, the Duke began to ask why, after all, should it be so extraordinary! Why should he suppose Jimmy so unlike the rest of his set? More scrupulous, more sinless than other men—than himself? He couldn't answer his own question, but he did so think of Bulstrode, and since his late house party had believed that Jimmy cared for Mrs. Falconer. The lady at The Dials was certainly not she.

Bulstrode, in the shadow of this delinquence, surrounded certainly in the mind of the Duke by an atmosphere of intrigue, became very human, rather consolingly human. In their mutual intercourse the Duke had felt himself living in a clearer atmosphere than he usually breathed. Along by Bulstrode's mode of life, points of view and principles, his own life had seemed more mistaken than he had ever thought it to be. And although Jimmy had never breathed a word of criticism, he had felt himself judged by the man's just, though gentle codes.

By the time he had reached this point in his reflections the motor had stopped at one of the side doors of the castle.

"There is, of course, some perfectly proper explanation—" the Duke decided. It's a harmless flirtation, if any flirtation at all. Perhaps it's a beneficent bit of benevolence; at any rate it's Jimmy's own affair, and after all, he's going to buy the property—perhaps he's going to marry. Why not?

Ashamed to have placed his friend, if only momentarily, in an equivocal position, he turned about as they got out of the car and put an affectionate hand on the American's shoulder.

"Oh, I expect, old man, that you've got some wonderful scheme up your sleeve! You're going to be married and fetch your bride to The Dials."

Poor Bulstrode unfortunately echoed: "Married!" with a world of scorn in his tone. "My poor Westboro,' after what I've lately seen and heard here—forgive me if I say that for the time at least I'm not too sharply tempted."

"Since," he said as he greeted her, "you appear to be intending to live here forever, you'll welcome me when I come back from London. I'm coming back for Christmas, but if I don't run in before you'll understand, won't you, that it is because I simply haven't dared. Westboro' has already seen me cut across to this place."

The Duchess interrupted him. "Oh, in that case, I shall, of course, be obliged to move away." And to her great surprise Bulstrode quickly agreed with her.

"I should think it wise—not of course in the least knowing why you originally came."

She looked at him rather quizzically.

"You mean to say then that you don't really know?"

"Oh,"—he was truthful—"I have rather an idea, and I hope a more or less true one."

But the lady did not confess or in anywise help him. He went on to say:

"Your love for the castle couldn't, of course, long continue to keep you mewed up here; and you'll be shortly discovered. As far as your own interests are concerned it will be rather better to obtain the divorce as soon as possible."

"Oh, Mr. Bulstrode," she interposed, "don't misread me."

He nodded sagely. "On the contrary, I am translating you from sight, my dear Duchess. And you are decidedly in your right regarding the Duke."

She was so at his mercy that she hardly moved her lips, watching his face. And as Bulstrode lit the cigarette she permitted him, and took his seat before the tea things which she had set at his elbow, he went on to make out her case for her.

"He has quite spoiled your life. He has been a brute, and not in the least worth your——"

But the Duchess had dropped her tongs; they fell ringing on the hard-wood floor. She raised a scarlet face to him.

"It's a piége," she murmured, "an autodafé."

"No," he said quietly, "it's a plain truth. Westboro' has told me everything. I must think that he has done so. The man of me naturally condones him, and the friend in me is inclined to be lenient. But the justice and right, my dear Duchess, are all on your side."

"Oh, justice and right!" she dismissed, "only criminals need such words."

Bulstrode said cooly: "But Westboro' has been a criminal!"

"If he were," emphasized the Duchess, "didn't I forgive him?"

"Of course, you did, my dear," her friend agreed warmly, "how wonderfully, how beautifully, everyone knows. And he is all the more, therefore, dreadfully to be blamed."

She said passionately: "What do you mean, Mr. Bulstrode? How—why do you speak to me like this?"

Her extraordinary guest drank his tea with singular peace of mind.

"I think he is dreadfully to be blamed."

"But why should you tell it to me?"

"Why not?" he returned, his charming eyes on hers with the greatest tribute of affection and sympathy—"I've known you for years, I'm fond of you, you've been horribly wronged, and I'm going to see that things are made right for you. I've been very blind. I have longed for a reconciliation, I admit, with this husband who, poor stuff as he is, loves you still. But I see what a sentimental ass I've been, and how right you are."

She put her hand to her throat as if the soft lace suffocated her; she had grown very pale indeed.

"What," she gasped, "do you know of my plans and my intentions, Mr. Bulstrode? I have not told them to you."

"But I've been able to guess them," he replied.

"You've dared to, then?" she flashed.

"Oh, don't blame me," he returned. "Seeing you as I have all the while, I've been forced to make out something—to attach some reason to your living in this isolation. You've wanted, not unnaturally and very cleverly, I acknowledge, to see what's been going on at Westboro', what the Duke's been up to."

Her voice was suffocated as she said:

"Oh, stop, please! Whatever has come to you, Mr. Bulstrode, I don't know, or why you dare to speak to me as you do."

Seeing her agitation he said smoothly: "My dear child, you're so right in everything you've done, and of course I shall stand by you."

She made a dismissing gesture. "Oh, I don't need you, I don't want you."

He smiled benignly on her. "But I'm here, and I'm going to see you through."

"See me through what?"

"Through your divorce," he said practically.

"But you're Westboro's friend," she stammered, and he repudiated with just a little hesitation in his voice:

"Oh, not so much as yours. But I'm the friend of both of you in this. It's the best thing all round."

The gentleman's attitude so baffled her, he was so serious, and yet he took it so lightly, apparently, that she was obliged to believe he meant what he said.

"You talked to me very differently," she reminded him, and he shrugged.

"Oh, I've been far too emotional and unpractical. I'm going henceforth to look at things from the worldly and conventional stand-point."

She put out her hand beseechingly. "Oh, leave that for the rest of us. It quite spoils you."

"I don't pretend to think—" He made his gaze small as he looked past her in an attitude of reflection. "Oh, I don't claim that, it's an ideal way of looking at things. But there is not much idealism in the modern divorce, is there?"

The Duchess took a turn across the floor, twisting her fair hands together, then came round to his side and sat down on a low chair near him.

"Are you quite serious?" she asked. "But I know that you are not. Let me at least think so. Your words shock me horribly"—and she looked piteously at him. "I have felt you to be such a gentle person, and yours is such an understanding atmosphere."

Bulstrode had given himself methodically another cup of tea, and helped himself now to sugar.

"Oh, atmosphere!" he repeated scornfully. "One can't live on air, you know. And I have been of the most colorless kind."

"Well, you've changed terribly," she accused him.

"I've only come down to solid earth," he explained. "And the earth's after all where we belong, Duchess. Stand firm, keep to your own part of it, and don't cloud-gaze, or somebody with a claim will knock you off your little foothold."

"Oh, heavens!" exclaimed his companion.

The gentleman, who appeared at length quite to have finished his material enjoyment of the tea, put his second empty cup down and looked at the lady.

"You should have married an American husband," he said to her, "a man who would have idolized you, not cared whether you developed or not. A duchess isn't far enough up. An American empress is higher."

The lady listening to him, shuddered a little.

"As it is," he went on regretfully, "you've been forced to develop, whether or not you wanted to, to grow finer and freer, to go farther on, to become more delightful. Here you are progressed and civilized, after years of education, experience and suffering, and, my poor child, here you are all alone."

She cried out, "Oh, Mr. Bulstrode," with a little gasp.

"Oh, no, no," he softly ejaculated, "it is not fair! You're terribly wasted, and you've been, as you too well know, terribly betrayed."

But here he felt her hand on his arm with a strong grasp. She shook the arm a little.

"Don't go on," she said deeply. "I tell you not to go on." After a few seconds, in which he heard the fire and the slow bubbling of the gently boiling water and the cooing of the doves without, under the eaves, the Duchess said: "Listen to me. I haven't talked at all to you, let me say something now."

Her companion reflected to himself: "Well, at all events, she's not going to malign the Duke; that's a foregone conclusion."

The Duchess clasped her hands round her knee and raised her face to him.

"Do you think," she asked, "that there's any egoist as nasty as a feminine one? Men are admitted to be generally selfish, but we specialize, and each one of us has the faculty of getting up some new and peculiar brand, I begin to believe. At any rate, when I married, I was an egoist, and I've stayed on being one until a very little time ago. I suppose I must in a way have more or less ornamented my position, as the papers say. I did have two children as well, and in that way fulfilled my duty as a Westboro'. But really and truly, I have never in the least been a wife, and very little of a mother. I was as silly and vain as could be, and I never for a moment valued my husband. I wasn't indifferent to my children, but I was absorbed by my worldly life, and when my little boys were taken ill and died, I was on a dahabeah on the Nile, and I don't think that Cecil ever forgave us for being so far away."

She remained quiet for a long time, looking down at her hands, and when she lifted her face Bulstrode saw that she had wept.

"That," she went on, "broke the ice round my heart, when I came home to those empty rooms."

He said soothingly, "There, there, my child."

"Oh, let me go on," she urged him, "let me speak. I shall probably never feel like doing so again. But at that time when I turned to find my husband, I discovered that I had no power over him, and I realized that for years I had not possessed his love. I suppose you'll tell me that it is unusual for a woman to see so clearly as this. Perhaps it is. At any rate, just because I did so clearly, I forgave him when he came to me last year, at Cannes."

"You were wonderful!" he repeated again, "perfectly noble, and, as I said before, Westboro' did not deserve you."

She did not here, as she had done before, catch him up; on the contrary, after a few moments, she asked him point-blank:

"What then do you advise us, knowing us both, to do?"

He was distinctly disappointed that she should have put the question to him, and gave her time to withdraw it as he asked tentatively: "You really feel that you must ask me, Duchess?"

"Tell me, at all events."

"You are quite sure that you could not go back to your husband?"

After a little pause, she lingeringly said:

"Yes, quite sure. You must know that he will not be the first to break the ice now." Then she pushed: "You would advise my filing my papers for divorce?"

Held in this way pitilessly for a direct challenge, he met her eyes with his own, asking her gently:

"Is there nothing that speaks for Westboro' more distinctly than anything I can say? And more appealingly than anything which you in all your pride feel?"

The Duchess assented that there was, with a movement of her lips; she put her hands over her face and so sat quietly for a few moments, and when she spoke again to her visitor, her words were irrelevant. When some few moments after she bade him good-by, she regretted his absence in London and begged him to come and see her as soon as he returned.

"Come," she said, "at least to see whether I am here or whether I have pitched my tent and gone away."

As Bulstrode stood in the doorway she asked him: "I understand there are a lot of people at the castle for Christmas, and among them will be Mrs. Falconer? Isn't it so? Is she really so very lovely?"

"It's a different type of loveliness from yours," Bulstrode returned. And the Duchess supposed: "A happier type?"

"Well, she's rather happy I think, take it all together," Jimmy said.

"Has she children?"

"None."

"Is she in love with her husband?"

And he was so long searching for a reply that the Duchess laughed quietly.

"Poor man," she said, "don't bother. But then since she's so happy, she must be in love with somebody else's husband."

But he put her right immediately.

"I don't think she in the least is. And why," he went on, "since happiness is so greatly the question of other people's state of mind, might we not let it go at the fact that she is herself very much loved?"

The Duchess looked at her guest rather absently. She was thinking of the happy beauty, the woman of a different type from her own, whose presence at Westboro' had been sought by her husband for the second time.

"Oh," she answered rather absently, giving Jimmy her hand, "she wouldn't, you know, be happy if the feeling were all on the other side."

When the Duke had casually asked his guest's plans for Christmas week, Bulstrode had come near to offending his host by declaring that he could not possibly be one of a second house party.

"Do you, then," Westboro' had asked, "hate the holidays?"

The genial Bulstrode had assured him to the contrary.

"Nor do I," continued the Duke, "even though I'm a miserable man on the verge of a divorce. I expect there's too long a line of jolly Christmases back of the Westboro's for me to mope through the season. But I don't want to have Christmas coming to an empty house, my dear fellow"—He put it pathetically, "there's no one in this gloomy place but yourself and myself. We must have a Christmas party. The tenants will, of course, be noisy and cheerful, but I'm going to ask a lot of people down and make the list out now."

And Bulstrode had, however, firmly insisted that he could not really stop on—that he must go away. "There are," he wound up his arguments, "a thousand reasons why I should go."

But Westboro' had comprehendingly suggested that they might together bring "every reason" down to the country. "And," continued his Grace, "we'll narrow things into the most intimate circle possible. For I shall ask the Ravensworths of Surrey and their children, there are eight of them, ripping little things; they used to play with my boys. We'll turn them loose and have a tree, old man."

Jimmy watched his face with a keen pity, for there had not been one ray of light in it as he planned for his celebration.

"But you arrange to come back for Christmas Eve. There must be some one in charge—I mean to say, some one so that if the whole thing is too much for me, why I'll bolt and you'll have to stand by."

He was, as he spoke, writing the names on a sheet of paper. Bulstrode felt the plan to be rather triste and lifeless, and he knew that he could not and would not keep the Duchess' secret much longer, let its revelation cost him what it would.

"Westboro'," he said, "I shall have to be getting off to-morrow. You know I would stand by you if I could possibly see my way clear."

"I know perfectly well," the Duke acknowledged, "what a rotten bore I've been, and how sick of me you must be." He wrote on: "I shall ask Mrs. Falconer (her husband is in the States); she is quite alone in town at Lady Sorgham's." As he quoted this last name the Duke folded his list up. He nodded affectionately at Jimmy. "You'll arrange perhaps to come down with Mrs. Falconer on the Friday train?"

And Bulstrode capitulating weakly, murmured, "Oh, we'll fetch the toys and things for the tree," he offered.

"Ripping!" his Grace nodded.

Jimmy, on his way at last to London, stopped once more at The Dials, and was hurrying across the forest when the Duchess herself appeared to him at the big dial. She wore her furs, muff, and big enveloping stole, her hat with fur on it, and a veil. She was not in house or garden trim. The urban air of her toilet was a surprise to Bulstrode, and he took in her readiness for something he had not expected, something great, something decisive.

"It's good of you to come when you must be full of delightful ways of passing your time, Mr. Bulstrode," she said, "and I wanted so much to see you again."

"Again?"

"Of course," she replied nodding, "again and many times. But I mean I wanted to see you here." Bulstrode did not want her to tell him a piece of final news. He did not care to learn of an arbitrary departure, and he said, laughing: "Then you don't like my property? Any repairs you...?"

"Oh, I adore The Dials," she said gravely, "and I can't think why they ever let you buy it, or what you'll do with it after I'm gone." She smiled. ".... or with whom." Before he could speak she added: "Where is my husband to-day?"

"I left him wandering about the house like a lost spirit," Bulstrode replied. "Looking," he went on, "all about for something or other. I expect he himself didn't quite know what. For something to cheer up the empty rooms."

"Oh, don't," she murmured.

But he seemed pleased with the picture he drew. "I doubt if Westboro' stops in the house alone; he's probably gone out shooting."

"But he has a house full of people....?"

"No one has come, or is coming, after all."

"You don't mean to say that they've all refused!"

"Yes," Jimmy said, "every man of them, and all the women as well."

The Duchess put out her hand quickly, and said touchingly: "Oh, but you don't for a moment think——"

"That it's because of the scandal, dear lady?" he smiled. "Well, that would be a new phase. No, I think on the other hand they would revel, and the only reason in the world that they have not come down is that they were really asked too late. Christmas week, you know—

"And, of course, then, Mrs. Falconer," the Duchess's face brightened. "She——"

"Oh, she!" Bulstrode exclaimed, "she's as right as possible. She's sure to be along in good season."

"Oh!" accepted the Duchess, "and with whom does she come?"

Bulstrode waited. "Well, of course, the poor thing expects to find more or less some one to help her bear up her end. And I can't say how she will take the fact of only us two."

The Duchess interrupted cheerfully:

"Why, she, of course, will go directly back! You don't think for a second that she would stop on alone like that?"

"Alone?" Bulstrode gave her with a little malice. "But she'll have Westboro' and me so entirely to herself and one can always ask in the rector or curate or corral a neighbor."

But the Duchess shook her head as if she understood. "Oh, no, not at this time."

Bulstrode miscomprehended blithely: "Christmas time? You see, I know the visiting lady pretty well, and I believe she'll feel me to be more or less of a standby, and I know her spirit and her human kindness. I am inclined to think that she will feel it's up to her not to run off like a hare; to think that Westboro' may, in a way, need her; and that when she finds everybody's gone back on the poor man, and there's to be no tree after all, why, I'm tempted, by jove, to think——"

The Duchess helped him: "That she'll make a charity of it."

"Yes, if you like," he laughed. "Or be a sport," he preferred to put it. "Stay on, stand by. It will be perfectly ripping of her, you know."

But the Duchess had no sympathy for the other woman. Her eyes fixed themselves on the trees before her, and as a shot rang out in the distance she said abruptly: "Why, that might be Cecil, mightn't it? Does he shoot birds on your premises?"

Bulstrode wondered very much for what reason she was habited in street dress and furs, whether she had planned to leave The Dials or had intended going up to see her husband.

"Forgive me," he said, "if I seem to be shockingly in a hurry, but I must have a look at the time, for as it happens, even in this far-off place, I have an engagement."

Impulsively putting out her hand the Duchess exclaimed: "I can't ever, ever thank you."

"Oh, after your divorce——"

But she cried out so against his words that he hastened: "You want me to think then that you do not believe...."

"Believe!" she ardently repeated, "Oh, I don't know what I believe or think," and he saw that the poor thing spoke the truth. "It's I who am as unstable as the sea, I who am the derelict."

He contradicted her gently: "My dear, you're only trying to solve alone a problem which it takes two to answer. When you see Westboro' you will know."

She turned on him with the first sparkle of humor he had ever seen her display. "Why don't you marry Mrs. Falconer?"

He didn't start; indeed, the idea had such a familiar sound it would have been hard to frighten him with it from any corner.

"I thought you didn't believe in divorces?"

"Oh, but you'd make a wonderful husband!"

He laughed. "No one has ever thought so—la preuve....?"

With great frankness in her gesture and a great—he was quick to see it—a great affection—she put out her hand to him and said: "Oh, yes, you'd make a wonderful companion, and you've been a wonderful friend. If anything good comes to me now, I shall in great measure owe it to you."

He protested: "You owe me nothing, nothing."

There were tears in her eyes as she said: "But I want to, I like to, and I do. I don't know," she went on, "that I might not have been reconciled ultimately to my husband, but I feel quite sure it would only have been the basting up of the seam—it would have ripped away again. Did you ever—" she challenged him with still a little sparkle of humor, "hear of a thing called a change of heart?"

"Yes, at Methodist meetings."

She said gravely: "That's not what I mean. But whatever has happened it's only been since you told me things."

Her face was so girlish, her eyes so sweet, her humility so sudden, that her companion found himself embarrassed and could hardly find words to say good-by to her. She went on to say, in a tone so low that he bent a little over the dial to hear her. "You told me you could not advise my husband to come to me."

Ah, had he! It was hard to remember that. Had he said so?

"I think," she whispered, "you need not keep him away now, if he should want to come."

As her friend said nothing, she added in a voice more like a child than a great Duchess, "You may trust me. I want him to come— There, I've said it. I hope he'll come. If he doesn't—

"Why, then, you'll go away," he finished. "You can't bear it."

The Duchess shook her head. "I'll go to him, on the contrary."

"You were going?"

"Yes, when you came."

He cried out: "Oh, I'm off then, I'm off for London, and I shan't be back for the Christmas holidays. You may count on me."

The Duchess smiled delightfully, and was in a second the elusive woman, intangible, and impossible to seize.

"No, no," she said, "please don't exile yourself either to-day or to-morrow. It isn't after all the moment, and I want to prove to you that I'm not jealous. I've decided to wait until that lovely woman has gone away."

The waste of his territory, its largesse to no purpose, its vastness through which only unbearable silences echoed; accumulated revenues and hereditary title, only added to the Duke's melancholy.

He had planned the Christmas house party too late as it proved, and refusals, one after another, came in during the week. The poor gentleman's mood led him to resent each fresh defection on the part of his guests as personal wounds inflicted by old friends at a time when charity would have been sweet. And it was with really tragic melancholy that he threw the last letter down exclaiming:

"And they all with one consent began to make excuse."

He quite waited for a line from Mrs. Falconer, which would tell him that she, too, had decided to abandon him: and the thought of what he believed to be Jimmy's complications at The Dials caused him half to regard the matter with a pity for her.

"If Jimmy isn't married, he's the most whited of sepulchres!"

The satin shine of holly, the glimmer of pearly mistletoe, the odor of spruce and pine, and heavier scent of hemlock bewitched the castle throughout with their fragrance. Setting and decoration suggested a feast, and the Duke as he passed through the upper halls, and by the doors of his children's rooms, saw holly wreaths on the walls and that the little gates were twisted with green.

The day was dampish and the Duke, unable to bear the silence of the house, with his gun and his dogs and with a lack of resource and superfluity of ennui to urge him from the castle, started to tramp off his unrest. The afternoon was young, and the bare, naked sunlight fell over the bare nakedness of the land. The little low clumps of neutral-colored underbrush, the reddish-brown thickets between wood and field, would hide the birds well, and with his gun across his back, his hands in his pockets, his Grace covered many miles before he at length stopped to take in the length of the land or to listen for wings.

Coveys had flown up and away unseen by him, and their whirring unheard. His dogs had run off, and without being abruptly brought to heel, skulked back by themselves shamefaced and bewildered by the hunter's indifference. The holly reddened on the hedges, the scarlet berries bright among the glowing leaves; high in the poplars the parasite mistletoe with crystal balls, hung tiny white globules like fairy grapes; holiday in the air, and over the grey winter landscape the finest possible powder of snow lay pale under the furtive sun. As the forest edges closed about him and the Duke with still no idea of where he was going, continued to tramp, he unconsciously entered the property Bulstrode had lately acquired, and which he had begged his friend to avoid.

There was something in the country air, in its pungent sweetness, and in the season, that penetrated even Westboro's melancholy, and every now and then he lifted his head to breathe in deeply the fragrance of hemlock and the cold earthy aroma, the spice of bracken and the balm of a fragrant thicket that smelled like a rose. It was winter, however, and although a snow bird piped in it and the sun was out, there was a December quality that, in the mood he was in, overcame all the festivities of the time. He heard the bird who was persistent and sharp-voiced, and, for the first time thinking of the other game he had come out for, he paused. His dogs were gone, the beggars! He called them to no purpose, whistled and waited. They were a new brace and young. God knew where they had cut away to.

Before him, as he stood, the brown vistas of the winter forest opened out here and there into ochre circles and filled at this hour with brilliant sunlight, their round openings overflowing; the light filtered gently out and was swallowed up by the cold and closer wood. Under his feet there was only the faint ghost of the late snowfall on the turned-up, curled-up edges of the dry leaves. There beeches, red as copper, and iron-strong oaks struck their roots deep down into the mould. Westboro' did not know where he had wandered to, but here and there through the bare trees gleamed the white of a statue on its mossy base, and a little farther along, a broken pedestal held its slender column up amongst the tree trunks as mossy and veined as they, and right in the heart of the bowl, on a brick pedestal was a sundial, a round brass disc, cut into with the tooth of time, and all black and green. The sun at this moment shone full on it and its slight shadow fell along the noon. The Duke stooped down and through the glass read the inscription:

Utere dum licet.

"I'm a trespasser," he thought. "This is Bulstrode's property."

Through an opening just to the right he could see a brown path, and at the end of it a gate.

"What the deuce could Jimmy have so wanted this old place for? What was he hiding here?"

He turned back with the intention of taking as sudden leave of the place as he had made an entrance. He saw his dogs in front of him and called them. Before him lay the clean low fall of the meadow with the line of high hedge, and directly opposite him he could see the elms of his own park. He had not gone more than a couple of hundred feet away before he paused again and turned about to have one last look back at the enchanting place. As he stood thus, in Jimmy's property, he at first took it to be a trick of vision, for he stood perfectly rigid, peering back at the opening he had left not five minutes before. He leaned forwards, setting his eyeglass and staring at two figures who had come into the bowl and stood close by the big dial.

He set his gun on the ground and leaned upon it. There was a cordial meeting; he could hear the voices but he could not distinguish their words, and during all the interview, which must have consumed some fifteen minutes, the Duke never stirred. Finally, and curiously enough it seemed a short time to him, they took leave of each other, the man going out of the forest by a different path, the woman slowly turning down the neat walk that led to the brick arch, and to the old house. Whether or not the Duke had at this moment the vaguest suspicion of her, suspicion of his friend or of his wife that did them wrong, he never had time or clearness to reflect or to ask himself. A dense blindness took his senses away from him. He put his hands out to steady himself in vain, and staggered. His dogs were at his feet, he fell over them, struggled to get his balance back and like a stricken tree went down. In his heavy fall on his gun it discharged, filling his upper arm and shoulder with a quantity of bird shot. The scattering pain, instead of finishing his faint, roused him with a sharp, ugly sting, and the rush of the warm, wet blood. He half picked himself up, and then, aware of the pain tearing his muscles and flesh, he fell back like a dog on his haunches. Through his confusion he still contrived to remember a little path, and inch by inch he dragged himself towards it. He pulled along over the leaves and russet paths of ground. His bare hand finally struck the bricks of the little walk and he could still know that he was wonderfully in the road. There was a cloud before his swimming eyes and his troubled mind; his face, pale as death, was lifted towards the arch; leaving a bloody trail as he crawled along the ground, he contrived to reach the gate and fell across its threshold. His head lay on his arm, the string of his broken eyeglass wound pathetically about his wrist. The Duke proved to be a modern replica of the poor knight who fell, face downwards, on the grass when Elizabeth's carriage passed him by, some four hundred years before the present Duke.

After Bulstrode had left her, the Duchess of Westboro' hurried back to the house that was not her home; to the little long drawing-room that was not hers. For the first time since her voluntary exile, since her occupation of this asylum, she found it bereft of charm and the cosey, dear place as cold to her as if the snows had drifted in and filled a deserted nest. It had nevertheless been a cloister, and she knew it, where the best of her had prayed, where the true woman—and the true woman is always something of a saint—had folded submissive hands, where self had gone away and left nothing at all but love.

On this Christmas Eve, The Dials was the loneliest corner of England. The scarcely occupied house suggested to the Duchess the thought of a stocking hung before a chimney when there were no children who cared whether it was filled or not, when there was no reason why St. Nicholas should pass. But it was only the very edge of her thoughts that touched anything so fantastic as this picture. The Duchess was serious and lonely. With a sigh, and winking back tears she threw off her furs, laid off her hat, and, after poking up the fire into sparkling brightness, she wandered up-stairs to the apartment that she had made her bedroom. Under the low eaves the bed-chamber shone out gay with chintz, fresh and sweet as a midwinter bouquet, the frostiness coming in around it through the slightly opened window, and there was the scent of the firs and the cedar wood that closely hemmed the old place in.

"Heavens!" thought the Duchess, half aloud. "How dreadfully in love Jimmy Bulstrode is, how dreadfully, faithfully in love!" And then she went on to say: "How dreadfully I am myself in love, and no one is hurrying to me!"

She walked aimlessly about the pretty room, irritated and annoyed at the cloister effect. She found it too remote, too virgin, and no room for a wife. "I promised," she mused, "to wait until Mrs. Falconer has gone. I shall break my promise. Oh, I can't really wait at all! If things are going to be as bad as this, I want to leave England, I want at least to know. And Jimmy will forgive me, it's such a wonderfully good cause ... a woman going to find her husband on Christmas Eve!"

The Duchess threw open the window to its widest. Down in the garden on the stone wall the big dial lay in the shadow of the afternoon. She could not read its motto, but she knew perfectly what it said—Utere dum licet. As she leaned out above her garden, under her window the snowballs hung their waxen globes in a green tree. There were a few winter roses blooming, and the English garden had the beauty of summer in winter time.

The Duchess heard a sharp sound close to the house. It was a rifle shot, and died instantly on the still air. Shots were not uncommon in this season, but here in The Dials woods they were entirely out of character; in fact, they were quite inadmissible. There was no shooting let, and a shot could only mean poaching, or something more serious. The Duchess waited a few moments, but no other sound followed. She nevertheless drew the casement in, and, going down stairs threw her stole about her shoulders and opened the house door into the garden. At the sight of her, down by the other end of the wall, the gardener lifted up his bent form, and with a little pannier of hot-house violets in his hands, hurried towards his lady.

"Mellon," said she, "have you any violets?"

The Duchess took the fragrant basket with its delicate burden.

"A mort, my lady."

"Pick them all, Mellon, and all the flowers from the green-house too, every one of them, and fetch up whatever there is to the cottage."

The old man was deaf, as well as discreet, and if this sudden command to vandalism surprised him, he did not say so. Holding his hand behind his ear, he nodded.

"I shall send them," the Duchess thought, "up to Jimmy Bulstrode. I think he will understand, and I will ask him at the same time to take his friend off somewhere in a motor that I may go unobserved to the castle."

She said a few more words to the old man, asked him a few questions, then with the basket on her arm she was about to turn away when she remembered the shot.

"Did you hear a shot, Mellon? They should not be shooting about here, you know." But the old man had heard nothing, and, intending to find the lodgekeeper who was clipping the trees on the lower terrace and ask him to go through the woods for her, the Duchess walked toward the gate and in the direction of the brick path.

As she came up to it she gave a low cry, lifted her hands to her heart; the basket of flowers fell to the earth and scattered their purple blooms at her feet. Then the hands that had gone to her heart extended, she held out her arms and went forwards, crying her husband's name.

The Duke of Westboro' had managed to pick himself up. He was a strong man, in the fulness of health and vigor; there was nothing of the mollycoddle about the last Duke of the line. The sound of voices had reached his dull ear, his swoon was over, and he had manfully, with a few sturdy curses, pulled himself up and now stood, albeit very pale, clinging to the gatepost, leaning on it, finding his legs shaking and his balance not all he could wish. Before him was a little brick house, with bright curtains in the windows, and between it and himself, lovely as a ghost, and no less white, was his wife, and her arms were extended towards him.

"Cecil!" she cried. "Oh, my God! Cecil, what has happened to you?"

Before Westboro' knew it, the arms to which he had gone in visions were about him and the soft shoulder gave him a prop more fragile perhaps than the stone against which he leaned, but it was a living support, and it felt warm and wonderful.

"Don't," he said vaguely, "get near me. I'm nasty and bloody. It's all right; I'm only a bit scratched, really. A lot of beastly shot has gone off into my shoulder. Just call some one to help me, will you?"

"Cecil," she said, "lean on me, put your arm around my shoulder; you can perfectly well get along with only me. Come, come!"

The Duke saw that he could perfectly get along with another faint—he was near to it, but something besides his wound and his light head kept him manfully to his feet. With his left hand he very firmly pushed the Duchess a little away from him.

"Come?" he repeated. "Come where?"

"Home," said the Duchess with a catch in her voice—she was bearing up. "Oh, lean on me! You'll fall, you'll fall! Mellon!" she cried. "O Mellon!"

But the Duke put up his hand. "I'm all right," he said. "Don't call. What house is that? What home do you mean?"

"Mine," said the Duchess, "my house—that is, I mean to say, Mr. Bulstrode's."

The Duchess saw a slight wave of red rush up her husband's pale cheek.

"Damn Bulstrode!" he breathed. "What the devil does he do here? I saw you together—I saw you not half an hour since—that is the whole mischief of it—it was too much for me—it took away my senses and I fell on my gun, and the beastly thing went off. If I ever get back to where Bulstrode is——"

"Cecil!" cried the Duchess. She again wound her arms around him, and it was as well that she was a strong, fine creature and that the columns of the gate were back of him, for Westboro' was swaying like a child that has just learned to walk.

"He is fainting!" she cried. "Mellon, Mellon!"

The old man had not heard his mistress but he had seen her, and after staring open-mouthed at the couple at the gate, he came scurrying like a rabbit, dropping his shears on the wall. They hit the big dial with a ring.

The Duke heard the steps and tried to start forwards; also tried weakly to extricate himself from his wife's embrace. "I beg your pardon," he said, with a coolness that had something of the humorous in its formality—"I beg your pardon, but I am not going to Bulstrode's house, you know."

"Cecil," pleaded the woman tenderly, "how ridiculous you are! Bulstrode's house! Why, it's mine! Oh, don't break my heart. He's only bought it, you know, that's all."

"Break her heart!" It was a new voice that spoke to the Duke of Westboro'. He had never heard it in all his life. It was warm and struggling for clearness, it was full of tears and quivering, it was the voice of love, and unmistakable, certainly, to a lover.

"What was Bulstrode doing here?" he persisted.

"Going to Mrs. Falconer," breathed the Duchess.

The Duke moved a step forwards: "What are you doing here?"

"Going to you, Cecil—I have been going to you all day. I think I have been going to you ever since you left me that night on the Riviera; at any rate, I was on my way to the castle as you came."

The Duke halted again on his crawling way. Mellon, who had really reached his side, was doing his best to be of some use and kept himself well under the wounded arm, on which the blood had clotted and dried, but ceased to flow.

"Lean hard on me, your Grace," pleaded the gardener, and with his word, he looked over at his mistress to see if she realized who their noble visitor was.

With fine disregard for his help or existence, the Duke said crossly: "Send this damned gardener away."

"Oh, Cecil, no, no; you can't stand without him."

They had reached the garden wall, just at the place where the big dial, round and shining, had come a little out of the shadow and the last of the afternoon sun touched its edges. Westboro' lurched towards the wall. "Send this man away," he commanded.

"He is deaf, Cecil, as the stones." But at her husband's face she motioned to Mellon: "Stand away a bit. His Grace wants to rest on the wall. I'll call you."

With his wife's arms about him, Westboro' leaned on the garden wall, his ashen face lifted to her.

"I've only one arm," he said. He put it around her and he drew her down as close to him as he could. He felt her face warm against his, wet against his with tears. As the Duke, who, Bulstrode said, was no lover, kissed his wife, the dial seemed to sing its motto aloud.

"You were coming to me?" he breathed. "Do you forgive me? ... Then," said Westboro', satisfied by what he heard, "I'm cured. I love you—I love you."

The woman could not find her voice, but as she held him she was the warmest, sweetest prop that ever a wounded man leaned upon. After a few seconds she helped him to rise, helped him on, and he found his balance and his equilibrium to be very wonderful under the circumstances, and managed to reach the door-sill. Mellon and the maids were there, and as the Duchess passed in, leading her husband, she bade them send for a doctor as fast as they could and to send at once for Bulstrode at the castle.

Westboro's wound had become a sort of intoxication to him, and he assured her, "I'll be all right in an hour. I need no one but you; send them all away, all away."

He had never commanded her before, he had let her rule him, he had been indifferent to her disobedience. But now she did what he bade her, and led him to the drawing-room, suddenly repossessed of all its old charm; led him to the lounge, where he sank down. Here, by his side, she gave him stimulants and bathed his head and hands, waiting for the doctor to come; and Westboro', like his ancestors who had fought in the King's wars, bore up like a man with no resemblance whatsoever to the amorous cavalier whose curls had met the dust of the road for love of Queen Elizabeth.

The Duchess found him that best of all things—very much of a man, and knew that he was hers. And he, more wild with love for her than suffering physical pain, found her a woman and knew that she loved him and that she was his.

The house, so deserted and desolate an hour ago, grew fresh, warm, and rosy as over the west meadows the sunset, gilding the wall and The Dials, flushed the windows red, and the deserted bird's-nest, lately "filled with snow" appeared to have, as the light rained upon it, filled itself with roses. So, an hour later, it seemed to Bulstrode, when he came and found it housing the lovers.