'Her whole being was seething with passionate and revengeful thought.' - Marriage à la mode - 13

"Her whole being was seething with passionate and revengeful thought."

So Roger had lied to her. Instead of a casual ride, involving a meeting with a few old acquaintances, as he had represented to her, he had been engaged that day in an assignation with Mrs. Fairmile, arranged beforehand, and carefully concealed from his wife. Miss Farmer had seen them coming out of a wood together hand in hand! In the public road, this!—not even so much respect for appearances as might have dictated the most elementary reticence and decency. The case was so clear that it sickened her; she shivered with cold and nausea as she lay there by the now glowing fire which yet gave her no physical comfort. Probably in the past their relation had gone much farther than Roger had ever confessed to his wife. Mrs. Fairmile was a woman who would stick at nothing. And if Daphne were not already betrayed, she could no longer protect herself. The issue was certain. Such women as Chloe Fairmile are not to be baulked of what they desire. Good women cannot fight them on equal terms. And as to any attempt to keep the affections of a husband who could behave in such a way to the wife who had given him her youth, herself, and all the resources and facilities of life, Daphne's whole being stiffened into mingled anguish and scorn as she renounced the contest. Knowing himself the traitor that he was, he could yet hold her, kiss her, murmur tender things to her, allow her to cry upon his breast, to stammer repentance and humbleness. Cowardly! False! Treacherous! She flung out her hands, rigid, before her in the darkness, as though for ever putting him away.

Anguish? Yes!—but not of such torturing quality as she could have felt a year, six months even, before this date. She was astonished that she could bear her life, that he could sit there in the night stillness, motionless, holding her breath even, while Roger slept there in the shadowed bed. Had this thing happened to her before their arrival at Heston, she must have fallen upon Roger in mad grief and passion, ready to kill him or herself; must at least have poured out torrents of useless words and tears. She could not have sat dumb like this; in misery, but quite able to think things out, to envisage all the dark possibilities of the future. And not only the future. By a perfectly logical diversion her thoughts presently went racing to the past. There was, so to speak, a suspension of the immediate crisis, while she listened to her own mind—while she watched her own years go by.

It was but rarely that Daphne let her mind run on her own origins. But on this winter night, as she sat motionless by the fire, she became conscious of a sudden detachment from her most recent self and life—a sudden violent turning against both—which naturally threw her back on the past, on some reflection upon what she had made of herself, by way of guide to what she might still make of herself, if she struck boldly, now, while there was yet time, for her own freedom and development.

As to her parents, she never confessed, even to herself, that she owed them anything, except, of course, the mere crude wealth that her father had left her. Otherwise she was vaguely ashamed of them both. And yet!—in her most vital qualities, her love of sensational effect, her scorn of half-measures, her quick, relentless imagination, her increasing ostentation and extravagance, she was the true child of the boastful mercurial Irishman who had married her Spanish mother as part of a trade bargain, on a chance visit to Buenos Ayres. For twenty years Daniel Floyd had leased and exploited, had ravaged and destroyed, great tracts of primæval forest in the northern regions of his adopted state, leaving behind him a ruined earth and an impoverished community, but building up the while a colossal fortune. He had learnt the arts of municipal "bossing" in one of the minor towns of Illinois, and had then migrated to Chicago, where for years he was the life and soul of all the bolder and more adventurous corruption of the city. A jovial, handsome fellow!—with an actor's face, a bright eye, and a slippery hand. Daphne had a vivid, and, on the whole, affectionate, remembrance of her father, of whom, however, she seldom spoke. The thought of her mother, on the other hand, was always unwelcome. It brought back recollections of storm and tempest; of wild laughter, and still wilder tears; of gorgeous dresses, small feet, and jewelled fingers.

No; her parents had but small place in that dramatic autobiography that Daphne was now constructing for herself. She was not their daughter in any but the physical sense; she was the daughter of her own works and efforts.

She leant forward to the fire, her face propped in her hands, going back in thought to her father's death, when she was fifteen; to her three years of cloying convent life, and her escape from it, as well as from the intriguing relations who would have kept her there; to the clever lawyer who had helped to put her in possession of her fortune, and the huge sums she had paid him for his services; to her search for education, her hungry determination to rise in the world, the friends she had made at college, in New York, Philadelphia, Washington. She had been influenced by one milieu after another; she had worked hard, now at music, now at philosophy; had dabbled in girls' clubs, and gone to Socialist meetings, and had been all through driven on by the gadfly of an ever-increasing ambition.

Ambition for what! She looked back on this early life with a bitter contempt. What had it all come to? Marriage with Roger Barnes!—a hasty passion of which she was already ashamed, for a man who was already false to her.

What had made her marry him? She did not mince matters with herself in her reply. She had married him, influenced by a sudden, gust of physical inclination—by that glamour, too, under which she had seen him in Washington, a glamour of youth and novelty. If she had seen him first in his natural environment she would have been on her guard; she would have realized what it meant to marry a man who could help her own ideals and ambitions so little. And what, really, had their married life brought her? Had she ever been sure of Roger?—had she ever been able to feel proud of him, in the company of really distinguished men?—had she not been conscious, again and again, when in London, or Paris, or Berlin, that he was her inferior, that he spoiled her social and intellectual chances? And his tone toward women had always been a low one; no great harm in it, perhaps; but it had often wounded and disgusted her.

And then—for climax!—his concealment of the early love affair with Chloe Fairmile; his weakness and folly in letting her regain her hold upon him; his behaviour at the Brendon ball, the gossip which, as Agnes Farmer declared, was all over the neighbourhood, ending in the last baseness—the assignation, the lies, the hypocrisy of the afternoon!

Enough!—more than enough! What did she care what the English world thought of her? She would free and right herself in her own way, and they might hold up what hands they pleased. A passion of wounded vanity, of disappointed self-love swept through her. She had looked forward to the English country life; she had meant to play a great part in it. But three months had been enough to show her the kind of thing—the hopeless narrowness and Philistinism of these English back-waters. What did these small squires and country clergy know of the real world, the world that mattered to her, where people had free minds and progressive ideas? Her resentment of the milieu in which Roger expected her to live subtly swelled and strengthened her wrath against himself; it made the soil from which sprang a sudden growth of angry will—violent and destructive. There was in her little or none of that affinity with a traditional, a parent England, which is present in so many Americans, which emerges in them like buried land from the waters. On the contrary, the pressure of race and blood in her was not towards, but against; not friendly, but hostile. The nearer she came to the English life, the more certain forces in her, deeply infused, rose up and made their protest. The Celtic and Latin strains that were mingled in her, their natural sympathies and repulsions, which had been indistinct in the girl, overlaid by the deposits of the current American world, were becoming dominant in the woman.

Well, thank goodness, modern life is not as the old! There are ways out.

Midnight had just struck. The night was gusty, the north-west wind made fierce attacks on the square, comfortable house. Daphne rose slowly; she moved noiselessly across the floor; she stood with her arms behind her looking down at the sleeping Roger. Then a thought struck her; she reached out a hand to the new number of an American Quarterly which lay, with the paper knife in it, on a table beside the bed. She had ordered it in a mood of jealous annoyance because of a few pages of art criticism in it by Mrs. Fairmile, which impertinently professed to know more about the Vitali Signorelli than its present owner did; but she remembered also an article on "The Future for Women," which had seemed to her a fine, progressive thing. She turned the pages noiselessly—her eyes now on the unconscious Roger—now on the book.

"All forms of contract—in business, education, religion, or law—suffer from the weakness and blindness of the persons making them—the marriage contract as much as any other. The dictates of humanity and common-sense alike show that the latter and most important contract should no more be perpetual than any of the others."

Again:—

"Any covenant between human beings that fails to produce or promote human happiness, cannot in the nature of things be of any force or authority; it is not only a right but a duty to abolish it."

And a little further:—

"Womanhood is the great fact of woman's life. Wifehood and motherhood are but incidental relations."

Daphne put down the book. In the dim light, the tension of her slender figure, her frowning brow, her locked arms and hands, made of her a threatening Fate hovering darkly above the man in his deep, defenceless sleep.

She was miserable, consumed with jealous anger. But the temptation of a new licence—a lawless law—was in her veins. Have women been trampled on, insulted, enslaved?—in America, at least, they may now stand on their feet. No need to cringe any more to the insolence and cruelty of men. A woman's life may be soiled and broken; but in the great human workshop of America it can be repaired. She remembered that in the majority of American divorces it is the woman who applies for relief. And why not? The average woman, when she marries, knows much less of life and the world than the average man. She is more likely—poor soul!—to make mistakes.

She drew closer to the bed. All round her glimmered the furniture and appointments of a costly room—the silver and tortoise-shell on the dressing-table, the long mirrors lining the farther wall, the silk hangings of the bed. Luxury, as light and soft as skill and money could make it—the room breathed it; and in the midst stood the young creature who had designed it, the will within her hardening rapidly to an irrevocable purpose.

Yes, she had made a mistake! But she would retrieve it. She would free herself. She would no longer put up with Roger, with his neglect and deceit—his disagreeable and ungrateful mother—his immoral friends—and this dull, soul-deadening English life.

Roger moved and murmured. She retreated a little, still looking at him fixedly. Was it the child's name? Perhaps. He dreamed interminably, and very often of Beatty. But it did not move her. Beatty, of course, was her child. Every child belongs to the mother in a far profounder sense than to the father. And he, too, would be free; he would naturally marry again.

Case after case of divorce ran through her mind as she stood there; the persons and circumstances all well known to her. Other stories also, not personally within her ken; the famous scandals of the time, much discussed throughout American society. Her wits cleared and steeled. She began to see the course that she must follow.

It would all depend upon the lawyers; and a good deal—she faced it—upon money. All sorts of technical phrases, vaguely remembered, ran through her mind. She would have to recover her American citizenship—she and the child. A domicile of six months in South Dakota, or in Wyoming—a year in Philadelphia—she began to recall information derived of old from Madeleine Verrier, who had, of course, been forced to consider all these things, and to weigh alternatives. Advice, of course, must be asked of her at once—and sympathy.

Suddenly, on her brooding, there broke a wave of excitement. Life, instead of being closed, as in a sense it is, for every married woman, was in a moment open and vague again; the doors flung wide to flaming heavens. An intoxication of recovered youth and freedom possessed her. The sleeping Roger represented things intolerable and outworn. Why should a woman of her gifts, of her opportunities, be chained for life to this commonplace man, now that her passion was over?—now that she knew him for what he was, weak, feather-brained, and vicious? She looked at him with a kind of exaltation, spurning him from her path.

But the immediate future!—the practical steps! What kind of evidence would she want?—what kind of witnesses? Something more, no doubt, of both than she had already. She must wait—temporize—do nothing rashly. If it was for Roger's good as well as her own that they should be free of each other—and she was fast persuading herself of this—she must, for both their sakes, manage the hateful operation without bungling.

What was the alternative? She seemed to ask it of Roger, as she stood looking down upon him. Patience?—with a man who could never sympathize with her intellectually or artistically?—the relations of married life with a husband who made assignations with an old love, under the eyes of the whole neighbourhood?—the narrowing, cramping influences of English provincial society? No! she was born for other and greater things, and she would grasp them. "My first duty is to myself—to my own development. We have absolutely no right to sacrifice ourselves—as women have been taught to do for thousands of years."

Bewildered by the rhetoric of her own thoughts, Daphne returned to her seat by the fire, and sat there wildly dreaming, till once more recalled to practical possibilities by the passage of the hours on the clock above her.

Miss Farmer? Everything, it seemed, depended on her. But Daphne had no doubts of her. Poor girl!—with her poverty-stricken home, her drunken father lately dismissed from his post, and her evident inclination towards this clever young fellow now employed in the house—Daphne rejoiced to think of what money could do, in this case at least; of the reward that should be waiting for the girl's devotion when the moment came; of the gifts already made, and the gratitude already evoked. No; she could be trusted; she had every reason to be true.

Some fitful sleep came to her at last in the morning hours. But when Roger awoke, she was half-way through her dressing; and when he first saw her, he noticed nothing except that she was paler than usual, and confessed to a broken night.

But as the day wore on it became plain to everybody at Heston—to Roger first and foremost—that something was much amiss. Daphne would not leave her sitting-room and her sofa; she complained of headache and over-fatigue; would have nothing to say to the men at work on the new decoration of the east wing of the house, who were clamouring for directions; and would admit nobody but Miss Farmer and her maid. Roger forced his way in once, only to be vanquished by the traditional weapons of weakness, pallor, and silence. Her face contracted and quivered as his step approached her; it was as though he trampled upon her; and he left her, awkwardly, on tiptoe, feeling himself as intrusively brutal as she clearly meant him to feel.

What on earth was the matter? Some new grievance against him, he supposed. After the softening, the quasi-reconciliation of the day before, his chagrin and disappointment were great. Impossible she should know anything of his ride with Chloe! There was not a soul in that wood; and the place was twenty miles from Heston. Again he felt the impulse to blurt it all out to her; but was simply repelled and intimidated by this porcupine mood in which she had wrapped herself. Better wait at least till she was a little more normal again. He went off disconsolately to a day's shooting.

Meanwhile, his own particular worry was sharp enough. Chloe had taken advantage of their casual tête-à-tête, as she had done before on several occasions, to claim something of the old relation, instead of accepting the new, like a decent woman; and in the face of the temptation offered him he had shown a weakness of which not only his conscience but his pride was ashamed. He realized perfectly that she had been trying during the whole autumn to recover her former hold on him, and he also saw clearly and bitterly that he was not strong enough to resist her, should he continue to be thrown with her; and not clever enough to baffle her, if her will were really set on recapturing him. He was afraid of her, and afraid of himself.

What, then, must he do? As he tramped about the wet fields and plantations with a keeper and a few beaters after some scattered pheasants, he was really, poor fellow! arguing out the riddle of his life. What would Herbert French advise him to do?—supposing he could put the question plainly to him, which of course was not possible. He meant honestly and sincerely to keep straight; to do his duty by Daphne and the child. But he was no plaster saint, and he could not afford to give Chloe Fairmile too many opportunities. To break at once, to carry off Daphne and leave Heston, at least for a time—that was the obviously prudent and reasonable course. But in her present mood it was of no use for him to propose it, tired as she seemed to be of Heston, and disappointed in the neighbours: any plan brought forward by him was doomed beforehand. Well then, let him go himself; he had been so unhappy during the preceding weeks it would be a jolly relief to turn his back on Heston for a time.

But as soon as he had taken his departure, Chloe perhaps would take hers; and if so, Daphne's jealousy would be worse than ever. Whatever deserts he might place between himself and Mrs. Fairmile, Daphne would imagine them together.

Meanwhile, there was that Lilliput bond, that small, chafing entanglement, which Chloe had flung round him in her persistence about the letters. There was, no doubt, a horrid scandal brewing about Mrs. Weightman, Chloe's old friend—a friend of his own, too, in former days. Through Chloe's unpardonable indiscretions he knew a great deal more about this lady's affairs than he had ever wished to know. And he well remembered the letter in question: a letter on which the political life or death of one of England's most famous men might easily turn, supposing it got out. But the letter was safe enough; not the least likely to come into dangerous hands, in spite of Chloe's absurd hypotheses. It was somewhere, no doubt, among the boxes in the locked room; and who could possibly get hold of it? At the same time he realized that as long as he had not found and returned it she would still have a certain claim upon him, a certain right to harass him with inquiries and confidential interviews, which, as a man of honour, he could not altogether deny.

A pheasant got up across a ploughed field where in the mild season the young corn was already green. Roger shot, and missed; the bird floated gaily down the wind, and the head keeper, in disgust, muttered bad language to the underling beside him.

But after that Barnes was twice as cheerful as before. He whistled as he walked; his shooting recovered; and by the time the dark fell, keepers and beaters were once more his friends.

The fact was that just as he missed the pheasant he had taken his resolution, and seen his way. He would have another determined hunt for that letter; he would also find and destroy his own letters to Chloe—those she had returned to him—which must certainly never fall into Daphne's hands; and then he would go away to London or the North, to some place whence he could write both to Chloe Fairmile and to his wife. Women like Daphne were too quick; they could get out a dozen words to your one; but give a man time, and he could express himself. And, therewith, a great tenderness and compunction in this man's heart, and a steady determination to put things right. For was not Daphne Beatty's mother? and was he not in truth very fond of her, if only she would let him be?

Now then for the hunt. As he had never destroyed the letters, they must exist; but, in the name of mischief, where? He seemed to remember thrusting his own letters to Chloe into a desk of his schoolboy days which used to stand in his London sitting-room. Very likely some of hers might be there too. But the thought of his own had by now become a much greater anxiety to him than the wish to placate Chloe. For he was most uncomfortably aware that his correspondence with Chloe during their short engagement had been of a very different degree of fervour from that shown in the letters to Daphne under similar circumstances. As for the indelicacy and folly of leaving such documents to chance, he cursed it sorely.

How to look? He pondered it. He did not even know which attic it was that had been reserved at the time of the letting of Heston, and now held some of the old London furniture and papers. Well, he must manage it, "burgle" his own house, if necessary. What an absurd situation! Should he consult his mother? No; better not.

That evening General Hobson was expected for a couple of nights. On going up to dress for dinner, Roger discovered that he had been banished to a room on the farther side of the house, where his servant was now putting out his clothes. He turned very white, and went straight to his wife.

Daphne was on the sofa as before, and received him in silence.

"What's the meaning of this, Daphne?" The tone was quiet, but the breathing quick.

She looked at him—bracing herself.

"I must be alone! I had no sleep last night."

"You had neuralgia?"

"I don't know—I had no sleep. I must be alone."

His eyes and hers met.

"For to-night, then," he said briefly. "I don't know what's the matter with you, Daphne and I suppose it's no use to ask you. I thought, yesterday—but—however, there's no time to talk now. Are you coming down to dinner?"

"Not to dinner. I will come down for an hour afterwards."

He went away, and before he had reached his own room, and while the heat of his sudden passion still possessed him, it occurred to him that Daphne's behaviour might after all prove a godsend. That night he would make his search, with no risk of disturbing his wife.

The dinner in the newly decorated dining-room went heavily. Lady Barnes had grown of late more and more anxious and depressed. She had long ceased to assert herself in Daphne's presence, and one saw her as the British matron in adversity, buffeted by forces she did not understand; or as some minor despot snuffed out by a stronger.

The General, who had only arrived just in time to dress, inquired in astonishment for Daphne, and was told by Roger that his wife was not well, but would come down for a little while after dinner. In presence of the new splendours of Heston, the General had—in Roger's company—very little to say. He made the vague remark that the dining-room was "very fine," but he should not have known it again. Where was the portrait of Edward, and the full-length of Edward's father by Sir Francis Grant? Lady Barnes drew herself up, and said nothing. Roger hastily replied that he believed they were now in the passage leading to the billiard-room.

"What! that dark corner!" cried the General, looking with both distaste and hostility at the famous Signorelli—a full-length nude St. Sebastian, bound and pierced—which had replaced them on the dining-room wall. Who on earth ever saw such a picture in a dining-room? Roger must be a fool to allow it!

Afterwards the General and Lady Barnes wandered through the transformed house, in general agreement as to the ugliness and extravagance of almost everything that had been done, an agreement that was as balm to the harassed spirits of the lady.

"What have they spent?" asked the General, under his breath, as they returned to the drawing-room—"thousands and thousands, I should think! And there was no need for them to spend a penny. It is a sinful waste, and no one should waste money in these days—there are too many unemployed!" He drew up his spare person, with a terrier-like shake of the head and shoulders, as of one repudiating Mammon and all its works.

"Daphne has simply no idea of the value of money!" Lady Barnes complained, also under her breath. They were passing along one of the side corridors of the house, and there was no one in sight. But Roger's mother was evidently uneasy, as though Daphne might at any moment spring from the floor, or emerge from the walls. The General was really sorry for her.

"It's like all the rest of them—Americans, I mean," he declared; "they haven't our sense of responsibility. I saw plenty of that in the States."

Lady Barnes acquiesced. She was always soothed by the General's unfaltering views of British superiority.

They found Daphne in the drawing-room—a ghostly Daphne, in white, and covered with diamonds. She made a little perfunctory conversation with them, avoided all mention of the house, and presently, complaining again of headache, went back to her room after barely an hour downstairs.

The General whistled to himself, as he also retired to bed, after another and more private conversation with Lady Barnes, and half an hour's billiards with a very absent-minded host. By Jove, Laura wanted a change! He rejoiced that he was to escort her on the morrow to the London house of some cheerful and hospitable relations. Dollars, it seemed, were not everything, and he wished to heaven that Roger had been content to marry some plain English girl, with, say, a couple of thousand a year. Even the frugal General did not see how it could have been done on less. Roger no doubt had been a lazy, self-indulgent beggar. Yet he seemed a good deal steadier, and more sensible than he used to be; in spite of his wife, and the pouring out of dollars. And there was no doubt that he had grown perceptibly older. The General felt a vague pang of regret, so rare and so compelling had been the quality of Roger's early youth, measured at least by physical standards.

The house sank into sleep and silence. Roger, before saying good-night to his mother, had let fall a casual question as to the whereabouts of the room which still contained the débris of the London house. He must, he said, look up two or three things, some share certificates of his father's, for instance, that he had been in want of for some time. Lady Barnes directed him. At the end of the nursery wing, to the right. But in the morning one of the housemaids would show him. Had she the key? She produced it, thought no more of it, and went to bed.

He waited in his room till after midnight, then took off his shoes, his pride smarting, and emerged. There was one electric light burning in the hall below. This gave enough glimmer on the broad open landing for him to grope his way by, and he went noiselessly toward the staircase leading up to Beatty's rooms. Once, just as he reached it, he thought he caught the faint noise of low talking somewhere in the house, an indeterminate sound not to be located. But when he paused to listen, it had ceased and he supposed it to be only a windy murmur of the night.

He gained the nursery wing. So far, of course, the way was perfectly familiar. He rarely passed an evening without going to kiss Beatty in her cot. Outside the door of the night-nursery he waited a moment to listen. Was she snoozling among her blankets?—the darling! She still sucked her thumb, sometimes, poor baby, to send her to sleep, and it was another reason for discontent with Miss Farmer that she would make a misdemeanour of it. Really, that woman got on his nerves!

Beyond the nursery he had no knowledge whatever of his own house. The attics at Heston were large and rambling. He believed the servants were all in the other wing, but was not sure; he could only hope that he might not stumble on some handmaiden's room by mistake!

A door to the right, at the end of the passage. He tried the key. Thank goodness! It turned without too much noise, and he found himself on the threshold of a big lumber-room, his candle throwing lines of dusty light across it. He closed the door, set down the light, and looked round him in despair. The room was crowded with furniture, trunks, and boxes, in considerable confusion. It looked as though the men employed to move them had piled them there as they pleased; and Roger shrewdly suspected that his mother, from whom, in spite of her square and business-like appearance, his own indolence was inherited, had shrunk till now from the task of disturbing them.

He began to rummage a little. Papers belonging to his father—an endless series of them; some in tin boxes marked with the names of various companies, mining and other; some in leather cases, reminiscent of politics, and labelled "Parliamentary" or "Local Government Board." Trunks containing Court suits, yeomanry uniforms, and the like; a medley of old account books, photographs, worthless volumes, and broken ornaments: all the refuse that our too complex life piles about us was represented in the chaos of the room. Roger pulled and pushed as cautiously as he could, but making, inevitably, some noise in the process. At last! He caught sight of some belongings of his own and was soon joyfully detaching the old Eton desk, of which he was in search, from a pile of miscellaneous rubbish. In doing so, to his dismay, he upset a couple of old cardboard boxes filled with letters, and they fell with some clatter. He looked round instinctively at the door; but it was shut, and the house was well built, the walls and ceilings reasonably sound-proof. The desk was only latched—beastly carelessness, of course!—and inside it were three thick piles of letters, and a few loose ones below. His own letters to Chloe; and—by George!—the lost one!—among the others. He opened it eagerly, ran it through. Yes, the very thing! What luck! He laid it carefully aside a moment on a trunk near by, and sat with the other letters on his lap.

His fingers played with them. He almost determined to take them down unopened, and burn them, as they were, in his own room; but in the end he could not resist the temptation to look at them once more. He pulled off an india-rubber band from the latest packet, and was soon deep in them, at first half ashamed, half contemptuous. Calf love, of course! And he had been a precious fool to write such things. Then, presently, the headlong passion of them began to affect him, to set his pulses swinging. He fell to wondering at his own bygone facility, his own powers of expression. How did he ever write such a style! He, who could hardly get through a note now without blots and labour. Self-pity grew upon him, and self-admiration. By heaven! How could a woman treat a man—a man who could write to her like this—as Chloe had treated him!

The old smart revived; or rather, the old indelible impressions of it left on nerve and brain.

The letters lay on his knee. He sat brooding: his hands upon the packets, his head bowed. One might have thought him a man overcome and dissolved by the enervating memories of passion; but in truth, he was gradually and steadily reacting against them; resuming, and this time finally, as far as Chloe Fairmile was concerned, a man's mastery of himself. He thought of her unkindness and cruelty—of the misery he had suffered—and now of the reckless caprice with which, during the preceding weeks, she had tried to entangle him afresh, with no respect for his married life, for his own or Daphne's peace of mind.

He judged her, and therewith, himself. Looking back upon the four years since Chloe Fairmile had thrown him over, it seemed to him that, in some ways, he had made a good job of his life, and, in others, a bad one. As to the money, that was neither here nor there. It had been amusing to have so much of it; though of late Daphne's constant reminders that the fortune was hers and not his, had been like grit in the mouth. But he did not find that boundless wealth had made as much difference to him as he had expected. On the other hand, he had been much happier with Daphne than he had thought he should be, up to the time of their coming to Heston. She wasn't easy to live with, and she had been often, before now, ridiculously jealous; but you could not, apparently, live with a woman without getting very fond of her—he couldn't—especially if she had given you a child; and if Daphne had turned against him now, for a bit—well, he could not swear to himself that he had been free from blame; and it perhaps served him right for having gone out deliberately to the States to marry money—with a wife thrown in—in that shabby sort of way.

But, now, to straighten out this coil; to shake himself finally free of Chloe, and make Daphne happy again! He vowed to himself that he could and would make her happy—just as she had been in their early days together. The memory of her lying white and exhausted after child-birth, with the little dark head beside her, came across him, and melted him; he thought of her with longing and tenderness.

With a deep breath he raised himself on his seat; in the old Greek phrase, "the gods breathed courage into his soul"; and as he stretched out an indifferent hand toward Chloe's letters on the trunk, Roger Barnes had perhaps reached the highest point of his moral history; he had become conscious of himself as a moral being choosing good or evil; and he had chosen good. It was not so much that his conscience accused him greatly with regard to Chloe. For that his normal standards were not fine enough. It was rather a kind of "serious call," something akin to conversion, or that might have been conversion, which befell him in this dusty room, amid the night-silence.

As he took up Chloe's letters he did not notice that the door had quietly opened behind him, and that a figure stood on the threshold.

A voice struck into the stillness.

"Roger!"

He turned with a movement that scattered all his own letters on the floor. Daphne stood before him—but with the eyes of a mad woman. Her hand shook on the handle of the door.

"What are you doing here?" She flung out the question like a blow.

"Hallo, Daphne!—is that you?" He tried to laugh. "I'm only looking up some old papers; no joke, in all this rubbish." He pointed to it.

"What old papers?"

"Well, you needn't catechize me!" he said, nettled by her tone, "or not in that way, at any rate. I couldn't sleep, and I came up here to look for something I wanted. Why did you shut your door on me?"

He looked at her intently, his lips twitching a little. Daphne came nearer.

"It must be something you want very badly—something you don't want other people to see—something you're ashamed of!—or you wouldn't be searching for it at this time of night." She raised her eyes, still with the same strange yet flaming quiet, from the littered floor to his face. Then suddenly glancing again at the scattered papers—"That's your hand-writing!—they're your letters! letters to Mrs. Fairmile!"

"Well, and what do you make of that?" cried Roger, half wroth, half inclined to laugh. "If you want to know, they are the letters I wrote to Chloe Fairmile; and I, like a careless beast, never destroyed them, and they were stuffed away here. I have long meant to get at them and burn them, and as you turned me out to-night——"

"What is that letter in your hand?" exclaimed Daphne, interrupting him.

"Oh, that has nothing to do with you—or me——" he said, hastily making a movement to put it in his coat pocket. But in a second, Daphne, with a cry, had thrown herself upon him, to his intense amazement, wrestling with him, in a wild excitement. And as she did so, a thin woman, with frightened eyes, in a nurse's dress, came quickly into the room, as though Daphne's cry had signalled to her. She was behind Roger, and he was not aware of her approach.

"Daphne, don't be such a little fool!" he said indignantly, holding her off with one hand, determined not to give her the letter.

Then, all in a moment—without, as it seemed to him, any but the mildest defensive action on his part—Daphne stumbled and fell.

"Daphne!—I say!—--"

He was stooping over her in great distress to lift her up, when he felt himself vehemently put aside by a woman's hand.

"You ought to be ashamed of yourself, sir! Let me go to her."

He turned in bewilderment. "Miss Farmer! What on earth are you doing here?"

But in his astonishment he had given way to her, and he fell back pale and frowning, while, without replying, she lifted Daphne—who had a cut on her forehead and was half fainting—from the ground.

"Don't come near her, sir!" said the nurse, again warding him off. "You have done quite enough. Let me attend to her."

"You imagine that was my doing?" said Roger grimly. "Let me assure you it was nothing of the kind. And pray, were you listening at the door?"

Miss Farmer vouchsafed no reply. She was half leading, half supporting Daphne, who leant against her. As they neared the door, Roger, who had been standing dumb again, started forward.

"Let me take her," he said sternly. "Daphne!—send this woman away."

But Daphne only shuddered, and putting out a shaking hand, she waved him from her.

"You see in what a state she is!" cried Miss Farmer, with a withering look. "If you must speak to her, put it off, sir, at least till to-morrow."

Roger drew back. A strange sense of inexplicable disaster rushed upon him. He sombrely watched them pass through the door and disappear.

Daphne reached her own room. As the door closed upon them she turned to her companion, holding out the handkerchief stained with blood she had been pressing to her temple.

"You saw it all?" she said imperiously—"the whole thing?"

"All," said Miss Farmer. "It's a mercy you're not more hurt."

Daphne gave a hysterical laugh.

"It'll just do—I think it'll do! But you'll have to make a good deal out of it."

And sinking down by the fire, she burst into a passion of wild tears.

The nurse brought her sal volatile, and washed the small cut above her eyebrow.

"It was lucky we heard him," she said triumphantly. "I guessed at once he must be looking for something—I knew that room was full of papers."

A knock at the door startled them.

"Never mind." The nurse hurried across the room. "It's locked."

"How is my wife?" said Roger's strong, and as it seemed, threatening voice outside.

"She'll be all right, sir, I hope, if you'll leave her to rest. But I won't answer for the consequences if she's disturbed any more."

There was a pause, as though of hesitation. Then Roger's step receded.

Daphne pushed her hair back from her face, and sat staring into the fire. Everything was decided now. Yet she had rushed upstairs on Miss Farmer's information with no definite purpose. She only knew that—once again—Roger was hiding something from her—doing something secret and disgraceful—and she suddenly resolved to surprise and confront him. With a mind still vaguely running on the legal aspects of what she meant to do, she had bade the nurse follow her. The rest had been half spontaneous, half acting. It had struck her imagination midway how the incident could be turned—and used.

She was triumphant; but from sheer excitement she wept and sobbed through the greater part of the night.

PART III

CHAPTER IX

It was a cheerless February day, dark and slaty overhead, dusty below. In the East End streets paper and straw, children's curls, girls' pinafores and women's skirts were driven back and forward by a bitter wind; there was an ugly light on ugly houses, with none of that kind trickery of mist or smoke which can lend some grace on normal days even to Commercial Street, or to the network of lanes north of the Bethnal Green Road. The pitiless wind swept the streets—swept the children and the grown-ups out of them into the houses, or any available shelter; and in the dark and chilly emptiness of the side roads one might listen in fancy for the stealthy returning steps of spirits crueller than Cold, more tyrannous than Poverty, coming to seize upon their own.

In one of these side streets stood a house larger than its neighbours, in a bit of front garden, with some decrepit rust-bitten-railings between it and the road. It was an old dwelling overtaken by the flood of tenement houses, which spread north, south, east, and west of it. Its walls were no less grimy than its neighbours'; but its windows were outlined in cheerful white paint, firelight sparkled through its unshuttered panes, and a bright green door with a brass knocker completed its pleasant air. There were always children outside the Vicarage railings on winter evenings, held there by the spell of the green door and the firelight.

Inside the firelit room to the left of the front pathway, two men were standing—one of whom had just entered the house.

"My dear Penrose!—how very good of you to come. I know how frightfully busy you are."

The man addressed put down his hat and stick, and hastily smoothed back some tumbling black hair which interfered with spectacled eyes already hampered by short sight. He was a tall, lank, powerful fellow; anyone acquainted with the West-country would have known him for one of the swarthy, gray-eyed Cornish stock.

"I am pretty busy—but your tale, Herbert, was a startler. If I can help you—or Barnes—command me. He is coming this afternoon?"

Herbert French pointed his visitor to a chair.

"Of course. And another man—whom I met casually, in Pall Mall this morning—and had half an hour's talk with—an American naval officer—an old acquaintance of Elsie's—Captain Boyson—will join us also. I met him at Harvard before our wedding, and liked him. He has just come over with his sister for a short holiday, and I ran across him."

"Is there any particular point in his joining us?"

Herbert French expounded. Boyson had been an old acquaintance of Mrs. Roger Barnes before her marriage. He knew a good deal about the Barnes story—"feels, so I gathered, very strongly about it, and on the man's side; and when I told him that Roger had just arrived and was coming to take counsel with you and me this afternoon, he suddenly asked if he might come, too. I was rather taken aback. I told him that we were going, of course, to consider the case entirely from the English point of view. He still said, 'Let me come; I may be of use to you.' So I could only reply it must rest with Roger. They'll show him first into the dining-room."

Penrose nodded. "All right, as long as he doesn't mind his national toes trampled upon. So these are your new quarters, old fellow?"

His eyes travelled round the small book-lined room, with its shelves of poetry, history, and theology; its parish litter; its settle by the fire, on which lay a doll and a child's picture-book; back to the figure of the new vicar, who stood, pipe in hand, before the hearth, clad in a shabby serge suit, his collar alone betraying him. French's white hair showed even whiter than of old above the delicately blanched face; from his natural slenderness and smallness the East End and its life had by now stripped every superfluous ounce; yet, ethereal as his aspect was, not one element of the Meredithian trilogy—"flesh," "blood," or "spirit"—was lacking in it.

"Yes, we've settled in," he said quietly, as Penrose took stock.

"And you like it?"

"We do."

The phrase was brief; nor did it seem to be going to lead to anything more expansive. Penrose smiled.

"Well, now"—he bent forward, with a professional change of tone—"before he arrives, where precisely is this unhappy business? I gather, by the way, that Barnes has got practically all his legal advice from the other side, though the solicitors here have been coöperating?"

French nodded. "I am still rather vague myself. Roger only arrived from New York the day before yesterday. His uncle, General Hobson, died a few weeks ago, and Roger came rushing home, as I understand, to see if he could make any ready money out of his inheritance. Money, in fact, seems to be his chief thought."

"Money? What for? Mrs. Barnes's suit was surely settled long ago?"

"Oh, yes—months ago. She got her decree and the custody of the child in July."

"Remind me of the details. Barnes refused to plead?"

"Certainly. By the advice of the lawyers on both sides, he refused, as an Englishman, to acknowledge the jurisdiction of the Court."

"But he did what he could to stop the thing?"

"Of course. He rushed out after his wife as soon as he could trace where she had gone; and he made the most desperate attempts to alter her purpose. His letters, as far as I could make them out, were heart-rending. I very nearly went over to try and help him, but it was impossible to leave my work. Mrs. Barnes refused to see him. She was already at Sioux Falls, and had begun the residence necessary to bring her within the jurisdiction of the South Dakota Court. Roger, however, forced one or two interviews with her—most painful scenes!—but found her quite immovable. At the same time she was much annoyed and excited by the legal line that he was advised to take; and there was a moment when she tried to bribe him to accept the divorce and submit to the American court."

"To bribe him! With money?"

"No; with the child. Beatty at first was hidden away, and Roger could find no traces of her. But for a few weeks she was sent to stay with a Mrs. Verrier at Philadelphia, and Roger was allowed to see her, while Mrs. Barnes negotiated. It was a frightful dilemma! If he submitted, Mrs. Barnes promised that Beatty should go to him for two months every year; if not, and she obtained her decree, and the custody of the child, as she was quite confident of doing, he should never—as far as she could secure it—see Beatty again. He too, foresaw that she would win her suit. He was sorely tempted; but he stood firm. Then before he could make up his mind what to do as to the child, the suit came on, Mrs. Barnes got her decree, and the custody of the little girl."

"On the ground of 'cruelty,' I understand, and 'indignities'?"

French nodded. His thin cheek flushed.

"And by the help of evidence that any liar could supply!"

"Who were her witnesses?"

"Beatty's nurse—one Agnes Farmer—and a young fellow who had been employed on the decorative work at Heston. There were relations between these two, and Roger tells me they have married lately, on a partnership bought by Mrs. Barnes. While the work was going on at Heston the young man used to put up at an inn in the country town, and talk scandal at the bar."

"Then there was some local scandal—on the subject of Barnes and Mrs. Fairmile?"

"Possibly. Scandal pour rire! Not a soul believed that there was anything more in it than mischief on the woman's side, and a kind of incapacity for dealing with a woman as she deserved, on the man's. Mrs. Fairmile has been an intrigante from her cradle. Barnes was at one time deeply in love with her. His wife became jealous of her after the marriage, and threw them together, by way of getting at the truth, and he shilly-shallied with the situation, instead of putting a prompt end to it, as of course he ought to have done. He was honestly fond of his wife the whole time, and devoted to his home and his child."

"Well, she didn't plead, you say, anything more than 'cruelty' and 'indignities'. The scandal, such as it was, was no doubt part of the 'cruelty'?"

French assented.

"And you suspect that money played a great part in the whole transaction?"

"I don't suspect—the evidence goes a long way beyond that. Mrs. Barnes bought the show! I am told there are a thousand ways of doing it."

Penrose smoked and pondered.

"Well, then—what happened? I imagine that by this time Barnes had not much affection left for his wife?"

"I don't know," said French, hesitating. "I believe the whole thing was a great blow to him. He was never passionately in love with her, but he was very fond of her in his own way—increasingly fond of her—up to that miserable autumn at Heston. However, after the decree, his one thought was for Beatty. His whole soul has been wrapped up in that child from the first moment she was put into his arms. When he first realized that his wife meant to take her from him, Boyson tells me that he seemed to lose his head. He was like a person unnerved and bewildered, not knowing how to act or where to turn. First of all, he brought an action—a writ of habeas corpus, I think—to recover his daughter, as an English subject. But the fact was he had put it off too long——"

"Naturally," said Penrose, with a shrug. "Not much hope for him—after the decree."

"So he discovered, poor old fellow! The action was, of course, obstructed and delayed in every way, by the power of Mrs. Barnes's millions behind the scenes. His lawyers told him plainly from the beginning that he had precious little chance. And presently he found himself the object of a press campaign in some of the yellow papers—all of it paid for and engineered by his wife. He was held up as the brutal fortune-hunting Englishman, who had beguiled an American heiress to marry him, had carried her off to England to live upon her money, had then insulted her by scandalous flirtations with a lady to whom he had formerly been engaged, had shown her constant rudeness and unkindness, and had finally, in the course of a quarrel, knocked her down, inflicting shock and injury from which she had suffered ever since. Mrs. Barnes had happily freed herself from him, but he was now trying to bully her through the child—had, it was said, threatened to carry off the little girl by violence. Mrs. Barnes went in terror of him. America, however, would know how to protect both the mother and the child! You can imagine the kind of thing. Well, very soon Roger began to find himself a marked man in hotels, followed in the streets, persecuted by interviewers; and the stream of lies that found its way even into the respectable newspapers about him, his former life, his habits, etc., is simply incredible! Unfortunately, he gave some handle——"

French paused a moment.

"Ah!" said Penrose, "I have heard rumours."

French rose and began to pace the room.

"It is a matter I can hardly speak of calmly," he said at last. "The night after that first scene between them, the night of her fall—her pretended fall, so Roger told me—he went downstairs in his excitement and misery, and drank, one way and another, nearly a bottle of brandy, a thing he had never done in his life before. But——"

"He has often done it since?"

French raised his shoulders sadly, then added, with some emphasis. "Don't, however, suppose the thing worse than it is. Give him a gleam of hope and happiness, and he would soon shake it off."

"Well, what came of his action?"

"Nothing—so far. I believe he has ceased to take any interest in it. Another line of action altogether was suggested to him. About three months ago he made an attempt to kidnap the child, and was foiled. He got word that she had been taken to Charlestown, and he went there with a couple of private detectives. But Mrs. Barnes was on the alert, and when he discovered the villa in which the child had been living, she had been removed. It was a bitter shock and disappointment, and when he got back to New York in November, in the middle of an epidemic, he was struck down by influenza and pneumonia. It went pretty hard with him. You will be shocked by his appearance. Ecco! was there ever such a story! Do you remember, Penrose, what a magnificent creature he was that year he played for Oxford, and you and I watched his innings from the pavilion?"

There was a note of emotion in the tone which implied much. Penrose assented heartily, remarking, however, that it was a magnificence which seemed to have cost him dear, if, as no doubt was the case, it had won him his wife.

"But now, with regard to money; you say he wants money. But surely, at the time of the marriage, something was settled on him?"

"Certainly, a good deal. But from the moment she left him, and the Heston bills were paid, he has never touched a farthing of it, and never will."

"So that the General's death was opportune? Well, it's a deplorable affair! And I wish I saw any chance of being of use."

French looked up anxiously.

"Because you know," the speaker reluctantly continued, "there's nothing to be done. The thing's finished."

"Finished?" French's manner took fire. "And the law can do nothing! Society can do nothing, to help that man either to right himself, or to recover his child? Ah!"—he paused to listen—"here he is!"

A cab had drawn up outside. Through the lightly curtained windows the two within saw a man descend from it, pay the driver, and walk up the flagged passage leading to the front door.

French hurried to greet the new-comer.

"Come in, Roger! Here's George Penrose—as I promised you. Sit down, old man. They'll bring us some tea presently."

Roger Barnes looked round him for a moment without replying; then murmured something unintelligible, as he shook hands with Penrose, and took the chair which French pushed forward. French stood beside him with a furrowed brow.

"Well, here we are, Roger!—and if there's anything whatever in this horrible affair where an English lawyer can help you, Penrose is your man. You know, I expect, what a swell he is? A K. C. after seven years—lucky dog!—and last year he was engaged in an Anglo-American case not wholly unlike yours—Brown v. Brown. So I thought of him as the best person among your old friends and mine to come and give us some private informal help to-day, before you take any fresh steps—if you do take any."

"Awfully good of you both." The speaker, still wrapped in his fur coat, sat staring at the carpet, a hand on each of his knees. "Awfully good of you," he repeated vaguely.

Penrose observed the new-comer. In some ways Roger Barnes was handsomer than ever. His colour, the pink and white of his astonishing complexion, was miraculously vivid; his blue eyes were infinitely more arresting than of old; and the touch of physical weakness in his aspect, left evidently by severe illness, was not only not disfiguring, but a positive embellishment. He had been too ruddy in the old days, too hearty and splendid—a too obvious and supreme king of men—for our fastidious modern eyes. The grief and misfortune which had shorn some of his radiance had given a more human spell to what remained. At the same time the signs of change were by no means, all of them, easy to read, or reassuring to a friend's eye. Were they no more than physical and transient?

Penrose was just beginning on the questions which seemed to him important, when there was another ring at the front door. French got up nervously, with an anxious look at Barnes.

"Roger! I don't know whether you will allow it, but I met an American acquaintance of yours to-day, and, subject to your permission, I asked him to join our conference."

Roger raised his head—it might have been thought, angrily.

"Who on earth——?"

"Captain Boyson?"

The young man's face changed.

"I don't mind him," he said sombrely. "He's an awfully good sort. He was in Philadelphia a few months ago, when I was. He knows all about me. It was he and his sister who introduced me to—my wife."

French left the room for a moment, and returned accompanied by a fair-haired, straight-shouldered man, whom he introduced to Penrose as Captain Boyson.

Roger rose from his chair to shake hands.

"How do you do, Boyson? I've told them you know all about it." He dropped back heavily into his seat.

"I thought I might possibly put in a word," said the new-comer, glancing from Roger to his friends. "I trust I was not impertinent? But don't let me interrupt anything that was going on."

On a plea of chill, Boyson remained standing by the fire, warming his hands, looking down upon the other three. Penrose, who belonged to a military family, reminded himself, as he glanced at the American, of a recent distinguished book on Military Geography by a Captain Alfred Boyson. No doubt the same man. A capable face,—the face of the modern scientific soldier. It breathed alertness; but also some quality warmer and softer. If the general aspect had been shaped and moulded by an incessant travail of brain, the humanity of eye and mouth spoke dumbly to the humanity of others. The council gathered in the vicarage room felt itself strengthened.

Penrose resumed his questioning of Barnes, and the other two listened while the whole miserable story of the divorce, in its American aspects, unrolled. At first Roger showed a certain apathy and brevity; he might have been fulfilling a task in which he took but small interest; even the details of chicanery and corruption connected with the trial were told without heat; he said nothing bitter of his wife—avoided naming her, indeed, as much as possible.

But when the tale was done he threw back his head with sudden animation and looked at Boyson.

"Is that about the truth, Boyson? You know."

"Yes, I endorse it," said the American gravely. His face, thin and tanned, had flushed while Barnes was speaking.

"And you know what all their papers said of me—what they wished people to believe—that I wasn't fit to have charge of Beatty—that I should have done her harm?"

His eyes sparkled. He looked almost threateningly at the man whom he addressed. Boyson met his gaze quietly.

"I didn't believe it."

There was a pause. Then Roger sprang suddenly to his feet, confronting the men round him.

"Look here!" he said impatiently. "I want some money at once—and a good lot of it." He brought his fist down heavily on the mantelpiece. "There's this place of my uncle's, and I'm dashed if I can get a penny out of it! I went to his solicitors this morning. They drove me mad with their red-tape nonsense. It will take some time, they say, to get a mortgage on it, and meanwhile they don't seem inclined to advance me anything, or a hundred or two, perhaps. What's that? I lost my temper, and next time I go they'll turn me out, I dare say. But there's the truth. It's money I want, and if you can't help me to money it's no use talking."

"And when you get the money what'll you do with it?" asked Penrose.

"Pay half a dozen people who can be trusted to help me kidnap Beatty and smuggle her over the Canadian frontier. I bungled the thing once. I don't mean to bungle it again."

The answer was given slowly, without any bravado, but whatever energy of life there was in the speaker had gone into it.

"And there is no other way?" French's voice from the back was troubled.

"Ask him?" Roger pointed to Boyson.

"Is there any legal way, Boyson, in which I can recover the custody and companionship of my child?"

Boyson turned away.

"None that I know of—and I have made every possible inquiry."

"And yet," said Barnes, with emphasis, addressing the English barrister, "by the law of England I am still Daphne's husband and that child's legal guardian?"

"Certainly."

"And if I could once get her upon ground under the English flag, she would be mine again, and no power could take her from me?"

"Except the same private violence that you yourself propose to exercise."

"I'd take care of that!" said Roger briefly.

"How do you mean to do it?" asked French, with knit brows. To be sitting there in an English vicarage plotting violence against a woman disturbed him.

"He and I'll manage it," said the quiet voice of the American officer.

The others stared.

"You?" said French. "An officer in active service? It might injure your career!"

"I shall risk it."

A charming smile broke on Penrose's meditative face.

"My dear French, this is much more amusing than the law. But I don't quite see where I come in." He rose tentatively from his seat.

Boyson, however, did not smile. He looked from one to the other.

"My sister and I introduced Daphne Floyd to Barnes," he said steadily, "and it is my country, as I hold,—or a portion of it—that allows these villainies. Some day we shall get a great reaction in the States, and then the reforms that plenty of us are clamouring for will come about. Meanwhile, as of course you know"—he addressed French—"New Yorkers and Bostonians suffer almost as much from the abomination that Nevada and South Dakota call laws, as Barnes has suffered. Marriage in the Eastern States is as sacred as with you—South Carolina allows no divorce at all—but with this licence at our gates, no one is safe, and thousands of our women, in particular—for the women bring two-thirds of the actions—are going to the deuce, simply because they have the opportunity of going. And the children—it doesn't bear thinking of! Well—no good haranguing! I'm ashamed of my country in this matter—I have been for a long time—and I mean to help Barnes out, coûte que coûte! And as to the money, Barnes, you and I'll discuss that."

Barnes lifted a face that quivered, and he and Boyson exchanged looks.

Penrose glanced at the pair. That imaginative power, combined with the power of drudgery, which was in process of making a great lawyer out of a Balliol scholar, showed him something typical and dramatic in the two figures:—in Boyson, on the one hand, so lithe, serviceable, and resolved, a helpful, mercurial man, ashamed of his country in this one respect, because he adored her in so many others, penitent and patriot in one:—in Barnes, on the other, so heavy, inert, and bewildered, a ship-wrecked suppliant as it were, clinging to the knees of that very America which had so lightly and irresponsibly wronged him.

It was Penrose who broke the silence.

"Is there any chance of Mrs. Barnes's marrying again?" he asked.

Barnes turned to him.

"Not that I know of."

"There's no one else in the case?"

"I never heard of anyone." Roger gave a short, excited laugh. "What she's done, she's done because she was tired of me, not because she was in love with anyone else. That was her great score in the divorce case—that there was nobody."

Biting and twisting his lip, in a trick that recalled to French the beautiful Eton lad, cracking his brains in pupil-room over a bit of Latin prose, Roger glanced, frowning, from one to the other of these three men who felt for him, whose resentment of the wrong that had been done him, whose pity for his calamity showed plainly enough through their reticent speech.

His sense, indeed, of their sympathy began to move him, to break down his own self-command. No doubt, also, the fatal causes that ultimately ruined his will-power were already at work. At any rate, he broke out into sudden speech about his case. His complexion, now unhealthily delicate, like the complexion of a girl, had flushed deeply. As he spoke he looked mainly at French.

"There's lots of things you don't know," he said in a hesitating voice, as though appealing to his old friend. And rapidly he told the story of Daphne's flight from Heston. Evidently since his return home many details that were once obscure had become plain to him; and the three listeners could perceive how certain new information had goaded, and stung him afresh. He dwelt on the letters which had reached him during his first week's absence from home, after the quarrel—letters from Daphne and Miss Farmer, which were posted at intervals from Heston by their accomplice, the young architect, while the writers of them were hurrying across the Atlantic. The servants had been told that Mrs. Barnes, Miss Farmer, and the little girl were going to London for a day or two, and suspected nothing. "I wrote long letters—lots of them—to my wife. I thought I had made everything right—not that there ever had been anything wrong, you understand,—seriously. But in some ways I had behaved like a fool."

He threw himself back in his chair, pressing his hands on his eyes. The listeners sat or stood motionless.

"Well, I might have spared my pains. The letters were returned to me from the States. Daphne had arranged it all so cleverly that I was some time in tracing her. By the time I had got to Sioux Falls she was through a month of her necessary residence. My God!"—his voice dropped, became almost inaudible—"if I'd only carried Beatty off then!—then and there—the frontier wasn't far off—without waiting for anything more. But I wouldn't believe that Daphne could persist in such a monstrous thing, and, if she did, that any decent country would aid and abet her."

Boyson made a movement of protest, as though he could not listen any longer in silence.

"I am ashamed to remind you, Barnes,—again—that your case is no worse than that of scores of American citizens. We are the first to suffer from our own enormities."

"Perhaps," said Barnes absently, "perhaps."

His impulse of speech dropped. He sat, drearily staring into the fire, absorbed in recollection.

Penrose had gone. So had Boyson. Roger was sitting by the fire in the vicar's study, ministered to by Elsie French and her children. By common consent the dismal subject of the day had been put aside. There was an attempt to cheer and distract him. The little boy of four was on his knee, declaiming the "Owl and the Pussy Cat," while Roger submissively turned the pages and pointed to the pictures of that immortal history. The little girl of two, curled up on her mother's lap close by, listened sleepily, and Elsie, applauding and prompting as a properly regulated mother should, was all the time, in spirit, hovering pitifully about her guest and his plight. There was in her, as in Boyson, a touch of patriotic remorse; and all the pieties of her own being, all the sacred memories of her own life, combined to rouse in her indignation and sympathy for Herbert's poor friend. The thought of what Daphne Barnes had done was to her a monstrosity hardly to be named. She spoke to the young man kindly and shyly, as though she feared lest any chance word might wound him; she was the symbol, in her young motherliness, of all that Daphne had denied and forsaken. "When would America—dear, dear America!—see to it that such things were made impossible!"

Roger meanwhile was evidently cheered and braced. The thought of the interview to which Boyson had confidentially bidden him on the morrow ran warmly in his veins, and the children soothed him. The little boy especially, who was just Beatty's age, excited in him a number of practical curiosities. How about the last teeth? He actually inserted a coaxing and inquiring finger, the babe gravely suffering it. Any trouble with them? Beatty had once been very ill with hers, at Philadelphia, mostly caused, however, by some beastly, indigestible food that the nurse had let her have. And they allowed her to sit up much too late. Didn't Mrs. French think seven o'clock was late enough for any child not yet four? One couldn't say that Beatty was a very robust child, but healthy—oh yes, healthy!—none of your sickly, rickety little things.

The curtains had been closed. The street children, the electric light outside, were no longer visible. Roger had begun to talk of departure, the baby had fallen fast asleep in her mother's arms, when there was another loud ring at the front door.

French, who was expecting the headmaster of his church schools, gathered up some papers and left the room. His wife, startled by what seemed an exclamation from him in the hall outside, raised her head a moment to listen; but the sound of voices—surely a woman's voice?—died abruptly away, and the door of the dining-room closed. Roger heard nothing; he was laughing and crooning over the boy.

"The Pobble that lost his toes
Had once as many as we."

The door opened. Herbert stood on the threshold beckoning to her. She rose in terror, the child in her arms, and went out to him. In a minute she reappeared in the doorway, her face ashen-white, and called to the little boy. He ran to her, and Roger rose, looking for the hat he had put down on entering.

Then French came in, and behind him a lady in black, dishevelled, bathed in tears. The vicar hung back. Roger turned in astonishment.

"Mother! You here? Mother!"—he hurried to her—"what's the matter?"

She tottered toward him with outstretched hands.

"Oh Roger, Roger!"

His name died away in a wail as she clasped him.

"What is it, mother?"

"It's Beatty—my son!—my darling Roger!" She put up her hands piteously, bending his head down to her. "It's a cable from Washington, from that woman, Mrs. Verrier. They did everything, Roger—it was only three days—and hopeless always. Yesterday convulsion came on—and this morning——" Her head dropped against her son's breast as her voice failed her. He put her roughly from him.

"What are you talking of, mother! Do you mean that Beatty has been ill?"

"She died last night. Roger—my darling son—my poor Roger!"

"Died—last night—Beatty?"

French in silence handed him the telegram. Roger disengaged himself and walked to the fireplace, standing motionless, with his back to them, for a minute, while they held their breaths. Then he began to grope again for his hat, without a word.

"Come home with me, Roger!" implored his mother, pursuing him. "We must bear it—bear it together. You see—she didn't suffer"—she pointed to the message—"the darling!—the darling!"

Her voice lost itself in tears. But Roger brushed her away, as though resenting her emotion, and made for the door.

French also put out a hand.

"Roger, dear, dear old fellow! Stay here with us—with your mother. Where are you going?"

Roger looked at his watch unsteadily.

"The office will be closed," he said to himself; "but I can put some things together."

"Where are you going, Roger?" cried Lady Barnes, pursuing him. Roger faced her.

"It's Tuesday. There'll be a White Star boat to-morrow."

"But, Roger, what can you do? She's gone, dear—she's gone. And before you can get there—long before—she will be in her grave."

A spasm passed over his face, into which the colour rushed. Without another word he wrenched himself from her, opened the front door, and ran out into the night.

CHAPTER X

"Was there ever anything so poetic, so suggestive?" said a charming voice. "One might make a new Turner out of it—if one just happened to be Turner!—to match 'Rain: Steam, and Speed.'"

"What would you call it—'Mist, Light, and Spring'?"

Captain Boyson leant forward, partly to watch the wonderful landscape effect through which the train was passing, partly because his young wife's profile, her pure cheek and soft hair, were so agreeably seen under the mingled light from outside.

They were returning from their wedding journey. Some six weeks before this date Boyson had married in Philadelphia a girl coming from one of the old Quaker stocks of that town, in whose tender steadfastness of character a man inclined both by nature and experience to expect little from life had found a happiness that amazed him.

The bridegroom, also, had just been appointed to the Military Attachéship at the Berlin Embassy, and the couple were, in fact, on their way south to New York and embarkation. But there were still a few days left of the honeymoon, of which they had spent the last half in Canada, and on this May night they were journeying from Toronto along the southern shore of Lake Ontario to the pleasant Canadian hotel which overlooks the pageant of Niagara. They had left Toronto in bright sunshine, but as they turned the corner of the lake westward, a white fog had come creeping over the land as the sunset fell.

But the daylight was still strong, the fog thin; so that it appeared rather as a veil of gold, amethyst, and opal, floating over the country, now parting altogether, now blotting out the orchards and the fields. And into the colour above melted the colour below. For the orchards that cover the Hamilton district of Ontario were in bloom, and the snow of the pear-trees, the flush of the peach-blossom broke everywhere through the warm cloud of pearly mist; while, just as Mrs. Boyson spoke, the train had come in sight of the long flashing line of the Welland Canal, which wound its way, outlined by huge electric lamps, through the sunset and the fog, till the lights died in that northern distance where stretched the invisible shore of the great lake. The glittering waterway, speaking of the labour and commerce of men, the blossom-laden earth, the white approaching mist, the softly falling night:—the girl-bride could not tear herself from the spectacle. She sat beside the window entranced. But her husband had captured her hand, and into the overflowing beauty of nature there stole the thrill of their love.

"All very well!" said Boyson presently. "But a fog at Niagara is no joke!"

The night stole on, and the cloud through which they journeyed grew denser. Up crept the fog, on stole the night. The lights of the canal faded, the orchards sank into darkness, and when the bride and bridegroom reached the station on the Canadian side the bride's pleasure had become dismay.

"Oh, Alfred, we shan't see anything!"

And, indeed, as their carriage made its slow progress along the road that skirts the gorge, they seemed to plunge deeper and deeper into the fog. A white darkness, as though of impenetrable yet glimmering cloud, above and around them; a white abyss beneath them; and issuing from it the thunderous voice of wild waters, dim first and distant, but growing steadily in volume and terror.

"There are the lights of the bridge!" cried Boyson, "and the towers of the aluminum works. But not a vestige of the Falls! Gone! Wiped out! I say, darling, this is going to be a disappointment."

Mrs. Boyson, however, was not so sure. The lovely "nocturne" of the evening plain had passed into a Vision or Masque of Force that captured the mind. High above the gulf rose the towers of the great works, transformed by the surging fog and darkness into some piled and castled fortress; a fortress of Science held by Intelligence. Lights were in the towers, as of genii at their work; lights glimmered here and there on the face of the farther cliff, as though to measure the vastness of the gorge and of that resounding vacancy towards which they moved. In front, the arch of the vast suspension bridge, pricked in light, crossed the gulf, from nothingness to nothingness, like that sky bridge on which the gods marched to Walhalla. Otherwise, no shape, no landmark; earth and heaven had disappeared.

"Here we are at the hotel," said Boyson. "There, my dear,"—he pointed ironically—"is the American Fall, and there—is the Canadian! Let me introduce you to Niagara!"

They jumped out of the carriage, and while their bags were being carried in they ran to the parapeted edge of the cliff in front of the hotel. Niagara thundered in their ears; the spray of it beat upon their faces; but of the two great Falls immediately in front of them they saw nothing whatever. The fog, now cold and clammy, enwrapped them; even the bright lights of the hotel, but a stone's throw distant, were barely visible; and the carriage still standing at the steps had vanished.

Suddenly, some common impulse born of the moment and the scene—of its inhuman ghostliness and grandeur—drew them to each other. Boyson threw his arm round his young wife and pressed her to him, kissing her face and hair, bedewed by the spray. She clung to him passionately, trembling a little, as the roar deafened them and the fog swept round them.

As the Boysons lingered in the central hall of the hotel, reading some letters which had been handed to them, a lady in black passed along the gallery overhead and paused a moment to look at the new arrivals brought by the evening train.

As she perceived Captain Boyson there was a quick, startled movement; she bent a moment over the staircase, as though to make sure of his identity, and then ran along the gallery to a room at the farther end. As she opened the door a damp cold air streamed upon her, and the thunder of the Falls, with which the hotel is perpetually filled, seemed to redouble.

Three large windows opposite to her were, in fact, wide open; the room, with its lights dimmed by fog, seemed hung above the abyss.

An invalid couch stood in front of the window, and upon it lay a pale, emaciated woman, breathing quickly and feebly. At the sound of the closing door, Madeleine Verrier turned.

"Oh, Daphne, I was afraid you had gone out! You do such wild things!"

Daphne Barnes came to the side of the couch.

"Darling, I only went to speak to your maid for a moment. Are you sure you can stand all this damp fog?"

As she spoke Daphne took up a fur cloak lying on a chair near, and wrapped herself warmly in it.

"I can't breathe when they shut the windows. But it is too cold for you."

"Oh, I'm all right in this." Daphne drew the cloak round her.

Inwardly she said to herself, "Shall I tell her the Boysons are here? Yes, I must. She is sure to hear it in some way."

So, stooping over the couch, she said:

"Do you know who arrived this evening? The Alfred Boysons. I saw them in the hall just now."

"They're on their honeymoon?" asked the faint voice, after a just perceptible pause.

Daphne assented. "She seems a pretty little thing."

Madeleine Verrier opened her tired eyes to look at Daphne. Mrs. Floyd—as Daphne now called herself—was dressed in deep black. The costly gown revealed a figure which had recently become substantial, and the face on which the electric light shone had nothing left in it of the girl, though Daphne Floyd was not yet thirty. The initial beauty of complexion was gone; so was the fleeting prettiness of youth. The eyes were as splendid as ever, but combined with the increased paleness of the cheeks, the greater prominence and determination of the mouth, and a certain austerity in the dressing of the hair, which was now firmly drawn back from the temples round which it used to curl, and worn high, à la Marquise, they expressed a personality—a formidable personality—in which self-will was no longer graceful, and power no longer magnetic. Madeleine Verrier gazed at her friend in silence. She was very grateful to Daphne, often very dependent on her. But there were moments when she shrank from her, when she would gladly never have seen her again. Daphne was still erect, self-confident, militant; whereas Madeleine knew herself vanquished—vanquished both in body and soul.

Certain inner miseries and discomforts had been set vibrating by the name of Captain Boyson.

"You won't want to see him or come across him?" she said abruptly.

"Who? Alfred Boyson? I am not afraid of him in the least. He may say what he pleases—or think what he pleases. It doesn't matter to me."

"When did you see him last?"

Daphne hesitated a moment. "When he came to ask me for certain things which had belonged to Beatty."

"For Roger? I remember. It must have been painful."

"Yes," said Daphne unwillingly, "it was. He was very unfriendly. He always has been—since it happened. But I bore him no malice"—the tone was firm—"and the interview was short."

"——" The half inaudible word fell like a sigh from Madeleine's lips as she closed her eyes again to shut out the light which teased them. And presently she added, "Do you ever hear anything now—from England?"

"Just what I might expect to hear—what more than justifies all that I did."

Daphne sat rigid on her chair, her hands crossed on her lap. Mrs. Verrier did not pursue the conversation.

Outside the fog grew thicker and darker. Even the lights on the bridge were now engulfed. Daphne began to shiver in her fur cloak. She put out a cold hand and took one of Mrs. Verrier's.

"Dear Madeleine! Indeed, indeed, you ought to let me move you from this place. Do let me! There's the house at Stockbridge all ready. And in July I could take you to Newport. I must be off next week, for I've promised to take the chair at a big meeting at Buffalo on the 29th. But I can't bear to leave you behind. We could make the journey quite easy for you. That new car of mine is very comfortable."

"I know it is. But, thank you, dear, I like this hotel; and it will be summer directly."

Daphne hesitated. A strong protest against "morbidness" was on her lips, but she did not speak it. In the mist-filled room even the bright fire, the electric lights, had grown strangely dim. Only the roar outside was real—terribly, threateningly real. Yet the sound was not so much fierce as lamentable; the voice of Nature mourning the eternal flow and conflict at the heart of things. Daphne knew well that, mingled with this primitive, cosmic voice, there was—for Madeleine Verrier—another; a plaintive, human cry, that was drawing the life out of her breast, the blood from her veins, like some baneful witchcraft of old. But she dared not speak of it; she and the doctor who attended Mrs. Verrier dared no longer name the patient's "obsession" even to each other. They had tried to combat it, to tear her from this place; with no other result, as it seemed, than to hasten the death-process which was upon her. Gently, but firmly, she had defied them, and they knew now that she would always defy them. For a year past, summer and winter, she had lived in this apartment facing the Falls; her nurses found her very patient under the incurable disease which had declared itself; Daphne came to stay with her when arduous engagements allowed, and Madeleine was always grateful and affectionate. But certain topics, and certain advocacies, had dropped out of their conversation—not by Daphne's will. There had been no spoken recantation; only the prophetess prophesied no more; and of late, especially when Daphne was not there—so Mrs. Floyd had discovered—a Roman Catholic priest had begun to visit Mrs. Verrier. Daphne, moreover, had recently noticed a small crucifix, hidden among the folds of the loose black dress which Madeleine commonly wore.

Daphne had changed her dress and dismissed her maid. Although it was May, a wood-fire had been lighted in her room to counteract the chilly damp of the evening. She hung over it, loth to go back to the sitting-room, and plagued by a depression that not even her strong will could immediately shake off. She wished the Boysons had not come. She supposed that Alfred Boyson would hardly cut her; but she was tolerably certain that he would not wish his young wife to become acquainted with her. She scorned his disapproval of her; but she smarted under it. It combined with Madeleine's strange delusions to put her on the defensive; to call out all the fierceness of her pride; to make her feel herself the champion of a sound and reasonable view of life as against weakness and reaction.

Madeleine's dumb remorse was, indeed, the most paralyzing and baffling thing; nothing seemed to be of any avail against it, now that it had finally gained the upper hand. There had been dark times, no doubt, in the old days in Washington; times when the tragedy of her husband's death had overshadowed her. But in the intervals, what courage and boldness, what ardour in the declaration of that new Feminist gospel to which Daphne had in her own case borne witness! Daphne remembered well with what feverish readiness Madeleine had accepted her own pleas after her flight from England; how she had defended her against hostile criticism, had supported her during the divorce court proceedings, and triumphed in their result. "You are unhappy? And he deceived you? Well, then, what more do you want? Free yourself, my dear, free yourself! What right have you to bear more children to a man who is a liar and a shuffler? It is our generation that must suffer, for the liberty of those that come after!"

What had changed her? Was it simply the approach of mortal illness, the old questioning of "what dreams may come"? Superstition, in fact? As a girl she had been mystical and devout; so Daphne had heard.

Or was it the death of little Beatty, to whom she was much attached? She had seen something of Roger during that intermediate Philadelphia stage, when he and Beatty were allowed to meet at her house; and she had once or twice astonished and wounded Daphne at that time by sudden expressions of pity for him. It was she who had sent the cable message announcing the child's death, wording it as gently as possible, and had wept in sending it.

"As if I hadn't suffered too!" cried Daphne's angry thought. And she turned to look at the beautiful miniature of Beatty set in pearls that stood upon her dressing-table. There was something in the recollection of Madeleine's sensibility with regard to the child—as in that of her compassion for the father's suffering—that offended Daphne. It seemed a reflection upon herself, Beatty's mother, as lacking in softness and natural feeling.

On the contrary! She had suffered terribly; but she had thought it her duty to bear it with courage, not to let it interfere with the development of her life. And as for Roger, was it her fault that he had made it impossible for her to keep her promise? That she had been forced to separate Beatty from him? And if, as she understood now from various English correspondents, it was true that Roger had dropped out of decent society, did it not simply prove that she had guessed his character aright, and had only saved herself just in time?

It was as though the sudden presence of Captain Boyson under the same roof had raised up a shadowy adversary and accuser, with whom she must go on thus arguing, and hotly defending herself, in a growing excitement. Not that she would ever stoop to argue with Alfred Boyson face to face. How could he ever understand the ideals to which she had devoted her powers and her money since the break-up of her married life? He could merely estimate what she had done in the commonest, vulgarest way. Yet who could truthfully charge her with having obtained her divorce in order thereby to claim any fresh licence for herself? She looked back now with a cool amazement on that sudden rush of passion which had swept her into marriage, no less than the jealousy which had led her to break with Roger. She was still capable of many kinds of violence; but not, probably, of the violence of love. The influence of sex and sense upon her had weakened; the influence of ambition had increased. As in many women of Southern race, the period of hot blood had passed into a period of intrigue and domination. Her wealth gave her power, and for that power she lived.

Yes, she was personally desolate, but she had stood firm, and her reward lay in the fact that she had gathered round her an army of dependents and followers—women especially—to whom her money and her brains were indispensable. There on the table lay the plans for a new Women's College, on the broadest and most modern lines, to which she was soon to devote a large sum of money. The walls should have been up by now but for a quarrel with her secretary, who had become much too independent, and had had to be peremptorily dismissed at a moment's notice. But the plan was a noble one, approved by the highest authorities; and Daphne, looking to posterity, anticipated the recognition that she herself might never live to see. For the rest she had given herself—with reservations—to the Feminist movement. It was not in her nature to give herself wholly to anything; and she was instinctively critical of people who professed to be her leaders, and programmes to which she was expected to subscribe. Wholehearted devotion, which, as she rightly said, meant blind devotion, had never been her line; and she had been on one or two occasions offensively outspoken on the subject of certain leading persons in the movement. She was not, therefore, popular with her party, and did not care to be; her pride of money held her apart from the rank and file, the college girls, and typists, and journalists who filled the Feminist meetings, and often made themselves, in her eyes, supremely ridiculous, because of what she considered their silly provinciality and lack of knowledge of the world.

Yet, of course, she was a "Feminist"—and particularly associated with those persons in the suffrage camp who stood for broad views on marriage and divorce. She knew very well that many other persons in the same camp held different opinions; and in public or official gatherings was always nervously—most people thought arrogantly—on the look-out for affronts. Meanwhile, everywhere, or almost everywhere, her money gave her power, and her knowledge of it was always sweet to her. There was nothing in the world—no cause, no faith—that she could have accepted "as a little child." But everywhere, in her own opinion, she stood for Justice; justice for women as against the old primæval tyranny of men; justice, of course, to the workman, and justice to the rich. No foolish Socialism, and no encroaching Trusts! A lucid common sense, so it seemed to her, had been her cradle-gift.

And with regard to Art, how much she had been able to do! She had generously helped the public collections, and her own small gallery, at the house in Newport, was famous throughout England and America. That in the course of the preceding year she had found among the signatures, extracted from visitors by the custodian in charge, the name of Chloe Fairmile, had given her a peculiar satisfaction.

She walked proudly across the room, her head thrown back, every nerve tense. Let the ignorant and stupid blame her if they chose. She stood absolved. Memory reminded her, moreover, of a great number of kind and generous things—private things—that she had done with her money. If men like Herbert French, or Alfred Boyson, denounced her, there were many persons who felt warmly towards her—and had cause. As she thought of them the tears rose in her eyes. Of course she could never make such things public.

Outside the fog seemed to be lifting a little. There was a silvery light in the southeast, a gleam and radiance over the gorge. If the moon struggled through, it would be worth while slipping out after dinner to watch its play upon the great spectacle. She was careful to cherish in herself an openness to noble impressions and to the high poetry of nature and life. And she must not allow herself to be led by the casual neighbourhood of the Boysons into weak or unprofitable thought.

The Boysons dined at a table, gay with lights and flowers, that should have commanded the Falls but for the curtain of fog. Niagara, however, might flout them if it pleased; they could do without Niagara. They were delighted that the hotel, apparently, contained no one they knew. All they wanted was to be together, and alone. But the bride was tired by a long day in the train; her smiles began presently to flag, and by nine o'clock her husband had insisted on sending her to rest.

After escorting her upstairs Captain Boyson returned to the veranda, which was brightly lit up, in order to read some letters that were still unopened in his pocket. But before he began upon them he was seized once more by the wizardry of the scene. Was that indistinct glimmer in the far distance—that intenser white on white—the eternal cloud of spray that hangs over the Canadian Fall? If so, the fog was indeed yielding, and the full moon behind it would triumph before long. On the other hand, he could no longer see the lights of the bridge at all; the rolling vapour choked the gorge, and the waiter who brought him his coffee drily prophesied that there would not be much change under twenty-four hours.

He fell back upon his letters, well pleased to see that one among them came from Herbert French, with whom the American officer had maintained a warm friendship since the day of a certain consultation in French's East-End library. The letter was primarily one of congratulation, written with all French's charm and sympathy; but over the last pages of it Boyson's face darkened, for they contained a deplorable account of the man whom he and French had tried to save.

The concluding passage of the letter ran as follows:

"You will scarcely wonder after all this that we see him very seldom, and that he no longer gives us his confidence. Yet both Elsie and I feel that he cares for us as much as ever. And, indeed, poor fellow, he himself remains strangely lovable, in spite of what one must—alas!—believe as to his ways of life and the people with whom he associates. There is in him, always, something of what Meyers called 'the imperishable child.' That a man who might have been so easily led to good has been so fatally thrust into evil is one of the abiding sorrows of my life. How can I reproach him for his behaviour? As the law stands, he can never marry; he can never have legitimate children. Under the wrong he has suffered, and, no doubt, in consequence of that illness in New York, when he was badly nursed and cared for—from which, in fact, he has never wholly recovered—his will-power and nerve, which were never very strong, have given way; he broods upon the past perpetually, and on the loss of his child. Our poor Apollo, Boyson, will soon have lost himself wholly, and there is no one to help.

"Do you ever see or hear anything of that woman? Do you know what has become of her? I see you are to have a Conference on your Divorce Laws—that opinion and indignation are rising. For Heaven's sake, do something! I gather some appalling facts from a recent Washington report. One in twelve of all your marriages dissolved! A man or a woman divorced in one state, and still bound in another! The most trivial causes for the break-up of marriage, accepted and acted upon by corrupt courts, and reform blocked by a phalanx of corrupt interests! Is it all true? An American correspondent of mine—a lady—repeats to me what you once said, that it is the women who bring the majority of the actions. She impresses upon me also the remarkable fact that it is apparently only in a minority of cases that a woman, when she has got rid of her husband, marries someone else. It is not passion, therefore, that dictates many of these actions; no serious cause or feeling, indeed, of any kind; but rather an ever-spreading restlessness and levity, a readiness to tamper with the very foundations of society, for a whim, a nothing!—in the interests, of ten, of what women call their 'individuality'! No foolish talk here of being 'members one of another'! We have outgrown all that. The facilities are always there, and the temptation of them. 'The women—especially—who do these things,' she writes me, 'are moral anarchists. One can appeal to nothing; they acknowledge nothing. Transformations infinitely far-reaching and profound are going on among us."

"'Appeal to nothing!' And this said of women, by a woman! It was of men that a Voice said long ago: 'Moses, because of the hardness of your hearts, suffered you to put away your wives'—on just such grounds apparently—trivial and cruel pretexts—as your American courts admit. 'But I say unto you!—I say unto you!'...

"Well, I am a Christian priest, incapable, of course, of an unbiassed opinion. My correspondent tries to explain the situation a little by pointing out that your women in America claim to be the superiors of your men, to be more intellectual, better-mannered, more refined. Marriage disappoints or disgusts them, and they impatiently put it aside. They break it up, and seem to pay no penalty. But you and I believe that they will pay it!—that there are divine avenging forces in the very law they tamper with—and that, as a nation, you must either retrace some of the steps taken, or sink in the scale of life.

"How I run on! And all because my heart is hot within me for the suffering of one man, and the hardness of one woman!"

Boyson raised his eyes. As he did so he saw dimly through the mist the figure of a lady, veiled, and wrapped in a fur cloak, crossing the farther end of the veranda. He half rose from his seat, with an exclamation. She ran down the steps leading to the road and disappeared in the fog.

Boyson stood looking after her, his mind in a whirl.

The manager of the hotel came hurriedly out of the same door by which Daphne Floyd had emerged, and spoke to a waiter on the veranda, pointing in the direction she had taken.

Boyson heard what was said, and came up. A short conversation passed between him and the manager. There was a moment's pause on Boyson's part; he still held French's letter in his hand. At last, thrusting it into his pocket, he hurried to the steps whereby Daphne had left the hotel, and pursued her into the cloud outside.

The fog was now rolling back from the gorge, upon the Falls, blotting out the transient gleams which had seemed to promise a lifting of the veil, leaving nothing around or beneath but the white and thunderous abyss.

CHAPTER XI

Daphne's purpose in quitting the hotel had been to find her way up the river by the road which runs along the gorge on the Canadian side, from the hotel to the Canadian Fall. Thick as the fog still was in the gorge she hoped to find some clearer air beyond it. She felt oppressed and stifled; and though she had told Madeleine that she was going out in search of effects and spectacle, it was in truth the neighbourhood of Alfred Boyson which had made her restless.

The road was lit at intervals by electric lamps, but after a time she found the passage of it not particularly easy. Some repairs to the tramway lines were going on higher up, and she narrowly escaped various pitfalls in the shape of trenches and holes in the roadway, very insufficiently marked by feeble lamps. But the stir in her blood drove her on; so did the strangeness of this white darkness, suffused with moonlight, yet in this immediate neighbourhood of the Falls, impenetrable. She was impatient to get through it; to breathe an unembarrassed air.

The roar at her left hand grew wilder. She had reached a point some distance from the hotel, close to the jutting corner, once open, now walled and protected, where the traveller approaches nearest to the edge of the Canadian Fall. She knew the spot well, and groping for the wall, she stood breathless and spray-beaten beside the gulf.

Only a few yards from her the vast sheet of water descended. She could see nothing of it, but the wind of its mighty plunge blew back her hair, and her mackintosh cloak was soon dripping with the spray. Once, far away, above the Falls, she seemed to perceive a few dim lights along the bend of the river; perhaps from one of the great power-houses that tame to man's service the spirits of the water. Otherwise—nothing! She was alone with the perpetual challenge and fascination of the Falls.

As she stood there she was seized by a tragic recollection. It was from this spot, so she believed, that Leopold Verrier had thrown himself over. The body had been carried down through the rapids, and recovered, terribly injured, in the deep eddying pool which the river makes below them. He had left no letter or message of any sort behind him. But the reasons for his suicide were clearly understood by a large public, whose main verdict upon it was the quiet "What else could he do?"

Here, then, on this very spot, he had stood before his leap. Daphne had heard him described by various spectators of the marriage. He had been, it seemed, a man of sensitive temperament, who should have been an artist and was a man of business; a considerable musician, and something of a poet; proud of his race and faith and himself irreproachable, yet perpetually wounded through his family, which bore a name of ill-repute in the New York business world; passionately grateful to his wife for having married him, delighting in her beauty and charm, and foolishly, abjectly eager to heap upon her and their child everything that wealth could buy.

"It was Madeleine's mother who made it hopeless," thought Daphne. "But for Mrs. Fanshaw—it might have lasted."

And memory called up Mrs. Fanshaw, the beautifully dressed woman of fifty, with her pride of wealth and family, belonging to the strictest sect of New York's social élite, with her hard, fastidious face, her formidable elegance and self-possession. How she had loathed the marriage! And with what a harpy-like eagerness had she seized on the first signs of Madeleine's discontent and ennui; persuaded her to come home; prepared the divorce; poisoned public opinion. It was from a last interview with Mrs. Fanshaw that Leopold Verrier had gone straight to his death. What was it that she had said to him?

Daphne lingered on the question; haunted, too, by other stray recollections of the dismal story—the doctor driving by in the early morning who had seen the fall; the discovery of the poor broken body; Madeleine's blanched stoicism, under the fierce coercion of her mother; and that strong, silent, slow-setting tide of public condemnation, which in this instance, at least, had avenged a cruel act.

But at this point Daphne ceased to think about her friend. She found herself suddenly engaged in a heated self-defence. What comparison could there be between her case and Madeleine's?

Fiercely she found herself going through the list of Roger's crimes; his idleness, treachery and deceit; his lack of any high ideals; his bad influence on the child; his luxurious self-indulgent habits, the lies he had told, the insults he had offered her. By now the story had grown to a lurid whole in her imagination, based on a few distorted facts, yet radically and monstrously untrue. Generally, however, when she dwelt upon it, it had power to soothe any smart of conscience, to harden any yearning of the heart, supposing she felt any. And by now she had almost ceased to feel any.

But to-night she was mysteriously shaken and agitated. As she clung to the wall, which alone separated her from the echoing gulf beyond, she could not prevent herself from thinking of Roger, Roger as he was when Alfred Boyson introduced him to her, when they first married, and she had been blissfully happy; happy in the possession of such a god-like creature, in the envy of other women, in the belief that he was growing more and more truly attached to her.

Her thoughts broke abruptly. "He married me for money!" cried the inward voice. Then she felt her cheeks tingling as she remembered her conversation with Madeleine on that very subject—how she had justified what she was now judging—how plainly she had understood and condoned it.

"That was my inexperience! Besides, I knew nothing then of Chloe Fairmile. If I had—I should never have done it."

She turned, startled. Steps seemed to be approaching her, of someone as yet invisible. Her nerves were all on edge, and she felt suddenly frightened. Strangers of all kinds visit and hang about Niagara; she was quite alone, known to be the rich Mrs. Floyd; if she were attacked—set upon——

The outline of a man's form emerged; she heard her name, or rather the name she had renounced.

"I saw you come in this direction, Mrs. Barnes. I knew the road was up in some places, and I thought in this fog you would allow me to warn you that walking was not very safe."

The voice was Captain Boyson's; and they were now plain to each other as they stood a couple of yards apart. The fog, however, was at last slightly breaking. There was a gleam over the nearer water; not merely the lights, but the span of the bridge had begun to appear.

Daphne composed herself with an effort.

"I am greatly obliged to you," she said in her most freezing manner. "But I found no difficulty at all in getting through, and the fog is lifting."

With a stiff inclination she turned in the direction of the hotel, but Captain Boyson stood in her way. She saw a face embarrassed yet resolved.

"Mrs. Barnes, may I speak to you a few minutes?"

Daphne gave a slight laugh.

"I don't see how I can prevent it. So you didn't follow me, Captain Boyson, out of mere regard for my personal safety?"

"If I hadn't come myself I should have sent someone," he replied quietly. "The hotel people were anxious. But I wished to come myself. I confess I had a very strong desire to speak to you."

"There seems to be nothing and no one to interfere with it," said Daphne, in a tone of sarcasm. "I should be glad, however, with your permission, to turn homeward. I see Mrs. Boyson is here. You are, I suppose, on your wedding journey?"

He moved out of her path, said a few conventional words, and they walked on. A light wind had risen and the fog was now breaking rapidly. As it gave way, the moonlight poured into the breaches that the wind made; the vast black-and-silver spectacle, the Falls, the gorge, the town opposite, the bridge, the clouds, began to appear in fragments, grandiose and fantastical.

Daphne, presently, seeing that Boyson was slow to speak, raised her eyebrows and attempted a remark on the scene. Boyson interrupted her hurriedly.

"I imagine, Mrs. Barnes, that what I wish to say will seem to you a piece of insolence. All the same, for the sake of our former friendship, I would ask you to bear with me."

"By all means!"

"I had no idea that you were in the hotel. About half an hour ago, on the veranda, I opened an English letter which arrived this evening. The news in it gave me great concern. Then I saw you appear, to my astonishment, in the distance. I asked the hotel manager if it were really you. He was about to send someone after you. An idea occurred to me. I saw my opportunity—and I pursued you."

"And here I am, at your mercy!" said Daphne, with sudden sharpness. "You have left me no choice. However, I am quite willing."

The voice was familiar yet strange. There was in it the indefinable hardening and ageing which seemed to Boyson to have affected the whole personality. What had happened to her? As he looked at her in the dim light there rushed upon them both the memory of those three weeks by the seaside years before, when he had fallen in love with her, and she had first trifled with, and then repulsed him.

"I wished to ask you a question, in the name of our old friendship; and because I have also become a friend—as you know—of your husband."

He felt, rather than saw, the start of anger in the woman beside him.

"Captain Boyson! I cannot defend myself, but I would ask you to recognize ordinary courtesies. I have now no husband."

"Of your husband," he repeated, without hesitation, yet gently. "By the law of England at least, which you accepted, and under which you became a British subject, you are still the wife of Roger Barnes, and he has done nothing whatever to forfeit his right to your wifely care. It is indeed of him and of his present state that I beg to be allowed to speak to you."

He heard a little laugh beside him—unsteady and hysterical.

"You beg for what you have already taken. I repeat, I am at your mercy. An American subject, Captain Boyson, knows nothing of the law of England. I have recovered my American citizenship, and the law of my country has freed me from a degrading and disastrous marriage!"

"While Roger remains bound? Incapable, at the age of thirty, of marrying again, unless he renounces his country—permanently debarred from home and children!"

His pulse ran quick. It was a strange adventure, this, to which he had committed himself!

"I have nothing to do with English law, nothing whatever! It is unjust, monstrous. But that was no reason why I, too, should suffer!"

"No reason for patience? No reason for pity?" said the man's voice, betraying emotion at last. "Mrs. Barnes, what do you know of Roger's present state?"

"I have no need to know anything."

"It matters nothing to you? Nothing to you that he has lost health, and character, and happiness, his child, his home, everything, owing to your action?"

"Captain Boyson!" she cried, her composure giving way, "this is intolerable, outrageous! It is humiliating that you should even expect me to argue with you. Yet," she bit her lip, angry with the agitation that would assail her, "for the sake of our friendship to which you appeal, I would rather not be angry. What you say is monstrous!" her voice shook. "In the first place, I freed myself from a man who married me for money."

"One moment! Do you forget that from the day you left him Roger has never touched a farthing of your money? That he returned everything to you?"

"I had nothing to do with that; it was his own folly."

"Yes, but it throws light upon his character. Would a mere fortune-hunter have done it? No, Mrs. Barnes!—that view of Roger does not really convince you, you do not really believe it."

She smiled bitterly.

"As it happens, in his letters to me after I left him, he amply confessed it."

"Because his wish was to make peace, to throw himself at your feet. He accused himself, more than was just. But you do not really think him mercenary and greedy, you know that he was neither! Mrs. Barnes, Roger is ill and lonely."

"His mode of life accounts for it."

"You mean that he has begun to drink, has fallen into bad company. That may be true. I cannot deny it. But consider. A man from whom everything is torn at one blow; a man of not very strong character, not accustomed to endure hardness.—Does it never occur to you that you took a frightful responsibility?"

"I protected myself—and my child."

He breathed deep.

"Or rather—did you murder a life—that God had given you in trust?"

He paused, and she paused also, as though held by the power of his will. They were passing along the public garden that borders the road; scents of lilac and fresh leaf floated over the damp grass; the moonlight was growing in strength, and the majesty of the gorge, the roar of the leaping water all seemed to enter into the moral and human scene, to accent and deepen it.

Daphne suddenly clung to a seat beside the path, dropped into it.

"Captain Boyson! I—I cannot bear this any longer."

"I will not reproach you any more," he said, quietly. "I beg your pardon. The past is irrevocable, but the present is here. The man who loved you, the father of your child, is alone, ill, poor, in danger of moral ruin, because of what you have done. I ask you to go to his aid. But first let me tell you exactly what I have just heard from England." He repeated the greater part of French's letter, so far as it concerned Roger.

"He has his mother," said Daphne, when he paused, speaking with evident physical difficulty.

"Lady Barnes I hear had a paralytic stroke two months ago. She is incapable of giving advice or help."

"Of course, I am sorry. But Herbert French——"

"No one but a wife could save him—no one!" he repeated with emphasis.

"I am not his wife!" she insisted faintly. "I released myself by American law. He is nothing to me." As she spoke she leant back against the seat and closed her eyes. Boyson saw clearly that excitement and anger had struck down her nervous power, that she might faint or go into hysterics. Yet a man of remarkable courtesy and pitifulness towards women was not thereby moved from his purpose. He had his chance; he could not relinquish it. Only there was something now in her attitude which recalled the young Daphne of years ago; which touched his heart.

He sat down beside her.

"Bear with me, Mrs. Barnes, for a few moments, while I put it as it appears to another mind. You became first jealous of Roger, for very small reason, then tired of him. Your marriage no longer satisfied you—you resolved to be quit of it; so you appealed to laws of which, as a nation, we are ashamed, which all that is best among us will, before long, rebel against and change. Our State system permits them—America suffers. In this case—forgive me if I put it once more as it appears to me—they have been used to strike at an Englishman who had absolutely no defence, no redress. And now you are free; he remains bound—so long, at least, as you form no other tie. Again I ask you, have you ever let yourself face what it means to a man of thirty to be cut off from lawful marriage and legitimate children? Mrs. Barnes! you know what a man is, his strength and his weakness. Are you really willing that Roger should sink into degradation in order that you may punish him for some offence to your pride or your feeling? It may be too late! He may, as French fears, have fallen into some fatal entanglement; it may not be possible to restore his health. He may not be able"—he hesitated, then brought the words out firmly—"to forgive you. Or again, French's anxieties about him may be unfounded. But for God's sake go to him! Once on English ground you are his wife again as though nothing had happened. For God's sake put every thing aside but the thought of the vow you once made to him! Go back! I implore you, go back! I promise you that no happiness you have ever felt will be equal to the happiness that step would bring you, if only you are permitted to save him."

Daphne was by now shaking from head to foot. The force of feeling which impelled him so mastered her that when he gravely took her hand she did not withdraw it. She had a strange sense of having at last discovered the true self of the quiet, efficient, unpretending man she had known for so long and cast so easily aside. There was shock and excitement in it, as there is in all trials of strength between a man and a woman. She tried to hate and despise him, but she could not achieve it. She longed to answer and crush him, but her mind was a blank, her tongue refused its office. Surprise, resentment, wounded feeling made a tumult and darkness through which she could not find her way.

She rose at last painfully from her seat.

"This conversation must end," she said brokenly. "Captain Boyson, I appeal to you as a gentleman, let me go on alone."

He looked at her sadly and stood aside. But as he saw her move uncertainly toward a portion of the road where various trenches and pits made walking difficult, he darted after her.

"Please!" he said peremptorily, "this bit is unsafe."

He drew her hand within his arm and guided her. As he did so he saw that she was crying; no doubt, as he rightly guessed, from shaken nerves and wounded pride; for it did not seem to him that she had yielded at all. But this time he felt distress and compunction.

"Forgive me!" he said, bending over her. "But think of what I have said—I beg of you! Be kind, be merciful!"

She made various attempts to speak, and at last she said, "I bear you no malice. But you don't understand me, you never have."

He offered no reply. They had reached the courtyard of the hotel. Daphne withdrew her hand. When she reached the steps she preceded him without looking back, and was soon lost to sight.

Boyson shook his head, lit a cigar, and spent some time longer pacing up and down the veranda. When he went to his wife's room he found her asleep, a vision of soft youth and charm. He stood a few moments looking down upon her, wondering in himself at what he had done. Yet he knew very well that it was the stirring and deepening of his whole being produced by love that had impelled him to do it.

Next morning he told his wife.

"Do you suppose I produced any effect?" he asked her anxiously. "If she really thinks over what I said, she must be touched! unless she's made of flint. I said all the wrong things—but I did rub it in."

"I'm sure you did," said his wife, smiling. Then she looked at him with a critical tenderness.

"You dear optimist!" she cried, and slipped her hand into his.

"That means you think I behaved like a fool, and that my appeal won't move her in the least?"

The face beside him saddened.

"Dear, dear optimist!" she repeated, and pressed his hand. He urged an explanation of her epithet. But she only said, thoughtfully:

"You took a great responsibility!"

"Towards her?"

She shook her head.

"No—towards him!"

Meanwhile Daphne was watching beside a death-bed. On her return from her walk she had been met by the news of fresh and grave symptoms in Mrs. Verrier's case. A Boston doctor arrived the following morning. The mortal disease which had attacked her about a year before this date had entered, so he reported, on its last phase. He talked of a few days—possibly hours.

The Boysons departed, having left cards of inquiry and sympathy, of which Mrs. Floyd took no notice. Then for Daphne there followed a nightmare of waiting and pain. She loved Madeleine Verrier, as far as she was capable of love, and she jealously wished to be all in all to her in these last hours. She would have liked to feel that it was she who had carried her friend through them; who had nobly sustained her in the dolorous past. To have been able to feel this would have been as balm moreover to a piteously wounded self-love, to a smarting and bitter recollection, which would not let her rest.

But in these last days Madeleine escaped her altogether. A thin-faced priest arrived, the same who had been visiting the invalid at intervals for a month or two. Mrs. Verrier was received into the Roman Catholic Church; she made her first confession and communion; she saw her mother for a short, final interview, and her little girl; and the physical energy required for these acts exhausted her small store. Whenever Daphne entered her room Madeleine received her tenderly; but she could speak but little, and Daphne felt herself shut out and ignored. What she said or thought was no longer, it seemed, of any account. She resented and despised Madeleine's surrender to what she held to be a decaying superstition; and her haughty manner toward the mild Oratorian whom she met occasionally on the stairs, or in the corridor, expressed her disapproval. But it was impossible to argue with a dying woman. She suffered in silence.

As she sat beside the patient, in the hours of narcotic sleep, when she relieved one of the nurses, she went often through times of great bitterness. She could not forgive the attack Captain Boyson had made upon her; yet she could not forget it. It had so far roused her moral sense that it led her to a perpetual brooding over the past, a perpetual re-statement of her own position. She was most troubled, often, by certain episodes in the past, of which, she supposed Alfred Boyson knew least; the corrupt use she had made of her money; the false witnesses she had paid for; the bribes she had given. At the time it had seemed to her all part of the campaign, in the day's work. She had found herself in a milieu that demoralized her; her mind had become like "the dyer's hand, subdued to what it worked in." Now, she found herself thinking in a sudden terror, "If Alfred Boyson knew so and so!" or, as she looked down on Madeleine's dying face, "Could I even tell Madeleine that?" And then would come the dreary thought, "I shall never tell her anything any more. She is lost to me—even before death."

She tried to avoid thinking of Roger; but the memory of the scene with Alfred Boyson did, in truth, bring him constantly before her. An inner debate began, from which she could not escape. She grew white and ill with it. If she could have rushed away from it, into the full stream of life, have thrown herself into meetings and discussion, have resumed her place as the admired and flattered head of a particular society, she could easily have crushed and silenced the thoughts which tormented her.

But she was held fast. She could not desert Madeleine Verrier in death; she could not wrench her own hand from this frail hand which clung to it; even though Madeleine had betrayed the common cause, had yielded at last to that moral and spiritual cowardice which—as all freethinkers know—has spoiled and clouded so many death-beds. Daphne—the skimmer of many books—remembered how Renan—sain et sauf—had sent a challenge to his own end, and defying the possible weakness of age and sickness, had demanded to be judged by the convictions of life, and not by the terrors of death. She tried to fortify her own mind by the recollection.

The first days of June broke radiantly over the great gorge and the woods which surround it. One morning, early, between four and five o'clock, Daphne came in, to find Madeleine awake and comparatively at ease. Yet the preceding twenty-four hours had been terrible, and her nurses knew that the end could not be far off.

The invalid had just asked that her couch might be drawn as near to the window as possible, and she lay looking towards the dawn, which rose in fresh and windless beauty over the town opposite and the white splendour of the Falls. The American Fall was still largely in shadow; but the light struck on the fresh green of Goat Island and leaped in tongues of fire along the edge of the Horseshoe, turning the rapids above it to flame and sending shafts into the vast tower of spray that holds the centre of the curve. Nature was all youth, glitter and delight; summer was rushing on the gorge; the mingling of wood and water was at its richest and noblest.

Madeleine turned her face towards the gorge, her wasted hands clasped on her breast. She beckoned Daphne with a smile, and Daphne knelt down beside her.

"The water!" said the whispering voice; "it was once so terrible. I am not afraid—now."

"No, darling. Why should you be?"

"I know now, I shall see him again."

Daphne was silent.

"I hoped it, but I couldn't be certain. That was so awful. Now—I am certain."

"Since you became a Catholic?"

She made a sign of assent.

"I couldn't be uncertain—I couldn't!" she added with fervour, looking strangely at Daphne. And Daphne understood that no voice less positive or self-confident than that of Catholicism, no religion less well provided with tangible rites and practices, could have lifted from the spirit the burden of that remorse which had yet killed the body.

A little later Madeleine drew her down again.

"I couldn't talk, Daphne—I was afraid; but I've written to you, just bit by bit, as I had strength. Oh, Daphne——!"

Then voice and strength failed her. Her eyes piteously followed her friend for a little, and then closed.

She lingered through the day; and at night when the June starlight was on the gorge, she passed away, with the voice of the Falls in her dying ears. A tragic beauty—"beauty born of murmuring sound—had passed into her face;" and that great plunge of many waters, which had been to her in life the symbol of anguish and guilt, had become in some mysterious way the comforter of her pain, the friend of her last sleep.

A letter was found for Daphne in the little box beside her bed.

It ran thus:

Daphne, Darling,—

"It was I who first taught you that we may follow our own lawless wills, and that marriage is something we may bend or break as we will. But, oh! it is not so. Marriage is mysterious and wonderful; it is the supreme test of men and women. If we wrong it, and despise it, we mutilate the divine in ourselves.

"Oh, Daphne! it is a small thing to say 'Forgive!' Yet it means the whole world.—

"And you can still say it to the living. It has been my anguish that I could only say it to the dead.... Daphne, good-bye! I have fought a long, long fight, but God is master—I bless—I adore——"

Daphne sat staring at the letter through a mist of unwilling tears. All its phrases, ideas, preconceptions, were unwelcome, unreal to her, though she knew they had been real to Madeleine.

Yet the compulsion of the dead was upon her, and of her scene with Boyson. What they asked of her—Madeleine and Alfred Boyson—was of course out of the question; the mere thought of that humiliating word "forgiveness" sent a tingle of passion through her. But was there no third course?—something which might prove to all the world how full of resource and generosity a woman may be?

She pondered through some sleepless hours; and at last she saw her way plain.

Within a week she had left New York for Europe.

CHAPTER XII

The ship on which Daphne travelled had covered about half her course. On a certain June evening Mrs. Floyd, walking up and down the promenade deck, found her attention divided between two groups of her fellow-travellers; one taking exercise on the same deck as herself; the other, a family party, on the steerage deck, on which many persons in the first class paused to look down with sympathy as they reached the dividing rail aft.

The group on the promenade deck consisted of a lady and gentleman, and a boy of seven. The elders walked rapidly; holding themselves stiffly erect, and showing no sign of acquaintance with anyone on board. The child dragged himself wearily along behind them, looking sometimes from side to side at the various people passing by, with eyes no less furtive than his mother's. She was a tall and handsome woman, with extravagantly marine clothes and much false hair. Her companion, a bulky and ill-favoured man, glanced superciliously at the ladies in the deck chairs, bestowing always a more attentive scrutiny than usual on a very pretty girl, who was lying reading midway down, with a white lace scarf draped round her beautiful hair and the harmonious oval of her face. Daphne, watching him, remembered that she had see him speaking to the girl—who was travelling alone—on one or two occasions. For the rest, they were a notorious couple. The woman had been twice divorced, after misdoings which had richly furnished the newspapers; the man belonged to a financial class with which reputable men of business associate no more than they are obliged. The ship left them severely alone; and they retaliated by a manner clearly meant to say that they didn't care a brass farthing for the ship.

The group on the steerage deck was of a very different kind. It was made up of a consumptive wife, a young husband and one or two children. The wife's malady, recently declared, had led to their being refused admission to the States. They had been turned back from the emigrant station on Ellis Island, and were now sadly returning to Liverpool. But the courage of the young and sweet-faced mother, the devotion of her Irish husband, the charm of her dark-eyed children, had roused much feeling in an idle ship, ready for emotion. There had been a collection for them among the passengers; a Liverpool shipowner, in the first class, had promised work to the young man on landing; the mother was to be sent to a sanatorium; the children cared for during her absence. The family made a kind of nucleus round which whatever humanity—or whatever imitation of it—there was on board might gather and crystallize. There were other mournful cases indeed to be studied on the steerage deck, but none in which misfortune was so attractive.

As she walked up and down, or sat in the tea room catching fragments of the conversation round her, Daphne was often secretly angered by the public opinion she perceived, favourable in the one case, hostile in the other. How ignorant and silly it was—this public opinion. As to herself, she was soon aware that a few people on board had identified her and communicated their knowledge to others. On the whole, she felt herself treated with deference. Her own version of her story was clearly accepted, at least by the majority; some showed her an unspoken but evident sympathy, while her wealth made her generally interesting. Yet there were two or three in whom she felt or fancied a more critical attitude; who looked at her coolly, and seemed to avoid her. Bostonian Pharisees, no doubt!—ignorant of all those great expansions of the female destiny that were going forward.

The fact was—she admitted it—that she was abnormally sensitive. These moral judgments, of different sorts, of which she was conscious, floating as it were in the life around her, which her mind isolated and magnified, found her smarting and sore, and would not let her be. Her irritable pride was touched at every turn; she hardly knew why. She was not to be judged by anybody; she was her own defender and her own judge. If she was no longer a symbolic and sympathetic figure—like that young mother among her children—she had her own claims. In the secrecy of the mind she fiercely set them out.

The days passed, however, and as she neared the English shores her resistance to a pursuing thought became fainter. It was, of course, Boyson's astonishing appeal to her that had let loose the Avenging Goddesses. She repelled them with scorn; yet all the same they hurtled round her. After all, she was no monster. She had done a monstrous thing in a sudden brutality of egotism; and a certain crude state of law and opinion had helped her to do it, had confused the moral values and falsified her conscience. But she was not yet brutalized. Moreover, do what she would, she was still in a world governed by law; a world at the heart of which broods a power austere and immutable; a power which man did not make, which, if he clash with it, grinds him to powder. Its manifestations in Daphne's case were slight, but enough. She was not happy, that certainly was clear. She did not suppose she ever would be happy again. Whatever it was—just, heroic, or the reverse—the action by which she had violently changed her life had not been a success, estimated by results. No other man had attracted her since she had cast Roger off; her youth seemed to be deserting her; she saw herself in the glass every morning with discontent, even a kind of terror; she had lost her child. And in these suspended hours of the voyage, when life floats between sky and sea, amid the infinity of weaves, all that she had been doing since the divorce, her public "causes" and triumphs, the adulations with which she had been surrounded, began to seem to her barren and futile. No, she was not happy; what she had done had not answered; and she knew it.

One night, a night of calm air and silvery sea, she hung over the ship's side, dreaming rather miserably. The ship, aglow with lights, alive with movement, with talk, laughter and music, glided on between the stars and the unfathomable depths of the mid-Atlantic. Nothing, to north and south, between her and the Poles; nothing but a few feet of iron and timber between her and the hungry gulfs in which the highest Alp would sink from sight. The floating palace, hung by Knowledge above Death, just out of Death's reach, suggested to her a number of melancholy thoughts and images. A touch of more than Arctic cold stole upon her, even through this loveliness of a summer night; she felt desperately unhappy and alone.

From the saloon came a sound of singing:

"An die Lippen wollt' ich pressen
Deine kleine weisse Hand,
Und mit Thränen sie benetzen
Deine kleine weisse Hand."

The tears came to her eyes. She remembered that she, too, had once felt the surrender and the tenderness of love.

Then she brushed the tears away, angry with herself and determined to brood no more. But she looked round her in vain for a companion who might distract her. She had made no friends on board, and though she had brought with her a secretary and a maid, she kept them both at arm's length, and they never offered their society without an invitation.

What was she going to do? And why was she making this journey?

Because the injustice and absurdity of English law had distorted and besmirched her own perfectly legitimate action. They had given a handle to such harsh critics as Alfred Boyson. But she meant somehow to put herself right; and not only herself, but the great cause of woman's freedom and independence. No woman, in the better future that is coming, shall be forced either by law or opinion to continue the relations of marriage with a man she has come to despise. Marriage is merely proclaimed love; and if love fails, marriage has no further meaning or raison d'être; it comes, or should come, automatically to an end. This is the first article in the woman's charter, and without it marriage itself has neither value nor sanctity. She seemed to hear sentences of this sort, in her own voice, echoing about windy halls, producing waves of emotion on a sea of strained faces—women's faces, set and pale, like that of Madeleine Verrier. She had never actually made such a speech, but she felt she would like to have made it.

What was she going to do? No doubt Roger would resent her coming—would probably refuse to see her, as she had once refused to see him. Well, she must try and act with dignity and common sense; she must try and persuade him to recognize her good faith, and to get him to listen to what she proposed. She had her plan for Roger's reclamation, and was already in love with it. Naturally, she had never meant permanently to hurt or injure Roger! She had done it for his good as well as her own. Yet even as she put this plea forward in the inner tribunal of consciousness, she knew that it was false.

"You have murdered a life!" Well, that was what prejudiced and hide-bound persons like Alfred Boyson said, and no doubt always would say. She could not help it; but for her own dignity's sake, that moral dignity in which she liked to feel herself enwrapped, she would give as little excuse for it as possible.

Then, as she stood looking eastward, a strange thought struck her. Once on that farther shore and she would be Roger's wife again—an English subject, and Roger's wife. How ridiculous, and how intolerable! When shall we see some real comity of nations in these matters of international marriage and divorce?

She had consulted her lawyers in New York before starting; on Roger's situation first of all, but also on her own. Roger, it seemed, might take certain legal steps, once he was aware of her being again on English ground. But, of course, he would not take them. "It was never me he cared for—only Beatty!" she said to herself with a bitter perversity. Still the thought of returning within the range of the old obligations, the old life, affected her curiously. There were hours, especially at night, when she felt shut up with thoughts of Roger and Beatty—her husband and her child—just as of old.

How, in the name of justice, was she to blame for Roger's illness? Her irritable thoughts made a kind of grievance against him of the attack of pneumonia which she was told had injured his health. He must have neglected himself in some foolish way. The strongest men are the most reckless of themselves. In any case, how was it her fault?

One night she woke up suddenly, in the dawn, her heart beating tumultuously. She had been dreaming of her meeting—her possible meeting—with Roger. Her face was flushed, her memory confused. She could not recall the exact words or incidents of the dream, only that Roger had been in some way terrible and terrifying.

And as she sat up in her berth, trying to compose herself, she recalled the last time she had seen him at Philadelphia—a painful scene—and his last broken words to her, as he turned back from the door to speak them:—

"As to Beatty, I hold you responsible! She is my child, no less than yours. You shall answer to me! Remember that!"

Answer to him? Beatty was dead—in spite of all that love and science could do. Involuntarily she began to weep as she remembered the child's last days; the little choked cry, once or twice, for "Daddy!" followed, so long as life maintained its struggle, by a childish anger that he did not come. And then the silencing of the cry, and the last change and settling in the small face, so instinct already with feeling and character, so prophetic of the woman to be.

A grief, of course, never to be got over; but for which she, Daphne, deserved pity and tenderness, not reproaches. She hardened herself to meet the coming trial.

She arrived in London in the first week of July, and her first act was to post a letter to Herbert French, addressed to his East-End vicarage, a letter formally expressed and merely asking him to give the writer "twenty minutes' conversation on a subject of common interest to us both." The letter was signed "Daphne Floyd," and a stamped envelope addressed to "Mrs. Floyd" was enclosed. By return of post she received a letter from a person unknown to her, the curate, apparently, in charge of Mr. French's parish. The letter informed her that her own communication had not been forwarded, as Mr. French had gone away for a holiday after a threat of nervous breakdown in consequence of overwork; and business letters and interviews were being spared him as much as possible. "He is, however, much better, I am glad to say, and if the subject on which you wish to speak to him is really urgent, his present address is Prospect House, St. Damian's, Ventnor. But unless it is urgent it would be a kindness not to trouble him with it until he returns to town, which will not be for another fortnight."

Daphne walked restlessly up and down her hotel sitting-room. Of course the matter was urgent. The health of an East-End clergyman—already, it appeared, much amended—was not likely to seem of much importance to a woman of her temperament, when it stood in the way of her plans.

But she would not write, she would go. She had good reason to suppose that Herbert French would not welcome a visit from her; he might indeed very easily use his health as an excuse for not seeing her. But she must see him.

By mid-day she was already on her way to the Isle of Wight. About five o'clock she arrived at Ventnor, where she deposited maid and luggage. She then drove out alone to St. Damian's, a village a few miles north, through a radiant evening. The twinkling sea was alive with craft of all sizes, from the great liner leaving its trail of smoke along the horizon, to the white-sailed yachts close upon the land. The woods of the Undercliff sank softly to the blues and purple, the silver streaks and gorgeous shadows of the sea floor. The lights were broad and rich. After a hot day, coolness had come and the air was delightful.

But Daphne sat erect, noticing nothing but the relief of the lowered temperature after her hot and tiresome journey. She applied herself occasionally to natural beauty, as she applied herself to music or literature, but it is not to women of her type that the true passion of it—"the soul's bridegroom"—comes. And she was absorbed in thinking how she should open her business to Herbert French.

Prospect House turned out to be a detached villa standing in a garden, with a broad view of the Channel. Daphne sent her carriage back to the inn and climbed the steep drive which led up to the verandaed house. The front garden was empty, but voices—voices, it seemed, of children—came from behind the house where there was a grove of trees.

"Is Mr. Herbert French at home?" she asked of the maid who answered her bell.

The girl looked at her doubtfully.

"Yes, ma'am—but he doesn't see visitors yet. Shall I tell Mrs. French? She's in the garden with the children."

"No, thank you," said Daphne, firmly. "It's Mr. French I have come to see, and I am sure that he will wish to see me. Will you kindly give him my card? I will come in and wait."

And she brushed past the maid, who was intimidated by the visitor's fashionable dress and by the drooping feathers of her Paris hat, in which the sharp olive-skinned face with its magnificent eyes was picturesquely framed. The girl gave way unwillingly, showed Mrs. Floyd into a small study looking on the front garden, and left her.

"Elsie!" cried Herbert French, springing from the low chair in which he had been lounging in his shirt-sleeves with a book when the parlour-maid found him, "Elsie!"

His wife, who was at the other end of the lawn, playing with the children, the boy on her back and a pair of girl twins clinging to her skirts, turned in astonishment and hurried back to him.

"Mrs. Floyd?" They both looked at the card in bewilderment. "Who is it? Mrs. Floyd?"

Then French's face changed.

"What is this lady like?" he asked peremptorily of the parlour-maid.

"Well, sir, she's a dark lady, dressed very smart——"

"Has she very black eyes?"

"Oh yes, sir!"

"Young?"

The girl promptly replied in the negative, qualifying it a moment afterward by a perplexed "Well, I shouldn't say so, sir."

French thought a moment.

"Thank you. I will come in."

He turned to his wife with a rapid question, under his breath. "Where is Roger?"

Elsie stared at him, her colour paling.

"Herbert!—it can't—it can't——"

"I suspect it is—Mrs. Barnes," said French slowly. "Help me on with my coat, darling. Now then, what shall we do?"

"She can't have come to force herself on him!" cried his wife passionately.

"Probably she knows nothing of his being here. Did he go for a walk?"

"Yes, towards Sandown. But he will be back directly."

A quick shade of expression crossed French's face, which his wife knew to mean that whenever Roger was out by himself there was cause for anxiety. But the familiar trouble was immediately swallowed up in the new and pressing one.

"What can that woman have come to say?" he asked, half of himself, half of his wife, as he walked slowly back to the house. Elsie had conveyed the children to their nurse, and was beside him.

"Perhaps she repents!" The tone was dry and short; it flung a challenge to misdoing.

"I doubt it! But Roger?" French stood still, pondering. "Keep him, darling—intercept him if you can. If he must see her, I will come out. But we mustn't risk a shock."

They consulted a little in low voices. Then French went into the house and Elsie came back to her children. She stood thinking, her fine face, so open-browed and purely lined, frowning and distressed.

"You wished to see me, Mrs. Barnes?"

French had closed the door of the study behind him and stood without offering to shake hands with his visitor, coldly regarding her.

Daphne rose from her seat, reddening involuntarily.

"My name is no longer what you once knew it, Mr. French. I sent you my card."

French made a slight inclination and pointed to the chair from which she had risen.

"Pray sit down. May I know what has brought you here?"

Daphne resumed her seat, her small hands fidgeting on her parasol.

"I wished to come and consult with you, Mr. French. I had heard a distressing account of—of Roger, from a friend in America."

"I see," said French, on whom a sudden light dawned. "You met Boyson at Niagara—that I knew—and you are here because of what he said to you?"

"Yes, partly." The speaker looked round the room, biting her lip, and French observed her for a moment. He remembered the foreign vivacity and dash, the wilful grace of her youth, and marvelled at her stiffened, pretentious air, her loss of charm. Instinctively the saint in him knew from the mere look of her that she had been feeding herself on egotisms and falsehoods, and his heart hardened. Daphne resumed:

"If Captain Boyson has given you an account of our interview, Mr. French, it was probably a one-sided one. However, that is not the point. He did distress me very much by his account, which I gather came from you—of—of Roger, and although, of course, it is a very awkward matter for me to move in, I still felt impelled for old times' sake to come over and see whether I could not help you—and his other friends—and, of course, his mother——"

"His mother is out of the question," interrupted French. "She is, I am sorry to say, a helpless invalid."

"Is it really as bad as that? I hoped for better news. Then I apply to you—to you chiefly. Is there anything that I could do to assist you, or others, to——"

"To save him?" French put in the words as she hesitated.

Daphne was silent.

"What is your idea?" asked French, after a moment. "You heard, I presume, from Captain Boyson that my wife and I were extremely anxious about Roger's ways and habits; that we cannot induce him, or, at any rate, we have not yet been able to induce him, to give up drinking; that his health is extremely bad, and that we are sometimes afraid that there is now some secret in his life of which he is ashamed?"

"Yes," said Daphne, fidgeting with a book on the table. "Yes, that is what I heard."

"And you have come to suggest something?"

"Is there no way by which Roger can become as free as I now am!" she said suddenly, throwing back her head.

"By which Roger can obtain his divorce from you—and marry again? None, in English law."

"But there is—in Colonial law." She began to speak hurriedly and urgently. "If Roger were to go to New Zealand, or to Australia, he could, after a time, get a divorce for desertion. I know he could—I have inquired. It doesn't seem to be certain what effect my action—the American decree, I mean—would have in an English colony. My lawyers are going into it. But at any rate there is the desertion and then"—she grew more eager—"if he married abroad—in the Colony—the marriage would be valid. No one could say a word to him when he returned to England."

French looked at her in silence. She went on—with the unconscious manner of one accustomed to command her world, to be the oracle and guide of subordinates:—

"Could we not induce him to go? Could you not? Very likely he would refuse to see me; and, of course, he has, most unjustly to me, I think, refused to take any money from me. But the money might be provided without his knowing where it came from. A young doctor might be sent with him—some nice fellow who would keep him amused and look after him. At Heston he used to take a great interest in farming. He might take up land. I would pay anything—anything! He might suppose it came from some friend."

French smiled sadly. His eyes were on the ground. She bent forward.

"I beg of you, Mr. French, not to set yourself against me! Of course"—she drew herself up proudly—"I know what you must think of my action. Our views are different, irreconcilably different. You probably think all divorce wrong. We think, in America, that a marriage which has become a burden to either party is no marriage, and ought to cease. But that, of course"—she waved a rhetorical hand—"we cannot discuss. I do not propose for a moment to discuss it. You must allow me my national point of view. But surely we can, putting all that aside, combine to help Roger?"

"To marry again?" said French, slowly. "It can't, I fear, be done—what you propose—in the time. I doubt whether Roger has two years to live."

Daphne started.

"Roger!—to live?" she repeated, in horror. "What is really the matter? Surely nothing more than care and a voyage could set right?"

French shook his head.

"We have been anxious about him for some time. That terrible attack of septic pneumonia in New York, as we now know, left the heart injured and the lungs weakened. He was badly nursed, and his state of mind at the time—his misery and loneliness—left him little chance. Then the drinking habit, which he contracted during those wretched months in the States, has been of course sorely against him. However, we hoped against hope—Elsie and I—till a few weeks ago. Then someone, we don't know who, made him go to a specialist, and the verdict is—phthisis; not very advanced, but certain and definite. And the general outlook is not favourable."

Daphne had grown pale.

"We must send him away!" she said imperiously. "We must! A voyage, a good doctor, a dry climate, would save him, of course they would! Why, there is nothing necessarily fatal now in phthisis! Nothing! It is absurd to talk as though there were."

Again French looked at her in silence. But as she had lost colour, he had gained it. His face, which the East End had already stamped, had grown rosy, his eyes sparkled.

"Oh, do say something! Tell me what you suggest?" cried Daphne.

"Do you really wish me to tell you what I suggest?"

Daphne waited, her eyes first imploring, then beginning to shrink. He bent forward and touched her on the arm.

"Go, Mrs. Barnes, and ask your husband's forgiveness! What will come of it I do not know. But you, at least, will have done something to set yourself right—with God."

The Christian and the priest had spoken; the low voice in its intensity had seemed to ring through the quiet sun-flooded room. Daphne rose, trembling with resentment and antagonism.

"It is you, then, Mr. French, who make it impossible for me to discuss—to help. I shall have to see if I can find some other means of carrying out my purpose."

There was a voice outside. Daphne turned.

"Who is that?"

French ran to the glass door that opened on the veranda, and trying for an ordinary tone, waved somebody back who was approaching from without. Elsie came quickly round the corner of the house, calling to the new-comer.

But Daphne saw who it was and took her own course. She, too, went to the window, and, passing French, she stepped into the veranda.

"Roger!"

A man hurried through the dusk. There was an exclamation, a silence. By this time French was on the lawn, his wife's quivering hand in his. Daphne retreated slowly into the study and Roger Barnes followed her.

"Leave them alone," said French, and putting an arm round his wife he led her resolutely away, out of sound and sight.

Barnes stood silent, breathing heavily and leaning on the back of a chair. The western light from a side window struck full on him. But Daphne, the wave of excitement spent, was not looking at him. She had fallen upon a sofa, her face was in her hands.

"What do you want with me?" said Roger at last. Then, in a sudden heat, "By God, I never wished to see you again!"

Daphne's muffled voice came through her fingers.

"I know that. You needn't tell me so!"

Roger turned away.

"You'll admit it's an intrusion?" he said fiercely. "I don't see what you and I have got to do with each other now."

Daphne struggled for self-control. After all, she had always managed him in the old days. She would manage him now.

"Roger—I—I didn't come to discuss the past. That's done with. But—I heard things about you—that——"

"You didn't like?" he laughed. "I'm sorry, but I don't see what you have to do with them."

Daphne's hand fidgeted with her dress, her eyes still cast down.

"Couldn't we talk without bitterness? Just for ten minutes? It was from Captain Boyson that I heard——"

"Oh, Boyson, was that it? And he got his information from French—poor old Herbert. Well, it's quite true. I'm no longer fit for your—or his—or anybody's society."

He threw himself into an arm-chair, calmly took a cigarette out of a box that lay near, and lit it. Daphne at last ventured to look at him. The first and dominant impression was of something shrunken and diminished. His blue flannel suit hung loose on his shoulders and chest, his athlete's limbs. His features had been thinned and graved and scooped by fever and broken nights; all the noble line and proportion was still there, but for one who had known him of old the effect was no longer beautiful but ghastly. Daphne stared at him in dismay.

He on his side observed his visitor, but with a cooler curiosity. Like French he noticed the signs of change, the dying down of brilliance and of bloom. To go your own way, as Daphne had done, did not seem to conduce to a woman's good looks.

At last he threw in a dry interrogation.

"Well?"

"I came to try and help you," Daphne broke out, turning her head away, "to ask Mr. French what I could do. It made me unhappy——"

"Did it?" He laughed again. "I don't see why. Oh, you needn't trouble yourself. Elsie and Herbert are awfully good to me. They're all I want, or at any rate," he hesitated a moment, "they're all I shall want—from now on. Anyway, you know there'd be something grotesque in your trying your hand at reforming me."

"I didn't mean anything of the kind!" she protested, stung by his tone. "I—I wanted to suggest something practical—some way by which you might—release yourself from me—and also recover your health."

"Release myself from you?" he repeated. "That's easier said than done. Did you mean to send me to the Colonies—was that your idea?"

His smile was hard to bear. But she went on, choking, yet determined.

"That seems to be the only way—in English law. Why shouldn't you take it? The voyage, the new climate, would probably set you up again. You need only be away a short time."

He looked at her in silence a moment, fingering his cigarette.

"Thank you," he said at last, "thank you. And I suppose you offered us money? You told Herbert you would pay all expenses? Oh, don't be angry! I didn't mean anything uncivil. But," he raised himself with energy from his lounging position, "at the same time, perhaps you ought to know that I would sooner die a thousand times over than take a single silver sixpence that belonged to you!"

Their eyes met, his quite calm, hers sparkling with resentment and pain.

"Of course I can't argue with you if you meet me in that tone," she said passionately. "But I should have thought——"

"Besides," he interrupted her, "you say it is the only way. You are quite mistaken. It is not the only way. As far as freeing me goes, you could divorce me to-morrow—here—if you liked. I have been unfaithful to you. A strange way of putting it—at the present moment—between you and me! But that's how it would appear in the English courts. And as to the 'cruelty'—that wouldn't give you any trouble!"

Daphne had flushed deeply. It was only by a great effort that she maintained her composure. Her eyes avoided him.

"Mrs. Fairmile?" she said in a low voice.

He threw back his head with a sound of scorn.

"Mrs. Fairmile! You don't mean to tell me, Daphne, to my face, that you ever believed any of the lies—forgive the expression—that you, and your witnesses, and your lawyers told in the States—that you bribed those precious newspapers to tell?"

"Of course I believed it!" she said fiercely. "And as for lies, it was you who began them."

"You believed that I had betrayed you with Chloe Fairmile?" He raised himself again, fixing his strange deep-set gaze upon her.

"I never said——"

"No! To that length you didn't quite go. I admit it. You were able to get your way without it." He sank back in his chair again. "No, my remark had nothing to do with Chloe. I have never set eyes on her since I left you at Heston. But—there was a girl, a shop-girl, a poor little thing, rather pretty. I came across her about six months ago—it doesn't matter how. She loves me, she was awfully good to me, a regular little brick. Some day I shall tell Herbert all about her—not yet—though, of course, he suspects. She'd serve your purpose, if you thought it worth while. But you won't——"

"You're—living with her—now?"

"No. I broke with her a fortnight ago, after I'd seen those doctors. She made me see them, poor little soul. Then I went to say good-bye to her, and she," his voice shook a little, "she took it hard. But it's all right. I'm not going to risk her life, or saddle her with a dying man. She's with her sister. She'll get over it."

He turned his head towards the window, his eyes pursued the white sails on the darkening blue outside.

"It's been a bad business, but it wasn't altogether my fault. I saved her from someone else, and she saved me, once or twice, from blowing my brains out."

"What did the doctors say to you?" asked Daphne, brusquely, after a pause.

"They gave me about two years," he said, indifferently, turning to knock off the end of his cigarette. "That doesn't matter." Then, as his eyes caught her face, a sudden animation sprang into his. He drew his chair nearer to her and threw away his cigarette. "Look here, Daphne, don't let's waste time. We shall never see each other again, and there are a number of things I want to know. Tell me everything you can remember about Beatty that last six months—and about her illness, you understand—never mind repeating what you told Boyson, and he told me. But there's lots more, there must be. Did she ever ask for me? Boyson said you couldn't remember. But you must remember!"

He came closer still, his threatening eyes upon her. And as he did so, the dark presence of ruin and death, of things damning and irrevocable, which had been hovering over their conversation, approached with him—flapped their sombre wings in Daphne's face. She trembled all over.

"Yes," she said, faintly, "she did ask for you."

"Ah!" He gave a cry of delight. "Tell me—tell me at once—everything—from the beginning!"

And held by his will, she told him everything—all the piteous story of the child's last days—sobbing herself; and for the first time making much of the little one's signs of remembering her father, instead of minimizing and ignoring them, as she had done in the talk with Boyson. It was as though for the first time she were trying to stanch a wound instead of widening it.

He listened eagerly. The two heads—the father and mother—drew closer; one might have thought them lovers still, united by tender and sacred memories.

But at last Roger drew himself away. He rose to his feet.

"I'll forgive you much for that!" he said with a long breath. "Will you write it for me some day—all you've told me?"

She made a sign of assent.

"Well, now, you mustn't stay here any longer. I suppose you've got a carriage? And we mustn't meet again. There's no object in it. But I'll remember that you came."

She looked at him. In her nature the great deeps were breaking up. She saw him as she had seen him in her first youth. And, at last, what she had done was plain to her.

With a cry she threw herself on the floor beside him. She pressed his hand in hers.

"Roger, let me stay! Let me nurse you!" she panted. "I didn't understand. Let me be your friend! Let me help! I implore—I implore you!"

He hesitated a moment, then he lifted her to her feet decidedly, but not unkindly.

"What do you mean?" he said, slowly. "Do you mean that you wish us to be husband and wife again? You are, of course, my wife, in the eye of English law, at this moment."

"Let me try and help you!" she pleaded again, breaking into bitter tears. "I didn't—I didn't understand!"

He shook his head.

"You can't help me. I—I'm afraid I couldn't bear it. We mustn't meet. It—it's gone too deep."

He thrust his hands into his pockets and walked away to the window. She stood helplessly weeping.

When he returned he was quite composed again.

"Don't cry so," he said, calmly. "It's done. We can't help it. And don't make yourself too unhappy about me. I've had awful times. When I was ill in New York—it was like hell. The pain was devilish, and I wasn't used to being alone, and nobody caring a damn, and everybody believing me a cad and a bully. But I got over that. It was Beatty's death that hit me so hard, and that I wasn't there. It's that, somehow, I can't get over—that you did it—that you could have had the heart. It would always come between us. No, we're better apart. But I'll tell you something to comfort you. I've given up that girl, as I've told you, and I've given up drink. Herbert won't believe it, but he'll find it is so. And I don't mean to die before my time. I'm going out to Switzerland directly. I'll do all the correct things. You see, when a man knows he's going to die, well," he turned away, "he gets uncommonly curious as to what's going to come next."

He walked up and down a few turns. Daphne watched him.

"I'm not pious—I never was. But after all, the religious people profess to know something about it, and nobody else does. Just supposing it were true?"

He stopped short, looking at her. She understood perfectly that he had Beatty in his mind.

"Well, anyhow, I'm going to live decently for the rest of my time—and die decently. I'm not going to throw away chances. And don't trouble yourself about money. There's enough left to carry me through. Good-bye, Daphne!" He held out his hand to her.

She took it, still dumbly weeping. He looked at her with pity.

"Yes, I know, you didn't understand what you were doing. But you see, Daphne, marriage is——" he sought rather painfully for his words, "it's a big thing. If it doesn't make us, it ruins us; I didn't marry you for the best of reasons, but I was very fond of you—honour bright! I loved you in my way, I should have loved you more and more. I should have been a decent fellow if you'd stuck to me. I had all sorts of plans; you might have taught me anything. I was a fool about Chloe Fairmile, but there was nothing in it, you know there wasn't. And now it's all rooted up and done with. Women like to think such things can be mended, but they can't—they can't, indeed. It would be foolish to try."

Daphne sank upon a chair and buried her face in her hands. He drew a long and painful breath. "I'm afraid I must go," he said waveringly. "I—I can't stand this any longer. Good-bye, Daphne, good-bye."

She only sobbed, as though her life dissolved in grief. He drew near to her, and as she wept, hidden from him, he laid his hand a moment on her shoulder. Then he took up his hat.

"I'm going now," he said in a low voice. "I shan't come back till you have gone."

She heard him cross the room, his steps in the veranda. Outside, in the summer dark, a figure came to meet him. French drew Roger's arm into his, and the two walked away. The shadows of the wooded lane received them.

A woman came quickly into the room.

Elsie French looked down upon the sobbing Daphne, her own eyes full of tears, her hands clasped.

"Oh, you poor thing!" she said, under her breath. "You poor thing!" And she knelt down beside her and folded her arms round her.

So from the same heart that had felt a passionate pity for the victim, compassion flowed out on the transgressor. For where others feel the tragedy of suffering, the pure in heart realize with an infinitely sharper pain the tragedy of guilt.

THE END

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Amiel's Journal (translated)
Miss Bretherton
Robert Elsmere
The History of David Grieve
Marcella
Sir George Tressady
Helbeck of Bannisdale
Eleanor
Lady Rose's Daughter
The Marriage of William Ashe
Agatha
Fenwick's Career
Milly and Olly
The Testing of Diana Mallory