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THE TRUANTS

THE TRUANTS

BY

A. E. W. MASON

AUTHOR OF

"THE FOUR FEATHERS," "MIRANDA OF THE BALCONY,"
ETC., ETC.

LONDON
SMITH, ELDER & CO., 15, WATERLOO PLACE
1904

(All rights reserved)

PRINTED BY
WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED,
LONDON AND BECCLES.

CONTENTS

THE TRUANTS

CHAPTER I

[PAMELA MARDALE LEARNS A VERY LITTLE HISTORY]

There were only two amongst all Pamela Mardale's friends who guessed that anything was wrong with her; and those two included neither her father nor her mother. Her mother, indeed, might have guessed, had she been a different woman. But she was a woman of schemes and little plots, who watched with concentration their immediate developments, but had no eyes for any lasting consequence. And it was no doubt as well for her peace of mind that she never guessed. But of the others it was unlikely that any one would suspect the truth. For Pamela made no outward sign. She hunted through the winter from her home under the Croft Hill in Leicestershire; she went everywhere, as the saying is, during the season in London; she held her own in her own world, lacking neither good spirits nor the look of health. There were, perhaps, two small peculiarities which marked her off from her companions. She was interested in things rather than in persons, and she preferred to talk to old men rather than to youths. But such points, taken by themselves, were not of an importance to attract attention.

Yet there were two amongst her friends who suspected: Alan Warrisden and the schoolmaster of Roquebrune, the little village carved out of the hillside to the east of Monte Carlo. The schoolmaster was the nearer to the truth, for he not only knew that something was amiss, he suspected what the something was. But then he had a certain advantage, since he had known Pamela Mardale when she was a child. Their acquaintance came about in the following way--

He was leaning one evening of December over the parapet of the tiny square beside the schoolhouse, when a servant from the Villa Pontignard approached him.

"Could M. Giraud make it convenient to call at the villa at noon to-morrow?" the servant asked. "Madame Mardale was anxious to speak to him."

M. Giraud turned about with a glow of pleasure upon his face.

"Certainly," he replied. "But nothing could be more simple. I will be at the Villa Pontignard as the clock strikes."

The servant bowed, and without another word paced away across the square and up the narrow winding street of Roquebrune, leaving the schoolmaster a little abashed at his display of eagerness. M. Giraud recognised that in one man's mind, at all events, he was now set down for a snob, for a lackey disguised as a schoolmaster. But the moment of shame passed. He had no doubt as to the reason of the summons, and he tingled with pride from head to foot. It was his little brochure upon the history of the village--written with what timidity, and printed at what cost to his meagre purse!--which had brought him recognition from the lady of the villa upon the spur of the hill. Looking upwards he could just see the white walls of the villa glimmering through the dusk, he could imagine its garden of trim lawns and dark cypresses falling from bank to bank in ordered tiers down the hillside.

"To-morrow at noon," he repeated to himself; and now he was seized with a shiver of fear at the thought of the mistakes in behaviour which he was likely to make. What if Madame Mardale asked him to breakfast? There would be unfamiliar dishes to be eaten with particular forks. Sometimes a knife should be used and sometimes not. He turned back to the parapet with the thought that he had better, perhaps, send up a note in the morning pleading his duties at the school as a reason for breaking his engagement. But he was young, and as he looked down the steep slope of rock on which the village is perched, anticipation again got the better of fear. He began to build up his life like a fairy palace from the foundation of this brief message.

A long lane of steps led winding down from the square, and his eyes followed it, as his feet had often done, to the little railway station by the sea through which people journeyed to and fro between the great cities, westwards to France and Paris, eastwards to Rome and Italy. His eyes followed the signal lights towards another station of many lamps far away to the right, and as he looked there blazed out suddenly other lights of a great size and a glowing brilliancy, lights which had the look of amazing jewels discovered in an eastern cave. These were the lights upon the terrace of Monte Carlo. The schoolmaster had walked that terrace on his mornings of leisure, had sat unnoticed on the benches, all worship of the women and their daintiness, all envy of the men and the composure of their manner. He knew none of them, and yet one of them had actually sent for him, and had heard of his work. He was to speak with her at noon to-morrow.

Let it be said at once that there was nothing of the lackey under the schoolmaster's shabby coat. The visit which he was bidden to pay was to him not so much a step upwards as outwards. Living always in this remote high village, where the rock cropped out between the houses, and the streets climbed through tunnels of rock, he was always tormented with visions of great cities and thoroughfares ablaze; he longed for the jostle of men, he craved for other companionship than he could get in the village wineshop on the first floor, as a fainting man craves for air. The stars came out above his head; it was a clear night, and they had never shone brighter. The Mediterranean, dark and noiseless, swept out at his feet beyond the woods of Cap Martin. But he saw neither the Mediterranean nor any star. His eyes turned to the glowing terrace upon his right, and to the red signal-lamps below the terrace.

M. Giraud kept his engagement punctually. The clock chimed upon the mantelpiece a few seconds after he was standing in the drawing-room of the Villa Pontignard, and before the clock had stopped chiming Mrs. Mardale came in to him. She was a tall woman, who, in spite of her years, still retained the elegance of her youth, but her face was hard and a trifle querulous, and M. Giraud was utterly intimidated. On the other hand, she had good manners, and the friendly simplicity with which she greeted him began to set him at his ease.

"You are a native of Roquebrune, Monsieur?" said she.

"No, Madame, my father was a peasant at Aigues-Mortes. I was born there," he replied frankly.

"Yet you write, if I may say so, with the love of a native for his village," she went on. M. Giraud was on the point of explaining. Mrs. Mardale, however, was not in the least interested in his explanation, and she asked him to sit down.

"My daughter, Monsieur, has an English governess," she explained, "but it seems a pity that she should spend her winters here and lose the chance of becoming really proficient in French. The curé recommended me to apply to you, and I sent for you to see whether we could arrange that you should read history with her in French during your spare hours."

M. Giraud felt his head turning. Here was his opportunity so long dreamed of come at last. It might be the beginning of a career--it was at all events that first difficult step outwards. He was to be the teacher in appearance; at the bottom of his heart he knew that he was to be the pupil, he accepted the offer with enthusiasm, and the arrangements were made. Three afternoons a week he was to spend an hour at the Villa Pontignard.

"Well, I hope the plan will succeed, said Mrs. Mardale, but she spoke in a voice which showed that she had no great hopes of success. And as M. Giraud replied that he would at all events do his best, she rejoined plaintively--

"It is not of you, Monsieur, that I have any doubts. But you do not know my daughter. She will learn nothing which she does not want to learn, she will not endure any governess who is not entirely her slave, and she is fifteen and she really must learn something."

Pamela Mardale, indeed, was at this time the despair of her mother. Mrs. Mardale had mapped out for her daughter an ideal career. She was to be a model of decorum in the Early Victorian style, at once an ornament for a drawing-room and an excellent housekeeper, and she was subsequently to make a brilliant marriage. The weak point of the scheme was that it left Pamela out of the reckoning. There was her passion for horses for one thing, and her distinct refusal, besides, to sit quietly in any drawing-room. When she was a child, horses had been persons to Pamela rather than animals, and, as her conduct showed, persons preferable by far to human beings. Visitors to the house under Croft Hill were at times promised a sight of Pamela, and indeed they sometimes did see a girl in a white frock, with long black legs, and her hair tumbled all over her forehead, neighing and prancing at them from behind the gate of the stable yard. But they did not see her at closer quarters than that, and it was certain that if by any chance her lessons were properly learnt, they had been learnt upon the corn-bin in the stables. Portraits of Pamela at the age of nine remain, and they show a girl who was very pretty, but who might quite well have been a boy, with a mass of unruly dark hair, a pair of active dark eyes, and a good-humoured face alertly watching for any mischief which might come its way.

Something of the troubles which M. Giraud was likely to find ahead of him Mrs. Mardale disclosed that morning, and the schoolmaster returned to his house filled with apprehensions. The apprehensions, however, were not justified. The little schoolmaster was so shy, so timid, that Pamela was disarmed. She could be gentle when she chose, and she chose now. She saw, too, M. Giraud's anxiety to justify her mother's choice of him, and she determined with a sense of extreme virtue to be a credit to his teaching. They became friends, and thus one afternoon, when they had taken their books out into the garden of the villa, M. Giraud confided to her the history of the brochure which had made them acquainted.

"It was not love for Roquebrune which led me to write it," he said. "It was, on the contrary, my discontent. I was tortured with longings, I was not content with the children's lessons for my working hours, and the wineshop for my leisure. I took long walks over Cap Martin to Mentone, along the Corniche road to La Turbie, and up Mont Agel. But still I had my longings as my constant companions, and since everywhere I saw traces of antiquity, I wrote this little history as a relief. It kept my thoughts away from the great world."

The garden ran here to a point at the extreme end of that outcropping spur of rock on which the villa was built. They were facing westwards, and the sun was setting behind the hills. It lay red upon the Mediterranean on their left, but the ravine and front was already dark, and down the hillside the shadows of the trees were lengthening. At their feet, a long way below, a stream tumbled and roared amongst the oleanders in the depths of the ravine. Pamela sat gazing downwards, her lips parted in a smile.

"The great world," she said in a low voice of eagerness. "I wonder what it's like."

That afternoon marked a distinct step in their friendship, and thereafter in the intervals of their reading they talked continually upon this one point they had in common, their curiosity as to the life of the world beyond their village. But it happened that Pamela did the greater part of the talking, and one afternoon that fact occurred to her.

"You always listen now, Monsieur," she said. "Why have you grown so silent?"

"You know more than I do, Mademoiselle."

"I?" she exclaimed in surprise. "I only know about horses." Then she laughed. "Really, we both know nothing. We can only guess and guess."

And that was the truth. Pamela's ideas of the world were as visionary, as dreamlike as his, but they were not his, as he was quick to recognise. The instincts of her class, her traditions, the influence of her friends, were all audible in her voice as well as in her words. To her the world was a great flower garden of pleasure with plenty of room for horses. To him it was a crowded place of ennobling strife.

"But it's pleasant work guessing," she continued, "isn't it? Then why have you stopped?"

"I will tell you, Mademoiselle. I am beginning to guess through your eyes."

The whistle of a train, the train from Paris, mounted through the still air to their ears.

"Well," said Pamela, with a shrug of impatience, "we shall both know the truth some time."

"You will, Mademoiselle," said the schoolmaster, suddenly falling out of his dream.

Pamela looked quickly at him. The idea that he would be left behind, that he would stay here all his life listening to the sing-song drone of the children in the schoolroom, teaching over and over again with an infinite weariness the same elementary lessons, until he became shabby and worn as the lesson-books he handled, had never struck her till this moment. The trouble which clouded his face was reflected by sympathy upon hers.

"But you won't stay here," she said gently. "Oh no! Let me think!" and she thought with a child's oblivion of obstacles and a child's confidence. She imparted the wise result of her reflections to M. Giraud the next afternoon.

He came to the garden with his eyes fevered and his face drawn.

"You are ill?" said Pamela. "We will not work to-day."

"It's nothing," he replied.

"Tell me," said she.

M. Giraud looked out across the valley.

"Two travellers came up to Roquebrune yesterday. I met them as I walked home from here. I spoke to them and showed them the village, and took them by the short cut of the steps down to the railway station. They were from London. They talked of London and of Paris. It's as well visitors come up to Roquebrune rarely. I have not slept all night," and he clasped and unclasped his hands.

"Hannibal crossed the Alps," said Pamela. "I read it in your book," and then she shook a finger at him, just as the schoolmaster might have done to one of his refractory pupils.

"Listen," said she. "I have thought it all out."

The schoolmaster composed himself into the attentive attitude of a pupil.

"You are to become a Deputy."

That was the solution of the problem. Pamela saw no difficulties. He would need a dress-suit of course for official occasions, which she understood were numerous. A horse, too, would be of use, but that didn't matter so much. The horse was regretfully given up. It might come later, he must get elected first, never mind how. In a word, he was as good as a Deputy already. And from a Deputy to the President of the French Republic, the step after all was not so very long. "Though I am not quite sure that I approve of Republics," said Pamela, very seriously.

However, that was the best she could do in the way of mapping out his future, and the schoolmaster listened, seeing the world through her eyes. Thus three winters passed and Pamela learned a very little history.

Towards the end of the third winter the history books were put away. Pamela was now eighteen and looking eagerly forward to her first season in London. And no doubt frocks and hats occupied more of her thoughts than did the fortunes of the schoolmaster. Some remorse for her forgetfulness seized her the day before she went away. It was a morning of spring, and the schoolmaster saw her coming down the dark narrow streets towards him. She was tall beyond the average, but without ungainliness, long of limb and lightly built, and she walked with the very step of youth. Her dark hair swept in two heavy waves above her forehead, and was coiled down behind on the back of her neck. Her throat rose straight and slim from the firm shoulders, and her eyes glowed with anticipation. Though her hair was dark, she was not sallow. Her face was no less fresh and clear than were her eyes, and a soft colour like the bloom of a fruit brightened her cheeks. In that old brown street she shone like a brilliant flower, and Giraud, as he watched her, felt all at once that he could have no place in her life, and in his humility he turned aside. But she ran after him and caught him up.

"I am going to-morrow," she said, and she tried to keep the look of happiness out of her eyes, the thrill out of her voice. And she failed.

"It is good-bye, then," said he.

"For a little while. I shall come back to Roquebrune in December."

The schoolmaster smiled.

"I shall look forward from to-day until that month comes. You will have much to tell me."

"Yes, shan't I?" she cried; and then, lest her eagerness should hurt her friend, she added, "But I shall not forget our quiet afternoons on the garden terrace."

The recollection of them, however, was not strong enough to check either her thoughts or their utterance. Later on perhaps, in after years, she might in her musings return to that terrace and the speculations they indulged in, and the fairy palaces they built, with an envy of the ignorance and the high thoughts of youth. To-day she was all alert to grasp the future in her hands. One can imagine her looking much as she looked in those portraits of her childhood.

"News of the great world," she cried. "I shall bring it back. We will talk it over in Roquebrune and correct our guesses. For I shall know."

As a fact, they never did talk over her news, but that she could not foresee. She went on her way with a smile upon her face: all confidence and courage, and expectation, a brilliant image of youth. Giraud, as he watched her the proud poise of her head, the light springing step, the thing of beauty and gentleness which she was, breathed a prayer that no harm might come to her, and no grief ever sadden her face.

The next morning she went away, and the schoolmaster lost his one glimpse of the outer world. But he lived upon the recollections of it, and took again to his long walks on the Corniche road. The time hung heavily upon his hands. He hungered for news, and no news came, and when in the month of December he noticed that the shutters were opened in the Villa Pontignard, and that there was a stir of servants about the house, he felt that the shutters were being opened after a long dark time from his one window on the outside world. He frequented the little station from that moment. No "Rapide" passed from France on its way to Italy during his leisure hours but he was there to watch its passengers. Mrs. Mardale came first, and a fortnight afterwards Pamela descended from a carriage with her maid.

Giraud watched her with a thrill of longing. It was not merely his friend who had returned, but his instructor, with new and wonderful knowledge added to the old.

Then came his first chilling moment of disillusion. It was quite evident that she saw him as she was stepping on to the platform. Her eyes went straight to his--and yet she turned away without the slightest sign of recognition and busied herself about her luggage. The world had spoilt her. That was his first thought, but he came to a truer understanding afterwards. And indeed that thought had barely become definite in his mind, when she turned again, and, holding out her hand, came to him with a smile.

"You are well?" she said.

"Yes," said he.

And they walked up the long flight of steps to Roquebrune, talking banalities. She gave him none of the news for which he longed, and they spoke not at all of the career which together they had mapped out for him. All their long talks upon the terrace, their plans and their speculations seemed in an instant to Giraud to have become part of a pleasant, very foolish, and very distant past. He was aware of the vast gulf between them. With a girl's inimitable quickness to adapt herself to new surroundings, she had acquired in the few months of her absence the ease, the polish, and the armour of a woman of the world. He was still the village schoolmaster, the peasant tortured with vain aspirations, feeding upon vain dreams; and in this moment he saw himself very clearly. Her silence upon their plan helped him to see himself thus. Had she still believed in that imagined career, surely she would have spoken of it. In a word, he was still looking at the world through her eyes.

"You must come up to the villa," she said. "I shall look forward to your coming."

They were in the little square by the schoolhouse and he took the words for his dismissal. She went up the hill alone and slowly, like one that is tired. Giraud, watching her, could not but compare her with the girl who had come lightly down that street a few months ago. It dawned upon him that, though knowledge had been acquired, something had gone, something perhaps more valuable, the elasticity from her step, the eagerness from her eyes.

Giraud did not go up to the villa of his own accord, but he was asked to lunch in a week's time, and after lunch Pamela and he went out into the garden. Instinctively they walked down to that corner on the point of the bluff which overhung the ravine and the white torrent amongst the oleanders in its depths. They had come indeed to the bench on which they used to sit before Pamela was quite aware of the direction their steps had taken. She drew back suddenly as she raised her head.

"Oh no, not here," she cried, and she moved away quickly with a look of pain. Giraud suddenly understood why she had turned away at the railway station. Here they had dreamed, and the reality had shown the dreams to be bitterly false, so false that the very place where they had dreamed had become by its associations a place of pain. She had needed for herself that first moment when she had stepped down from the carriage.

"The world must be the home of great troubles,' said Giraud, sadly.

"And how do you know that?" Pamela asked with a smile.

"From you," he replied simply.

The answer was unexpected. Pamela stopped and looked at him with startled eyes.

"From me? I have said nothing--nothing at all."

"Yet I know. How else should I know except from you, since through you alone I see the world?"

"A home of great troubles?" she repeated, speaking lightly. "Not for all. You are serious, my friend, this afternoon, and you should not be, for have I not come back?"

The schoolmaster was not deceived by her evasion. There had come a gravity into her manner, and a womanliness into her face, in a degree more than natural at her years.

"Let us talk of you for a change," said she.

"Well, and what shall we say?" asked Giraud, and a constraint fell upon them both.

"We must forget those fine plans," he continued at length. "Is it not so? I think I have learnt that too from you."

"I hare said nothing," she interrupted quickly.

"Precisely," said he, with a smile. "The school at Roquebrune will send no Deputy to Paris."

"Oh! why not?" said Pamela, but there was no conviction in her voice. Giraud was not of the stern stuff

"To break his birth's invidious bar."

He had longings, but there was the end.

"At all events," she said, turning to him with a great earnestness, "we shall be friends always, whatever happens."

The words were the death-knell to the schoolmaster's aspirations. They conveyed so much more than was actually said. He took them bravely enough.

"That is a good thing," he said in all sincerity. "If I stay here all my life, I shall still have the memory of the years when I taught you history. I shall know, though I do not see you, that we are friends. It is a great thing for me."

"For me, too," said Pamela, looking straight into his eyes, and she meant her words no less than he had meant his. Yet to both they had the sound of a farewell. And in a way they were. They were the farewell to the afternoons upon the terrace, they closed the door upon their house of dreams.

Giraud leaned that evening over the parapet in the little square of Roquebrune. The Mediterranean lay dark and quiet far below, the terrace of Monte Carlo glowed, and the red signal-lamps pointed out the way to Paris. But he was no longer thinking of his fallen plans. He was thinking of the girl up there in the villa who had been struck by some blind blow of Destiny, who had grown a woman before her time. It was a pity, it was a loss in the general sum of things which make for joy.

He had of course only his suspicions to go upon. But they were soon strengthened. For Pamela fell into ill-health, and the period of ill-health lasted all that winter. After those two years had passed, she disappeared for a while altogether out of Giraud's sight. She came no more to the Villa Pontignard, but stayed with her father and her horses at her home in Leicestershire. Her mother came alone to Roquebrune.

CHAPTER II

[PAMELA LOOKS ON]

Alan Warrisden was one of the two men who had walked up to Roquebrune on that afternoon of which M. Giraud spoke. But it was not until Pamela had reached the age of twenty that he made her acquaintance at Lady Millingham's house in Berkeley Square. He took her down to dinner, and, to tell the truth, paid no particular attention either to her looks or her conversation. His neighbour upon the other side happened to be a friend whom he had not seen for some while, and for a good part of the dinner he talked to her. A few days afterwards, however, he called upon Lady Millingham, and she asked at once quite eagerly--

"Well, what did you think of Pamela Mardale?"

Warrisden was rather at a loss. He was evidently expected to answer with enthusiasm, and he had not any very definite recollections on which enthusiasm could be based. He did his best, however; but he was unconvincing. Lady Millingham shrugged her shoulders and frowned. She had been married precisely a year, and was engaged in plans for marrying off all her friends with the greatest possible despatch.

"I shall send you in with somebody quite old the next time you dine here," she said severely, and she discoursed at some length upon Pamela's charms. "She loves horses, and yet she's not a bit horsey," she said in conclusion, "and there's really nothing better than that. And just heaps of men have wanted to marry her." She leaned back against her sofa and contemplated Warrisden with silent scorn. She had set her heart upon this marriage more than upon any other. Of all the possible marriages in London, there was not one, to her mind, so suitable as this. Pamela Mardale came of one of the oldest families of commoners in Leicestershire. The family was not well off, the estate had shrunk year by year, and what was left was mortgaged, owing in some degree to that villa at Roquebrune upon which Mrs. Mardale insisted. Warrisden, on the other hand, was more than well off, his family was known, and at the age of twenty-eight he was still dividing his life between the season in London and shooting expeditions about the world. And he had the look of a man who might do something more.

That visit had its results. Warrisden met Pamela Mardale again and realised that Lady Millingham's indignation had been justified. At the end of that season he proposed, and was gently refused. But if he was slow to move, he was also firm to persevere. He hunted with the Quorn that winter, and during the following season he was persistently but unobtrusively at her elbow; so that Pamela came, at all events, to count upon him as a most reliable friend. Having duly achieved that place in her thoughts, he disappeared for ten months and returned to town one afternoon in the last week of June. There were letters waiting for him in his rooms, and amongst them a card from Lady Millingham inviting him to a dance upon that night. At eleven o'clock his coupé turned out of Piccadilly and entered Berkeley Square. At the bottom of the square the lighted windows of the house blazed out upon the night, the balconies were banked with flowers, and behind the flowers, silhouetted against the light, were visible the thronged faces of men and women. Warrisden leaned forward, scrutinising the shapes of the heads, the contours of the faces. His sight, sharpened by long practice over wide horizons, was of the keenest; he could see, even at that distance, the flash of jewels on neck and shoulder. But the face he looked for was not there.

Lady Millingham, however, set his mind at case.

"You are back, then?" she cried.

"This afternoon."

"You will find friends here."

Warrisden passed on into the reception rooms. It seemed to him indeed that all the friends he had ever made were gathered to this one house on this particular evening. He was a tall man, and his height made him noticeable upon most occasions. He was the more noticeable now by reason of his sunburn and a certain look of exhilaration upon his face. The season was drawing to its end, and brown faces were not so usual but that the eyes turned to them. He spoke, however, the fewest possible words to the men who greeted him, and he did not meet the eyes of any woman. Yet he saw the women, and was in definite quest of one of them. That might have been noticed by a careful observer, for whenever he saw a man older than the rest talking to a girl he quickened his pace that he might the sooner see that girl's face. He barely looked into the ball-room at all, but kept to the corridors, and, at last, in a doorway, came face to face with Pamela Mardale. He saw her face light up, and the hand held out to him was even eagerly extended.

"Have you a dance to spare?"

Pamela looked quickly round upon her neighbours.

"Yes, this one," she answered. She bowed to her companion, a man, as Warrisden expected, much older than herself, and led the way at once towards the balcony. Warrisden saw a youth emerge from the throng and come towards them. Pamela was tall, and she used her height at this moment. She looked him in the face with so serene an indifference that the youth drew back disconcerted. Pamela was deliberately cutting her partners.

Another man might have built upon the act, but Warrisden was shrewd, and shrewdness had taught him long since to go warily in thought where Pamela Mardale was concerned. She might merely be angry. He walked by her side and said nothing. Even when they were seated on the balcony, he left for her to speak first. She was sitting upon the outside against the railing, so that the light from the windows streamed full upon her face. He watched it, looking for the change which he desired. But it had still the one fault he found with it. It was still too sedate, too womanly for her years. It happened that they had found a corner where flowers made a sort of screen, and they could talk in low voices without being overheard.

"I heard of you," she said. "You were shooting woodcock in Dalmatia."

"That was at Christmas."

"Yes. You were hurt there."

"Not seriously," he replied. "A sheep-dog attacked me. They are savage brutes, and indeed they have to be, there are so many wolves. The worst of it is, if you are attacked, you mustn't kill the dog, or there's trouble."

"I heard of you again. You were at Quetta, getting together a caravan."

"That was in February. I crossed by the new trade route from Quetta to Seistan."

She had spoken in an indefinite tone, which left him with no clue to her thoughts. Now, however she turned her eyes upon him, and said in a lower voice, which was very gentle--

"Don't you think yon might have told me that you were going away for a year?"

Warrisden had gone away deliberately, and as deliberately he had abstained from telling her of his intention. He had no answer to make to her question, and he did not attempt to invent one. He sat still and looked at her. She followed the question with another. "Don't you think it would have been kinder if you had written to me once or twice, instead of letting me hear about you from any chance acquaintance?"

Again he made no answer. For he had deliberately abstained from writing. The gentleness with which she spoke was the most hopeful sign for him which she had made that evening. He had expected a harsher accusation. For Pamela made her claims upon her friends. They must put her first or there was likely to be a deal of trouble.

"Well," she said, with a shrug of her shoulders, "I hope you enjoyed it."

"Yes. I wish I could have thought you would have enjoyed it too. But you wouldn't have."

"No," she answered listlessly.

Warrisden was silent. He had expected the answer, but he was none the less disappointed to receive it. To him there was no century in the history of the world comparable to that in which he lived. It had its faults, of course. It was ugly and a trifle feverish, but to men of his stamp, the men with means and energy, a new world with countless opportunities had been opened up. Asia and Africa were theirs, and the farthest islands of the sea. Pamela, however, turned her back on it. The new trade route to Seistan had no message for her. She looked with envy upon an earlier century.

"Of course," he resumed, "it's pleasant to come back, if only as a preparation for going away again."

And then Pamela turned on him with her eyes wide open and a look of actual trouble upon her face.

"No," she said with emphasis. She leaned forward and lowered her voice. "You have no right to work upon people and make them your friends, if you mean, when you have made them your friends, to go away without a word for ever so long. I have missed you very much."

"I wanted you to miss me," he replied.

"Yes, I thought so. But it wasn't fair," she said gently. "You see, I have been quite fair with you. If you had gone away at once, if you had left me alone when I said 'No' to you two years ago, then I should have no right to complain. I should have no right to call you back. But it's different now, and you willed that it should be different. You stayed by me. Whenever I turned, there were you at my side. You taught me to count on you, as I count on no one else. Yes, that's true. Well, then, you have lost the right to turn your back now just when it pleases you."

"It wasn't because it pleased me."

"No. I admit that," she agreed. "It was to make an experiment on me, but the experiment was made at my expense. For after all you enjoyed yourself," she added, with a laugh.

Warrisden joined in the laugh.

"It's quite true," he said. "I did." Then his voice dropped to the same serious tone in which she had spoken. "Why not say the experiment succeeded? Couldn't you say that?"

Pamela shook her head.

"No. I can give you no more now than I gave you a year ago, two years ago, and that is not enough. Oh, I know," she continued hurriedly as she saw that he was about to interrupt. "Lots of women are content to begin with friendship. How they can, puzzles me. But I know they do begin with nothing more than that, and very often it works out very well. The friendship becomes more than friendship. But I can't begin that way. I would if I could. But I can't."

She leaned back in her chair, and sat for a while with her hands upon her knees in an attitude extraordinarily still. The jingle of harness in the square rose to Warrisden's ears, the clamour of the town came muffled from the noisy streets. He looked upwards to the tender blue of a summer sky where the stars shone like silver; and he leaned back disheartened. He had returned to London, and nothing was changed. There was the same busy life vociferous in its streets, and this girl still sat in the midst of it with the same lassitude and quiescence. She seemed to be waiting, not at all for something new to happen, but for the things, which were happening, to cease, waiting with the indifference of the very old. And she was quite young. She sat with the delicate profile of her face outlined against the darkness; the colour of youth was in her cheeks; the slender column of her throat, the ripple of her dark hair, the grace of her attitude claimed her for youth; she was fragrant with it from head to foot. And yet it seemed that there was no youth in her blood.

"So nothing has changed for you during these months," he said, deeply disappointed.

She turned her face quietly to him and smiled. "No," she answered, "there has been no new road for me from Quetta to Seistan. I still look on."

There was the trouble. She just looked on, and to his thinking it was not right that at her age she should do no more. A girl nowadays had so many privileges, so many opportunities denied to her grandmother, she could do so much more, she had so much more freedom, and yet Pamela insisted upon looking on. If she had shown distress, it would have been better. But no. She lived without deep feeling of any kind in a determined isolation. She had built up a fence about herself, and within it she sat untouched and alone.

It was likely that no one else in the wide circle of her acquaintances had noticed her detachment, and certainly to no one but Warrisden had she admitted it. And it was only acknowledged to him after he had found it out for himself. For she did not sit at home. On the contrary, hardly a night passed during the season but she went to some party. Only, wherever she went, she looked on.

"And you still prefer old men to young ones?" he cried in a real exasperation.

"They talk more of things and less of persons," she explained.

That was not right either. She ought to be interested in persons. Warrisden rose abruptly from his chair. He was completely baffled. Pamela was like the sleeping princess in the fairy tale, she lay girt about with an impassable thicket of thorns. She was in a worse case, indeed, for the princess in the story might have slept on till the end of time, a thing of beauty. But was it possible for Pamela, so to sleep to the end of life, he asked himself. Let her go on in her indifference, and she might dwindle and grow narrow, her soul would be starved and all the good of her be lost. Somehow a way must be forced through the thicket, somehow she must be wakened. But he seemed no nearer to finding that way than he had been two years ago, and she was no nearer to her wakening.

"No, there has been no change," he said, and as he spoke his eye was caught by a bright light which suddenly flamed up in the window of a dark house upon his right. The house had perplexed him more than once. It took so little part in the life of the square, it so consistently effaced itself from the gaieties of the people who lived about. Its balconies were never banked with flowers, no visitors mounted its steps; and even in the daytime it had a look of mystery. It may have been that some dim analogy between that house and the question which so baffled him arrested Warrisden's attention. It may have been merely that he was by nature curious and observant. But he leaned forward upon the balcony-rail.

"Do you see that light?" he asked. "In the window on the second floor?"

"Yes."

He took out his watch and noticed the time. It was just a quarter to twelve. He laughed softly to himself and said--

"Wait a moment!"

He watched the house for a few minutes without saying a word. Pamela with a smile at his eagerness watched too. In a little while they saw the door open and a man and a woman, both in evening dress, appear upon the steps. Warrisden laughed again.

"Wait," he said, as if he expected Pamela to interrupt. "You'll see they won't whistle up a cab. They'll walk beyond the house and take one quietly. Very likely they'll look up at the lighted window on the second floor as though they were schoolboys who had escaped from their dormitories, and were afraid of being caught by the master before they had had their fun. There, do you see?"

For as he spoke the man and the woman stopped and looked up. Had they heard Warrisden's voice and obeyed his directions they could not have more completely fulfilled his prediction. They had the very air of truants. Apparently they were reassured. They walked along the pavement until they were well past the house. Then they signalled to a passing hansom. The cab-driver did not see them, yet they did not call out, nor did the man whistle. They waited until another approached and they beckoned to that. Warrisden watched the whole scene with the keenest interest. As the two people got into the cab he laughed again and turned back to Pamela.

"Well?" she said, with a laugh of amusement, and the quiet monosyllable, falling as it were with a cold splash upon his enjoyment of the little scene, suddenly brought him back to the question which was always latent in his mind. How was Pamela to be awakened?

"It's a strange place, London," he said. "No doubt it seems stranger to me, and more full of interesting people and interesting things just because I have come back from very silent and very empty places. But that house always puzzled me. I used to have rooms overlooking this square, high up, over there," and he pointed to the eastern side of the square towards Berkeley Street, "and what we have seen to-night used to take place every night, and at the same hour. The light went up in the room on the second floor, and the truants crept out. Guess where they go to! The Savoy. They go and sit there amongst the lights and the music for half an hour, then they come back to the dark house. They live in the most curious isolation with the most curious regularity. There are three of them altogether: an old man--it is his light, I suppose, which went up on the second floor--and those two. I know who they are. The old man is Sir John Stretton."

"Oh!" said Pamela, with interest.

"And the two people we saw are his son and his son's wife. I have never met them. In fact, no one meets them. I don't know any one who knows them."

"Yes, you do," said Pamela, "I know them." And in her knowledge, although Warrisden did not know it, lay the answer to the problem which so perplexed him.

CHAPTER III

[THE TRUANTS]

Warrisden turned quickly to Pamela.

"You never mentioned them."

"No," she replied with a smile. "But there's no mystery in my silence. I simply haven't mentioned them because for two years I have lost sight of them altogether. I used to meet them about, and I have been to their house."

"There?" asked Warrisden, with a nod towards the lighted window.

"No; but to the house Millie and Mr. Stretton had in Deanery Street. They gave that up two years ago when old Lady Stretton died. I thought they had gone to live in the country."

"And all the while they have been living here," exclaimed Warrisden. He had spoken truthfully of himself. The events, and the people with whom he came, however slightly, into contact always had interested and amused him. It was his pleasure to fit his observations together until he had constructed a little biography in his mind of each person with whom he was acquainted. And there was never an incident of any interest within his notice, but he sought the reason for it and kept an eye open for its consequence.

"Don't you see how strange the story is?" he went on. "They give up their house upon Lady Stretton's death, and they come to live here with Sir John. That's natural enough. Sir John's an old man. But they live in such seclusion that even their friends think they have retired into the country."

"Yes, it is strange," Pamela admitted. And she added, "I was Millie Stretton's bridesmaid."

Upon Warrisden's request she told him what she knew of the couple who lived in the dark house and played truant. Millie Stretton was the daughter of a Judge in Ceylon who when Millie had reached the age of seventeen had married a second time. The step-mother had lacked discretion; from the very first she had claimed to exercise a complete and undisputed authority; she had been at no pains to secure the affections of her step-daughter. And very little trouble would have been needed, for Millie was naturally affectionate. A girl without any great depth of feeling, she responded easily to a show of kindness. She found it neither difficult to make intimate friends, nor hard to lose them. She was of the imitative type besides. She took her thoughts and even her language from those who at the moment were by her side. Thus her step-mother had the easiest of tasks but she did not possess the necessary tact. She demanded obedience, and in return offered tolerance. The household at Colombo, therefore, became for Millie a roofstead rather than a home, and a year after this marriage she betook herself and the few thousands of pounds which her mother had bequeathed her to London. The ostensible reason for departure was the invitation of Mrs. Charles Rawson, a friend of her mother's. But Millie had made up her mind that a return to Ceylon was not to be endured. Somehow she would manage to make a home or herself in England.

She found her path at once made easy. She was pretty, with the prettiness of a child, she gave no trouble, she was fresh, she dressed a drawing-room gracefully, he fitted neatly into her surroundings, she picked up immediately the ways of thought and the jargon of her new companions. In a word, with the remarkable receptivity which was hers, she was very quickly at home in Mrs. Rawson's house. She became a favourite no less for her modest friendliness than on account of her looks. Mrs. Rawson, who was nearing middle age, but whose love of amusements was not assuaged, rejoiced to have so attractive a companion to take about with her. Millie, for her part, was very glad to be so taken about. She had fallen from the obscure clouds into a bright and wonderful world.

It was at this time that Pamela Mardale first met Millicent Stretton, or rather, one should say, Millicent Rundell, since Rundell was at that time her name. They became friends, although so far as character was concerned they had little in common. It may have been that the difference between them was the actual cause of their friendship. Certainly Millie came rather to lean upon her friend, admired her strength, made her the repository of her confidences, and if she received no confidences in return, she was content to believe that there were none to make. It was at this time too that Millie fell in with Lady Stretton.

Lady Stretton, a tall old woman with the head of a Grenadier, had the characteristic of Sir Anthony Absolute. There was no one so good-tempered so long as she had her own way; and she generally had it.

"Lady Stretton saw that Millie was easily led," Pamela continued. "She thought, for that reason, she would be a suitable wife for Tony, her son, who was then a subaltern in the Coldstream. So she did all she could to throw them together. She invited Millie up to her house in Scotland, the house Lady Millingham now has, and Mr. Stretton fell in love. He was evidently very fond of Millie, and Millie on her side liked him quite as much as any one else. They were married. Lady Stretton hired them the house I told you of, close to Park Lane, and took a great deal of trouble to see that they were comfortable. You see, they were toys for her. There, that's all I know. Are you satisfied?"

She leaned back in her chair, smiling at Warrisden's serious face.

"And what about the old man, Sir John Stretton?" he asked.

"I never met him," replied Pamela. "He never went out to parties, and I never went to that house."

As she concluded the sentence, a man looked on to the balcony and, seeing them, withdrew. Pamela rose at once from her chair, and, with a sudden movement of jealousy, Warrisden swung round and looked into the room. The man was well past the middle age, stout of build, and with a heavy careworn face with no pleasure in it at all. He was the man who had been with Pamela when Warrisden had arrived. Warrisden turned back to the girl with a smile of relief.

"You are engaged?"

"Yes, for this dance to Mr. Mudge," and she indicated the man who was retiring. "But we shall meet again--at Newmarket, at all events. Perhaps in Scotland too."

She held out her hand to Warrisden, and, as he took it, her voice dropped to a plea.

"Please don't go away again without telling me first, without talking it over, so that I may know where you are from month to month. Please promise!"

Warrisden promised, and went away from the house with her prayer echoing in his ears. The very sound of her voice was audible to him, and he never doubted the sincerity of its appeal. But if she set such store on what she had, why was she content with just that and nothing more, he asked himself. Why did she not claim a little more and give a little more in return? Why did she come to a halt at friendship, a mere turnpike on the great road, instead of passing through the gate and going on down the appointed way. He did not know that she passed the turnpike once, and that if she refused to venture on that path again, it was because, knowing herself, she dared not.

In the narrows of Berkeley Street Warrisden was shaken out of these reflections. A hansom jingled past him, and by the light of the lamp which hung at the back within it he caught a glimpse of the truants. They were driving home to the dark house in the Square, and they sat side by side silent and with troubled faces. Warrisden's thoughts went back to what Pamela had told him that night. She had told him the half, but not the perplexing, interesting half of their history. That indeed Pamela could not tell, for she did not know Sir John Stretton, and the old man's warped and churlish character alone explained it.

It was by his doing that the truants gave up their cheery little house in Deanery Street and came to live in Berkeley Square. The old man was a miser, who during his wife's existence had not been allowed to gratify his instincts. He made all the more ample amends after she had died. The fine allowance on which the young couple had managed to keep a pair of horses and a little brougham was stripped from them.

"Why should I live alone?" said the old man. "I am old, Tony, and I need some attention. The house is big, much too big for me, and the servants are eating their heads off for the want of something to do." There were indeed more servants than were needed. Servants were the single luxury Sir John allowed himself. Their liveries were faded, they themselves were insolent and untidy, but they were there, in the great bare dining-room at dinner-time, in the hall when Sir John came home of an afternoon. For the old man went out each day as the clock struck three; he came back each evening at half-past six. He went out alone, he returned alone, and he never went to his club. He took an omnibus from the corner of Berkeley Street and journeyed eastwards as far as Ludgate Hill. There he took a drink in the refreshment bar, and, coming out, struck northwards into Holborn, where he turned westwards, and walking as far as the inn at the corner of the Tottenham Court Road, stepped for an hour into the private bar. Thence he took another omnibus, and finally reached home, where his footmen received him solemnly in the hall. To this home he brought Tony and his wife.

"There choose your own rooms, Tony," he said magnanimously. "What's that? Money? But what for? You'll have it soon enough."

Tony Stretton suggested that it was hardly possible for any man, however careful, to retain a commission in the Coldstream without an allowance. Sir John, a tall thin man, with high bald forehead, and a prim puritanical face, looked at his son with a righteous severity.

"A very expensive regiment. Leave it, Tony! And live quietly at home. Look after your father, my boy, and you won't need money," and he stalked upstairs leaving Tony aghast in the hall. Tony had to sit down and think it over before he could quite realise the fate which had over-taken him. Here he was, twenty-six years old brought up to spend what he wanted and to ask for more when that was ended, and he was to live quietly on nothing at all. He had no longer any profession, he was not clever enough to enter upon a new one without some sort of start and in addition he had a wife. His wife, it was true, had a few thousands; they had remained untouched ever since the marriage and Tony shrank from touching them now. He sat on one of the hall-chairs, twisting his moustache and staring with his blank blue eyes at the opposite wall. What in the world was he to do? Old Sir John was quite aware of those few thousands. They might just as well be used now he thought, and save him expense. Tony could pay them back after his father was dead. Such was Sir John's plan and Tony had to fall in with it. The horses and the brougham and all the furniture, the prints, the pictures and the mirrors which had decked out so gaily the little house in Deanery Street went to the hammer. Tony paid off his debts and found himself with a hundred pounds in hand at the end; and when that was gone he was forced to come to his wife.

"Of course," said she, "we'll share what I have, Tony."

"Yes, but we must go carefully," he replied. "Heaven knows how long we will have to drag on like this."

So the money question was settled, but that was in reality the least of their troubles. Sir John, for the first time in his life, was master in fact as well as in name. He had been no match for his wife, but he was more than a match for his son. He was the fifth baronet of his name, and yet there was no landed property. He was rich, and all the money was safely tucked away in the public funds, and he could bequeath it as he willed. He was in a position to put the screw on Tony and his wife, and he did not let the opportunity slip. The love of authority grew upon him. He became exacting and portentously severe. In his black, shabby coat, with his long thin figure, and his narrow face, he had the look of a cold self-righteous fanatic. You would have believed that he was mortifying his son for the sake of his son's soul, unless perchance you had peeped into that private bar in the Tottenham Court Road and had seen him drinking gloomily alone.

He laid down rules to which the unfortunate couple must needs conform. They had to dine with him every night and to sit with him every evening until he went to bed. It followed that they lost sight of their friends, and every month isolated them more completely. The mere humiliation of the position in which they stood caused them to shrink more and more into their privacy. When they walked out in the afternoon they kept away from the Park; when they played truant in the evening, at the Savoy, they chose a little table in an obscure corner. This was the real history of the truants with whose fortunes those of Warrisden and Pamela were to be so closely intermingled. For that life in the dark house was not to last. Even as Warrisden passed them in Berkeley Street, Tony Stretton was saying over and over again in his inactive mind--

"It can't go on. It can't go on!"

In the after times, when the yapping of dogs in the street at night would wake Tony from his sleep, and set him on dreaming of tent villages in a wild country of flowers, or when the wind in the trees would recall to him a little ship labouring on short steep seas in a mist of spray, he always looked back to this night as that on which the venture of his wife's fortunes and his own began.

CHAPTER IV

[TONY STRETTON MAKES A PROPOSAL]

Regular as Warrisden had declared the lives of the truants to be, on the night following the dance at Lady Millingham's there came a break in the monotony of their habits. For once in a way they did not leave the house in their search for light and colour as soon as they were free. They stayed on in their own sitting-room. But it seemed that they had nothing to speak about. Millie Stretton sat at the table, staring at the wall in front of her, moody and despairing. Tony Stretton leaned against the embrasure of the window, now and then glancing remorsefully at his wife, now and then looking angrily up to the ceiling where the heavy footsteps of a man treading up and down the room above sounded measured and unceasing.

Tony lifted a corner of the blind and looked out.

"There's a party next door," he said, "there was another at Lady Millingham's last night. You should have been at both, Millie, and you were at neither. Upon my word, it's rough."

He dropped the blind and came over to her side. He knew quite well what parties and entertainments meant to her. She loved them, and it seemed to him natural and right that she should. Light, admiration, laughter and gaiety, and fine frocks--these things she was born to enjoy, and he himself had in the old days taken a great pride in watching her enjoyment. But it was not merely the feeling that she had been stripped of what was her due through him which troubled him to-night. Other and deeper thoughts were vaguely stirring in his mind.

"We have quarrelled again to-night, Millie," he continued remorsefully. "Here we are cooped up together with just ourselves to rely upon to pull through these bad years, and we have quarrelled again."

Millie shrugged her shoulders.

"How did it begin?" he asked. "Upon my word I don't remember. Oh yes, I----" and Millie interrupted him.

"What does it matter, Tony, how the quarrel began? It did begin, and another will begin to-morrow. We can't help ourselves, and you have given the reason. Here we are cooped up by ourselves with nothing else to do."

Tony pulled thoughtfully at his moustache.

"And we swore off quarrelling, too. When was that?"

"Yesterday."

"Yesterday!" exclaimed Tony, with a start of surprise. "By George, so it was. Only yesterday."

Millie looked up at him, and the trouble upon his face brought a smile to hers. She laid a hand upon his arm.

"It's no use swearing off, Tony," she said. "We are both of us living all the time in a state of exasperation. I just--tingle with it, there's no other word. And the least, smallest thing which goes wrong sets us quarrelling. I don't think either of us is to blame. The house alone gets on our nerves, doesn't it? These great empty, silent, dingy rooms, with their tarnished furniture. Oh! they are horrible! I wander through them sometimes and it always seems to me that, a long time ago, people lived here who suddenly felt one morning that they couldn't stand it for a single moment longer, and ran out and locked the street door behind them; and I have almost done it myself. The very sunlight comes through the windows timidly, as if it knew it had no right here at all."

She leaned back in her chair, looking at Tony with eyes that were hopeless and almost haggard. As Tony listened to her outburst the remorse deepened on his face.

"If I could have foreseen all this, I would have spared you it, Millie," he said. "I would, upon my word." He drew up a chair to the table, and, sitting down, said in a more cheerful voice, "Let's talk it over, and see if we can't find a remedy."

Millie shook her head.

"We talked it over yesterday."

"Yes, so we did."

"And quarrelled an hour after we had talked it over."

"We did that too," Tony agreed, despondently. His little spark of hopefulness was put out and he sat in silence. His wife, too, did not speak, and in a short while it occurred to him that the silence was more complete than it had been a few minutes ago. It seemed that a noise had ceased, and a noise which, unnoticed before, had become noticeable by its cessation. He looked up to the ceiling. The heavy footsteps no longer dragged upon the floor overhead. Tony sprang up.

"There! He is in bed," he exclaimed. "Shall we go out?"

"Not to-night," replied Millie.

He could make no proposal that night which was welcomed, and as he walked over to the mantelshelf and filled his pipe, there was something in his attitude and bearing which showed to Millie that the quick rebuff had hurt.

"I can't pretend to-night, Tony, and that's the truth," she added in a kinder voice. "For, after all, I do only pretend nowadays that I find the Savoy amusing."

Tony turned slowly round with the lighted match in his hand and stared at his wife. He was a man slow in thought, and when his thoughts compelled expression, laborious in words. The deeper thoughts which had begun of late to take shape in his mind stirred again at her words.

"You have owned it," he said.

"It had been pretence with you too, then?" she asked, looking up in surprise.

Tony puffed at his pipe.

"Of late, yes," he replied. "Perhaps chiefly since I saw that you were pretending."

He came back to her side and looked for a long time steadily at her while he thought. It was a surprise to Millie that he had noticed her pretence, as much of a surprise as that he had been pretending too. For she knew him to be at once slow to notice any change in others and quick to betray it in himself. But she was not aware how wide a place she filled in all his thoughts, partly because her own nature with its facile emotions made her unable to conceive a devotion which was engrossing, and partly because Tony himself had no aptitude for expressing such a devotion, and indeed would have shrunk from its expression had the aptitude been his. But she did fill that wide place. Very slowly he had begun to watch her, very slowly and dimly certain convictions were taking shape, very gradually he was drawing nearer and nearer to a knowledge that a great risk must be taken and a great sacrifice made partly by him, partly too by her. Some part of his trouble he now spoke to her.

"It wasn't pretence a year ago, Millie," he said wistfully. "That's what bothers me. We enjoyed slipping away quietly when the house was quiet, and snatching some of the light, some of the laughter the others have any time they want it. It made up for the days, it was fun then, Millie, wasn't it? Upon my word, I believe we enjoyed our life, yes, even this life, a year ago. Do you remember how we used to drive home, laughing over what we had seen, talking about the few people we had spoken to? It wasn't until we had turned the latch-key in the door, and crept into the hall----"

"And passed the library door," Millie interrupted, with a little shiver.

Tony Stretton stopped for a moment. Then he resumed in a lower voice, "Yes, it wasn't until we had passed the library door that the gloom settled down again. But now the fun's all over, at the latest when the lights go down in the supper room, and often before we have got to them at all. We were happy last year"--and he shook her affectionately by the arm--"that's what bothers me."

His wife responded to the gentleness of his voice and action.

"Never mind, Tony," she said. "Some day we shall look back on all of it--this house and the empty rooms and the quarrels"--she hesitated for a second--"Yes, and the library door; we shall look back on it all and laugh."

"Shall we?" said Tony, suddenly. His face was most serious, his voice most doubtful.

"Why, what do you mean?" asked Millie. Then she added reassuringly, "It must end some time. Oh yes, it can't last for ever."

"No," replied Tony; "but it can last just long enough."

"Long enough for what?"

"Long enough to spoil both our lives altogether."

He was speaking with a manner which was quite strange to her. There was a certainty in his voice, there was a gravity too. He had ceased to leave the remedy of their plight to time and chance, since, through two years, time and chance had failed them. He had been seriously thinking, and as the result of thought he had come to definite conclusions. Millie understood that there was much more behind the words he had spoken and that he meant to say that much more to her to-night. She was suddenly aware that she was face to face with issues momentous to both of them. She began to be a little afraid. She looked at Tony almost as if he were a stranger.

"Tony," she said faintly, in deprecation.

"We must face it, Millie," he went on steadily. "This life of ours here in this house will come to an end, of course, but how will it leave us, you and me? Soured, embittered, quarrelsome, or no longer quarrelsome, but just indifferent to each other, bored by each other?" He was speaking very slowly, choosing each word with difficulty.

"Oh no," Millie protested.

"It may be even worse than that. Suppose we passed beyond indifference to dislike--yes, active dislike. We are both of us young, we can both reasonably look forward to long lives, long lives of active dislike. There might too be contempt on your side."

Millie stared at her husband.

"Contempt?" she said, echoing his words in surprise.

"Yes. Here are you, most unhappy, and I take it sitting down. Contempt might come from that."

"But what else can you do?" she said.

"Ah," said Tony, as though he had been waiting for that question, couched in just those words. "Ask yourself that question often enough, and contempt will come."

This idea of contempt was a new one to Millie, and very likely her husband was indiscreet in suggesting its possibility. But he was not thinking at all of the unwisdom of his words. His thoughts were set on saving the cherished intimacy of their life from the ruin which he saw was likely to overtake it. He spoke out frankly, not counting the risk. Millie, for her part, was not in the mood to estimate the truth of what he said, although it remained in her memory. She was rather confused by the new aspect which her husband wore. She foresaw that he was working towards the disclosure of a plan; and the plan would involve changes, great changes, very likely a step altogether into the dark. And she hesitated.

"We sha'n't alter, Tony," she said. "You can be sure of me, can't you?"

"But we are altering," he replied. "Already the alteration has begun. Did we quarrel a year ago as we do now? We enjoyed those evenings when we played truant, a year ago"; and then he indulged in a yet greater indiscretion than any which he had yet allowed himself to utter. But he was by nature simple and completely honest. Whatever occurred to him, that he spoke without reserve, and the larger it loomed in his thoughts the more strenuous was its utterance upon his lips. He took a seat at the table by her side.

"I know we are changing. I take myself, and I expect it is the same with you. I am--it is difficult to express it--I am deadening. I am getting insensible to the things which not very long ago moved me very much. I once had a friend who fell ill of a slow paralysis, which crept up his limbs little by little and he hardly noticed its advance. I think that's happening with me. I am losing the associations--that's the word I want--the associations which made one's recollections valuable, and gave a colour to one's life. For instance, you sang a song last night, Millie, one of those coon songs of yours--do you remember? You sang it once in Scotland on a summer's night. I was outside on the lawn, and past the islands across the water, which was dark and still, I saw the lights in Oban bay. I thought I would never hear that song again without seeing those lights in my mind far away across the water, clustered together like the lights of a distant town. Well, last night all those associations were somehow dead. I remembered all right, but without any sort of feeling, that that song was a landmark in one's life. It was merely you singing a song, or rather it was merely some one singing a song."

It was a laboured speech, and Tony was very glad to have got it over.

"I am very sorry," replied Millie in a low voice. She did not show him her face, and he had no notion whatever that his words could hardly have failed to hurt. He was too intent upon convincing her, and too anxious to put his belief before her with unmistakable clearness to reflect in what spirit she might receive the words. That her first thought would be "He no longer cares" never occurred to him at all, and cheerfully misunderstanding her acquiescence, he went on--

"You see that's bad. It mustn't go on, Millie. Let's keep what we've got. At all costs let us keep that!"

"You mean we must go away?" said Millie, and Tony Stretton did not answer. He rose from his chair and walked back to the fireplace and knocked the ashes from his pipe. Millie was accustomed to long intervals between her questions and his replies, but she was on the alert now. Something in his movements and his attitude showed her that he was not thinking of what answer he should make. He was already sure upon that point. Only the particular answer he found difficult to speak. She guessed it on the instant and stood up erect, in alarm.

"You mean that you must go away, and that I must remain?"

Tony turned round to her and nodded his head.

"Alone! Here?" she exclaimed, looking round her with a shiver.

"For a little while. Until I have made a home for you to come to. Only till then, Millie. It needn't be so very long."

"It will seem ages!" she cried, "however short it is. Tony, it's impossible."

The tedious days stretched before her in an endless and monotonous succession. The great rooms would be yet more silent, and more empty than they were; there would be a chill throughout all the house; the old man's exactions would become yet more oppressive, since there would be only one to bear them. She thought of the long dull evenings, in the faded drawing-room. They were bad enough now, those long evenings during which she read the evening paper aloud, and Sir John slept, yet not so soundly but that he woke the instant her voice stopped, and bade her continue. What would they be if Tony were gone, if there were no hour or so at the end when they were free to play truant if they willed? What she had said was true. She had been merely pretending to enjoy their hour of truancy, but she would miss it none the less. And in the midst of these thoughts she heard Tony's voice.

"It sounds selfish, I know, but it isn't really. You see, I sha'n't enjoy myself. I have not been brought up to know anything well or to do anything well--anything, I mean, really useful--I'll have a pretty hard time too." And then he described to her what he thought of doing. He proposed to go out to one of the colonies, spend some months on a farm as a hand, and when he had learned enough of the methods, and had saved a little money, to get hold of a small farm to which he could ask her to come. It was a pretty and a simple scheme, and it ignored the great difficulties in the way, such as his ignorance and his lack of capital. But he believed in it sincerely, and every word in his short and broken sentences proved his belief. He had his way that night with Millicent. She was capable of a quick fervour, though the fervour might as quickly flicker out. She saw that the sacrifice was really upon his side, for upon him would be the unaccustomed burden of labour, and the labour would be strange and difficult. She rose to his height since he was with her and speaking to her with all the conviction of his soul.

"Well, then, go," she cried. "I'll wait here, Tony, till you send for me."

And when she passed the library door that night she did not even shrink.

CHAPTER V

[PAMELA MAKES A PROMISE]

Millie's enthusiasm for her husband's plan increased each day. The picture which his halting phrases evoked for her, of a little farm very far away under Southern skies, charmed her more by reason of its novelty than either she or Tony quite understood. In the evenings of the following week, long after the footsteps overhead had ceased, they sat choosing the site of their house and building it. It was to be the exact opposite of their house of bondage. The windows should look out over rolling country, the simple decorations should be bright of colour, and through every cranny the sun should find its way. Millie's hopes, indeed, easily outran her husband's. She counted the house already built, and the door open for her coming. Colour and light bathed it in beauty.

"There's my little fortune, Tony," she said, when once or twice he tried to check the leap of her anticipations; "that will provide the capital."

"I knew you would offer it," Tony replied simply. "Your help will shorten our separation by a good deal. So I'll take half."

"All!" cried Millie.

"And what would you do when you wanted a new frock?" asked Tony, with a smile.

Millie shrugged her shoulders.

"I shall join you so soon," she said.

It dawned upon Tony that she was making too little of the burden which she would be called upon to bear--the burden of dull lonely months in that great shabby house.

"It will be a little while before I can send for you, Millie," he protested. But she paid no heed to the protest. She fetched her bank book and added up the figures.

"I have three thousand pounds," she said.

"I'll borrow half," he repeated. "Of course, I am only borrowing. Should things go wrong with me, you are sure to get it back in the end."

They drove down to Millie's bank the next morning, and fifteen hundred pounds were transferred to his account.

"Meanwhile," said Tony, as they came out of the door into Pall Mall, "we have not yet settled where our farm is to be. I think I will go and see Chase."

"The man in Stepney Green?" Millie asked.

"Yes. He's the man to help us."

Tony called a cab and drove off. It was late in the afternoon when he returned, and he had no opportunity to tell his wife the results of his visit before dinner was announced. Millie was in a fever to hear his news. Never, even in this house, had an evening seemed so long. Sir John sat upright in his high-backed chair, and, as was his custom, bade her read aloud the evening paper. But that task was beyond her. She pleaded a headache and escaped. It seemed to her that hours passed before Tony rejoined her. She had come to dread with an intense fear that some hindrance would, at any moment, stop their plan.

"Well?" she asked eagerly, when Tony at last came into their sitting-room.

"It's to be horses in Kentucky," answered Tony. "Farming wants more knowledge and a long apprenticeship; but I know a little about horses."

"Splendid!" cried Millie. "You will go soon?"

"In a week. A week is all I need."

Millie was quiet for a little while. Then she asked, with an anxious look--

"When do you mean to tell your father?"

"To-morrow."

"Don't," said she. She saw his face cloud, she was well aware of his dislike of secrecies, but she was too much afraid that, somehow, at the last moment an insuperable obstacle would bar the way. "Don't tell him at all," she went on. "Leave a note for him. I will see that it is given to him after you have gone. Then he can't stop you. Please do this, I ask you."

"How can he stop me?

"I don't know; but I am afraid that he will. He could threaten to disinherit you; if you disobeyed, he might carry out the threat. Give him no opportunity to threaten."

Very reluctantly Tony consented. He had all a man's objections to concealments, she all a woman's liking for them; but she prevailed, and since the moment of separation was very near, they began to retrace their steps through the years of their married life, and back beyond them to the days of their first acquaintance. Thus it happened that Millie mentioned the name of Pamela Mardale, and suddenly Tony drew himself upright in his chair.

"Is she in town, I wonder?" he asked, rather of himself than of his wife.

"Most likely," Millie replied. "Why?"

"I think I must try to see her before I go," said Tony, thoughtfully; and more than once during the evening he looked with anxiety towards his wife; but in his look there was some perplexity too.

He tried next day; for he borrowed a horse from a friend, and rode out into the Row at eleven o'clock. As he passed through the gates of Hyde Park, he saw Pamela turning her horse on the edge of the sand. She saw him at the same moment and waited.

"You are a stranger here," she said, with a smile, as he joined her.

"Here and everywhere," he replied. "I came out on purpose to find you."

Pamela glanced at Tony curiously. Only a few days had passed since Warrisden had pointed out the truants from the window of Lady Millingham's house, and had speculated upon the seclusion of their lives. The memory of that evening was still fresh in her mind.

"I want to ask you a question."

"Ask it and I'll answer," she replied carelessly.

"You were Millie's bridesmaid?"

"Yes."

"You saw a good deal of her before we were married?"

"Yes."

They were riding down the Row at a walk under the trees, Pamela wondering to what these questions were to lead, Tony slowly formulating the point which troubled him.

"Before Millie and I were engaged," he went on, "before indeed there was any likelihood of our being engaged, you once said to me something about her."

"I did?"

"Yes. I remembered it last night. And it rather worries me. I should like you to explain what you meant. You said, 'The man who marries her should never leave her. If he goes away shooting big game, he should take her with him. On no account must she be left behind.'"

It was a day cloudless and bright. Over towards the Serpentine the heat filled the air with a soft screen of mist, and at the bottom of the Row the rhododendrons glowed. As Pamela and Tony went forward at a walk the sunlight slanting through the leaves now shone upon their faces and now left them in shade. And when it fell bright upon Pamela it lit up a countenance which was greatly troubled. She did not, however, deny that she had used the words. She did not pretend that she had forgotten their application.

"You remember what I said?" she remarked. "It is a long while ago."

"Before that," he explained, "I had begun to notice all that was said of Millie."

"I spoke the words generally, perhaps too carelessly."

"Yet not without a reason," Tony insisted. "That's not your way."

Pamela made no reply for a moment or two. Then she patted her horse's head, and said softly--

"Not without a reason." She admitted his contention frankly. She did more, for she turned in her saddle towards him and, looking straight into his face, said--

"I was not giving you advice at the time. But, had I been, I should have said just those words. I say them again now."

"Why?"

Tony put his question very earnestly. He held Pamela in a great respect, believing her clear-sighted beyond her fellows. He was indeed a little timid in her presence as a rule, for she overawed him, though all unconsciously. Nothing of this timidity, however, showed now. "That was what I came out to ask you. Why?"

Again Pamela attempted no evasion.

"I can't tell you," she said quietly.

"You promised."

"I break the promise."

Tony looked wistfully at his companion. That the perplexing words had been spoken with a definite meaning he had felt sure from the moment when he had remembered them. And her refusal to explain proved to him that the meaning was a very serious one--one indeed which he ought to know and take into account.

"I ask you to explain," he urged, "because I am going away, and I am leaving Millie behind."

Pamela was startled. She turned quickly towards him.

"Must you?" she said, and before he could answer she recovered from her surprise. "Never mind," she continued; "shall we ride on?" and she put her horse to a trot. It was not her business to advise or to interfere. She had said too much already. She meant to remain the looker-on.

Stretton, however, was not upon this occasion to be so easily suppressed. He kept level with her, and as they rode he told her something of the life which Millie and he had led in the big lonely house in Berkeley Square; and in spite of herself Pamela was interested. She had a sudden wish that Alan Warrisden was riding with them too, so that he might hear his mystery resolved; she had a sudden vision of his face, keen as a boy's, as he listened.

"I saw Millie and you a few nights ago. I was at a dance close by, and I was surprised to see you. I thought you had left London," she said.

"No; but I am leaving," Stretton returned; and he went on to describe that idyllic future which Millie and he had allotted to themselves. The summer sunlight was golden in the air about them; already it seemed that new fresh life was beginning. "I shall breed horses in Kentucky. I was recommended to it by an East End parson called Chase, who runs a mission on Stepney Green. I used to keep order in a billiard room at his mission one night a week, when I was quartered at the Tower. A queer sort of creature, Chase; but his judgment's good, and of course he is always meeting all sorts of people."

"Chase?" Pamela repeated; and she retained the name in her memory.

"But he doesn't know Millie," said Stretton, "and you do. And so what you said troubles me very much. If I go away remembering your words and not understanding them, I shall go away uneasy. I shall remain uneasy."

"I am sorry," Pamela replied. "I broke a rule of mine in saying what I did, a rule not to interfere. And I see now that I did very wrong in breaking it. I will not break it again. You must forget my words."

There was a quiet decision in her manner which warned Tony that no persuasions would induce her to explain. He gave up his attempt and turned to another subject.

"I have something else to ask--not a question this time, but a favour. You could be a very staunch friend, Miss Mardale, if you chose. Millie will be lonely after I have gone. You were a great friend of hers once--be a friend of hers again."

Pamela hesitated. The promise which he sought on the face of it no doubt looked easy of fulfilment. But Tony Stretton had been right in one conjecture. She had spoken the words which troubled him from a definite reason, and that reason assured her now that this promise might lay upon her a burden, and a burden of a heavy kind. And she shrank from all burdens. On the other hand, there was no doubt that she had caused Tony much uneasiness. He would go away, on a task which, as she saw very clearly, would be more arduous by far than even he suspected--he would go away troubled and perplexed. That could not be helped. But she might lighten the trouble, and make the perplexity less insistent, if she granted the favour which he sought. It seemed churlish to refuse.

"Very well," she said reluctantly. "I promise."

Already Tony's face showed his relief. She had given her promise reluctantly, but she would keep it now. Of that he felt assured, and, bidding her good-bye, he turned his horse and cantered back.

Pamela rode homewards more slowly. She had proposed to keep clear of entanglements and responsibilities, and, behold! the meshes were about her. She had undertaken a trust. In spite of herself she had ceased to be the looker-on.

CHAPTER VI

[NEWS OF TONY]

The promise which Pamela had given was a great relief to Tony; he went about the work of preparing for his departure with an easier mind. It was even in his thoughts when he stood with his wife upon the platform of Euston station, five minutes before his train started for Liverpool.

"She will be a good friend, Millie," he said. "Count on her till I send for you. I think I am right to go, even though I don't understand----"

He checked himself abruptly. Millie, however, paid heed only to the first clause of his sentence.

"Of course you are right," she said, with a confidence which brought an answering smile to his face.

She watched the red tail-light of the train until it disappeared, and drove home alone to the big dreary house. It seemed ten times more dreary, ten times more silent than ever before. She was really alone now. But her confidence in herself and in Tony was still strong. "I can wait," she said, and the consciousness of her courage rejoiced her. She walked from room to room and sat for a few moments in each, realising that the coldness, the dingy look of the furniture, and the empty silence had no longer the power to oppress her. She even hesitated at the library door with her fingers on the key. But it was not until the next day that she unlocked it and threw it open.

For Pamela, mindful of her promise, called in the afternoon. Millicent was still uplifted by her confidence.

"I can wait quite patiently," she said; and Pamela scrutinised her with some anxiety. For Millicent was speaking feverishly, as though she laboured under an excitement. Was her courage the mere effervescence of that excitement, or was it a steady, durable thing? Pamela led her friend on to speak of the life which she and Tony had led in the big house, sounding her the while so that she might come upon some answer to that question. And thus it happened that, as they came down the stairs together, Millicent again stopped before the library door.

"Look!" she said. "This room always seemed to me typical of the whole house, typical too of the lives we led in it."

She unlocked the door suddenly and flung it open. The floor of the library was below the level of the hall, and a smooth plane of wood sloped down to it very gradually from the threshold.

"There used to be steps here once, but before my time," said Millicent. She went down into the room. Pamela followed her, and understood why those two steps had been removed. Although the book-shelves rose on every wall from floor to ceiling, it was not as a library that this room was used. Heavy black curtains draped it with a barbaric profusion. The centre of the room was clear of furniture, and upon the carpet in that clear space was laid a purple drugget; and on the drugget opposite to one another stood two strong wooden crutches. The room was a mortuary chamber--nothing less. On those two crutches the dead were to lie awaiting burial.

Millie Stretton shook her shoulders with a kind of shiver.

"Oh, how I used to hate this room, hate knowing that it was here, prepared and ready!"

Pamela could understand how the knowledge would work upon a woman of emotions, whose nerves were already strung to exasperation by the life she led. For even to her there was something eerie in the disposition of the room. It looked out upon a dull yard of stone at the back of the house; the light was very dim and the noise of the streets hardly the faintest whisper; there was a chill and a dampness in the air.

"How I hated it," Millie repeated. "I used to lie awake and think of it. I used to imagine it more silent than any other of the silent rooms, and emptier--emptier because day and night it seemed to claim an inhabitant, and to claim it as a right. That was the horrible thing. The room was waiting--waiting for us to be carried down that wooden bridge and laid on the crutches here, each in our turn. It became just a symbol of the whole house. For what is the house, Pamela? A place that should have been a place of life, and is a place merely expecting death. Look at the books reaching up to the ceiling, never taken down, never read, for the room's a room for coffins. It wasn't merely a symbol of the house--that wasn't the worst of it. It was a sort of image of our lives, the old man's upstairs, Tony's and mine down here. We were all doing nothing, neither suffering nor enjoying, but just waiting--waiting for death. Nothing you see could happen in this house but death. Until it came there would only be silence and emptiness."

Millie Stretton finished her outburst, and stood dismayed as though the shadow of those past days were still about her. The words she had spoken must have seemed exaggerated and even theatrical, but for the aspect of her as she spoke them. Her whole frame shuddered, her face had the shrinking look of fear. She recovered herself, however, in a moment.

"But that time's past," she said. "Tony's gone and I--I am waiting for life now. I am only a lodger, you see. A month or two, and I pack my boxes."

She turned towards the door and stopped. The hall door had just at that moment opened. Pamela heard a man's footsteps sound heavily upon the floor of the hall and then upon the stairs.

"My father-in-law," said Millie.

"This was his doing?" asked Pamela.

"Yes," replied Millie. "It's strange, isn't it? But there's something stranger still."

The footsteps had now ceased. Millie led the way back to her room.

"When I got home yesterday," she related, "I had Tony's letter announcing his departure taken up to Sir John. I waited for him to send for me. He did not. I am not sure that I expected he would. You see, he has never shown the least interest in us. However, when I went up to my room to dress for dinner, I saw that the candles were all lighted in Tony's room next door, and his clothes laid out upon the bed. I went in and put the candles out--rather quickly." Her voice shook a little upon those last two words. Pamela nodded her head as though she understood, and Millicent went on, after a short pause--

"It troubled me to see them burning; it troubled me very much. And when I came downstairs I told the footman the candles were not to be lit again, since Tony had gone away. He answered that they had been lit by Sir John's orders. At first I thought that Sir John had not troubled to read the letter at all. I thought that all the more because he never once, either during dinner or afterwards, mentioned Tony's name or seemed to remark his absence. But it was not so. He has given orders that every night the room is to be ready and the candles lit as though Tony were here still, or might walk in at the door at any moment. I suppose that after all in a queer way he cares."

Again her voice faltered; and again a question rose up insistent in Pamela's mind. She knew her friend, and it was out of her knowledge that she had spoken long ago in Tony's presence when she had said, "her husband should never leave her." It was evident that Tony's departure had caused his wife great suffering.

Millicent had let that fact escape in spite of her exaltation. Pamela welcomed it, but she asked, "Was that regret a steady and durable thing?"

Pamela left London the next day with her question unanswered, and for two months there was no opportunity for her of discovering an answer. Often during that August and September, on the moors in Scotland, or at her own home in Leicestershire, she would think of Millie Stretton, in the hot and dusty town amongst the houses where the blinds were drawn. She imagined her sitting over against the old stern impassive man at dinner, or wearily reading to him his newspaper at night. Had the regret dwindled to irritation, and the loneliness begotten petulance?

Indeed, those months were dull and wearisome enough for Millicent. No change of significance came in the routine of that monotonous household. Sir John went to his room perhaps a little earlier than had been his wont, his footsteps dragged along the floor for a while longer, and his light burned in the window after the dawn had come. Finally he ceased to leave his room at all. But that was all. For Millicent, however, the weeks passed easily. Each day brought her a day nearer to the sunlit farm fronting the open plain. She marked the weeks off in her diary with a growing relief; for news kept coming from America, and the news was good.

Early in October, Pamela passed through London on her way to Sussex, and broke her journey that she might see her friend.

"Frances Millingham is writing to you," she said. "She wants you to stay with her in Leicestershire. I shall be there too. I hope you will come."

"When?"

"At the beginning of the New Year."

Millicent laughed.

"I shall have left England before then. Tony will have made his way," she said, with a joyous conviction.

"There might be delays," Pamela suggested, in a very gentle voice. For suddenly there had risen before her mind the picture of a terrace high above a gorge dark with cypresses. She saw again the Mediterranean, breaking in gold along the curving shore, and the gardens of the Casino at Monte Carlo. She heard a young girl prophesying success upon that terrace with no less certainty than Millicent had used. Her face softened and her eyes shone with a very wistful look. She took out her watch and glanced at it. It was five o'clock. The school children had gone home by now from the little school-house in the square of Roquebrune. Was the schoolmaster leaning over the parapet looking downwards to the station or to the deserted walk in front of the Casino? Was a train passing along the sea's edge towards France and Paris?

"One must expect delays, Millie," she insisted; and again Millie laughed.

"I have had letters. I am expecting another. It should have come a fortnight since." And she told Pamela what the letters had contained.

At first Tony had been a little bewildered by the activity of New York, after his quiescent years. But he had soon made an acquaintance, and the acquaintance had become a friend. The two men had determined to go into partnership; a farm in Kentucky was purchased, each man depositing an equal share of the purchase money.

"Six weeks ago they left New York. Tony said I would not hear from him at once."

And while they were sitting together there came a knock upon the door, and two letters were brought in for Millicent. One she tossed upon the table. With the other in her hand she turned triumphantly to Pamela.

"Do you mind?" she asked. "I have been waiting so long."

"Read it, of course," said Pamela.

Millie tore the letter open, and at once the light died out of her eyes, and the smile vanished from her lips.

"From New York," she said, halfway between perplexity and fear. "He writes from New York." And with trembling fingers she turned over the sheets and read the letter through.

Pamela watched her, saw the blood ebb from her cheeks, and dejection overspread her face. A great pity welled up in Pamela's heart, not merely for the wife who read, but for the man who had penned that letter--with what difficulty, she wondered, with how much pain! Failure was the message which it carried. Millicent's trembling lips told her that. And again the village of Roquebrune rose up before her eyes as she gazed out of the window on the London square. What were the words the schoolmaster had spoken when, stripped of his dreams, he had confessed success was not for him? "We must forget these fine plans. The school at Roquebrune will send no deputy to Paris." Pamela's eyes grew dim.

She stood looking out of the window for some while, but hearing no movement she at length turned back again. The sheets of the letter had fallen upon the floor, they lay scattered, written over in a round, sprawling, schoolboy's hand. Millicent sat very still, her face most weary and despairing.

"It's all over," she said. "The friend was a swindler. He left the train at a station on the way and disappeared. Tony went on, but there was no farm. He is back in New York."

"But the man can be found?"

"He belongs to a gang. There is little chance, and Tony has no money. He will take no more of mine."

"He is coming home, then?" said Pamela.

"No; he means to stay and retrieve his failures."

Pamela said nothing, and Millicent appealed to her. "He will do that, don't you think? Men have started badly before, and have succeeded, and have not taken so very long to succeed."

"No doubt," said Pamela; and she spoke with what hopefulness she could. But she remembered Tony Stretton. Simplicity and good-humour were amongst his chief qualities; he was a loyal friend, and he had pluck. Was that enough? On the other hand, he had little knowledge and little experience. The schoolmaster of Roquebrune and Tony Stretton stood side by side in her thoughts. She was not, however, to be put to the task of inventing encouragements. For before she could open her lips again, Millicent said gently--

"Will you mind if I ask to be left alone? Come again as soon as you can. But this afternoon----" Her voice broke so that she could not finish her sentence, and she turned hastily away. However, she recovered her self-control and went down the stairs with Pamela, and as they came into the hall their eyes turned to the library door, and then they looked at one another. Both remembered the conversation they had had within that room.

"What if you told Sir John?" said Pamela. "It seems that he does after all care."

"It would be of no use," said Millicent, shaking her head. "He would only say, 'Let him come home,' and Tony will not. Besides, I never see him now."

"Never?" exclaimed Pamela.

"No; he does not leave his room." She lowered her voice. "I do not believe he ever will leave it again. It's not that he's really ill, his doctor tells me, but he's slowly letting himself go."

Pamela answered absently. Sir John Stretton and his ailments played a small part in her thoughts. It seemed that the library was again to become typical of the house, typical of the life its inhabitants led. Nothing was to happen, then. There was to be a mere waiting for things to cease.

But a second letter was lying upstairs unopened on the table, and that letter, harmless as it appeared, was strangely to influence Millicent Stretton's life. It was many hours afterwards when Millicent opened it, and, compared with the heavy tidings she had by the same post received, it seemed utterly trifling and unimportant. It was no more indeed than the invitation from Frances Millingham of which Pamela had spoken. Pamela forgot it altogether when she heard the news which Tony had sent, but she was to be affected by it too. For she had made a promise to Tony Stretton, and, as he had foreseen, she would at any cost fulfil it.

CHAPTER VII

[THE LADY ON THE STAIRS]

Whitewebs, Frances Millingham's house in Leicestershire, was a long white building with many level windows. The square main block of the building rose in the centre two storeys high, and on each side a wing of one storey projected. Behind the house a broad lawn sloped to the bank of a clear and shallow trout stream, with an avenue of old elms upon its left, and a rose garden upon its right. In front of the house a paddock made a ring of green, and round this ring the carriage drive circled from a white five-barred gate. Whitewebs stood in a flat grass country. From the upper windows you looked over a wide plain of meadows and old trees, so level that you had on a misty day almost an illusion of a smooth sea and the masts of ships; from the lower, you saw just as far as the nearest hedgerow, except in one quarter of the compass. For to the south-west the ground rose very far away, and at the limit of view three tall poplars, set in a tiny garden on the hill's crest, stood clearly out against the sky like sentinels upon a frontier. These three landmarks were visible for many miles around. Pamela, however, saw nothing of them as she was driven over the three miles from the station to Whitewebs.

It was late on a February evening, and already dark. The snow had fallen heavily during the last week, and as Pamela looked out through the carriage windows she saw that the ground glimmered white on every side; above the ground a mist thickened the night air, and the cold was piercing. When she reached the house she found that Frances Millingham was waiting for her alone in the big inner hall, with tea ready; and the first question which she asked of her hostess was--

"Is Millie Stretton here?"

"Yes," replied Frances Millingham. "She has been here a week."

"I couldn't come before," said Pamela, rather remorsefully. "My father was at home alone. How is Millie? I have not seen her for a long time. Is she enjoying herself?"

Pamela's conscience had been reproaching her all that afternoon. She could plead in her own behalf that after the arrival of Tony's letter with its message of failure, she had deferred her visit into the country and had stayed in London for a week. But she had not returned to London since, and consequently she had not seen her friend. She had heard regularly from her, it is true; she also knew that there was yet no likelihood of the hoped-for change in the life of that isolated household in Berkeley Square. But there had been certain omissions of late in Millicent's letters which began to make Pamela anxious.

"Yes," Frances Millingham replied; "she seems to be happy enough."

Lady Millingham related the names of her guests. There were twelve in all, but the first ten may be omitted, for they are in no way concerned with Pamela's history. The eleventh name, however, was that of a friend.

"John Mudge is here, too," said Frances Millingham; and Pamela said, with a smile--

"I like him."

John Mudge was that elderly man whom Allan Warrisden had seen with Pamela at Lady Millingham's dance, the man with no pleasure in his face. "And Mr. Lionel Callon," said Frances; "you know him."

"Do I?" asked Pamela.

"At all events, he knows you."

It was no doubt a consequence of Pamela's deliberate plan never to be more than an onlooker, that people who did not arouse her active interest passed in and out of her acquaintanceship like shadows upon a mirror. It might be that she had met Lionel Callon. She could not remember.

"A quarter past seven," said Frances Millingham, glancing at the clock. "We dine at eight."

Pamela dressed quickly in the hope that she might gain a few minutes before dinner wherein to talk to Millicent. She came down the stairs with this object a good quarter of an hour before eight, but she was to be disappointed. The stairs descended into the big inner hall of the house, and just below the roof of the hall they took a bend. As Pamela came round this bend the hall was exposed to her eyes, and she saw, below her, not Millicent at all, but the figure of a man. He was standing by the fireplace, on her left hand as she descended, looking into the fire indeed, so that his back was towards her. But at the rustle of her frock he swung round quickly and looked up. He now moved a few steps towards the foot of the stairs with a particular eagerness. Pamela at that moment had just come round the bend, and was on the small platform from which the final flight of steps began. The staircase was dimly lit, and the panelling of the wall against which it rested dark. Pamela took a step or two downwards, and the light of the hall struck upon her face. The man came instantly to a dead stop, and a passing disappointment was visible upon his upturned face. It was evident that he was expecting some one else. Pamela on her side was disappointed, too, for she had hoped to find Millicent. She went down the stairs and stopped on the third step from the bottom.

"How do you do, Miss Mardale?" said the man. "You have arrived at last."

The man was Lionel Callon. Pamela recognised him now that they stood face to face; she had met him, but she had retained no impression of him in her memory. For the future, however, she would retain a very distinct impression. For her instincts told her at once and clearly that she thoroughly disliked the man. He was thirty-three in years, and looked a trifle younger, although his hair was turning grey. He was clean shaven, handsome beyond most men, and while his features were of a classical regularity and of an almost feminine delicacy, they were still not without character. There was determination in his face, and his eyes were naturally watchful. It was his manner which prompted Pamela's instinct of dislike. Assurance gave to it a hint of arrogance; familiarity made it distasteful. He might have been her host from the warmth of his welcome. Pamela put on her sedatest air.

"I am quite well," she said, with just sufficient surprise to suggest the question, "What in the world has my health to do with you?" She came down the three steps, and added, "We are the first, I suppose."

"There may be others in the drawing-room," said Callon, with a glance towards the open door. But Pamela did not take the hint. For one thing no sound of any voice was audible in that room; for another Mr. Callon was plainly anxious to be rid of her. Even as he was speaking his glance strayed past her up the staircase. Pamela disliked him; she was, besides, disappointed by him of that private talk with Millicent which she desired. She was in a mood for mischief. She changed her manner at once, and, crossing over to the fireplace, engaged Mr. Callon in conversation with the utmost cordiality, and as she talked she began to be amused. Callon became positively uneasy; he could not keep still, he answered her at random. For instance, she put to him a question about the number of guests in the house. He did not answer at all for a moment or two, and when he did speak, it was to say, "Will the frost hold, do you think?"

"There's no sign of a thaw to-night," replied Pamela; and the sounds for which both were listening became audible--the shutting of a door on the landing above, and then the rustle of a frock upon the stairs. Mr. Callon was evidently at his wits' end what to do; and Pamela, taking her elbow from the mantelpiece, said, with great sympathy--

"One feels a little in the way----"

"Oh, not at all, Miss Mardale," Callon answered hurriedly, with a flustered air.

Pamela looked at her companion with the blankest stare of surprise.

"I was going to say, when you interrupted me," she went on, "that one feels a little in the way when one has brought a couple of horses, as I have, and the frost holds."

Callon grew red. He had fallen into a trap; his very hurry to interrupt what appeared to be almost an apology betrayed that the lady upon the stairs and Mr. Lionel Callon had arranged to come down early. He had protested overmuch. However, he looked Pamela steadily in the face, and said--

"I beg your pardon, Miss Mardale."

He spoke loudly, rather too loudly for the ears of any one so near to him as Pamela. The sentence, too, was uttered with a note of warning. There was even a suggestion of command. The command was obeyed by the lady on the stairs, for all at once the frock ceased to rustle, and there was silence. Lionel Callon kept his eyes fixed upon Pamela's face, but she did not look towards the stairs, and in a little while again the sound was heard. But it diminished. The lady upon the stairs was ascending, and a few minutes afterwards a door closed overhead. She had beaten a retreat.

Callon could not quite keep the relief which he felt out of his eyes or the smile from his lips. Pamela noticed the change with amusement. She was not in the mind to spare him uneasiness, and she said, looking at the wall above the mantelpiece--

"This is an old mirror, don't you think? From what period would you date it?"

Callon's thoughts had been so intent upon the stairs that he had paid no heed to the ornaments above the mantelshelf. Now, however, he took note of them with a face grown at once anxious. The mirror was of an oval shape and framed in gold. Under the pretence of admiring it, he moved and stood behind Pamela, looking into the mirror over her shoulder, seeing what she could see, and wondering how much she had seen. He was to some extent relieved. The stairs were ill-lighted, the panelling of the wall dark mahogany; moreover, the stairs bent round into the hall just below the level of the roof, and at the bend the lady on the stairs had stopped. Pamela could not have seen her face. Pamela, indeed, had seen nothing more than a black satin slipper arrested in the act of taking a step, and a black gown with some touches of red at the waist. She had, however, noticed the attitude of the wearer of the dress when the warning voice had brought her to a stop. The lady had stooped down and had cautiously peered into the hall. In this attitude she had been able to see, and yet had avoided being seen.

Pamela, however, did not relieve Mr. Callon of his suspense. She walked into the drawing-room and waited, with an amused curiosity, for the appearance of the black dress. It was long in coming, however. Pamela had no doubt that it would come last, and in a hurry, as though its wearer had been late in dressing. But Pamela was wrong. Millicent Stretton came into the room dressed in a frock of white lace, and at once dinner was announced. Pamela turned to Frances Millingham with a startled face--

"Are we all here?"

Frances Millingham looked round.

"Yes;" and Lord Millingham at that moment offered his arm to Pamela. As she took it, she looked at Millicent, who was just rising from her chair. Millicent was wearing with her white dress black shoes and stockings. She might be wearing them deliberately, of course; on the other hand, she might be wearing them because she had not had time to change them. It was Millicent, certainly, who had come down last. "I beg your pardon, Miss Mardale," Callon had said, and it was upon the "Miss Mardale" that his voice had risen. The emphasis of his warning had been laid upon the name.

As she placed her hand on her host's arm, Pamela said--

"It was very kind of Frances to ask Millie Stretton here."

"Oh no," Lord Millingham replied. "You see, Frances knew her. We all knew, besides, that she is a great friend of yours."

"Yes," said Pamela; "I suppose everybody here knows that?"

"Mrs. Stretton has talked of it," he answered, with a smile.

The "Miss Mardale" might be a warning, then, to Millicent that her friend had arrived--was actually then in the hall. There was certainly no one but Millicent in that house who could have been conscious of any need to shrink back at the warning, who would have changed her dress to prevent a recognition; and Millicent herself need not have feared the warning had there not been something to conceal--something to conceal especially from Pamela, who had said, "I have promised your husband I would be your friend." There was the heart of Pamela's trouble.

She gazed down the two lines of people at the dinner-table, hoping against hope that she had overlooked some one. There was no one wearing a black gown. All Pamela's amusement in outwitting Callon had long since vanished. If Tony had only taken her advice without question, she thought. "Millie's husband should never leave her. If he goes away he should take her with him." The words rang in her mind all through dinner like the refrain of a song of which one cannot get rid. And at the back of her thoughts there steadily grew and grew a great regret that she had ever promised Tony to befriend his wife.

That Millicent was the lady on the stairs she no longer dared to doubt. Had she doubted, her suspicions would have been confirmed immediately dinner was over. In the drawing-room Millicent avoided any chance of a private conversation, and since they had not met for so long such avoidance was unnatural. Pamela, however, made no effort to separate her friend from the other women. She had a plan in her mind, and in pursuit of it she occupied a sofa, upon which there was just room for two. She sat in the middle of the sofa, so that no one else could sit on it, and just waited until the men came in. Some of them crossed at once to Pamela, but she did not budge an inch. They were compelled to stand. Finally, Mr. Mudge approached her, and immediately she moved into one corner and bade him take the other. Mr. Mudge accepted the position with alacrity. The others began to move away; a couple of card-tables were made up. Pamela and John Mudge were left alone.

"You know every one here?" she asked.

"No, very few."

"Mr. Callon, at all events?"

Mr. Mudge glanced shrewdly at his questioner.

"Yes, I know him slightly," he answered.

"Tell me what you know."

Mr. Mudge sat for a moment or two with his hands upon his knees and his eyes staring in front of him. Pamela knew his history, and esteemed his judgment. He had built up a great contracting business from the poorest beginnings, and he remained without bombast or arrogance. He was to be met nowadays in many houses, and, while he had acquired manners, he had lost nothing of his simplicity. The journey from the Seven Dials to Belgrave Square is a test of furnace heat, and John Mudge had betrayed no flaws. There was a certain forlornness, too, in his manner which appealed particularly to Pamela. She guessed that the apples, for which through a lifetime he had grasped, had crumbled into ashes between his fingers. Sympathy taught her that the man was lonely. He wandered through the world amidst a throng of acquaintances; but how many friends had he, she wondered? She did not interrupt his reflections, and he turned to her at last, with an air of decision.

"I am on strange ground here," he said, "as you know. I am the outsider; and when I am on strange ground I go warily. If I am asked what I think of this man or that I make it a rule to praise."

"Yes; but not to me," said Pamela, with a smile. "I want to know the truth to-night."

Mudge looked at her deliberately, and no less deliberately he spoke--

"And I think you ought to know the truth to-night."

Mudge, then, like the rest, knew that she was Millicent's friend. Was it for that reason that she ought to know the truth?

"I know Callon a little," he went on, "but I know a good deal about him. Like most of the men who know him I dislike him heartily. Women, on the other hand, like him, Miss Mardale--like him too well. Women make extraordinary mistakes over men just as men do over women. They can be very blind--like your friend----"

Mudge paused for an appreciable time. Then he went on steadily--

"Like your friend Lady Millingham, who invites him here."

Pamela was grateful for the delicacy with which the warning was conveyed, but she did not misunderstand it. She had been told indirectly, but no less definitely on that account, that Millie was entangled.

"Callon has good looks, of course," continued Mudge; and Pamela uttered a little exclamation of contempt. Mudge smiled, but rather sadly.

"Oh, it's something. All people have not your haughty indifference to good looks. He is tall, he has a face which is a face and not a pudding. It's a good deal, Miss Mardale."

Pamela looked in surprise at the stout, heavily-built bald man who spoke. That he should ever have given a thought to how he looked was a new idea to her. It struck her as pathetic.

"But he is not merely good-looking. He is clever, persistent besides, and, so far as I can judge, untroubled by a single scruple in the management of his life. Altogether, Miss Mardale, a dangerous man. How does he live?" he asked suddenly.

"I neither know nor care," said Pamela. "Ah, but you should care," replied Mudge. "The answer is instructive. He has a small income--two hundred a year, perhaps; a mere nothing compared with what he spends--and he never does an hour's work, as we understand work. Yet he pays his card debts at his club, and they are sometimes heavy, and he wants for nothing. How is it done? He has no prospect of an inheritance, so post-obits are not the explanation."

Mr. Mudge leaned back in his chair and waited. Pamela turned the question over in her mind. "I can't guess how it's done," she said. "And I can do no more than hint the answer," he replied. "He rides one woman's horses, he drives another woman's phaeton, he is always on hand to take a third to a theatre, or to make up a luncheon party with a fourth. Shall we say he borrows money from a fifth? Shall we be wrong in saying it?" And suddenly Mr. Mudge exclaimed, with a heat and scorn which Pamela had never heard from him before, "A very contemptible existence, anyway, Miss Mardale. But the man's not to be despised, mind. No, that's the worst of it. Some day, perhaps, a strong man will rise up and set his foot on him. Till that time he is to be feared." And when Pamela by a gesture rejected the word, Mudge repeated it. "Yes, feared. He makes his plans, Miss Mardale. Take a purely imaginary case," and somehow, although he laid no ironic stress on the word imaginary, and accompanied it with no look, but sat gazing straight in front of him, Pamela was aware that it was a real case he was going to cite. "Imagine a young and pretty woman coming to a house where most of the guests were strangers to her; imagine her to be of a friendly, unsuspecting temperament, rather lonely, perhaps, and either unmarried or separated for a time from her husband. Add that she will one day be very rich, or that her husband will be. Such a woman might be his prey, unless----"

Pamela looked up inquiringly.

"Unless she had good friends to help her."

Pamela's face, distressed before, grew yet more troubled now. The burden of her promise was being forced upon her back. It seemed she was not for one moment to be allowed to forget it.

"I'll tell you my philosophy, Miss Mardale," Mudge continued, "and I have inferred it from what I have seen. I do not believe that any man really comes to good unless he has started in life with the ambition to make a career for himself, with no help other than his hands and his brains afford. Later on he will learn that women can be most helpful; later on, as he gets towards middle life, as the years shorten and shorten, he will see that he must use whatever extraneous assistance comes his way. But he will begin with a fearless ambition to suffice with his own hands and head." Mr. Mudge dropped from the high level of his earnestness. He looked towards Lionel Callon, who was seated at a card-table, and the contempt again crept into his voice. "Now that man began life meaning to use all people he met, and especially women. Women were to be his implements." Mr. Mudge smiled suddenly. "He's listening," he said.

"But he is too far away to hear," replied Pamela.

"No doubt; but he knows we are speaking of him. Look, his attitude shows it. This, you see, is his battleground, and he knows the arts of his particular warfare. A drawing-room! Mr. Lionel Callon fights among the teacups. Cajolery first, and God knows by what means afterwards. But he wins, Miss Mardale; don't close your eyes to that! Look, I told you he was listening. The rubber's over, and he's coming towards us. Oh, he's alert upon his battle-ground! He knows what men think of him. He's afraid lest I should tell what men think to you. But he comes too late."

Callon crossed to the sofa, and stood talking there until Frances Millingham rose. Pamela turned to Mr. Mudge as she got up.

"I thank you very much," she said gratefully.

Mr. Mudge smiled.

"No need for thanks," said he. "I am very glad you came to-night, for I go away to-morrow."

Pamela went to her room and sat down before the fire. What was to be done, she wondered? She could not get Lionel Callon sent away from the house. It would be no use even if she could, since Millie had an address in town. She could not say a word openly.

She raised her head and spoke to her maid.

"Which is Mrs. Stretton's room?" And when she had the answer she rose from her chair and stood, a figure of indecision. She did not plead that John Mudge had exaggerated the danger; for she had herself foreseen it long-ago, before Millie's marriage--even before Millie's engagement. It was just because she had foreseen it that she had used the words which had so rankled in Tony's memory. Bitterly she regretted that she had ever used them; greatly she wished that she could doubt their wisdom. But she could not. Let Millie's husband leave her, she would grieve with all the strength of her nature; let him come back soon, she would welcome him with a joy as great. Yes; but he must come back soon. Otherwise she would grow used to his absence; she would find his return an embarrassment, for it would be the return of a stranger with the prerogative of a husband; she might even have given to another the place he once held in her thoughts. And the other might be a Lionel Callon. For this was Millicent's character. She yielded too easily to affection, and she did not readily distinguish between affection and the show of it. She paddled in the shallows of passion, and flattered herself that she was swimming in the depths. Grief she was capable of--yes; but a torrent of tears obliterated it. Joy she knew; but it was a thrill with her lasting an hour.

Pamela walked along the passage and knocked at Millicent's door, saying who she was. Millicent opened the door, and received her friend with some constraint.

"Can I come in?" said Pamela.

"Of course," said Millie.

They sat opposite to one another on each side of the fire.

"I wanted to see you before I went to bed," said Pamela. "You have not told me lately in your letters how Tony is getting on."

Millie raised her hand to shield her face from the blaze of the fire. She happened to shade it also from the eyes of Pamela; and she made no reply.

"Is he still in New York?" Pamela asked; and then Millie replied.

"I do not know," she answered slowly. She let her hand fall, and looked straight and defiantly at her friend.

"I have not heard from him for a long while," she added; and as she spoke there crept into her face a look of disdain.

CHAPTER VIII

[GIDEON'S FLEECE]

Millicent was reluctant to add any word of explanation. She sat with her eyes upon the fire, waiting, it seemed, until Pamela should see fit to go. But Pamela remained, and of the two women she was the stronger in will and character. She sat, with her eyes quietly resting upon Millicent's face; and in a little while Millicent began reluctantly to speak. As she spoke the disdainful droop of her lips became more pronounced, and her words were uttered in a note of petulance.

"He would stay to retrieve his failure. You remember?" she said.

"Yes," replied Pamela.

"I wrote to him again and again to come home, but he would not. I couldn't make him see that he wasn't really a match for the people he must compete with."

Pamela nodded her head.

"You wrote that to him?"

Millicent lifted her face to Pamela's.

"I put it, of course, with less frankness. I offered him, besides, the rest of my money, so that he might try again; but he refused to take a farthing more. It was unreasonable, don't you think? I could have got on without it, but he couldn't. I was very sorry for him."

"And you expressed your pity, too?" asked Pamela.

"Yes, indeed," said Millicent, eagerly. "But he never would accept it. He replied cheerfully that something was sure to happen soon, that he would be sure to find an opening soon. But, of course, he never did. It was not likely that with his inexperience he ever would."

Tony's own words had recoiled upon him. On the evening when he had first broached his plan to Millicent in Berkeley Square, he had laid before her, amongst others, this very obstacle, thinking that she ought to be aware of it, and never doubting but that he would surmount it. The honesty of his nature had bidden him speak all that he had thought, and he had spoken without a suspicion that his very frankness might put in her mind an argument to belittle him. He had seemed strong then, because he knew the difficulties, and counted them up when she omitted them. His image was all the more pale and ineffectual now because, foreknowing them well, he had not mastered them.

"I wrote to him at last that it wasn't any use for him to go on with the struggle. He would not tell me how he lived, or even where. I had to send my letters to a post-office, and he called for them. He must be living in want, in misery. I wrote to him that I had guessed as much from his very reticence, and I said how sorry I was. Yet, in spite of what I wrote," and here her voice hardened a little; she showed herself as a woman really aggrieved, "in spite of what I wrote, he answered me in a quite short letter, saying that I must not expect to hear from him again until he had recovered from his defeat and was re-established in my eyes. I can't understand that, can you?"

"I think so," Pamela answered. She spoke gently. For there was something to be said upon Millicent's side. The sudden collapse of her exaggerated hopes, the dreary life she led, and her natural disappointment at the failure of the man whom she had married, when once he stepped down into the arena to combat with his fellow-men. These things could not fail to provoke, in a nature so easily swayed from extreme to extreme as Millicent's, impatience, anger, and a sense of grievance. Pamela could hold the balance fairly enough to understand that. But chiefly she was thinking of Tony--Tony hidden away in some lodging in New York, a lodging so squalid that he would not give the address, and vainly seeking for an opportunity whereby he would make a rapid fortune; very likely going short of food, and returning home at night to read over a letter from his wife of which every line cried out to him, with a contemptuous pity, "You are a failure. You are a failure. Come home." Pamela's heart went out in pity, too. But there was no contempt in her pity. She could not but admire the perseverance with which, on this, the first time that he had ever walked hand in hand with misery, he endured its companionship.

"I think I understand," she said. "You say he answered you in that short way in spite of what you wrote. I think it was not in spite of, but because----"

Millie Stretton shook her head.

"No, that's not the reason," she replied. She gave one herself, and it fairly startled Pamela. "Tony no longer cares for me. He means to go out of my life altogether."

Pamela remembered what store Tony had always set upon his wife, how he had spoken of her that July morning in the park, and how he had looked at the moment when he spoke. It was just because he cared so much that he had taken his wild leap into the dark. That, at all events, she believed, and in such a strain she replied. But Millicent would not be persuaded.

"Before Tony went away," she said stubbornly, "he let me see that he no longer cared. He was losing the associations which used to be vivid in his memory. Our marriage had just become a dull, ordinary thing. He had lost the spirit in which he entered into it."

Again Tony's indiscreet frankness had done him wrong. The coon song, which was always to be associated in his mind with the summer night, and the islets in the sea, and the broad stretch of water trembling away in the moonlight across to the lights of the yachts in Oban Bay, had become a mere coon song "sung by some one." Millicent had often remembered and reflected upon that unfortunate sentence, and as her disappointment in Tony increased and the pitying contempt gradually crept into her mind, she read into it more and more of what Tony had not meant.

"I am sure you are wrong," said Pamela, very earnestly. "He went away because he cared. He went away to keep your married life and his from fading away into the colourless, dull, ordinary thing it so frequently becomes. He has lost ground by his failure. No doubt your own letters have shown that; and he is silent now in order to keep what he has. You have said it yourself. He will not write until he is able to re-establish himself in your thoughts."

But would Tony succeed? Could he succeed? The questions forced themselves into her mind even while she was speaking, and she carried them back to her room. The chances were all against him. Even if he retrieved his failure, it would be a long time before that result was reached--too long, perhaps, when his wife was Millicent, and such creatures as Lionel Callon walked about the world. And he might never succeed at all, he was so badly handicapped.

Pamela was sorely tempted to leave the entanglement alone to unravel itself. There was something which she could do. She was too honest to close her eyes to that. But her own history rose up against her and shook a warning finger. It had a message to her ears never so loudly repeated as on this night. "Don't move a step. Look on! Look on!" She knew herself well. She was by nature a partisan. Let her take this trouble in hand and strive to set it right, her whole heart would soon be set upon success. She was fond of Millicent already; she would become fonder still in the effort to save her. She liked Tony very much. The thought of him stoutly persevering, clinging to his one ambition to keep his married life a bright and real thing in spite of want and poverty--and even his wife's contempt, appealed to her with a poignant strength. But she might fail. She had eaten of failure once, and, after all these years, the taste of it was still most bitter in her mouth.

She fought her battle out over her dying fire, and at the end two thoughts stood out clearly in her mind. She had given her promise to Tony to be a good friend to his wife, and there was one thing which she could do in fulfilment of her promise.

She walked over to her window and flung it open. She was of the women who look for signs; no story quite appealed to her like the story of Gideon's Fleece. She looked for a sign now quite seriously. If a thaw had set in, why, the world was going a little better with her, and perhaps she might succeed. But the earth was iron-bound, and in the still night she could hear a dry twig here and there snapping in the frost. No, the world was not going well. She decided to wait until things improved.

But next day matters were worse. For one thing John Mudge went away, and he was the only person in the house who interested her at all. Furthermore, Lionel Callon stayed, and he announced some news.

"I have been chosen to stand for Parliament at the next election," he said; and he named an important constituency. Pamela noticed the look of gratification, almost of pride, which shone at once on Millie's face, and her heart sank. She interpreted Millie's thought, and accurately. Here was a successful man, a man who had got on without opportunities or means, simply by his own abilities; and there, far away in New York, was her failure of a husband. Moreover, Callon and Millicent were much together; they had even small secrets, to which in conversation they referred. The world was not going well with Pamela, and she waited for the fleece to be wet with dew.

After four days, however, the frost showed signs of breaking. A thaw actually set in that evening, and on the next morning two pieces of good news arrived. In the first place, Pamela received a letter from Alan Warrisden. There was nothing of importance in it, but it gave her his actual address. In the second, Millie told Frances Millingham that she had received news that Sir John Stretton was really failing, and although there was no immediate danger, she must hold herself in readiness to return to town. This to Pamela was really the best news of all. This morning, at all events, Gideon's Fleece was wet. She looked out some trains in the railway guide, and then sent a telegram to Warrisden to come by a morning train. She would meet him at the railway station. The one step in her power she was thus resolved to take.

CHAPTER IX

[THE NEW ROAD]

On the crest of that hill which was visible from the upper windows of Whitewebs, a village straggled for a mile; and all day in the cottages the looms were heard. The sound of looms, indeed, was always associated with that village in the minds of Pamela Mardale and Alan Warrisden, though they drove along its broad street but once, and a few hours included all their visit. Those few hours, however, were rich with consequence. For Pamela asked for help that day, and, in the mere asking, gave, as women must; and she neither asked nor gave in ignorance of what she did. The request might be small, the gift small, too; but it set her and her friend in a new relation each to each, it linked them in a common effort, it brought a new and a sweet intimacy into both their lives. So that the noise of a loom was never heard by them in the after times but there rose before their eyes, visible as a picture, that grey chill day of February, the red-brick houses crowding on the broad street in a picturesque irregularity, and the three tall poplars tossing in the wind. The recollection brought always a smile of tenderness to their faces; and in their thoughts they had for the village a strange and fanciful name. It was just a little Leicestershire village perched upon a hill, the village of looms, the village of the three poplars. But they called it Quetta.

At the very end of the street, and exactly opposite to the small house from whose garden the poplars rose, there stood an inn. It was on the edge of the hill, for just beyond the road dipped steeply down between high hedges of brambles and elder trees, and, turning at the bottom of the incline, wound thence through woods and level meadows towards Leicester. It was the old coach road, and the great paved yard of the inn and the long line of disused stables had once been noisy with the shouts of ostlers and the crack of whips. Now only the carrier's cart drove twice a week down the steep road to Leicester, and a faint whistle from the low-lying land and a trail of smoke showed where now the traffic ran. On the platform of the little roadside station, three miles from the village, Pamela met Alan Warrisden on the morning after she had sent off her telegram. She had a trap waiting at the door, and as they mounted into it she said--

"I rode over to the village this morning and hired this dog-cart at the inn. I am not expected to be back at Whitewebs until the afternoon; so I thought we might lunch at the inn, and then a man can drive you back to the station, while I ride home again."

"It was bad going for a horse, wasn't it?" said Warrisden.

The thaw had fairly set in; the roads, still hard as cement, ran with water, and were most slippery. On each side patches of snow hung upon the banks half melted, and the air was raw.

"Yes, it was bad going," Pamela admitted. "But I could not wait. It was necessary that I should see you to-day."

She said no more at the moment, and Warrisden was content to sit by her side as she drove, and wait. The road ran in a broad straight line over the sloping ground. There was no vehicle, not even another person, moving along it. Warrisden could see the line of houses ahead, huddled against the sky, the spire of a church, and on his right the three sentinel poplars. He was to see them all that afternoon.

Pamela drove straight to the inn, where she had already ordered luncheon; and it was not until luncheon was over that she drew up her chair to the fire and spoke.

"Won't you smoke?" she said first of all. "I want you to listen to me."

Warrisden lit a pipe and listened.

"It is right that I should be very frank with you," she went on, "for I am going to ask you to help me."

"You need me, then?" said Warrisden. There was a leap in his voice which brought the colour to her cheeks.

"Very much," she said; and, with a smile, she asked, "Are you glad?"

"Yes," he answered simply.

"Yet the help may be difficult for you to give. It may occupy a long time besides. I am not asking you for a mere hour or a day."

The warning only brought a smile to Warrisden's face.

"I don't think you understand," he said, "how much one wants to be needed by those one needs."

Indeed, even when that simple truth was spoken to her, it took Pamela a little while to weigh it in her thoughts and give it credence. She had travelled a long distance during these last years down her solitary road. She began to understand that now. To need--actually to need people, to feel a joy in being needed--here were emotions, familiar to most, and no doubt at one time familiar to her, which were, nevertheless, now very new and strange. At present she only needed. Would a time come when she would go further still? When she would feel a joy in being needed? The question flashed across her mind.

"Yes," she admitted, "no doubt that is true. But none the less there must be no misunderstanding between you and me. I speak of myself, although it is not for myself that I need your help; but I am not blind. I know it will be for my sake that you give it, and I do not want you to give it in any ignorance of me, or, perhaps"--and she glanced at him almost shyly--"or, perhaps, expecting too much."

Warrisden made no other answer than to lean forward in his chair, with his eyes upon Pamela's face. She was going to explain that isolation of hers which had so baffled him. He would not for worlds have interrupted her lest he should check the utterance on her lips. He saw clearly enough that she was taking a great step for her, a step, too, which meant much to him. The actual explanation was not the important thing. That she should confide it of her own accord--there was the real and valuable sign. As she began to speak again, diffidence was even audible in her voice. She almost awaited his judgment.

"I must tell you something which I thought never to tell to any one," she said. "I meant to carry it as my secret out with me at the end of my life. I have been looking on all these last years. You noticed that; you thought perhaps I was just obeying my nature. But I wasn't. I did not begin life looking on. I began it as eager, as expectant of what life could give me as any girl that was ever born. And I had just my first season, that was all." She smiled rather wistfully as her thoughts went back to it. "I enjoyed my first season. I had hardly ever been in London before. I was eighteen; and everybody was very nice to me. At the end of July I went to stay for a month with some friends of mine on the coast of Devonshire, and--some one else stayed there, too. His name does not matter. I had met him during the season a good deal, but until he came down to Devonshire I had not thought of him more than as a friend. He was a little older than myself, not very much, and just as poor. He had no prospects, and his profession was diplomacy.... So that there was no possibility from the first. He meant never to say anything; but there came an hour, and the truth was out between us."

She stopped and gazed into the fire. The waters of the Channel ran in sunlit ripples before her eyes; the red rocks of Bigbury Bay curved warmly out on her right and her left; further away the towering headlands loomed misty in the hot, still August air. A white yacht, her sails hardly drawing, moved slowly westwards; the black smoke of a steamer stained the sky far out; and on the beach there were just two figures visible--herself and the man who had not meant to speak.

"We parted at once," she went on. "He was appointed a consul in West Africa. I think--indeed I know--that he hoped to rise more quickly that way. But trouble came and he was killed. Because of that one hour, you see, when he spoke what he did not mean to speak, he was killed." It seemed that there was the whole story told. But Pamela had not told it all, and never did; for her mother had played a part in its unfolding. It was Mrs. Mardale's ambition that her daughter should make a great marriage; it was her daughter's misfortune that she knew little of her daughter's character. Mrs. Mardale had remarked the growing friendship between Pamela and the man, she had realised that marriage was quite impossible, and she had thought, with her short-sighted ingenuity, that if Pamela fell in love and found love to be a thing of fruitless trouble, she would come the sooner to take a sensible view of the world and marry where marriage was to her worldly advantage. She thus had encouraged the couple to a greater friendliness, throwing them together when she could have hindered their companionship; she had even urged Pamela to accept that invitation to Devonshire, knowing who would be the other guests. She was disappointed afterwards when Pamela did not take the sensible view; but she did not blame herself at all. For she knew nothing of the suffering which her plan had brought about. Pamela had kept her secret. Even the months of ill-health which followed upon that first season had not opened the mother's eyes, and certainly she never suspected the weary nights of sleeplessness and aching misery which Pamela endured. Some hint of the pain of that bad past time, however, Pamela now gave to Warrisden.

"I stayed as much at home in Leicestershire as possible," she said. "You see there were my horses there; but even with them I was very lonely. The time was long in passing, and it wasn't pleasant to think that there would be so much of it yet, before it passed altogether. I went up to London for the season each year, and I went out a great deal. It helped me to keep from thinking."

The very simplicity with which she spoke gave an intensity to her words. There was no affectation in Pamela Mardale. Warrisden was able to fill out her hints, to understand her distress.

"All this is a great surprise to me," he said. "I have thought of you always as one who had never known either great troubles or great joys. I have hoped that some day you would wake, that I should find you looking out on the world with the eagerness of youth. But I believed eagerness would be a new thing to you."

He looked at her as she sat. The firelight was bright upon her face, and touched her hair with light; her dark eyes shone; and his thought was that which the schoolmaster at Roquebrune had once sadly pondered. It seemed needlessly cruel, needlessly wanton that a girl so equipped for happiness should, in her very first season, when the world was opening like a fairyland, have been blindly struck down. There were so many others who would have felt the blow less poignantly. She might surely have been spared.

"You can guess, now," said Pamela, "why I have so persistently looked on. I determined that I would never go through such distress again. I felt that I would not dare to face it again." She suddenly covered her face with her hands. "I don't think I could," she cried in a low, piteous voice. "I don't know what I would do," as though once more the misery of that time were closing upon her, so vivid were her recollections.

And once more Warrisden felt, as he watched her, the shock of a surprise. He had thought her too sedate, too womanly for her years, and here she sat shrinking in a positive terror, like any child, from the imagined recurrence of her years of trouble. Warrisden was moved as he had seldom been. But he sat quite still, saying no word; and in a little while she took her hands from her face and went on--

"My life was over, you see, at the very beginning, and I was resolved it should be over. For the future I would get interested only in trifling, unimportant things; no one should ever be more to me than a friend whom I could relinquish; I would merely look on. I should grow narrow, no doubt, and selfish." And, as Warrisden started, a smile came on to her face. "Yes, you have been thinking that, too, and you were right. But I didn't mind. I meant to take no risks. Nothing serious should ever come near me. If I saw it coming, I would push it away; and I have pushed it away."

"Until to-day, when you need my help?" Warrisden interrupted.

"Yes, until to-day," Pamela repeated softly.

Warrisden walked over to the window and stood with his back towards her. The three tall poplars stood leafless up in front of him; the sky was heavy with grey clouds; the wind was roaring about the chimneys; and the roads ran with water. It was as cheerless a day as February can produce, but to Warrisden it had something of a summer brightness. The change for which he had hoped so long in vain had actually come to pass.

"What do you want me to do?" he asked, turning again to the room.

"I want you to find Millie Stretton's husband," she replied; "and, at all costs, to bring him home again."

"Millie Stretton's husband?" he repeated, in perplexity.

"Yes. Don't you remember the couple who stepped out of the dark house in Berkeley Square and dared not whistle for a hansom--the truants?"

Warrisden was startled. "Those two!" he exclaimed. "Well, that's strange. On the very night when we saw them, you were saying that there was no road for you, no new road from Quetta to Seistan. I was puzzling my brains, too, as to how in the world you were to be roused out of your detachment; and there were the means visible all the time, perhaps--who knows?--ordained." He sat down again in his chair.

"Where shall I look for Mr. Stretton?" he asked.

"I don't know. He went away to New York, six months ago, to make a home for Millie and himself. He did not succeed, and he has disappeared."

"Disappeared?" cried Warrisden.

"Oh, but of his own accord," said Pamela. "I can't tell you why; it wouldn't be fair. I have no right to tell you. But he must be found, and he must be brought back. Again I can't tell you why; but it is most urgent."

"Is there any clue to help us?" Warrisden asked. "Had he friends in New York?"

"No; but he has a friend in England," said Pamela, "and I think it's just possible that the friend may know where he is to be found, for it was upon his advice that Mr. Stretton went to New York."

"Tell me his name."

"Mr. Chase," Pamela replied. "He is head of a mission in Stepney Green. Tony Stretton told me of him one morning in Hyde Park just before he went away. He seemed to rely very much upon his judgment."

Warrisden wrote the name down in his pocket-book.

"Will he tell me, do you think, where Stretton is, even if he knows? You say Stretton has disappeared of his own accord."

"I have thought of that difficulty," Pamela answered. "There is an argument which you can use. Sir John Stretton, Tony's father, is ill, and in all probability dying."

"I see. I can use the same argument to Stretton himself, I suppose, when I find him?"

"I can give you no other," said Pamela; "but you can add to it. Mr. Stretton will tell you that his father does not care whether he comes back in time or not. He is sure to say that. But you can answer that every night since he went away the candles have been lit in his dressing-room and his clothes laid out by his father's orders, on the chance that some evening he might walk in at the door."

That Sir John Stretton's illness was merely the pretext for Tony's return both understood. The real reason why he must come home Pamela did not tell. To her thinking Millie was not yet so deeply entangled with Lionel Callon but that Tony's home-coming might set the tangle right. A few weeks of companionship, and surely he would resume his due place in his wife's thoughts. Pamela, besides, was loyal to her sex. She had promised to safeguard Millicent; she was in no mind to betray her.

"But bring him back," she cried, with a real passion. "So much depends on his return, for Millie, for him, and for me, too. Yes, for me! If you fail, it is I who fail; and I don't want failure. Save me from it!"

"I'll try," Warrisden answered simply; and Pamela was satisfied.

Much depended, for Warrisden too, upon the success of his adventure. If he failed, Pamela would retire again behind her barrier; she would again resume the passive, indifferent attitude of the very old; she would merely look on as before and wait for things to cease. If, however, he succeeded, she would be encouraged to move forward still; the common sympathies would have her in their grasp again; she might even pass that turnpike gate of friendship and go boldly down the appointed road of life. Thus success meant much for him. The fortunes of the four people--Millicent, Tony, Pamela, and Warrisden--were knotted together at this one point.

"Indeed, I'll try," he repeated,

Pamela's horse was brought round to the inn door. The dusk was coming on.

"Which way do you go?" asked Warrisden.

"Down the hill."

"I will walk to the bottom with you. The road will be dangerous."

They went slowly down between the high elder hedges, Pamela seated on her horse, Warrisden walking by her side. The wide level lowlands opened out beneath them--fields of brown and green, black woods with swinging boughs, and the broad high road with its white wood rails. A thin mist swirled across the face of the country in the wind, so that its every feature was softened and magnified. It loomed dim and strangely distant, with a glamour upon it like a place of old romance. To Pamela and Warrisden, as the mists wove and unwove about it, it had a look of dreamland.

They reached the end of the incline, and Pamela stopped her horse.

"This is my way," said she, pointing along the highway with her whip.

"Yes," answered Warrisden. The road ran straight for some distance, then crossed a wooden bridge and curved out of sight round the edge of a clump of trees. "The new road," he said softly. "The new road from Quetta to Seistan!"

Pamela smiled.

"This is Quetta," said she.

Warrisden laid his hand upon her horse's neck, and looked suddenly up into her face.

"Where will be Seistan?" he asked in a low voice.

Pamela returned the look frankly. There came a softness into her dark eyes. For a moment she let her hand rest lightly upon his sleeve, and did not speak. She herself was wondering how far she was to travel upon this new road.

"I cannot tell," she said very gently. "Nor, my friend, can you. Only"--and her voice took on a lighter and a whimsical tone-"only I start alone on my new road."

And she went forward into the level country. Warrisden climbed the hill again, and turned when he had reached the top; but Pamela was out of sight. The dusk and the mists had enclosed her.

CHAPTER X

[MR. CHASE]

The night had come when Warrisden stepped from the platform of the station into the train. Pamela was by this time back at Whitewebs--he himself was travelling to London; their day was over. He looked out of the window. Somewhere three miles away the village of the three poplars crowned the hill, but a thick wall of darkness and fog hid it from his eyes. It seemed almost as if Pamela and he had met that day only in thought at some village which existed only in a dream. The train, however, rattled upon its way. Gradually he became conscious of a familiar exhilaration. The day had been real. Not merely had it signalled the change in Pamela, for which for so long he had wished; not merely had it borne a blossom of promise for himself, but something was to be done immediately, and the thing to be done was of all things that which most chimed with his own desires. He was to take the road again, and the craving for the road was seldom stilled for long within his heart. He heard its call sung like a song to the rhythm of the wheels. The very uncertainty of its direction tantalised his thoughts.

Warrisden lodged upon the Embankment, and his rooms overlooked the Thames. The mist lay heavy upon London, mid all that night the steamboats hooted as they passed from bridge to bridge. Warrisden lay long awake listening to them; each blast had its message for him, each was like the greeting of a friend; each one summoned him, and to each he answered with a rising joy, "I shall follow, I shall follow." The boats passed down to the sea through the night mist. Many a time he had heard them before, picturing the dark deck and the side lights, red and green, and the yellow light upon the mast, and the man silent at the wheel with the light from the binnacle striking up upon the lines of his face. They were little river or coasting boats for the most part, but he had never failed to be stirred by the long-drawn melancholy of their whistles. They talked of distant lands and an alien foliage.

He spent the following morning and the afternoon in the arrangement of his affairs, and in the evening drove down to the mission house. It stood in a dull by-street close to Stepney Green, a rambling building with five rooms upon the ground floor panelled with varnished deal and furnished with forms and rough tables, and on the floor above, a big billiard-room, a bagatelle-room, and a carpenter's workshop. Mr. Chase was superintending a boxing class in one of the lower rooms, and Warrisden, when he was led up to him, received a shock of surprise. He had never seen a man to the outward eye so unfitted for his work. He had expected a strong burly person, cheery of manner and confident of voice; he saw, however, a tall young man with a long pale face and a fragile body. Mr. Chase was clothed in a clerical frock-coat of unusual length, he wore linen of an irreproachable whiteness, and his hands were fine and delicate as a woman's. He seemed indeed the typical High Church curate fresh that very instant from the tea-cups of a drawing-room.

"A gentleman to see you, sir," said the ex-army sergeant who had brought forward Warrisden. He handed Warrisden's card to Chase, who turned about and showed Warrisden his full face. Surprise had been Warrisden's first sentiment, but it gave place in an instant to distaste. The face which he saw was not ugly, but he disliked it. It almost repelled him. There was no light in the eyes at all; they were veiled and sunken; and the features repelled by reason of a queer antagonism. Mr. Chase had the high narrow forehead of an ascetic, the loose mouth of a sensualist, and a thin crop of pale and almost colourless hair. Warrisden wondered why any one should come to this man for advice, most of all a Tony Stretton. What could they have in common--the simple, good-humoured, unintellectual subaltern of the Coldstream, and this clerical exquisite? The problem was perplexing.

"You wish to see me?" asked Chase.

"If you please."

"Now? As you see, I am busy."

"I can wait."

"Thank you. The mission closes at eleven. If you can wait till then you might come home with me, and we could talk in comfort."

It was nine o'clock. For two hours Warrisden followed Chase about the mission, and with each half-hour his interest increased. However irreconcilable with his surroundings Chase might appear to be, neither he nor any of the members of the mission were aware of it. He was at ease alike with the boys and the men; and the boys and the men were at ease with him. Moreover, he was absolute master, although there were rough men enough among his subjects. The fiercest boxing contest was stopped in a second by a motion of that delicate hand.

"I used to have a little trouble," he said to Warrisden, "before I had those wire frames fixed over the gas-jets. You see they cover the gas taps. Before that was done, if there was any trouble, the first thing which happened was that the room was in darkness. It took some time to restore order;" and he passed on to the swimming-bath.

Mr. Chase was certainly indefatigable. Now he was giving a lesson in wood-carving to a boy; now he was arranging an apprenticeship for another in the carpenter's shop. Finally he led the way into the great billiard-room, where only the older men were allowed.

"It is here that Stretton used to keep order?" said Warrisden; and Chase at once turned quickly towards him.

"Oh," he said slowly, in a voice of comprehension, "I was wondering what brought you here. Yes; this was the room."

Chase moved carelessly away, and spoke to some of the men about the tables. But for the rest of the evening he was on his guard. More than once his eyes turned curiously and furtively towards Warrisden. His face was stubborn, and wore a look of wariness. Warrisden began to fear lest he should get no answer to the question he had to put. No appeal would be of any use--of that he felt sure. His argument must serve--and would it serve?

Chase, at all events, made no attempt to avoid the interview. As the hands of the clock marked eleven, and the rooms emptied, he came at once to Warrisden.

"We can go now," he said; and unlocking a drawer, to Warrisden's perplexity he filled his pockets with racket-balls. The motive for that proceeding became apparent as they walked to the house where Chase lodged. Their way lay through alleys, and as they walked the children clustered about them, and Chase's pockets were emptied.

"We keep this house because men from the Universities come down and put in a week now and then at the mission. My rooms are upstairs."

Chase's sitting-room was in the strangest contrast to the bareness of the mission and the squalor of the streets. It was furnished with luxury, but the luxury was that of a man of taste and knowledge. There was hardly a piece of furniture which had not an interesting history; the engravings and the brass ornaments upon the walls had been picked up here and there in Italy. A bright fire blazed upon the hearth.

"What will you drink?" Chase asked, and brought from a cupboard bottle after bottle of liqueurs. It seemed to Warrisden that the procession of bottles would never end--some held liqueurs of which he had never even heard the name; but concerning all of them Mr. Chase discoursed with great knowledge and infinite appreciation.

"I can recommend this," he said tentatively, as he took up one fat round bottle and held it up to the light. "It is difficult perhaps to say definitely which is the best, but--yes, I can recommend this."

"Can't I have a whiskey and soda?" asked Warrisden, plaintively.

Mr. Chase looked at his companion with a stare.

"Of course you can," he replied. But his voice was one of disappointment, and with an almost imperceptible shrug of the shoulders he fetched a Tantalus and a siphon of seltzer.

"Help yourself," he said; and lighting a gold-tipped cigarette he drew up a chair and began to talk. And so Warrisden came at last to understand how Tony Stretton had gained his great faith in Mr. Chase. Chase was a talker of a rare quality. He sat stooping over the fire with his thin hands outspread to the blaze, and for half an hour Warrisden was enchained. All that had repelled him in the man, all that had aroused his curiosity, was soon lost to sight. He yielded himself up as if to some magician. Chase talked not at all of his work or of the many strange incidents which he must needs have witnessed in its discharge. He spoke of other climates and bright towns with a scholarship which had nothing of pedantry, and an observation human as it was keen. Chase, with the help of his Livy, had traced Hannibal's road across the Alps and had followed it on foot; he spoke of another march across snow mountains of which Warrisden had never till this moment heard--the hundred days of a dead Sultan of Morocco on the Passes of the Atlas, during which he led his forces back from Tafilet to Rabat. Chase knew nothing of this retreat but what he had read. Yet he made it real to Warrisden, so vividly did his imagination fill up the outlines of the written history. He knew his Paris, his Constantinople. He had bathed from the Lido and dreamed on the Grand Canal. He spoke of the peeling frescoes in the Villa of Countess Guiccioli above Leghorn, of the outlook from the terrace over the vines and the olive trees to the sea where Shelley was drowned; and where Byron's brig used to round into the wind and with its sails flapping drop anchor under the hill. For half an hour Warrisden wandered through Europe in the pleasantest companionship, and then Chase stopped abruptly and leaned back in his chair.

"I was forgetting," he said, "that you had come upon a particular errand. It sometimes happens that I see no one outside the mission people for a good while, and during those periods when I get an occasion I am apt to talk too much. What can I do for you?"

The spirit had gone from his voice, his face. He leaned back in his chair, a man tired out. Warrisden looked at the liqueur bottles crowded on the table, with Chase's conversation still fresh in his mind. Was Chase a man at war with himself, he wondered, who was living a life for which he had no taste that he might the more completely escape a life which his conscience disapproved? Or was he deliberately both hedonist and Puritan, giving to each side of his strange nature, in turn, its outlet and gratification?

"You have something to say to me," Chase continued. "I know quite well what it is about."

"Stretton," said Warrisden.

"Yes; you mentioned him in the billiard-room. Well?"

Chase was not looking at Warrisden. He sat with his eyes half-closed, his elbows on the arms of his chair, his finger-tips joined under his chain, and his head thrown back. There was no expression upon his face but one of weariness. Would he answer? Could he answer? Warrisden was in doubt, indeed in fear. He led to his question warily.

"It was you who recommended Stretton to try horse-breeding in Kentucky."

"Yes," said Chase; and he added, "after he had decided of his own accord to go away."

"He failed."

"Yes."

"And he has disappeared."

Chase opened his eyes, but did not turn them to his companion.

"I did not advise his disappearance," he said. "That, like his departure, was his own doing."

"No doubt," Warrisden agreed. "But it is thought that you might have heard from him since his disappearance."

Chase nodded his head.

"I have."

"It is thought that you might know where he is now."

"I do," said Mr. Chase. Warrisden was sensibly relieved. One-half of his fear was taken from him. Chase knew, at all events, where Stretton was to be found. Now he must disclose his knowledge. But before he could put a question, Chase said languidly--

"You say 'it is thought,' Mr. Warrisden. By whom is it thought? By his wife?"

"No. But by a great friend of hers and his."

"Oh," said Chase, "by Miss Pamela Mardale, then."

Warrisden started forward.

"You know her?" he asked.

"No. But Stretton mentioned her to me in a letter. She has sent you to me in fulfilment of a promise. I understand."

The words were not very intelligible to Warrisden. He knew nothing of Pamela's promise to Tony Stretton. But, on the other hand, he saw that Mr. Chase was giving a more attentive ear to what he said. He betrayed no ignorance of the promise.

"I am sent to fetch Stretton home," he said. "I want you to tell me where he is."

Chase shook his head.

"No," he said gently.

"It is absolutely necessary that Stretton should come back," Warrisden declared with great deliberation. And with no less deliberation Chase replied--

"In Stretton's view it is absolutely necessary that he should stay away!"

"His father is dying."

Chase started forward in his chair, and stared at Warrisden for a long time.

"Is that an excuse?" he said at length.

It was, as Warrisden was aware. He did not answer the question.

"It is the truth," he replied; and he replied truthfully.

Chase rose from his chair and walked once or twice across the room. He came back to the fire, and leaning an elbow on the mantelpiece stared into the coals. Warrisden sat very still. He had used his one argument--he could add nothing to it; he could only wait for the answer in a great anxiety. So much hung upon that answer for Stretton and his wife, for Pamela, for himself! The fortunes of all four were knotted together. At last the answer came.

"I promised Tony that I would keep his secret," said Chase. "But when he asked for the promise, and when I gave it, the possibility of his father dying was not either in his mind or mine. We considered--in letters, of course--other possibilities; but not this one. I don't think I have the right to remain silent. Even in the face of this possibility I should have kept my promise, I think, if you had come from his wife--for I know why he disappeared. But as things are, I will tell you. Tony Stretton is in the North Sea on a trawler."

"In the North Sea?" exclaimed Warrisden. And he smiled. After all, the steamboats on the river had last night called to him with a particular summons.

"Yes," continued Chase, and he fetched from his writing-desk a letter in Tony's hand. "He came back to England two months ago. He drifted across the country. He found himself at Yarmouth with a few shillings in his pocket. He knew something of the sea. He had sailed his own yacht in happier times. He was in great trouble. He needed time to think out a new course of life. He hung about on Gorleston pier for a day or two, and then was taken on by a skipper who was starting out short of hands, he signed for eight weeks, and he wrote to me the day before he started. That's four weeks ago."

"Can I reach him?" Warrisden asked.

"Yes. The boat is the Perseverance, and it belongs to the Blue Fleet. A steam cutter goes out every day from Billingsgate to fetch the fish. I know one of the owners. His son comes down to the mission. I can get you a passage. When can you start?"

"At any time," replied Warrisden. "The sooner the better."

"To-morrow, then," said Chase. "Meet me at the entrance to Billingsgate Market at half-past eleven. It will take you forty-eight hours with ordinary luck to reach the Dogger Bank. Of course, if there's a fog in the Thames the time will be longer. And I warn you, living is rough on a fish-carrier."

"I don't mind that," said Warrisden, with a smile. He went away with a light heart, and that night wrote a letter to Pamela, telling her of his interview with Mr. Chase. The new road seemed after all likely to prove a smooth one. As he wrote, every now and then a steamboat hooted from the river, and the rain pattered upon his window. He flung it up and looked out. There was no fog to-night, only the rain fell, and fell gently. He prayed that there might be no fog upon the Thames to-morrow.

Mr. Chase, too, heard the rain that night. He sat in his armchair listening to it with a decanter at his elbow half filled with a liquid like brown sherry. At times he poured a little into his glass and drank it slowly, crouching over his fire. Somewhere in the darkness of the North Sea Tony Stretton was hidden. Very likely at this moment he was standing upon the deck of his trawler with his hands upon the spokes of the wheel, and his eyes peering forward through the rain, keeping his long night-watch while the light from the binnacle struck upwards upon the lines of his face. Mr. Chase sat late in a muse. But before he went to bed he locked the decanter and the glass away in a private cupboard, and took the key with him into his bedroom.

CHAPTER XI

[ON THE DOGGER BANK]

The City of Bristol swung out of the huddle of boats off Billingsgate Wharf at one o'clock on the next afternoon. Mr. Chase, who stood upon the quay amongst the porters and white-jacketed salesmen, turned away with an episcopal wave of the hand. Warrisden leaned over the rail of the steamer's bridge, between the captain and the pilot, and shouted a reply. The City of Bristol, fish-cutter of 300 tons, was a boat built for speed, long and narrow, sitting low on the water, with an upstanding forecastle forward, a small saloon in the stern, and a tiny cabin for the captain under the bridge on deck. She sidled out into the fair way and went forward upon her slow, intricate journey to the sea. Below the Tower she took her place in the long, single file of ships winding between the mud banks, and changed it as occasion served; now she edged up by a string of barges, now in a clear broad space she made a spurt and took the lead of a barquantine, which swam in indolence, with bare masts, behind a tug; and at times she stopped altogether, like a carriage blocked in Piccadilly. The screw thrashed the water, ceased, and struck again with a suggestion of petulance at the obstacles which barred the boat's way. Warrisden, too, chafed upon the bridge. A question pressed continually upon his mind--"Would Stretton return?" He had discovered where Stretton was to be found. The tall grey spire of Stepney Church rose from behind an inlet thick with masts, upon the left; he was already on his way to find him. But the critical moment was yet to come. He had still to use his arguments; and as he stood watching the shipping with indifferent eyes the arguments appeared most weak and unpersuasive. Stretton's father was dying, it was true. The son's return was no doubt a natural obligation. But would the natural obligation hold when the father was unnatural? Those months in New York had revealed one quality in Tony Stretton, at all events; he could persist. The very name of the trawler in which he was at work seemed to Warrisden of a bad augury for his success--the Perseverance!

Greenwich, with its hill of grass, slipped behind on the right; at the Albert Docks a huge Peninsular and Oriental steamer, deck towering above deck, swung into the line; the high chimneys of the cement works on the Essex flats began to stand out against the pale grey sky, each one crowned with white smoke like a tuft of wool; the barges, under their big brown sprit-sails, now tacked this way and that across a wider stream; the village of Greenhithe and the white portholes of the Worcester showed upon the right.

"Would Stretton return?" The question revolved in Warrisden's mind as the propeller revolved in the thick brown water. The fortunes of four people hung upon the answer, and no answer could be given until a night, and a day, and another night had passed, until he saw the Blue Fleet tossing far away upon the Dogger Bank. Suppose that the answer were "No!" He imagined Pamela sinking back into lassitude, narrowing to that selfishness which she, no less than he, foresaw; looking on again at the world's show with the lack-lustre indifference of the very old.

At Gravesend the City of Bristol dropped her pilot, a little, white-bearded, wizened man, who all the way down the river, balancing himself upon the top-rail of the bridge, like some nautical Blondin, had run from side to side the while he exchanged greetings with the anchored ships; and just opposite to Tilbury Fort, with its scanty fringe of trees, she ran alongside of a hulk and took in a load of coal.

"We'll go down and have tea while they are loading her," said the captain.

The dusk was falling when Warrisden came again on deck, and a cold wind was blowing from the north-west. The sharp stem of the boat was cutting swiftly through the quiet water; the lift of the sea under her forefoot gave to her a buoyancy of motion--she seemed to have become a thing alive. The propeller cleft the surface regularly; there was no longer any sound of petulance in its revolutions, rather there was a throb of joy as it did its work unhindered. Throughout the ship a steady hum, a steady vibration ran. The City of Bristol was not merely a thing alive; it was a thing satisfied.

Upon Warrisden, too, there descended a sense of peace. He was en rapport with the ship. The fever of his questioning left him. On either side the arms of the shore melted into the gathering night. Far away upon his right the lights of Margate shone brightly, like a chain of gold stretched out upon the sea; in front of him there lay a wide and misty bay, into which the boat drove steadily. All the unknown seemed hidden there; all the secret unrevealed Beyond. There came whispers out of that illimitable bay to Warrisden's ears; whispers breathed upon the north wind, and all the whispers were whispers of promise, bidding him take heart. Warrisden listened and believed, uplifted by the grave quiet of the sea and its mysterious width.

The City of Bristol turned northward into the great channel of the Swin, keeping close to the lightships on the left, so close that Warrisden from the bridge could look straight down upon their decks. The night had altogether come--a night of stars. Clusters of lights, low down upon the left, showed where the towns of Essex stood; upon the light hand the homeward-bound ships loomed up ghost-like and passed by; on the right, too, shone out the great green globes of the Mouse light like Neptune's reading-lamps. Sheltered behind the canvas screen at the corner of the bridge Warrisden looked along the rake of the unlighted deck below. He thought of Pamela waiting for his return at Whitewebs, but without impatience. The great peace and silence of the night were the most impressive things he had ever known. The captain's voice complaining of the sea jarred upon him.

"It's no Bobby's job," said the captain in a low voice. "It's home once in three weeks from Saturday to Monday, if you are in luck, and the rest of your time you're in carpet slippers on the bridge. You'll sleep in my chatoo, to-night. I sha'n't turn in until we have passed the Outer Gabbard and come to the open sea. That won't be till four in the morning."

Warrisden understood that he was being offered the captain's cabin.

"No, thanks," said he. "The bench of the saloon will do very well for me."

The captain did not press his offer.

"Yes; there's more company in the saloon," he said. "I often sleep there myself. You are bound for the Mission ship, I suppose?"

"No; I want to find a man on the trawler Perseverance."

The captain turned. Warrisden could not see his face, but he knew from his attitude that he was staring at him in amazement.

"Then you must want to see him pretty badly," he commented. "The No'th Sea in February and March is not a Bobby's job."

"Bad weather is to be expected?" asked Warrisden.

"It has been known," said the captain dryly; and before the lights of the Outer Gabbard winked good-bye on the starboard quarter at four o'clock in the morning, the City of Bristol was taking the water over her deck.

Warrisden rolled on the floor of the saloon--for he could not keep his balance on the narrow bench--and tried in vain to sleep. But the strong light of a lamp, swinging from the roof, glared upon his eyes, the snores of his companions trumpeted in his ears. Moreover, the heat was intolerable. Five men slept in the bunks--Warrisden made a sixth. At four in the morning the captain joined the party through his love of company. The skylight and the door were both tightly closed, a big fire burned in the stove, and a boiling kettle of tea perpetually puffed from its spout a column of warm, moist steam. Warrisden felt his skin prickly beneath his clothes; he gasped for fresh air.

Living would be rough upon the fish-carrier, Chase had told him; and rough Warrisden found it. In the morning the steward rose, and made tea by the simple process of dropping a handful of tea into the kettle and filling it up with water. A few minutes later he brought a dish of ham and eggs from the galley, and slapped it down on the table.

"Breakfast," he cried; and the five men opened their eyes, rubbed them, and without any other preparation sat down and ate. Warrisden slipped up the companion, unscrewed the skylight and opened it for the space of an inch. Then he returned.

The City of Bristol was rolling heavily, and Warrisden noticed with surprise that all of the five men gave signs of discomfort. Surely, he thought, they must be used to heavy weather. But, nevertheless, something was wrong; they did not talk. Finally, the captain looked upwards, and brought his hand down upon the table.

"I felt something was wrong," said he; "the skylight's open."

All stared up to the roof.

"So it is."

"I did that," Warrisden said humbly.

At once all the faces were turned on him in great curiosity.

"Now why?" asked the captain. "Don't you like it nice and snug?"

"Yes; oh yes," Warrisden said hurriedly.

"Well, then!" said the captain; and the steward went on deck and screwed the skylight down.

"After all, it's only for thirty-six hours," thought Warrisden, as he subsequently bathed in a pail on deck. But he was wrong; for the Blue Fleet had gone a hundred miles north to the Fisher Bank, and thither the City of Bristol followed it.

The City of Bristol sailed on to the Fisher Bank, and found an empty sea. It hunted the Blue Fleet for half-a-dozen hours, and, as night fell, it came upon a single trawler with a great flare light suspended from its yard.

"They're getting in their trawl," said the captain; and he edged up within earshot.

"Where's the Blue Fleet?" he cried.

"Gone back to the Dogger," came the answer.

The captain swore, and turned southwards. For four days and nights Warrisden pitched about on the fish-carrier and learned many things, such as the real meaning of tannin in tea, and the innumerable medical uses to which "Friar's Balsam" can be put. On the morning of the fifth day the City of Bristol steamed into the middle of the fleet, and her engines stopped.

These were the days before the steam-trawler. The sailing-ships were not as yet laid up, two by two, alongside Gorleston quay, and knocked down for a song to any purchaser. Warrisden looked over a grey, savage sea. The air was thick with spindrift. The waves leaped exultingly up from windward and roared away to leeward from under the cutter's keel in a steep, uprising hill of foam. All about him the sailing-boats headed to the wind, sinking and rising in the furrows, so that Warrisden would just see a brown topsail over the edge of a steep roller like a shark's fin, and the next instant the dripping hull of the boat flung out upon a breaking crest.

"You will have to look slippy when the punt from the Perseverance comes alongside with her fish," the captain shouted. "The punt will give you a passage back to the Perseverance, but I don't think you will be able to return. There's a no'th-westerly gale blowing up, and the sea is increasing every moment. However, there will be another cutter up to-morrow, and if it's not too rough you could be put on board of her."

It took Warrisden a full minute to realise the meaning of the captain's words. He looked at the tumbling, breaking waves, he listened to the roar of the wind through the rigging.

"The boats won't come alongside to-day," he cried.

"Won't they?" the skipper replied. "Look!"

Certainly some manœuvre was in progress. The trawlers were all forming to windward in a rough semicircle about the cutter. Warrisden could see boat tackle being rigged to the main yards and men standing about the boats capsized on deck. They were actually intending to put their fish on board in the face of the storm.

"You see, with the gale blowing up, they mayn't get a chance to put their fish on board for three or four days after this," the captain explained. "Oh, you can take it from me. The No'th Sea is not a Bobby's job."

As Warrisden watched, one by one the trawlers dropped their boats, and loaded them with fish-boxes. The boats pushed off, three men to each, with their life-belts about their oil-skins, and came down with the wind towards the fish-carrier. The trawlers bore away, circled round the City of Bristol, and took up their formation to leeward, so that, having discharged their fish, the boats might drop down again with the wind to their respective ships. Warrisden watched the boats, piled up with fish-boxes, coming through the welter of the sea. It seemed some desperate race was being rowed.

"Can you tell me which is the boat from the Perseverance?" he asked.

"I think it's the fifth," said the captain.

The boats came down, each one the kernel of a globe of spray. Warrisden watched, admiring how cleverly they chose the little gaps and valleys in the crests of the waves. Each moment he looked to see a boat tossed upwards and overturned; each moment he dreaded that boat would be the fifth. But no boat was overturned. One by one they passed under the stern of the City of Bristol, and came alongside under the shelter of its wall.

The fifth boat ranged up. A man stood up in the stern.

"The Perseverance," he cried. "Nine boxes." And as he spoke a great sea leapt up against the windward bow of the cutter. The cutter rolled from it suddenly, her low bulwarks dipped under water on the leeward side, close by the Perseverance boat.

"Shove off!" the man cried, who was standing up; and as he shouted he lurched and fell into the bottom of the boat. The two men in the bows pushed off with their oars; but they were too late. The cutter's bulwark caught the boat under the keel; it seemed she must be upset, and men and boxes whelmed in the sea, unless a miracle happened. But the miracle did happen. As the fish-cutter righted she scooped on to her deck the boat, with its boxes and its crew. The incident all seemed to happen within the fraction of a second. Not a man upon the fish-cutter had time to throw out a rope. Warrisden saw the cutter's bulwarks dip, the sailor falling in the boat, and the boat upon the deck of the cutter in so swift a succession that he had not yet realised disaster was inevitable before disaster was avoided.

The sailor rose from the bottom of the boat and stepped on deck, a stalwart, dripping figure.

"From the Perseverance, sir. Nine boxes," he said, looking up to the captain on the bridge; and Warrisden, leaning by the captain's side upon the rail, knew the sailor to be Tony Stretton. The accent of the voice would have been enough to assure him; but Warrisden knew the face too.

"This is the man I want," he said to the captain.

"You must be quick, then," the captain replied. "Speak to him while the boat is being unloaded."

Warrisden descended on to the deck.

"Mr. Stretton," said he.

The sailor swung round quickly. There was a look of annoyance upon his face.

"You are surely making a mistake," said he, abruptly. "We are not acquainted," and he turned back to the fish-boxes.

"I'm not making a mistake," replied Warrisden. "I have come out to the North Sea in order to find you."

Stretton ceased from his work and stood up. He led the way to the stern of the cutter, where the two men were out of earshot.

"Now," he said. He stood in front of Warrisden, in his sea-boots and his oilskins, firmly planted, yet swaying to the motion of the ship. There was not merely annoyance in his face, but he had the stubborn and resolute look of a man not lightly to be persuaded. Standing there on the cutter's deck, backed by the swinging seas, there was even an air of mastery about him which Warrisden had not expected. His attitude seemed, somehow, not quite consistent with his record of failure.

"Now," said Stretton, "we must be quick. The sea is getting worse each minute, and I have to get back to the Perseverance. You are----?"

"Alan Warrisden, a stranger to you."

"Yes," Stretton interrupted; "how did you find me out?"

"Chase told me."

Stretton's face flushed angrily.

"He had no right to tell you. I wished for these few weeks to be alone. He gave me his word he would tell no one."

"He had to break his word," said Warrisden, firmly. "It is necessary that you should come home at once."

Stretton laughed. Warrisden was clinging to a wire stay from the cutter's mizzen-mast, and even so could hardly keep his feet. He had a sense of coming failure from the very ease with which Stretton stood resting his hands upon his hips, unsupported on the unsteady deck.

"I cannot come," said Stretton abruptly; and he turned away. As he turned Warrisden shouted--for in that high wind words carried in no other way--"Your father, Sir John Stretton, is dying."

Stretton stopped. He looked for a time thoughtfully into Warrisden's face; but there was no change in his expression by which Warrisden could gather whether the argument would prevail or no. And when at last he spoke, it was to say--

"But he has not sent for me."

It was the weak point in Warrisden's argument, and Stretton had, in his direct way, come to it at once. Warrisden was silent.

"Well?" asked Stretton. "He has not sent for me?"

"No," Warrisden admitted; "that is true."

"Then I will not come."

"But though he has not sent for you, it is very certain that he wishes for your return," Warrisden urged. "Every night since you have been away the candles have been lighted in your dressing-room and your clothes laid out, in the hope that on one evening you will walk in at the door. On the very first night, the night of the day on which you went, that was done. It was done by Sir John Stretton's orders, and by his orders it has always since been done."

Just for a moment Warrisden thought that his argument would prevail. Stretton's face softened; then came a smile which was almost wistful about his lips, his eyes had a kindlier look. And the kindlier look remained. Kindliness, too, was the first tone audible in his voice as he replied; but the reply itself yielded nothing.

"He has not sent for me."

He looked curiously at Warrisden, as if for the first time he became aware of him as a man acting from motives, not a mere instrument of persuasion.

"After all, who did send you?" he asked. "My wife?"

"No."

"Who then?"

"Miss Pamela Mardale."

Stretton was startled by the name. It was really the strongest argument Warrisden had in his armoury. Only he was not aware of its strength.

"Oh," said Stretton, doubtfully; "so Miss Mardale sent you!"

He thought of that morning in the Row; of Pamela's words--"I still give the same advice. Do not leave your wife." He recalled the promise she had given, although it was seldom long absent from his thoughts. It might be that she sent this message in fulfilment of that promise. It might be that, for some unknown reason, he was now needed at his wife's side. But he had no thought of distrust; he had great faith in Millicent. She despised him, yes; but he did not distrust her. And, again, it might be that Pamela was merely sending him this news thinking he would wish to hear of it in time. After all, Pamela was his friend. He looked out on the wild sea. Already the boats were heading back through the foam, each to its trawler.

"One must take one's risks," he said. "So much I have learnt here in the North Sea. Look!" and he pointed to the boats. "Those boats are taking theirs. Yes; whether it's lacing your topsail or taking in a reef, one must take one's risks. I will not come."

He went back to the middle of the ship. The punt of the Perseverance was already launched, the two fishermen waiting in it. As it rose on a swell, Stretton climbed over the bulwarks and dropped into the stern.

"Good-bye," he said. "I have signed on for eight weeks, and only four have passed. I cannot run away and leave the ship short-handed. Thank you for coming; but one must take one's risks."

The boat was pushed off and headed towards the Perseverance. The waves had increased, the crests toppled down the green slopes in foam. Slowly the boat was rowed down to the trawler, the men now stopping and backing water, now dashing on. Warrisden saw them reach the ship's side and climb on board, and he saw the boat slung upwards and brought in on to the deck. Then the screw of the City of Bristol struck the water again. Lurching through the heavy seas, she steamed southwards. In a few minutes the Blue Fleet was lost to sight.

CHAPTER XII

[TONY'S INSPIRATION]

Warrisden had failed. This was the account of his mission which he had to give to Pamela Mardale; and he gave it without excuses. He landed at Billingsgate Wharf at eleven o'clock on the second day after the sails of the Blue Fleet had dropped out of sight behind the screen of breaking waves. That afternoon he travelled down to the village of the three poplars. It was night when he stepped out of the train on to the platform of the little station. One can imagine what bitter and humiliating thoughts occupied his mind. Away on the crest of the hill the lights of the village shone brightly through the clear night air, just as the lights of Margate had shone across the bay when the steam-cutter had sprung like a thing alive to the lift of the sea beneath her bows. Then all the breeze had whispered promises; now the high hopes were fallen. "Do not fail!" Pamela had cried, with a veritable passion, hating failure as an indignity, he could hear the words in the very accent of her voice. Once she had suffered failure, but it was not to be endured again. That was what she had meant; and he had failed. He drove along that straight road which he had traversed with Pamela at his side; he slept under the roof of the inn where Pamela had claimed his help. The help had been fruitless, and the next morning he rode down the hill and along the load with the white wood rails--"the new road"--to tell her so. The sun was bright; there was a sparkle of spring in the air; on the black leafless boughs birds sang. He looked back to the three poplars pointing to the sky from the tiny garden on the crest of the hill. Quetta--yes! But it seemed there was to be no Seistan.

He had started early, fearing that there might be a meet that day; and he had acted wisely, for in the hall there were one or two men lounging by the fire in scarlet, and Pamela was wearing her riding-habit when she received him. He was shown into a little room which opened on to the garden behind the house, and thither Pamela came.

"You are alone!" she said.

"Yes; Stretton would not come."

"None the less, I am very grateful."

She smiled as she spoke, and sat down, with her eyes upon him, waiting for his story. The disappointment was visible upon his face, but not upon hers. Pamela's indeed, was to him at this moment rather inscrutable. It was not indifferent, however. He recognised that, and was, in a way, consoled. It had been his fear that at the first word she would dismiss the subject, and turn her back on it for good. On the contrary, she was interested, attentive.

"You found him, then?" she asked.

"Yes. You would like to hear what passed?"

"Of course."

"Even though I failed?"

She looked at him with some surprise at his insistence.

"Yes, yes," she said, a little impatiently.

"We were nearly three days longer in reaching the Blue Fleet than we anticipated," he began. "Stretton came on board the fish-cutter----" And Pamela interrupted him--

"Why were you nearly three days longer? Tell me about your own journey out to the fleet from the beginning."

She was, in fact, as much interested in her messenger as in the errand upon which she had sent him. Warrisden began to see that his journey after all was not entirely a defeat. The alliance to which they had set their hands up there in the village on the hill was bearing its fruit. It had set them in a new relationship to each other, and in a closer intimacy.

He told the story of his voyage, making light of his hardships on the steam-cutter. She, on the other hand, made much of them.

"To quote your captain," she remarked, with a smile, "it was not a Bobby's job."

Warrisden laughed, and told her of Stretton's arrival in the punt of the Perseverance. He described the way in which he had come on board; he related the conversation which had passed between them at the stern of the cutter.

"He hadn't the look of a man who had failed," Warrisden continued. "He stood there on the swinging deck with his legs firmly planted apart, as easily as if he were standing on a stone pavement. I, on the other hand, was clinging desperately to a stay. He stood there, with the seas swinging up behind him, and stubbornly refused to come."

"You told him of his father's illness?" asked Pamela.

"He replied that his father had not sent for him."

"You spoke of the candles lit every night?"

"His answer was the same. His father had not sent for him. Besides, he had his time to serve. He had signed on for eight weeks. There was only one moment when I thought that there was a chance I might persuade him; and, indeed, my persuasions had really nothing to do with it at all. It was just the mention of your name."

"My name?" asked Pamela, in surprise.

"Yes. In answer to a question of his I told him that I had been sent out by you, and for a moment he faltered."

Pamela nodded her head in comprehension.

"I understand; but he refused in the end?"

"Yes. He said, 'One must take one's risks.'"

Pamela repeated the sentence softly to herself; and Warrisden crossed over to her side. His voice took a gentler note, and one still more serious than that which he had used.

"Do you know what I think?" he asked. "You sent me out with a message to Stretton. I think that he has sent me back with a message for you--'One must take one's risks.' He said that he had learned that in the North Sea. He pointed to the little boats carrying the fish-boxes to the steamer through the heavy, breaking seas. Each man in each of the boats was taking his risks. 'Whether it's lacing your topsail or taking in a reef,' he said, 'one must take one's risks.'"

Pamela was silent for awhile after he had spoken. She sat with her hands folded in her lap, and her face most serious. Then she looked up at her companion with a very friendly smile; but she did not answer him at all. And when she spoke, she spoke words which utterly surprised him. All the time since the ketches had disappeared behind the waves he had been plagued with the thought of the distress which defeat would cause her; and here she was saying--

"I am very glad that you went out to the North Sea for me, even though the journey proved fruitless. It makes us so much the better friends, doesn't it? And that is a gain for me. Think of it that way, and you will not mind the hardships and the waste of time."

She held out her hand--rather a rare act with her--and Warrisden took it. Then came the explanation why defeat meant so little just at this time.

"I need not have sent you at all," she continued, "could I have foreseen. Sir John Stretton died yesterday afternoon, suddenly. I received a telegram last night from Millie. So Tony will naturally come home when his four weeks are up. I wrote last night to Millie, telling her where Tony was." Then she added, "But I am glad that I did not foresee."

She rose from her chair, and they walked out through the hall to the front of the house. A groom was holding Pamela's horse. The others who were hunting that day had already ridden off. Warrisden helped her into the saddle, and she rode away.

Sir John had died, and Stretton would now naturally come home. That explained to Warrisden how it was that Pamela made so little of the defeat. But it was not the whole explanation. Pamela was waking from her long sleep, like the princess in the fairy tale, and the mere act of waking was a pleasure. In the stir of emotions, hitherto rigorously suppressed, in the exercise of sympathies, she found a delight such as one may find in the mere stretching of one's muscles after a deep rest. The consciousness of life as a thing enjoyable began to tingle in her. She was learning again lessons which she remembered once to have learned before. The joy of being needed by those one needs--there was one of them. She had learned a new one to-day--"One must take one's risks." She repeated the sentence over to herself as she rode between the hedgerows on this morning which had the sparkle of spring. A few days ago she would have put that view of life away from her. Now, old as it was, simple as it was, she pondered upon it as though it were a view quite novel. She found it, moreover, pleasant. She had travelled, indeed, further along the new road than she was aware. The truth is that she had rather hugged to herself the great trouble which had overshadowed her life. She had done so unwittingly. She had allowed it to dominate her after it had lost its power to dominate, and from force of habit. She began to be aware of it now that she had stepped out from her isolation, and was gathering again the strings of her life into her hands.

* * * * *

But Pamela was wrong in her supposition that since Sir John's death the danger for Millicent was at an end. Tony Stretton would now return home, she thought; and nothing was further from Tony's thoughts. At the time when Pamela was riding through the lanes of Leicestershire on that morning of early spring, Tony was lying in his bunk in the cabin of the Perseverance reading over, for the thousandth time, certain letters which he kept beneath his pillow. This week he kept the long night watch from midnight until eight of the morning; it was now eleven, and he had the cabin to himself. The great gale had blown itself out. The trawl, which for three days had remained safely stowed under the lee bulwarks, was now dragging behind the boat; with her topsails set the ketch was sailing full and by the wind; and down the open companion the sunlight streamed into the cabin and played like water upon the floor. The letters Tony Stretton was reading were those which Millie had sent him. Disappointment was plain in every line; they were sown with galling expressions of pity; here and there contempt peeped out. Yet he was glad to have them; they were his monitors, and he found a stimulus in their very cruelty. Though he knew them by heart, he continually read them on mornings like this, when the sun shone down the companion, and the voices of his fellow sailors called cheerily overhead; at night, leaning upon his elbow, and spelling them out by the dim light of the swinging lamp, while the crew slept about him in their bunks.

To his companions he was rather a mystery. To some of them he was just down on his luck; to others he was a man "who had done something."

"I suppose you have come out here to lie doggo," said the skipper to him, shouting out the words in the height of the gale, when both were standing by the lashed wheel one night. "I ask no questions. All I say is, you do your work. I have had no call to slap a haddick across your face. I say that fair and square. Water!"

He concluded his speech with a yell. Stretton saw a ragged line of white suddenly flash out in the darkness, high up by the weather bow, and descend with a roar. It was a wave breaking down upon the deck. Both men flung themselves down the companion, and the water sluiced after them and washed them struggling about the floor of the cabin. The wave saved Stretton from the need to reply, and the skipper did not refer to the subject again.

Stretton had signed on for this cruise on the Perseverance because he wanted a time during which he could be quite sure of his livelihood. So far he had failed. He must map out a new course for himself upon his life's chart. But for that work he needed time for thought, and that time, up till now, he had not enjoyed. The precarious existence which he had led since he had lost the half of Millie's small fortune--now a clerk in a store, and a failure; now a commercial traveller, and again a failure--had left him little breathing space wherein to gather up his slow thoughts and originate a new plan. That breathing space, however, the Perseverance had afforded him. During the long watches on fine nights, when the dark sails, swinging up and down to the motion of the boat, revealed and obscured the stars, he wrestled with the difficult problem of his life.

He could go back when his cruise was over if he chose. His father was dying; he faced the fact quite frankly. The object with which he set out would be, after all, accomplished, though not accomplished by himself. There would be a house for Millie and himself independent of the old man's caprice; their life would be freed from the shadow of his tyranny; their seclusion would come to an end; they could let the sunlight in upon their lives. Yes! But there were the letters down in the cabin there, underneath his pillow. Did not they alter the position? He had gone away to keep his wife, just, in a word, to prevent that very contempt of which the letters gave him proof. Must he not now stay away in order to regain her? His wife was at the bottom of all his thoughts. He had no blame for her, however much her written words might hurt. He looked back upon their life together, its pleasant beginnings, when they were not merely lovers, but very good friends into the bargain. For it is possible to be the one and yet not the other. They were good days, the days in the little house in Deanery Street, days full of fun and good temper and amusement. He recalled their two seasons in London--London bright with summer--and making of each long day a too short holiday. Then had come the change, sudden, dark, and complete. In the place of freedom, subjection; in the place of company, isolation; in the place of friends, a sour old man, querulous and exacting. Then had come the great hope of another home; and swiftly upon that hope its failure through his incapacity. He could not blame her for the letters underneath his pillow. He was no less set upon regaining her than he had been before on keeping her. His love for her had been the chief motive of his life when he left the house in Berkeley Square. It remained so still. Could he go back, he asked himself?

There was one inducement persuading him always to answer "Yes"--the sentence which Pamela had spoken, and which she had refused to explain. He should be at his wife's side. He had never understood that saying; it remained fixed in his memory, plaguing him. He should be at his wife's side. So Pamela Mardale had said, and for what Pamela said he had the greatest respect. Well, he could be in a few weeks at his wife's side. But would it not be at too great a cost unless he had first redeemed himself from her contempt?

Thus he turned and turned, and saw no issue anywhere. The days slipped by, and one morning the fish-cutter brought to him a letter, which told him that four days ago his father had died. He could not reach home in time for the funeral, even if he started at once. And he could not start at once; he had signed on for eight weeks.

But the letter left him face to face with the old problem. Should he go back or should he stay away? And if he stayed away, what should he do?

He came on deck one morning, and his skipper said--

"There's a fog on land, Stretton,"

"How do you know that?" asked Stretton.

The captain pointed to some birds hovering over the masts of the ketch.

"Those are land birds," said he. "Look, there's a thrush and there's a blackbird. You won't find them so far from land without a reason. There has been a fog, and very likely a storm. They have lost their bearings in the fog."

The birds hovered about the ships of the fleet, calling plaintively--here, at all events, were men recognisably belonging to the land they vainly sought. Stretton, watching them, felt very much like one of those birds. He, too, had lost his way in a fog, and though he made no outcry, his need of guidance was no less great than theirs.

Then came a morning at last when the trawl was hauled in for the last time, and the boat's head pointed towards Yarmouth.

"When shall we reach harbour?" Stretton asked anxiously.

"If this breeze holds, in twenty-four hours," replied the skipper.

Twenty-four hours! Just a day and a night, and Stretton would step from the deck on to Gorleston Quay; and he was no nearer to the solution of his problem than when he had stepped from the quay on to the deck eight weeks ago. Those eight weeks were to have resolved all his perplexities, and lo! the eight weeks had passed.

He was in a fever of restlessness. He paced the deck all the day when he was not standing at the wheel; at night he could not sleep, but stood leaning over the bulwarks, watching the stars trembling in the quiet water. At one o'clock in the morning the Perseverance passed a lightship. Already the boat was so near home! And in the hour which followed, his eight weeks of solitary communing, forced, as it were, by immediate necessity, bore their fruit. His inspiration--he counted the idea no less than an inspiration-came to him suddenly. He saw all at once his course marked out for him upon the chart of life. He would not suffer a doubt of it to enter his mind; he welcomed it with passion, and the great load was lifted from his mind. The idea had come. It was water in a dry land.

A fisherman leaning over the bulwark by Stretton's side heard him suddenly begin to sing over to himself a verse or two of a song--

"Oh, come out, mah love! I'm a-waiting foh you heah!
Doan' you keep yuh window closed to-night."

It was a coon song which Stretton was humming over to himself. His voice dropped to a murmur, He stopped and laughed softly to himself, as though the song had very dear associations in his thoughts. Then his voice rose again, and there was now a kind of triumph in the lilt of the song, which had nothing to do with the words--

"De stars all a-gwine put dey little ones to bed

Wid dey 'hush now, sing a lullaby,'

De man in de moon nod his sleepy, sleepy head,

And do sandman put a little in his eye."

The words went lilting out over the quiet sea. It seemed to Stretton that they came from a lighted window just behind him, and were sung in a woman's voice. He was standing on a lawn surrounded by high dark trees in the warmth of a summer night. He was looking out past the islets over eight miles of quiet water to the clustered lights of the yachts in Oban Bay. The coon song was that which his wife had sung to him on one evening he was never to forget; and this night he had recovered its associations. It was no longer "a mere song sung by somebody." It seemed to him, so quickly did his anticipations for once outrun his judgment, that he had already recovered his wife.

The Perseverance was moored alongside of the quay at eight o'clock in the morning, and just at that time Millie was reading a letter of condolence from Lionel Callon.

CHAPTER XIII

[TONY STRETTON RETURNS TO STEPNEY]

Mr. Chase left the mission quite early in the evening and walked towards his lodging. That side of his nature which clamoured for enjoyments and a life of luxury was urgent with him to-night. As he turned into his street he began to debate with himself whether he should go in search of a cab and drive westwards out of the squalor. A church clock had just struck nine; he would find his club open and his friends about the fire. Thus debating he came to his own door, and had unconsciously taken his latch-key from his pocket before he had decided upon his course. The latch-key decided him. He opened the door and went quickly up to his sitting-room. The gas was low, and what light there was came from the fire. Chase shut the door gently, and his face underwent a change. There came a glitter into his eyes, a smile to his lips. He crossed to the little cupboard in the corner and unlocked it, stealthily, even though he was alone. As he put his hand into it and grasped the decanter, something stirred in his armchair. The back of the chair was towards him. He remained for a second or two motionless, listening. But the sound was not repeated. Chase noiselessly locked the cupboard again and came back to the fire. A man was sitting asleep in the chair.

Chase laid a hand upon his shoulder and shook him.

"Stretton," he said; and Tony Stretton opened his eyes.

"I fell asleep waiting for you," he said.

"When did you get back?" asked Chase.

"I landed at Yarmouth this morning. I came up to London this afternoon."

Chase turned up the gas and lit a cigarette.

"You have not been home, then?" he said. "There is news waiting for you there. Your father is dead!"

"I know," Stretton replied. "He died a month ago."

Mr. Chase was perplexed. He drew up a chair to the fire and sat down.

"You know that?" he asked slowly; "and yet you have not gone home?"

"No," replied Stretton. "And I do not mean to go."

Stretton was speaking in the quietest and most natural way. There was no trace in his manner of that anxiety which during the last few days had kept him restless and uneasy. He had come to his decision. Chase was aware of the stubborn persistence of his friend; and it was rather to acquire knowledge than to persuade that he put his questions.

"But why? You went away to make an independent home, free from the restrictions under which you and your wife were living. Well, you have got that home now. The reason for your absence has gone."

Stretton shook his head.

"The reason remains. Indeed it is stronger now than it was when I first left England," he answered. He leaned forward with his elbows upon his knees, gazing into the fire. The light played upon his face, and Chase could not but notice the change which these few months had brought to him. He had grown thin, and rather worn; he had lost the comfortable look of prosperity; his face was tanned. But there was more. It might have been expected that the rough surroundings amidst which Stretton had lived would leave their marks. He might have become rather coarse, rather gross to the eye. On the contrary, there was a look of refinement. It was the long battle with his own thoughts which had left the marks. The mind was showing through the flesh. The face had become spiritualised.

"Yes, the reason remains," said Stretton. "I left home to keep my wife. We lived a life of quarrels. All the little memories, the associations, the thousand and one small private things--ideas, thoughts, words, jokes even, which two people who care very much for one another have in common--we were losing, and so quickly; so very quickly. I can't express half what I mean. But haven't you seen a man and a woman at a dinner-table, when some chance sentence is spoken, suddenly look at one another just for a second, smile perhaps, at all events speak, though no word is spoken? Well, that kind of intimacy was going. I saw indifference coming, perhaps dislike, perhaps contempt; yes, contempt, just because I sat there and looked on. So I went away. But the contempt has come. Oh, don't think I believe that I made a mistake in going away. It would have come none the less had I stayed. But I have to reckon with the fact that it has come."

Mr. Chase sat following Stretton's words with a very close attention. Never had Stretton spoken to him with so much frankness before.

"Go on," said Chase. "What you are saying is--much of it--news to me."

"Well, suppose that I were to go back now," Stretton resumed, "at once--do you see?--that contempt is doubled."

"No," cried Chase.

"Yes, yes," Stretton insisted. "Look at it from Millie's point of view, not from yours, not even from mine. Look at the history of the incident from the beginning! Work it out as she would; nay," he corrected himself, remembering the letters, "as she has. I leave her when things are at their worst. That's not all. I take half Millie's fortune, and am fool enough to lose it right away. And that's not all. I stay away in the endeavour to recover the lost ground, and I continually fail. Meanwhile Millie has the dreary, irksome, exacting, unrequited life, which I left behind, to get through as best she can alone; without pleasure, and she likes pleasure----" He suddenly looked at Chase, with a challenge in his eyes. "Why shouldn't she?" he asked abruptly. Chase agreed.

"Why shouldn't she?" he said, with a smile. "I am not disapproving."

Stretton resumed his former attitude, his former tone.

"Without friends, and she is fond of having friends about her; without any chance of gratifying her spirits or her youth! To make her life still more disheartening, every mail which reaches her from New York brings her only another instalment of my disastrous record. Work it out from her point of view, Chase; then add this to crown it all." He leaned forward towards Chase and emphasized his words with a gesture of his hand. "The first moment when her life suddenly becomes easy, and does so through no help of mine, I--the failure--come scurrying back to share it. No, Chase, no!"

He uttered his refusal to accept that position with a positive violence, and flung himself back in his chair. Chase answered quietly--

"Surely you are forgetting that it is your father's wealth which makes her life easy."

"I am not forgetting it at all."

"It's your father's wealth," Chase repeated. "You have a right to share in it."

"Yes," Stretton admitted; "but what have rights to do with the question at all? If my wife thinks me no good, will my rights save me from her contempt?"

And before that blunt question Mr. Chase was silent. It was too direct, too unanswerable. Stretton rose from his chair, and stood looking down at his companion.

"Just consider the story I should have to tell Millie tonight--by George!" he exclaimed suddenly--"if I went back to-night. I start out with fifteen hundred pounds of hers to make a home and a competence; and within a few months I am working as a hand on a North Sea trawler at nineteen shillings a week."

"A story of hardships undergone for her sake," said Chase; "for that's the truth of your story, Stretton. And don't you think the hardships would count for ever so much more than any success you could have won?"

"Hardships!" exclaimed Stretton, with a laugh. "I think I would find it difficult to make a moving tale out of my hardships. And I wouldn't if I could--no!"

As a fact, although it was unknown to Tony, Chase was wrong. Had Stretton told his story never so vividly, it would have made no difference. Millie Stretton had not the imagination to realise what those hardships had been. Tony's story would have been to her just a story, calling, no doubt, for exclamations of tenderness and pity. But she could not have understood what he had felt, what he had thought, what he had endured. Deeper feelings and a wider sympathy than Millie Stretton was dowered with would have been needed for comprehension.

Stretton walked across the room and came back to the fire. He looked down at Chase with a smile. "Very likely you think I am a great fool," he said, in a gentler voice than he had used till now. "No doubt nine men out of ten would say, 'Take the gifts the gods send you, and let the rest slide. What if you and your wife drift apart? You won't be the only couple.' But, frankly, Chase, that is not good enough. I have seen a good deal of it--the boredom, the gradual ossification. Oh no; I'm not content with that! You see, Chase," he stopped for a moment and gazed steadily into the fire; then he went on quite simply, "you see, I care for Millie very much."

Chase knew well what weight to give to that short sentence. Had it been more elaborate it would have meant less. It needed no other commentary than the quiet sincerity with which it was uttered.

"Yes, I understand," he said.

Stretton seated himself again in his chair and took out a briar pipe from his pocket. The pipe had an open metal covering over the bowl.

"I need that no longer," Stretton said, with a laugh, as he removed it. Then he took out a pouch, filled his pipe, and lighted it.

"Have a whisky and soda?" said Chase.

"No, thanks."

Chase lighted a cigarette and looked at his friend with curiosity. The change which he had noticed in Stretton's looks had been just as noticeable in his words. This man sitting opposite to him was no longer the Tony Stretton who had once come to him for advice. That man had been slow of thought, halting of speech, good-humoured, friendly; but a man with whom it was difficult to get at close quarters. Talk with him a hundred times, and you seemed to know him no better than you did at the moment when first you were introduced to him. Here, however, was a man who had thought out his problem--was, moreover, able lucidly to express it.

"Well," said Chase, "you are determined not to go back?"

"Not yet," Stretton corrected.

"What do you propose to do?"

The question showed how great the change had been, begun by the hard times in New York, completed by the eight weeks in the North Sea. For Chase put the question. He no longer offered advice, understanding that Stretton had not come to ask for it.

"I propose to enlist in the French Foreign Legion."

Stretton spoke with the most matter-of-fact air imaginable; he might have been naming the house at which he was to dine the next night. Nevertheless, Chase started out of his chair; he stared at his companion in a stupefaction.

"No," said Stretton, calmly; "I am not off my head, and I have not been drinking. Sit down again, and think it over."

Chase obeyed, and Stretton proceeded to expound that inspiration which had come to him the night before.

"What else should I do? You know my object now. I have to re-establish myself in my wife's thoughts. How else can I do it? What professions are open to me in which I could gain, I don't say distinction, but mere recognition? I am not a money-maker; that, at all events, is evident. I have had experience enough during the last months to know that if I lived to a thousand I should never make money."

"I think that's true," Chase agreed, thoughtfully.

"Luckily there's no longer any need that I should try. What then? Run through the professions, Chase, and find one, if you can, in which a man at my age--twenty-nine--with my ignorance, my want of intellect, has a single chance of success. The bar? It's laughable. The sea? I am too old. The army? I resigned my commission years ago. So what then?"

He waited for Chase to speak, and Chase was silent. He waited with a smile, knowing that Chase could not speak.

"There must be an alternative," Chase said, doubtfully, at last.

"Name it, then."

That was just what Chase could not do. He turned in his mind from this calling to that. There was not one which did not need a particular education; there was not one in which Stretton was likely to succeed. Soldiering or the sea. These were the two callings for which he was fitted. From the sea his age debarred him; from soldiering too, except in this one way. No, certainly, Stretton was not off his head.

"How in the world did you think of the Foreign Legion?" he asked.

Stretton shrugged his shoulders.

"I thought of most other courses first, and, one by one, rejected them as impossible. This plan came to me last of all, and only last night. We were passing a light-ship. In a way, you see, we were within sight of home. I was in despair; and suddenly the idea flashed upon me, like the revolving blaze from the light-ship. It is a sound one, I think. At all events, it is the only one."

"Yes," answered Chase, slowly; "I suppose there will be chances, for there's always something stirring on the Algerian frontier."

"There, or in Siam," said Stretton.

"What arrangements are you making here?"

"I have written to my lawyers. Millie can do as she pleases with the income. She has power, too, to sell the house in Berkeley Square. I made my will, you know, before I left England."

Chase nodded, and for a while there fell a silence upon the two friends. A look of envy crept into the face of the clergyman as he looked at Stretton. He could appreciate a motive which set a man aiming high. He admired the persistence with which Stretton nursed it. The plan it had prompted might be quixotic and quite fruitless, but, at all events, it was definite; and a definite scheme of life, based upon a simple and definite motive, was not so common but that it was enviable. Stretton was so sure of its wisdom, too. He had no doubts. He sat in his chair not asking for approval, not caring for censure; he had made up his mind. The image of Stretton, indeed, as he sat in that chair on that evening, with the firelight playing upon his face, was often to come to Chase's thoughts.

"There will be great risks," he said. "Risks of death, of trouble in the battalion."

"I have counted them," Stretton replied; and he leaned forward again, with his hands upon his knees. "Oh yes; there will be great risks! But there's a prize, too, proportionate to the risks. Risks! Every one speaks of them," he went on, with a laugh of impatience. "But I have been eight weeks on the Dogger Bank, Chase, and I know--yes, I know--how to estimate risks. Out there men risk their lives daily to put a few boxes of fish on board a fish-cutter. Take the risk half-heartedly and your boat's swamped for a sure thing; but take it with all your heart and there are the fish-boxes to your credit. Well, Millie is my fish-boxes."

He ended with a laugh, and, rising, took his hat.

"Shall I put you up for the night?" Chase asked.

"No, thanks," said Stretton. "I have got a bed at an hotel. I have something else to do to-night;" and a smile, rather wistful and tender, played about his lips. "Goodbye!" He held out his hand, and as Chase took it he went on, "I am looking forward to the day when I come back. My word, how I am looking forward to it; and I will look forward each day until it actually, at the long last, comes. It will have been worth waiting for, Chase, well worth waiting for, both to Millie and to me."

With that he went away. Chase heard him close the street door behind him, and his footsteps sound for a moment or two on the pavement. After all, he thought, a life under those Algerian skies, a life in the open air, of activity--there were many worse things, even though it should prove a second failure.

Chase stood for a little before the fire. He crossed slowly over to that cupboard in the corner at which Stretton's movement in the chair had stayed his hand. Chase looked back to the armchair, as though he half expected still to see Stretton sitting there. Then he slowly walked back to the fire, and left the cupboard locked. Stretton had gone, but he had left behind him memories which were not to be effaced--the memory of a great motive and of a sturdy determination to fulfil it. The two men were never to meet again; but, in the after time, more than once, of an evening, Chase's hand was stayed upon that cupboard door. More than once he looked back towards the chair as if he expected that again his friend was waiting for him by the fire.

CHAPTER XIV

[TONY STRETTON PAYS A VISIT TO BERKELEY SQUARE]

While Tony Stretton was thus stating the problem of his life to Mr. Chase in Stepney Green, Lady Millingham was entertaining her friends in Berkeley Square. She began the evening with a dinner-party, at which Pamela Mardale and John Mudge were present, and she held a reception afterwards. Many people came, for Frances Millingham was popular. By half-past ten the rooms were already over-hot and overcrowded, and Lady Millingham was enjoying herself to her heart's content. Mr. Mudge, who stood by himself at the end of a big drawing-room, close to one of the windows, saw the tall figure of Warrisden come in at the door and steadily push towards Pamela. A few moments later M. de Marnay, a youthful attaché of the French Embassy, approached Mr. Mudge. M. de Marnay wiped his forehead and looked round the crowded room.

"A little is a good thing," said he, "but too much is enough." And he unlatched and pushed open the window. As he spoke, Mr. Mudge saw Callon appear in the doorway.

"Yes," he answered, with a laugh; "too much is enough."

Mudge watched Callon's movements with his usual interest. He saw him pass, a supple creature of smiles and small talk, from woman to woman. How long would he last in his ignoble career? Mudge wondered. Would he marry in the end some rich and elderly widow? Or would the crash come, and parties know Mr. Lionel Callon no more? Mudge never saw the man but he had a wish that he might get a glimpse of him alone in his own rooms, with the smile dropped from his face, and the unpaid bills piled upon his mantel-shelf, and his landlord very likely clamouring for the rent. He imagined the face grown all at once haggard and tired and afraid--afraid with a great fear of what must happen in a few years at the latest, when, with middle-age heavy upon his shoulders, he should see his coevals prospering and himself bankrupt of his stock-in-trade of good looks, and without one penny to rub against another. No presage of mind weighed upon Callon to-night, however, during his short stay in Frances Millingham's house. For his stay was short.

As the clock upon the mantelpiece struck eleven, his eyes were at once lifted to the clock-face, and almost at once he moved from the lady to whom he was talking and made his way to the door.

Mr. Mudge turned back to the window and pushed it still more open. It was a clear night of April, and April had brought with it the warmth of summer. Mr. Mudge stood at the open window facing the coolness and the quiet of the square; and thus by the accident of an overcrowded room he became the witness of a little episode which might almost have figured in some bygone comedy of intrigue.

Callon passed through the line of carriages in the roadway beneath, and crossed the corner of the square to the pavement on the right-hand side. When he reached the pavement he walked for twenty yards or so in the direction of Piccadilly, until he came to a large and gloomy house. There a few shallow steps led from the pavement to the front door. Callon mounted the steps, rang the bell, and was admitted.

There were a few lights in the upper windows and on the ground floor; but it was evident that there was no party at the house. Callon had run in to pay a visit. Mr. Mudge, who had watched this, as it were, the first scene in the comedy, distinctly heard the door close, and the sound somehow suggested to him that the time had come for him to go home to bed. He looked at his watch. It was exactly a quarter past eleven--exactly, in a word, three-quarters of an hour since Tony Stretton, who "had something else to do," had taken his leave of his friend Chase in Stepney.

Mr. Mudge turned from the window to make his way to the door, and came face to face with Pamela and Alan Warrisden. Pamela spoke to him. He had never yet met Warrisden, and he was now introduced. All three stood and talked together for a few minutes by the open window. Then Mudge, in that spirit of curiosity which Callon always provoked in him, asked abruptly--

"By the way, Miss Mardale, do you happen to know who lives in that house?" and he pointed across the corner of the square to the house into which Callon had disappeared.

Pamela and Warrisden looked quickly at one another. Then Pamela turned with great interest to Mr. Mudge.

"Yes, we both know," she answered. "Why do you ask?"

"Well, I don't know," said Mudge; "I think that I should like to know."

The glance which his two companions had exchanged, and Pamela's rather eager question, had quickened his curiosity. But he got no answer for a few moments. Both Pamela and Warrisden were looking out towards the house. They were standing side by side. Mr. Mudge had an intuition that the same thought was passing through both their minds.

"That is where the truants lived last July," said Warrisden, in a low voice. He spoke to Pamela, not to Mr. Mudge at all, whose existence seemed for the moment to have been clean forgotten.

"Yes," Pamela replied softly. "The dark house, where the truants lived and where"--she looked at Warrisden and smiled with a great friendliness--"where the new road began. For it was there really. It's from the steps of the dark house, not from the three poplars that the new road runs out."

"Yes, that is true," said Warrisden.

And again both were silent.

Mr. Mudge broke in upon the silence. "I have no doubt that the truants lived there, and that the new road begins at the foot of the steps," he said plaintively; "but neither statement adds materially to my knowledge."

Pamela and Warrisden turned to him and laughed. It was true that they had for a moment forgotten Mr. Mudge. The memory of the star-lit night, in last July, when from this balcony they had watched the truants slip down the steps and furtively call a cab, was busy in their thoughts. From that night their alliance had dated, although no suspicion of it had crossed their minds. It seemed strange to them now that there had been no premonition.

"Well, who lives there?" asked Mudge.

But even now he received no answer; for Warrisden suddenly exclaimed in a low, startled voice--

"Look!" and with an instinctive movement he drew back into the room.

A man was standing in the road looking up at the windows of the dark house. His face could not be seen under the shadow of his hat. Pamela peered forward.

"Do you think it's he?" she asked in a whisper.

"I am not sure," replied Warrisden.

"Oh, I hope so! I hope so!"

"I am not sure. Wait! Wait and look!" said Warrisden.

In a few moments the man moved. He crossed the road and stepped on to the pavement. Again he stopped, again he looked up to the house; then he walked slowly on. But he walked northwards, that is, towards the watchers at the window.

"There's a lamp-post," said Warrisden; "he will come within the light of it. We shall know."

And the next moment the light fell white and clear upon Tony Stretton's face.

"He has come back," exclaimed Pamela, joyfully.

"Who?" asked Mr. Mudge; "who has come back?"

This time he was answered.

"Why, Tony Stretton, of course," said Pamela, impatiently. She was hardly aware of Mr. Mudge, even while she answered him; she was too intent upon Tony Stretton in the square below. She did not therefore notice that Mudge was startled by her reply. She did not remark the anxiety in his voice as he went on--

"And that is Stretton's house?"

"Yes."

"And his wife, Lady Stretton, is she in London? Is she there--now?"

Mr. Mudge spoke with an excitement of manner which at any other time must have caused surprise. It passed now unremarked; for Warrisden, too, had his preoccupation. He was neither overjoyed, like Pamela, nor troubled, like Mr. Mudge; but as he looked down into the square he was perplexed.

"Yes," replied Pamela, "Millie Stretton is at home. Could anything be more fortunate?"

To Mudge's way of thinking, nothing could be more unfortunate. Pamela had come late to the play; Mr. Mudge, on the other hand, had seen the curtain rise, and had a clearer knowledge of the plot's development. The husband outside the house, quite unexpected, quite unsuspicious, and about to enter; the wife and the interloper within: here were the formulas of a comedy of intrigue. Only, Mr. Mudge doubtfully wondered, after the husband had entered, and when the great scene took place, would the decorous accent of the comedy be maintained? Nature was after all a violent dramatist, with little care for the rules and methods. Of one thing, at all events, he was quite sure, as he looked at Pamela: she would find no amusement in the climax. There was, however, to be an element of novelty, which Mr. Mudge had not foreseen.

"What puzzles me," said Warrisden, "is that Stretton does not go in."

Stretton walked up to the corner of the square, turned, and retraced his steps. Again he approached the steps of the house. "Now," thought Mr. Mudge, with a good deal of suspense, "now he will ascend them." Pamela had the same conviction, but in her case hope inspired it. Tony, however, merely cast a glance upwards and walked on. They heard his footsteps for a little while upon the pavement; then that sound ceased.

"He has gone," cried Pamela, blankly; "he has gone away again."

Mr. Mudge turned to her very seriously.

"Believe me," said he, "nothing better could have happened."

Tony, in fact, had never had a thought of entering the house. Having this one night in London, he had yielded to a natural impulse to revisit again the spot where he and Millie had lived--where she still lived. The bad days of the quarrels and the indifference and the weariness were forgotten by him to-night. His thoughts went back to the early days when they played truant, and truancy was good fun. The escapes from the house, the little suppers at the Savoy, the stealthy home-comings, the stumbling up the stairs in the dark, laughing and hushing their laughter--upon these incidents his mind dwelt, wistfully, yet with a great pleasure and a great hopefulness. Those days were gone, but in others to come all that was good in them might be repeated. The good humour, the intimacy, the sufficiency of the two, each to the other, might be recovered if only he persisted. To return now, to go in at the door and say, "I have come home," that would be the mistake which there would be no retrieving. He was at the cross-ways, and if he took the wrong road life would not give him the time to retrace his steps. He walked away, dreaming of the good days to come.

Meanwhile, Lionel Callon was talking to Millie in that little sitting-room which had once been hers and Tony's.

Millie was surprised at the lateness of his visit, and when he was shown into the room she rose at once.

"Something has happened?" she said.

"No," Callon replied. "I was at Lady Millingham's party. I suddenly thought of you sitting here alone. I am tired besides, and overworked. I knew it would be a rest for me if I could see you and talk to you for a few minutes. You see, I am selfish."

Millie smiled at him.

"No, kind," said she.

She asked him to sit down.

"You look tired," she added. "How does your election work go on?"

Callon related the progress of his campaign, and with an air of making particular confidences. He could speak without any reserve to her, he said. He conveyed the impression that he was making headway against almost insuperable obstacles. He flattered her, moreover, by a suggestion that she herself was a great factor in his successes. The mere knowledge that she wished him well, that perhaps, once or twice in the day, she gave him a spare thought, helped him much more than she could imagine. Millie was induced to believe that, although she sat quietly in London, she was thus exercising power through Callon in his constituency.

"Of course, I am a poor man," said Callon. "Poverty hampers one."

"Oh, but you will win," cried Millie Stretton, with a delighted conviction; "yes, you will win."

She felt strong, confident--just, in a word, as she had felt when she had agreed with Tony that he must go away.

"With your help, yes," he answered; and the sound of his voice violated her like a caress. Millie rose from her chair.

At once Callon rose too, and altered his tone.

"You have heard from Sir Anthony Stretton?" he said. "Tell me of yourself."

"Yes, I have heard. He will not return yet."

There came a light into Callon's eyes. He raised his hand to his mouth to hide a smile.

"Few men," he said, with the utmost sympathy, "would have left you to bear these last weeks alone."

He was standing just behind her, speaking over her shoulder. He was very still, the house was very silent. Millie was suddenly aware of danger.

"You must not say that, Mr. Callon," she said rather sharply.

And immediately he answered, "I beg your pardon. I had no idea my sympathy would have seemed to you an insult."

He spoke with a sudden bitterness. Millicent turned round in surprise. She saw that his face was stern and cold.

"An insult?" she said, and her voice was troubled. "No, you and I are friends."

But Callon would have none of these excuses. He had come to the house deliberately to quarrel. He had a great faith in the efficacy of quarrels, given the right type of woman. As Mudge had told Pamela, he knew the tactics of the particular kind of warfare which he waged. To cause a woman some pain, to make her think with regret that in him she had lost a friend; that would fix him in her thoughts. So Callon quarrelled. Millie Stretton could not say a word but he misinterpreted it. Every sentence he cleverly twisted into an offence.

"I will say good-bye," he said, at length, as though he had reached the limits of endurance.

Millie Stretton looked at him with troubled eyes.

"I am so sorry it should end like this," she said piteously. "I don't know why it has."

Callon went out of the room, and closed the door behind him. Then he let himself into the street. Millie Stretton would miss him, he felt sure. Her looks, her last words assured him of that. He would wait now without a movement towards a reconciliation. That must come from her, it would give him in her eyes a reputation for strength. He knew the value of that reputation. He had no doubt, besides, that she would suggest a reconciliation. Other women might not, but Millie--yes. On the whole, Mr. Callon was very well content with his night's work. He had taken, in his way of thinking, a long step. The square was empty, except for the carriages outside Lady Millingham's door. Lionel Callon walked briskly home.

CHAPTER XV

[MR. MUDGE COMES TO THE RESCUE]

Lionel Callon's visit to Millie Stretton bore, however, consequences which had not at all entered into his calculations. He was unaware of the watchers at Lady Millingham's window; he had no knowledge of Pamela's promise to Tony Stretton; no suspicion, therefore, that she was now passionately resolved to keep it in the spirit and the letter. He was even without a thought that his advances towards Millie had at all been remarked upon or their motive discovered. Ignorance lulled him into security. But within a short while a counter-plot was set in train.

The occasion was the first summer meeting on Newmarket Heath. Pamela Mardale seldom missed a race meeting at Newmarket dining the spring and summer. There were the horses, in the first place; she met her friends besides; the heath itself, with its broad expanse and its downs, had for her eyes a beauty of its own; and in addition the private enclosure was separated by the width of the course from the crowd and clamour of the ring. She attended this particular meeting, and after the second race was over she happened to be standing amidst a group of friends within the grove of trees at the back of the paddock. Outside, upon the heath, the air was clear and bright; a light wind blew pleasantly. Here the trees were in bud, and the sunlight, split by the boughs, dappled with light and shadow the glossy coats of the horses as they were led in and out amongst the boles. A mare was led past Pamela, and one of her friends said--

"Semiramis. I think she will win this race."

Pamela looked towards the mare, and saw, just beyond her, Mr. Mudge. He was alone, as he usually was; and though he stopped in his walk, now here, now there, to exchange a word with some acquaintance, he moved on again, invariably alone. Gradually he drew nearer to the group in which Pamela was standing, and his face brightened. He quickened his step; Pamela, on her side, advanced rather quickly towards him.

"You are here?" she said, with a smile. "I am glad, though I did not think to meet you."

Mr. Mudge, to tell the truth, though he carried a race-card in his hand, and glasses slung across his shoulder, had the disconsolate air of a man conscious that he was out of place. He answered Pamela, indeed, almost apologetically.

"It is better after all to be here than in London on a day of summer," he said, and he added, with a shrewd glance at her, "You have something to say to me--a question to ask."

Pamela looked up at him in surprise.

"Yes, I have. Let us go out."

They walked into the paddock, and thence through the gate into the enclosure. The enclosure was at this moment rather empty. Pamela led the way to the rails alongside the course, and chose a place where they were out of the hearing of any bystander.

"You remember the evening at Frances Millingham's?" she asked. She had not seen Mr. Mudge since that date.

Mr. Mudge replied immediately.