F.E. Mills Young

"The Bigamist"

Chapter One.

In the handsome room, softly lighted with shaded electric lamps, a man sat in a low chair, his legs stretched out compass-wise, his brow resting on his hand. He had the appearance of being asleep, save that every now and again the fingers pressing his brow pressed harder or were momentarily relaxed; he made no other movement: for fully half an hour he had not altered his pose. The only other occupant of the room, a woman, tall and slender, with a wealth of golden hair crowning her small head, stood at the long open window with her back to the room, her pose as still as the man’s, but considerably less absorbed.

The girl, she was little more than a girl, despite the five years of happy married life, and the tiny mite of four asleep in the nursery overhead, turned from the open window and the soft darkness of the summer night and faced the lighted room. So long the man had sat there silent, motionless, plunged in thought, that she had almost forgotten his presence in a pleasant reverie of her own till roused by the extraordinary quiet, as effectually as though recalled by some unexpected sound. She turned her head and regarded him with surprised, inquiring eyes.

“Worried, Herbert?” she asked.

He started at the sound of her voice, and roused himself with an effort.

“What makes you ask that?” he said, without looking at her.

“I don’t know... You are so quiet,” she answered. “And at dinner I fancied you seemed a little put out.”

She crossed to his chair and knelt beside him, resting her clasped hands on his shoulders, her face lifted to his. He put out a hand and touched her hair.—“Pamela,” he said abruptly, “you’ve been happy with me? You’ve—I’ve made you happy?” he insisted.

She looked surprised: a faint questioning showed in the blue eyes and the slight puckering of the finely pencilled brows.

“My dear!” she said. “You know that.” She pulled his face down to hers and kissed him. “You never doubted me?” she asked.

“No,” he answered,—“no.”

Suddenly he caught her to him and held her strained against his breast.

“Oh! but it’s good to have you,” he cried. “You are the best thing that life has given me. I’d fight till my last breath to keep you.”

“Well, but there isn’t any fear of your losing me,” she said, and drew back to regard him, perplexed at this unusual demonstration from a man who, save in moments of passionate excess, was habitually rather reserved. “Silly person! Did you think I was going to run away?”

“You couldn’t,” he answered confidently. “You are chained here to my side with invisible, unbreakable bonds.”

“Oh; there’s the divorce court,” she remarked with light-hearted flippancy.

“I wasn’t referring to social laws,” he answered gravely. “The bond that holds you is the strength of our love. It is the one invincible power in the world. Whatever happened, you would never cease to love me, Pamela.”

He made the statement with a look which seemed to question her. Pamela responded to the look.

“No,” she answered, her sweet face grown suddenly very earnest. “I could never cease to love you. That’s the surest thing in heaven or earth to me.”

He set her aside and stood up. Then he lifted her to her feet and put his arm about her and drew her towards the open window.

“Come into the garden,” he said. “The air indoors stifles me. I don’t want to talk. I want to be in the open and feel you near.”

She pressed his hand sympathetically.

“There’s certainly a little worry of some sort,” she said.

“Yes, there’s a little worry,” he answered in an evasive tone which discouraged inquiries. “But it needn’t concern you.”

Pamela was not naturally curious. Her husband seldom discussed his affairs with her. She did not resent this lack of confidence, but attributed it to the disparity of their ages: Pamela was twenty-six, and Herbert Arnott was forty, and rather staid and settled. He had been a widower when he married Pamela; but he never spoke of his first wife. He had been married when he was quite young and had made a hash of his early life. She knew that because he had told her when they became engaged: he did not refer to the subject again; and Pamela never knew what the first wife was like nor who her people were. Arnott was reserved about his past, and, so far as his wife knew, he was without ties or relations. He had put the old life behind him entirely when he quitted his native land; and very early Pamela learnt that it was not wise to try to get him to talk about himself and the days before she knew him. He was a man whose past was a closed book to the world, nor would he allow his wife to turn over the pages.

He had first met Pamela on board the vessel in which he sailed for South Africa. She was going out to a post as governess in a girl’s college at Port Elizabeth. He had sat next her at meals in the saloon and found her congenial. When he left the ship at Cape Town he had asked her to write to him. Subsequently he had journeyed round the coast to see her, and shortly afterwards they were married. That was five years ago, and during those five years Pamela had been extraordinarily happy. She had never had even a trivial disagreement with her husband; the usual petty domestic worries had not intruded into their pleasant, easy home life. Arnott made an admirable husband, and Pamela’s disposition was naturally sunny and contented. Moreover, this life of luxurious comfort as the wife of a wealthy man of independent means formed a delightful contrast to the old days of poverty and constant struggle, with nothing more inspiring ahead than a succession of years of continuous teaching, and then old age and uselessness, and a small pittance at the end. She felt grateful to Arnott for having saved her from that.

The Arnotts lived at Wynberg, that beautiful suburb of Cape Town; a place of tree-lined avenues and shady woods, dominated by the grand old mountain, its bosky slopes presenting every varying shade of colour as the seasons came and passed; its grey summit, gilded by the sunlight or shrouded softly in billowy mists, standing out against the blue remoteness of the heavens, an eternal symbol of imperishable greatness which the sea in its retreat has left in a grand isolation towering over the city and the outlying districts spreading away at its base.

Pamela was the proud and happy mistress of a fine house, and a staff of inefficient native servants. She had tried the European variety, but found them too superior, and so had fallen back on the native article whose inefficiency was qualified by unfailing good temper, though the system of British training and education was making them fairly independent too. In the years to come the dark man will compete with the white man and question his authority, perhaps even his right to rule in the land which is the heritage of the seed of Ham. The early history of Africa is written in blood, and its history is still in its infancy.

Arnott was not particularly popular in Wynberg: he was too reserved to make friends easily; but his hospitality was lavish and attracted people to the house; and his wife was a general favourite. Men admired her for her sparkling prettiness, and women took to her readily: she was easy to get on with, and she gave pleasant parties. She did not, however, form particular friendships with her own sex; she was a little shy with women and preferred male society, which is not unusual in the case of a woman whose life has been spent in schoolrooms in the unexciting transition from student to teacher, surrounded always with an atmosphere of immature femininity. Pamela never quite grasped the feminine mind, and had little sympathy with its restricted outlook. This inability to comprehend the sex of which she was a representative, she attributed to the fact that, having been saturated with feminine principles from her youth up, she had become so confused with its mass of inconsistencies that she failed utterly to realise its finer qualities. The brain of the woman teacher is usually developed on one-sided lines. Indeed, the chief failing of the average woman lies in the fact that she refuses to look at life all round, but persists in regarding it from her sole point of view; and the point of the woman is to ignore realities if by chance they happen to affront her. A want of sincerity therefore mars the beautiful vision of life.

Pamela did not consciously look at life from any particular point. So far the world had treated her well; and she accepted the pleasant condition of things, and was undemonstratively grateful.

One cloud there was in her serene sky of happiness, and that was that she had no son; the pretty little girl in the nursery had been a disappointment. Arnott, himself, had not desired children: the birth of the baby had vexed him, and Pamela’s hunger for a male addition was a further aggravation. He could not understand, he told her, why one kid would not suffice. Children were a responsibility, and gave more trouble than pleasure. Certainly he derived no pleasure from his child, and Pamela was very careful that it should not be a trouble to him. She seldom had the child with her when he was present: small children possibly worried him, she decided; when the baby grew older she would make a place for herself in his heart.

“And then,” she reflected, with a little rueful smile, “my nose will be out of joint.”

It was odd what a pang this prospective jealousy caused her. She could not bear the thought of sharing her husband’s love, even with her child. And yet there was room in her own heart for both.

“I am so happy, Herbert,” she said, as they paced the garden path together in the summer dusk. “It doesn’t seem right, somehow, to be so entirely satisfied. I feel at times that it is too good to last. How can it? One can’t go on being happy for ever.”

“Why not?” he said gruffly. “So long as one has health one can always enjoy.”

“Ah! but it needs more than health,” she returned. “We have such a lot of other things. Surely we shall be required to pay back some day?”

“Rot!” he answered testily. “Why should one pay for one’s rights? Happiness is a right. We’ve got it. We’ll keep it. Hold fast to it, little girl, and don’t encourage morbid superstition.”

He stood still in the path, and took her face between his hands, and held it so, imprisoned.

“By God!” he cried, with sudden, swift vehemence, “no power on earth shall wrest mine from me. My happiness is bound up in you, and only death can take it from me. You aren’t going to escape me that way, Pam,—you are so exuberantly alive.”

Pamela laughed softly, and twined her arms about his neck, drawing closer to him.

“But you’d love me sick, dear?” she said... “You’d love me sick just the same? If you were bed-ridden I’d only love you the more tenderly.”

“Fishing as usual,” he returned, and kissed her. “A fine emotional scene for a middle-aged married man. One would suppose we had been married five months instead of five good years.”

“Five good years!” Pamela repeated, and added presently, “And they have been good. I wonder if I had never met you what I should be doing now?”

“You’d have met some one else,” he answered. “Matrimony is so much more your forte than anything else.”

“And you?” she hazarded. “Would you have met some one too?”

“No,” he replied with a convincing directness which gratified her immensely, so that she desired to kiss him again, and only refrained from fear of irritating him with an excess of emotionalism. “I didn’t set out with that idea in my mind. I should be exploring the interior, as I purposed doing—and probably have become a physical wreck with fever and other ills. You saved me from that when you bewitched me on the outward voyage.”

“I didn’t know I was doing it,” she returned, with a quiet, satisfied laugh. “You were such a grave, reserved person. I always felt proud when you came and talked with me.”

“You don’t feel that now,” he said banteringly.

“Not proud, no.” She slipped a hand into his. “But happy always,” she said, pressing his hand.

“Not so bad an admission after five years of it,” he remarked with reflective complacency. “I take it that proves fairly conclusively that we were meant for each other. I don’t profess to understand this old riddle of a universe, Pam; but I’ve grasped the human need at least; and it doesn’t fit in with the world’s decree that the individual should be judged according to established custom. The entire social scheme, with its restrictions and its definite rules, is nothing but a well-intentioned muddle. At the back of the new law stands the great primeval laws which refuse to be set aside.”

He broke off abruptly with a short, constrained laugh, and added jerkily:

“Which windy exposition, reduced to bald commonplace, amounts to the certainty that, having discovered my need of you and your need of me, we were bound to come together whatever forces opposed... You believe that, Pamela?”

“I—don’t—know,” Pamela answered slowly. She turned her face and searched his by the faint light of the stars. “I’m glad there weren’t any opposing forces,” she said.

“Little coward!” he responded in lighter tones... “I would face any amount of opposition for you.”

“Now—yes,” Pamela answered. “So could I for you. But—before we were married... I don’t know...”

Chapter Two.

It was the fifth anniversary of the Arnott’s wedding, and Arnott had presented his wife with the customary present of jewellery: on this occasion it took the form of a rope of pearls. Pamela wore the pearls at the anniversary dinner, which function also had become a custom. It was the one entertainment during the year to which Pamela limited her invitations to the guests she especially liked; and with her careful selection was also particular in limiting the numbers. On this day, if on no other, she informed her husband, she insisted upon enjoying herself.

Arnott was quite satisfied to leave the arrangements to her; and it often transpired that he did not know who his guests were to be until they arrived. But on the day in question he did an entirely unforeseen thing, and astonished Pamela with the announcement—made while drinking tea on the stoep, and eating wedding-cake, which Pamela considered indispensable to the day—that he had met a man in town he knew and had asked him to dine.

“But,” gasped Pamela, “did you forget what day it is?”

“I haven’t had a chance of forgetting,” he replied, smiling. “Dare won’t clash with the harmony. I think you’ll like him.”

“Oh, like him!” she said. “That isn’t the point. He’ll be an odd man. I can’t possibly ask any one to fill up at the eleventh hour. And—good gracious, Herbert!—he’ll bring our numbers up to thirteen. What a deplorable thing for you to have done!”

He looked amused.

“Why shouldn’t thirteen people be as jolly as twelve?” he asked. “You aren’t going to make me believe that you are silly enough to feel superstitious about it; because, if you are, I’ll sit out.”

“That would spoil everything for me,” she said. “I don’t know that I’m exactly superstitious; but other people are; and some one may not like it. It’s—unfortunate.”

“I’ll motor to the Mount Nelson and put him off, if you like,” he suggested.

But Pamela negatived this.

“He’d think it so queer,” she objected.

“Not he. But he would probably conclude I was henpecked.”

“Let him come,” said Pamela resignedly. “Perhaps no one will notice at a round table that we make such an awkward total. But the next time you do a thing like that, do make it a pair.”

Pamela dressed early. She had a new frock for the occasion, white and soft and unrelieved by any colour, and she wore for her sole ornament her husband’s gift of pearls. Arnott surveyed her with critical appreciation when she entered the drawing-room. He held her by the arms under the electric light.

“By Jove! Pam, you look prettier to-night than I’ve ever seen you look,” he remarked. “I’m proud of you.”

She lifted her face to be kissed.

“Just one—on the lips,” she said. “You mustn’t crumple me.”

In the dining-room on the other side of the hall the dinner-table was already rearranged to accommodate the additional guest. A caterer from Cape Town was responsible for everything; so Pamela had no anxiety in regard to the entertainment, and felt almost a guest herself. It was such a delightfully easy way of entertaining. She had peeped into the room to inspect the table decorations, and expressed herself charmed with the whole effect. The floral design was perfect.

This mode of giving parties without any trouble, and not even being worried with the bills, which she never saw, was very agreeable. Pamela’s mind reverted often to the schoolroom days, to the prize award functions, and other entertainments of similar dulness, needing much weary preparation, and she wondered if she had ever really enjoyed those things. At the time, though often tired out with the business of organising and assisting, she had thought them pleasant enough. But she could not go back to that sort of thing, not now. Prosperity had killed her appreciation of simple pleasures.

The guests began to arrive. Dare was the last. He was indeed rather late, which Pamela thought was rude of him, until he explained that his taxi had broken down on the road. He did not make his apology immediately; it came out later in the course of conversation. At the moment of meeting his hostess the thing slipped from his mind. He showed surprise when first confronted with her. It was a very brief betrayal, just a momentary unexpected flash of something which looked like recognition in his grey-blue eyes. It passed almost immediately before she could be certain it had been there; his face was mask-like in its gravity as he shook hands with her.

He murmured something. Pamela did not quite catch what he said; but the main drift of the remark was to the effect that he appreciated the kindness which gave him this opportunity of meeting her in her home. She thought him rather abrupt, and decided that he would not add greatly to the general amusement. Later, she modified this opinion, because, despite a severe appearance and the slight awkwardness he displayed on entering, he proved an excellent conversationalist.

He was a tall man in the early thirties, rather thin, with a clever face, and light keen, extraordinarily penetrating eyes. By profession he was a mining engineer, and Arnott had described him as a particularly smart man at his job. He had met him in Cape Town before his marriage, and had run across him again that day unexpectedly after the lapse of years. The invitation to dinner had been prompted by impulse; he had no particular feeling of friendship for the man.

Dare, who was often in Cape Town, was acquainted with some of the guests present. The Carruthers, who were neighbours of the Arnotts, and with whom Pamela was on terms of greater intimacy than with the majority of her large circle of friends, had known him for years. Mrs Carruthers had once thought of marrying him before she met Carruthers, misled by a certain deferential kindliness he displayed towards all women, being naturally fond of the sex, into thinking he cared for her. She still flirted mildly with him on the occasions when they met; but she had grown out of the belief that her marriage mattered to him.

“I didn’t expect to see you here,” she remarked, when he sought her out after dinner and suggested a stroll in the grounds. “I did not think you knew the Arnotts.”

“I knew Arnott years ago, before he was married,” he answered.

“Then you haven’t met her before? ... They’ve been married five years.”

“So long ago as that, was it?” he observed meditatively. “She is very sweet looking.”

“Yes; she is pretty,” Mrs Carruthers allowed. “They are the most devoted couple in the Peninsula.”

“What’s amiss between you and Dick?” he asked.

“Oh!” she laughed. “I never worshipped Dickie quite so blindly as that. The Arnotts’ is the only case of perennial courtship I’ve ever been privileged to witness... But after all five years is but a step of the journey.”

“I should think a man could continue in love indefinitely with a woman like Mrs Arnott,” he remarked.

“If time stood still for her, perhaps,” she conceded. “But she won’t always be pretty.”

“She will always be sweet,” he returned. “I don’t set great store by looks myself. But I like a woman to be amiable; and a sweet expression suggests a sweet disposition.”

“It may suggest it; it doesn’t necessarily prove that it’s there.”

“Leave me a few of my pleasant beliefs,” he pleaded. “It’s an old-fashioned notion, but I like to think that the world is a good place, and human nature on the whole inclined to charity. It’s a much more comfortable theory than the deliberately cultivated scepticism towards the disinterestedness of human motives. I like to think that what looks sweet, is sweet; just as I like to believe that when a woman is kind to me it is because she feels kindly. That is why I always enjoy being with you.”

“By which subtle flattery you force me to sheathe my claws, and make an effort towards being amiable. You haven’t altered much.”

“Nor have you,” he returned, smiling. “And amiability being one of your many admirable qualities, the effort you propose making on my behalf won’t cost you much.”

Since the time of year was unsuited to sitting indoors, the Arnotts had had the grounds lighted, and engaged some musicians to play at intervals during the evening. Pamela, who possessed a very fine contralto voice, sang once towards the finish of the evening, standing on the brilliantly lighted stoep outside the drawing-room windows, a fair, radiant, girlish figure, singing with extraordinary passion that seductive song from Saint-Saëns’ “Samson et Dalila,” “Mon coeur s’ouvre à ta voix.”

Dare, a little apart from the rest, took up his position beside a tall bush of gardenias and listened with absorbed attention until the finish of the song, his keen eyes never leaving the singer’s face, lost in a wondering rapture of admiration for the singer as much as for the song.

“Ah! réponds à ma tendresse...”

The seductive words, the seductive tones, thrilled him. He was Samson listening to Delilah,—a Delilah sweet and charming and womanly, without the sting of poison in her passionate entreating.

When the song ended he still remained motionless, not joining in the applause which followed, heedless of everything about him, conscious only of one fair girlish face, of a pair of limpid eyes, blue as the African sky itself, and of the tender curve of sweet lips made for laughter. For five years he had been searching for this face, and he found it here—the centre jewel in another man’s crown of happiness.

“Her price is far above rubies; the heart of her husband doth safely trust in her; her children rise up and call her blessed...” Involuntarily the words came to his mind with a sense of their appropriateness. Where had he heard them? He did not know. But assuredly they were written for her.

He turned his head and glanced at the people near him. With the finish of the song they had started talking again, carrying on the conversations which the music had interrupted. No one seemed to have been impressed, as he had been, with the moving power of the seductive voice. Possibly they had heard it often before: he heard it for the first time, and felt profoundly stirred.

When he looked round again she had moved away, and formed one of a gay group on the stoep. He waited until she left this group, then, when he saw her alone for a moment, he seized his chance and joined her. Her guests had been pressing her to sing again, but she declined. For some reason Dare was glad she refused. He wanted no other song, perhaps with an altogether different sentiment, to sweep away the emotions which the first song had produced in his soul. He was oddly stirred and excited, moved out of his ordinary calm by a sensuous love song finely rendered by a woman who was an artist, and yet surprisingly natural.

He did not compliment her on her singing. It was the obvious thing to do; but Dare seldom did the obvious. If he could have thanked her in his own way for the pleasure she had given, that would have been an altogether different matter. But his way was not consistent with twentieth-century customs, nor was it practicable in the case of a married woman in the company of her husband and friends.

“I’ve been exploring your beautiful grounds, Mrs Arnott,” he said. “What a delightful place you have here.”

“Yes; isn’t it?” returned Pamela, with ingenuous pride in her home. “I’m so glad you like it. I love it.”

“I’m sure you must,” he replied.

“You must come and see the garden in the day time,” she added graciously. “From the lawn the view of the mountain is very fine,—if you admire the mountain. I never tire of watching it. It adapts itself to one’s mood. Or perhaps I should say its varying aspects affect one’s mood. I sit out there and study it for hours at a stretch.”

“I should like to do that,” he said.

“Well, you shall, if you care to. I like to share my mountain.”

“Do you ever visit Johannesburg?” he asked.

“I haven’t been there yet.”

“You ought to,” he said. “It is an interesting city. There are some nice homes there, too—and gardens.”

“You have a good garden, I suppose?” Pamela said. “You must have, because you appreciate them.”

“Ah! there are plenty of things which I appreciate that I haven’t got,” he replied. “I am a bachelor, and live at hotels—when I’m above ground,” he added with a smile. “A fairly unenviable existence, eh?”

“Why not change all that, and marry?” she suggested.

He regarded her contemplatively for a second, and then looked deliberately away.

“I don’t fancy I belong to the marrying sort,” he said.

“Oh, nonsense!” returned Pamela brightly. “Every one is the marrying sort when he meets the right person.”

“Yes! Then I imagine the right person hasn’t revealed herself.”

“You should go in search of her,” she said.

“I did once—five years ago.”

“Yes?” Pamela looked at him with a gleam of feminine interest in her deep eyes. “Five years ago you went in search of her... And then?...”

“She had run away,” he said, “and was married to some one else.”

“Oh!” Her voice had a disappointed ring. This that she was hearing was altogether the wrong kind of a finish to an interesting romance. “Then she wasn’t the right person after all.”

“She was for me,” he replied with quiet conviction. “But, you see, both sides have a voice in these matters.”

“But if she didn’t care for you, she couldn’t have been the right person,” she insisted. “Believe me, the right person is waiting somewhere.”

“In that case,” he said lightly, “when we meet I shall doubtless recognise her. I won’t give her the chance to run away a second time. A man who is dilatory in his love affairs deserves to spend his days underground and his nights in hotels. I’m not complaining.”

Suddenly she laughed.

“I don’t believe you are the least bit in earnest,” she observed. “You are one of these contradictory people who look serious, and are always laughing at life.”

He scrutinised the smiling face with added interest.

“I don’t as a rule take life seriously,” he returned,—“and a very good rule too. If I am not mistaken, Mrs Arnott, it is a rule you practise yourself.”

“I don’t know about that,” Pamela said in her bright, young voice. “I take each day as it comes, and make the most of it. That’s the best way, really.”

“For you, perhaps,” he answered. “But some of us would have a dull time if we had no to-morrow in contemplation. I have no quarrel with to-day, for instance; but there are days in my life I could cheerfully wipe off the calendar.”

“There used to be those kind of days in my life once,” she rejoined. She looked up at him, smiling, so radiant in her gladness that he was forced to smile in sympathy with it. “They make the present so much jollier,” she said.

“You enjoy by comparison,” he returned.

“I suppose that’s it—in a way; yes. When you have followed my advice you will do that too.”

“The same prescription doesn’t fit every case,” he ventured.

“It doesn’t cure every complaint,” she allowed; “but it will cure yours.”

“Mine being?” he asked with an uplift of the brows.

“Loneliness.”

He laughed at this diagnosis, and Pamela laughed with him.

“No woman ought to prescribe for that complaint,” he said, “unless she is prepared to provide the remedy.”

“Ah! the patient has to find that for himself.”

“And suppose it happens to be out of his reach?—suppose it runs away?”

Pamela looked thoughtful.

“There’s an endless supply of the remedy always at hand,” she returned presently.

“That’s merely another version of the fishes in the sea,” he answered. “But when I’ve shaped my appetite to sole, mackerel is no substitute. I’ve hauled in my line... I think you might have offered more original advice than that,” he added, slightly aggrieved.

“I wash my hands of your case,” she said. “You aren’t needing advice. You are entirely satisfied with your life as it is.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “I am borrowing a leaf from your book and enjoying the now.”

Chapter Three.

The following afternoon Dare called upon Pamela, and was glad to find her at home and alone. He was returning the next day to Johannesburg, he explained, and was not likely to be in Cape Town again for some time.

Pamela entertained him in the garden, and gave him tea under the trees on the lawn. She expressed regret for her husband’s absence: he had motored into town, and would not be home before seven.

“He will be so sorry to miss you,” she said. “You had better stay and dine with us.”

He thanked her, but declined the invitation, pleading a prior engagement. The absence of Arnott occurred to him as rather an agreeable accident; Mrs Arnott’s sole company was sufficient for his enjoyment.

She chatted inconsequently while she poured out the tea, and he watched her, and admired again, as he had admired on the previous night, the sweet expression of her face, her air of joyous youth. In the daylight she was less radiantly pretty than she had appeared by artificial light; possibly, he decided, evening dress was more becoming to her than day-wear; but she was fair enough in any guise to excite admiration. Dare would have admired her sweet expression had she been otherwise plain of feature; it was in his opinion beautiful of itself.

“Do you know, I’ve seen you before last night,” he said, as he stirred his tea, and contemplated her gravely across the little table that was drawn up beside her chair.

“Seen me before?” she repeated, surprised. “Where?”

“Were you ever in Port Elizabeth?” he asked.

“Yes, of course. I was teaching there. But that was five years ago.”

“I saw you there,” he answered,—“five years ago.”

Pamela’s blue eyes opened wide. She scrutinised him closely, and shook her head.

“I don’t remember,” she said.

“You wouldn’t,” he replied. He helped himself to cake, and resumed in a careless manner: “It was at a tennis tournament. You were in the stand, and I was playing in the men’s singles.”

“Did you win?” she asked.

He smiled.

“No; I played rottenly. I came in defeated, and sat in the stand near you.”

“If you had won,” she said, “I might possibly have noticed you.”

“It would be kinder,” he said, “if you spared defeat a few of your glances. You shook hands with the winner.”

“How horrid of me!” she cried.

“Oh! well, he was a P.E. man. I expect you were pleased he carried off the honours. I had to go back immediately; I went by the night train. Soon afterwards I was back in Port Elizabeth. I didn’t see you on that occasion.”

Pamela looked away from him, and gazed thoughtfully above the trees at the mountain which towered high above them, blue in the afternoon sunlight, with dark purple shadows in its cleft sides that deepened into black.

“I married just about that time,” she said.

“So I heard.”

She glanced at him curiously.

“You seem to have known quite a lot about me,” she said. “It’s funny hearing all this now.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “Odd to have run up against you like this! I knew you again at once.”

“You have a good memory for faces,” she observed. “I feel I ought to have recognised you.”

“Ah! but I was defeated,” he reminded her smilingly,—“defeated all round. And there was no reason why you should have noticed a stranger particularly. They were pretty well all strange faces to me, you see; and I was amusing myself by picking out a few. It’s a habit of mine. I fix on a face and construct a story in connection with it.”

“Did you construct a story about me?”

“I forget,” he returned evasively. “Quite possibly I did... But it was entirely wrong, anyway. When a man constructs a story in connection with a girl’s face, he doesn’t provide her with a lover, unless—”

“Unless?” prompted Pamela. She was faintly amused with the halting recital which showed a tendency to break off at the most interesting points. She glanced at him with a laugh in her eyes, and repeated encouragingly: “Unless?”

“Well, the answer is fairly obvious,” he replied, smiling too. “Do you want me to go on?”

“No,” she said, and flushed and looked away again, but the laughter was still in her eyes. “I think I can imagine the rest.”

“It shouldn’t require a great mental strain,” he returned.

“If you amuse yourself in that fashion,” Pamela remarked, “what a lot of exciting adventures you can contrive.”

“Make-believe adventures of that nature aren’t exciting,” he said. “They’re the last word in dulness really,—the substitute for the real thing. Sitting talking with you here is infinitely pleasanter than weaving impossible romances. Certainly, when one is stage-managing, one can have things all one’s own way; but it’s a bloodless form of amusement.”

“Do you still visit Port Elizabeth—for the tennis tournament?” she asked.

“No; that defeat of mine sickened me. I’ve done with competing. It’s the younger men’s turn now.”

Pamela looked amused.

“You are very easily discouraged,” she said. “I don’t think I altogether admire that easy acquiescence in failure: it’s not a British characteristic.”

“Perhaps not,” he allowed. “But when one has suffered the knock-out blow it’s idiotic to enter the ring again.”

At this junction Pamela’s little girl, eluding her coloured nurse, ran across the lawn towards her mother, having espied the tea-table from afar. In her eagerness for cake she overlooked the stranger, until abruptly made aware of his presence as she hurled her plump body into Pamela’s arms. The sight of the strange man sobered her gladness with surprising suddenness. The bright head dropped swiftly, and the flushed, shy little face buried itself in Pamela’s dress.

Dare smiled. There was no doubt as to the child’s identity; Pamela the second was Pamela the first in miniature.

“Somebody’s come for cake,” said Pamela, and tried to lift the hidden face from its resting place; but the child resisted her attempts.

“And somebody’s got a nasty shock,” Dare added, as he cut a slice of the most tempting dainty on the table and held it out invitingly. “Won’t you come and make friends?”

But Pamela the second merely peeped at him like a shy, inquisitive bird, and nestled closer in the sheltering arms. Experience, in the form of her father, had led her to be distrustful of men.

“See, Pamela,” coaxed her mother; “Mr Dare has a beautiful slice of cake for you. See!”

“Don’t want it,” Pamela pouted.

“But that’s rude,” remarked Pamela the first. “You mustn’t be naughty.”

“Oh, don’t!” pleaded Dare. “You only prejudice my chances.” He leaned over her chair, and placed the slice of cake in the chubby hand which opened and closed upon it shyly. “I’m awfully fond of cake too, Pamela,” he said. “You eat that piece, and I’ll eat a piece; and we’ll see who gets through first.”

“You’ll ruin her digestion,” Pamela the elder observed with smiling reproof, while Pamela the younger set her small teeth in the cake and munched it with evident appreciation. While she ate, she kept a suspicious but interested eye on the stranger, who was eating cake also with apparent whole-hearted enjoyment. To Pamela the second’s delight the stranger’s slice failed to disappear as rapidly as her own.

“You’ve won,” he cried, as the last mouthful was crammed with unfair haste upon its unmasticated predecessor.

Pamela the second licked her small fingers and laughed because the stranger was beaten and looked so sorry about it too. She hoped he was going to cry.

“Let’s try again,” he suggested, and cut a second and smaller slice.

Pamela scrambled down from her mother’s lap and approached near to him, leaning with her small sticky hands on his knees, and her greedy blue eyes on the cake.

“Try again!” she repeated delightedly, and held out an eager hand.

“It is just as well,” remarked Pamela the first, “that this doesn’t happen often.”

She met his eyes over the child’s bright head and returned their quiet smile. In making his bid for baby favours he was gaining more than he guessed. Before the second piece of cake was finished, Pamela the second was seated on his knee; and because he was badly beaten this time also, and seemed to mind his defeat even more than before, she rested her head contentedly against his sleeve, and evinced entire satisfaction at his expressions of disappointment. Pamela the second was hard-hearted and crowed loudly over her success.

“I think you may claim to have won this time,” said Pamela the first, watching the child’s friendly response to his overtures with pleased, surprised eyes.

He caught the reference.

“Through another defeat,” he said, “yes.”

“It is a greater victory than you imagine,” she added. “I have never known her won over by your sex before. You are accustomed to children?”

“Not accustomed,—little people don’t come my way; but I’m in sympathy with them. My tastes are infantile, you see.”

He rose shortly afterwards and took his departure. Pamela the second had gone off in pursuit of other diversion: Pamela the first accompanied him to the gate.

“I am sorry you are going back so soon,” she said as she shook hands with him. “I don’t feel as though we were new acquaintances. I seem to know you quite well.”

“Five years,” he returned... “I regard the friendship as dating from then. We are quite old friends really.”

“It’s odd,” she said, and laughed. “I am going to adopt your view. If you have known me for five years, it stands to reason that I must have known you too. Good-bye. Be sure to look us up when you come this way again.”

He looked into her eyes with a protracted, earnest gaze, and hesitated.

“I don’t know when that will be,” he answered slowly. “I don’t anticipate coming this way again for some while. When I do, you may be very sure of one thing,—that I shall look you up.”

Pamela went back to her seat under the trees, and thought about him for the rest of the afternoon. There was something—she could not define it satisfactorily—in the man’s personality that attracted her: she had never met any one before with whom she had felt so quickly at home. He was companionable and sympathetic. The odd mixture of serio-comic in his conversation left her slightly in doubt as to the entire sincerity of all he said; but this only further piqued her interest. It was possible to imagine him clothing in flippant language his deepest feelings with a view to disguising their earnestness. She could not conceive him ever betraying emotion. Abruptly she roused herself with a laugh, and consulted the watch at her wrist.

“Seven o’clock!” she mused. “A nice thing for a married woman to devote nearly two hours in a sentimental reverie about a stranger!”

She went indoors to change her dress. Arnott returned while she was upstairs. She heard him go to his dressing-room, and after a while he crossed the landing to her room, hesitated at the door, and finally entered. She observed that he was looking worried again. He appeared excited and irritable, and a restlessness most unusual in him kept him constantly on the move. He fingered things on the dressing-table, and brushed aside impatiently any article that came in his way.

Pamela wondered what it was that worried him so of late, but she did not like to question him. This worry harassed him usually on mail days. She was beginning to connect the trouble with his English letters. But for the fact that he never showed any anxiety with regard to their expenses, she would have concluded that he was financially embarrassed. But not once had he suggested to her that it would be wise to practise economy. He was, as a matter of fact, far more extravagant than she was. He spent money with the careless indifference of a man whose banking account more than sufficed for his needs.

“Mr Dare called this afternoon,” remarked Pamela, watching her husband as he fidgeted at her dressing-table. “He leaves Cape Town to-morrow. I thought you might like to see him, so I asked him to dine.”

He faced round abruptly and stared at her, frowning and displeased.

“He isn’t coming,” she added, meeting his vexed gaze, and feeling for the first time glad that Dare had refused the invitation. “He was engaged for to-night.”

“I’m not sorry,” he said, looking immeasurably relieved. “I’d rather have a quiet evening with you, Pam. Last night tired me; I’m feeling cheap.”

“It was thoughtless of me to have asked him,” said Pamela contritely. “But it’s all right, as it happens. We’ll have a Darby and Joan dinner, and you shall be as surly as you please, and sit and smoke all the evening. There.”

He pinched her ear.

“I’ll take you at your word one of these days; and you’ll see what a bear I can be.”

Pamela slipped her hand through his arm and they left the bedroom together. Although she had made a joke of the quiet evening they would spend, she knew quite well that he would sit as she had promised he should, silent and abstracted, so lost in gloomy thought that he would seem oblivious of her presence. She had seen him in this mood frequently of late, and had grown familiar with the symptoms.

At dinner, quietly observant of him, she noticed that he ate scarcely anything; but he drank more than usual. When he exceeded his customary allowance, it did not loosen his tongue; he became morosely silent, and betrayed a tendency towards irritability if spoken to. Pamela was a tactful woman, and knew when to be silent. But she was beginning to resent her husband’s want of confidence in her. If there was a secret worry that pressed upon his mind so that it threatened to become a serious trouble, he ought to share it with her. His silence showed a lack of trust. Surely by now he ought to realise that her love was sufficiently strong to help her to understand and sympathise with him in any trouble that might overtake him. She desired to share his full confidence, to have the strength of her love put to the test. There was no shadow of doubt in her own mind that it would rise to meet any occasion. A love which is entirely strong has no fear of the fire.

“To-morrow,” she told herself, and stilled a cowardly impulse to put the date further off, “when he is more himself, I will ask him to trust me.”

Then she got up quietly, moved to the back of his chair, and kissed him on his forehead. He made no direct response, but his eyes, as they followed her from the room, were alight with a passionate hunger that quenched in its fiercer fire the slightly furtive expression of dread which marred their ordinary frankness.

Chapter Four.

The morning found Arnott recovered from his overnight depression; and Pamela’s determination to inquire into things was less positive than on the previous evening. On reflection she decided to wait a little longer. Perhaps if she waited he would broach the matter himself. It might be that she was exaggerating the importance of this thing. In any case she would exercise patience and see what the next mail day brought forth; if his letters caused him annoyance again she would ask him to confide in her the nature of this worry which, while not allowed to share it, was becoming her trouble too. She could not look on and see him bothered without feeling bothered in a measure also; and her entire ignorance as to the nature of the trouble was worrying of itself.

Pamela held modern ideas as to a wife’s right to share her husband’s confidence. Marriage unless a mental as well as a physical union was no marriage in her opinion. She desired to face life at her husband’s side, and take all that it offered fearlessly, the bad as well as the good. It had been all good up to the present; but no sky is always cloudless: eternal sunshine would dry up the generous fountains of life, as unbroken happiness will narrow the sympathies and shrivel the best emotions of the heart. Pamela had a healthy appreciation of the blue skies, but she was not in the least afraid of the rain. So long as she had her husband’s love, so long as they were together, she believed that she could meet any trouble, bear any sorrow bravely in the strengthening knowledge of his great love for her.

So long as they were together... She dwelt on that thought, smiling and confident. They were together, that was very certain; it seemed equally certain that nothing could happen to separate them. It was indeed such an assured impossibility that she encouraged herself to consider it for the pleasure of proving its absurdity. Herbert, himself, had declared that only death could divide them; and at twenty-six death looms very indistinct along the vista of years.

Wandering in the garden, waiting for her husband who was going to motor her out to Sea Point, Pamela speculated on these things with the easy optimism natural to her, and indulged the happy conceit of creating purely imaginary and highly impossible situations for the satisfaction of filling them effectively,—a habit of make-believe which endured from schoolroom days. The appearance of the postman in the drive awoke her from her dreaming to the realisation that the morning was slipping away. Something must be detaining Herbert, possibly something to do with the car.

She took the letters from the postman and went indoors. One of the letters was for herself. It was addressed to her in her name before she married, the name she had neither signed nor seen written for five years. It puzzled her that the writer of the letter should be familiar with her present address and yet be ignorant of her change of name. She could not recall having seen the handwriting before. The postmark was London. It was doubtless due to the mistake in the name on the envelope that the letter had not found its way into Arnott’s box at the post office, and so have been collected by him when he fetched his own letters on the previous evening.

She went into the sitting-room, and seated herself near the window, and turned the envelope about in her hands. Flailing to identify her correspondent from the superscription, she finally opened it, and withdrawing the closely written sheet of foreign paper, glanced first at the signature. “Lucy Arnott” was written in clear, firm characters at the foot of the page.

Pamela’s amazement was unbounded. Who was Lucy Arnott? And why should a connection of her husband address her as Miss Horton? She concluded that it must be a connection of her husband; it was such an unlikely accident that a stranger of the same name would write to her.

Curious, and vaguely troubled, Pamela began to read. She read the letter through, read with white, set face, and a mind which failed to grasp the significance of what the cold, formal phrases expressed with perfect lucidity. It occurred to her that the thing was a cruel hoax, a wicked, malicious lie. She could not credit the truth of the writer’s assertion that she was Herbert Arnott’s lawful wife, and that therefore Pamela was not a wife at all—was not legally married...

Pamela tried to realise this abomination, and then thrust the horror from her as too terrible for credence. It could not be. She knew that she was married. She had her marriage certificate. Everything had been done in order. Whoever Lucy Arnott was, she could not disprove that.

“I don’t know,” the writer said, “whether you were aware of my existence when you consented to pose as Herbert’s wife. I only heard recently that he was living with a wife at Wynberg; therefore I cannot judge whether you have been deceived, or are simply a willing accomplice. If it is a case of deception, you have my sympathy; if the latter, you will not need, and would not appreciate, it. I may state at once, in the event of your cherishing the hope that I will divorce him, that I have no intention of doing so. I have no respect for the divorce laws, which are man-made and for their own convenience, and I have no wish to have my name dragged before the public. I shall take no proceedings against Herbert; it is a matter of entire indifference to me what he does, or how he lives. After this letter you will not hear from me again. Having informed you of what I felt it right you should know, I leave it to you to act as your conscience dictates. If, as I am inclined to fear from a too intimate knowledge of Herbert’s character, you have been cruelly duped, you may, if you stand in need of a friend, count on me as a woman who has suffered also at the same hands and can therefore feel for another.”

Pamela sat with the letter in her lap and stared at the page unseeingly. A little choking sound escaped her; it was scarcely a sob, more nearly it resembled a catching of the breath. She made no other sound.

For a long while she sat there motionless, holding the letter in her lap between her limp, shaking hands. It wasn’t true... It couldn’t be true... This thought reiterated itself persistently in her bewildered mind; but behind the thought, companioning it always, a doubt chilled her unbelief in the writer’s veracity,—a doubt which came, and came again, until finally it asserted its right to a place in her thoughts; and instead of the reiterated: It can’t be true, the phrase shaped itself: Suppose this thing were true? Suppose this were the secret worry which had troubled Herbert’s peace of late...

And then suddenly she heard his voice calling her name, and, looking up, saw him advancing towards her along the stoep. He was looking hot and slightly out of humour. He had taken off his cap in order to cool his brow; he carried it in his hand.

“It’s no go, Pam,” he said; “the drive is off for this morning. There is something wrong with the engine. It’s beyond me; the car will have to go into town for repair.”

He came up to the window, and stood in the aperture, and gazed at her in surprise. Never had he seen Pamela wear such a look as she wore then. Her face was white; the blue eyes, dilated and dark with pain, stared back into his own with the dazed, unseeing look of a sleep-walker. For the moment he believed she was ill; and he stepped through the window hurriedly and bent over her with anxious solicitude.

“Pam!” he said... “My dear, what is it?”

Then his eyes fell on the letter in her hands, and his face reddened and then went very white. It was evident that the handwriting was perfectly familiar to him.

Pamela put the letter into his hand.

“Read it,” she said dully.

“Good God!” he cried, and turned the thing he held in hands only a little less unsteady than her own. “How did you get hold of this?”

“It came by the post—just now.”

“Damn!” he muttered under his breath, and read the letter deliberately. When he had read it he crushed it in his palm and thrust it into his pocket.

“I would have died sooner than you had read this,” he said.

He made no attempt, she observed, to refute the charge. Somehow she had not expected him to; from the moment when his eye had fallen upon the letter she realised that the information contained in it was true. His first wife was not dead.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she said. She looked at him resentfully with her darkened, pain-filled eyes. “It wasn’t fair to me... You’ve cheated me... You—Oh!”

She broke off piteously, and looked away from him out through the window; and he saw that she was weeping. The tears ran down her cheeks, and splashed unheeded on the hands that lay clenched in her lap and made no move to check the bitter rain. Arnott turned his eyes from the piteous face.

“I couldn’t tell you,” he muttered... “I loved you. I dared not risk losing you,—and I believed you would never know.”

“It’s—bigamy,” she said, and caught her breath again sharply.

“Yes.”

His voice was sullen.

“But that’s punishable,” Pamela said, and scrutinised him with wide, distressed eyes... “Isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

He made a sudden movement. Before she could stay him he was on his knees beside her, with his arms about her, holding her closely.

“I wanted you so badly,” he said. “It was the only way. Oh! Pamela, believe me, I never meant to hurt you... I never meant you to know. My dear—Oh! my dear, don’t turn from me. Forget that you’ve read that letter,—forget that you ever received it. Let things be as they were before.”

“But they can’t be,” she insisted. “I’m not—”

She broke off and stared at him, frightened and dismayed.

“I’m not even married,” she added, the horror of this truth revealing itself in her tones.

“You are,” he asserted sullenly. “I married you...”

“But you couldn’t,” she persisted, “with your wife alive. The law can punish you for bigamy.”

“Do you want the law to punish me?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “That wouldn’t help me. And... there’s the child.”

He frowned.

“You are distressing yourself unnecessarily, Pamela,” he said. “There is no difference really. You felt quite secure until to-day. Your position is as assured now as it ever was. You are more my wife than the woman who wrote that letter. She has a legal right to my name; but we were never mated as you and I are. My first marriage was a bitter mistake which I have ceased to consider long ago. She stands for nothing in my life. You are everything to me—everything. I’d fight to keep you with my last breath.”

“You ought not to have done it,” Pamela said, and wrung her hands. He put his hand over hers and stayed her. “You ought to have left me in peace... What peace is there for me now? Any hour this thing may come out. It’s not our secret,—yours and mine alone.”

“It’s yours and mine and hers,” he said. “She won’t speak.”

“How can you be sure?” Pamela cried passionately. “She told me.”

“Yes—damn her!” he returned, and stood up abruptly. “She has been threatening to do that for months. But I thought I could intercept the letter. I never dreamed of her writing to you like this... But she has done what she meant to. She will be silent now.”

“But things can’t go on as they have been,” Pamela said piteously. “I can’t stay here, now I know. I—Don’t you see, Herbert?—it wouldn’t be right. I should feel—”

She shivered suddenly, and broke down again and wept bitterly.

“Oh, dear heaven!” she wailed. “What am I to do?”

“Do you mean,” he said in a hard voice, “that you think of leaving me?” Then, his calmness deserting him, he went to her and took her in his arms and kissed her tenderly. “Pamela,” he whispered brokenly, “what I have done, I did out of love for you. It may be that I did you a wrong in marrying you; but,—to give you up! ... I couldn’t. Oh! my dearest, believe me, I have fought hard... I fought against my love for you; but it was too strong; it broke down every barrier. It would have broken me if I could not have had you... Dearest, speak to me... Tell me that you forgive me,—that you’ll stick to me. You can’t leave me, Pam,—you can’t leave me. My dear, I couldn’t let you go.”

Pamela freed herself from his embrace, and sat bade looking at him with her miserable tear-blurred eyes. She put up a hand and swept the hair back from her brow.

“It wouldn’t be right,” she said, and stirred restlessly... “I don’t know... I must think.”

She got up and passed him and walked towards the door. He made no attempt to stop her.

“I want to be alone,” she said slowly... “I want to think...”

She passed out, and the man, rising also and looking after her, stood with a heavy frown darkening his face, his shaking hand pulling nervously at his moustache. The blow which he had so long dreaded had fallen like a thunderbolt and threatened to destroy his home. He could not feel sure how Pamela would act now that she knew the truth. Of her love for him he had no shadow of a doubt; but women like Pamela possessed scruples, queer principles of honour which hardened into obstinacy when the question of right manifested itself beyond all argument. When a thing became a matter of conscience with such women, it was all a toss up, he reflected, whether the woman will not deliberately sacrifice herself to her sense of equity. That as a general rule on smaller matters she is less sensitive in regard to points of honour, inclines her in moments of a serious decision to a greater severity. For the life of him he could not determine what Pamela would decide to do after reflection. The fact that she had insisted on thinking the thing out alone occurred to him as the first step in a moral victory which might spell disaster to the happiness of both.

Chapter Five.

Pamela spent the day locked in her room. She held no communication with any one. Arnott had no means of discovering how she was passing the time, because on the one occasion when he pleaded for admission she refused to open her door; and he went away troubled and sorely dissatisfied.

He left the house and did not return until evening.

When she saw him go Pamela had a mad impulse to seize the opportunity and escape from him, but she dismissed this idea almost immediately. To run away would be ridiculous: she was quite free to go at any time. And there was the child. The child was her child; it did not belong to its father. That was the one right of the unmarried mother. The child of the dishonoured union belongs as nature intended to the mother. Pamela began dimly to understand why Herbert had so hated the thought of having children; that at least was a point which counted in his favour.

She paced the room at intervals, walking restlessly between the window and the door; but for the greater part of the time she remained seated listlessly in a chair near the open window, staring out at the sunshine, thinking, thinking always, trying to resolve what she ought to do, what she intended doing. The matter rested now between those two points. She had no longer any real doubt as to what she ought to do. Every argument she advanced against taking the right step she recognised perfectly as a deliberate oversight of duty in the pursuit of her own happiness. She wanted him so. In despite of the wrong he had done her, she loved him passionately, with a love which attempted to excuse the injury because of the depth of feeling which had moved him to act as he had acted, which held him to her still in defiance of every law. He had sinned out of love for her. Was she too going to sin in order to keep him?

She realised perfectly that if she went out of his life now, though it might break her heart to leave him, though it would possibly break his, she would save from the wreckage her virtue, her self-respect; to continue to live with him, knowing what she knew, was to become an abandoned woman, a woman of loose morals, the wings of whose happiness would be clipped by the sense of her degradation. She would be a thing in the mire, soiled and ashamed,—Arnott’s woman, no longer his wife...

She broke off in her reflections, weeping passionately.

“I couldn’t bear it,” she moaned. “I couldn’t bear it.”

Then, when she grew a little calmer, she faced the alternative. Life without him... never to see him again. To live in some place where her story was unknown,—to know that he was alive, in the world somewhere, hungry for her, aching for her, as she would ache for him,—and not be able to go to him,—never to see his face, nor hear his voice again,—never to feel the clasp of his arms, his kisses on her lips... Would that be more bearable than the other, she wondered, and shivered at a prospect so utterly bleak and forlorn that she could scarce dwell on it even in her thoughts. How could she face separation from him?—such a death in life for them both?

And then began again the struggle, the fight of the soul against the desire of the flesh...

That evening Pamela went downstairs. She dined with Herbert, or rather sat through the meal; she could not eat. Neither of them spoke much. Once Arnott insisted on her drinking a glass of wine. He had noticed her lack of appetite; and he poured the wine into her glass, and stood by her while she drank it. He was keenly observant of her, and careful not to let her see his attentive regard. He wondered whether she had arrived at any decision, whether she would speak about the matter later. He was feverishly anxious to know what was in her mind. If she was bent on leaving him, he was determined to oppose her to the utmost, to exert every art, every argument he could devise to induce her to alter her decision,—to see the thing from his point of view,—to be reasonable.

When she left the table, he rose also and followed her from the room. In the hall, at the foot of the stairs, she paused, glanced at him uncertainly, and changing her mind about going upstairs, entered the drawing-room. He followed her and shut the door.

“Tell me,” he said, and stood facing her in the dull glow of the shaded lights, his voice trembling with emotion, body and features tense with the restraint he was bringing to bear on himself, to subdue the anxious desire to hear her speak, to hear her pronounce her verdict, to know the result of that long, miserable, mental struggle which he knew had been taking place in the bedroom from which she had shut him out,—“tell me what you have decided... I can’t bear this racking uncertainty any longer, Pamela... I can’t bear it.”

Pamela looked at him with perplexed, miserable eyes.

“I haven’t decided,” she said, “anything.”

Suddenly her eyes filled with tears, there was a sound of tears in her voice.

“I don’t know what to do,” she moaned. “I’ve thought, and thought... I can’t see a way out.”

A momentary gleam of triumph leaped into his eyes. He held out his arms.

“My dear!” he said.

She made no move towards him. She leaned forward, resting her arms on the back of a chair, her gaze fixed on the carpet.

“There seems only one thing to do,” she resumed in an expressionless voice... “There is only one thing,—no decent minded woman would consider any other course.”

“You mean parting?” he said, and his face hardened.

“Yes,—parting,” she echoed, and lifted her gaze and scrutinised him intently. “It won’t undo the evil; but it sets things right, as far as it is possible to right them now.”

“Look here!” he cried. He went to her and knelt on the chair upon which she leaned and looked up into her face... “Could you part from me? ... Could you? Think what we have been to one another,—all that our love has meant, and then think of being apart,—always,—never seeing one another even... Could you do it, Pam?”

Her troubled eyes met his, clouded with a mist of tears.

“Don’t!” she muttered, and put a hand quickly to her throat. “I’ve been thinking about it—like that all day.”

“And you can’t face it!” he said. He laid a hand firmly upon hers where it rested upon the back of the chair. “My dear... you can’t face it... I can’t face it. I’ve looked at the matter all round; and I can’t face parting now any better than I could face renunciation five years ago. It’s out of the question. It can’t be, Pamela. We’ve gone a long way beyond that.”

“But the other thing,—to stay,—that’s impossible too.”

“No,” he asserted. “That’s the only thing left us. Except for the compunction I feel in the pain this knowledge has brought you, it hasn’t altered anything for me. I’m trying to look at it from your point of view. The relative values of our position are not changed for me, you see. When you have recovered from the shock of the revelation, I’m hoping you will see things as I do. Nothing is altered really. I have regarded you always sacredly as my dear wife. You will ever remain so to me. Nothing can alter that.”

“But I am not your wife,” Pamela said. “Do you think I can ever forget that, now I know? Every time that my eyes meet yours that thought will be in my mind... not you wife,—only your—”

“Don’t say it,” he said sharply, and gripped her hand hard. “You are my wife.” He spoke with a certain obstinacy, as though his purpose were to insist on her imagination taking hold of realities which she sought to overlook, which were none the less realities to him because he justified them by his own standard in defiance of conventional law.

“I’m not going to give you up, Pamela. I’m going to keep you. If you left me I should follow you. Don’t you see that parting for us is impossible? If we loved less it might be easy to talk of parting,—easy to assume a smug respectability, and give up a little for the satisfaction of feeling virtuous. But people don’t give up everything for the sake of virtue—and to part now would be giving up everything for you and me.”

“But I can’t,” she insisted, “continue to live here—as your wife. It’s not only a case of conscience, it’s a matter of self-respect. I should hate myself.”

This was a fresh issue. He had not foreseen this, and he realised his inadequacy to grasp the point; it was too intrinsically feminine for his understanding. He stared at her in baffled perplexity.

“Do you mean,” he began, and paused, scrutinising her tortured face with disconcerted, incredulous eyes.

He stood up, and moved away from her, and remained with his back to her, facing the window. Then abruptly he faced round again.

“What do you want to do?” he asked, his nerves on edge with the intolerable strain. “For God’s sake, be reasonable! I can’t stand this any longer. Do you mean that you want to leave me?”

Pamela made no answer. She bent forward and leaned her face in her hands and broke into bitter weeping. In a moment he was beside her. He took her in his arms, and drew her head down to his breast, and held her so, still sobbing, with her face hidden in her hands. Tenderly he kissed the bright hair.

“Poor little woman!” he said.

She clung to him, sobbing and weeping in his embrace.

“Oh! I can’t,” she wailed... “I can’t.”

Again the light of victory shone in the man’s eyes. He held her more closely.

“No,” he said; “we couldn’t do it... Never to meet again! ... We couldn’t do it, dear.”

She drew back from his embrace and, seating herself in the chair, continued to weep hopelessly. He fell on his knees beside her.

“I’m a brute to have brought this on you,” he muttered. “But I loved you so... Dearest heart, say you forgive me.”

He caught her wrists and pulled her hands from her face and kissed the tear-drenched eyes.

“Pamela, my darling, forgive me. I meant no harm to you. I never meant you to know.”

She regarded him with brimming eyes.

“Oh! I wish,” she said, “that I didn’t love you so well.”

He kissed her hands. He had won in this first struggle. With patience, he told himself, he would recover the whole ground.

For an hour Pamela remained with him, talking the matter threadbare. Arnott did most of the talking; Pamela listened, acquiescing by her silence to much that he urged in his own defence, occasionally interrupting him, more occasionally disputing a point. Gradually he worked round to the subject of their future relations. On this point Pamela was more difficult. She held views of her own in regard to that; and the discussion at times took a bitter tone. He pleaded, he argued eloquently, he even offered concessions. He was patient and displayed a tender consideration which moved her to a corresponding tenderness, but did not shake her resolve.

They were still at cross purposes when, heavy with fatigue and misery, she arose and announced her intention of going to bed. The discussion, he recognised, would have to be postponed to some future time. This exasperated him; he left that the delay minimised his chances of victory. Further wrestling with her conscience might confirm her in her resolution, would inevitably make persuasion more difficult. Ultimate victory depended largely on his success in wearing down her scruples before they had time to harden into a conviction of duty.

He eyed her resentfully, and bit his lip to keep back the sharp words of reproach which came to his tongue.

The puritanical strain in the composition of a good woman was the most baffling factor to cope with; the element of passion became a weak, a futile argument against its frigid strength.

“You are punishing me heavily, Pamela,” he said.

She turned towards him slowly. Her sad eyes dwelt for a long moment on his face and then looked deliberately away.

“My dear, I am not wishing to punish,” she said. “It is equally hard for me.”

“Then why...” he began, and paused, irresolute and almost ungovernably angry. “It’s monstrous,” he muttered. “Absurd! We might as well be apart altogether.”

Pamela made no response, but went with a dragging step out of the room, up the stairs to the bedroom where she had spent the tragic hours of that weary day.

When he was alone, Arnott moved to a chair and seated himself, and remained lost in a gloomy reverie, his sombre gaze fixed sullenly on the floor. The hand of the clock revolved slowly twice round the dial before he roused himself from his bitter reflections. He saw no way out of this muddle. If Pamela persisted in her present attitude it meant the end of their happiness together; her daily presence in his home under the conditions she imposed would prove merely an aggravation.

Arnott’s nature was passionate, and his love for Pamela was of the quality that refuses to be subdued. He had never practised restraint; the thought was intolerable. The fever of desire which had led to his bigamous marriage still fired his blood, and moved him to passionate rebellion against Pamela’s decree. He refused to submit to this cold-blooded arrangement. He would have it out with her; he would overcome her scruples; he would,—he must win.

He got up, switched off the lights in the room, and passed out into the hall. He switched off the hall light also, and went up the darkened stairs. From beneath the door of Pamela’s room a thin line of light told him that she was awake. He fancied he heard a movement inside the room, and listened. Then deliberately he advanced and tried the door. It was locked.

He gritted his teeth, and passed on and entered his dressing-room. For that night at least he had to admit defeat. Oddly, at the moment, though smarting with indignation at being thus determinedly denied admittance, he respected her decision, even while bitterly opposed to it,—he respected her.

He sat on the edge of his bed and beat softly on the carpet with his foot. A tormenting desire for her gripped him, as it had not gripped him since the days before he had married her—those days when he had recognised how impossible it was for him to do without her, when finally he had flung every consideration aside and gone through the form of a marriage, which he knew was no marriage, because he could not give her up. His need of her now was every whit as insistent as it had been then. Its very urgency had broken down every law, razed every barrier: it should, he told himself, surmount also this new obstacle which fate had flung in his path.

Chapter Six.

They were difficult days which followed. Pamela went about as usual, but she looked white and worn, and evidences of sleepless nights and much weeping disfigured her eyes. Arnott, unequal to the tension, decided on a brief separation, and took a trip round the coast. His absence—it was the first time he had gone away without her since their marriage—might bring home to her some realisation of what life would be like if they finally parted. Perhaps, when she was alone, when she missed his actual presence, she would relent. If, when he returned, he found her still obdurate he would broach the subject of a more complete separation.

He did not seriously believe that she would bring herself to the point of parting irrevocably. As things were, it was more difficult to part now than it would have been in the first shock of revelation. She had had time in which to adjust her mind to the altered conditions, to be called upon to readjust it, to do so late what she had felt she ought to have done at the beginning, and had failed to do, would add a fresh humiliation to the former difficulty, would make the difficulty greater. He felt fairly convinced that she would not willingly leave him, and he meant to force her into compliance by holding out this suggestion as the only possible alternative.

Pamela received the news of his intended departure with a sense of relief. She too had felt the strain to be well nigh intolerable, more so in view of his increased kindness and consideration for her, which made it so terribly difficult to refuse to listen to his pleading. She welcomed the thought of his absence as a relief from the constant pain and embarrassment of his reproachful presence; but when he was gone she missed him, missed him so sorely that she experienced, as he had hoped she would, a sort of terror at the idea of living without him. Almost it seemed to her that the talked-of separation had actually taken place, that he had gone away from her finally, that she would never see him again. A fear took hold of her imagination that he might have gone with the intention of not returning, that this might be his way of avoiding further distresses. Perhaps he would write and inform her that he had chosen this means as the best solution of the problem. He had not, she recalled, made any mention of returning. He had stated simply that he couldn’t stand it, that he must get away. And she had accepted this without questioning, had felt glad that he should go. She no longer felt glad: she only wanted him back.

An aching sense of loneliness oppressed her as the days passed and brought no letter from him. She had expected to hear from him when the boat reached Algoa Bay. He sent no word until he was as far as Durban, then he wrote briefly that he was going on further up the coast. She had no knowledge of his movements after that. He did not write again.

In the weeks which followed she had ample time for reflection, time in which to determine her future course of action. She spent long hours in the garden revolving things in her mind, trying to disentangle thoughts and emotions and impulses of right and wrong, trying to sift them and get them into some consecutive order. And always she worked back to the one impassable point, the point which his absence made so distressingly clear, that life apart from him was a sheer impossibility. She could not face it. The long lonely years...

And yet to continue to live with him! ... That were to choose evil deliberately. And all their life together would be a lie,—an outward respectability which at any moment was liable to exposure for the sham it was.

From the bottom of her heart she wished that she might have remained in ignorance of this horrible truth. Then the responsibility of choice would not have been hers. She wanted to keep her happiness and her peace of mind, and that was now impossible. She wanted to continue as Herbert’s wife, and yet remain virtuous; and she could not; her happiness or her virtue must be sacrificed, the one for the other.

Pamela prayed for strength and guidance, but her prayers held—as the prayers of many people hold—reservations. She attempted to bargain for the retention of her happiness. She asked to be shown the path of duty clearly, and when it was revealed to her she shut her eyes. There is never great difficulty in seeing the road which is called Duty; it shows always direct and straight ahead; but many people turn their backs on it and look in the opposite direction, because the path of duty is an uphill path, and it is not until one has reached the summit that one can appreciate the fairness of the prospect and the exhilarating freshness of the air. Pamela stood in the valley, and the steepness and the loneliness of the ascent appalled her. Hers was not a nature fashioned for high purposes. The big battles of life require sterner moral principles to bring them to a triumphant issue. She was not gifted with that altruism which enables one to meet a great crisis with the utter self-abnegation by which alone such crises are successfully overcome. Pamela fought her great battle handicapped by reason of her limitations. The high ideals which, while unfaced with any great issue, she had cherished with unconscious hypocrisy failed her in the stress of her need. She was just a weak, loving woman, stricken to the heart, and lonely beyond words to describe,—a woman hungry for her lover, whose last scruple of honour faded into nothingness in the period of his absence.

Arnott came home unexpectedly. He sent no intimation of his return; he had not, as a matter of fact, intended to turn back when he did. He obeyed an odd impulse, prompted by a queer, unaccountable fear that if he prolonged his absence Pamela might grow reconciled to doing without him, might grow independent of him. He felt no longer so confident that his temporary separation had been a wise move. He had prolonged it unduly. He had given her time to miss him, and had made the mistake of giving her further time in which to grow used to the idea. With this doubt in his mind he hurried back.

He got back in the afternoon rather late for tea. They had met with contrary winds round the coast, and the boat was delayed some hours. Arnott took a taxi at the docks and drove out to his home. He dismissed the taxi at the gate and carried his luggage himself up the path and dumped it down on the stoep for one of the servants to take inside. Then he looked about him with a strange feeling of unreality, and an unexpected sensation of nervousness that manifested itself chiefly in the dryness of his throat. Where, he wondered, was Pamela? This return to a silent, unwelcoming house was disconcerting. He forgot that he was not expected, and began to feel unreasonably annoyed.

And then abruptly he became aware of Pamela, standing in the opening of the drawing-room window, gravely regarding him. He looked round suddenly, and their gaze met.

“So you have come back?” she said.

Her eyes were deep and very intense; the man as he met their shining look felt certain of his welcome. He advanced towards her quickly.

“Couldn’t stick it any longer, Pam,” he said. “I wanted you.”

He held out his arms. She went forward unhesitatingly, and put her arms about his neck and drew his face to hers and kissed him.

“I am so glad you have come home,” she said.

Arnott’s clasp of her tightened.

“Oh! Pam,” he said, “how good, how jolly to have you again.”

He drew her inside the room, looking away from her a little awkwardly, looking about him with an overdone air of ease. Pamela also, now that their greeting was over, assumed an outward calm which she certainly was not feeling, and busied herself with the tea things, having an equal difficulty it seemed in meeting his eyes. That, she discovered later, was one of the developments of their adjusted relations, a sort of furtiveness, that comprised a mixture of deprecation and a shamed shyness that was more instinctive than anything else. The realisation of this hurt her; it detracted immensely from the beauty of their love. But just at first she did not recognise it other than as a temporary embarrassment; it did not distress her particularly.

“I was just going to have a lonely tea,” she said, and rang the bell for a fresh supply; “and now—there’s you!”

She glanced at him brightly, a swift colour flushing her cheeks. He seated himself on the sofa near the tea-table, and studied her curiously when he believed himself unobserved. He speculated on what might be in her mind, what the actual thoughts and feeling were which she hid so successfully behind her welcoming manner. For the first time within his knowledge of her he realised a subtlety, a certain secretive force, which he had not suspected in her. It was like coming unexpectedly upon a familiar spot and finding the view altered and contracted by surprising innovations. One felt that behind the obstructions the prospect was exactly the same; it was one’s own view that was restricted and created these new impressions.

“It’s good to be home,” he said, and dropped into a discursive chat about the places he had visited. “Tried all I could to get rid of the thought of you, Pam,” he said at the finish, and glanced at her with a sudden, faintly deprecating smile. “It wasn’t a bit of use. You pursued and brought me back... God! how you haunted me at nights! ... And your face looked back at me from the water whenever I gazed down at the sea.”

Pamela sat down beside him. She slipped a hand into his, but she did not look at him.

“It’s been the same with me,” she said,—“you were always there, somehow. I wonder... I suppose there are lots of people like ourselves who grow dependent on one another... You’ve never been away from me before.”

“And you missed me?” he questioned.

She looked at him then with grave, perplexed eyes, and nodded.

“It was an experiment,” he said presently. “I wanted to see if we could do it—and we can’t... We can’t part.”

“And we can’t,” Pamela repeated slowly. “No, I don’t think we can.”

Suddenly she leaned forward and played nervously with a little fanciful spoon in her saucer.

“I meant to,” she said,—“at first. I felt—I still feel it’s the right thing to do. After you had gone away, I knew I couldn’t. I suppose I am not a good woman really.” She broke off the jerky sentences, and gazed at him somewhat wistfully. “It’s hard to want to be happy, and to know that one ought not to be. I suppose that’s why she told me... She wouldn’t leave me to be peacefully ignorant. She wanted to stretch me on the rack too.”

“Lord knows!” he answered, and stirred his tea irritably. “She’s threatened to tell you,” he added, “ever since some fool of an acquaintance, who’d been out here and was struck with the name, told her that I was living here; but I thought I could intercept the letter. I didn’t allow for it coming to the house. I knew she would never make an open scandal. She’s too proud, for one thing. Besides, she is absolutely indifferent. So long as we are not in the same country, it would never trouble her what I did.”

“But,” said Pamela, a little shyly, “she must have loved you once.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I am beginning to doubt myself, whether it is really love which brings the greater part of the world together. Not infrequently curiosity is at the bottom of it,—or the desire to make a home. The majority of cases, of course, are the result of passion,—the fundamental scheme for the continuance of the race. I don’t see that it’s much use bothering one’s head about these matters. I married when I was a hot-headed young fool; after I found out my mistake—too late. I met love... Well, I suppose I ought to have turned my back on love,—and I didn’t. There you are.”

“Yes,” Pamela returned slowly. “That is just the part I find it impossible to excuse. That was your big error; and it is going to be responsible for our further wrong-doing.”

“Look here!” he cried. “Life is in one’s own hands. One either makes it difficult by moralising, or simple by being philosophical and taking all it has to offer. It holds a lot of good for you and me, Pam... Why moralise?”

“Because,” Pamela answered, and her eyes filled with unexpected tears, “in making a deliberate choice of evil I don’t wish to cheat myself into believing that it is the only course open to me; it isn’t. If I am a bad woman, I will at least be sincere.”

He took her two hands and held them between his own and looked with kindly tolerance into the sweet, distressed face. He no longer felt any need to plead with her; he knew his case was won. Very tenderly he put her hands to his lips.

“You odd inconsistency,” he murmured, “how you delight in tormenting yourself! Can’t you see that in this matter you are entirely blameless? All the evil is mine. You are driven into a corner, poor child. Nobody in his senses would hold you responsible. Put the blame on to me, Pam,—I’m equal to shouldering it.” He slipped an arm about her, and drew her closer. “If it had all to be gone through again, I’d do the same.”

Chapter Seven.

For the first few months after Arnott’s return Pamela enjoyed once more the delirious happiness of a second honeymoon. Arnott was very much in love, very grateful to her for her acceptance of her awkward and delicate position. He was bent on making good in every way possible. His love overflowed in floods of grave tenderness: he lavished upon her unexpected and extravagant gifts. Pamela appreciated his tenderness; but the gifts—too frequent and haphazard, suggesting that he recognised the necessity for pleasing and propitiating her—hurt her; it seemed to her that they represented the price of her degradation. She was reminded continually that she was no longer a free woman: she was a man’s mistress, bought and owned by hire. The price of the jewels he heaped upon her might be taken as an estimate of her value. Always he had been generous to her; he had given her many valuable presents, on her birthday, on their marriage day, and such like occasions, not, as he did now, at odd moments as though he had constantly in his mind the humiliation she endured for his sake, as though he felt the necessity to express his gratitude in some fashion, to reward her uncomplaining devotion.

Pamela endured many hours of secret shame over these glittering evidences of his recognition of their altered relations. But the thing which wounded her most, wounded her whenever she looked into the clear eyes of her child, whenever the sound of little feet, the sweet shrill baby voice, fell upon her ears, was the knowledge that this little innocent creature—her baby—was born out of wedlock, was a bastard.

Pamela’s mind was growing accustomed to the use of ugly terms, which she recognised fully that the world—if the world ever learnt the truth—would connect with her name and with her child’s. Such terms had once been an offence in her ears,—now they fitted her; they were no less an offence, but she accustomed herself to them. She was brutally frank with herself in the matter of her voluntarily accepted, shameful position.

But in one matter she determined she would always remain secretive; the child should never learn the facts of her parents’ marriage. Neither she nor Arnott could ever requite the injury they had done the child. She had sinned in ignorance, his was the greater sin; but now her responsibility, her culpability, exceeded his. Her knowledge of the truth made her duty to the child manifestly clear; but duty had fought its unequal battle, and was beaten to the dust.

Pamela’s honour had gone down into the mud, a beaten and trampled thing. She had made her first great mistake, and already her punishment was beginning. In yielding against all her principles of right, though he had fought his hardest to conquer her scruples of honourable decency, she had lost to a great extent Arnott’s respect. At the moment when knowledge first came to her, when she had so miserably tried to do what was right, his respect for her had stood so high, had been so immense and overwhelming and self-humiliating, that instead of hating her chastity which threatened to part them, he had only loved her the more strongly because of it, had admired and wanted her more insistently; now he recognised that in this weak, yielding woman, whose passion for him equalled his passion for her, subjugated all her finer qualities, he held an easy captive; a captive who shrank from freedom, who had ceded all right to be considered before and above himself.

When the first flush of triumph over his victory had worn off, and with it his almost humble gratitude for her tender submissiveness, the quality of his love underwent a change, a change which manifested itself in surprising and disconcerting ways. The sensualism in his nature, which he had never allowed her to suspect hitherto, was no longer kept under; little discourtesies, formerly never practised, became common with him; on occasions he was openly rude to her. He atoned for these lapses afterwards with presents and demonstrations of greater affection. He believed that Pamela forgot these occasions as soon as he did; she always forgave readily and responded at once to his kinder moods; but Pamela did not forget. Each act of discourtesy, each rough word, left its wound in her soul.

She realised, despite Arnott’s reiterated insistence that, save for the distress which this knowledge afforded her, everything remained really unchanged, that this was not so. The whole fabric of their world was changed. Their union became a deliberate criminal conspiracy, a furtive defiance of the laws of the land; it had ceased to be a bond of comradeship based on mutual esteem,—it had ceased to be a bond in any sense of the word, save in their dependence on one another. A love which has once been fine and free and frankly expansive contracts in an atmosphere of secrecy and shamed suppressions; it loses vitality.

There was in the changed conditions of her life much which influenced very strongly Pamela’s development. Strange new emotions were born in her with all the anguish of new birth; a deeper understanding and at the same time a less generous conception of life grew in her. She lost something of her joyous irresponsibility and acquired a profounder wisdom. It was as though her mind developed while her soul’s growth remained temporarily arrested. And during the process the girl in her died for ever and the woman evolved in her stead.

No one can pass through a grave crisis and emerge unchanged from the devastating floods that submerge one during the process. It depends entirely on the moral strength of the individual plunged into these deep waters whether he or she rises above them grandly, or merely flounders desperately until an insecure footing results as the waters recede. The calm mind, the braced purpose, of the moral victor, faces the dark hour and conquers it, and gains even from the bitterest struggle much which beautifies and is helpful to the soul, much which makes each succeeding battle to be fought simpler of conquest than the last; on the other hand, to reject the fight from motives of fear or other reluctance leaves one not only a loser in the battle, but shorn of the necessary armour wherewith to face the next fight. Pamela had lost her battle; she had thrown aside her armour and surrendered, because victory seemed to promise only an empty reward. She lost more than she knew by her surrender; not only did she forfeit her self-respect, her purity, her great gladness in life; she lost too the clean honest delight in Arnott’s love for her, in her love for him; the bright pleasant surface of things was smudged and dull; she no longer breathed in the open; it was as though ugly walls enclosed and stifled her soul.

Inexplicably, she blamed the woman who had enlightened her,—Arnott’s wife,—more than she blamed Arnott himself for these miserable new conditions. She rebelled at being forced to shoulder the responsibility of her own act. If only she had been left in ignorance! ... From the bottom of her stricken, aching heart she wished that she had never received, never opened, that fatal letter. She wanted to go back to the period of her ignorance, wanted intensely to have her unsullied happiness again; and that was impossible. The door which has once stood open no longer conceals what it guards, nor can the surface of a thing that is tarnished attain to the same pristine beauty as before.

During those first months of knowledge, Pamela passed through many varied phases; from dull misery, to heroic intention, which ended in a passive defeat and an acceptance of the new conditions. There followed a period of shamed, yet glowing, happiness in Arnott’s return. This phase waned all too speedily, and left only discontent and distressful self-reproach, and a first doubt as to the selflessness of Arnott’s devotion. After a while these emotions also faded, ceased in time to harass her continually; and she drifted into a state of careless apathy, a comatose condition of the soul, the result of which only future events could determine, according to the influences and impressions that were likely to bear on her life.

It was during this period of indifference, of atrophied emotions, and moral inertia, that her second child was born to her,—a son. What once had been the crowning wish of her life was now granted when she had ceased to desire the gift. The birth of the boy was her final humiliation.

Arnott, himself, awaited the coming of this child with mixed emotions; its birth was at once a source of triumph and of disgust to him. The last remnant of respect he retained for Pamela died at the boy’s birth. He scorned her weakness, yet he rejoiced at it because of the more complete hold it gave him upon her. She could never reproach him with being the father of their second child; she must even cease to reproach him for the past. She was now equally guilty with him.

Pamela had made her first great mistake in refusing to part from him; her second greater mistake resulted in the birth of their son.

By an odd chance, as though an ironic fate decreed that this child should perpetuate the older shame of his parents’ bigamous marriage with the later shame of his own birth, the baby was born on the anniversary of the wedding day. The old custom of keeping up that date as the most festive day in the year would assuredly have lapsed, even had the boy’s coming not made it an impossibility. Whatever Arnott felt about the matter, Pamela could not have celebrated with her friends the mock event which formerly had been to her a glad and sacred rite. She deeply regretted that the boy’s birth fell on the same date. Always she would be reminded of that date, would be compelled to recognise it. With each year of the child’s growth it would assume an added importance, call for greater distinctiveness; the child when he grew old enough would insist on its recognition.

Arnott bought her a diamond bracelet to celebrate the double event; but he had sense enough not to present his offering until she was downstairs again and able to take an interest in things. He gave it to her one afternoon out in the garden.

They had had tea together under the trees, and Pamela lay in her cane lounge, so still and so unusually silent that he fancied she was drowsy, and remained quiet also in order not to disturb her. But Pamela was not asleep; she was lost in thought. Suddenly she opened her eyes and looked at him fully.

“I have been thinking about a name for baby,” she said. “Have you any preference in the matter?”

“No,” he answered.

He thought he detected a slight shade of vexation pass across her face, and added, after reflection:

“Why not Herbert? ... We’ve reproduced you.”

She flushed faintly.

“That was your wish,” she said. “But it seems to me confusing when the children are christened after the parents.”

“Well, it was merely a suggestion,” he returned easily.

“I think I should like him called David, after my father,” she added presently. “He was the best man I have ever known.”

Arnott made no response. The expression of her reason for her selection seemed to him in the circumstances uncalled for.

“You don’t dislike the name, I hope?” she asked.

“No. I don’t say I’d choose it. It’s rather Welsh, isn’t it?”

“It’s British,” she replied, “anyway.”

“Look here!” he said, dismissing the subject of the baby’s name, and fumbling in his pocket for the present which he had brought out with him, “I’ve something here for a good girl.”

He leaned forward and dropped the case into her lap. Pamela took it up and opened it carelessly. She was growing a little bored with having to express gratitude so frequently for his thought for her.

“Another!” she said, and held the bracelet in a languid hand. She made no effort to try it on. “You really shouldn’t be so extravagant, Herbert. I have more jewellery than I can possibly wear.”

He went round to her chair and slipped the bracelet on her arm and fastened it.

“It’s pretty,” he said... “You like it?”

“It’s beautiful,” she replied.

“And my thanks?” he said.

He leaned over her. Flushed, faintly reluctant Pamela lifted her face in response. He kissed her eagerly. She always failed to understand his appreciation of these exacted caresses. It was one of his peculiarities that he enjoyed what he gained masterfully more than what was voluntarily ceded.

Chapter Eight.

Dare sat on the stoep of his hotel in Johannesburg reading a letter from Mrs Carruthers, who kept up a spasmodic correspondence with him at his own urgent request; her letters, he explained, gave him a sense of living still in the world. One clause in this letter interested him particularly; it was a clause which referred to Pamela.

“I have just returned,” the writer stated, “from the christening of the Arnott baby,—a querulous man-child whom I have undertaken to keep uncontaminated from the wiles of the devil,—a preposterous thing to ask one human being to do for another. Being a childless woman myself, I am more afraid of my godson than of the devil, the latter being so conveniently unsubstantial. Whether it is the added cares of maternity, or due to the fact that the connubial bliss I once dilated upon to you is not so assertive as it was a year ago, your sweet-faced divinity is decidedly less prepossessing in appearance. I would never have believed that a year could age a woman as it has aged Pamela Arnott. Besides looking older, she is considerably less gay. But she is a dear woman, all the same.”

The writer passed on to other matters, and mentioned that she was glad there was a chance of seeing him shortly. She hoped while he was in Cape Town he would spare them a few days.

Dare folded the letter and placed it in his pocket-book; then he sat back in his chair and fell to thinking about Pamela. Why, he wondered, should a year make such a difference in a woman’s appearance that to her intimate friends who saw her continually this change should be so apparent? And what had caused the diminution in the married happiness which, little as he had seen of the Arnott’s home life, he too had been conscious of? Pamela had radiated happiness on the evening he first met her.

He recalled Mrs Carruthers’ words, uttered carelessly to him that night in the garden, when she had alluded to the Arnotts’ marriage as an instance of perennial courtship, and had added, with a touch of sarcasm not altogether innocent of malice: “But, after all, five years is but a step of the journey.”

That bore out what more than one married man had told him, that it was the silliest mistake man or woman ever made to imagine that because one is violently in love for a period that state of erotic bliss is going to endure.

“It’s beyond the bounds of possibility,” one man had said to him recently in palliation of his own unfaithfulness. “And it’s a good thing all round for the race that we are as we are.”

But Dare had a conviction that, given the right woman, his love would endure to the end. The right woman for him, he believed, was Pamela; and she was beyond his reach.

Feeling as he did about Pamela, the wisest course for him to pursue was to keep out of her way. He realised this fully; at the same time he desired very earnestly to see her. Since she was ignorant of his feeling in regard to her, he argued, there could be no harm in their meeting; he had sufficient self-control to be able to converse with a woman without allowing her to suspect that he was interested in her in any marked degree. Indeed, he would have found his interest difficult to explain. To assert that he had fallen in love at sight with the face of a girl he had seen several years ago and never spoken to until he met her later as a married woman, would have lain him open to ridicule; it would have strained the credulity, he felt, of Pamela herself. He had heard of cases of love at first sight, but he had not believed in them prior to his own experience. It had always seemed to him that love could be begotten only of some quality of deep attraction in the personality of the individual. Certainly had he not found those attractive qualities in Pamela when eventually he met her, the romance he had cherished for five years would have gone the way of dreams; but his meeting with her kindled afresh the fires of his sleeping fancy; and the romance, which had promised to remain only a sentimental memory, was quickened into life. What he had loved in the girl’s face, he loved again in her personality. He was quite satisfied that Pamela was as sweet as she looked; and he determined to play the unobtrusive part of the silent male friend to this woman who was his ideal. He would not deny himself the pleasure of her society merely because he loved her. Never from look or word of his should she guess his secret. But if destiny ever offered him the chance of serving her, he would count himself well rewarded for his undeclared devotion.

The news concerning Pamela in Mrs Carruthers’ letter, quite as much as his own feelings, made him feverishly anxious to see her again. Business was taking him to Cape Town; he decided that when he was through with the business he would put in a little time on his own account; and Mrs Carruthers’ invitation fitted in with his plans.

He wrote her a cordial, but guarded, letter, in which he told her that he would take her at her word and bring himself and his suit case along and enjoy himself for a week. He followed shortly after the despatch of his letter.

Once arrived in Cape Town, the doubtful wisdom of his action in laying himself open to the direct influence of Pamela’s personality struck him forcibly for the first time. He stood to lose more than he was ever likely to gain in thus venturing so close to the flame. He was likely to emerge from the conflict scarred pretty badly, he told himself. But no amount of prudent reasoning could overcome his desire to see her again; that desire was paramount; it subdued every argument he brought forward against it. It was not wise, he allowed. But was a man in love ever wise?

He had resolved when he first met Pamela Arnott, and discovered in his friend’s wife the girl he had seen years before, to go out of her life finally; he had felt that it would not be safe to continue an acquaintance which could only be disturbing to himself, if indeed it developed no further inconvenience; but that suggestion in Mrs Carruthers’ letter that everything was not as formerly in the conditions of Pamela’s life shook this resolution, unsettled him. He wanted to judge for himself. If, as Mrs Carruthers had seemed to insinuate, Pamela was no longer happy in her marriage, then perhaps...

He broke off in his reverie, frowning at his own unbidden thoughts. If there was a grain of truth in that disquieting statement, it was very plain to him that the position of sympathiser was the last thing for him to take upon himself. The platonic, useful friend was very well in theory, but it didn’t answer put into practice as a rule, particularly in the case of the disappointed wife fretting at the conditions of her lot.

Dare had arrived at Mrs Carruthers to find her out, but he was sufficiently at home in that house to be equal to settling himself in, even to the ordering of refreshment, which, in the form of a whisky and soda, was brought to him on the stoep. Mrs Carruthers returned to find him reading the English papers, and quietly smoking.

“You look as though you had been sitting there for years,” she remarked, as she came up the steps. “When did you get here?”

He came forward with alacrity and took her extended hands. Each displayed unaffected pleasure in the other.

“Oh, about an hour ago! How well you look!”

“I’ve been enjoying myself. I suppose that’s why... Dickie’s late.”

She seated herself and began drawing off her gloves. Dare returned to his former chair.

“Tell me how you have contrived to get so much pleasurable excitement out of the afternoon,” he said.

“Oh, bridging,” she said,—“and I won—enormously. But never mind me. What I want to know is, what has abruptly shaken your obduracy? You have persistently refused my pressing invitations for over a year,—and now suddenly you arrive.”

He sat forward and regarded her inquiring face with a faintly amused smile. Ever since he had known her she had subjected him to this kind of suggestive inquiry. She was always reading a motive in his simplest act.

“Your last invitation arrived at a moment when it was possible, as well as agreeable, to accept it,” he explained. “I couldn’t get away before.”

“Umph!” she returned, and laughed. “I thought perhaps—But no matter. Your sex always suits its own convenience. Now tell me exactly what you want to do while you are here, and I’ll lay myself out to be obliging. That’s a prerogative of my sex, and I’ve not noticed that you ever attempt to check it.”

“Why should one discourage anything so commendable?” he asked.

“That’s no answer to my question,” she observed.

“No,” he returned. “But, you see, the question scarcely needs answering from my point of view. What should I want to do, but enjoy your society, and loaf delightfully?”

“Never at a loss,” she said, and smiled at him approvingly. “I hope your ideas of loafing will fit in with my evening’s arrangement I have asked the Arnotts and three others in to make a couple of tables for bridge. I had a feeling at the back of my mind that you would wish to see something of your sweet-faced Madonna during your stay, so I wasted no time. Considering that I am three parts in love with you myself, that is rather magnanimous on my side.”

“In any one else it might be,” he returned; “but you were made like that. Besides, you are fully assured that no one on earth could shake my intense admiration for yourself. I wonder why you married Dick?” he added speculatively. “All the nicest women are married.”

“I wasn’t married when I met you first,” she reminded him. “The truth of the matter is, you, like the majority of middle-aged bachelors, only appreciate the fruit which grows beyond your reach.”

“Middle-aged!” he protested. “Come now! I’m only thirty-five.”

“And seventy is the limit the Psalmist gives us. You have wasted your time, my friend.”

“Yes,” he agreed abruptly, and sat a little straighten, “I’ll have to go the pace,” he said, “in order to catch up.”

“You can make the most of the years that are left you,” Mrs Carruthers replied crushingly, “but you can never catch up. If people realised that in their youth, they wouldn’t waste their time as they do.”

“I wish you wouldn’t be so depressing,” he expostulated.

“I’m not I’m merely lamenting your lost opportunities. I’m for early marriages, and big families, and bother the cost.”

“That’s all very fine. But big families can’t be launched indiscriminately, and flung on the State.”

“People are so prudent nowadays,” she said; “they miss a lot of happiness. A jolly struggle is preferable to discreet luxury, with a will at the finish, leaving everything to the stranger or organised charities. I was one of fourteen, and there wasn’t a jollier or a poorer home in the Colony.”

She laughed, and thrust forward a small, misshapen foot.

“That comes of having to wear my elder sister’s outgrown shoes. But if I had had my footgear made for me, my feet would probably have been flat and large; and the sight of an incipient bunion brings back glorious memories of childhood’s makeshifts, and the joy of trying on coveted and outgrown clothes. We weren’t proud as children. And the bread and butter and onions we ate for supper tasted lots better than the eight-o’clock dinner I take now with Dickie.”

She sighed deeply, and became suddenly grave.

“All the rest have big families themselves,” she added wistfully. “I’m just out of it.”

“Children are mixed blessings,” he said consolingly.

“They aren’t,” she asserted. “They give one the satisfied feeling of carrying on. When we haven’t children, we just finish with our own little lives.” She sat up and smiled at him with cheerful encouragement. “I have invited a girl for you this evening. She is young and fresh and—”

“Oh, don’t!” he interposed hastily.

“She is quite nice to look at,” Mrs Carruthers resumed, not heeding his interruption. “She comes of good stock, and is amiable, and not too clever. She dances well, and plays games well, and is thoroughly domesticated,—an orphan, poor,—the eldest of a family of seven.”

“Ye gods!” he murmured. “Why didn’t you invite the other six?”

“They aren’t out,” replied Mrs Carruthers.

He repressed a desire to smile.

“It is my particular wish that you pay her special attention,” she continued calmly, “with a view to an early and suitable marriage. Now don’t make up your mind against it straightway. It will be an admirable thing for you, and I’ve set my heart on it.”

He laughed outright.

“Oh, you woman!” he said. “You inveterate matchmaker! If your girl is all you profess, why can’t you find her some one younger and more human? As my wife, she would have the devil of a time—you know she would.”

“I think you are rather severe in your judgment of yourself,” she returned imperturbably. “You are quite agreeable. And you could provide handsomely for a woman, and—other things.”

“Oh, yes; fourteen of them, if necessary,” he returned sarcastically. “But I don’t want them, really. I should feel horribly embarrassed with them.”

“Oh, you would get over that!” she answered easily. “You mustn’t think so much of yourself.”

He got up and passed round to the back of her chair and laid his two hands on her shoulders.

“You scheming little fiend!” he said. “You have had this in your mind all along when you have asked me repeatedly to come down.”

“I have always wanted you to marry,” she allowed, smiling up at him. “You will make a delightful husband.”

“Well, I’m not going to marry,” he said. “If you air any more of your matrimonial plans, I’ll make love to you. I’ll wreck your home.”

“You couldn’t,” she said. “Dickie would never trouble to be jealous of any one.” She put up her two hands and laid them upon his where they rested upon her shoulders. “You will be nice to her, George, won’t you?” she said. “You’ll like her immensely, if only you let yourself.”

“Of course I shall,” he replied, and smiled grimly. “I like every Eve’s daughter of you, worse luck!”

Chapter Nine.

Change in a person’s appearance when it is due to mental conditions varies according to mood and outside influences. When Dare was face to face with Pamela Arnott he decided that Mrs Carruthers had exaggerated the want of look about which she had written: there was nothing to excite sympathy, or even comment, in the faintly flushed, pleasantly excited face which turned eagerly to greet him, as, on entering the Carruthers’ drawing-room, Pamela’s eyes singled him out with a smiling welcome in their blue depths.

When he had talked with her a little while he did notice that she looked older; the girlishness, with its expression of frank gaiety, had faded during the past eighteen months.

There was a more perceptible change he considered in Arnott himself. The man had coarsened, in manner as much as appearance. He was more noisy and assertive, and inclined to be offhand when addressing his wife. Dare hated him for that,—hated him for his lack of courtesy, and the absence of those small but significant attentions which had formerly been so noticeable in his bearing towards her. He seldom looked at her now, never with the old tender, almost absurdly chivalrous regard which one associates more with the lover than with the husband of some years’ standing. Dare decided that he had put off the lover finally; that was about what it amounted to. But that, after all, cannot be reckoned a calamity: men do not remain always obviously their wives’ lovers.

“So glad to see you again,” murmured Pamela, and her smile seemed to demand that he should recall the length of the friendship he had once insisted upon, with its consequent intimacy. “I began to think you were becoming a mere memory.”

“So long as you didn’t forget altogether!” he said, and looked earnestly into her eyes. “But I didn’t think you would.”

“One doesn’t forget—pleasant things,” she returned. “Besides, it is only a little over a year and a half since we met, isn’t it?”

“A long year and a half ago,” he replied enigmatically.

Pamela acquiesced with unusual gravity. His speech broke in upon her happy mood, disturbing the careless tenor of her thoughts. A long year and a half! ... Truly it had been a long year and a half for her. So much had happened in the time: her whole life was altered with the changing of the months.

“It has been a long year and a half,” she replied abstractedly, not thinking of the man at her side, nor of the interpretation he might put upon her words, upon the weary discontent of her tones: she thought only of the crowded events of the past eighteen months,—of the pain, the sickening disillusion, the constant humiliation. In certain circumstances a year and a half may seem a lifetime.

He scrutinised her intently. There was something, after all, in Mrs Carruthers’ report. The discontent in her voice, the sadness of her face, arrested his attention. Had it been merely discontent, it would have failed to move him particularly, but her look of sadness roused his deepest sympathy. He rebelled at the thought that any sorrow should touch, should perhaps spoil, her life. She lifted her glance to his swiftly, on her guard, he fancied, against himself.

“I have had rather a dull time,” she added, assuming a lighter manner.

“Dulness is depressing,” he allowed. “I have more experience of it than you, I expect. You’ve not been my way yet?”

“No,” she returned slowly. “I don’t go from home much. You see, there are the children.”

“True!” he said, and kept the conversation in the safer channel into which she had directed it. “And how is my little friend?”

“Oh, growing big—and naughty! I am beginning to think of schoolroom discipline for her.”

“Oh, lord!” he said. “That baby! Let her run wild for a bit longer.”

“You haven’t to live with her,” she said. “But I only mean a nursery governess. She is getting beyond the control of coloured nurses. I am hoping I shall get Blanche Maitland. She is so nice with children.”

“Blanche... Oh, I know,” he said.

His glance followed hers across the room to where the girl Mrs Carruthers was bent on his marrying was talking with their host. So Pamela’s domestic arrangements were to clash with his. He smiled at the fancy. Blanche Maitland was a tall girl, with a noticeably good figure, a clear skin, and fine, dark, slumbrous eyes. Her face in repose was calm and unemotional and difficult to read; when she smiled it lighted wonderfully. She did not smile readily, but she looked really handsome and delightfully shy when surprised into laughter. She was laughing at the moment Dare looked at her: he did not immediately remove his gaze.

“She is handsome,” he observed.

“Is she?” Pamela regarded the subject of their talk with renewed interest. “I never thought her that—but I suppose she is.”

“She is,” he affirmed.

“It isn’t a necessary qualification in a governess,” she said.

“It would be, if I were engaging one,” he returned. “I should make that and an agreeable voice the principal requirements. Personally, I am interested in good-looking faces. And plain people haven’t a monopoly of the virtues, you know.”

“No,” she answered. “But they occasionally more than make up the deficit in looks in agreeable qualities.”

“The wise make the most of what they have,” he replied. “And sometimes nature is lavish and adds kindliness and a sweet disposition to physical perfection... May I come and see you to-morrow?” he asked somewhat abruptly.

“Do. Come and dine—informally. I’ll ask the Carruthers.”

He looked slightly dissatisfied.

“But I want you all to myself,” he objected. “I’m a selfish fellow; I hate sharing. I prefer rather to see my friends singly than in batches. And Carruthers always wants to play bridge. One can’t talk. He’s fussing about the tables already. Let me come and look at the mountain with you, and gossip, and drink tea. We don’t meet very often.”

Pamela, if she felt a little surprised, was not displeased at his cool readjustment of her invitation. She returned his steady gaze with a faint uplift of her brows and the hint of a smile in her eyes.

“If you really prefer that, of course you shall,” she said.

“I’ve only a week,” he said. “I want to make the most of it.”

“And when the week is up?”

“I return to my mole-like habits,” he replied.

“And you haven’t followed my advice?” she said.

“What was that?” he asked... “Oh! I remember. Mrs Carruthers is always giving me the same. No; I don’t think there is much chance of my doing that.”

Carruthers sauntered towards them with every intention, Dare realised, of ending the tête-à-tête.

“You play at my table, Mrs Arnott,” he said. He glanced at Dare. “The wife has put you at the no-stakes table,” he added, grinning. “She thinks it is good for your morals to play for love on occasions.”

Dare regarded the speaker coolly.

“That sounds like your joke, rather than Mrs Carruthers’,” he remarked; “it’s so feeble.”

Carruthers chuckled.

“Ask her,” he returned.

Pamela looked back at Dare over her shoulder as she moved away beside her host.

“It’s quite the best game, really,” she said, and smiled at him.

“I admit it,” he answered quietly, “when one is allowed to choose one’s partner.”

Bridge without stakes was not much of a game, in Dare’s opinion; but he was obliged to acknowledge that Blanche Maitland played remarkably well. He had never seen a girl play with such skill; and she held good cards. They were partners. This might have been due to chance, since they cut; but he had a suspicion that Mrs Carruthers manipulated the cards. She was clever enough, and deep enough, to do it, he reflected.

He did his best to oblige her in the matter of being agreeable; but, as he complained to her later, when discussing the evening after the guests had left, had he been the vainest of men he could not have flattered himself that he had created a favourable impression in the quarter in which she insisted he should exert his powers of fascination.

“She thought me a stick,” he said. “I’m not at all comfortably assured in my mind that she didn’t think me a fool. I had an exhausting time racking my brain for agreeable conversation. She wouldn’t help me. It isn’t a ha’p’orth of use, my dear, trying to interest me in these sphinx-like young women with no small talk. You said she wasn’t clever.”

“She isn’t.”

“You are mistaken. No one who isn’t clever dare be so deadly dull. She is profound. I don’t think I like your selection of a wife.”

“You can’t judge on a first acquaintance like that,” she insisted.

“There you are entirely out. All my loves have been at first sight.”

“Then why haven’t you married one of them?”

“Because they have all been provided with husbands,” he answered. “When it is a matter of transgressing the moral law, one naturally hesitates.”

“You seem singularly unfortunate,” Mrs Carruthers observed sarcastically. “I believe you have only been in love once in your life. You are true to that first love still.”

“And who is that?” he inquired, looking down at her with mild curiosity in his eyes.

“George Dare,” she answered.

He laughed.

“Poor devil!” he remarked. “If I didn’t show him some affection, who would? Besides, it’s a proof that there are lovable qualities in him. If a man can’t tolerate himself, he must be a fairly bad egg.”

“You are not justified in making a virtue of egoism,” she argued. “And you ought to marry. It’s a duty you owe the State... Men are so selfish!”

“Oh, come!” he remonstrated. “One can’t place all the big questions of life on such a brutally practical basis. There’s the human side to be considered. Your argument lowers the beautiful to a mere matter of essentials. There is a spiritual element in marriage, after all.”

Mrs Carruthers turned a frankly wondering, inquisitive gaze upon him, with the disconcerting observation:

“If you were not in love, you wouldn’t talk in that exalted strain. It’s unlike you.”

“I didn’t know I was such a material beast,” he retorted.

His eyes met hers for a second or so, and then, to her increasing amazement, avoided her gaze. He thrust his hands in his pockets and looked everywhere save at this woman whom he liked immensely, but whom he hoped to keep comfortably outside his confidence. He was afraid of Mrs Carruthers’ powers of divination. When a woman takes an affectionate interest in a man, she can become an embarrassment as much as a pleasure.

“You are in love!” she cried triumphantly. “It’s no use... Own up that I’m right.”

“I believe that I have already admitted to you that it is a state which frequently overtakes me,” he replied.

But his manner, despite its banter, lacked assurance. He felt that she was not in the least deceived.

“And you never told me!” she said reproachfully.

“There is nothing to tell. My love affairs never lead anywhere. Besides, it’s such an old story.”

“Old!” she echoed.

He smiled at the indignant incredulity in her voice.

“It’s running Jacob’s romance pretty close now,” he said.

“You are trying to put me off the scent,” she declared,—“if there is any scent. You won’t persuade me that you have been in love for seven years, and that I knew nothing about it.”

“Six years and nearly nine months, to be exact,” he answered.

“And who, may I ask, was fortunate enough to win your unswerving devotion six years and nine months ago?” she demanded, with fine sarcasm.

“She hadn’t a personality for me,” he replied. “I fell in love with a face.”

His listener eyed him derisively.

“She hadn’t any body, I suppose?” she said.

“Oh, yes, I believe so. The body was there, all right. But if it had been misshapen, or even, as you suggest, non-existent, that wouldn’t have made the slightest difference to my affections.”

“Oh, don’t try to humbug me!” Mrs Carruthers exclaimed. “You can’t convince me, after all you have said, that you are in love with nothing more substantial than a face. Where is the girl now?”

“She disappeared,” he answered vaguely. “I took the trouble to inquire, believe me. They told me she had married.”

“That disposes of her,” Mrs Carruthers responded, with that touch of finality which convention brings to bear upon romance that can have no legitimate ending. “It is not decent of you to talk as though you were in love with her still. That’s all finished, anyhow.”

“One cannot regulate one’s feelings,” he protested, “to satisfy a silly prejudice like that.”

“But it’s not fair to the girl,” she urged.

“Good lord!” he ejaculated. “The girl doesn’t know... How should she? Didn’t I tell you that I fell in love with a face?—Its owner was a stranger to me. I intended to effect an introduction; but some fellow got ahead of me, and carried her off.”

“Oh!” said Mrs Carruthers, manifestly relieved.

“A stranger! Then she doesn’t count. You have simply been wearying me with your nonsense.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought you were genuinely interested. When you are bored you shouldn’t appear so eager for details. In a desire to be obliging one is apt to become prosy.”

Carruthers entered the room at the moment with a syphon of soda and glasses. Dare eyed the syphon discontentedly.

“I hope you are for offering me something more heartening than that,” he remarked. “Your wife has reduced me to a state bordering on nervous collapse. She is starting a matrimonial agency. I wish you would bear me out in the lie that I’ve got a wife somewhere. I fancy she thinks it is not respectable to be unmarried.”

“The whisky is on the table behind you,” returned Carruthers, unmoved. “As for bearing you out in the lie, how do I know it is one? It isn’t to be credited that every man who poses as a bachelor is single.”

“If you are going to talk in that strain,” Mrs Carruthers observed, “I’m going to bed. It is past two.”

She paused beside her husband, and pointed at Dare with a gesture that conveyed a mixture of derision and tolerant amusement and a certain affectionate malice.

“He has been treating me to a resuscitation of his dead and gone love affairs,” she explained, “because I am desirous of interesting him in Blanche Maitland.”

“Blanche Maitland! Why not?” quoth Carruthers, squirting soda-water into a glass. “Devilish fine girl. What!”

Dare held the door open for Mrs Carruthers.

“You’ve entrusted it to quite capable hands, you see,” he said. “The worst of it is, old Dick is so hopelessly frank. That is exactly how a man would describe her, and that is exactly how I wouldn’t choose to have my wife described. You’ll have to try again, Connie.”

She placed her hand affectionately on his sleeve.

“You are rather a dear, George,” she said softly, and passed out, leaving the astonished man to close the door behind her.

It took a clever woman to accept defeat gracefully, he reflected.

Chapter Ten.

The week Dare had promised himself at Wynberg overlapped and ran into the better part of three weeks. He gave as his reason for this extension of his holiday that he was enjoying himself, and that he felt he needed the rest.

“I suppose it is restful,” Mrs Carruthers remarked to him once, “mooning about the Arnott’s garden all day. Of course it is more of a change for you than using this garden... You do sleep here.”

He looked at her oddly. They were standing on the stoep together. He was just about to visit next door to take Mrs Arnott a book he had promised her. He had explained all this to Mrs Carruthers rather elaborately, and had failed to meet her steady, disconcerting gaze with his usual candour. These daily explanations of his informal visits next door called for much ingenuity, and were growing increasingly embarrassing. He disliked having to account for his doings; at the same time courtesy to his hostess demanded something; he rather fancied that it demanded more than it received.

“I admit the justice of that box on the ears,” he said. He held the book towards her. “We dine there to-night, I know; but I promised her she should have this this afternoon. Perhaps you wouldn’t mind sending it in with my compliments,” he suggested.

“Pamela would be disappointed,” she said.

“I believe she would,” he agreed.

“George,” she looked at him very gravely, and her tone was admonishing, “I don’t wish to annoy you,—but do you think you are acting wisely?”

“You couldn’t annoy me,” he answered. “And I haven’t considered the question in that light... What do you think?”

“I think you are growing too interested in Pamela,” she replied.

He was silent for a second or so, turning the book he held in his hand and gazing absently at its title. Abruptly he looked up.

“You haven’t overstated the truth,” he said quietly, a little defiantly, she fancied.

She shook her head seriously.

“I am sorry to hear you admit it. From my knowledge of you, I should have thought that, realising that you would at least have avoided her.”

“I am not doing her any harm,” he said.

“How can you be sure of that? Two years ago I should have felt confident that you couldn’t. I am not so positive now.”

“You mean she cares less for her husband than she did?”

The eager light in his eyes as he put the question troubled her. It was not consistent with her opinion of Dare that he should behave other than strictly honourably towards any woman.

“I don’t think you ought to have asked that,” she returned. He changed colour.

“No,” he said; “perhaps not. In any case, there wasn’t any need. It’s fairly obvious.”

“Leave her alone,” she counselled.

“Look here!” He took a step nearer to her, and spoke quickly and with a kind of repressed excitement that conveyed more than his actual words how deeply he was moved. “Don’t start getting a lot of false ideas into your head. I’m not playing the despicable game you think I’m after. I’m not amusing myself. Amusing myself! God! there isn’t much amusement in it. I’m leaving on Saturday,—I’ve made up my mind to that. But I’m going to see as much of her as I can in the interval. It’s the last time... I sha’n’t come back, unless I can feel perfectly sure of myself. But I’m going to leave her with the knowledge that I am her friend,—to be counted on if she needs me. I only ask to serve her. If she doesn’t want my service, I will stand outside her life altogether.”

“My dear boy,” she returned disapprovingly, “you are talking arrant nonsense. A married woman can have no need for a male friend such as you propose to be. He is either an object of ridicule to her, or she grows too fond of him. I am afraid you would not become an object for ridicule with Pamela; she hasn’t a sufficient sense of humour. You had far better give up going there.”

“I can’t do that,” he said. “But I promise you when I leave here I won’t come back.”

“Then leave to-morrow,” she advised.

“Not unless you turn me out.”

“You know I won’t do that,” she said. “But I don’t like it, George. I am—disappointed in you.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, and having nothing more to add, he left her, and walked away down the path.

She watched the tall figure disappear in the sunshine, and turned and went indoors, feeling justly aggrieved with this man whom she liked because he had fallen below the standard she believed him capable of attaining to. Love is either an elevating or a destructive factor; it is the supreme test of the qualities of the individual. She had believed that George Dare was made of stouter stuff. But the human being does not exist, she philosophised, on whom one can count absolutely. One may be able to answer for a person’s actions in relation to most human events, then the unexpected event befalls and one’s calculations are entirely at fault.

Dare, as he walked away from her, was fully alive to the criticism his behaviour evoked. He had been aware of her unspoken disapproval for days, had anticipated the inevitable remonstrance. He admitted the justice and the wisdom of her reproof, none the less it irritated him intensely. It is usually the self-acknowledged wrong that one most resents the detection of by another. When a man knows that his steps are tending crookedly he likes to be assured that he is walking straight; even though he recognises the assurance to be mistaken, it gives him a comfortable sense of secure deception.

“After all,” he reflected savagely, as though his conscience needed reassuring on the point, “I am intending her no harm. It’s my soul that gets scorched.”

But he knew, as he crossed the Arnotts’ lawn to where Pamela sat under the trees waiting for him, that he was to a certain extent disturbing her peace. He filled the newly created blank in her life, added an agreeable atmosphere of romance and excitement which for the time caused her to cease to miss the happiness she was conscious of missing of late. His homage was gratifying; it reinstated her in her own regard. In these ways he was securing a place for himself, making himself necessary to her.

She looked round at his approach, and a light came into her eyes, a smile to her lips, as he drew near. With his critical faculties keenly alert, following the recent interview, he noted more particularly the gladness of her welcome, and felt the inexplicable something that was like a mute bond of sympathy and understanding between them, perceived the furtive shyness of her glance, the quick change of colour as their hands met; and his mind became extraordinarily clear and active. He roused himself from his mental attitude of personal engrossment, and forced himself to an impartial consideration of her position. There was not a shadow of a doubt about it, though she had possibly not discovered the fact herself; she was becoming interested in him—in the man, not merely the friend. There wasn’t any danger, he told himself,—not yet; but there might be.

He recalled how every day since he had been in Wynberg he had seen her on some pretext or other: they had aided one another in the invention of trivial reasons for meeting. He had not always had her to himself as now: sometimes she had the children with her; on occasions Arnott was present. Arnott always seemed glad when Dare came in; he contrived generally to monopolise the conversation, and was manifestly entirely unaware of Dare’s preference for his wife’s society. It simply did not occur to him. His friends always admired Pamela; he was never jealous, perhaps because he felt so certain that this woman who had cleaved to him in defiance of her principles of honour, would cleave to him always. Although he was conscious of a waning of his own passion, it did not strike him that any change in himself could possibly weaken her love. He felt absolutely sure of her.

Pamela had been sewing before Dare joined her. When he sauntered across the lawn and drew up beside her chair, she dropped the work into her lap and gave him her undivided attention.

“You’ve brought the book,” she said, and took it from him with a pleased smile. “I rather wondered if you would come to-day.”

“Didn’t you feel fairly certain I would?” he asked, and fetched a chair for himself, which he placed close to hers, facing her.

He seated himself. Pamela did not answer his question. She opened the book and turned its pages idly. It was a beautifully bound volume of “Paolo and Francesca.” He had wished her to read it. But she understood quite well that the poem was a secondary matter; the bringing it to her was the primary motive.

“I am glad to have this,” she said. “I think I shall like it. The outside is beautiful, anyway.”

“So is the inside,” he answered. “But it is a bit on the tragic side. You mustn’t look for the happy ending.”

“No,” replied Pamela gravely. She put the book down and gazed beyond him at the sunshine that lay warmly on the garden, the golden mantle of gaiety which mocks the sadness of the world. “Life isn’t all happy ending, is it?”

“For many of us, no,” he allowed.

“I think the really happy people,” observed Pamela, wrinkling her brows while she pursued her reflections, “are the people who feel least.”

“You mean,” he said, watching her, “the people who never love?”

“I didn’t mean that exactly... And yet, in a way, I suppose I did. I meant the people of moderate passions,—self-disciplined people whose emotions are under control, whose minds are like a well ordered establishment in which nothing is ever out of place. They don’t admit disturbing elements, and so their lives run on in an even content. There are no big joys and no big sorrows. I have known several women like that. They suggest twilight somehow,—never the sunlight, and never blank darkness. They are restful.”

“I prefer the glowing beauty of vivid contrasts myself,” he said. “A world in which there is only twilight would be a prison house.”

“And yet you can spend a good portion of your time in the mines!” she said, bringing her face round and smiling at him.

He was glad she had introduced a lighter note into their talk.

“I get my contrasts that way,” he returned. “Besides, you can’t imagine how jolly it is to drop down into the warm darkness on a broiling sunny day. Come along to the mines some time, and I’ll take you down.”

“I should be scared to death,” she declared.

Quite unexpectedly he put his strong, thin hand over hers.

“I don’t think so,” he answered. “I wouldn’t take you where there was any danger. You would be safe with me.”

Pamela flushed deeply. There was in the strong, steady pressure of the nervous fingers which closed upon her hand so much of latent force, of protective power, of sex, that she felt strangely frightened. She wanted to withdraw her hand, and could not; some influence stronger than her own will prevented her. She felt oddly stirred, and immensely troubled and disconcerted. With an effort she lifted her eyes, disturbed and faintly questioning, to his. He was leaning forward, looking into the flushed face with earnest, compelling gaze.

“I’m going back to-morrow,” he said jerkily, and was quick to see the startled expression which darkened her eyes as he made the announcement. “This is the last chance I have of seeing you alone. Will you write to me?”

“I don’t think—I couldn’t,” she stammered nervously.

“Then will you promise me that if ever you are in any trouble, no matter what, in which a friend who has your well-being at heart might perhaps be useful, you will write to me? ... You know that I am your friend?” he inquired.

“I believe you are—yes.”

“And will you promise what I have asked?” he persisted.

Pamela hesitated, and stared at him with perplexed, embarrassed gaze.

“But there isn’t any need,” she began...

“Not now; no. I pray there never will be. But you will promise?”

“Yes—oh! yes,” she whispered, and, to her own intense dismay, burst into sudden tears. She dashed them hastily away with her disengaged hand. “You’re—frightening me,” she gasped. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Don’t cry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to frighten you. I’m not a beast. I’m not making love to you. But I just wanted you to know that everything I possess, myself included, is at your service at any time, and in any way you choose to command. Perhaps you may never require my services; but at least you know that I wish to be useful. Don’t misunderstand me,—that is all I wish to convey.”

He released her hand and sat back. Pamela dabbed her eyes furtively, ashamed of her emotional outburst, and angry with herself beyond measure for behaving like a simpleton.

“How silly I am!” she murmured. “I don’t know what you must think of me. I don’t know why I am crying.”

“I think you are very sweet,” he said gently, “and beautifully natural. I probably startled you. The unexpected is often disconcerting. If you had been one of the temperamentally even people of whom we have been talking you wouldn’t have been startled; but then, in that case, neither should I have been offering knightly service after the manner of a hero of romance. As a sign that I am forgiven, will you sing this evening the song you delighted us with on the night I first met you?”

“What was that?” Pamela asked, still too confused to meet his eyes.

“Mon coeur s’ouvre à ta voix.”

“Oh! Saint-Saëns... Yes, of course I will.”

When Dare returned next door, which he did earlier than Mrs Carruthers expected, he amazed her with the abrupt announcement of his intended departure on the morrow.

“You were right,” he said, “and I was wrong. I obey your marching orders. And now naturally,” he added, smiling at her grimly, “you’ll enjoy the feminine satisfaction in a moral victory—which is a euphony for getting your own way.”

She approached him with a glad look on her face, which had in it a good deal of admiration, and held out her hand as a man might do.

“I knew it,” she cried triumphantly. “Boy, you’re straight.”

He made a wry face as he shook hands with her. Then suddenly he stooped and kissed her.

“It’s the least you can offer me,” he said in explanation.

She laughed, well satisfied. She had not been mistaken; he had vindicated her belief in him.

Chapter Eleven.

Dare, as he sat at the Arnotts’ dinner-table that evening, making the extra man, the odd number, as he had done on a former occasion, was conscious of two discrepant facts; namely, that he had not decided a moment too soon to quit the danger zone of Pamela’s seductive influence, and that he was sincerely sorry he was leaving on the morrow. The regret was, perhaps, the keener sensation of the two; it balanced his sense of moral satisfaction to a nicety. The dinner was the funeral feast of his only real love affair. He intended, when he parted from Pamela that night, never to see her again.

“I was a fool to come,” he told himself. “No one can handle fire and expect to escape unhurt. And I knew it was fire I was playing with.”

Yet he would gladly have continued to act foolishly. The strongest inducement towards wisdom was the fear that Pamela herself might get singed; fire which spreads ends in a conflagration.

One thing he noticed after the women had withdrawn, and it was not the first time he had observed the same thing, was that Arnott drank more than was good for him. This possibly accounted for the coarsening so evident in the man’s general deportment. It disgusted him; though probably had he not been in love with the man’s wife it would not have struck him so unpleasantly. It was revolting to think of a sweet, refined woman contaminated by close association with a man of intemperate habits. Arnott was inclined to be offensive when he had been drinking; it was on these occasions that he displayed discourtesy towards his wife. It enraged Dare to see how readily she recognised these symptoms, and how tactful she was in her avoidance of friction. It was as much as he could do at times to be civil to his host. Arnott’s self-indulgence was, he supposed, the cause of the cloud which had disturbed the domestic peace. If the man persistently made a beast of himself, it was not surprising that his wife should lose her affection for him.

He was thankful to escape from the dining-room and join Pamela and Mrs Carruthers on the stoep.

Mrs Carruthers, doubtless as a sign of her approval of the decision he had arrived at, acted that evening with a considerate kindness of which he was keenly sensible and gratefully appreciative: she contrived with admirable skill to engage her host and her husband in a political discussion which bored her exceedingly, and which roused Arnott to a heated denunciation of the Hertzog faction. Like many men sufficiently indifferent to public affairs to take no active part in them, Arnott was a fiery critic of anti-imperialism, indeed of any opinions which failed to accord with his own way of thinking. Mrs Carruthers threw in the necessary challenge at intervals in order to keep the talk from flagging, and, to her own amazement, found herself defending some of the backveld ideals.

“I am a staunch believer in race preservation,” she announced. “I admire the Dutch for defending their principles, and insisting on the recognition of their language.”

“Language!” Arnott sneered.

“Oh! it’s a language of sorts, though we may not consider it exactly important. But it’s a kind of instinct with them, like the Family Bible, and a contempt for the natives. I don’t see why they shouldn’t uphold these things.”

Dare, talking a little apart with Pamela, gazed thoughtfully at the quiet darkness of the garden and proposed walking in it. She hesitated for the fraction of a second, and then complied. He noted the slight hesitation, and felt glad that she conquered her reluctance. To have refused his request would have seemed to suggest a want of confidence in him. Nevertheless, some impulse, prompted by the recollection of that slight hesitation, impelled him to turn before they got beyond view of the others on the lighted stoep, and confine their walking to the limit of the path in front of the house. He had not intended this at the start; he longed for darkness and solitude. The murmur of voices, the little disjointed scraps of conversation overheard as they passed and repassed, disturbed him irritatingly; Arnott’s frequently raised, assertive tones sounded intrusive, broke upon the quiet of the garden discordantly, reminding the two who walked in it of his presence with a needlessly aggressive insistence.

Dare tried to ignore these things, but they jarred his nerves none the less. He had not suspected until recently that he possessed any nerves; but they had made many disquieting manifestations of their actuality of late.

“I can’t grow accustomed to the thought that you are leaving to-morrow,” Pamela said to him presently. Her voice was low, and betrayed unmistakable regret. The back of her hand brushed his lightly as they paced the gravel slowly side by side. The contact gave him immense satisfaction; he was grateful to her for not increasing the space between them and thus denying him this small pleasure. “Of course I knew you were only down for a short while; but your departure is a little unexpected, isn’t it?”

“I came for a week,” he answered with a brief laugh. “It’s been a long one as days are reckoned, but time skips along when one is enjoying oneself... It was sweet of you to say that, to allow me to think that you will miss me a little. We have had some pleasant times together. The worst of these things is there always has to be an end. I shall miss you more than you will miss me.”

“I wonder!” said Pamela.

He turned his head suddenly and looked her squarely in the eyes. The light from the stoep shone on her face and showed it very fair and pale and pure. She turned aside as though unwilling to bear his earnest scrutiny.

“One grows used to people,” she said. “Somehow, I have always felt at home with you. When you go away I have a feeling that you won’t come back. I had that feeling last time.”

“Yet here I am,” he said in a lighter tone.

“Yes,” she said. “I know. It’s stupid of me. I hate losing sight of friends. I have so few.”

“Few!” he echoed. “I expect if I had half the number I should reckon myself rich.”

“You don’t use the word in the sense I do,” she returned. “I meant the friends one can depend upon... who wouldn’t fail one under any circumstances.”

“I understand,” he said, and added quietly: “I am glad you place me in that category.”

“You head the list,” she answered with a faint smile. “I’m not quite sure your name doesn’t stand alone.”

While she was speaking the belief was suddenly confirmed in her that this man was entirely sincere in his protestations of friendship, that even if he heard the shameful story of her life with Arnott, he would not withdraw his friendship. She felt that she could rely on him, trust him implicitly. She also knew that if she needed help at any time he was the one person in the world she would ask for it. He was so sympathetic that she believed he would understand, as no one else without a similar experience could understand, her position. He, at least, would recognise that she had not acted solely from base motives.

“I shouldn’t like to believe that,” he said gently; “but I am proud to top the list. I have a feeling to-night,” he added slowly, unconsciously watching Arnott as the latter leaned forward in excited argument with Mrs Carruthers, “that we shall yet prove our belief in one another’s sincerity. Don’t think I am suggesting all manner of unnameable tragedies in your life,—the proof of loyal friendship is to be helpful also in little things. It’s rather a rotten idea—isn’t it?—that a man can’t be pals with a married woman.”

“I think so,” Pamela answered. “Besides, you’ve disproved that in your friendship with Connie.”

Dare was silent for a moment. There was, he knew, a very substantial difference in the quality of his friendship with Mrs Carruthers and his friendship with Pamela; sentiment was entirely absent in his feeling for the one; in the latter case the whole fabric of his regard was built upon it. He had a fairly strong conviction that he would throw, over Connie, throw over the whole world if need be, for this other woman. But he also realised with an equal certainty that the one thing he would not do was to allow her fair name to be sullied through his indiscretion. If it were necessary to the maintenance of a platonic friendship to remain at a distance, he would avoid any future possibility of their paths crossing. That much he could do for her. It was the strongest proof of his regard.

“Men and women disprove that theory continually,” he returned. “But we only hear of the failures, and that brings discredit on the idea. One might as reasonably argue that the divorce court brings discredit on the married state. The whole thing is absurd.”

“I wonder why you never married,” Pamela said suddenly. “Somehow, I can’t think of you as a married man; and yet you must surely have contemplated marriage. Most men do at some time or another.”

“I suppose,” he said, “that you, like Connie, regard me as an old fogey and past such things?”

“No,” she answered simply. “My husband was older than you when I—when—”

She floundered helplessly, and paused in swift confusion. It was impossible, she found, to refer to her marriage; the word stuck in her throat. Always, it seemed to her in her distress, this galling knowledge that she was not legally married was being forced upon her realisation to her further humiliation. Unable to complete the sentence, she added lamely:

“A man is never too old.”

He laughed.

“You think I might find some one to take pity on me even now?”

“I think,” she returned warmly, “that the woman who wins you will be very fortunate. And you are only quizzing me in respect of age; you are quite young yet.”

“Only recently,” he explained, “I have been called middle-aged, and it hurt my vanity. Age, like most things, is relative. When one is in one’s teens forty appears senility; when one approaches forty it wears quite another aspect,—a comfortably matured, youthful aspect compared with which the teens are puerile. The heart defies wrinkles. I resent being described as middle-aged: it tempts me to the committal of youthful follies.”

They had reached the end of the path and were beyond the circle of light from the stoep. Dare brought up abruptly, and instead of turning, halted, and faced her in the gloom of the overhanging trees. His eyes scrutinised her face in the dimness with tender intensity.

“This is the last lap,” he said. “I’m going to take you back now, and you’ll sing for me. ‘Mon coeur s’ouvre à ta voix.’ ... Don’t you love the words? They express better than any words in our language could just exactly how the dear particular voice affects one... Oh! little friend, I wish that fate did not decree that our paths in life must diverge just here, and so seldom cross.”

“That bears out what I have felt,” said Pamela slowly, gazing steadily bade at him. “You won’t come again.”

“Who can say?” he returned. “I feel—and I think you do too, though you are too wise and sweet to say so—that it is better I should stay away. I want you to bear me always kindly in your thoughts. And when I am near you I am never quite confident that I shall not say something which may lower me in your esteem. I shouldn’t like to do that. Man is but human, and humanity has some of the brute instincts, though we flatter ourselves we are only a little lower than the angels,—that little makes all the difference. Shall we turn back?”

Pamela acquiesced in silence, and walked in silence to the house. She was conscious that Dare talked, but she scarcely heard what he said in her troubled preoccupation. What he had said beyond there in the shadow of the trees was repeating itself over and over in her mind. She could not misunderstand the purport of his words; and she felt sorry. She liked him so well. She wanted to keep and enjoy his friendship,—wanted him to be in her life, not forced by a recognition of the weakness he hinted at to stand always outside. Why could they not have remained friends in the real sense of the word, as he had first suggested? His admission made it impossible. She felt angry with him. She wanted his friendship so urgently.

“You are not offended with me?” he asked presently, struck by her unheeding silence which insensibly conveyed a hurt resentment. He put the question twice before she answered him.

“No,” she replied. “But—”

“But?” he prompted gently.

“I want your friendship,” she said quickly, with a little nervous catch of her breath. “I thought I had it... And you are making it impossible.”

“Oh! no,” he answered. “I am making it very possible. It is because I feel I may perhaps be useful as a friend that I have been so honest with you. Don’t make any mistake about that.”

She made no response. They were approaching within hearing of the others, and Mrs Carruthers was leaning on the rail of the stoep, watching their slow advance, observing them, it occurred to Pamela, from the concentrated earnestness of her look, with an unaccountable interest. She leaned towards them as they came up.

“I’m on the verge of quarrelling with every one,” she said with remarkable cheerfulness. “You’ve only arrived in time to prevent bloodshed. If you have tired of doing the romantic, come in and let us have some music.”

“Sing to us, Mrs Arnott,” pleaded Carruthers,—“something soothing. My wife has been most extraordinarily aggravating.”

Pamela made some laughing response, and joined him. Mrs Carruthers turned towards Dare, who remained standing alone at the top of the steps.

“I have saved the situation for you this evening,” she said, “and lost my own temper. But I am thankful for three things.”

“And they are?” he inquired.

“That there is no moon,—that you turned back when you did,—and that to-morrow is not many hours off.”

“I never believed before,” he returned drily, “that it was in your nature to be unpleasant.”

She smiled encouragingly.

“You are only beginning,” she said, “to gauge my possibilities.”

Chapter Twelve.

Of the beauty of friendship much has been said and written, but little of its danger. In a friendship between the sexes there is always danger; for a friendship between a man and a woman is based on an entirely different sentiment from any other relation. The danger may not be apparent; in many cases it is latent; but the spark which will ignite it is present in the attribute of sex, and the unforeseen accident of circumstance may fire it at any moment. Men realise this more readily than women, perhaps because they are less given to subduing these qualities. Dare’s resolve to act on Mrs Carruthers’ advice and flee the danger was the result of his recognition of it. His sudden departure was an acknowledgment of his own weakness, and at the same time a proof of strength of purpose. To act contrary to one’s inclination for the sake of principle entails sacrifice.

The sacrifice did not affect him solely. This abrupt cessation of their pleasant intercourse made a fresh break in Pamela’s life. For some weeks after he had gone she missed his society greatly; his frequent, unexpected visits had added a pleasurable excitement to her days; she had grown used to his dropping in at all hours, had grown to look for him. Until he was gone she had not realised how much she had enjoyed these visits; now that they had ceased she felt unaccountably lonely.

She sought distraction from the dulness of her home by going out a good deal, and took up again with feverish energy the old round of social pleasures which the tragic discovery of the deception of her marriage had interrupted. She had had little heart for such things of late, and had made the baby’s advent an excuse for retirement.

She started entertaining again in the lavish manner of happier days, and so filled in the blank which Dare’s departure had created. She had not suspected until he left how much she had grown to depend on him. It distressed her not a little to discover that she missed him so greatly; she felt ashamed to acknowledge it even to herself.

Arnott was on the whole rather pleased to observe what he believed to be Pamela’s reawakened interest in life. He had resented her persistent avoidance of all save a favoured few of her former friends. Her attitude had struck him as a tacit reproach to himself, and this had annoyed him. Her resumption of neglected duties won him over to greater amiability, and kept him more at home. Since the birth of the boy, the care of whom had been a tie upon Pamela, he had fallen into the habit of motoring alone into Cape Town and spending much of his time at his club. The parental rôle was not at all in his line.

He could not understand why Pamela refused to engage a capable European nurse, and hand the care of the children over to her. Nevertheless, when Pamela suggested having a governess for them, he opposed the idea vigorously. A nurse was reasonable, he argued; but a governess was not a servant, and would be continually in the way. He disliked the idea of admitting a stranger into the household.

Pamela allowed the matter to drop for a time, but she did not give it up entirely. She discussed it with Mrs Carruthers, and Mrs Carruthers made inquiries for her, and ascertained that Blanche Maitland would be quite willing to undertake the position. After the lapse of a few months Pamela broached the project with greater determination. In the interval she invited Blanche to the house on several occasions with a view to accustoming Arnott to her. It was following one of these occasions that she opened the subject again.

“That girl seems to be here fairly often,” Arnott remarked. “What is the attraction?”

“I like her,” said Pamela. “She is quiet, and nice.”

“She’s quiet enough,” he admitted.

“I want you to agree to my engaging her as nursery governess,” she said. “Pamela is growing big enough to begin easy lessons, and both the children need a white woman’s care. They must have an educated person with them. It is impossible for me to be with them all day.”

“I don’t see why a good European nurse,” he began.

But she interrupted him firmly.

“There are very few good European nurses to be had out here,” she declared, and urged her reasons more strongly.

Arnott was not easily won over. He resented the idea of a stranger in the household, whom he could not ignore as he might a nurse, to whom it would be necessary, he complained, to be civil.

“I don’t see why a nurse shouldn’t be good enough for our kids as well as for other people’s,” he grumbled. “A governess is always in the way.”

“I will take very good care she doesn’t get in your way,” Pamela returned. “And I don’t fancy you will find it difficult to be civil to Blanche.”

“You can’t treat a girl like that as if she were a nursemaid,” he objected.

“Of course not. One need not go to extremes either way.”

He looked at her with some displeasure, made an impatient sound between his teeth, muttered: “Damn the kids!” and finally gave in.

“You’ll never leave off pestering until you get what you want,” he said. “You can try the experiment, but as soon as it becomes a nuisance you will have to make other arrangements.”

“All right,” Pamela agreed cheerfully, satisfied at having gained her point, and feeling very little anxiety as to the result of her venture. “You’ll see; it will work admirably. And I shall have far more leisure to devote to your exacting self.”

He suddenly smiled.

“I’m glad you recognise that you have neglected me of late,” he observed. “I’ve been of no greater account in this household than a piece of waste paper since the boy came.”

Pamela flushed painfully. It was the first time Arnott had made any direct allusion to the change that was gradually alienating their sympathies. The knowledge that he too recognised it added to the distress of her own unwilling acceptance of the inevitable estrangement.

“I too have felt that we were—were growing a little apart,” she faltered. “You don’t seem to need me quite so much as you did.”

“What’s the use of needing you when I can’t have you?” he grumbled. “The kids always come first with you.”

“You don’t mean that,” she said quickly.

Arnott laughed, and put a careless arm about her shoulders.

“I’m only teasing, Pam,” he said. “You don’t stand chaff like you used to. You were rare sport at one time. What’s changing you?”

“Life,” she answered quietly.

“Oh, rot!” he ejaculated irritably. “That’s talking heroics. Your life runs on fairly even lines. Don’t be melodramatic.”

He kissed her lightly, and released her. The next day he brought her a present out from town. In this manner he believed he smoothed away unpleasantness.

Pamela settled the matter of the governess by engaging her immediately, thus giving Arnott no opportunity for reconsidering his reluctant acquiescence. Within the month Blanche Maitland was established in the house, and very quickly made herself indispensable to Pamela. She was not only useful with the children; she took over many domestic duties which she contrived to fit in without interfering with her legitimate occupation. Pamela stood out for a time against this encroachment on her province. She was not altogether satisfied to have her home run by a stranger. But Blanche seemed so anxious to prove helpful, and was so excellent with the children, that little by little she gave way, until practically the entire control passed into Miss Maitland’s capable hands. After a while Pamela decided that it was rather agreeable to have the housekeeping worries lifted from her shoulders. She increased Miss Maitland’s salary in recognition of her worth, and became a mere cipher in the management of her home.

The arrangement pleased Arnott. Miss Maitland was more efficient as a housekeeper than Pamela had ever been; and her release from these ties enabled his wife to devote more of her time and attention upon himself. She too was happier in the new arrangement. Arnott showed a renewed pleasure in her society. Being a man who did not make friends, his wife’s companionship was to a great extent necessary to him; now that he could enjoy it freely whenever he desired he fell into the habit of wanting her and became somewhat exacting in his demands upon her leisure.

But in this selfish dependency on her company there remained little of the eager gladness in each other, the perfect understanding of happier days. Pamela was sensible of the difference, though she tried to ignore it. It was, she felt largely her own fault. In the difficult time following her enlightenment she had lost her influence over Arnott; had allowed the power she had possessed to slip away from her in her timid shrinking from ugly realities, and her newly acquired distrust of himself. She had strained his love and patience often in those days, and she was reaping the result now.

These things troubled her no longer to the extent they once had done. She was becoming reconciled to the changes in her life. Although she strove to fight against an increasing indifference in her own feeling towards him, she knew that her love was not as perfect as it had been: it had gone down under the shock, and come out of the wreckage of her happiness a crippled thing.

When Pamela allowed her mind to dwell on these matters she became frightened. It was terrifying to contemplate what might result if they ceased finally to care for one another. Life together in such circumstances would become unendurable. Plenty of people lived together who were mutually antipathetic, but not in the dishonoured relations of her union with Arnott. A real love alone offered any extenuation—if extenuation could be urged—in defence of their sin against society. She dared not admit a doubt of her loyal devotion, dared not cease to struggle to retain Herbert’s affection. Her life became an endless fight to keep alive the shrunken image of the old love. A love which needs constant tending and guarding and encouraging is a difficult plant to keep flourishing: when one is compelled to resort to artificial stimulus it is a proof that the nature has gone out of it.

Pamela had at one time regarded the Carruthers’ married life as a rather prosy affair; now she was inclined to envy the humdrum content of this eminently well-mated couple. If there was not much actual romance in Connie Carruthers’ life, there was solid satisfaction and entire trust. She and Dick Carruthers had been comrades rather than lovers, and they remained comrades still.

“Don’t you think,” Pamela observed to her one day, when she came in to see her godson, and take tea, as she often did, with the children, “that babies make a big difference? ... They seem to come between the parents... They make a break. I suppose it’s because they claim so much of one’s time and attention.”

“Yours don’t get it, whatever they may claim,” Mrs Carruthers answered. “And children are the only decent excuse for marriage. I wish I had a dozen.”

She looked at Pamela curiously, not quite sure what to make of her speech, and not liking it particularly. The children had just been taken away by Miss Maitland. Pamela had let them go reluctantly. Whatever her opinion as to the desirability of children, she was unquestionably devoted to her own.

“They make a difference,” Pamela insisted.

“Of course they do. They interfere with one’s comfort. It’s good discipline for selfish people. Why, you silly person, you would be miserable without your babies.”

Pamela smiled drearily.

“I suppose I should—now. But I sometimes wish they hadn’t come... especially the boy,” she added wistfully.

Mrs Carruthers felt slightly uncomfortable. She had an instinctive dread of intimate confidences; and the tone of Pamela’s plaint occurred to her as significant of a desire to unburden herself. If babies in the house upset Arnott’s temper, she did not wish to hear about it. Arnott was a man whom she cordially disliked. It was not in the least surprising to her that Pamela was finding life with him less of an idyll than she had once believed it; the mystery was that she had not suffered disillusion earlier; the man was so absolutely selfish.

“It isn’t any use wishing,” she replied with a downright commonsense that damped Pamela’s disposition to be confidential. “And Blanche relieves you of all trouble. You were lucky to secure that girl. I knew she was a treasure. She is the kind of girl who deserves to have a home of her own to run. But men usually marry the helpless, ornamental women; they are connoisseurs merely in exteriors. Not that there is anything amiss with Blanche’s exterior. Dickie admires her tremendously.”

“She is very useful,” Pamela said. “The children like her.”

“Don’t you?”

“Oh! yes, of course.” Pamela’s tone was a little uncertain; it qualified her words, Mrs Carruthers thought. “One can’t have everything,” she went on, in the manner of one weighing advantages against disadvantages, and finding the balance fairly even. “She is an enormous help to me—indeed, I am growing to depend too much on her. But I don’t see enough of the children since she came. When I am home and able to have them, she has some reason which interferes. It is always a sound reason. But there is so much discipline in the nursery now; it robs me of a good deal of enjoyment. The children don’t belong to me any more.”

“Well,” said Mrs Carruthers, “you can soon alter that.”

“It isn’t so simple as it sounds,” Pamela replied. “I tried at first; but one has to give way. It is all for the benefit of the children. It’s no good employing any one like that, and interfering with her authority. She has to be with them always, and I only see them at odd moments.”

She broke off with a laugh.

“It’s a shame to inflict all this grumbling on you; but I needed an outlet. It wouldn’t do to grumble to Herbert because he was so greatly against having a governess. He would say it was what he foresaw, and advise me to get rid of her. I shouldn’t like to do that. I always feel easy in my mind about them when I leave them now. She is entirely trustworthy.”

“I think I should put my foot down upon that point,” Mrs Carruthers advised. “That sort of thing can become annoying. Some people are greedy for authority, and if you give in to them they become arbitrary. If you want the children any hour of the day, have them, whether it is the time for their rest or any other legitimate exercise.”

“And spoil their tempers,” laughed Pamela.

“Rubbish!” scoffed Mrs Carruthers. “Temper in the human animal develops naturally. One has to spank it out of them. All children are not brought up by rule, you know; it isn’t possible in some households. We were dragged up; but I must add that our tempers on the whole did not suffer as a result. Keep their little bodies nourished, and their minds will develop of themselves. The one thing, I suppose, every mother strives to do is to develop her baby on the lines she considers the most admirable; and the baby invariably develops on its own lines, because it is an individual. It is difficult to regard the infant as an individual. We imagine we form its character; but nature forms its character in the embryo stage; we merely advance its development by the aid of our own experience. See more of your children, Pamela, my dear; nothing will ever make up to you, nor to them, the enjoyment you forego in your present separation.”

She rose abruptly, and approached Pamela’s side. Stooping, she took the wistful face between her hands and kissed it.

“I am a stony-hearted, philosophical lunatic,” she said. “Go and put on your hat, you blessed infant, and come out for a walk with me.”

Chapter Thirteen.

Miss Maitland had been some months in the house before Arnott became in any degree alive to her actual presence. He met her occasionally coming in or going out. Usually she had the children with her, and a coloured girl in charge of the boy. He always passed them, thankful that politeness demanded nothing further than the raising of his hat. Sometimes he encountered her on the stairs, when he felt constrained to make a remark. But she was exceedingly retiring, and appeared quite as anxious as he was to avoid these encounters. She had a habit of effacing herself when he was at home.

But one day when he had been lunching with some men at his club, and returned unexpectedly early in the afternoon with the intention of running Pamela out to Camps Bay in the motor, he found that Pamela had gone visiting; and Miss Maitland, who supplied this information, ceased amazingly to stand as a mere cog in the wheel of his domestic machinery, and assumed a distinct feminine personality that caught and held his attention. She was, he noted, and felt surprised that he noticed this for the first time, a striking, fine-looking girl.

He had run upstairs to look for Pamela, and was calling for her loudly when quite unexpectedly a door in the corridor opened, and Miss Maitland appeared, closing the door softly behind her, and keeping her hand on the knob.

“The children are asleep,” she said, which he recognised was a warning to him not to disturb them.

Instead of feeling annoyed, he stopped short and stared at her apologetically.

“Sorry I was so inconsiderate,” he said. “I forgot. Can you tell me where Mrs Arnott is?”

Blanche explained.

“What a bore,” he said. “I particularly wanted her.”

He surveyed the calm face turned gravely in his direction, with its serene eyes and unsmiling lips, and was amused to see it change colour under his scrutiny. His interest was immediately aroused. She assumed from that moment an individuality that excited his curiosity. Why, he wondered, had he been so entirely unaware of her before?—not unaware of her actual bodily presence in his home, but of her separate existence as a sentient human being,—a feminine human being with possibilities of engaging developments.

He held her for a few minutes in conversation; then, quite pleasantly excited, he went downstairs, and sat on the stoep and smoked until Pamela returned.

Pamela found him in a mood of high good humour, notwithstanding his announcement that he had spent a solitary afternoon, chafing at her absence. The period of solitude had been less irksome than he allowed. She leaned against the rail of the stoep near his chair, and gave an account of her afternoon’s doings, which had been fairly dull on the whole.

“I would rather have been motoring,” she finished.

Miss Maitland appeared with the children at this moment. She had waited until Pamela returned home, not caring to pass Arnott, for some inexplicable reason, and fully alive to the fact that he was seated on the stoep near the door. It was late for their walk. For the first time since her arrival the rigid rule of regular hours was relaxed.

Pamela looked round in surprise.

“Going out?” she exclaimed, catching up Pamela, the younger, who had flown towards her and flung herself into her arms.

Arnott sat up, regarding the governess under his eyes. She had no look for him.

“Baby slept late,” she explained to Pamela. “I thought we might manage a short walk before tea.”

“You come too,” the little girl pleaded, tugging at Pamela’s hand.

“Nonsense!” interposed Arnott. “You have got Miss Maitland. Daddy wants mummy.”

The child pouted her disappointment.

“You can have Miss Maitland,” she said, with unflattering generosity. “Pamela wants her mummy.”

Arnott laughed.

“Suppose I come instead, kiddie?” he suggested.

But his small daughter was decided in her opinions, and unblushingly frank in the expression of them.

“I want mummy,” she announced. “I don’t want any one else.”

“I’ll tell you what I will do,” he said, rising abruptly, to Pamela’s wondering amazement. “The car is all ready for going out I’ll take the whole lot for a spin.” He tried not to look as though he were conscious of acting in an altogether unprecedented manner, and added: “You can nurse the boy between you.”

“That will be jolly,” said Pamela.

Little Pamela clapped her hands.

“That will be jolly,” she echoed.

“I feel quite the family man,” Arnott remarked later, when he had settled Miss Maitland in the back with the children,—an arrangement against which Pamela, the younger, at first protested loudly. She wanted her mummy. Why couldn’t Miss Maitland sit in front with daddy?

Pamela touched his arm affectionately as he seated himself beside her and grasped the steering wheel.

“I love you in the rôle,” she said softly. “I wish you played it more often.”

He laughed constrainedly.

“We’ll see how it works,” he answered guardedly.

It worked well on the whole. David howled lustily part of the time, for no apparent reason, after the manner of small people; but he ceased his cries when Pamela took him on her lap and coaxed him into a good temper. That hour was the happiest she had spent for a long while. It was the first occasion on which Arnott had taken the children out, or evinced any interest in them whatever. She wondered what impulse had moved him to act in this wholly unexpected and delightful way. She understood him sufficiently to realise that it was an impulse, and entertained no great hope that it would develop into a practice; but even as an isolated instance of parental affection it presented him in a new and more kindly light.

Aware that he was giving her pleasure, Arnott experienced an agreeable sense of virtuous complacency. He speculated upon what the girl in the tonneau was thinking, as she sat in her silent fashion, responding only when necessary to Pamela’s ceaseless prattle. He looked round occasionally to make some joking remark to the child, and once he deliberately addressed himself to the governess. She started when he spoke to her, and answered briefly, and with faint embarrassment. After that one attempt at conversation he did not look round again.

“I like going out in the car,” remarked little Pamela, when she was lifted out on their return home. “Why don’t we go every day?”

“Daddy wouldn’t be bothered with such a small fidget every day,” he answered. “But you shall go again, if you are good.”

“To-morrow?” demanded Pamela.

“We’ll see,” he returned, and drove the car round to the garage.

Pamela carried the boy upstairs to the nursery, and remained for the nursery tea. Then she changed her dress and went downstairs. Arnott was in the drawing-room when she entered. She went to him and put her arms about his neck and kissed him.

“Thank you, dear, for a very happy drive,” she said.

He laughed awkwardly.

“Odd ideas of happiness some people have,” he commented.

“It gave the children a lot of pleasure,” she said. “And it was a change for Miss Maitland. I have often wished to take her in the car, but I haven’t liked to suggest it.”

“Why not?” he asked.

“I was afraid you might think it a nuisance. It was one of the conditions, you know, that I wasn’t to let her get in your way.”

“Oh, that!” he returned... “Yes. But you’ve taken me rather more literally than I intended. She is a very self-effacing young woman. What on earth does she do with herself? It must be fairly dull for her to be always with the kids. Why don’t you have her down for an hour of an evening? ... I don’t see why she shouldn’t dine with us.”

“I don’t think that’s necessary,” she said.

“Just as you like,” he answered. “I only thought it would make it brighter for her.”

She considered the matter for a second or so, not altogether liking the idea, and half wishing that he had not made the suggestion. A third person sharing their quiet evenings would end finally the pleasant companionable home life which had once meant so much to both of them, but which Pamela was forced to recognise was no longer all it had been. Perhaps the addition of a third person would make the increasing strain of these domestic evenings less apparent, might, by introducing a fresh note, rouse them both from the apathy of indifference into which they were drifting. People could have too much of one another’s undiluted society; the presence of a third person, even if sometimes irksome, stimulates the interest afresh. And, as Arnott had remarked, it would certainly be brighter for Blanche.

“If you are sure you don’t mind,” she said.

“Why should I mind? The girl is harmless enough,” he replied. “I don’t like the idea of her spending her evenings alone.”

“No,” Pamela said, perching herself on the arm of his chair, and turning a smiling face to his. “I don’t like it either. But I am just a little reluctant to admit her altogether as one of the family. It’s going to put a finish to this comfortable state of affairs.”

He laughed, and got an arm about her waist.

“I suppose it is,” he allowed. “But if you will introduce strange young women into the happy home you must put up with that. It was your doing, remember.”

“I know,” Pamela assented. “But you must admit, Herbert, that it has been a success.”

“I don’t deny it,” he returned. “So far as I am able to judge, the arrangement has worked towards the greater comfort of the establishment all round. That’s one reason why I think we ought to study the girl. At present she is being treated like an upper servant. That won’t do. A girl needs some society outside the nursery.”

“Very well,” agreed Pamela. “We will inaugurate the new system to-morrow.”

Accordingly on the morrow Miss Maitland joined them at dinner. Although Arnott himself had suggested, and practically insisted on this extension of privileges, he made very little effort in helping Pamela in the laborious task of sustaining conversation during the meal, or later when they sat on the stoep. The governess occupied herself with some sewing, and Arnott sat under the electric light and read the papers, only very occasionally throwing in a remark. Pamela found the evening very tedious, and was relieved when punctually at nine-thirty Miss Maitland retired. Never very talkative, Miss Maitland’s powers of conversation seemed to dry up in Arnott’s presence. She seldom looked at him, and never addressed him spontaneously.

“Bit dull, isn’t she?” Arnott observed, when she had left them and gone indoors. He dropped his paper on to the floor and yawned. Then he got up. “You don’t seem to have the knack of setting her at her ease,” he said irritably.

“I don’t see what more I can be expected to do,” Pamela returned, a little nettled. “She is shy—I think of you. When we are alone she is more companionable.”

“Well, I’m going in for a whisky,” he said. “Dull people always give me a thirst.”

He went inside. Miss Maitland was mounting the stairs as he crossed the hall. He paused at the foot of the stairs and looked after her.

“Good-night,—mouse,” he called softly.

She looked back over her shoulder and flushed warmly.

“Good-night,” she answered, and gave him one of her rare smiles, and hurried on.

He entered the dining-room, drank off a glass of whisky, and poured himself out a second, which he carried with him on to the stoep and placed in the armhole of his chair. He had quite recovered his good humour. He smiled a trifle self-consciously, and leaned over the back of Pamela’s chair, and rallied her on her silence.

“Am I to sit through the rest of the evening with another speechless young woman?” he inquired.

Pamela, who felt unaccountably depressed, made no direct reply to this. Instead she observed:

“Blanche plays wonderfully. Would it bore you if I suggested a little music occasionally? I think she would enjoy it, and it would relieve the strain.”

“It wouldn’t bore me,” he answered. “I’m fond of music when it’s good. If she would like to strum, let her. There was a time when you used to sing to me. But I haven’t heard you sing for months, and then only when we had people here.”

Pamela remembered perfectly. The last time she had sung was the night Dare dined with them.

“You never seemed to care much,” she said.

“Not care! You didn’t think that when I used to hang over you and the piano on board ship,” he laughed.

“Well, you don’t take the trouble to hang over the piano any longer,” she replied.

He straightened himself, and moved away, frowning impatiently. Why, he wondered, did a woman always demand open demonstration of a man’s affection? As a sex they were tiresomely exacting.

“I’ll get a gramophone,” he said.

Pamela laughed.

“Some one has to hang over that. That will be my job, I suppose?”

“No. I will make myself independent of you. Miss Maitland shall work it.”

“It seems,” Pamela observed, “that she is to be a person of many avocations,—nurse to the children, housekeeper for me, and companion to you.”

“Why not?” he said. “She’ll find the last job the most amusing.”

“If this evening was a sample of your mutual interest, I should doubt that,” Pamela retorted. “I never knew you could be so absolutely wooden. You did not make the least attempt to be agreeable. After all, it was your idea to have her down.”

“It’s no use, Pam,” he answered coolly. “I refuse to make a social effort in my own home after eight o’clock. I expect to be amused,—or at least left in peace. I didn’t lay myself out to be entertaining when I proposed her joining us. She will fit in, in time. Don’t you worry.”

He raised his glass, and took a long drink.

“If one is obliged to admit the stranger within one’s gate, I prefer she should err on the quiet side,” he added. He recalled the swift, surprised flush, and the smile which the girl, pausing on the landing, had given him; and he wondered whether in her own room she was thinking, as he was, of that unexpected encounter, and the confidential half-whisper of his murmured good-night. It had, he felt, established a sort of understanding between them. Odd, he reflected, that he had lived in the same house with her for months, and only now discovered in her that quality of the essential feminine which made her an interesting problem to the male mind.

Chapter Fourteen.

It seemed as though Arnott, after years of indifference, had abruptly awoke to his duties as a father. He began to take a quite extraordinary interest in his children. Exercise in the car ceased to be an astounding treat and became an almost daily custom. He even penetrated into the nursery, usually when the children were in bed. He bought sweets for them, and chose this hour for presenting his gifts.

Pamela looked on, puzzled. She refrained from any comment; she was on the whole pleased; but she was not confident as to the staying qualities of this sudden show of interest; and she awaited developments with a doubt as to his entire sincerity in the new pose. Not for a long time did she connect the change in his attitude with the presence of Miss Maitland in the nursery. It spoke eloquently for Arnott’s discretion that Pamela was so blind to his intimacy with her children’s governess; had he been at all indiscreet in his conduct before the children they would have carried tales. It was in order to avoid the disconcerting evidence of sharp eyes and small ears that he usually visited the nursery when they were in bed.

During these visits he contrived to snatch a few minutes alone with Blanche in the playroom, having previously closed the door between it and the night-nursery. These interviews began by being entirely commonplace. Arnott was carefully feeling his way; he had no desire to precipitate matters; and the girl was shy. He was satisfied that this was not a pose; the girl really was shy. She was also, he perceived, pleasantly flattered by his attentions.

He began his overtures towards a greater familiarity by addressing her by fanciful names. He bought her elaborate boxes of chocolates, which he gave her with some jesting remark about all little girls liking sweets. One day he gave her a brooch. Blanche looked utterly confused at receiving this present, and pushed it back hastily into his hand.

“Oh, no, please! I can’t take it,” she said.

For a moment he looked disconcerted.

“Why not?” he asked.

The rich blood was showing under her skin in the way he enjoyed seeing it, and the dark, mystery-eyes, as he called them, were lowered in quick embarrassment. She was obviously much distressed. His annoyance vanished.

“Please don’t think me ungracious,” she pleaded; “but I would rather you didn’t give me things like that.”

He slipped the trinket into his pocket, and possessed himself of her hand.

“Then I won’t,” he said. “But I am sorry you won’t let me.”

He hesitated for a moment, studying her downcast face; then he bent forward and kissed her lips. She looked more confused than before, but she did not draw back. He kissed her again.

“Just to show that you are not vexed,” he said.

After which he released her, and went downstairs with an air of elation, and his pulses beating at a great rate with pleasurable excitement. He walked on to the stoep, whistling softly. She didn’t seem to mind, he reflected. He wondered why he had not kissed her before.

That evening, when she came downstairs, he spoke very little to her, and studiously avoided looking at her. She played accompaniments for Pamela part of the time; and he sat alone on the stoep and smoked and watched them through the French windows. Once Pamela put her arm round the girl’s shoulders, and remained in this position while she sang. Inexplicably her attitude jarred Arnott. The girl sat very stiffly. She did not, he observed, once lift her eyes from the sheet of music she was reading.

Shortly before her usual time for retiring he left his seat, and went upstairs, and waited on the landing until she appeared. He heard the drawing-room door open and close. Then the piano sounded again, and Pamela’s voice, rich, and full, and sweet, came to his ears as he stood there in the gloom of the landing, listening for Blanche’s light ascending footfall.

Presently she appeared, and stood, a dusky figure in the half light, her simple white dress revealing soft full throat and rounded arms, and a surprisingly graceful form. She paused, startled at seeing him there, and instinctively threw out a protesting hand. He caught her to him, and kissed her passionately, holding her strained against his breast.

“Oh, don’t!” she gasped, a little frightened at the steel-like pressure of his arms.

She was trembling from head to foot. Never had she been kissed like this in all her life before. His passion scorched her, terrified her, left her quivering with shame and mortification. And yet she was not angry. These hot kisses raining upon her lips, his kisses earlier in the day, roused in her the desire to be kissed. An unemotional, loveless girlhood had repressed, but not slain, the inherent qualities of a passionate nature; Arnott’s virile love-making was calling these repressed emotions to life. She wanted to be loved; she wanted to be kissed; wanted to be made to feel that she counted in some one’s life,—was important,—necessary to some one.

At the moment of offering her feeble protest, when she yet yielded to his caresses, it did not occur to her that Arnott had no right to make her of account in his life. That aspect of the case appealed to her later, when she lay in bed unable to sleep for the unwholesome excitement which fired her brain and quickened the beating of her heart. When she considered Arnott in the light of a married man, and realised that his making love to her was an insult, it sickened her. She felt angry—angry with him, and fiercely jealous of Pamela. She hated Pamela,—hated her for having all the things which she desired and had not got,—hated her for her fair smiling prettiness, her kindness, her utter lack of appreciation—as it seemed to Blanche—of all the good she possessed. Why should Pamela have everything, and she only the stealthy kisses of a man whose kisses were an insult?

As she felt again in imagination the close pressure of his lips upon hers, the grip of his arms, which had hurt her, frightened her, and yet given her a thrill of sensuous pleasure, she turned her face to the pillow and pressed her mouth against its coolness and cried weakly. How dared he kiss her like that? ... How dared he endeavour to make her love him when he could never be anything closer in her life than at present? It was cruel and mean of him...

Yet, despite her realisation of his baseness, she could not hate the man. Already he had succeeded beyond his expectation in rousing in her a hungry craving for him, which, if he persisted in his selfish persecution, could only end disastrously for her. And he had no intention to desist. The game which he had started idly for his own amusement was becoming absorbingly interesting. That was how he regarded the affair. In his ungenerous pursuit of amusement he lost sight of the girl’s youth, of her helpless position in his household, exposed to the evil influence of his attentions, and unable to protect herself save by giving up her post, which he was comfortably assured from the moment she suffered his caresses she would not have the strength of mind to do.

He was not in love with her. He was merely gratifying a sensual impulse to take advantage of the moment. It seemed absurd, he told himself, to have a girl, eager for initiation, at hand and refrain from using the opportunity. She could stop him if she chose.

When she broke away from him on the landing, he went downstairs and returned quietly to his seat on the stoep. Pamela was still singing. She ceased presently, and closed the piano and joined him.

“I believe you were asleep,” she said, and perched herself on his knee.

His eyes flashed open instantly. He had been leaning back with them closed, lost in a comfortable reverie; her unexpected action startled him into sudden alertness.

“Something very near it,” he admitted. “I believe, myself, I’ve been dreaming.”

“Pleasant dreams?” she demanded.

He took her chin in his hand.

“Confused,” he answered. “I’m not fully awake now... Am I an old fogey, Pam?”

“No,” she replied, smiling. “But you are not exactly a boy.”

“Not a dashing hero,” he rejoined. “Then my dreams were deceptive. Dreaming after dinner suggests age. I’ll have to buck up.”

“Buck up now, and talk to me,” Pamela said. “You’ve been very slow this evening.”

“Have I?” He took hold of her wrist and spanned it with his fingers. “You are growing abominably thin,” he remarked irrelevantly.

Involuntarily, he compared her slimness with Blanche Maitland’s generous lines, and decided that thinness was unbecoming.

“I never was plump,” Pamela answered calmly, quite satisfied with her own proportions, and unconscious of his comparison.

“No... ‘A rag and a bone and a hank of hair’ ... How does the thing go?”

“I don’t think I want to hear any more of it,” she said.

He laughed.

“Then don’t grow any thinner. You are getting to be all angles.”

She got off his knee and took a chair some little distance from him.

“These unflattering remarks are not soothing,” she said. “I think I prefer your silence.”

Arnott felt carelessly amused.

“You needn’t get ratty,” he returned. “It is only concern for your well-being that is responsible for my criticisms. The fact is, you need a change, Pam. I have half a mind to shut up the house and cart the lot of you off to the seaside for a fortnight—Muizenberg, or somewhere handy, so that I can get in every day and see that things here are going on all right. Miss Maitland could look after the kiddies, and you and I could motor around, and forget all about Wynberg. What do you say to my plan?”

Pamela sat forward in her chair, her face alight with pleasure.

“Oh! that would be good,” she said. “I should love it? Let it be Muizenberg, Herbert. The sea is so safe and warm there. You could teach Pamela to swim. She hasn’t a scrap of fear.”

The suggestion took Arnott’s fancy. It occurred to him that he might derive a good deal of pleasure in this way. Surf bathing at Muizenberg was noted. He would have them all in the sea, and teach the governess as well as Pamela aquatic accomplishments.

“Then that’s settled,” he said. “I will secure rooms at the hotel before the holiday rush. If we get bored, we can return and leave the children there.”

“I shan’t get bored,” she said. “I shall sit on the sands all day and revel in idleness. You can’t think what a joy it will be to me to have the children always. I shan’t want to go motoring. One can do that any time.”

“You shall please yourself,” he returned with unusual good humour. “It’s your holiday. If you want to build castles in the sand, I’ll help you. You must get yourself a bathing dress—we must all have bathing dresses, and we will become amphibious.”

“I really believe,” observed Pamela, looking at him with a quiet smile, “that you are actually keen on this adventure.”

“I am,” he replied. “I told you I was dreaming myself youthful again. I want to roll in the surf, and do all manner of foolish things... Why have we never done these things before?”

“It never occurred to me that you would agree to an annual seaside trip,” she answered. “And I shouldn’t care to go without you. It is only lately,” she added thoughtfully, “that you have shown any disposition to be bothered with the children. You wouldn’t let yourself get interested in them before; and now I believe you realise that you have missed a lot. They are dear wee things.”

“Oh! they are jolly little cards,” he answered carelessly. “I am grateful to them in a sense. They are the raison d’être for this excursion after all. An old fogey like myself couldn’t submit to the indignity of paddling in the surf without the legitimate excuse of the necessity for his presence in order to smack the little Arnotts with their own spades when they become unruly. It won’t be all heaven, I expect.”

Pamela spent the next few days in preparing for the wonderful holiday, assisted by her small excited family, and a silent and detached governess, who looked on, while Pamela shopped extensively for every one, with a furtive disapproval in her dark eyes, as though disliking the idea of this change to the sea, and her compulsory participation in it.

When Pamela presented her with a smart bathing costume she at first declined the gift.

“I can’t swim,” she protested. “And I’m afraid of the sea. I shouldn’t like to bathe—really.”

“Oh! but,” said Pamela, feeling unaccountably disappointed, “we shall all bathe. You won’t be afraid with Mr Arnott; he will teach you to swim in no time. It will be half the fun.”

Blanche blushed at this suggestion that Arnott should teach her to swim, and looked with greater disfavour than ever at the ridiculous garment in Pamela’s hand.

“I’m too big a coward to learn,” she said. “I should hate it. Please don’t ask me.”

Miss Maitland was, Pamela decided, a most unsatisfactory girl to deal with.

She told Arnott of the difficulty, and held up the amazing garment of navy alpaca and white braid for his inspection.

“It is so pretty,” she said. “And she looked at it as though it were indecent.”

He laughed.

“As a sex you are all more or less mock modest,” he announced. “You will half undress of an evening, and blush to be discovered in a perfectly decorous petticoat. Pack the thing in with your own clothes, and I’ll undertake to state when she sees every one else in the water she will yearn to get in too. We will cure her of her distaste for salt water.”

And so the bathing dress went to Muizenberg in Pamela’s trunk.

Chapter Fifteen.

With their arrival in Muizenberg Pamela took entirely upon herself the care of the children. She informed Miss Maitland that she was to regard her stay there in the light of a holiday; she was to go and come as she chose, and leave the children with her.

“But that won’t be any holiday for you,” objected Blanche.

“It is my holiday being with them,” Pamela answered.

Robbed of her occupation, Miss Maitland sat on the sands alone and read a book; while Pamela, with the aid of Maggie, the coloured nurse, bathed and put to bed two very weary and rather fretful little people, tired out with the excitement of the day, with a surfeit of undiluted sunlight, and strong salt air. They had rebelled at going to bed. The boy had howled his hardest when he was forcibly removed from the beach. They had been naughty over tea, and cross at being undressed. Pamela had to be coaxed into saying her prayers. But eventually they were put into bed, and within five minutes of being there were sleeping soundly.

Arnott came in when they were asleep, and expressed surprise at finding Pamela there. She raised a cautious finger.

“Why don’t you let Miss Maitland do this?” he asked.

“Because I like to do it myself,” she replied in an undertone.

“Aren’t you coming out?”

“No.”

He left the room quietly, and strolled down to the beach.

The sun had set, and the turquoise of the sea had deepened; its waves no longer shone with glancing lights. The long stretch of white sand was almost deserted; one or two people loitered on it, and down by the water’s edge, watching the incoming tide, the solitary figure of a girl in a blue linen frock lent an unexpected touch of harmonious colour against the silvery background of sand. Arnott’s glance fell on the girl, and, his interest quickening at sight of her, he hastened his steps. She looked up at his approach, flushed warmly, and made a movement as if to rise. He stayed her.

“Don’t move,” he said, and dropped on the sands beside her. “You looked deliciously lazy. What were you pondering over when I interrupted that deep train of thought?”

She had been thinking about him, but she did not say so. She kept her gaze fixed on the long waves, rolling in in ceaseless regularity and sweeping lazily up the beach, as she answered:

“I was thinking how beautiful it is here.”

“So you like Muizenberg?” he said. “I hoped you would. Doesn’t the sea look jolly?”

“I’m afraid of the sea,” she said slowly.

He was watching her intently, admiring the rich colour under her skin, and the way in which the little tendrils of dark hair curled over the small ears, admiring too the long line of her shoulder, and the soft contour of the partly averted face. At her admission he suddenly smiled.

“So I heard,” he replied. “You must get better acquainted with it, and then you will lose your fear. I brought the gown along in my suit case. We will christen it to-morrow.”

“No,” she said, startled, and flashed a quick, almost terrified look at him. There was a strong appeal in her tones. “I don’t wish to bathe—really.”

“Not to please me—Blanche?” he said, and dropped on his elbow on the sand and possessed himself of her hand.

“Oh, don’t!” she cried. “Some one will see us.”

“There is no one to see,” he answered, with a cautious look about him. “What a timid little mouse it is!” He ran his hand up the loose sleeve of her blouse and caressed her elbow with his fingers. “Your skin is like satin,” he said, and smiled into her shrinking eyes. “You mustn’t be angry with me, Blanche. I have a very great affection for you. And I want you to be very happy with us,—I want you to consider yourself as one of the family. What would you say to my adopting you?”