FENELLA

A NOVEL

BY HENRY LONGAN STUART

Author of "Weeping Cross"

"NAY, MY MOTHER CRIED: BUT THEN THERE WAS
A STAR DID DANCE AND BENEATH IT
I WAS BORN"

Garden City
New York
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1911

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION
INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN

COPYRIGHT, 1911, BY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY

CONTENTS

PART I

I

MORGENGABE

Like the sudden, restless motion of a sleeper, a wave, marking the tide's height, broke out of the slumberous heart of the sea, and laid its crest low along the beach. Fenella, who had been swimming to shore, rose in the foam, like that other woman in the morning of the world, and began to walk slowly, wringing the salt water from her hair, toward the bleached bathing hut that stood, by itself, under a shoulder of the dunes. The backwash of the wave swirled past her bare ankles as she walked. Beyond the strip of beach that it had covered with weed and spume, the sand was hot and loose as ashes to the soles of her feet. The noontide sun seemed to rob the earth at once of motion, of sound, of color. It grizzled the long sharp grass with which the sand hills were sparsely covered, quenched the red roofs of the little cream-walled fishing village, and turned the watered lawn, which lay at the foot of the flaunting summer hotel quarter of a mile inland, to a level smudge of dark green. All sound was stilled—all movement in suspense—all beauty, even, deferred. At such an hour, the supreme of the sun's possession of the earth, none can stand, alone and without shelter in its untempered light, and not realize that he is intercepting an elemental force as relentless as it is impersonal. Upon these barren, ragged edges of the earth, where the land casts its detritus upon the sea, and the sea casts it back, transformed, upon the land, it is felt to be what it truly is—a power that blights as well as fosters—death no less than life. All that has its roots firmly fastened in the soil—that has a purpose unfulfilled—fruit to bear—pollen to sow, feels the impulse—spreads, aspires, swells, and scatters. All that is weak or ephemeral—whose purposes are frustrated or whose uses past, turns from that light and fervor—withers—bows its head—wilts at the fiery challenge. To it the sun is a torch—the earth an oven—noontide the crisis of its agony.

At the door of the gray bathing-hut the girl turned, and, bracing herself, with her arms against her wet sides, to which her dark tight bathing-dress clung sleek and shapely as its pelt to a seal, stood for a moment looking out to sea. Her bosom rose and fell quickly, but without any distress; her heart beat high with the sense, so rare to women until of late, of physical powers put to the test. A mile out, the fishing-boat to which she had swum—whose very bulwarks she had touched—seemed to hang like some torpid bat—its claws hooked onto the line where sea and sky met. She caught her breath at sight of the distance she had ventured: nothing in her life, she felt, had been pleasanter than this—to stand with the sun on her shoulders, the warm sand over her toes, and to measure with a glance the cold, treacherous and trackless space which, stroke by stroke, she had overcome.

Suddenly, and as though she remembered, she turned and looked inland. High up on the dunes to her left a little black shadow spotted the gray, reed-streaked expanse. Fenella waved one brown arm toward it, and throwing back the wet hair from her forehead, peered anxiously under her hand for some signal in reply. Apparently it came, for her face changed. Something that had been almost austerity went out of it and was replaced by a look so full of tender concern that the long-lashed eyes and sensitive mouth seemed to brim over with it. A moment later, and amid a charming confusion which draped the pegs and benches of the hut, she was humming a waltz tune softly as she dressed. The happy, interrupted melody filled the hot silence like the song of a honey-seeking bee.

The blot upon the dunes was cast by a white sketching umbrella, lined with green, whose long handle, spiked and jointed, was driven deep into the loose soil. Near it, but somewhat away from the shadow, which the southward roll of the earth was carrying farther and farther from his shoulders, a man was sitting. He sat, with knees drawn up and with his hands clasped across them, staring out upon the colorless ocean, over which a slight haze was beginning to drift. A gaunt, large-framed man, but with a physical economy in which fat had no place. The skin upon the strong hands and lean neck was brown and loose, as though years of exposure to a sun, fiercer and more persistent than that to which he heedlessly bared his head now, had tanned it for all time. His hair, thick, crisp, and grizzling at the temples, was cropped close over a shapely head. A short beard, clipped to a point, left the shape of the chin an open question, but his moustache was brushed away, gallantly enough, from the upper lip, and showed all the lines of a repressed and unhappy mouth. The prisoner, his dungeon once accepted, sets himself to carve the record of his chagrins upon its walls; no less surely will a soul, misunderstood and checked in its purposes, grave the tale of its disappointments upon the prison-house of the flesh. On the face that confronted the ocean now, infinite sadness, infinite distaste were written plain.

He was oddly dressed, after a bizarre fashion which complexity, eager, we must suppose, for such simplifications as are within its reach, occasionally affects. A coarse canvas smock, open at the throat, such as fishermen wear, and dyed the color of their sails; corduroy trousers of brown velvet, coarse gray knitted socks, that fell in careless folds round his ankles and over the low iron-shod shoes. Under all this uncouth parade one divined rather than saw fine linen.

Suddenly that view of the ocean in which was so little present help was blotted out. From behind him two hands, cool and a little clammy from prolonged immersion in salt water, were covering his eyes. Yet for a while he did not move; possibly he felt the eclipse a grateful one. It was not until the girl who had stolen upon him so silently shook him gently and whispered in his ear that he took the hands from his eyes, and, still without turning, laid them against his lips.

He might well have turned. For Fenella, one would think, would be always worth another look. She was quite beautiful, with the precision of color and texture that makes beauty for the artist, and sometimes, be it said, obscures it for the general. She was pale, but not from any retrenchment of the vital flame which burned, clear and ardent, in her gaze—glowed in the red of her moist and tremulous mouth. Her eyes were set full and a little far apart, and fringed with lashes that were of an almost even length and thickness on the upper and lower lids. Her face, broad at the temples and cheek bones, sloped to her chin with a slight concavity of the cheeks, in which a sort of impalpable dusk, that was not shadow, for no light killed it—nor bloom, for her tint was colorless as a lily, and which was probably caused by the minute and separately invisible down of the skin, seemed immanent. Her hair, fine, abundant, and nearer black than brown, grew low and made all manner of pretty encroachments upon the fair face. There was a peak of it in the centre of her forehead, and two little tufts waved near the temples which no mode of hairdressing had ever managed to successfully include. Her neck was slight and childish—her breasts scarcely formed, but her hips were already arched, of the true heroic mould of woman, and the young torso soared from them with the grace and strength of a dryad. Beyond all, face and figure possessed the precious and indefinable quality of romance. Fenella upon the Barrière du Trône in the livid light of a February morning—long, damp curls in which a little powder lingers drooping upon her slender shoulders: Fenella in côte-hardie and wimple, gazing over moat and bittern-haunted moorland from an embrasured château window of Touraine: Fenella in robe of fine-fringed linen, her black hair crisped into spiral ringlets, couched between the hooves of some winged monster of Babylon or Tharshish, with the flame of banquet or sacrifice red upon her colorless cheek. All these were imaginable.

She sank gracefully upon her knees in the yielding sand, and, putting her hand across the man's shoulder, laid her cheek to his. The spontaneity of the action and its tacit acceptance by her lover—for he neither moved nor checked his reverie on its account—were eloquent of self-surrender, and a witness also to the truth of the observation that, in affairs of the heart, there is one who proffers love and one who endures it. But she was over-young and over-fair to know the chill of the unrequited kiss already.

"Are you still worrying, Paul?" she asked after a while, "still vexed and disturbed? You needn't answer. Your forehead was all gathers and tucks just now when I came behind you: I could feel every wrinkle. Tell me, this minute," with playful peremptoriness; "was he anxious about his young lady?"

"A little," her lover answered. "It's natural, isn't it?"

"But, dear, I swim so strongly," she pleaded. "There's no current when the tide's at flood. And, oh! Paul, it was such fun. I swam out to that fishing-boat you can just—barely—see. Look!" and she turned the listless head with her hand; "it's over there. I can tell you the exact number: B759 Boulogne. That shows I'm not fibbing, doesn't it, Mister Ingram. I hung onto the side and called out, 'Woilà!' Have you ever noticed you can't say 'V' when your mouth's full of saltiness? And the man was so scared. He crossed himself twice, poor old soul, and his pipe nearly fell into the sea. Can't you imagine what he'll say when he gets home 'Cette Anglaise!—quelle effrontée!—quelle conduite!' Now, who says I can't speak French?—Oh! Paul; why aren't you a swimmer?"

"It wasn't quite such fun watching you," said Ingram; "the sea's such a big thing. Why, your head looked no bigger than a pin's out on all that water. Things happen so easily, too."

The girl felt him shiver, and tightened her hold on his shoulder.

"And you've such an imagination to plague you; haven't you, Paul? Oh dear! Well—here's the pin sticking into you again: here's the head back, safe and sound, light and empty as ever. Isn't it hard luck for you?" And she laid it on his shoulder.

"Would you rather I didn't swim out so far again, Paul?" she asked presently, in a softened voice.

"Why should I break your spirit?" the man argued, more reasonably, perhaps, than he intended.

"Oh, but it isn't worth it if it worries you," his sweetheart said earnestly. "Nothing's worth that, when you have so much to bear besides. I've had my foolish way and now I promise you I'll paddle with you, dear old muff, in two feet of water all the rest of the holidays."

Ingram turned to her now. "Nelly, I don't want to disappoint you, but—but, there won't be any 'rest of the holidays' for us this summer."

She looked into his face; her own alarmed and pleading.

"You're not going, Paul? Oh, you promised to stay on until we all went back together."

"I know, I know," he answered, with an impatience that was none the less real because it was the expression of his reluctance to give pain. Silken bonds strain at times.

"Something has happened then, since last night? What is it, dear?"

"I had a letter this morning. It had been waiting at the 'Arrêt.'"

"A letter at last! Oh! Paul—Why didn't you tell me? Is it good news?"

"Only a straw; but then, I'm a drowning man."

"Tell me! Tell me!" the girl insisted.

"It's from Prentice; the man you saw in Soho the night before we came away. He's taken my MSS. to Althea Rees."

"You mean the woman who writes those queer books where every one talks alike."

"What does it matter? The talk's all good. Anyhow, she's 'struck.' Some one's actually struck at last. She's going to try and make her own publishers do something. But she says she must see me first, and Prentice thinks she's only passing through London."

Fenella's face clouded and was so far from expressing enthusiasm that her lover looked at her rather ruefully.

"You don't seem very glad, Nelly."

Nelly kept her eyes averted. She had already taken her head from his shoulder.

"I shouldn't care to publish anything," she declared slowly. "Not—that way."

As though he had been waiting for her words, Paul Ingram sprang to his feet. All his impatience and dissatisfaction seemed to boil over. He began to pace the dunes like a caged animal, kicking the sand from his feet and tugging fiercely at the grizzling beard that was a daily reproach to his lack of achievement.

"That way! that way!" he repeated. "But isn't even 'that way' better than no way at all? I tell you, Nelly, I'm discouraged, aghast, at this conspiracy to keep a man bottled up and away from the people for whom his message is intended. I haven't written like all these clever—clever people; after a morning's motoring, and an afternoon 'over the stubble,' isn't that the expression?—three hours every day, while the man is laying out the broadcloth and fine linen for a dinner at eight. What I did was done with as much sweat and strain as that shrimper uses down there, who's getting ready to push his net through the sand as soon as the tide turns. And when the work is done, between me and my public a soulless, brainless agency uprears itself that weighs the result by exactly the same standards as it would weigh a tooth-paste or a patent collar stud or a parlor game—as a 'quick seller.'"

He would have said more, but Fenella was at his side, trying to reach his lips with the only comfort the poor child had.

"Oh! Paul," she cried; "be patient just a little longer. Publish how you can! I wasn't blaming you, dear. I only meant that—that working as you do, it was only a question of time and you'd succeed without any one's help. I don't feel uneasy or impatient about you."

Ingram sat down again, a little ashamed of his outburst, but his face was still bitter.

"Just so," said he. "And it's precisely your limitless, superhuman patience that's doing more than anything else to kill me by inches. It would be a relief if you'd lose it sometimes, curse me—reproach me for the failure I am. After all, how do you know all these duffers aren't right? They're wonderfully unanimous."

Fenella sat silent for a few minutes, not resenting his words, but racking her brain for some comforting parallel that would ring true and not be repulsed.

"Do you remember, Paul," she said at last, "the story we read together at Christmas about Holman Hunt? How he got so sick of the unsold pictures hanging in his studio that he turned them all with their faces to the wall? And yet one of those pictures was the 'Light of the World.'"

But Ingram, even if he had an equal reverence for the work in question, which I should doubt, was not an easy man to console. He brushed the poor little crumb of comfort impatiently aside.

"There's no comparison at all," he declared. "A picture painted is a picture painted. A glance can take it in, and a glance recover for the artist all the inspiration and joy in his work that filled him when he painted it. But what inspiration is there in a bundle of dog-eared manuscript, that comes back to you with the persistence of a cur you've saved from drowning? Besides, every artist worth the name has his following, however small, who help him—flatter him perhaps—anyhow, keep him sane. There's no unwritten law against showing a canvas. But the unpublished author—the un-acted play writer—is shunned like a man with the plague. Oh! don't I know it?"

Fenella gave a weary little sigh. Amid all this glorified space, just to be alive seemed to her simple soul a thing to be deeply and reverently thankful for. Her own blood was racing and tingling in her veins, with the reaction from her long swim. She wanted to run, to sing; above all, she wanted to dance. As for books, her own idea of a book was a very concrete one, indeed. She knew that whole rooms were filled with them, bookstalls littered by them, libraries building everywhere to catch the overflow. She was familiar, for reasons that will appear in their course, with the reading-room at the British Museum. She had confronted that overwhelming fact. And yet, one book could mean so much to this man that, for its sake, the holiday she had so joyously planned had gone to pieces. The truth must be told. She had to draw a rather big draft upon her love and loyalty.

"When are you going?" she asked, in a little flat voice.

"I ought to have caught the mid-day boat from Boulogne," the man answered, with a briskness that sounded ungratefully in her ears. "But it's too late for that to-day. There's another at six or seven. They stop the Paris train for you here if you signal."

"Don't go till to-morrow, Paul," she urged patiently. "There's the eclipse to-night, you know, and you promised we should watch it together. Then we can talk things over quietly. I want—oh, I want so to help you! I have a sort of foolish plan in my own head, but I'm afraid you'll laugh at it.... And there's poor mummy, struggling over the sand with our luncheon. Run and help her, dear."

II

SHADOWS BEFORE

Mrs. Barbour was a comely, wholesome-looking body upon the descending slope of fifty. Her face, like her daughter's, was of the teint mât, and her homely English figure had what a flippant mind has described as a "middle-aged spread" in its proportions. Her large oval brooch, a cunning device in hair, proclaimed to these skilled in rebus that without a cross there was no prospect of a crown, and a black bonnet of low church tendencies, trimmed with little jet-tipped tentacles that quivered and danced when she moved her head, honorably crowned her abundant silver locks. She had declined Ingram's proffered aid with a tenacity often to be noticed in those who have given hard service all their lives, and as she drooped with weary finality upon the sand, various parcels, string-bags, and small baskets were distributed to right and left.

"Oh dear," she gasped breathlessly; "those dreadful, dreadful dunes."

"Have they tired you very much, mummy?" the girl asked concernedly, as she unfastened the lavender bonnet-strings.

"The sand is so loose to-day with the great 'eat—heat." Mrs. Barbour added the corrected version with almost lightning rapidity. One of her peculiarities, which it is sufficient to have indicated once, was a constant snatch at evasive aspirates. They can scarcely be said to have really dropped; she caught them before they fell.

"No, Nelly," the good lady went on, while Ingram unravelled the mysteries of the string-bag, and gathered driftwood for the fire. "Here we are in France, where you've always wanted to be; but, another year, if I'm consulted, Bognor or Westgate for me, my dear. Two hours' comfortable travelling"—Mrs. Barbour ticked off the advantages of home travel on her fingers one by one, and unconsciously quoted some railway placard she had seen—"no Channel crossing, no customs, and the sea at your door. And even when you've come all this way, no amusement, unless you call a horrid Casino amusing, where grown men, and women who ought to be sent home to finish dressing, make donkeys of themselves over little lead horses."

"There's very good music there in the afternoon," Paul hazarded, who was shaving a stick into kindling after the fashion of the Western plains.

"Music—yes; but nothing really tuneful. Do you remember the Elite Pierrots at Westgate, Nelly, last year, with the blue masks. That dark-haired one, my dear, who used to sigh for the silvery moon and cough so terribly in the intervals. Don't tell me he wasn't some one in disguise. No! I hold to what I've said. The French don't understand amusement."

The fire was lit, the kettle boiled, and luncheon eaten amid such conversation as a garrulous old woman and two very preoccupied people could contrive. Nelly was particularly silent, and had lost, besides, what her mother was pleased to term her "sand appetite." The talk ranged hither and thither listlessly. Paul's inability to swim, so strange in a man who had girdled the earth, was discussed in all its bearings till it could be borne no longer; the lurid history of Simone, Mrs. Barbour's strapping, smiling bonne, unmarried and unmoral, was matter for another half-hour. Followed various excursions into the obvious, and a list of "discoveries" made that morning. Mrs. Barbour collected facts like shells, and made some very pretty castles with them, too, at times.

"... and Nelly, I believe I know who the two gentlemen are that you had your adventure with yesterday."

Ingram raised his head at the two odious words very much as a horse would do if you were to explode two fog signals under his nose in succession; quickly enough, indeed, to intercept a warning and reproachful glance that the girl sent her mother. Mrs. Barbour clapped both hands playfully over her mouth. "Oh! now I have done it!" she exclaimed. Her eyes snapped with, perhaps, a shade more of malice than a kind-hearted old lady's should ever hold. Without being a scheming or a worldly woman, she resented a little, in her heart, the monopoly which this man had established over her child; a man so alien to her in thought, so sparing of speech, so remote from her ideal, which, diffuse enough in all truth, would perhaps have found it nearest realization just now in some florid, high-spirited lad, who would have brought her his socks to darn and his troubles to soothe of an evening, been "company," in a word, to the talkative, commonplace old woman. As far as she was concerned, Ingram swallowed his disappointments, and she rather suspected him of darning his own socks.

Fenella considered her mother for some time, though not as a resource to evade her lover's eye.

"What a rummy way you have of putting things, mother!" she said at last. "My 'adventure' with 'two gentlemen'!"

Paul's face was blank, like the page of a diary awaiting confidences.

Feeling herself at bay, Mrs. Barbour grew flustered and tearful.

"Well, well!" she exclaimed, waving her hands helplessly in the air. "I'm sure I'm sorry, Nelly, since you choose to make such a mystery of it. But what there is in it to make you both look as grave as judges, I can't see. I'm sure that, as your mother, I'd be the first to be offended if there was anything disrespectful."

An awkward silence followed her words, which Ingram was the first to break.

"I think, perhaps, you'd best tell now, Nelly," he said quietly.

The girl blushed and covered her eyes for a moment with her hands.

"It's so—so foolish," she said, clenching them with an impatient movement. "Oh, well, if I must, I must.... It was yesterday morning while you were both at breakfast. I ran down, you know, to catch the tide. After I had come out—oh, well, there wasn't a soul in sight—I thought they would all be at breakfast at the Grande Falaise; I was chilly, too, and there was a kind of tune in the sea. So, after I'd taken off my wet bathing-suit, I threw on my kimono and began to practise the last dance Madame de Rudder has been teaching me—you know the one, mother, where she won't let me use my feet as much as I want—out on the sand where it was hard. And then, like a little fool I am, I forgot everything, until I heard some one clapping hands and saying, 'Bravo!'—and I looked up—and there were two men on the dunes, smoking cigars—I suppose they were coming from the golf links to the hotel, and I don't know how long they'd been watching me, and—and," with sudden passion, "I just hate you, Paul, for dragging it out of me when I didn't want to tell."

And Fenella, already overwrought, hid her head in her mother's capacious lap and had her cry out.

Mrs. Barbour stroked the dark head gently, but like the wise old mother bird she was, made no attempt to check the burst of tears.

"Such a dancing girl she is," she murmured complacently, "and she does hate to have it talked about so. Do you know, Mr. Ingram, I only discovered it myself by accident, after it had been going on months and months. Do you remember, dearie, that awful day, the first time I was up after influenza, that Druce got the spot on her nose that the doctor said was erysipelas, and Twyford scalded her arm and hand making a poultice? It's the only time, I do believe, Nelly, I've ever spoken to you crossly."

A muffled voice, "You were horrid, mummy."

"Well, there, I really was, Mr. Ingram. I pushed the child out of the way and said, 'If you can't help, don't hinder. Run upstairs and play with the other ornaments!' I didn't think any more about it, with all that trouble on my hands, till about half an hour afterward, when down comes Miss Rigby with her face white—you know what a coward she is, Nelly—and in her dressing-gown, at nearly twelve! 'Do come up, Mrs. Barbour,' she says, 'I believe Rock has gone mad in the box-room and is dashing himself against the wall.' Oh dear! I ran upstairs with the poker, and what do you think it was, Mr. Ingram. My own crazy child, dancing and waving her arms about. Such a picture of fun as she looked!"

A hand was laid suddenly on her mouth, and a face, very flushed and penitent in its tumbled dark hair, emerged from between the parental knees.

"I'm a silly"—sniff—"fool"—sniff—said Fenella. "Paul, gimme my hank."

Ingram passed the handkerchief across the smouldering blaze. The girl looked at him as she blew her nose. He seemed absorbed, not angry, but queer, she thought. She had never seen his face look so wan and tired. He seemed to avoid her eyes.

"Aren't you well, Paul?" she asked at last.

Ingram seemed to shiver and then rouse himself. "I'm all right," he said; "but I think I'll go back to the chalêt. I've got letters to write. Isn't the sun grown pale? And I guess I've either caught cold or some one's walking backward and forward over my grave."

They went home together, for the women would not be left behind, taking the longer way in order to avoid the sand-hills. Along the loose, tiring beach—dried sea waifs crackling underfoot, by the douane with its toy battery and lounging sentry; up a narrow path that was half by-street and half flight of steps, near whose summit a Christ flung his saving arms wide over a yellow affiche of the Courses at Wimereux, and into a straggling village of low-browed houses, cream, pink, light-blue, and strong as castles, through whose doorways leather-faced crones and tow-headed children swarmed and tumbled. They were nearing the inn of the Toison d'Or, where the new road to the hotel turns out of the village, slowly, for Mrs. Barbour climbed with difficulty and rejected assistance, when two men in tweed jackets, flat-capped and flannel-trousered, swung round the corner. At their backs two shaggy town urchins straggled along, each with an arsenal of clubs and cleeks peeping over his shoulder. The two men raised their caps and bowed slightly, but certainly not in response to any recognition that any of the party accorded them. Fenella blushed and hung her head.

Paul turned sharply on his heel. "Are those the cads who stared at you?" he asked, in a voice which he took no pains to render inaudible.

Nelly caught his arm before she answered. "Hush, dear! Yes. You're not to be foolish," she added.

Her mother, glad of a respite, stopped and looked after them, too. She held it a legitimate source of pride that she had always had an eye for a fine man.

"Those are the two, then," she said triumphantly, with an air of sagacity justified. "Then, my dear, I can tell you who they are. The short, dark one is Mr. Dreyfus—no, Dollfus—who manages the 'Dominion' in London, and the big, handsome one with the loose hair under his cap at the back is Sir Bryan Lumsden, the millionaire, and a frightful reputation, my dear. Mrs. Lesueur told me all about him this morning when she came in to borrow Simone for ironing."

Meantime, the two men whom they had passed turned likewise, but only to whistle up their caddies, who, with an avidity for the "p'tit sou" which would seem to be sucked in with the maternal milk in French Flanders, were holding out claw-like hands to the family party and more especially to Ingram, who had already acquired an unfortunate reputation in this respect.

"What d'you make of it, Dolly?" the big man asked. "Husband?"

The Jew shook his head decisively. "No, no, my boy! She's not a marrit woman. Relations, more likely. Eh?—ah?"

"Or lovers, likelier still. It's highly respectable, anyway. They've got the old lady to come along. That looks as if he were French."

"I'd like to meet the liddle girl, alone," said Dollfus, fervently.

"Some dark night?—eh, Dolly!" remarked Sir Bryan, beginning to whip the Dominion director's stout calves and thighs with the handle of the putter he was carrying. "You're such a devil—such a devil, Dolly."

Mr. Dollfus raised a corrective hand.

"Don't mithtake my meaning, Lumpsden," he said, getting out of the sportive baronet's long reach as quickly as was consistent with dignity. "I only wanter tell her she's got a forchune in her feet and legth if she'd go in training. I oughter know something about legth, oughtn't I, old fellow. Becoth it's my bizzyness, ain't it, Lumpsden?"

"Tell the lunatic in the red shirt instead," the baronet suggested, derisively. "She's bored, anyway. See her bat her eyelid when we bowed? Oh yes, she did, Dolly. Just one little flicker—but I caught it. Hullo! there's Grogan and old Moon at the tenth hole."

And, this being a world where the incredible is always happening, it is possible that Bryan Lumsden didn't think of Fenella again that day.

III

AN ECLIPSE

Ingram took her down to the beach again that night, as he had promised, through a sparse, pungent pine wood that by day and night seemed to keep something of the peace of the primeval world in its coniferous shade, and across a trackless little wilderness of sand-hills, scooped and tortured by the earthquake storms of winter into strange, unnatural contours, over which the moon to-night spread a carpet so white, so deceptively level, that often they could only be guessed by the abrupt rise or fall of the ground beneath one's feet. Rabbits popped in and out of the earth, the sharp reeds that bind the sand barriers together bit spitefully at the girl's tender ankles, and withered branches, catching in her silk skirt, snapped dryly as her lover helped her through the hedges with which the dunes are ribbed.

Although the night was cool, she was wearing the thin dress she had put on for dinner. Over his shoulder Ingram had slung a soldier's cloak of blue-gray cloth, long and wide, that was to cover them in to-night as it had often covered them before. Fenella was already familiar with its every fold—knew exactly when the rough backing of the clasp would chafe her delicate cheek, could recall at any moment the peculiar fragrance of cigar smoke with which the heavy frieze was impregnated, and some other smell, stranger still, sweet, foreign and spicy, that she could not define, but which, evanescent as it was—the very ghost of an odor—clung obstinately to her skin and dress, and which she loved to lie awake at night and feel exhaled from her thick hair like some secret earnest of joy upon the morrow.

She slid her hand into the man's as they descended the slippery, needle-carpeted path, and turned up a face to him in the darkness of the wood that was contrite and humble as a reproved child's. She had been a bad child, in fact; had failed in sympathy—had told him in her passion that she hated him. Hated—him! When they had found the fire, still smouldering, and had blown it into a blaze, she crept silently within his arms, under the folds of the cloak, and, laying her head upon his breast, watched the flames, creeping like fern-fronds through the gnarled roots and sodden bleached faggots that Paul had heaped upon it. She began to suck her thumb too: always with Fenella the sign of a chastened spirit. The moon, serenely unconscious of the earth shadow that was creeping upon her, made a path of crinkled glory across the waters, straight toward them, and, like foam at the foot of a silver cascade, the phosphorescent surf tumbled, soft and luminous, along the shore.

"Are you warm enough?" Ingram asked presently, feeling a tremor, perhaps, in the yielding figure that rested in his arms.

Fenella nodded her head, but she might more truly have told him that she was cold and sick. For her the night was full of voices that threatened her happiness. The ripple of the cold wind along dry grass at her back, the soft thud and effervescence of the surf against the sand, were all so many whispers telling her that her lover was going—going to some other woman who could help him, and away from the weak arms that only clung and hindered. She had no confidence in herself—no belief in her own power to hold him a moment, once his will should feel an alien attraction. The very profuseness of the poor child's passion, its abandonment of one uninvaded reserve after another, had been proof of this inward unrest. Let no mistake be made. Fenella was a good girl, who could by no possibility become other than a good woman: nevertheless it is as true as it is, perhaps, disquieting that she might have remained at the same time happier and more maidenly in contact with an affection less worthy and less spiritual than that which she had encountered. For, so long as the attraction of sex for sex, beneath all modern refinements and sophistications, remains endowed with anything of the purpose for which nature instituted it—so long as its repulsions are a definite distance, to be annihilated toward a definite end, so long, if one party to the vital bargain hangs unduly back, must the other press unduly forward.

She was silent so long that Ingram put out his hand, and, touching her cheek, found it wet.

"You're crying!" he exclaimed sharply.

"I'm n-not," Fenella protested unevenly, and even as she spoke the great drops splashed down on his hand.

"Nelly, look up! Do you love me as much as you say?"

"Oh, my heart!—my heart!" she sobbed, covering his mouth with kisses, salt as the sea. And while she kissed him he was making a mental note that women were unduly robust on the emotional side.

"If you do," said he, "you'll stop crying—at once."

He spoke so sternly that the girl clenched her hands and struggled and fought with her sorrow.

"That's better," he said, when, by dint of swallowing her tears, she was, outwardly at least, a little calmer. "I'm sorry if I spoke harshly just now," he went on; "but everybody has a last straw. A woman crying seems to be mine. It—it strains my heart."

"Do you think I like it any better?" his sweetheart asked, desperately.

"I suppose," he hazarded, with a shyness that was almost grotesque, "it's because I'm going to-morrow."

"Oh yes, dear, yes," the girl told him, eagerly seeking relief in words since tears were forbidden her. "Oh, Paul! how I shall miss you! You don't know what it's meant to me to have you living in the same house—to even know you were sleeping near me. Darling, do you know I've sometimes wished you snored so I might hear you at night. Don't stop me, love!" she went on, buttoning and unbuttoning his coat with nervous fingers. "Let me confess my full shamelessness. I've even helped Simone do your room sometimes in the morning. You're not shocked—are you? Oh! you are," she cried piteously, drawing away from his arm. "You think me unmaidenly. But I can't help it, love; I can't help it. Don't you see? You are you. It's different to all the rest of the world."

Ingram's chest rose and fell unevenly beneath her cheek. She could not but perceive his distress.

"Listen, Nelly," he said huskily. "Don't cry again; but—but perhaps it's a good thing for you I am going away for a while. Things are so unsettled, and it may help you—get you used, supposing the worst happens, to the idea. There's so much in custom—in habit."

"Paul!" she cried once, and grew rigid in his arms. It was a death-cry, and he flinched. Who has struck at life and not drawn the blade away quicker because the first blow went home.

"Nelly, I'm not young."

"I don't care if you were sixty—seventy." Fenella was not crying now, but fighting for her love like the brave little girl she was.

"I'm a man without home, or country, or friends."

"I'm not a baby. I'll go with you wherever you like. We'll make them for ourselves, together."

"And I'm deadly poor."

"I'll lend you money, Paul. How much do you want? I've seventy pounds in the Post-Office."

I think if I had been Ingram and had only one more kiss to give, I would have given it her for this; but I am trying to tell the truth; and the truth is that these futile interruptions to his hateful task harassed and angered him. It is so much easier to confess to sin than to failure.

"Nelly! don't interrupt me! Let me say what I have to. I'm telling you that at thirty-seven, an age when most men have home and wife and children and see their way clear to the end, I haven't taken the first step upon a road that is haunted by tragedy and littered with the bones of those who have fallen by the way."

"I'll wait for you," said poor Fenella, but no longer with the same energy. What a gorgon head has common-sense to turn hearts of flesh to stone!

"Yes, you'll wait for me! Spend your youth waiting for me; your middle age—waiting. We'll save every cent; spend hours figuring out on just how much or how little life for two can be supported. Hundreds of people are doing that to-day who, thirty years ago, would have been setting out, full of hope and confidence, to make money. That's a by-product of industrial development. And, if we're lucky, just about the time your own daughters should be telling you their love affairs, you'll come to me and we'll crawl away together to some cottage in Cornwall, where I'll cultivate vegetables a little, rheumatically, and at night you'll sit opposite me by the kitchen fire—we'll call it our 'ingle-nook'—and listen to an old man babbling of his wrongs between spoonfuls of bread and milk, with enlightening criticisms upon the fools who succeeded where he was too clever not to fail.

"You'll think it strange, I suppose," he went on, no more interrupted now by her sobs than by the sough of the sea; "strange that I should wait until now, just when I've heard I'm to have the chance I've been whining for, to realize what a phantom I've committed myself to following. But it's not as strange as it looks. As long as there's some petty practical obstacle in the way, mercifully or unmercifully everything else is obscured by it. It's like a hill, hiding the desert you'll have to cross when you've climbed to the top. Oh, Nelly! look at the moon!"

Little by little, as the man talked and the woman paid in tears and heartscald for the reckless passion of her first love, the portent they had come out to watch was passing over their heads. At first it was but a spot—a little nibble at the silver rim of the great dead, shining orb; then a stain, that grew and spread, as though the moon were soaking up the blackness of the sky; last it took shape and form of the world's circumference, and for once man might watch his earth as, maybe, from some happier but still speculative planet his earth is watched, and idly conjecture at what precise spot upon that smooth segmental shadow any mountain or plain, roaring city or dark tumbling ocean that he has mapped and named, might lie. Two thousand years ago—a day as men have learned to count time—this man and woman, who had come out to watch the moon's eclipse for mere diversion, for an effect of light and shade, and who, in the multiplied perplexities of their own artificial life had even forgotten to watch it at all, would have been lying, prone upon their faces, wailing—praying until the ominous shadow had passed, while in the fire before them some victim of flock and herd smoked propitiation to the threatening heavens. And out of all the straining and striving toward knowledge of those two thousand years—out of all the Promethean struggle wherein learning, hot to unlearn, can but lop off one visionary beak or claw to find itself clutched more cruelly in another, not enough wisdom reached them now to comfort one simple, trustful heart, or to teach an intellect that had roamed the earth to its own undoing, the primal art of all—how to rear a roof and feed a hearth for the loving creature that clung at his breast.

No! Nelly wouldn't look at the moon. She left his arms and sat apart, bolt upright; her lithe body quivering with resolution.

"Paul Ingram," she said incisively, "I've listened patiently to you and you'll have to listen to me. You've been prophesying woe and misery, and now it's my turn. Shall I tell you what's really going to happen?"

Hope is like measles. No one is too young or too foolish to catch it from. In spite of himself the man's face brightened.

"Well, what's going to happen?"

"As soon as we get home I'm going to have Mme. de Rudder to tea, just our two selves, nice and comfy, and when she's lapped up her cream and I've stroked her down a little, I'm going to say, 'Now, Madame! For the last two years you've been buttering me up, to my face and behind my back, and showing me round, and if you've meant half you said' (and I think she does, Paul, though she's such an old pussy), 'there ought to be a living for me somewhere.' And then—oh, Paul!—I'll work and I'll work and I'll w-o-r-k-work. I'm not sure whether I'll see you"—with an adorable look askance—"perhaps once a week, if you're good. And, at the end of the year, I'll bring you a nice, newly signed contract at—oh! well, pounds a week, 'cos I've got a head, which you'll never have, poor dear. And then—don't stop me please—we'll get married, and have a little flat of our own or turn ma's lodgers out, and you'll write your mis-e-ra-ble, mis-e-ra-ble books all day," she took his head in her hands and shook it gently from side to side; "and at night you'll call for me and I'll go home with you, sir, in my own dear little taxicab, all warm and cosy from dancing—and, dear, you shall never have another money trouble or even hear the word mentioned as long as you live. Now, what does he think of that?"

She looked closely at her lover's face and suddenly shrank away, with a little cry, at what she saw there.

"Think of it?" Paul repeated, his nostrils quivering. "I'll soon tell you what I think of it. That if I didn't know your words were a mere childish fancy—if I really thought you were going to dance on the stage in London or Paris or New York or any city I've been in, I believe, Nelly"—he paused a moment—"yes, I believe I could bear to take you up in my arms, now, as you are, and carry you down to that sea and hold you under until you were dead."

Fenella moaned and covered her face with her hands. Then she jumped up. Paul caught at her silken skirt, a momentary cold fear at his heart.

"Nelly, stop! I know I shouldn't have said that."

She disengaged herself with a swift turn. "Let me go!" she cried angrily. "I'm not the sort of person that commits suicide. You can drown me afterward if you like. I'm going to dance first."

"To dance?" Ingram repeated, thunderstruck. "Out here? Sit down at once! Sit down," he pleaded in a changed voice. "Be a good child."

"I'm not a child," she cried rebelliously; "that's the mistake you're making. And I won't be forever checked and scolded by you, Paul. I will have some comfort. Oh, I knew you'd laugh and storm. I'm only a silly little thing that dances and that you pet when she's good"; her eyes flamed at him. "But it means as much to me as your books and long words do to you."

She stopped, not because she was ashamed, but because her mouth was inconveniently full of the pins which she was pulling from a rather elaborate "chevelure." She shook her head with the usual transforming result, kicked off her shoes, and, bending down, began to unfasten her long silk stockings under her skirt. Paul turned away his head, and perhaps it was as well she did not see the disgust in the averted face.

"Sing something," she commanded, throwing the long silk stockings on the sand and stretching her bare toes.

"I don't know anything," doggedly.

"Oh yes, you do! Sing the Algerian recruit song."

"It's too sad for you in your present mood of exaltation."

Fenella did not seem to resent the withering tone. She had drawn a little away from the fire and was looking upward, her hands clasped behind her neck and under her hair.

"Just to get a note," she said, dreamily.

Without quite knowing why, and in the teeth of his own shy distaste, Ingram began to sing. He had a fine baritone voice, to be exact where exactness is not called for, full of strength and feeling, that was none the less tuneful because it had only been trained to the tramp of gaitered feet along the blinding white chaussées of French Africa. The song rose and fell, haunting and melodious—

"Me voilà engagé

Pour l'amour d'une blond—e...."

The fire was between them, throwing all the beach into shadow, and, sung thus, squatted upon the sand, and his feet to the dying embers, with the old song so many memories crowded upon the man's own brain—so many visions peopled the lurid shadows around him—that he had arrived nearly at its end before he thought of regarding the swaying, tossing figure beyond with any degree of attention. But, when he did, the last words died away in his throat. This is not the place to describe Fenella Barbour's dancing. Many pens have done it justice. It has been described and overdescribed—ignorantly arraigned and disingenuously defended. Tyros of the press, anxious to win their spurs, and with a store of purple phrases to squander, have attempted, through a maze of adjectives and synonyms, to convey or reawaken its charm. She burst on the world in a time when such things were already grown a weariness to the plain man; yet never, I believe, was any success due more to the frank and spontaneous tribute of the people who sit in cheap seats to a wonderful thing wonderfully done, and less to the kid-gloved applause of stalled and jaded eclecticism in search of new sensation. And the key to it all, I believe—though mine is only one opinion among many—was to be sought in the mechanical precision with which, through all the changes and postures of arms and body above the hips, unstable and sensuous as vapor, the feet below the swirling skirts beat—beat out the measure of the dance unerringly and incisively as the percussion of a drummer's sticks upon the sheepskin. It was this that, for the man in the street at least, lifted her art out of trickery and imposture and veiled indelicacy into some region where his own criticism felt itself at home. "A clog-dancer with sophistications," she has been called; but at least it was upon honest toes and heels that Fenella danced into popular favor.

And all this the man by the fire watched with a sinking heart. Not altogether unmoved. He could not, being flesh and blood, remember that the girl dancing before him had just left his arms, and at the close of her transport would fling herself, breathless and glowing, into them again, eager for his approval, and spending upon his lips the aftermath of her excitement, without many a desire and emotion of his youth awaking and clamoring for its deferred due. But his desires had grizzled with his beard: he had analyzed the emotions and discarded them. Where the passions are concerned intellect is never impartial. It must be either oil or water—foster or extinguish. And he had chosen once for all the harder way. He was full of shyness, constraint, and the panic instinct of flight: shocked yet arrested, like some hermit of the Libyan desert watching the phantoms of his old life at Rome or Alexandria beckon him from his cave. Not only was the old dispensation void. He could imagine no ground upon which it could be renewed. His authority had been one of those gentle tyrannies of heart over heart, that are valid only so long as they are unquestioned. Having claimed her liberty, though it was but for an hour—resumed the possession of herself though it was only to dazzle his eyes—Fenella became to him from that moment a new woman, to be wooed and won afresh; and, being a wistful far more than a lustful man, in the very measure that the delayed revelation of her beauty penetrated his senses, he shrank further and further from its recapture.

It must have been a strange sight, had any been there to see it. The dying fire; the shadowed moon; the man with his head bent above his knees; and the barefooted girl, with fluttering skirts and dishevelled hair, singing and dancing on the sand before his averted face.

IV

TO INTRODUCE PAUL INGRAM

Exactly why it should be I who sit down to write of the loves and errors of Paul Ingram, his descent into hell and resurrection therefrom, is a thing that is not quite clear to me now, but which will not become clearer the more I try to justify it. It is certainly not because I was at one crisis of his life the instrument to save him, since I know how very careless Fate can be in the choice of her instruments. I am not his oldest friend, nor should I care to say—his dearest. We have done a good deal of work together—shared a good deal of opprobrium. I still bear upon my forehead the mark made by a stone that was meant for a better man, on the wild night when the Home Defence League roughs broke up our meeting at Silvertown. Yet, and notwithstanding, I am by no means sure, should the inevitable happen in my own lifetime, whether, of all the disciples who pass from the oration at the graveside to the whispers over the funeral baked meats, mine will be the pen chosen to write the life—mine the fingers authorized to untie the letters—of Paul Ingram, novelist, dreamer, and reformer.

A good deal of what I have written I was witness to myself; a good deal more I learnt from Ingram during what, with so many cleaner and pleasanter ways of leaving the world, we all hope will be his last illness of the kind; and a not considerable part has been told me by his wife, for whom it is notorious that I entertain an affection as hopeless as it is happily engrossing. Even so, when all is admitted, each part assigned to its proper source of inspiration, I am aware a good deal will remain unaccounted for. This I have no alternative but to leave to the sagacity of my readers. Even to their discretion—a little.

To begin with myself, only that I may get myself the sooner out of the way. My earlier years I have regarded from different points of view at different periods of my life. It is only comparatively lately that I have attained the true point of view and come to see that all the early portion should be regarded as a joke. For what legend can ask to be taken seriously whose sole remaining evidence is a small white towel, of the sort technically known, I believe, as "huckaback," lying folded now in a drawer of the desk at which I am writing. Two simple motions of the extensor and flexor muscles of one arm, and the proof of former greatness might lie beneath my eyes. But I will not make them. I know too well what would happen next. My fingers would not rest until the smooth bleached folds were shaken loose, nor my eyes until, written in indelible ink that successive launderings have only made blacker, the following legend appeared before them:

"J. B. Prentice.
Between-Maid—No. 8."

You see, when a man has fallen, suddenly, from a great height, he is not expected to record his impressions as the third, the second, the first floor windows flashed successively past his startled eyes. He wakes up, if he wakes at all, in a nice, cosy atmosphere of iodoform, neatly and securely packed in antiseptic dressing, with a fluffy, frilly angel at his side, who has been waiting for those tired, tired eyes to open, and who puts her finger to her lips, the moment they do, for fear her voice shan't reach the muffled ears, and says—you know what she says—

"Lie still! You're not to talk nor to agitate yourself."

So I don't propose to agitate myself, and though I've only just begun to talk, it shall be of something better worth while. Farewell, then, for the last time, great showy mansion among the Chislehurst hills, with your orchard and shrubberies, flower gardens and pergolas, your pineries and fineries, your two great cedars, inlaid in the pale enamel of the sky, and shaven lawns, across which and toward the pink-striped marquee a butler hurries with an armful of white napery and flashing silver. And to you, dear little fellow-worker—Polly or Molly or Betsy, as the case may be—who once wiped your honest, grimy phiz on No. 8, a quite especial grip of the hand, wherever you be to-day. Your reproach long since kissed away, I hope; suckling some good fellow's children; cooking some good fellow's meals. Life is so hard on the between-maid.

When I awoke it was in a Pimlico bed-sitting-room, writing literally for dear life, and for life that is growing dearer each year. I have a fatal facility for descriptive writing, and my speciality is the psychology of crowds. As old Winstanley of the Panoply would say when assigning me to anything I was to write up from the non-technical point of view, Aeroplane Meet, Palace Cup-tie, Royal Progress or what not: "Off with you, my boy! Column and a half, and a little more 'tripe' than last time. Turn 'em all loose, 'the hoarse cheer,' 'the lump in the throat,' and the 'mist over the eyes.' Don't be afraid! People have time for a little sentiment on Sundays."

I think they have. And I think I'm a witness to the price they are prepared to pay for it. Once a year, too, I write a novel whose circulation, for some occult reason, always stops short at eighteen hundred. Often when I'm reporting a football match, or anything like that, I try to count eighteen hundred, roughly, and imagine how my people would look all bunched together. A good many readers, but—what a gate!

Of all the pranks America has played upon us, I count not the least its having sent us an Ingram as a recruit to the cause of reform. The name is familiar over there, but it is quoted, I fancy, rather as a peg upon which would-be subverters of established anarchy hang their arguments than as authority for democratic ideals. Colonel Ingram, of Omaha, president of the Mid-West Chilling and Transportation Syndicate, is of the family; so is the Hon. Randolph Ingram, the great "Corporation Judge" of the Supreme Court. Jared Ingram, of Milburn, author of that contribution to Christian Unity, "A Rod for the Back of Dumb Devills," was one ancestor, and Elmer Ingram, the soldier-lawyer who helped to bait Arnold to his treason and damnation, was another. These names are not the fruit of any research on my part: I cull them from a little book which I saw at Ingram's rooms quite early in our acquaintance, and which, with a smile at my curiosity, he was good enough to lend me. It was one of those boastful little pamphlets "for private circulation," which are multiplying across the Atlantic, as a caste which has secured an undue share of material welfare becomes conscious of its origins and uneasy amid the obliterations of the democratic spirit. Of those we love, however, even the generations are dear to us, and I insist on recalling, with vicarious pride, that "Hump. Ingraham and Damaris his wyffe," who landed at South Bay from the brig Steadfast in Worcester year, and rode off, saddle and pillion, through forest paths to the clearing where their home was to be raised, were of good and gentle English stock, from Ministerley in Derbyshire. Sweet little Damaris (one almost loves her for her name) wilted and died within the year, but the task of increasing and multiplying, and getting hold of the land, was taken up by a sterner and, let us hope, stronger, Deborah, eight months later, and thence the seed has spread, through a riot of Bestgifts, Resolveds, Susannahs and Hepzibahs, broad of breast and hip, strong of limb, stout and undismayed of heart. Westward—always westward. Across Ohio and Indiana, striking its roots north and south in farm and factory, store and workshop; halting here for twenty, there for thirty, years, but always, as a new generation grows to manhood, up and away again. Over the plains in crawling wagons, too impatient to await the harnessing of the iron horse—the riveting of the strangling fetters of steel: through the lawless and auriferous canyons of Colorado and Nevada: blown along on the mad wind of the 'forties and 'fifties, until, amid the grapes and roses of the Pacific slope and upon the pearly Californian beach, a wind, warm and wasted and very old from across the great still ocean, whispered them, "Thus far!"

Paul was the last Ingram that will ever be born in the old homestead. His father he never saw; his sister died as a girl, and his mother, struck down by some obscure woman's disease, moved, within his memory, only from her bed to her chair, and from her chair to her bed again. He says he was a lazy, loafing, dreamy boy, with very little interest in anything beyond his meals; but the beautiful words in which he has enshrined that early home for us are proof how busily his brain must have been employed in those seemingly idle hours, and how keenly the spiritual significance of all that he saw came home to him from the first. Probably in the mere work of the house there was not enough to occupy strong, bony hands, such as his. Successive mortgages had nibbled the property away piecemeal, sparing only the house and yard; and even for that the last mortgage was running a race with death. He went to free school, but seems to have had few companions of his age. The village was depopulated; the house-doors opened only on old faces. He used sometimes to sit alone through a whole summer afternoon, he has told me, swinging on the garden gate and whittling wood. From the fence an old beaten track led away, through a marsh where a few ducks quacked and waddled still, up the shoulder of a little hill, and away around one of those woods of second growth that have sprung up all over the old pilgrim clearings—right into the heart of the setting sun. Often, he assures me, on looking up quickly from his whittling, he has seen an arm and hand beckoning him westward, from the edge of the trees. Set aside the stubborn mysticism that could conceive such a vision, and can still maintain its actuality—is not the picture a sufficiently haunting one? Within, the mother, waiting for death; outside, the lad, straining to be gone. And the old wattled kitchen chimney, smoking thinly, and the red glory through the sapling wood, and the drowsy quack of the ducks!

After Mrs. Ingram's death the mortgage foreclosed upon the farm and its contents with the precision and completeness of a highly organized machine. It is proof how forced a growth the modern cult of the family in America is, that it never seems to have occurred to son or mother to appeal to any of the prosperous breed whom the old house had sent forth. The land had long been earmarked for the great weighing-scale factory that has since galvanized Milburn into strenuous life, and made it a sort of industrial model, which commissions and deputations from Europe are taken to see, presumably, says Ingram, as a warning to what devilish lengths efficiency can be carried. The old homestead was torn down to make a site for the boiler-house. Nothing is left of it now except one rafter, in the lavishly endowed Museum, with what is presumably an Indian arrow-head still embedded in the wood.

I am bound to add that my indignation upon the subject never roused Paul to a corresponding heat. To his mind, already set upon first causes, no doubt it seemed very natural, a mere incident in the exploitation that dubs itself progress. He ate his last meal in the despoiled kitchen, warmed his coffee over a few sticks on the hearth that had burned away ten forests, and set off, by the path up the hill and round the corner of the wood, to wherever the arm might be beckoning him.

The lad was only fourteen when he left home, but tall and strong for his years. He tramped to Philadelphia, "jumped" the freight by night as it pulled out of the clattering, flaring yard, was shunted into a siding at Scranton, forgotten, and found there three days later starving and all but mad. From Scranton he beat his way to St. Louis; washed dishes and set up pins in a skittle alley; tired soon of the smoke and blood-warm water of the old French city; fed cattle in the stockyards of Kansas, wrestled a drunken brakeman for his life on the roof of the rocking, bumping cars halfway down the Missouri canyon, and wrestled him so well that the man begged a job for him at the journey's end. He was jacking wagons in the Union Pacific workshops at Rawlins when the White River expedition came through, and joined the force as teamster at a dollar a day. He smelt powder for the first time, lay trapped for ten days in the stinking corral at Snake River, when the water failed and the relief went wide, and "Bummer Jim" and "Flies Above," having thoughtfully strewn the carcasses of three hundred slaughtered horses to windward, serenaded the poisoned pale-faces nightly with copious obscenity, the burden of which was "come and be killed." After the relief and disbandment of the force, he stayed on in the Rockies and grew to manhood amid the silent aromatic barrenness of its mesas and arroyos. Settlers were dribbling into the old Indian reservation. He was in turn horse-jingler, range-rider, prospector, stage-driver; built fences, freighted logs, dug ditches; spotted the banks of Bear Creek and Milk Creek, with his campfires and tomato tins, and was happy, until something, indefinable as the scent that steals down wind to the hunted stag, told him that the civilization from which he had fled was hard upon his heels again. He left Colorado the year before the railroad came through, and turned his face east again.

I know I am telling the story of Ingram's early life very baldly and badly. You see, there is so little romance in it; just the instinctive repulsion that one so often notices in the history of the world's reformers toward the thing they are to do battle with in the end. As Paul used to tell it himself, leaning forward over the fire in my stuffy little sitting-room, his strong, lean hands clasped round the bowl of his pipe and the smoke drifting lazily about his moustache and beard, it was only from an occasional gleam of the deep-set eye or quiver of the thin nostril, as he talked, that one could gather how deeply every lesson of force and fraud had sunk into his soul, to bear its fruit later in unalterable resolve. I never saw him really moved from his stoicism but once. We had been walking home together from dinner through the West End streets and had been unwilling witnesses of a sordid detail of their policing. A woman, crying and screaming, was being led away, not roughly, I think, but very determinedly, by two men in blue. Her hair had come loose, and one great curl hung to her waist. Her fur stole had tumbled in the roadway, and some careless Samaritan had thrown it over her shoulders, besmearing the velvet coat with mud. We were very silent during the rest of the walk, and when we got to my rooms Ingram unbosomed himself.

It was when he was working his way back east in the shiftless and circuitous fashion that had become habitual to him. He got off the train at a small city, the seat of a state university. He wouldn't tell me the name, but I imagine it was somewhere in the Southwest. It was eight o'clock on a fall morning, the hour at which the stores are opening and the saloons being swept out. As he left the depot, his grip in his hand, on a hunt for breakfast and work, he became aware of some unusual excitement. Men were leaving their houses, collarless and in shirt-sleeves—calling to one another and running down the street. At the end, where it joined the main business avenue, a crowd had gathered—old men, young men, even children, and a few women. "And what do you think they were watching? Well, sir, there in God's blessed morning light, three women in silk dresses, with satin shoes, and bare heads and shoulders, were sweeping the filthy street with brooms and shovels and pitching the mud into a zinc handcart. Think of it, Prentice! Every one of them somebody's daughter—some mother's little girl. They were all good-lookers; but one, who might be my own child to-night, had a face like an angel—fallen if you like—with a slender neck such as the artist men we've been talking to to-night rave about, that's got those cute little blue shadows where it joins the shoulders. She was the one that had the spade. A man in the crowd told me what it all meant. They were sporting girls from a joint that had been pulled three times in the last month. The magistrates had got tired, and, instead of fining them, had worked in a state law two hundred years old that treats such women as tramps and vagrants and sets 'em to scavenging. 'And I guess,' my man adds, 'that's where they b'long all right.' He was a patriarchal old billy-goat, Prentice, with a nice long Pharisee beard, and, I'll bet, a sin for every hair. While he was pitching me his simple lay, my little girl looks up, and, either seeing I was a stranger or because mine was the only face there wasn't contempt in—or worse—gave a sort of heart-breaking smile; and just as I was trying not to see it, a lad behind me, with his hat over his eyes and a cigar sticking out of his cheek, calls out:

"'Get on to Mamie, fellows, with the mud-scoop!'

"Well, Prentice," (Paul breathes hard) "I hit him, clean and sweet, on the cheekbone, just under his damned leering swine's eye. It was very irregular: I suppose I should have given him a chance, but, by God! I couldn't wait. I've had to fight all my life, in warm blood and cold blood, but I've never hit a man as hard as that before or since. He went down like a skittle, and I thought I'd killed him; but the boy was full of gall and devil, and knew a lot besides. He fought me five minutes good before they carried him into a drug store. And how those canting woman-drivers came round! They wanted me to drink, wanted to carry my grip—asked me to name the job. But I went and sat in their depot, without breakfast and with a face like a boil, for four hours until the next train pulled out. I shook their mud off my feet pretty smart. I'd have thrown away the shoes if I'd had another pair. But I couldn't shake off what I'd seen.

"No, no, Prentice," he went on, stubbornly, as I, with my cockney worldly wisdom, tried to argue him out of what I thought an unhealthy view of a vexed question; "No, sir: you can split men up into sheep and goats, bad cases and hard cases; but women stand or fall together. Everything you do to one you do to the rest. On every woman's face—good or bad, white or black—I've seen since, down to that woman to-night, I've seen the shadow of the same wrong."

He was twenty-five years old when the desire of seeing Europe took hold on him. He had no money, and, though he was strong and handy, there was nothing he could do that any other strong man could not do as well. He had his health, however, and staked that. Wages were high in one department of the smelter at Leadville, for reasons that forced themselves on the bluntest intelligence after a few months. He worked there for a year, laying money by and fighting with the nausea that grew upon him week by week. At the end of the twelve months, reeling, half-blind, and with his teeth loose in their gums, but with more money in his pockets than he had ever owned before, he turned his face to the healing desert. An old miner turned ranchman found him at sunset lying under a rock, his face pressed to the earth, and quivering, like a landed trout, in the full grip of the deadly lead-sickness. He laid him across his pony, took him to his mud-roofed hovel close by, kept him for six months in his own blankets, gave him all the milk of his one cow, drove him to the railroad as soon as he was able to travel, and—bade him God-speed with a torrent of invective that struck even Leadville dumb. Ingram had committed the capital error of offering him pay for his hospitality, an error over which I believe he broods to-day.

By the time he was fit to work again his savings were gone. He was twenty-six, and Europe as far off as ever. This time, having damaged his health, he staked his reason, and for two years herded sheep on the Wyoming plains. Herding sheep seems at first cry a simple, pastoral task, with Pleasant Sunday Afternoon Biblical Associations. I must take Paul's word for it, then, that some special danger either to body or soul attends it, and that few men retire from it with a competence except to go into a madhouse or found a new religion. In either case, he says, they will have seen "Hell on the plains." The day before Ingram left for the sheep country he bought for a few dollars the entire stock of a misguided Englishman who was trying to sell second-hand books in Cheyenne City, loaded them into his grub-wagon and read them, slowly, one by one, in the exact order or disorder in which they were packed, and with a cold fear at his heart as the second year drew to a close, that his shepherding would outlast them. It seems absurd, but, as far as I can gather, this has been Ingram's sole literary education.

Either the wages of loneliness, or, I fancy, something else of which he has not told me, must have given Paul his heart's desire, for, two years afterward, at the recruiting office in the Rue St. Dominique, which has been many a good man's alternative to Seine water or the cold muzzle-end, he enlisted in the French Foreign Legion.

Whatever his reasons for this step (and I never was told them), I think the five years that Paul spent under the iron discipline of the Legion cured what, with all due allowance made for the strange ways by which men find themselves, was becoming an incurable unrest. Among the sad middle-aged soldiers who were his comrades, many of whom had come a longer and a stranger way than he, to find a hard bed and a bloody grave at the end, something, I believe, which he had roamed the world a-seeking and which had evaded him till now, was found at last. Out of that uneasy human cauldron, into which the deserter casts his broken oath, and the roué his disillusionment, and the unloved his loneliness, and the branded their shame, and to which, as long as it or its like shall endure, from time to time the artist will turn for inspiration, the brave man for opportunity, the coward, perhaps, for the stimulus which his own quailing heart denies him, and the saint for relief of temptation, and the hungry for bread, a vision, I believe, did arise for this lonely, unlettered American which the others missed, a knowledge was gained that all the schools and universities of the world could not have taught him: the vision and the knowledge of the human heart.

He was thirty-four years old when he left the Legion—a little gaunt and worn. He had given the world twenty years' hard service, and had a worsted stripe on one arm for his earnings.

V

"SAD COMPANY"

I first met Ingram by chance at the old Café à peu près in Greek Street. The À peu près of those days was far from being the institution which, in the capable hands of Philippe, the sulky waiter, who took to himself Madame's moustached daughter plus Madame's economies, it has since become—an over-lighted, bruyant restaurant of two stories and a basement, wherein an eighteen-penny meal of six exiguous courses, served at inhospitable speed to hurried suburban playgoers, is raised to the dignity of a diner français by various red and yellow compounds which masquerade under the names of the old French provinces of the midi. Then it was nothing but a secluded back room, panelled and painted green, with an oval table in the centre, round which the little circle of which I was, if not an ornament, at least an accredited unit—free lances of the press, war correspondents stranded during lengthening periods of peace and ill-will among nations, obscure authors and unbought painters—met nightly to dine and to nurse our chilled ambitions, under Madame's supplemental smile and in the warmth of a roaring fire which, during nine months of the year, was burning under the heavy Jacobean mantel.

Strangers were not exactly resented at the À peu près, but by an elaborate unconsciousness of their presence, to which the Oxford manner of one or two of us was a great assistance, we contrived for a long time to keep the circle restricted. Thus it happened that the bronzed and bearded man who spoke French so volubly at coming and going, and who seemed so little discountenanced by our exclusive attitude—glad, indeed, to be let alone—had been an irregular visitor for some weeks before we entered upon any conversation. One night the talk had turned, as it often did, upon the strong British preference for death as a preliminary to appreciation in matters literary or artistic, and little Capel, burrowing, as the subject drooped, into the obvious for a suitable remark, repeated that well-known legend—Milton's ten pounds for "Paradise Lost." The big man at my shoulder laughed.

"Fancy," said he, "any one getting as much as that for a poem to-day."

I turned, before the guard had descended on his eyes, and saw in them an expression that I, of all men, should recognize at the first glance: the sickness of the literary hope deferred.

We had become sufficiently intimate for me to receive a call from him, at my rooms, during an attack of the gout, which is an inheritance from Chislehurst, before he mentioned his book. I grieve to-day, remembering how often he was on the point of doing so, and waited in vain for the word from me that would have made the task less irksome than, I am sure, it was at last. By what I know now isn't a coincidence, his final appearance in Pimlico with the dreadful brown-paper parcel under his arm followed upon a period of three or four months during which he had practically disappeared from my consciousness. He looked worn, I thought, and had a new trouble in his eyes. He told me his story shamefacedly, and stammering like a schoolboy.

He had written a book, a novel, and could not get it published. None of the houses to which he had offered it advanced any reason for rejection, and in the one or two cases where he had pressed for one, seemed to think his insistence a solecism. He understood I not only wrote but published. Would it be troubling me unduly.... If I wasn't too busy....

Well, it was a great worry. I was busy just then too, after my futile fashion; but somehow it didn't seem the thing to have that man stammering and blushing before a wretched little ink-slinger like myself, and I tendered the vague service that is known as one's "best." But I was unaffectedly sorry the thing had happened. It is such happenings that, in literary circles, write FINIS to many a promising friendship. Ten men will lend you a pound for one that will lend you his countenance.

It was six o'clock the next morning when my lamp suddenly flared and went out. I stretched myself—realized that the fire was out as well, that I was cold and stiff, that dawn was coming up over the roofs of the stuccoed terrace opposite, and that the reason I had forgotten light and fire and the march of time lay in a disreputable, dog-eared typed manuscript that I had begun in weariness, gone on with in half-resentful surprise, and finished in a complete oblivion of everything save the swift rush of joys and fears, sorrows and mistakes to a doom that never befell. I remember a funny swelled feeling, as though I had been crying internally.

It is late in the day to attempt a criticism or even an appreciation of "Sad Company." Even as it stands to-day, in the close stereotype of the popular reprint, it is flawed and marred to my mind with many a naïveté and rawness, with here and there one of those lapses into the banal that are an evil legacy to American literature from the days of Poe and Hawthorne. Imagine what it must have been before, fearfully and reverently, for I knew I was handling a masterpiece, I helped brush off a little of the clay that still clung to it from the pit in which it had been cast.

What I did, then and there, was to sit down, chilled and numbed as I was, in the raw morning light, and write to Ingram bidding him, on pain of perpetual displeasure, repair to me that evening, to be severely rebuked for his presumption in having, without previous apprenticeship or servitude, taken his livery and chair with the pastmasters and wardens of his craft. This letter I carried downstairs through the sleeping house, tremulous with the good consciences of my fellow-lodgers, and slipped it in the pillar box at the corner of the crescent. I remember I even chuckled as I posted it, to the evident surprise of the stolid policeman who had wished me good morning. You see, I thought I was making literary history.

I am sorry to say that my enthusiasm didn't communicate itself to Paul. Six mute and incurious publishers were sitting too heavily on his self-esteem for that. He even took their part, with a perversity I have noticed before in the misunderstood of the earth. I have a theory that books like his are posthumous children, and that the state of mind which created them dies in giving them birth. What enraged him—what baffled him, because it was contrary to every lesson his strenuous life had taught him—was, that so much effort could be all in vain. I imagine he wrote the book with difficulty and without conscious exaltation of spirit.

"If I had put as much pains," I remembered his saying, "into any other thing I've set my hand to, I should be either a famous man, or a very rich one, to-day, Prentice."

And then, returning to the old grievance, that I could see had become a prepossession—

"And yet—six men can't be all wrong."

"Of course they can," I exclaimed indignantly, "and sixty."

He shrugged his shoulders wearily. "What can a man do, then?"

"One thing you can do," I answered severely, "is to sit down opposite me for a few hours a week and alter some of your modes of expression. I've made a list of some: Listen here!

"'Brightly shone the snow on the roof of the Rio Negro County Farmers' Institute.' You mustn't say that."

"Why not?" asked Paul, simply; "it's the name."

"If you don't know why, I can't tell you. You must take it from me that such a thing, in England, will almost secure rejection of itself. Then again: we don't talk of a man's 'white linen shirt bosom.' The word is de mode for a woman, but used for a man, it's offensive. And to say that Celia 'cached the mail-bags in a wash-out,' conveys no meaning at all to us."

Paul laughed out, and suddenly looked ten years younger.

"Sit down," he said, "and 'fais feu!' Don't spare me!"

But the revision was a thankless task. Only a determination on my part that such a book shouldn't be lost supported me through it at all. Paul came to work irregularly, and in a mood that oscillated between a careless acceptance of every suggestion I made and a peremptory refusal to consider any alteration at all. But it was done at last, and I admit I waited hopefully for news from Carroll and Hugus.

After three weeks, in fact, I got a postcard asking me to call. Bonnyman was sitting in his sanctum, looking as young and as wise as on the day he came down from Balliol, and with his habitual air of finding the publishing trade a great lark.

"How's the industrious Prentice?" he cried, as soon as he saw me. "What's he been doing with himself these many moons?"

I shook hands and sat down. I profess I have never felt so jumpy when work of my own has been in question.

Bonnyman put his finger to his forehead. "What did I want to see you about, Prentice?... Oh, yes!" He touched an electric button on his desk.

"Byrne!" said he to the clerk who answered it, "bring me down 'Sad Company.' I sent it up to the packing-room the day before yesterday. It ought to be ready."

My heart sank into my boots. "Aren't you going to publish it?" I faltered.

Bonnyman shook his head.

"No go, my boy! No go at all. You've brought it to the wrong shop."

"It kept me awake a whole night," I flashed out angrily.

Bonnyman smiled and yawned. "Kept me awake too, because I'd slept in the afternoon trying to read it."

"Oh! come now, Bonnyman," I protested. "You know better than that. Take the one scene alone," I went on eagerly, "where Holt is sitting with his dead wife, and the step-daughter comes to the door and he won't open because——"

But Bonnyman went on shaking his head with the impenetrable self-confidence any man acquires in time who exercises an habitual right of veto.

"Hugo and water!" he said. "Who can't write it? No, Prentice. To tell you the honest truth we're cutting out a lot of this problem stuff lately. What we're specializing in at present is the 'light touch.' The 'light touch,'" he repeated, illustrating what the world is hungering for, delicately, with an ivory paper cutter on his blotting-pad.

"'Polly Prattlings!'" I sneered.

"And d—d good stuff, too. Bring me some one like that, Prentice, and we'll talk.—Don't get angry, old man! Who is your little friend? American, ain't he?"

I nodded gloomily.

"Why don't he get a Rhodes scholarship and learn how to write English?"

"He's thirty-five," I said; "he's been all round the world and done everything."

Bonnyman pulled a long face that sufficiently disposed of Ingram's future. The brown-paper parcel was brought in and I slunk away with it under my arm, like a man repulsed from a pawnshop.

I didn't see Ingram for a long time, and was secretly glad of it. For I had no good news to give him. Other publishers were equally emphatic, with unimportant variations of delay and discourtesy. I don't say I lost faith in the book, but I did begin to doubt whether, in the present state of things, great work was worth while. It was too much like giving grand opera on a raft in mid-Atlantic.

At last, when I'd practically exhausted the firms I knew, and was beginning to wonder whether we wouldn't have to come down to a publication "by special arrangement," or a setting up in linotype by one of the smaller provincial weeklies, an idea flashed into my head. I knew one great writer, a woman, American, too; fashionable, rich, but with a passionate reverence for all that was worthiest in letters. She had succeeded by means of a brilliance and impetuosity of style that had literally stormed the defences of dullness. In her books I had noticed an underlying mysticism that I thought might find Paul's work akin. It was a ticklish undertaking, and I hadn't done screwing up my courage to it when Ingram suddenly reappeared. His long arm pushed open the paper curtained door of the sanctum where we dined, one raw night in June. By his side was absolutely the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. She wore a long purple coat, cut very smartly, and a big ribboned hat, and was swaying a little from side to side as though the lapsed rhythm of some tune she had just heard was still in her feet. She glanced round shyly but brightly and bowed with a pretty blush to Caulfield. We all gaped, and old Smeaton's pipe suddenly smelt very foul.

"Don't move!" said Ingram, as I made room for them at my side. "I haven't come for dinner. Just to ask if you've had any news, before I go away."

"No news at present," I confessed. "But I hope to have some soon."

He smiled a little grimly, and felt in his long rubber coat for a pocketbook.

"If anything turns up in the next month or so, write me here," he said, and handed me a card with an address scrawled across its face. "I'm going to France for a few weeks. Come, Nelly!" and was gone with his companion as abruptly as he had come.

"'Beauty like hers is genius,'" Capel quoted, breaking the silence with an air of saying something apposite, for once.

"Who's the pretty lady, Caulfield?" asked old Smeaton. "She bowed to you."

"She's a little person I've met at dances, and things," said Caulfield. "Goes round with the De Rudder woman. Does gavottes and pavanes and corantos and all that sort of thing. Pretty name, too,—'Fenella Barbour.'"

VI

A CHILD SPEAKS THE TRUTH

Fenella Barbour is the daughter of a clergyman of the Church of England, who remained unbeneficed to the end of his life. Younger son of a noble family, Scotch in origin but long settled in the Midlands, handsome, intellectual, and much yearned upon, the Honorable Nigel let opportunities for advantageous matrimony pass him one by one, to marry, comparatively late in his life and outside of his own class, a young parishioner with whose name the gossip of a small Cornish country town had spitefully and quite unjustifiably coupled his. To the day of her death Minnie Trevail never quite got over the surprise with which she received her pastor's offer of an honorable share in board and bed, and, whether it was gratitude or an uneasy sense that principles which do not often make for a man's happiness had played her hand for her, the fact remains, that to the end of his brief married life the Reverend Nigel Barbour continued to be a sort of married bachelor, free to come or go unquestioned, with a fine gift for silence and without obvious enthusiasms, unless it were for the girl baby who would sit for hours by his study fire, as he wrote his sermons, scolding her doll in whispers, and to whose round cheek and fine dark curls his eyes strayed oftener and oftener during the last year of his life.

Similarly circumstanced, other women by study, by observation, by an endless self-correction, have lifted themselves in time to something like a mental level with the men who have perversely chosen them. Not necessarily from a sense of her own limitations, Mrs. Barbour never tried. It is possible that she never, deliberately measuring the sacrifice which the man had made for her good name, determined the first sacrifice should be the last, but at least the unformed idea governed all her conduct. She kept the ideals, the accents—inside the house even the dress—of her class. For the spiritual companionship which she could never give she substituted the silent and tireless service of Martha. When her baby was born, she would have had the pain and peril tenfold; pain and peril so dimly comprehended by the man who smoothed her moist hair with an awkward hand, blinked his scholarly eyes at this crude and rather unseemly mystery, and, once assured the danger was past, went back to his weaving of words with a relief that even his kindness failed to conceal.

Nigel Barbour was one of the killed in the terrible Clee Level accident. He was returning from a New Year family gathering, the first he had attended since his marriage, and it is typical of their married relations that his wife never even "wondered" why she wasn't asked too. If reconciliation which should include her was on its way, his death disposed of the idea. Denied recognition during his lifetime his widow refrained, with what all her friends considered great lack of spirit, from attempting to win it after his death. He was uninsured, and, of the slender inheritance that devolved upon her, a great part consisted of house property at the "unfashionable" but expensive side of the Park. One of the houses, a great stuccoed mansion in a secluded square, happening to be empty at the time of her tragic bereavement, she assumed the tenancy, furnished it, and, reserving for herself only the basement and top floor, advertised discreetly but judiciously for lodgers.

Although the business is one that seldom shows a profit, and although in order to furnish the one house adequately she had been compelled to mortgage the freehold of the other, yet, if happiness be revenue, it is hard to see how she could have made a better investment. For the first time in her life she tasted liberty. She had her great house, her establishment, the direction of her three maids, and the intense respect of family butchers, family bakers, and family candlestick-makers in staid contiguous streets. On spring or autumn afternoons the champing and clashing of bits and hoofs outside her door, the murmurs of joyous life that floated along the hall and up the wide stairs, sounded no less sweetly in her ears because it was Miss Rigby or Lady Anne Caslon and not the Honorable Mrs. Barbour who was at home to all the fine company. The "Honorable Mrs. Barbour!" Often, in passing through the big bedrooms of the second floor, with clean pillowcases or window blinds over her arm, she would stop and look at her homely reflection in the long cheval glasses, with a little inward smile at the incongruity. And yet in her heart, so sensitive to the duties, so blind to the rights, of her equivocal position, the obligations which the barren title involved were tacitly acknowledged. If it conferred no privileges, it at least restrained her judgment upon the caste, a corner of whose ermine rested, however grudgingly, upon her own shoulder. She grew indisposed to gossip. Such of her relatives and friends as called upon her while upon "day-trips" to London found themselves cut short in their pursuit of one special branch of knowledge. They went home to Cornwall declaring that Minnie had grown "stuck-up."

But the rights which she abdicated so whole-heartedly for herself she claimed with an added fierceness for Fenella. The child was a miracle from the first. Even while it lay, a few pounds of pink flesh, in a corner of one arm and drained her breast, she was worshipping it, humbly and afar off. It is difficult to find words that adequately convey her state of mind toward her daughter without entrenching on a parallel that is sacred and therefore forbidden; but this much is certain: had the legal quibble which can prove a child to be no blood relation to its mother been propounded to Mrs. Barbour, it would have found in her a tearful and reluctant but convinced witness to its truth. For two successive nights before her baby's birth the same dream had visited her. The great house of her brother-in-law, which she had never seen, which her husband had never even thought of describing for her, had appeared to her, wrapped in flame. Pushing her way through the crowd that surrounded it and was watching it burn, after the inconsequent manner of dream people, with quiet satisfaction, she had run up tottering staircases and along choking passages, had reached a splendid room of state upon whose canopied bed a little naked infant lay, and, clasping it to her breast, had carried it out, smiling and unharmed. Fenella was no more truly her child than she was the child of the dream.

The little girl was four and still wore a black hair ribbon and a black sash over her pinafore, when one afternoon in October a big shallow barouche drove up to the door of No. 11 Suffolk Square. The springs were very high, the harness was very brightly plated, the chestnut horses, their heads held in by a torturing bearing rein, very shiny and soapy. A faded, artificial woman, with a tall osprey in her black bonnet, lolled back against the buff cloth cushions and regarded the world through a tortoise-shell lorgnette. A girl, quite young, with fair hair cut in a straight fringe across her forehead, sat up demurely at her side.

Fenella was taking tea in great state and composure on the window-seat of her nursery under the slates when the carriage drove up. A mug, on which Puss-in-Boots brushed back his bristling whiskers with one spirited paw, stood at her elbow, filled with a faintly tinted decoction of warm milk and sugar. A bun, delicately nibbled all round its lustrous circumference, was in her right hand, and a large over-dressed doll, with a vacant blue-eyed face, rested insecurely in the hollow of her left arm. From this household treasure her attention was just beginning to stray. James, the coachman, had pulled across the roadway, and was driving his fretful over-heated charges up and down along the railings of the Square. Fenella pressed her forehead against the cold window-pane.

"Gee-gees; gee-gees!" she soliloquized.

To her enter, without cue or warning, Druce the parlor-maid—also a little the nursemaid—in great excitement, and breathless after a non-stop run from the bottom of the house. The bun was snatched from the chubby fingers, Marianne saved, timely, from a headlong course to the floor, the Marquis of Carabas pushed unconstitutionally on one side, and the napkin whisked off, all in four brisk movements.

"Company for my little lady!" the excited girl exclaimed. "She is to have her pretty hair curled, and her best frock put on, and to go downstairs to see mamma's fine friends."

Nelly took the outrage with the docility that was one of her charms.

"Gee-gees, Drucie," she said, pointing over her shoulder as she was borne away. "Gee-gees in the Thquare."

The warm-hearted maid gave her a tight and quite unauthorized hug.

"Gee-gees, indeed! Well, they may trot! trot! trot! until their feet drop off, before they find anything finer than we're going to show them."

The carriage folk were in the front part of the big tastelessly furnished drawing-room, which ran the whole depth of the house, and which happened to be unlet at the time. A fire, just lit, was crackling and smoking sullenly. The elder lady sat, with a transient air, as much on the edge of a little gilt chair as is compatible with a seat at all. I am not quite certain whether vinegar can be frozen at certain temperatures or not. If so, her smile recalled the experiment. The young girl sat back in a velvet rocking chair, her slender black-stockinged legs reaching the ground from time to time as it oscillated. She had a little pale round face; her lank, whitey-gold hair was cut as straight at her waist as it was at her forehead. She had taken off her gloves, and the bony over-manicured fingers were interlocked in her lap with a sort of feeble repression. Near a table, covered with tea-things, but from which no hospitality had been dispensed, Mrs. Barbour was sitting, no less upright than her visitor. She was flushed and there was the fullness of suppressed tears round her eyelids, but there was as little sign of defeat in her face and attitude as in the other woman's unpleasant smile. The fine lady raised her lorgnette as the child was carried in. She turned languidly to her daughter.

"Your poor uncle's face. Oh, the very image!" she exclaimed, with an emphasis that extinguished any lingering idea poor Mrs. Barbour may have kept of a share in the matter.

Set upon the ground, the child beauty gravitated instantly to mother's skirts, and from this coign of vantage surveyed her visitors. Mrs. Barbour put the curls back from her forehead and stooped to her ear.

"Nelly," said she, "this is your aunt, Lady Lulford, your Aunty Hortense, come to see poor father's little girl. Won't you go and give her a kiss?"

The grasp tightened upon her skirt.

"Oh, shame!" the mother murmured, with a reproach in her voice that the glistening eyes belied. "Is this my kind little Nelly? Come over, then, with mother."

With a sidelong glance at the tea-table, Fenella was led, obliquely, across the thick new pile carpet, and received a kiss upon her forehead that was not much warmer than the window against which it had just been pressed.

"And now your cousin. Cousin——"

"Leslie," said Lady Lulford, covering a slight yawn with her golden card-case, and glancing out of the window toward her horses.

The girl's face seemed to yearn and melt as the reluctant little feet were guided to her. She pursed her pale lips and held out her thin arms. Fenella was to remember it years afterwards with a spasm of pity and indignation. But she was only a baby now, and struggled in the weak embrace. Once back at her mother's side, a violent reaction of shyness set in, and she buried her face in the maternal lap.

"Impressionable, too; like poor Nigel," the peeress remarked to her daughter in the same icy voice.

"Come," the mother coaxed, "hasn't Nelly a word to say? Her aunty"—Lady Lulford winched—"her aunty and cousin will think they've got a little dumb girl for a niece."

Fenella raised her face. "I weally——" she began, and, not finding encouragement to proceed, down went the black head again.

Mother lifts it gently.

"——was——" Nelly's finger went to her mouth. Her glance wavered, wandered tortuously along the floor, and finally and suddenly focussed the tea equipage.

"——in the middle of my tea." Louder and with sudden confidence as the full nature of the outrage was realized, "Weally was in the middle of my tea."

Lady Lulford smiled abstractedly. Leslie's lips moved. The mother drew her little girl closer.

"You shall have your tea presently, dear," she said, "but I want you to listen to me first. Now, tell me," she seemed to steady her voice, "how would you like to go into the country with your aunt and Cousin Leslie?"

Nelly's eyes grew big and round. "And mother?" added she, joining the palms of her hands, baby-wise, with stiff outspread fingers.

"No, dear. Mother must stay in London, because she has so much to do."

There was an agitation of the black curls, and from under them a most decided negative evolved itself.

"Oh, but my precious," the mother pleaded, as that other mother may have pleaded before the judgment seat of the great wise king; "just for a while; to see the green trees, and the moo-cows, and the bunnies, and, and——"

"The deer," said Lady Lulford, raising the conversation to a higher and, shall we say, ancestral level.

"Great—big—stags, baby," the cousin broke in, with her eager, unsteady voice, "great big stags with horns like this," and she made a pair with fingers that were almost as fleshless.

Fenella refused to weigh the catalogue of attractions a moment. The head shook faster and faster till the dark curls whipped first one cheek and then another.

"Not for a little while? Not for a few weeks?" Mrs. Barbour urged, almost roughly.

At this persistence in a quarter where it was so little to be looked for, two fat tears distilled themselves in Fenella's eyes and rolled down her cheeks. She opened her mouth, and I regret to say her face lost, temporarily, its attractive power. Mrs. Barbour snatched her up and sprang to her feet.

"She sha'n't be teased," she cried passionately, clasping the child to her breast. Then, turning quickly first to Lady Lulford and afterward to her daughter, "Don't you see she's too young now? She's only a baby, really. Perhaps later——"

The Viscountess turned upon her own offspring the cold ceremonial eye that on company nights lifted the ladies at Freres Lulford to their feet and up into the drawing-room.

"We must really go now, Leslie," she said, with a little explanatory wave of the card-case. "So many calls, you know. Well, Mrs. Barbour," turning to her hostess with an evident effort, "I suppose we mustn't expect you to decide such a matter in a hurry. For the present I think I may say our offer, Myles's and mine, stands open. I still think it is what poor Nigel would most have wished. And even if you should decide not to accept it now, remember, if at any time—at any time——" and in this golden air of good intentions Lady Lulford's visit ended.

"That is an ordeal well over, Leslie," she said, a few moments later, leaning back and closing her eyes slightly, as the carriage door slammed and the tall footman with a crook from the waist still in his long straight back, swung himself to his perch.

"Mother," said Leslie, nervously, pulling at her gloves, "we could hardly—could hardly——"

"Could hardly what, my dear? You are so disjointed at times."

"——expect her to give up such a pet," the girl said impulsively, with a gush of feeling that seemed to leave her colder and weaker than ever.