THE FAR HORIZON

BY

LUCAS MALET

(MRS. MARY ST. LEGER HARRISON)

BY THE SAME AUTHOR
The Wages of Sin
A Counsel of Perfection
Colonel Enderby's Wife
Little Peter
The Carissima
The Gateless Barrier
The History of Sir Richard Calmady

"Ask for the Old Paths, where is the Good Way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest."—JEREMIAS.

"The good man is the bad man's teacher; the bad man is the material upon which the good man works. If the one does not value his teacher, if the other does not love his material, then despite their sagacity they must go far astray. This is a mystery of great import."—FROM THE SAYINGS OF LAO-TZU.

..."Cherchons à voir les choses comme elles sont, et ne voulons pas avoir plus d'esprit que le bon Dieu! Autrefois on croyait que la canne à sucre seule donnait le sucre, on en tire à peu près de tout maintenant. Il est de même de la poésie. Extrayons-la de n'importe quoi, car elle git en tout et partout. Pas un atome de matière qui ne contienne pas la poésie. Et habituons-nous à considerer le monde comme un oeuvre d'art, dont il faut reproduire les procédées dans nos oeuvres."—GUSTAVE FLAUBERT.

CHAPTER I

Dominic Iglesias stood watching while the lingering June twilight darkened into night. He was tired in body, but his mind was eminently, consciously awake, to the point of restlessness, and this was unusual with him. He had raised the lower sash of each of the three tall, narrow windows to its extreme height, since the first-floor sitting-room, though of fair proportions, appeared close. His thought refused the limits of it, and ranged outward over the expanse of Trimmer's Green, the roadway and houses bordering it, to the far northwest, that region of hurried storm, of fierce, equinoctial passion and conflict, now paved with plaques of flat, dingy, violet cloud opening on smoky rose-red wastes of London sunset. All day thunder had threatened, but had not broken. And, even yet, the face of heaven seemed less peaceful than remonstrant, a sullenness holding it as of troops in retreat denied satisfaction of imminent battle.

Otherwise the outlook was wholly pacific, one of middle-class suburban security. The Green aforesaid is bottle-shaped, the neck of it debouching into a crowded westward-wending thoroughfare; while Cedar Lodge, from the first-floor windows of which Mr. Iglesias contemplated the oncoming of night, being situate in the left shoulder, so to speak, of the bottle, commanded, diagonally, an uninterrupted view of the whole extent of it. Who Trimmer was, how he came by a Green, and why, or what he trimmed on it, it is idle at this time of day to attempt to determine. Whether, animated by a desire for the public welfare, he bequeathed it in high charitable sort; or whether, fame taking a less enviable turn with him, he just simply was hanged there, has afforded matter of heated controversy to the curious in questions of suburban nomenclature and topography. But in this case, as in so many other and more august ones, the origins defy discovery. Suffice it, therefore, that the name remains, as does the open space—the latter forming one of those minor "lungs of London" which offer such amiable oases in the great city's less aristocratic residential districts. Formerly the Green boasted a row of fine elms, and was looked on by discreetly handsome eighteenth-century mansions and villas, set in spacious gardens. But of these, the great majority—Cedar Lodge being a happy exception—has vanished under the hand of the early Victorian speculative builder; who, in their stead, has erected full complement of the architectural platitudes common to his age and taste. Dignity has very sensibly given place to gentility. Nevertheless the timid red, or sickly yellow-grey, brick of the existing houses is pleasingly veiled by ivy and Virginia creeper, while no shop front obtrudes derogatory suggestion of retail trade. The local authorities, moreover, some ten years back girdled the Green with healthy young balsam-poplar and plane trees and enclosed the grass with iron hurdles—to rescue it from trampling into unsightly pathways—thus doing a well-intentioned, if somewhat unimaginative, best to safeguard the theatre of long ago Trimmer's beneficence or infamy from greater spoliation.

Hence it follows that, certain inherent limitations admitted, the scene upon which Dominic Iglesias' eyes rested was not without elements of attraction. And of this fact, being a person of an excellent temperance of expectation, he was gratefully aware. His surroundings, indeed, constituted, so it appeared to him, the maximum of comfort and advantage which could be expected by a middle-aged gentleman, of moderate fortune, in the capacity of a "paying guest." Not only in word but in thought—for in acknowledgment of obligation he was scrupulously courteous. He frequently tendered thanks to his neighbour and old school-fellow, Mr. George Lovegrove, first for calling his attention to Mrs. Porcher's advertisement, and subsequently for reassuring him as to its import. For, though incapable of forming so much as a thought to her concrete disparagement, Mr. Iglesias was not without a quiet sense of humour, or of that instinct of self-protection common to even the most chivalrous of mankind. He was, therefore, perfectly sensible that "the widow of a military officer," who describes herself in print as "bright, musical and thoroughly domesticated," while offering "a cheerful and refined home at the West End, within three minutes of Tube and omnibus"—"noble dining and recreation rooms, bath h. and c." thrown in—to unmarried members of the stronger sex, must of necessity be a lady whose close acquaintance it would be foolhardy to make without a trifle of preliminary scouting.

Happily not only George Lovegrove, but his estimable wife was at hand. The latter hastened to prosecute inquiries, beginning with a visit to the Anglican vicar of the parish, the Rev. Giles Nevington. He reported Mrs. Porcher an evening communicant at the greater festivals, and a not ungenerous donor to parochial charities; adding that a former curate had resided under her roof with perfect impunity. Mrs. Lovegrove terminated her researches by an interview with the fishmonger, who assured her that "Cedar Lodge always took the best cuts," sternly refused fish or poultry which had suffered cold storage, and paid its housebooks without fail before noon on Thursday. She ascertained, further, from a source socially intermediate between clergyman and tradesman, that Mrs. Porcher's husband, some time veterinary surgeon of a crack regiment, had died in the odour of alcohol rather than in that of sanctity, leaving his widow—in addition to his numerous and heavy debts—but a fraction of the comfortable fortune to procure the enjoyment of which he had so considerately married her. The solid Georgian mansion was her freehold; and it was to secure sufficient means for continued residence in it that the poor lady started a boarding-house, or in the politer language of the present day, had decided to receive paying guests.

Encouraged by the satisfactory nature of the above information, Mr. Iglesias—shortly after his mother's death, now nearly eight years ago—had become a member of Mrs. Porcher's household. He had never, so far, had reason to regret that step. And it was with a consciousness of well-being and repose that he returned daily—after hours of strenuous work in the well-known city banking house of Messrs. Barking Brothers & Barking—to this square first-floor sitting-room, to its dimly white panelled and painted walls, its nice details of carved work in chimney-piece and ceiling, and the outlook from its tall, narrow windows. A touch of old-world stateliness in its aspect satisfied his latent pride of race. To certain natures not obscurity or slender means, but the pretentious vulgarity which, in English-speaking countries, too often goes along with these constitutes the burden and the offence.

To-night, however, things were different. Material objects remained the same; but the conditions of existence had taken on a strange appearance, and with that appearance Iglesias was bound to reckon, being uncertain as yet whether it was destined to prove that of a friend or of an enemy. In furtherance of such reckoning, he had declined dining at the public table, in company with his hostess, Miss Eliza Hart, her devoted friend and companion, and the three gentlemen—Mr. de Courcy Smyth, Mr. Farge, and Mr. Worthington—who shared with him the hospitalities of Cedar Lodge. He had dined here, upstairs, solitary; and Frederick, the German-Swiss valet, had just finished clearing the table and departed. Usually under such circumstances Iglesias would have taken a favourite book from the carved Spanish mahogany bookcase containing his small library; and, reading again that which he had often read before, would have found therein the satisfaction of friendship, along with the soothing influences of familiarity. But to-night neither Gibbon's Rome—a handsome early edition in many volumes—The Travels of Anacharsis, Evelyn's Diary, Napier's Peninsular War, John Stuart Mill's Logic, Byron's Poems, nor those of Calderon, nor of that so-called "prodigy of nature," Lope de Vega, not even the dear and immortal Don Quixote himself, served to attract him. His own thoughts, his own life, filled his whole horizon, leaving no space for the thoughts or lives of others. He found himself a prey to a certain mental incoherence, a bewildering activity of vision. More than once before in the course of his laborious, monotonous, and, as men go, very virtuous life had this same thing happened to him—the tides of the obvious and accustomed suddenly receding and leaving him stranded, as on some barren sand-bank, uncertain whether the ship of his individual fate would lie there wind-swept and sun-bleached till rusty rivets fell out and planks parted, disclosing the ribs of her in unsightly nakedness, or whether the kindly tide, rising, would float her off into blue water and she would sail hopefully once again.

It was inevitable that this present experience should recall these other happenings, evoking memories poignant enough. The first time the ship of his fate thus stranded was when, as a lad of seventeen, he left school. Living alone with his mother in a quaint little house in Holland Street, Kensington, eagerly ambitious to make his way in the world and to obtain, it had dawned on him that there was something strange, unhappy, and not as it was wont to be with that, to him, most beautiful and beloved of women. The mere suspicion was as a blasphemy against which his young loyalty revolted. For Dominic, with the inherent pieties of his Latin and Celtic blood, had none of that contemptuous superiority in regard of his near relations so common to male creatures of the Protestant persuasion and Anglo-Saxon race. He took his parents quite seriously; it never having occurred to him that fathers and mothers are given us merely for purposes of discipline, or as helot-like examples of what to avoid. He was simple-minded enough indeed to regard them as sacred, altogether beyond the bounds of legitimate criticism—and this, as destiny would have it, with intimate and life-long results.

Vaguely, through the mists of infancy, he could remember a hurried exodus—after sound of cannon and sight of blood—from Spain, the fierce and pious country of his birth. Since then, while his mother lived—namely, till he was a man of over forty—always and only the house in the Kensington side street, with its crooked creaking stairways, its high wainscots—behind which mice squeaked and scampered—its clinging odour of ancient woodwork, its low ceilings, and uneven floors. At the back of it was a narrow strip of garden, glorious for one brief week in early summer, with the gold of a big laburnum; and fragrant later thanks to faithful effort on the part of the white jasmine clothing its enclosing walls. In fair weather the morning sun lay warm there; while the sky showed all the bluer overhead for the dark lines of the adjacent housetops, and upstanding deformities in the matter of zinc cowls and chimney-pots. Frequented by cats, boasting in the centre a rockery of gas clinkers and chalk flints surmounted by a stumpy fluted column bearing a stone basin—in which, after rain, sparrows disported themselves with much conversation and fluttering of sooty wings—the garden was, to little Dominic, a place of wonder and delight. He peopled it with beings of his own fancy, lovely or terrific, according to his passing humour. Granted a measure of imagination, the solitary child is often the happiest child, since the social element, with its inevitable materialism, is absent, and the dear spirit of romance is unquenched by vulgar comment.

His father, grave and preoccupied, whose arrivals after long periods of absence had in them an effect of secrecy and haste, was to the small boy a being, august, but remote. During his brief sojourns at home the quiet house awoke to greater fulness of life, with much coming and going of other grave personages, strange of dress, and with a certain effect of hardly restrained violence in their aspect. A spirit of fear seemed to enter with them, demanding an unnatural darkening of windows and closing of doors. Before Dominic they were of few words; but became eloquent enough, in sonorous foreign speech, as his ears testified when he was banished from their rather electric presence to the solitude of the nursery above. And so it came about that a sense of mystery, of large issues, of things at once strong and hidden, impenetrable to his understanding and concerning which no questions might be asked, encircled Dominic's childhood and passed into the very fabric of his thought. While through it all his mother moved, to him tender and wholly exquisite, but with the reticence of some deep-seated enthusiasm silently cherished, some far-reaching alarm silently endured, always upon her. And this resulted in an atmosphere of seriousness and responsibility which inevitably reacted on the boy, making him sober beyond his years, tempering his natural vivacity with watchfulness, and pitching even his laughter in a minor key.

Only many years later, when after his mother's death it became his duty to read letters exchanged between his parents during this period, did Dominic Iglesias touch the key to the riddle, and fully measure the public danger, the private strain and stress which had surrounded his childhood and early youth. For his father, a man of far from ignoble nature, but of narrow outlook and undying hatreds, was deeply involved in revolutionary intrigue of the most advanced type—a victim of that false passion of humanity which takes its rise not in honest desire for the welfare of mankind, but in blind rebellion against all forms of authority. His self-confidence was colossal; all rule being abominable to him—save his own—all rulers hideous, save himself. The anarchist, rightly understood, is merely the autocrat, the tyrant, turned inside out. And this man, as Dominic gathered from the perusal of those old letters, to whom the end so justified the means that red-handed crime took on the fair colours of virtue, his mother had loved, even while she feared him, with all the faithfulness and pure passion of her Irish blood. Pathetic combination, the patience and resignation of the one ever striving to temper the flaming zeal of the other, as though the spindrift of the Atlantic, sweeping inland from the dim sadness of far western coasts, should strive with relentless fierceness of sunglare outpoured on some high-lying walled city of arid central Spain! Mist is but a weak thing as against rock and fire; and what his mother must have suffered in moral and spiritual conflict, let alone all question of active dread, was to her son almost too cruel to contemplate, although it explained and justified much.

In 1860, when Dominic was a schoolboy of fourteen, his father left home on one of those sudden journeys the object and objective of which were alike concealed. For about a year letters arrived at irregular intervals, hailing from Paris, Naples, Prague, and finally Petersburg. Then followed silence, broken only by rumours furtively conveyed by a former associate, one Pascal Pelletier—an angel-faced, long-haired, hysteric creature, inspired by an impassioned enthusiasm for infernal machines and wholesale slaughter in theory, and, in practice, by a gentle doglike devotion to Mrs. Iglesias and young Dominic. He would arrive depressed and shadowy in the shadowy twilights. But, once in the presence of the beings whom he loved, he became effervescent. His belief was unlimited in the Head Centre, the Chief, in his demonic power and fertility of resource. That any evil should befall him!—Pascal snapped his thin fingers; while, with the inalienable optimism of the born fanatic, he proceeded to state hopeful conjecture as established fact, thereby doing homage to the spirit of delusion which so conspicuously ruled him even to his inmost thought. But a spell of cold weather in the winter of 1862 struck a little too shrewdly through Pascal's seedy overcoat, causing that tender-hearted subverter of society to cough his life out, with all possible despatch, in the third-floor back of a filthy lodging-house off Tottenham Court Road.

This was the end as far as information went, whether authentic or apocryphal. But Dominic, his horizon still bounded by the world of school, greedy of distinction both in learning and in games, away all day and eagerly, if somewhat sleepily, busy over the preparation of lessons at night, was very far from realising that. Poor voluble kind-eyed Pascal he mourned with all his heart; yet the months of his father's absence accumulated into years almost unnoticed. The same thing had so often happened before; and then, at an unlooked-for moment, the wanderer had returned. Moreover, the old habit of obedience was still strong in him. It was understood that concerning his father's occupations and movements no comment might be made, no questions might be asked.

Meanwhile, the small house in Holland Street was ever more still, more unfrequented. As he grew older Dominic became increasingly sensible of this—sensible of a sort of hush falling on him as he crossed the threshold, so that instinctively he left much of his wholesome young animality outside, while his voice took on softer tones in speech, and his quick light footsteps became more scrupulously noiseless as he ran up the little crooked stairs.

"When your father comes home we must decide what profession you shall follow, my Dominic," it had been his mother's habit to declare. But, even before the time for such decision arrived the boy had begun to understand he must see to all that unaided. For his mother was ill, how deeply and in what manner he could not tell. He shrank, indeed, from all clear thought, let alone speech, on the subject, as from something indelicate, in a way irreverent. Her beauty remained to her, notwithstanding a gradual wasting as of fever. A peculiar, very individual grace of dress and of bearing remained to her likewise. But she was uncertain in mood, the victim of strange fancies, a being almost alarmingly far removed from the interests of ordinary life. Long ago, in submission to her husband's anti-clerical prejudices, she had ceased to practise her religion, so that the services of the Church no longer called her forth in beneficent routine of sacred obligation. Now she never left the house, living, since poor Pascal Pelletier's death, in complete seclusion. Little wonder then that a hush fell on Dominic crossing the threshold, since so doing he passed from the world of healthy action to that of acquiescent sickness, from vigorous hoarse-voiced realities to the intangible sadness of unrelated dreams! The effect was one of rather haunting melancholy; and it was characteristic of the lad that he did not resent it, though rejoicing in the reputation at school of being high-spirited enough, impatient of restraint or of any frustration of purpose. His mother had always been sacred. She remained so, even though her sympathies had become imperfect, and she moved in regions which his sane young imagination failed to penetrate. One thing was perfectly plain to him, though it cut at the root of ambition—namely, that he could not leave her. So, in that matter of a profession, he must find work which would permit of his continuing to live at home; and, since her income was narrow, the work in question must make no heavy demand in respect of preliminary expense.

Here was a problem more easy of statement than of solution, in face of Dominic's pride, inexperience, and the singular isolation of his position! There followed dreary months wherein his evenings were spent in studying and answerings advertisements; and his days, till late afternoon, in walking the town from end to end for the interviewing of possible employers and the keeping of fruitless appointments. He would set forth full of hope and courage in the morning, only to return full of the dejection of failure at night. And it was then London began to reveal herself to him in her solidarity, under the cloud of dun-blue coal smoke—it was wintertime—which, at once hanging over and penetrating her immensity, adds the majesty of mystery to the majesty of mere size. He noted how, in the chill twilights, London grew strangely and feverishly alive. Lamps sprang into clearness along the pavements. A dazzling glitter of shop windows marked the great thoroughfares, while often the angry glare of a fire pulsed along the sky-line. When night comes in the country, so Dominic told himself, the land sinks into peaceful repose. But in cities it is otherwise. There the light leaves heaven for earth; and walks the streets, with much else far from celestial, until the small hours move towards the dawn and usher in the decencies of day.

Never before had he seen London thus and understood it in all its enormous variety, yet as a unit, a whole. How much he actually beheld with his bodily eyes, how much through the working of a rather exalted condition of imagination induced by loneliness and bodily fatigue, he could never subsequently determine. But the great city presented herself to him in the guise of some prodigious living creature, breathing, feeding, suffering, triumphing, above all mating and breeding, terrible in her power and vitality, age old, yet still unspent. Presented herself to him as horribly prolific, ever outpassing her own unwieldy limits, sending forth her children, year after year, all the wide world over by shipping or by rail; receiving some tithe of them back, proud with accomplished fortune to enhance her glory, or, disgraced and broken, slinking homeward to the cover of her fog and darkness merely to swell the numbers of the nameless who rot and die. He thought of those others, too—and this touched his young ardour with a quick shudder of personal fear—whom she never sends forth at all; but holds close in bondage all their lives long, enslaved to her countless and tyrant activities by their own poverty, or by their fellow-creatures' misfortune, cruelties, and sins. Was it thus she was going to deal with him, Dominic Iglesias? Was he to be among the great city's bondmen through the coming years, better acquainted with the very earthly light which walks her streets by night, than with the heavenly light which gladdens the sweet face of day in the open country and upon the open sea? And for a moment the boy's heart rebelled, hungry for pleasure, hungry for wide experience, hungry even for knowledge of those revolutionary intrigues which, as he was beginning to understand, had surrounded his childhood, and, as he was beginning to fear, had cost his mother her reason and his father both liberty and life. Thus did the ship of poor Dominic's fate appear to be stranded or ever it had fairly set sail at all.

Meanwhile, if London claimed him, she did so in very cynical fashion, mocking his willingness to labour, refusing to feed him even while she refused to let him go. Everything, he feared, was against him—his youth, his foreign name, his limited acquaintance, the impossibility of giving definite information regarding his father's past occupations or present whereabouts. Moreover, his spare young figure, his thin shapely hands and feet, his blue-black Irish eyes and black hair, his energetic colourless face, his ready yet reticent speech—all these marked him as unusual and exotic. And for the unusual and exotic the British employer of labour—of whatever sort—has, it must be conceded, but little use. He is half afraid, half contemptuous of it, instinctively disliking anything more alert and alive than his own most stolid self. But while men, distrusting the distinctness of his personality and his good looks, refused to give Dominic work, women, relishing them, were only too ready to give him enjoyment—of a kind. The boy, in those solitary wanderings, ran the gauntlet of many temptations; and was presented—did he care to accept it—with the freedom of the city on very liberal lines. Happily, inherent cleanliness of nature saved him from much; and reverent shame at the thought of entering the hushed and silent house where his mother lived—spotless, amid pathetic memories and delicate dreams—with the soil of licence upon him, saved him from more. Crime might have come close to him in his childhood, but vice never; and the influences of vice are far more insidious, and consequently more damaging, than those of crime.

Still, one way and another, the boy came very near touching the confines of despair. Then the tide rose and the stranded ship of his fate began to lift a little. By means of a series of accidents—the illness of his former school-fellow, the already mentioned George Lovegrove, whose post he offered temporarily to fill—he drifted into connection with the banking house of Messrs. Barking Brothers & Barking. There his knowledge of modern languages, his industry, and a certain discreet aloofness commended him to his superiors. A minor clerkship fell vacant; it was offered to him. And from thenceforth, for Dominic Iglesias, the monotony of fixed routine and steady labour, until the day when, as a man of past fifty, restless and somewhat distrustful both of the present and the future, he watched the dying of the sullen sunset over Trimmer's Green from the windows of the first-floor sitting-room of Cedar Lodge.

CHAPTER II

That which had in point of fact happened was not, as Iglesias felt, without a pretty sharp edge of irony. For to-day, London, so long his task-mistress and gaoler, had assumed a new attitude towards him. Suddenly, unexpectedly, she had cast him off, given him his freedom. It was amazing, a thing to take your breath away for the moment. And agitated and hurt—for his pride unquestionably had suffered in the process—Iglesias asked himself what in the world he should do with this gift of freedom, what he should do, indeed, with that which remained to him of life?

It had come about thus. Seeking an interview that morning with Sir Abel Barking, in the latter's private room at the bank, he had made certain statements regarding his own health in justification of a request for some weeks' rest and holiday now, rather than later, in September, when his yearly vacation would fall due.

"So you find yourself unequal to dealing satisfactorily with the increasing intricacy of our financial operations, become confused by the multiplicity of detail, suffer from pains in the head?" Sir Abel had commented, with a certain largeness of manner. "I own, my good friend, I was not wholly unprepared for this announcement."

"My work has not so far, I believe, suffered in any respect," Iglesias put in quietly. "Directly I had reason to fear it might suffer I——"

"Of course, of course. I make no complaint—none. I go further. I admit that the area of our undertakings is enlarged, enormously enlarged, thanks to the remarkable personal energy and strenuous transatlantic business methods introduced by my nephew Reginald. I grant you all that——"

Sir Abel cleared his throat. Seduced by the charms of his own eloquence, he was ready to mount the platform at the shortest possible notice, even in private life. He loved exposition. He loved periods. His critics—for what public man is without these, their strictures naturally inspired by envy?—had been known to add that he also loved platitudes. Be this as it may, certain it is that he loved an audience—even of one. He had been considerably ruffled this morning by communications made to him by his good-looking and somewhat scapegrace youngest son. Those who fail to rule their own households often find solace in attempting to rule the households of others. Speech and patronage consequently tended to the restoration of self-complacency.

"No doubt this expansion, these modern methods, constitute a tax upon your capacity, my good friend, you having acquired your training under a less exacting system. I am not surprised. I confess"—he leaned back in his chair, with an indulgent smile, as one who should say, "the gods themselves do not wholly escape"—"I confess," he repeated, "it is something of a tax upon the capacity of a veteran financier such as myself. But then strain in some form or other, as I frequently remind myself, is the very master-note of our modern existence. We all experience it in our degree. And there are those men, such as myself, for instance, who from their position, their vast interests and heavy responsibilities, from the almost incalculable issues dependent on their judgment and their action, are called upon to endure this strain in its most exhausting manifestations, who are compelled to subordinate personal case, even health itself, to public obligation. In the end they pay, incontestable they pay, for their self-abnegation, for their unswerving obedience to the trumpet-call of public duty."

He paused and mused a while, his head raised, his right hand resting—it was noticeably podgy and squat—on the highly polished surface of the extensive writing-table, his left hand dropped, with a rather awkward negligence, over the arm of his chair. Meanwhile he gazed, as pensively as his caste of countenance permitted, at a portrait of himself, in the self-same attitude, which adorned the opposite wall. It had been presented to him by the electors of his late constituency. It was life-size and full-length. It had been painted by a well-known artist whose appreciation of the outward as a revelation of the inward man is slightly diabolic in its completeness. The portrait was very clever; it was also very like. Looking upon it no sane observer could stand in doubt of Sir Abel's eminent respectability or eminent wealth. His appearance exuded both. Unluckily nature had been niggardly in the bestowal of those more delicate marks of breeding which, both in man and beast, denote distinction of personality and antiquity of race. Pursy, prolific, Protestant, a commonness pervaded the worthy gentleman's aspect, causing him, as compared with his head clerk, Dominic Iglesias—standing there patiently awaiting his further utterance—to be as is a cheap oleograph to a fine sketch in pen and ink. It may be taken as an axiom that, in body and soul alike, to be deficient in outline is a sad mistake. But of all these little facts and the result of them, Sir Abel was, needless to relate, sublimely ignorant.

"With you, my good friend, it is otherwise," he remarked presently, reluctantly removing his gaze from the portrait of himself. "A beneficent Providence has devised the law of compensation. And we may remark the workings of it everywhere with instruction and encouragement. Hence social obscurity has its compensating advantages. You, for example, are affected by none of those considerations of public obligation binding upon myself. You are so situated that you can avoid the more trying consequences of this universal overstrain. If the demands of the position you now fill are too much for you, you can retire. I congratulate you, Iglesias. For some of us it is impossible, it is forbidden to retire."

The speaker paused, as when in addressing a political or charitable meeting he paused for well-merited applause, secure of having made a telling point. Dominic Iglesias, however, had not applauded. To tell the truth, his back was stiffening a little. He had a very just appreciation of the relative social positions of himself and his employer; still it did not occur to him, somehow, that applause was necessarily in the part.

"You have the redress in your own hands," Sir Abel went on, not without a hint of annoyance. "If you need amusement, leisure, rest, they are all within your reach."

Still Iglesias did not speak.

"See now, my good friend, consider. To be practical"—Sir Abel raised his finger and wagged it, with a heavy attempt at bonhomie. "You have no family to provide for?"

"No," said Mr. Iglesias.

"You are, in short, not married?"

"No, Sir Abel," he said again.

"Well, then, no obstacle presents itself. But let us pause a moment, for I must guard myself against misconception. In the interests of both public and private morality I am a staunch advocate of marriage." Again he cleared his throat. The platform was conspicuous by its presence—in idea. "I hold matrimony to be among the primary duties, nay, to be the primary duty of the Christian and the citizen. We owe it to the race, we owe it to ourselves, we owe it to the opposite sex. Let us be quite clear on this point. Yet, since I deprecate all bigotry, I admit that there may be exceptional cases in which absence of the marital relation, though arguing some emotional callousness, may prove advantageous to the individual."

A queer light had come into Dominic Iglesias' eyes. The corners of his mouth worked a little. He stood quite still and rather noticeably erect.

"I do not deny this," Sir Abel continued. "I repeat, I do not deny it. And yours, my good friend, may be, I am prepared to acknowledge, a case in point. I take for granted, by the way, that you have saved, since your salary has been a liberal one?"

Iglesias inclined his head.

"Clearly we need discuss this matter no further then." The speaker became impressive, admonitory. "Indeed, it appears to me that your lot is a most favoured one. You are free of all encumbrances. You can retire in comfort—retire, moreover, with the assurance that your departure will cause no inconvenience to myself and my colleagues, since you make room for men younger and more in touch with modern methods than yourself."

Mr. Iglesias permitted himself to smile.

"Ah, yes!" he said. "Possibly I had not taken that fact sufficiently into account."

"Yet, clearly, it should augment your satisfaction," Sir Abel Barking observed, with a touch of severity. "And, by the by, you can draw your pension. You were entitled, strictly speaking, to do so some years ago—four, I believe, to be accurate. This was pointed out to you at the time by my nephew Reginald. He was not at all unwilling that you should retire then; but you preferred to remain. I had some conversation, at the time, with my nephew on the subject. I insisted upon the fact that your service had been exemplary. I finally succeeded in overruling his objection to your retaining your post."

"I am evidently under a heavy obligation to you, Sir Abel," said Iglesias.

"Don't mention it—don't mention it," the great man answered nobly. "Those in power should try to exercise it to the benefit of their subordinates. It has always been my effort not only to be just, but to be considerate of the interests and feelings of persons in my employment."

And with that he again fixed his eyes upon the ironical portrait adorning the opposite wall, wholly blind to the fact that it at once revealed his weaknesses and mocked at them, conscious only of an agreeable conviction that he had treated his head clerk with generosity and spoken to him with the utmost good-feeling and tact.

With the proud it is ever a question whether to spoil the Egyptians, or to fling back even the best-earned wages, payable by Egyptians, full in the said Egyptians' face. For the firm of Barking Brothers & Barking, in the abstract, Iglesias had the loyalty of long-established habit. It had been as the rising tide, setting the ship of his fate and fortune honourably afloat in the dismal days of that early stranding. Its service had eaten up the best years of his life, it is true. But, even in so doing, by mere force of constant association, the interests of the great banking house had come to be his own, its schemes and secrets his excitement, its successes his satisfaction. Fortunately the human mind is so constituted that it is possible to have an esteem, amounting to enthusiasm, for a body corporate, while entertaining but scanty admiration for the individuals of whom that body is composed—fortunately indeed, since otherwise what government, secular or sacred, would long continue to subsist? Hence, to Iglesias, this matter of the pension was decidedly difficult. Pride said, "This man, Abel Barking has been offensive; both he and his nephew have been ungrateful; reject it with contempt." Justice said, "You have no quarrel with the firm as a whole; accept it." Common sense, pricked up by anger, said, "Claim your own, take every brass farthing of it." While personal dignity, winding up the case, admonished, "By no means give yourself away. Make no impetuous demonstration. Go home and think it quietly over." And with the advice of personal dignity Mr. Iglesias fell in.

Yet he was still very sore, the heat of anger past, but the smart of it remaining, when he journeyed back from the city later in the day. And not only that after-smart, but a perplexity held him. For two strange faces had looked into his during the last few hours—those of Loneliness and Freedom. He had taken for granted, in a general sort of way, that such personages existed and exercised a certain jurisdiction in human affairs. But in all the course of his laborious life they had never before come close, personally claiming him. He had had no time for them. But they are patient, they only wait. They had time for him—plenty of it. Suddenly he understood that; and it perplexed him, for his estimate of his own importance was modest. He even felt apologetic towards them, as one at whose door distinguished guests alight for whose entertainment he has made no adequate provision. He was embarrassed, his sense of hospitality reproaching him.

It so happened that, on this same return journey, he occupied the seat on the right, immediately behind that of the driver. The sky was covered, the atmosphere close. The horses, grey ones, showed a thick yellowish lather where the collar rubbed their necks and the traces their flanks. They were slack and heavy, and the omnibus hugged the curb. Within it was empty, and on the top boasted but three passengers besides Iglesias himself. It followed that, carrying insufficiency of ballast, the great red-painted vehicle lumbered, and jerked, and swayed uneasily; while the lighter traffic swept past it in a glittering stream, the dominant note of which was black as against the dirty drab of the recently watered wood-pavement. And the character of that traffic was new to Dominic Iglesias, though he had travelled the Hammersmith Road, Kensington High Street and Kensington Gore, Knightsbridge and Piccadilly, back and forth daily, these many years. For the exigencies of business demanding that the hours of his journeying should be early and late, always the same, it came about that the aspect of these actually so-familiar thoroughfares was novel, as beheld in the height of the season at three o'clock in the afternoon.

At first Iglesias saw without seeing, busy with his own uncheerful thoughts. But after a while he began to speculate idly on the scene around him, turning to the outward and material for distraction, if not for actual comfort. And so the stream of carriages and hansoms, and the conspicuously well-favoured human beings occupying them, began to intrigue his attention. He questioned whom they might be and whither wending, decked forth in such brave array. They seemed to suggest something divorced from, yet native to, his experience; something he had never touched in fact, yet the right to which was resident in his blood. And with this he ceased, in instinct, to be merely the highly respected and respectable head clerk of Messrs. Barking Brothers & Barking—now superannuated and laid on the shelf. A gayer, fiercer, simpler life, quick with violences of vivacious sound and vivid colour, the excitement of it heightened by clear shining southern sunshine and blue-black shadow—a life undreamed of by conventional, slow-moving, rather vulgar middle-class London—to which, on the face of it, he appeared as emphatically to belong—awoke and cried in Dominic Iglesias.

It was a surprising little experience, causing him to straighten up his lean yet shapely figure; while the burden of his years, and the long monotony of them, seemed strangely lifted off him. Then, with the air of courtly reserve—at once the joke and envy of the younger clerks, which had earned him the nickname of "the old Hidalgo"—he leaned forward and addressed the omnibus driver. The latter upraised a broad, moist and sleepy countenance.

"Polo at Ranelagh," he answered, in a voice thickened by dust and the laying of that dust by strong waters. "Club team plays 'Undred and First Lancers."

The words had been to the inquirer pretty much as phrases from the liturgy of an unknown cult. But it was Iglesias' praiseworthy disposition not to be angry with that which he did not happen to understand, so much as angry with himself for not understanding it.

"Only an additional proof, were it needed, of the prodigious extent of my ignorance!" he reflected in stoically humorous self-contempt. His eyes dwelt, somewhat wistfully, on the glittering stream of traffic, once again those two unbidden guests, Loneliness and Freedom—for whose entertainment he had made inadequate provision—sitting, as it seemed, very close on either side of him. Then that happened which altered all the values. Dominic Iglesias suddenly saw a person whom he knew.

He had seen that same person about three hours previously in the bank in Threadneedle Street, while waiting for admittance to Sir Abel's private room. Rumour accredited this handsome young gentleman—Sir Abel's youngest son—with tastes expensive rather than profitable, liberal socially, rather than estimable ethically, declaring him to be distinctly of the nature of the proverbial thorn in the banker's otherwise very prosperous side. He had, so said rumour, the fortune or misfortune, as you chose to take it, of being at once a considerably bad boy and a distinctly charming one. Be all that as it might, the young man had certainly presented a grimly anxious countenance when, without so much as a nod of recognition, he had stalked past Mr. Iglesias in the dim light of the glass and mahogany-walled corridor. But now, as the latter noted, his expression had changed, and that very much for the better. The young man's face was flushed and eager, and his teeth showed white and even under his reddish brown moustache. If anxieties still pursued him they were in subjection to one main anxiety, the anxiety to please, which of all anxieties is the most engaging and grace-begetting.

Just then the traffic was held up, thus enabling Iglesias from his perch on the 'bustop to receive a more than fleeting impression. Two ladies were seated opposite the young man in the carriage. In them Iglesias recognised persons of very secure social standing. The elder he supposed to be Lady Sokeington—Alaric Barking's half-sister—to whom, on the occasion of her marriage, twelve or thirteen years ago, he had had the expensive honour of presenting, in his own name and that of his colleagues, a costly gift of plate. The other lady, so it appeared to him, was eminently sweet to look upon. She was very young. She leaned a little forward, and in the pose of her delicate figure and the carriage of her pretty head—under its burden of pale pink and grey feathers, flowers, and lace—he detected further example of that engaging anxiety to please. They made a delightful young couple, the fair seeming of this life and riches of it very much on their side. Mr. Iglesias' chivalrous heart went out to them in silent sympathy and benediction; while, the block being over, his gaze continued to follow them as long as the young girl's slender white-clad back and the young man's flushed and eager face remained distinguishable. Then he started, for he was aware that his unbidden companions had received unexpected reinforcement. A third guest had arrived, and looked hard and critically at him. It's name was Old Age, and he found something sardonic in its glance. With all his gentleness of soul, all his innate self-restraint, there remained fighting blood in Dominic Iglesias. Therefore, for the moment, recognising with whom he had to deal, a light anything but mild visited his eyes, and a rigidity the straight lines of his chin and lips. Old Age is a sinister visitant even to those who are moderate in demand and clean of life. For it gives to drink of the cup not of pleasure, but merely of patience, of physical loss and intellectual humiliation; and, once it has laid its spell upon you, you are past all remedy save the supreme remedy of death. And so, at first sight, Iglesias rebelled—as do all men—turning defiant. Then, being very sane, he gave in to the relentless logic of fact. Silently, yet with all courtesy, he acknowledged the newcomer, and bade it be seated along with the rest. While, after brief pause to rally his pride, and that courage which is the noblest attribute of pride, he turned to things concrete and material once more, finally addressing himself to the omnibus driver:

"Pardon me; polo, as I understand, is a species of game?"

The broad moist countenance was again uplifted, a hint of patronage now tempering its good-natured apathy.

"Sort'er 'ockey on 'orseback."

"That must be sufficiently dangerous," Mr. Iglesias remarked.

"Bless you, yes. Players breaks their backs pretty frequent, and cuts the ponies about most cruel—"

He ceased speaking abruptly, jammed the brake down with his heel in response to the conductor's bell, and drew the sweating horses up short to permit the ingress of fresh passengers. This accomplished, the omnibus lumbered onwards while Dominic Iglesias fell into further meditation.

The explanation vouchsafed him was still far from explicit; yet this much of illumination he gained from it, namely, the assurance that all these goodly personages, Alaric Barking and his sweet companion among them, were on pleasure bent. One and all they fared forth, on this heavy summer afternoon, in search of amusement—in search of that intangible yet very powerful factor in human affairs to which it is given to lift the too great weight of seriousness from mortal life, cheating perception of relentless actualities, helping to restore the balance, helping men to hope, to laugh, and to forget. Perceiving all which, conscious moreover of the near neighbourhood of Loneliness on the right hand and Old Age on the left, Iglesias began to bestow on these votaries of pleasure a more earnest attention, recognising in them the possessors of a secret which it greatly behoved him to enter into possession of likewise. In what, he asked himself, did it actually consist, this to him practically unknown quantity, amusement? How was the spirit of it cultivated, the enjoyment of it consciously attained? How far did it reside in inward attitude, how far in outward circumstance? In a word, how did they all do it? It was very incumbent upon him to learn, and he admitted a ridiculous ignorance.

CHAPTER III

Thus had the chapter of labour ended, and that of leisure opened. And it was with the sadness of things terminated very strongly upon him that, as Frederick, the German-Swiss valet, finished clearing the dinner-table and departed, Mr. Iglesias looked forth over the neatly protected verdure of Trimmer's Green in the evening quiet. The smugly pacific aspect of the place irritated him. He was aware of a great emptiness. And very certainly the scene before him offered no solution of the problem of the filling of that emptiness. And somehow or other it had to be filled—Iglesias knew that, knew it through every fibre of him—or life would be simply insupportable. Meanwhile from the public drawing-room below came sounds of revelry, innocent enough yet hardly calculated to soothe over-strained nerves. Little Mr. Farge—whose thin and reedy tenor carried as does a penny whistle—gave forth the refrain of a song just then popular in metropolitan music-halls.

"They're keeping latish hours at the Convalescent Home," piped Mr. Farge; while his friend and devout admirer, Albert Edward Worthington, tore at the banjo strings and the ladies tittered.

Iglesias listened in a somewhat grim spirit of endurance. On the far side of the Green he could see the gaslights in the Lovegroves' dining-room. These appeared to watch him rather uncomfortably, as with three supplicating and reproachful eyes. He debated whether he would not take his hat, step across, and tell his old friend what had happened—it would at least relieve him of the sound of little Farge's serenading. But his pride recoiled somehow. Good souls, man and wife, they would be full of solicitude and kindness; but they would say the wrong thing. They would not understand. How, indeed, should they, being wholly at one with their surroundings—unimaginative, domestic, British middle-class, with its virtues and limitations aggressively in evidence? George Lovegrove would suggest some minor municipal office, or membership of the local borough council, as a crown of consolation. His wife would skirt round the subject of matrimony. She had done so before now; and Iglesias, while presenting a dignified front to the enemy, had inwardly shuddered. She was an excellent, estimable woman; but when ponderously arch, when extensively sly! Oh, dear no! It didn't do. Her gambols were too sadly suggestive of those of a skittish hippopotamus. Dominic Iglesias was conscious that he had a skin too little to-night; he could not witness them with philosophy. The kindliest intention, the best-meant words, might cause him extravagant annoyance.

He turned away from the window and took a turn the length of the room—a tall, distinct, and even stately figure in the thickening dusk. He felt rather horribly desolate. He was fairly frightened by the greatness of the emptiness, within and about him, engendered by absence of employment. He had little to reproach himself with. His record was cleaner than most men's—he could not but know that. He had sacrificed personal ambition, personal happiness, to the service of one supremely dear to him. Not for a moment did he regret it. Had it to be done all over again, without hesitation he would do it. Still there was no blinking facts. Here was the nemesis, not of ill living, but of good—namely, emptiness, loneliness, homelessness, Old Age here at his elbow, Death waiting there ahead.

"The routine has gone on too long," he said to himself bitterly. "I have lost my pliability, lost my humanity. I am a machine now, not a man. To the machine, work is life. Work over, life is over; and the machine is just so much lumber—better broken up and sent to the rag and bottle shop, where it may fetch the worth of its weight as scrap-iron."

He turned, came back to the open window again and stood there, rather carefully avoiding the three reproachful eyes of the Lovegroves' dining-room gaselier, and fixing his gaze on that sullen fierceness of sunset still hanging in the extreme northwest.

"Unluckily there is no rag and bottle shop where superannuated bank clerks of five-and-fifty have even the very modest market value of scrap-iron!" he went on. "Of all kinds of uselessness, that of we godlike human beings is the most utterly obvious when our working day is past. Mental decay and bodily corruption as the ultimate. And, this side of it, a few years of increasing degradation, a mere senseless killing of time until the very unpleasing goal is reached—along with a growing selfishness, and narrowness of outlook; along, possibly, with some development of senile sensuality, the more detestable because it lacks the provocations of hot blood. Oh! Dominic Iglesias, Dominic Iglesias, is that the ugly road you are doomed to travel—a toothless greed for filling your belly with fly-blown dainties off the refuse-heap?"

And through the open window, in sinister accompaniment to little Mr. Farge's sophisticated and unpastoral pipings, came the voice of the great city herself in answer—low, multitudinous, raucous, without emphasis but without briefest relief of interval or of pause. And this laid hold strongly of Iglesias' imagination, reminding him of all the intimate wretchedness of that first stranding of the ship of his fate. Reminding him of his long and fruitless trampings in search of employment—good looks, energy, youth itself, seeming but an added handicap—when London revealed herself to him in her solidarity, revealed herself as a prodigious living creature, awful in her mysterious vigour, ever big with impending birth, merciless with impending death. As she showed herself to him then, with life all untried before him, so she showed herself still when, in the blackness of his present humour, all life worth the name appeared over and passed. He had changed, so he believed, to the point of nullity and final ineptitude. She remained strong, active, relentless as ever. As long ago, so now, she struck him as monstrous. Yet now, though all the conditions were changed, he had, as long ago, an instinct that from her there was no escape.

"I have served you honestly enough all these years," he said—since she had voice to speak, she had also ears to hear, mayhap—"and you have taken much and given little. To-day you have turned me off, told me to quit. But where, I ask you, can I go? I am too stiffened by work, unskilled in travel, too unadaptable to begin again elsewhere. Moreover, you hold the record of my experience, all my glad and sorrowful memories. I might try to leave you, but it's no use. I am planted and rooted in you, monstrous mother that you are. If I know myself, I should go only to come back."

For the moment the calm of long self-control was broken up within him. Dominic Iglesias dwelt, consciously and sensibly, in the horror of the Outer Darkness—which horror is known only to that small and somewhat suspect minority of human beings who are also capable, by the operation of the divine mercy, of dwelling in the glory of the Uncreated Light. The swing of the pendulum is equal to right as to left. He was staggered by the misery of his own isolation—a stranger, as he suddenly realised, by temperament and ideals, as well as by race! Then resolutely he turned his back on this, with an instinct of self-preservation directing his thought to things practical and average.

For example, that question of the pension—concerning which he now found, to his slight surprise, he was no longer the least in doubt. This money was his by right. The hard strain in his nature was dominant—to the full he would claim his rights. And since in moments of despair the human mind invariably requires a human victim, be it merely a simulacrum, a waxen image of a man to melt in the fires of its humiliation and revolt, Iglesias remembered, with much contemptuous satisfaction, the ironical portrait of Sir Abel Barking adorning the wall of the latter's private room at the bank. He hailed the diabolic talent of the artist who had laid bare with such subtle skill the flatulence of his sitter. It was a pretty revenge, very assuaging just now to Iglesias. For the real man, as he reflected, was not the man who sat heavily self-complacent in a library chair, exuding platitudes and pride of patronage; but the man who hung upon the wall forever ridiculous while paint and canvas should last. Thus would he go down to posterity! And to Dominic Iglesias, just now, it seemed very excellent that posterity should know him for the wind-bag hypocrite he essentially was. Securely entrenched behind his own large prosperity, uxoriousness, paternity, had he not counted his, Iglesias', blessings to him; counselling amusement, rest, congratulating him on just all that which made for his present distress—namely, his obscure position, his enforced idleness, his absence of human ties, the general meagreness of his state in life? The more he thought of the incident, the more it filled him with indignation and disgust. Therefore, very certainly he would claim his pension; claim an infinitesimal but actual fraction of this man's great wealth; would live long so as to claim it as long as possible, till the paying of it, indeed, should become a weariness to the payer. And he would spend it, too, unquestionably he would. Mr. Iglesias' rare and gracious smile had an almost cruel edge to it.

"The machine shall become a man again," he said. "And the man shall amuse himself. How, I don't yet know, but I will find out. Work has made me dull and inept."

He straightened himself up, tired, yet unbroken, defiant, aware—though the horror of the Outer Darkness was yet upon him—of purpose still militant and unspent.

"Play may make me the reverse of dull and inept. I have always been diligent and methodical. I will continue to be so. This enterprise admits of no delay. I will begin at once, begin to-morrow, to amuse myself."

It is characteristic of the Latin to see things written in fire and blood, which the slower-brained Anglo-Saxon only sees written in red paint—if, indeed, he ever arrives at seeing them written at all. To-night the Latin held absolute sway in Dominic Iglesias. With freedom had come a curious reversion to type. His humour, like his smile, was a trifle cruel. He observed, criticised, judged, condemned unsparingly, all mental courtesies in abeyance. When, therefore, at this juncture the three eyes of the Lovegroves' dining-room gaselier winked slowly, and closed their lids—so to speak—ceasing to watch and to supplicate, he suffered no self-reproach. The good, simple couple were shutting up house and going to bed, he supposed. They sought repose betimes; and, unless supper had been more aggressively cold and heavy than usual, slept, till broad day, a dreamless sleep. Decidedly it was well he had not taken his hat and stepped across to visit them, for, beyond all question, they would not have understood! The voice of London, for instance, meant nothing to them. They had no notion London had a voice. Still less had they any notion she was a prodigious living creature. London was the place where they resided—that was all, and, since the streets are admittedly noisy and dusty, they had taken a house in this genteel and convenient suburb. Of the tremendous life and force of things, miscalled man-made and inanimate, they had no faintest conception. Small wonder they went to bed betimes and slept a dreamless sleep! Thinking of which—notwithstanding their kindness and affection—they became, just now, to Iglesias as truly astonishing phenomena in their line as Sir Abel Barking in his. He saw in them merely specimens, though good ones, of the great majority of the British public, a public so overlaid and permeated by convention, so parochial in outlook, so hidebound by social tradition and insular prejudice, that it is really less in touch with everlasting fact than the animals it pets, demoralises, and eats. These at least have instinct, and so are at one with universal nature. In perception, in spontaneity of action, good Mrs. Lovegrove was as an infant compared to her parrot or her pug. So was little Mr. Farge with his sophisticated warblings—so, for that matter, were all the other persons among whom his, Iglesias', lot was cast. His sense of isolation deepened. If amusement was his object, most certainly the society of Trimmer's Green would not supply it. He must look further afield for all that.

In the far northwest the last of the sunset had faded; only the cloud remained. Yet the horizon, above the broken line of the house-roofs and chimney-pots, pulsed with light—the very earthly light which, in great cities, flares out when the light of heaven dies, to walk the streets, with much else of doubtful loveliness, till it is shamed by the cold chastity of dawn. And along with that outflaring, a certain meretricious element introduced itself into the aspect of Trimmer's Green. Across the roadway, the gaslamps showed cones of vivid yet sickly brightness, bringing at regular intervals the sharply indented leaves of the plane trees and the shivering silver of the balsam-poplars into an arresting and artificial distinctness. Between were spaces of vacancy and gloom. And from out such a space, immediately opposite, slowly emerged a shambling and ungainly figure, in which Dominic Iglesias recognised the third of his fellow-lodgers, Mr. de Courcy Smyth. His acquaintance with the said lodger was of the slightest, since the latter had but recently entered into residence and rarely appeared at meals. Mrs. Porcher habitually referred to him with a pitying respect as "a gentleman very influential in literary and professional circles, but unfortunate in his married life"; ending with a sigh and upward glance of her still fine eyes, as one who could sympathise, having herself been through that gate. Influential or not, it occurred to Iglesias that the man presented a sorry spectacle enough. For a minute or so he stood aimlessly in the full glare of a gaslamp. His thin, creasy Inverness cape was thrown back, displaying evening dress. He carried a soft grey felt hat in one hand. His whole aspect was seedy, disappointed, dejected; his face pale and puffy, his sparse reddish hair and beard but indifferently trimmed. It was borne in upon Iglesias, moreover, that the man was hungry, that he had not—and that for some time—had enough to eat. Voluntary poverty is among the most beautiful, involuntary poverty among the ugliest, sights upon earth; and to which order of poverty that of de Courcy Smyth belonged, Mr. Iglesias was in no doubt. This was a sordid sight, a sight of discouragement, adding the last touch to the melancholy which oppressed him. The seedy figure crossed the road, fumbled for a minute with a latchkey. Then nerveless footsteps ascended the stairs, passed the door, and took their joyless way up and onward to the bed-sitting-room immediately above.

Down below the music had ceased, while sounds arose suggestive of a little playfulness on the part of the two young men in bidding their hostess and Miss Eliza Hart good-night. Very soon the house became silent. But Dominic Iglesias, though tired, was in no humour for sleep. He drew forward a leather-covered armchair and sat near the open window, in at which came a breathing of night wind. This was soothing, touching his forehead as with delicate pressure of a cool and sympathetic hand; so that, without any sense of surprising transition, he found himself in the garden of the little house in Holland Street, Kensington, once again. The laburnum was in full blossom, and the breeze uplifted the light drooping branches of it, making all their golden glory dance in the sunshine. There must have been rain in the night, too, for the stone basin was full of water, in which the sparrows were busy washing, sending up tiny iridescent jets and fountains from their swiftly fluttering wings. It was delicious to Dominic. He felt very safe, very gay. Only a heavy ill-favoured tabby cat came from nowhere. It had designs upon the sparrows. Twice it climbed stealthily up the broken bricks and gas clinkers. Twice the little boy drove it away. It was not a nice cat. It had a broad white face, deceitful little eyes, and grey whiskers. It declared it only caught sparrows for their good and for the good of the community. It assured Dominic he was guilty of a grave error of judgment in attempting to interfere. It said a great deal about moral responsibility and the heavy obligations persons of wealth and position owe to themselves.

Just then Pascal Pelletier, carrying a square Huntley Palmer's biscuit tin, containing an infernal machine, under his arm, his angelic countenance radiant in the sunshine, came down the steps from the dining-room window. And, while Dominic ran to greet him, the cat crept back again—its face was the face of Sir Abel Barking, and it made a spring at the sparrows. But the pillar broke and the basin toppled over, pinning it, across the loins, down on to the clinkers under the edge of the stone lip.

"Oh! you've spoilt my garden, you've spoilt my garden!" Dominic cried. "The basin has fallen. The sparrows will never wash in it any more."

But Pascal Pelletier patted him on the head tenderly.

"Do not weep over the fallen basin, very dear one," he said. "Rather sing aloud Te Deum in praise of the glorious goddess of Social Revolution who has delivered the enemy of the people into our hands. This is no affair of cat and bird, but of the capitalist and the proletariat on which he battens. So for a little space let the unholy creature lie there writhing. Let it understand what it is to have a back broken by the weight of an impossible burden. Let it try vainly to drag its limbs from beneath an immovable load. Observe it, let it suffer. Very soon we will finish with it, and explode the iniquitous system it represents. See, in the name of humanity, of labour, of the unknown and unnumbered millions of the martyred poor, I set a match to this good little fuse, and, with the rapidity of thought, blow blasphemous tyrant Capital into a thousand fragments of reeking flesh and splintered bone!"

But to the little boy, words and spectacle alike had become unendurably painful.

"No, no, Pascal, you cannot cure everything that way. It is not just," he cried. And running forward with all his strength he lifted the stone basin off the wounded creature—cat, man, beast of prey, modern financier, be it what it might. He stopped to gather it up in his arms, and, repulsive though it was, to comfort and protect it. But just then came a thunderous rattle and crash knocking him senseless.

Mr. Iglesias sat bolt upright in his chair, uncertain of his identity and surroundings, shaken and bewildered.

Upstairs, de Courcy Smyth—spent and stupefied by the writing of a would-be smart critique on the first-night performance of a screaming farce, for one of to-morrow's evening papers—had stumbled, upsetting the fire-irons, as he slouched across his room to bed. Iglesias heard the creak of the wire-wove mattress as the man flung himself down; and that familiar sound restored his sense of actualities. Yet all his mood was changed and softened. The return to childhood had made a strange impression upon him, filling him with a great nostalgia for things apparently lost, but exquisite; and which, having once been, might, though he knew not by what conceivable alchemy of time or chance, once again be. Meanwhile, he must have slept long, for the wind had grown chill. The voice of London, the monstrous mother, had grown weak and intermittent. And the earthly light, pulsing along the horizon, had grown faint, humbled and chastened by the whiteness of approaching dawn.

CHAPTER IV

A quarter-mile range of high unpainted oak paling, well seasoned, well carpentered, innocent of chink or shrinkage, impervious to the human eye. Visible above it the domed heads of enormous elm trees steeped in sunshine, rising towards the ample curve of the summer sky. At intervals, with tumultuous rush and scurry, the thud of the hoofs of unseen horses, galloping for all they are worth over grass. The suck and rub of breeches against saddle-flaps, the rattle of a curb chain or the rings of a bit. A call, a challenge, smothered exclamations. The long-drawn swish of the polo stick through the air, and the whack of the wooden head of it against ball, or ground, or something unluckily softer and more sentient. A pause, broken only by distant voices, and the sound, or rather sense, of men and horses in quiet and friendly movement; followed by the tumultuous rush and scurry, and all the moving incidents of the heard, yet unwitnessed, drama over again.

For here it was that gallant and costly game beloved of Oriental princes—rather baldly described to Mr. Iglesias yesterday by the driver of the Hammersmith 'bus as a "kind of hockey on horseback"—in very full swing no doubt. Only unfortunately Iglesias found himself on the wrong side of the palings. And, since he had learned, indirectly, from the observations of the monumental police-sergeant—directing the stream of carriages at the entrance gates—to other would-be spectators, that to the polo ground, as to so much else obviously desirable in this world, there is "no admission except by ticket," on the wrong side of these same palings he recognised he was fated to stay. It was a disappointment, not to say an annoyance. For he had come forth, in accordance with his determination, to make observations and inquiries regarding that same matter of amusement. And, since the influence of that which is to be acts upon us almost, if not quite, as strongly as the influence of that which has been, the handsome, eager countenance of young Alaric Barking and the graceful figure of his fair companion, as seen from the 'bustop, occurred very forcibly in this connection to Dominic Iglesias' mind. He would go forth and behold that which they had gone forth to behold. He would witness the sports of the well-born and rich. From these he elected, somewhat proudly, to take his first lessons in the fine art of amusement. So here he was; and here, too—very much here—were the palings, spelling failure and frustration of purpose.

Fortunately unwonted exercise and the pure invigorating atmosphere tended to generate placidity, and agreeable harmony of the mental and physical being. It followed that active annoyance was short-lived. For a minute or two Mr. Iglesias loitered, listening to the moving music of the unseen game. Then, walking onward to the end of the enclosure, where the palings turn away sharply at the left, he crossed the road and made for a wooden bench just there amiably presenting itself. It was pleasant to rest. The walk had been a long one; but it now appeared to him that the labour of it had not been wholly in vain. For around him stretched a breezy common, broken by straggling bramble and furze brakes, and dotted with hawthorn bushes, upon the topmost branches of which the crowded pinkish-white blossoms still lingered. From one to another small birds flitted with a pretty dipping flight, uttering quick detached notes as in merry question and answer. Through the rough turf the bracken pushed upward, uncurling sturdy croziers of brownish green. Away to the right, beyond the railway line, rose the densely wooded slopes of Roehampton and Sheen; while, against the purple-green gloom of them, the home signals of Barnes Station—hard white lines and angles tipped with scarlet and black—stood out in high relief like the gigantic characters of some strange alphabet. Down the wide road motors ground and snorted; and carriages moved slowly, two abreast, the menservants sitting at ease, talking and smoking while waiting to take up at the police-guarded gate, back there towards the heat and smoke of London, when the polo match should be played out.

But immediately London, the heat, and smoke, and raucous voice of it, seemed far enough away, the wholesome charm of the country very present. For a while Dominic Iglesias yielded himself up to it. Receptive, quiescent, contented, he basked in the sunshine, his mind vacant of definite thought. But for a while only. For as physical fatigue wore off, definite thought returned; and with it the sense of his own loneliness, the oppression of a future empty of work, the bitterness of this enhanced by the little disappointment he had lately suffered. He leaned forward, his hands clasped between his knees, looking at the bracken croziers pushing bravely upward through the rough turf to air and light. Even these blind and speechless things worked, in a sense, fulfilling the law of their existence. He went back on the dream of last night, on his own childhood, the happiness, yet haunting unspoken anxiety of it, his father's fanaticism, fierce revolutionary propaganda, and mysteriously uncertain fate.

"And to think that was the pit out of which I, of all men, was digged!" he said to himself. "Have I done something to restore the family balance in respect of right reason, or is the shame of incapacity upon me? Have I sacrificed myself, or cowardly have I merely shirked living? Heaven knows—I don't, only——"

But here his uncheerful meditations were broken in on by a voice, imperative in tone, yet perceptibly shaken by laughter.

"Cappadocia!" it called. "Cappadocia! Do you hear? Come here, you little reprobate."

Then Dominic Iglesias perceived that he had ceased to be sole occupant of the bench. A dog, a tiny toy spaniel, sat beside him. It sidled very close, gazing at him with foolishly prominent eyes. Its ears, black edged with tan, soft and lustrous as floss silk, hung down in long lappets on either side its minute and melancholy face. The tip of its red tongue just showed. It was abnormally self-conscious and solemn. It planted one fringed paw upon Iglesias' arm and it snored.

"Cappadocia!—well, of all the cheeky young beggars——"

This time the voice broke in unmistakable merriment, wholly spontaneous, as of relief, even of mischievous triumph; and Mr. Iglesias, looking up, found himself confronted by a young woman. She advanced slowly, her trailing string-coloured lace skirts gathered up lazily in one hand. About her shoulders she wore a long blue-purple silk scarf, embroidered with dragons of peacock, and scarlet, and gold. These rather violent colours found repetition in the nasturtium leaves and flowers that crowned her lace hat, the wide brim of which was tied down with narrow strings of purple velvet, gipsy fashion, beneath her chin. Under her arm she carried another tiny spaniel, the creature's black morsel of a head peeping out quaintly from among the forms of the embroidered dragons, which last appeared to writhe, as in the heat of deadly conflict, as their wearer moved. Her face was in shadow owing to the breadth of the brim of her hat. Otherwise the sunshine embraced her whole figure, conferring on it a glittering yet singularly unsubstantial effect, as though a column of pale windswept dust were overlaid, here and there, with splendour of rich enamel.

And it was just this effect of something unsubstantial, in a way fictitious and out of relation to sober fact, which struck Dominic Iglesias, robbing him for the moment of his dignified courtesy. Frankly he stared at this appearance, so strangely at variance with the realities of his own melancholy thought. Meanwhile the little dog snuggled up yet closer against him.

"Yes—pray don't disturb yourself," the young lady went on volubly "It's too bad, I know, to intrude on you like this. But as Cappadocia refuses to come to me, it is clear I have to come after Cappadocia. It's simply disgraceful the way she carries on when one takes her out, making acquaintances like this, casually, all over the place. The maids flatly refuse to air her, even on a string. They say it becomes a little too compromising. But, as I explain to them, she's not a bit the modern woman. She belongs to a stage of social development when pretty people infinitely preferred being compromised to being squelched." The speaker laughed again quietly. "I'm not altogether sure they weren't right. When you are squelched, finished, done for, it matters precious little whether you've been compromised first or not. Don't you agree? Any way, Cappadocia's not going to be squelched if she can help it. She's horribly scared, or pretends to be, at motors. Let one toot and she forgets all her fine-lady manners, and just skips to anybody for protection. She'll take refuge in the most unconventional places to escape."

The part of wisdom, in face of this very forthcoming young person, would have been no doubt to arise and withdraw. But to Dominic Iglesias, just then, dogs, woman, conversation, were alike so remote and unreal, part merely of the scene which he had been contemplating, that he failed to take them seriously. Divorced from routine, he was divorced, in a way, from habitual modes of mind and conduct. He neither consented nor refused, but just let things happen, attaching little or no meaning to them. If this feminine being chose to prattle—well, let her do so. Really he did not care.

"I am not very modern myself," he said, with a shade of weariness. "So perhaps your small dog had some intuition of a kindred spirit when taking refuge with me."

"All the same, you hardly date from the social era of Charles II., I fancy," the young lady answered quickly.

As she spoke she raised her chin with a slightly impudent movement, thus bringing her countenance into the sunlight. For the first time Iglesias clearly saw her face. It was small, the features insignificant, the skin smooth and fine in texture, but sallow. Her hair, black and very massive, was puffed out and dressed low, hiding her ears. Her lips were rather positively red, and the tinge of colour on either cheek, though slight, was not wholly convincing in tone. Even to a person of Mr. Iglesias' praiseworthy limitation of experience in such matters, her face was vaguely suggestive of the footlights—would have been distinctly so but for her eyes. These were curiously at variance with the rest of her appearance. They belonged to a quite other order of woman, so to speak—a woman of finer physique, of higher intelligence, possibly of nobler purposes. They were arrestingly large in size, thereby helping to dwarf the proportions of her face. In colour they were a rather light warm hazel, with a slight film over both iris and pupil, and a noticeably bluish shade in the whites of them. In these last particulars they were like a baby's eyes; but very unlike in the reflective intensity of their observation as she fixed them upon Dominic Iglesias.

"Cappadocia may be a fool about motors," she remarked, "but she's uncommonly shrewd in reading character. She seems to like you, to have taken you on, don't you know; and she's generally right. So I'll sit down, please. Oh! no, no, come along now"—this as Mr. Iglesias rose and made a movement to depart—"why, dear man, the very point of the whole show is that you should sit down, too."

CHAPTER V

And so it came about that the Lady of the Windswept Dust sat at one end of the flat bench and Dominic Iglesias at the other, with the two absurd and exquisite little dogs in between. And the lady chattered. Her voice was sweet and full, with plaintive tones and turns of laughter in it; and, though the vowel sounds were not wholly impeccable, having the tang in them common to the speech of the cockney bred, the aspirates happily remained inviolate. And Iglesias listened, still with a curious indifference, as, sitting in the body of the house, he might have listened to patter from the other side of the footlights. It passed the time. Presently he would get up, taking the whole of his rather sorrowful personality along with him, and go out by the main entrance, while she left by the stage door—and so vanished, little dogs and all.

"It's my habit to play fair," she announced. "If I'm going to ask personal questions at the finish, I always lead up to them by supplying personal information at the start. It's mean to induce other people to give themselves away unless you give yourself away first—also, I observe it is usually quite unsuccessful. Well, then, to begin with, his name"—she gently poked the tiny spaniel beside her, causing it to wriggle uneasily all the length of its satiny back—"is Onions. Graceful and distinguished, isn't it? But I give you my word I couldn't help myself. Cappadocia's so duchessy that I had to knock the conceit out of her somehow, or it would not have been possible to live with her. She was altogether too smart for me—used to look at me as if I was a cockroach. So I consulted a friend of mine about it; for it's a little too much to be made to feel like a black-beetle in your own house, and by a thing of that size, too! And he—my friend—said there is nothing to compare with a mésalliance for taking the stuffing out of anyone. I own I was not exactly off my head about that speech of his. In a way it was rather a facer; but when I got cool I saw he was right. After all, he knew, and I knew—and he knew that I knew——"

The lady paused. Her voice had taken on a plaintive inflection. She looked away at the domed heads of the enormous elm trees above the range of oak palings.

"For the life of me I can't imagine why you're here," she exclaimed, "instead of inside there with all the rest of them! However, we haven't got as far as that yet. I was telling you about my King Charleses. So my friend brought me this one"—again she poked the little dog gently. "His pedigree's pretty fair, but of course it's not a patch on Cappadocia's. Her prizes and the puppies—you don't mind my alluding quite briefly to the puppies—are a serious source of income to me. But I believe she would have ignored the defective pedigree. He is rather nice-looking, you see, and Cappadocia is rather superficial. It is the name that worries her—Onions, Willie Onions, that's where the real trouble comes in. Not like it? I believe you. She's capable of saving up all her pocket-money to buy him a foreign title, as a rich, ugly woman I once knew did who married a man called Spittles. He was a bad lot when she married him, and he stayed so. But as the Comte d'Oppitale it didn't matter. Vices became merely quaint little eccentricities. If he beat her it was with an umbrella with a coronet on the handle, and that made all the difference. Everything for the shop window, you see, with a nature like hers or Cappadocia's. But I don't rub it in, I assure you I don't. I only remind Cappadocia of the fact by calling her Mrs. W. O. when she's a pest and a terror. And that's better than smacking her, anyhow, isn't it?"

To this proposition Mr. Iglesias gravely assented. The lady drew her blue-purple scarf a little closer about her shoulders, causing the embroidered dragons to writhe as in the heat of conflict, while the sunlight glinted on the gold thread of their crests and claws, and glittered in their jewelled eyes. She gazed at the elm trees again.

"It's quite nice to hear you speak, you know," she remarked parenthetically. "The conversation has been a little one-sided so far. I was beginning to be afraid you might be bored. But now it's all right. I flourish on encouragement! So, to go on, my name is Poppy—Poppy St. John—Mrs. St. John. Rather good, isn't it?"

"Distinctly so," said Mr. Iglesias. Her unblushing effrontery began to entertain him somewhat. And then he had sallied forth in search of amusement. This was not the form of amusement he would have selected; but—since it presented itself?

"I'm glad you like it," she returned. "I've always thought it rather telling myself—an improvement on Mrs. Willie Onions, anyhow. Oh! yes, a vast improvement," she repeated. "My friend was quite right. I tell you it's an awful handicap to have a name which gives you away socially. The man, the husband, I mean, may be the best of the good. Still, it's difficult to forgive him for labelling you with some stupidity like that. There's no getting away from it. You feel like a bottle of pickles, or boot-polish, or a tin of insecticide whenever a servant announces you. Everybody knows where you do—and don't—come in. But, to go on, I am barely three—only I fancy you are the sort of person who is rather rough on lying, aren't you? Well, in that case, quite between ourselves—I am just turned nine-and-twenty."

She faced round on Dominic Iglesias, fixing on him those curiously arresting eyes, which at once emphasised and redeemed the commonness of her face, as the sweetness of her voice emphasised and redeemed the commonness of her accent, and the quietude of her manner and movements mitigated the impertinence of her words and vulgarity of her diction.

"And really that's about all it is necessary for you to know at present," she asserted. "We shall see later, if we keep it up—if Cappadocia keeps it up, I mean, of course. She is fearfully gone on you now, that's clear; and she may be capable of a serious attachment. I can't tell. An unfortunate marriage has been known to turn that way before now. Anyhow, we'll give her the benefit of the doubt."

Poppy laughed softly, leaning forward and still looking at Mr. Iglesias from under the shadow of her wide-brimmed hat.

"Now," she said, "come along. I've shown you I play fair all round, even to a stuck-up little monkey of a thing like Cappadocia. It's your turn to stand and deliver. I had been watching you and speculating for ever so long before our introduction. Tell me, who on earth are you?"

Iglesias' figure stiffened a little; but it was impossible to be annoyed with her. To begin with, she was too unreal, too unsubstantial a being. And, to go on with, invincible good-temper is so very disarming.

"Who am I? Nobody," he answered gravely.

"Bless us, here's a find!" Poppy cried, apparently addressing the little dogs. "Hasn't he so much of a name even as Willie Onions? Where's it gone to? It must be nearly as awkward for him as it was for the man who had no shadow. Come, though," she added in tones of remonstrance, "you must play fair. Cards on the table and no humbugging. To put it another way, what do you do?"

"Since yesterday, nothing," he answered.

The young lady regarded him with increasing interest.

"But, my gentle lunatic," she said, "you didn't exactly begin your acquaintance with this planetary sphere yesterday—couldn't, you know, though you are very beautiful to look at. So, if you don't very particularly much mind, we'll hark back to before yesterday."

Dominic Iglesias' gravity gave way slightly. He smiled in spite of his natural pride and reticence.

"For over thirty-five years I was a clerk in a city bank."

"Pshaw!" Poppy cried hotly. "And pray what variety of congenital idiot do you take me for? If you are going to decline upon fiction, please let it be of a higher order than that. I tell you it's unworthy of you!"

She pursed up her lips and moved her head slowly from side to side in high disgust.

"Don't be childish," she said. "Don't be transparently silly. If you want to gas, do put a little more intelligence into it. You—you—out of sight the most distinguished-looking man I've ever met except Lord—well, we won't name names, it sounds showy—you a clerk in a city bank! There, excuse me, but simply—" Poppy snapped her fingers like a pair of castanets, making the little dogs start and whimper. "Fiddle!" she cried; "tell it to a bed-ridden spinster in a blind asylum!—Fiddle-de-dee!"

And for the life of him Dominic Iglesias could not help laughing. It was a new sensation. It occurred to him that he had not laughed for years—hardly since the days of poor Pascal Pelletier and the little garden in Holland Street, Kensington.

Poppy watched him, her eyes dancing. Her expression was very charming, wholly unselfconscious, in a way maternal, just then. But Iglesias was hardly sensible of it.

"That's good," she said. "Now you'll feel a lot better. I saw there was something wrong with you from the start which needed breaking up. Now, suppose you quit inadequate inventions and just tell the truth."

"Unfortunately, I have done so already," Mr. Iglesias said.

The lady paused a moment, her face full of inquiry and doubt.

"Honest injun?"

The term was not familiar to her hearer, but he judged it to be of the nature of an asseveration, and assented.

"And do you mean to tell me that for all those years you went through that drudgery every day?"

"I had my Sundays," Iglesias answered; "and, since their invention, my bank holidays. Latterly I got three weeks' holiday in the summer, formerly a fortnight."

Laughter had speedily evaporated; and, his harsher mood returning upon him, Iglesias found a certain bitter enjoyment in setting forth the extreme meagreness of his life before this light-hearted, unsubstantial piece of womanhood. Again he classed her with the absurd and exquisite little dogs as something superfluous, out of relation to sad and sober realities.

"And yet you manage to look as you do! It beats me," Poppy declared. "I tell you it knocks me out of time completely. For, if you'll excuse my being personal, there is an air about you not usually generated by an office stool—at least, in my experience. Where do you get it from? You can't be English?"

"I am a Spaniard by extraction," Mr. Iglesias said, with a slight lift of the head.

"There now, my dear man, don't you go and freeze up again. We were just beginning to get along so nicely," Poppy put in quickly. "I am having a capital good time, and you're not having an altogether bad one, are you? But, tell me, how long ago were you extracted?"

"Very long ago. I was brought to England as a baby child."

"Oh! I didn't mean it that way," she returned. "I was not touching on the unpardonable subject of age; not that it would matter much in your case, for you are one of the lucky sort with whom age does not count. I only meant are you an all-round foreigner?"

"Practically—my mother was partly Irish."

Dominic Iglesias looked away to those densely wooded slopes of Sheen and Roehampton, against the purple-green gloom of which the home signals of Barnes Station—hard white lines and angles tipped with scarlet and black—stood out like the gigantic characters of some strange alphabet. The air was sweet with the scent of new-mown hay. The birds flirted up and down the hawthorn bushes and furze brakes. It was all very charming; yet that same emptiness and distrust of the future were very present to Iglesias. He forgot all about his companion, aware only that those two unbidden guests, Old Age and Loneliness, stood close beside him, claiming harbourage and entertainment.

"Ah! your mother," Poppy said slowly, with the slightest perceptible inflection of mockery. "And she is alive still?"

Dominic Iglesias turned upon the poor Lady of the Windswept Dust fiercely. She had come too close, come from her proper place—were not her lips painted?—behind the footlights, and laid her hands upon that which was holy. He was filled with unreasoning anger towards her—anger towards himself, too, that he should have departed from his habitual silence and reticence, submitted to be cross-questioned, and listened to her feather-headed patter so long. He rose to his feet, for the moment young, alert, full of a pride at once militant and protective.

"God forbid!" he said sternly. "Dear saint and martyr, she is safe from all misreading at last. She is dead."

He stood a moment trying to choke down his anger before addressing her again.

"It is time I should go," he said presently. "I think we have talked enough."

But Poppy St. John presented a singular appearance. All the audacity had departed from her. She sat huddled together, looking very small and desolate; her eyes—the one noble feature of her face—swimming with tears.

"No, no; don't go," she cried in tones of childlike entreaty. "Why should you go? I like you, and I meant no harm. I've had the beastliest day, and meeting you was a let-up. You did me good somehow. Cappadocia was quite right in taking to you. I only wanted to know about you because—well, you are different. Pshaw, don't tell me. I know what I am talking about. You're straight. You're good right through."

The words were poured forth so rapidly that Iglesias hardly gathered the exact purport of them. But one thing was clear to him—namely, that this frivolous and meretricious being must be human after all, since she could suffer.

"Don't go," she repeated. "I'm miserable. I'll explain. I'll tell you. Just sit down again. It would be awfully kind. You see, I've been expecting a friend. It was all-important I should see him to-day, because there were things to be said. I've been awake half the night screwing up my courage to saying them. And then he never turned up. I got nerves waiting hour after hour—anybody would, waiting like that. And I began to imagine every kind of pestilent disaster."

Poppy swallowed a little and dabbed her pocket-handkerchief against her eyes.

"I shall be all right in a minute," she went on. "Do sit down, please. You say you're nobody and have nothing to do, so you can't very well be in a hurry. I am like this sometimes. It's awfully silly, but I can't help it. Some rotten trifle sets me off, and then I can't stop myself. I begin to go over all my worst luck.—Doesn't it occur to you there's no earthly good in standing? It obliges me to talk loud, and it's stupid to take all Barnes Common into our confidence. Thanks; that's very nice of you.—Well, you see when I'm like his, the flood-gates of memory are opened—which sounds pretty enough, but the prettiness is strictly limited to the sound for most of us, at least as far as my experience goes. The water is generally a bit dirty, and there are too many dead things floating about in it; and, when they reel by, as the current takes them, they turn and seem to struggle and come half alive."

She paused, hitching the embroidered dragons up about her shoulders.

"That is why I put on this scarf to-day. It was given me by a man who was awfully fond of me before—I married. He bought it in the bazaar at Peshawur, and sent it home to me just as he was starting on one of those little frontier wars the accounts of which they keep out of the English papers. And he was killed, poor dear old boy, in some footy little skirmish. And this is all I've got left of him."

Poppy spread out the ends of the scarf for Mr. Iglesias' inspection.

"It must have cost a lot of money. The stones are real, you see; and that gold thread is tremendously heavy. Just feel the weight. It was all his people's doing. They didn't consider me smart enough for him—or rather for themselves. They weren't anybody in particular, but they were climbing. The society microbe had bitten them badly. So they bundled him off to India. What another pair of shoes it would have been for me if he'd lived! At least it seems so to me when I'm down on my luck, as I am to-day. But after all, I don't know." Poppy began to be impudent, to laugh again, though somewhat brokenly. "Sometimes I don't believe one can count on any of you men till you are well dead, and then you're not much use, you know, faithful or unfaithful."

She dabbed her eyes once more and looked at Mr. Iglesias, smiling ruefully.

"Life's a pretty rotten business, at times, all round, isn't it?" she said. "You must have found it so with that thirty years' drudgery in a city bank. By the way, what bank was it?"

And Dominic Iglesias, touched by that very human story, attracted, in spite of himself, by the frankness of his companion, a little shaken by the novelty of the whole situation, answered mechanically:

"The bank? Oh, yes! Messrs. Barking Brothers & Barking of Threadneedle Street."

For a moment Poppy sat silent, her mouth round as an O. Then she drew her open hand down sharply behind poor Willie Onions, and shot the small dog, in a sitting position, off the bench on to the rough grass. His fringed legs stuck out stiff as sticks, while his enormous lappets of ears flew up and back, giving him the most wildly demented appearance during this brief inglorious flight through space.

"Catch birds!" she cried, "catch birds, I tell you! Think of your figure. My good child, take exercise or you'll be as round as a tub!"

She clapped her hands encouragingly, but the little animal, half-scared, half-offended, came closer, fawning upon her trailing string-coloured skirts. Poppy leaned down, resting her elbows upon her knees, and napped at the unhappy Onions with her handkerchief.

"Go away, you silly billy. Have a little decent pride, can't you? Don't bestow attentions when they're unwelcome." Then she addressed herself to Mr. Iglesias, but without looking up. "I beg your pardon, all this must seem rather abrupt. But sometimes one's duty to one's family takes one on the jump, as you may say; and one repairs neglect right away also on the jump. But—but—there's one thing I should like to know—when I told you my name just now—Poppy St. John, Mrs. St. John—you remember?"

"I remember," he said.

"Well, didn't it convey—didn't it mean anything special to you?"

"I am afraid not," Iglesias answered. "You must pardon my ignorance, since I have lived very much out of the world. I know nothing of society."

"So much the better. The world is a vastly overrated place, and society is about the biggest fraud going." She left off teasing the little dog, sat bolt upright, and looked full at Dominic Iglesias, her eyes serious, redeeming all the insignificance of her features and those little doubtful details of the general effect of her. "Don't make any mistake about either of them," she said. "Let the world and society alone as you value your peace of mind and independence. They're dead sea fruit to all outsiders such as—well—you and me. I hate them; only they've got me, and will have me in some form or other till the end, I suppose. But you are different, and I warn you"—Poppy's voice took on an odd inflection of mingled bitterness and tenderness—"they are not a bit adapted for a beautiful, innocent, uncrowned king like you."

She got up as she spoke, gathering her trailing skirts about her, and called sharply to the little dogs.

"The dew is rising," she said, "and Cappadocia's a regular cry-baby if she gets her feet wet. I must take her home. There's my card. You see the address? You can come when you like, only let me know the day beforehand, because I should be sorry to have people with me or to be out. Cappadocia 'll want you. So shall I. You do me good. I'll play quite fair, I promise you. Good-night."

The sun stood in a triumph of crimson and gold, which passed into the fine blue of a belt of earth mist. Eastward the sky blushed, too, but with brazen blushes, tarnished by the breath of the great city—the pure blue of the earth mist exchanged for the murk of coal smoke and the thousand and one exhalations of steaming streets, public-houses and restaurants. Poppy St. John walked slowly along the footpath, her figure dyed by the effulgence of the skies to the crimson and gold of her name. About her shoulders the embroidered dragons glittered as she moved, while the two tiny spaniels trotted humbly at her heels. For a brief space she showed absolutely resplendent. Then suddenly an interposing terrace of smart much-be-balconied and beflowered little houses shut off the sunset; and in their rather vulgar shadow Dominic Iglesias, watching, beheld her transformed into the unsubstantial, in a way fictitious, Lady of the Windswept Dust and of the footlights once again.

CHAPTER VI

That weekly ceremony—well known to Trimmer's Green—Mrs. Lovegrove's afternoon at-home, was in progress. She wore her black satin gown, and her white Maltese lace fichu, just to give it a touch of summer lightness. It must be added that she was warm and uncomfortable, having conscientiously superintended preparations in respect of commissariat in the overheated atmosphere of the basement; hurried upstairs—the imagined tinkle of the front-door bell perpetually in her ears—to pull her stays in at the waist and project herself into the aforementioned official garments—a very trying process on a June day to a person of ample contours and what may be described as the fluidic temperament. Later she had cooled off, or tried so to cool—for on such occasions there is invariably some window-blind, ornament, or piece of furniture actively in need of straightening—sitting in her somewhat fog-stained and sun-faded drawing-room during that evil period of waiting in which the intending hostess first suffers acute mortification because she is "quite sure nobody will come," and then gets hot all over from the equally agitating certainty that everybody she has ever known will appear simultaneously, and that there will be neither cakes nor conversation enough to go round.

But this disquieting and oft-repeated preface to the afternoon's festivity was now happily over. And the good lady, oblivious of discomfort and a slightly disorganised complexion, sat purring with satisfaction upon her best Chesterfield sofa, Dr. Giles Nevington beside her. "Pleasure, not business, to-day, Mrs. Lovegrove. For once I am going to make no demands on my faithful and able coadjutor. This call is a purely friendly one—no subscription lists of any sort or description in my pocket," the clergyman had said in his resonant bass when clasping her hand.—A large, dark, clean-shaven man of forty, a studied effect of geniality and benevolence about him, slightly tempered, perhaps, by cold and watchful blue-grey eyes, fixed—so said his detractors—with unswerving determination upon the shovel-hat, apron, and gaiters of the Anglican episcopate.

Rhoda Lovegrove, however, was very far from being among the detractors. She relished this gracious speech enormously. She also approved the attitude of her husband at this juncture; since, with praiseworthy tact, he engaged the attention of her two other guests, a Mrs. Ballard and her daughter. These ladies were rich, the younger had pretensions both to beauty and fashion; but their present was, alas! stained by Noncomformity, their past contaminated by association with retail trade. At the entrance of the vicar, remembering these sad defects, George Lovegrove rose to the occasion. Gently, but firmly, he pranced round them heading them towards the doorway.

"Who are those?" Dr. Nevington inquired, with some interest. "Not parishioners, I fancy."

"Not in any true sense," Mrs. Lovegrove replied. "Dissenters, and I am sorry to say rather spiteful against the Church."

The clergyman leaned back and crossed his legs comfortably.

"Ah! well, poor human nature! A touch of jealousy perhaps," he remarked.

Mrs. Lovegrove beamed.

"Very likely—still I should be just as well pleased not to continue their acquaintance. I don't like to hear things that are disrespectful. I should have ceased to call, but relatives of theirs are old friends of Mr. Lovegrove's mother's family."

"Quite so, quite so," the other returned. Even when silent the sound of him seemed to encompass him, as the roll of a drum seems to salute you when merely beholding that instrument. His speech filled all the room, flowing forth into every corner, sweeping upward in waves to the very cornice. The feminine members of his congregation found this most beautiful; having, indeed, been known to declare that did he preach in Chinese, they would still receive edification and spiritual benefit.—"Quite so," he repeated, "the breaking of old family ties is certainly to be avoided. And then, moreover, we should always guard against any appearance of harshness or illiberality in dealing with Christians from whom we have reason to differ in minor questions of doctrine or practice. We must never forget that the Nonconformists, though they went out from us, do remain the brethren of all right-minded Churchmen in a very special sense, since they have the great lessons of the Reformation at heart. I could wish that certain parties within the Church were animated by the same manly and intelligent intolerance of idolatry and superstition as the majority of the dissenters whom I meet. Personally I should welcome greater freedom of intercourse, and a frequent interchange of pulpits."

"We know who'd be the gainers," Mrs. Lovegrove put in gracefully.

"Ah! well, I am prepared to believe that the gain might not be exclusively on one side."

Mrs. Lovegrove folded her fat hands, purring almost audibly. He seemed to her so very wise and good.

"That's so like you, Dr. Nevington," she said. "As I always tell Mr. Lovegrove, we have a great responsibility in having you for our pastor and friend. You are a standing rebuke to many of us, being so wide-minded yourself."

"Hardly that, hardly that," he answered with becoming modesty. "In my humble way I do strive towards unity, that is all. Even towards the Church of Rome I would extend a friendly and helpful hand. We cannot, of course, go to her, yet she should never be discouraged from coming to us.—But here is your good husband back again—ceased to be unevenly yoked with the unbeliever, eh, Lovegrove?"

"I was glad you took them away, Georgie," Mrs. Lovegrove put in. "Still I'm sorry for you, for the vicar's been talking so nobly. You've missed such a lot."

"Ah, hardly that. I have merely been giving your dear good wife a little lecture on Christian charity. How is Mrs. Nevington? Thank you, wonderfull well, earnest and energetic as ever. I do not know how I could meet the demands of this large parish without her."

"A true helpmeet," purred Mrs. Lovegrove.

"Truly so—and specially in all questions of organisation. She is altogether my superior in administrative capacity. Indeed, it is an understood thing between us that I relieve her of what may be called the bad third of her marriage vow. If she will love and honour, I assure her I am ready to obey. A capital working rule for husbands—eh, Lovegrove?—always supposing they have found the right woman, as you and I have."

In the midst of this delicious badinage the hostess had to rise to receive further guests. Conflicting emotions struggled within her ample bosom—namely, regret at leaving that thrice happy sofa, and satisfaction that others should behold the glory thereon so visibly enthroned.

"How d'ye do, Mrs. Porcher? How d'ye do, Miss Hart?" she said. "Very kind of you to come and call. Only a few friends as yet, but perhaps that's just as pleasant this warm afternoon. Dr. Nevington, as you see, and at his very best"—she lowered her voice discreetly. "So at home, so full of great thoughts, and yet so comical—quite a privilege for all to hear him talk."

Encouraged by recent commendation, George Lovegrove again rose with praiseworthy tact to the occasion. It may be stated in passing that, in person, he was below the middle height, a thick oblong man, his figure, indeed, not unsuggestive of a large carapace, from the four corners of which sprouted short arms and legs. His face was round, fresh-coloured, and clean to the point of polish. His yellowish grey hair, well flattened and shining, grew far back on his forehead. And this, combined with small blue eyes, clear as a child's, a slight inward squint to them, produced an effect of permanent and innocent surprise not devoid of pathos. In character he was guileless and humble-minded. The spectacle of cruelty or injustice would, however, rouse him to the belligerent attitude of the proverbial brebis enragé. He believed himself to be very happy—an added touch of pathos perhaps—and was pained and surprised if it was brought home to him that others found life a less comfortable and kindly invention than he himself did. Hence reports of suicides worried him sadly. He would always have returned a verdict of temporary insanity, this being to him the only explanation conceivable of a voluntary exit from our so excellent present form of existence. Yet George Lovegrove was not without his little secret sorrow—who indeed is? A deep-seated regret for nonexistent small Lovegroves possessed him, the instinct of paternity being strong in him. He loved children, and, when alone, often lingered beside perambulators in Kensington Gardens fondly observing their contents. Yet not for ten thousand pounds sterling would he have admitted this weakness, lest in doing so he should hurt "the wife's feelings." And it was in obedience to consideration for the said feelings that he now threw himself gallantly into the breach. For, after acting as appreciative chorus to an interlude of sonorous trifling on the part of the clergyman with the newcomers, he adroitly—under promise of showing her recent additions to his collection of picture postcards—detached Miss Eliza Hart from the neighbourhood of the sofa and conveyed her to the farther side of the room. Mrs. Porcher, neat, pensive, and sentimental, could be trusted to play the part of attentive listener; but the great Eliza, as he knew by experience, was liable to develop dangerous energy, to get a little above herself, shake her leonine mane of upstanding sandy hair, and become altogether too talkative, not to say loud, for such distinguished company. Personally he had a soft spot in his heart for Eliza. But, if she put herself forward, he feared for "the wife's feelings," therefore did he skilfully detach her.

And he had reason to congratulate himself on this manoeuvre, for Eliza undoubtedly was in a frolicsome humour.

"Yes," she remarked, contemplating the portrait of a celebrated actress. "That is very taking and stylish; and it is just what I should like to have done with my Peachie." This graceful sobriquet was generally understood to bear testimony to the excellence of Mrs. Porcher's complexion. "Now, if we wanted a gentleman guest or two more at any time, a picture postcard of her like this, just slightly tinted, in answer to inquiries?"

Miss Hart, her head on one side, looked playfully at Mr. Lovegrove.

"What about a subsequent summons for over-crowding?" he chuckled. The whole breadth of the room, well understood, was between him and the wife's feelings, not to mention the august presence beside her upon the sofa.

"No doubt that has to be thought of!" Eliza nodded sagely. "But is she not looking sweeter than ever to-day? Do not pretend you have not noticed it, Mr. Lovegrove. There's no deceiving me! I know you."

Like all mild and moral men, Lovegrove flushed with delight at any suggestion that he was a gay dog, a dashing blade. His good, honest face took on a higher polish than ever.

"You are too clever by half, Miss Hart."

"Well, somebody has to keep their wits about them, with such a love as Peachie to care for. I dressed her myself to-day. 'The pearl-grey gown if you like,' I said, 'but not a scrap of black with it. Just a touch of colour at the throat, please.' 'No, dear Liz,' she said, 'it would call for remark, since I have never done so since I lost Major Porcher.' But there, Mr. Lovegrove, I insisted. For why she should go on wearing complimentary mourning all her life for a wretch that nearly broke her heart and ruined her, passes me. 'Forget the serpent,' I said, 'and put on a little turquoise tulle pompom.' Now just look at her!"

"Rather dangerous for some people, is it not?" Lovegrove inquired quite slyly.

"Hard on our gentlemen, you mean? Well, perhaps it is. But then they always have the sight of me to put up with.—No compliments, thank you. I have my eyesight and my toilet-glass, and they have let me know I was no Venus ever since I can remember. It would not do to depress our gentlemen too much. They might leave, and then wherever would Cedar Lodge be?"

Miss Hart became suddenly serious and confidential. "And that reminds me," she went on. "I wanted to have a private word with you to-day about a certain gentleman."

"Who may be?" the good George inquired.

"You can guess, can't you? Your own candidate."

"Mr. Iglesias?"

The lady nodded.

"Peachie must be spared anxiety, therefore I speak, Mr. Lovegrove. Something is going on, and she is getting worried. You cannot approach the person to whom we are alluding as you can either of our others. Rather stand-offish, even now after nearly eight years that he has been with us. Between you and me and the bedpost, Mr. Lovegrove, I am just a wee bit nervous of that person. So if you could hint, quite in confidence, what his plans may be for the future it would' be really friendly."

"Dear me, dear me! Plans? I do not quite follow you, Miss Hart. Nothing wrong with him, I trust?"

"That is just what we cannot find out. No spying, of course, Mr. Lovegrove. Neither Peachie nor I would descend to such meanness. Our gentlemen have perfect liberty. We would scorn to put questions. But it is close on a week now since the person we are alluding to has been to the City."

"Bless me! You surprise me. He cannot have left Barking Brothers & Barking?"

The great Eliza shook her leonine mane.

"I believe that is just exactly what he has done."

"You do surprise me. I can hardly credit it. Nearly a week, and he as punctual and regular as clockwork! I must run over this evening and catch him. Something must be wrong. And yet why has he not been here? Dear me. Miss Hart, you——"

But the end of the sentence was lost in the bass notes issuing from the presence upon the sofa.

"Truly, the prosperity of the nation," Dr. Nevington was saying, "of this dear old England of ours that we so love, is wholly bound up with the prosperity of her national Church. I use the word prosperity in a plain, manly, straightforward sense. Personally I should rejoice to see the bonds of Church and State drawn closer. It could not fail to make for the welfare of both. Then, among other benefits, we should see the poverty of many members of my cloth, which is now a crying scandal—"

"You do hear very sad tales from the country districts, certainly," sighed Mrs. Lovegrove.

"The state of affairs is more than sad, it is iniquitous. And therefore the Church must assert herself. The individual minister must assert himself, and claim a higher scale of remuneration. Help yourself, show push and principle, cultivate practical aims—that is what I preach to young men reading for Holy Orders. We have no place in these days for visionaries and dreamers. We want men who march with the times, who are interested in politics, and can make themselves felt."

So did the great voice roll on and outward. Very beautiful to the listeners in sound—though, in sense, it may be questioned whether it conveyed very definite ideas to them—but highly embarrassing to the house-parlourmaid, whose feminine tones quite failed to make headway against the volume of it. With the consequence that Dominic Iglesias was left standing in the shadow of the doorway unheeded.

He was aware, and that not without surprise, how much these few days of freedom and leisure had quickened his perceptions. His mental attitude had changed. His demand had ceased to be moderate. Hence he suffered a hundred offences to taste and sensibility hitherto unknown, or at least unregistered. He knew when a woman was plain, when a conversation was vapid or vulgar, a manner pretentious, a speech lacking in sincerity. Consciously he stood aside, no longer out of humility or indifference, but critically observant, challenging things however familiar, and passing judgment upon them. For example, the unlovely character of Mrs. Lovegrove's drawing-room engrossed his attention—the dirty-browns and tentative watery blues of it, the multiplicity of flimsy, worthless, little ornaments revealing a most lamentable absence of artistic perception. In that fine booming clerical voice he detected a kindred absence of delicate perception, a showiness born of very inadequate conception of relative values. Indeed, the voice and the sentiments given forth by it, in as far as he caught the drift of them, raised a definite spirit of antagonism in him. The voice seemed to trample. Dominic Iglesias was taken with an inclination—very novel in him—to trample, too. He crossed the room, an added touch of gravity and dignity in his aspect and manner.

The clergyman gazed at him with some curiosity, while Mrs. Lovegrove surged up off the sofa.

"Mr. Iglesias! Well, of all people! Whoever would have expected to see you at this early hour of the day?"

"Talk of a certain gentleman and that gentleman appears," Miss Eliza Hart whispered. Then wagging her finger at her host, "Now don't you forget that little question of mine. Find out his intentions, just, as you may say, under the rose. But there's Peachie signalling to go."

In the ensuing interval of farewells, which were slightly protracted owing to friskiness on the part of the fair Eliza, Iglesias found himself standing beside the clergyman. The latter still regarded him with curiosity. But, whatever his faults, not his worst enemy could accuse Dr. Nevington of being a respecter of persons unless he was well assured beforehand whom such persons might be. He therefore turned to Iglesias with the easy air of patronage not uncommon to his cloth, as one who should say: "My good sir, don't be afraid. I am a man of the world as well as a Christian. I will handle you gently. I won't hurt you."

"I think I caught a foreign name," he remarked. "You are paying a visit to London? I hope our capital makes an agreeable impression upon you."

"The visit has been of such long duration," Iglesias answered, "that impressions have, I am afraid, become slightly blurred by usage."

"Ah! indeed—no doubt that happens in some measure to all of us. I am to understand that you are a resident?"

Iglesias assented.

"In this district?"

Again he assented.

"Indeed. Really, I wish I had known it sooner. It always gives me pleasure to meet persons of another nationality than my own. Intercourse with them makes for liberality of view. It often dispels anti-English prejudice. I am always glad to be helpful to strangers."

"You are very kind," Iglesias said with gravity.

"Not at all—not at all. I hold very practical views not only regarding the duties of the Englishman to the alien, but of the pastor towards his flock. But I find it almost impossible, I regret to say, to become personally acquainted with all my parishioners. My curates are capital young fellows—earnest, active, go-ahead. But in a large area such as this there is always a shifting population with which the clergy, however energetic, find it difficult to keep in touch. We are obliged to discriminate between dwellers and sojourners. As soon as any person is proved to be a bona fide dweller my curates pass his or her name on to me, and either I or my wife call in due course."

Dominic Iglesias permitted himself to smile.

"An excellent system, no doubt," he remarked.

"I find it works very well on the whole. But no system is infallible. There must be occasional oversights, and you have been the victim of one. I mention this to disabuse your mind of the idea of any intentional neglect. Well, Mrs. Lovegrove, and so our good friends Mrs. Porcher and Miss Hart have gone—estimable women both of them in their own line. I ought to be running away, too, and I have just been having a word with your other guest here, Mr.——"

"Iglesias," Dominic put in coldly. He was in a state of pretty high displeasure. To hear his name mispronounced might, he felt, precipitate a catastrophe.

"Iglesias?—ah! yes, thank you—I have been explaining to Mr. Iglesias our system of parochial visiting and quoting our well-known joke about the dwellers and sojourners. You remember it? He has, I regret to find, been counted among the latter, while he has qualified as one of the former. The mistake must be remedied. Well, good-by to you, Mrs. Lovegrove; I shall see your good husband on my way downstairs. Good-day to you, Mr. Iglesias. I shall hope to meet you again."

And with that he, and the encompassing sound of him, moved towards the door. Mrs. Lovegrove subsided upon the sofa. The supreme glory had departed, yet an afterglow from the effulgence of it remained in her beaming face as she looked up at Mr. Iglesias.

"It was a good fairy that brought you in so early to-day," she said. "Really, I am pleased you should have had the chance to meet Dr. Nevington. And I could see he was quite taken with you, by the way he began to talk before I had the chance to introduce you. But that's the vicar all over! He never is one to stand upon ceremony."

"So I can believe," Dominic said.

"You saw it? Ah, part of his thoughtfulness, wanting to put everybody at their ease. And I'm sure if there's one thing more disheartening than another, it is to have two of your friends standing up side by side, as stiff as a couple of pokers, without so much as a word. I know I am too ready to enter into conversation with strangers; but if there is a thing I cannot bear, it's any appearance of coolness."

She passed her handkerchief round her forehead and across her lips. She was marshalling her energies for a daring effort.

"Very warm, is it not?" she remarked, perhaps superfluously. Then she came to the point. "I know you are not very much of a churchgoer, Mr. Iglesias."

"I am afraid not"—he paused a moment. "You see, I was born and brought up in another faith."

"Yes—so George has told me. But I am sure none of us would ever be so illiberal as to throw that up against you. The vicar has been talking so beautifully about Christian charity; and we all know it was a thing you could not help. It was your misfortune, anybody would understand that, not your fault. Too, it's all over long ago and forgotten."

Dominic looked rather hard at her; but it was clear her words were innocent of any intention of offence.

"I suppose it is," he said sadly, Old Age and Loneliness laying their hands upon him, for some reason, very sensibly once again.

"Not that that's anything to be otherwise than thankful for," she added, with a slightly misplaced effort at consolation. "Of course anyone must feel how providential it is to be saved from all those terrible false doctrines and practices—not that I know anything about them. There's so much, don't you think, it is so much better not to know anything about. Then one feels more at liberty to speak."

Mr. Iglesias smiled.

"I am not sure that the matter had occurred from exactly that point of view before."

"Really now, and a clever person like you!" Mrs. Lovegrove passed her handkerchief across her forehead again. "George has a wonderful opinion of your cleverness, you know. And that is why I have always wished you and the vicar could be brought together. I have—yes, I own to it—I have been afraid sometimes you were a little unsettled about religion, and that it might unsettle Georgie, too. But I knew if you once met the vicar that would all be set right. As I often say to George, let anybody just see Dr. Nevington and then they will begin to have an inkling of all they miss in not hearing him in the pulpit."

But here, perhaps fortunately, the master of the house trotted back. He, too, beamed. He was filled with innocent rejoicing. Had he not successfully protected the wife's feelings, and was not Iglesias—who remained to him a wonderful being, stirring whatever element of romance might be resident in his guileless nature—present in person?

"Why, what's the meaning of this, Dominic?" he chuckled. "You've turned over a new leaf, gadding round to at-home days! Where's Threadneedle Street? What's come over you?"

"Threadneedle Street and I have agreed to part company."

"What, for good? Never?" this from both husband and wife.

"Yes, for good," Iglesias said.

Mr. Lovegrove ceased to beam. He became anxious again, and consequently solemn.

"Well, you do surprise me," he said. "Nothing gone wrong, I trust? Not any unpleasantness happened?"

"None," Iglesias answered. In breaking the news to these kindly but rudimentary souls he had determined to treat it very lightly. "I have come to the conclusion that I have worked long enough. It is a mistake to risk dying in harness. You retired, Lovegrove, three years ago. I am going to look about me a little and see what the rest of the world is doing."

"You'll miss the bank, and feel a little strange at first. Georgie did, though he had his home to interest him," Mrs. Lovegrove remarked.

"Undoubtedly George was more fortunate than I am," Iglesias replied, in his most courtly manner.

"Not but that all that could be easily remedied," she added, with a touch of archness. Then Mr. Iglesias thought it time to depart. In the hall his host held him, literally by the buttonhole, looking up with squinting blue eyes into his face.

"It's all rather sudden, Dominic," he said. "I do not want to intrude upon your confidence; but if there is anything behind, anything in which I can help?"

Mr. Iglesias shook his head.

"Nothing, my good old friend," he said.

"The wife's right, you know. You'll miss the bank, the regular hours, and the occupation. She's quite right. I did at first."

"I know. But already I have pretty well got through that phase, I think."

"Ah, you have a bigger mind than mine. You can rise to a wider view. Change affects a commonplace man like myself most. I was dreadfully lost at first—more than the wife knew. Females are very sensitive, and it would have hurt her to know all I felt. If the Almighty is good enough to give a man a faithful woman to look after him, he can't be too scrupulous in sparing her pain—at least, so I think." Suddenly his tone changed. "But you are not going to leave us, Dominic?—you are not going to move, I do hope?"

He was mindful of his promise to Eliza Hart, but he was also mindful of himself. It had occurred to him for how very much in the interest and pleasure of his life Dominic Iglesias really stood.

"Why, should you regret my going? Should you miss me?" the other asked, struck by his tone.

"Miss you," he said, "and after a friendship covering forty years! I know you are my superior in every way. I know I am not on your level. All the advantage is on my side in our friendship, always has been. But that is just where it is. Why, you know, Dominic—next to the wife of course—all along you have been the best thing I had."

Then it came to Iglesias, looking down at him, that among the many millions of his fellow-mortals, this whimsical childlike being stood nearest to him in sympathy and in love. The thought moved him strangely, at once deepening his sense of isolation and lessening the load of it.

"In that case I will not move. I will stay here, at Trimmer's Green," he said.

When Mr. Lovegrove reentered the sun-faded drawing-room his wife greeted him in these words:

"Well, I have been thinking it all over, Georgie, and we shall only be doing our duty by Mr. Iglesias if we send for your cousin Serena. For my part, I don't trust Mrs. Porcher. Did you see that fly-away blue bow? Those who seem so soft are often the deepest. And widows have all sorts of little cunning ways with them." She rose from the thrice happy sofa. "I was gratified to have Dr. Nevington and Mr. Iglesias meet. But we certainly will have to send for Serena," she said.

CHAPTER VII

Mr. Iglesias crossed Trimmer's Green in the dusty sunshine. He had engaged to stay; and, indeed, he asked himself what person, what objects or interests there were to take him else-whither? Nevertheless, the promise seemed, somehow, a limiting of possibility and of hope. It was destiny. London, very evidently, having got him, did not mean to let him go. And London was not attractive this evening, but blouzy and jaded from the heat. He passed on into the great thoroughfare and turned eastward, absorbed in thought. Children cried. A pungent scent of over-ripe fruit came from barrows in the roadway and open doors of green-grocers' shops. Tempers appeared to be on edge. Workmen, pouring out from a big block of flats under construction on the left, jostled him in passing, not in insolence, but simply in inattention. Their language was starred with sanguinary adjectives. The noise of the traffic was loud. Iglesias turned up one of the side streets leading on to Campden Hill. It was quieter here and the air was a trifle purer. Halfway up the hill he hesitated. There was a shrine to be visited in these regions—in it stood an altar of the dead. And above that altar, in Iglesias' imagination, hung the picture of a woman, beautiful, and, to him, infinitely sad.

He turned eastward again and made his way into Holland Street. He rarely had the courage to go back there. He had never reentered the house. But this evening he was taken by the desire to look on it all once again. For he was still pursued by the disquieting question as to whether he had shirked the possibilities of his life, or had sacrificed them to a higher duty than any duty of personal development. If the latter, however barren of active happiness both past and present, he would be in his own eyes justified, and desolation would cease to have in it any flavour of self-contempt. Perhaps this dwelling-place of his childhood, youth, and what should have been the best of his manhood, might help to answer the question and set his doubts at rest.

A board—"To Let"—was up on the narrow iron balcony of the dining-room. Iglesias rang, and after brief parley with the caretaker—a neat bald-headed little old man, in carpet slippers and a well-brushed once-smart brown check suit, altogether too capacious for his attenuated person—was admitted.

"The place is quite empty save for my bits of sticks in the basement, sir," he said. "You are at liberty to go where you please. I am afflicted with the asthma and am glad to avoid mounting the stairs." He ended up with a husky little cough. So Iglesias passed through the vacant house unattended.

He received a pathetic yet agitating impression. The rooms were even smaller than he had supposed. They were gloomy, too, from the worn paint of the high wainscots and discoloration of the low ceilings. All the windows were shut and the atmosphere was close and faint. The corners were thick with crouching shadows, merely awaiting the cover of night, as it seemed to Iglesias, to take definite shape, stand upright, and come forth to possess and people all the house. Even now it belonged so sensibly to them that his own reverent footsteps sounded to him harshly intrusive upon the bare, uneven floors. At intervals, downstairs in the basement, he could hear the little old caretaker's husky cough.

And it was strange to him to consider what those crouching shadows might represent. Not the ghosts of human beings—in such he had small belief—but an aftermath of human emotions, purposes, and passions, formulated or endured in this apparently so innocent place. To his knowledge the origins of revolution had seethed here. The walls had listened to details of political intrigue, of projected assassination, to vehement declarations of undying hate. Of the men who had plotted and dreamed here, uplifted in spirit by the magic of terrible ideas, none were left. One by one they had gone out into the silence to meet death, swift-handed or heartlessly lingering, as the case might be. And what had they actually accomplished? he asked himself. Had their death, often as must be surmised of a sufficiently hideous sort, really advanced the cause of humanity and helped on the birth of that Golden Age, in which Justice shall reign alongside Peace? Or had these men merely wasted themselves, adding to the sum total of human confusion and wrong; and wasted the hearts and happiness of those allied to them by ties of friendship and of blood, leaving the second generation to repair, in so far as it might, the ruin which their violence had worked? Dominic Iglesias could not say. But this at least, though it savoured of reproach, he could not disguise from himself—namely, that out of the intemperate heat and fierceness of these men's thought and action had come, as a necessary consequence, the narrow opportunities and cold isolation of his own.

"As physically, so morally, spiritually, socially," he said to himself, "the younger generation pays the debts contracted by the generation immediately preceding it. Justice, indeed, reigns already, always has done so—. justice of a rather tremendous sort. But peace?—Peace is still very much to seek, both for the individual and the race."

Iglesias visited his mother's bed-chamber. He visited his former nursery. Then he visited the drawing-room, the heart of this very pathetic shrine where the altar of his dead was, almost visibly set up. To this room, during the many years of his mother's mental illness, he had come back daily after work; and had ministered to her, suiting his speech to her passing humour, trying to distract her brooding melancholy, and to soothe and amuse her as though she was an ailing child. Thank God, there was nothing ugly to remember regarding her. She had never been harsh or unlovely in her ways. Still, the strain of constant intercourse with her had been very great—how great Iglesias had hardly realised until now, as he stood in the centre of the room reconstructing its former appearance in thought and replacing its familiar furnishings.

There to the left of the further window, overlooking the garden, she had always sat, so that the light might fall upon her needlework—very fine Irish lace, in the making of which nearly all her waking hours were spent. She had learned the beautiful art as a young girl in her convent school; and her skill in it was great. In those sad later years when her mind was clouded the intricate designs and endless variety of delicate and ingenious stitches had come to have symbolic meanings for her full of mystic significance. In them she poured forth her soul, as another might pour it forth in music, finding there an imaginative language far surpassing, in its subtlety of suggestion, articulate speech. There were deserts of net, of spider's web fineness, to be laboriously traversed; hills of difficulty to be climbed, whence far horizons disclosed themselves; dainty flower-gardens, crossed by open paths, and hedged about with curves, sinuous and full of pretty impediments. And there were, to her, vaguely agitating and even fearful things in this lacework also—confusions of outline, broken purposes, multiplicity of opposing intentions, struggle of good and evil powers in the intricacies of some rich arabesque; or monotonous repetitions of design which distressed her as with the terrors of imprisonment and of unescapable fate. She was filled with feverish anxiety until such portions of her self-imposed task were completed. Then she would be very glad. And Iglesias, glancing up silently from the pages of his newspaper or book, would see the sorrow pass out of her face as she leaned back in her chair and softly laughed. And he would perceive that, in the achievement of those countless but carefully ordered stitches, she had also achieved some mysterious victory of the spirit which, for a time at least, would give her freedom of soul and content. As a boy he had been rather jealous of her lacemaking, declaring that it was dearer to her than he himself was. But as he grew more experienced, more chastened, and, it must be added, more sad, he had come to understand that it veritably was as speech to her—though speech which he could but rarely interpret—expressing all that she could not, or dared not, otherwise express, all the poetry of her sweet, broken nature, its denied aspirations in religion, its tortured memories of danger and of love.

Now, standing in the centre of the empty room, and looking at the place beside the window where she habitually sat, Iglesias seemed to see once more, as he had so often seen in the past, her fine-drawn profile and softly waved upturned hair, her head and shoulders draped in a black mantilla, the lines of which followed those of her figure as she bent over her work. He could see the long delicate white hands moving rhythmically, with the assurance of perfected skill, over the web in its varying degrees of whiteness from the filmy transparency of the net foundation to the opacity of the closely wrought pattern. Those hands, in their ceaseless and exquisite industry, had troubled his imagination at times. For too often it had seemed as though they alone were really alive, intelligent, sentient, the rest of the woman dead. The impression was so vivid even yet—though Iglesias knew it to be subjective only, projected by the vividness of remembrance—that instinctively he crossed the room, laid his left hand upon the moulding of the high wainscot, leaned over the vacant space which appeared to hold her image, and spoke gently to her, so that the moving hands might find rest for a moment, while she recognised and greeted him, looking up.

There had always been a pause before the words of greeting came, while her consciousness travelled back, hesitatingly, to the actual and material world around her from the world of emotion and phantasy in which her spirit lived. There was a pause now, a prolonged silence, broken at last by the husky cough of the little old caretaker downstairs. The vacant space remained vacant. Nevertheless Dominic Iglesias received both recognition and greeting, and from these derived inward assurance that all was well—that he was justified of his past action, that he had not shirked the possibilities of his life, but sacrificed them to a higher duty than any individual and private one. The present might be empty of purpose and pleasure, the future lacking in promise and in hope; yet to him one perfect thing had been granted—namely, a human relationship of unsullied beauty, notwithstanding all its sadness, from first to last.

"And in the strength of that meat, one should surely be able to go many days!" he said, as he straightened himself up. "Thank God, I never failed her. How far she realised it or not, is but a small matter. I am obscure, perhaps as things now stand wholly superfluous, still I have, at all events, never grasped personal advantage at the expense of a fellow-creature's heart."

Yet, even so, the longing for sympathy and companionship oppressed him as never before. The sight of this place had stirred his affections and his spiritual sense. His soul cried out for some language in which to express itself—even though it were a language of symbol only, such as his mother had found in her lacemaking. How barren and vapid a thing was the exterior life, as all those whom he knew understood and lived it—his co-lodgers, his fellow-clerks, the good Lovegroves, his late employer, Sir Abel Barking, even, as he divined, that sonorous Protestant clergyman whom he had met this afternoon—as against the interior life, suggestion of which this vacant shadow-haunted house of innumerable memories presented to his mind! Was there any method by which the interior and exterior life could be brought into sane and fruitful relation, so that the former might sensibly permeate and dignify the latter?

The comfortable inward conviction, just vouchsafed him, that he was justified of his own past action, merely emphasised his consciousness that he was still very much adrift, with no definite port to steer for. He had, perhaps unwisely, promised George Lovegrove that he would stay on at Trimmer's Green, but what, after all, did that amount to? Even the exterior life was second-hand enough there; the interior life, as he judged, practically non-existent. And so his staying must be ennobled by some purpose beyond that of stepping across to smoke an after-dinner pipe with the good, affectionate Lovegrove man, or attending his estimable wife's "at homes." During the last ten days Mr. Iglesias had striven, with rare, pathetic diligence, to cultivate amusement. True, the oak palings had shut him out from Ranelagh; but, with that and a few other exceptions, amusement, as practised in great cities, is merely a matter of cash. Therefore he had dined at smart restaurants, had sampled theatres and music halls, had sat in the Park and watched the world and—in their more decent manifestations—the flesh and the devil drive by. He had to admit that unfortunately all this left him cold, had bored rather than entertained him. He had not felt out of place socially. His natural dignity and detachment of mind were alike too strong for that; but he had arrived at the conclusion that you must have learned the rudiments of the art of amusement in early youth if you are to practise it with satisfaction to yourself in middle-age. And he very certainly had not learned the rudiments—not, anyhow, according to the English fashion. He had been aware, during these social excursions, that he was a good deal stared at and even commented on. At first he supposed this arose from some peculiarity of his dress or manner. Then he understood that the cause of this unsolicited attention bore a more flattering character, and in this connection certain remarks made by the Lady of the Windswept Dust occurred to his mind. But, Mr. Iglesias' pride being greatly in excess of his vanity—when the first moment of half-humorous surprise was passed—he found that these tributes to his personal appearance afforded him more displeasure than pleasure. He turned from them with a movement of annoyance, and turned from those places in which they were liable to manifest themselves likewise. No, indeed, it was something other than this he had to find, something lying far deeper in the needs of human nature, if the emptiness of his days was to be filled and the hunger of his heart and spirit satisfied!

Pondering which things he went down the creaking stairs of the house in Holland Street, Kensington, leaving the empty and, to him, sacred rooms to the crouching shadows. He had had his answer from the one person whom he had perfectly loved. And surely, in justifying the past, that answer gave promise of hope for the future? The way would be made clear, the method would declare itself. Let him have patience, only patience, as she, his mother, had had when traversing deserts and climbing Difficulty Hill in her lacework; and to him, also, should far horizons be disclosed.

In the narrow hall the neat little old caretaker met him, huskily coughing.

"The rent is low, sir," he said, "and the landlord is asking no premium. If you should wish further particulars, or to inspect the offices——"

But Mr. Iglesias put a couple of half-crowns into his hand.

"No," he answered, "I do not propose to take the house. Persons who were dear to me lived here once; and so I wanted to see it. As long as it is unlet I may come back from time to time."

The old man shuffled his slippered feet upon the bare boards, looking with mild ecstasy at the coins.

"And you will be most welcome, sir," he said. "Your generosity happens to be of great assistance to me—not that I wish it repeated. I am not grasping, sir, but I am grateful. I have a taste in literature which my reduced circumstances do not allow me to gratify. I see the prospect of many hours' enjoyment before me. I thank you."

CHAPTER VIII

And so it came about that a more tranquil spirit, touched with sober gladness, possessed Dominic Iglesias as, leaving that house of many memories, he pursued his way down Church Street and, passing into Kensington High Street opposite St. Mary Abbot's Church, turned eastward once again. A few doors short of the gateway leading into Palace Gardens was an unpretentious Italian restaurant where he proposed to dine. For it grew late. He had spent longer than he had supposed in wordless prayer before the altar of his dead. The remembrance of the book-loving little caretaker's gratitude remained by him pleasantly, softening his humour towards all his fellow-men. Simple kindness has great virtue, uplifting to the heart. To Iglesias it seemed those five shillings had been eminently well invested.

The streets were clearer now; and he walked slowly, enjoying the cooler air born of the sunset, and drawing from the leafy spaces of Kensington Gardens and the park. Presently he became aware of a figure, not altogether unfamiliar, threading its way among the intermittent stream of pedestrians along the pavement a few paces ahead. His eyes followed it reluctantly. In his present peaceful humour its aspect struck a jarring note. Soiled white flannel trousers, a short blue boating coat, a soft grey felt hat, tennis shoes, a shambling and uncertain gait as of one who neither knows nor cares whither he is going or why he goes—the whole effect purposeless, slovenly, inept.

Then followed a little scene which caused Iglesias to further slacken his pace. For the seedy figure, reaching the open door of the restaurant, hesitated, standing between the clipped bay trees set in green tubs which flanked the entrance on either hand. Stepped aside, craning upward to see over the yellow silk curtains drawn across the lower half of the windows. Moved back to the door and stood there undecided. Finally, as a smiling waiter, napkin on arm, came forward, the man crushed his hat down on his forehead, forced his hands deep into his trouser pockets and turned away with an audible oath. This brought him face to face with Mr. Iglesias, who recognised in him his fellow-lodger, Mr. de Courcy Smyth.

"What, you!" he exclaimed snarlingly, while his pasty face flamed. "There seems no escape from our dear Cedar Lodge to-night."

Then with an uneasy laugh he made an effort to recover himself.

"Really, I beg your pardon, Mr. Iglesias," he continued, "but my nerves are villainously on edge. I have just met those two young idiots, Farge and Worthington, waltzing home arm in arm like a pair of demented turtle-doves. Having to associate with such third-rate commercial fellows and witness their ebullitions of mutual admiration makes a man of education, like myself, utterly sick. I came out this evening to get free of the whole Cedar Lodge lot. You did the same, I suppose. Pray don't let me frustrate your purpose. I sympathise with it. I will remove myself."

The splotchy red had died out of the speaker's face. Notwithstanding the warmth of the evening he stood with his shoulders raised and his knees a little bent, as a poorly clad man stands in a chill wind on a wintry day. Iglesias observed his attitude, and in his present mood it influenced him more than the surly greeting had done.

"I intended to dine here," he said quietly. "So, I fancy, did you."

"Oh! I have changed my mind, thank you," Smyth answered.

"In consequence of my arrival, I am afraid?"

"No, I had other reasons."

"In any case I should be very glad if you would reconsider your decision and remain," Dominic said. "I am, as you see, alone, and I have not often the pleasure of meeting you. I shall be very happy if you will stay and dine with me, as my guest."

Smyth gave an odd, furtive look at the open door of the restaurant and the row of white tables within. A light had come into his pale blue eyes, making them uncomfortably like those of some half-starved animal.

"I am at a loss to know why I should accept hospitality from you," he remarked, at once cringingly and insolently.

"Simply because you would give me pleasure by doing so. I should value your society."

"I am not in evening dress."

"Nor am I," Dominic answered, with admirable seriousness. There was something pitiful to him in the conflict, obviously going forward in the other's mind, between hunger and reluctance to incur an obligation. He cut it short with gentle authority. "There is a vacant table in the corner where we can talk free from interruption. Let us go in and secure it."

At the beginning of the meal the conversation was intermittent, the burden of supporting it lying with Mr. Iglesias. But, as course followed course, hot and succulent, while the chianti at once steadied his circulation and stimulated his brain, de Courcy Smyth became talkative, not to say garrulous. Finally he began to assert himself, to swagger, thereby laying bare the waste places of his own nature.

"You may think I was hard on Farge and Worthington just now, Mr. Iglesias," he said. "I own they disgust me; not only in themselves, but as examples of certain modern tendencies which are choking the life out of me and such men as me. You business people are on the up grade just now, and you know it. Whoever goes under, you are safe to do yourselves most uncommonly well. I don't mean anything personal, of course. I am just stating a self-evident fact. Commerce is in the air—you all reek of success. And so even shopwalkers, like Worthington, and that thrice odious puppy Farge, grow sleek, and venture to spread themselves in the presence of their betters—in the presence of a scholar and a gentleman, who is well connected and has received a classical education, like myself."

Smyth paused, turning sideways to the table, leaning his elbow on it, crossing his legs and staring gloomily down the long room.

"But what do they know or care about scholarship?" he continued. "What they do know is that the spirit of this unspeakably vulgar age is with them and their miserable huckstering. They know that well enough and act upon it, though they are too illiterate to put it into words—know that trade is in process of exploding learning, of exploiting literature and art to its own low purposes, in process of scaling Olympus, in short, and ignominiously chucking out the gods."

Dominic Iglesias had listened to this astonishing tirade in silence. The man was evidently suffering from feelings of bitter injury, also he was his—Iglesias'—guest. Both pity and hospitality engaged him to endurance. But there are limits. And at this point professional dignity and a lingering loyalty towards the house of Barking Brothers & Barking enjoined protest.

"No doubt we live in times of commerce, rather than in those of chivalry," he remarked. "Still, I venture to think your condemnation is too sweeping. One should discriminate surely between trade and finance."

"Only as one discriminates between a little dog and a big one. The little dog is the easier to kick. I can't get at the Rothschilds and Rockefellers; and so I go for the Farges and Worthingtons," Smyth answered. "In principle I am right. Trade, commerce, finance, juggle with the names as you like, it all comes back to the same thing in the end, namely, the murder of intellect by money. Comes back to the worship of Mammon, chosen ruler of this contemptible fin de siècle, and safe to be even more tyrannously the ruler of the coming century. What hope, I ask you, is left for us poor devils of literary men? None, absolutely none. Just in proportion as we honour our calling and refuse to prostitute our talents we are at a discount. The powers that be have no earthly use for us. We have not the ghost of a chance."

He altered his position, looking quickly and nervously at his host.

"I beg your pardon," he said. "For the moment I forgot you were on the other side, among the conquerors, not the conquered. Probably this conversation does not interest you in the least."

"On the contrary, it interests me very deeply," Dominic replied gravely.

"All the same, out of self-respect I ought to hold my tongue about it, I suppose. For I have accepted the position, Mr. Iglesias. I have learned to do that. Only on each fresh occasion that it is brought home to me—and it has been brought home abominably clearly to-night—my gorge rises at it. And it ought to be so. For it is an outrage—you yourself must admit—that a man who started with excellent prospects and with the consciousness of unusual talents—of genius, perhaps—should be ruined and broken, while every miserable little counter-jumper——"

He leaned his elbows on the table, hiding his face in his hands, and his shoulders shook.

"For I have talent," he cried, in a curiously thin voice. "Before God I have. They may refuse to publish me, refuse to play me, force me to pick up scraps of hack-work on fourth-rate papers to earn a bare subsistence—at times hardly that. Yet all the same, no supercilious beast of an editor or actor-manager—curse the whole stinking lot—shall rob me of my faith in myself—of my belief that I am great—if I had justice, nothing less than that, I tell you, nothing less than great."

Dominic Iglesias drew himself up, sitting very still, his lips rigid, not from defect, but from excess of sympathy. The restaurant was empty now, save for a man, four tables down, safely ensconced behind the pink pages of an evening paper, and for a couple, at the far end, in the window—a young Frenchwoman, whose coquettish hat and trim rounded figure were silhouetted against the yellow silk curtain, and a precocious black-haired youth, with a skin like pale, pink satin, round eyeglasses and an incipient moustache. His attention was entirely occupied with the young woman; hers entirely occupied with herself. And of this Dominic Iglesias was glad. For the matter immediately in hand was best conducted without witnesses. He found it strangely engrossing, strangely moving. However vain, however madly exaggerated even, de Courcy Smyth's estimate of himself, there could be no question but that his present emotion was as actual and genuine as his past hunger had been. The man was utterly spent in body and in spirit. Offensive in speech, slovenly in person, yet these distasteful things added to, rather than detracted from, Iglesias' going out of sympathy towards him. He had rarely been in contact with a fellow-creature in such abandonment of distress. It was terrible to witness; yet it gave him a sense of fellowship, of nearness, even of power, which had in it an element of deep-seated satisfaction. While he waited for the moment when it should become clear to him how to act, his thought travelled back to the Lady of the Windswept Dust. He saw, not her over-red lips, but her serious eyes; saw her tearful and in a way broken, for all her light speech, her fanciful garments, and her antics with her absurd little dogs amid the sweetness of sunshine and summer breeze on Barnes Common. She was far enough away, so he judged, in sentiment and circumstance from the embittered and poverty-haunted man sitting opposite to him. Yet though superficially so dissimilar, they were alike in this, that both had dared to reveal themselves, passing beyond conventional limits in intercourse with him, Iglesias. Both had cried out to him in their distress. And then, thinking of that recently visited altar of the dead, thinking of the one perfect relationship he had known—his relationship to his mother—it came to him as a revelation that not participation in the pride of life and the splendour of it—still less association in mere pleasure and amusement—forms the cement which binds together the units of humanity in stable and consoling relationship; but association in sorrow, the cry for help and the response to that cry, whether it be help to the staying of the hunger of the heart and of the intellect, or simply to the staying of that baser yet very searching hunger of overstrained nerves and an empty stomach. The revelation was partial. Iglesias groped, so to speak, in the light of it uncertain and dazzled. But he received it as real—an idea the magnitude of which, in inspiration and application, he was as yet by no means equal to measure. Still he believed that could he but yield himself to it, and, in yielding, master it, it would carry him very far, teaching him that language of the spirit which he desired to acquire; and hence placing in his hand that earnestly coveted key to an adjustment between the exterior and interior life, the life of the senses and the life of the spirit, which must needs eventuate, manward and godward alike, in triumphant harmony.

Meanwhile there sat de Courcy Smyth, blear-eyed, sandy-red bearded, unsavoury, trying, poor wretch, to rally whatever of manhood was left in him and swagger himself out of his fit of hysteria. The Latin, however dignified, is instinctively more demonstrative than the Anglo-Saxon. Iglesias leaned across the table and laid his hand on the other man's shoulder.

"Wait a little," he said. "Drink your coffee and smoke. We need not hurry to move."

There was a pause, during which Smyth obediently swallowed his coffee, swallowed his chasse of cognac.

"I have made an egregious ass of myself," he said sullenly.

"No, no," Iglesias answered. "You have honoured me by taking me into your confidence. It rests with me to see that you never have cause to regret having done so."

"I believe you mean that."

"Certainly I mean it," Iglesias answered.

Smyth's hands trembled as he took a cigar and held a match to it.

"I am unaccustomed to meeting with kindness," he said in a low voice. Then recovering himself somewhat, he began to speak volubly again. "Of course I understand it all well enough. They are simply afraid of my work, those beasts of editors and playwrights. It is too big for them, they dare not face it and the consequences of it. It is strong stuff, Mr. Iglesias, strong stuff with plenty of red blood in it, and with scholarship, too. And so they pigeon-hole my stories and drames in self-defence, knowing that if these once reached the public, either in print or in action, their own fly-blown anæmic productions would be hissed off the stage or would ruin the circulation of the periodical which inserted them. It is all jealousy, I tell you, Mr. Iglesias, rank, snakish jealousy, bred by self-interest out of fear—a truly exalted parentage!"

He shifted his position restlessly, again setting his elbows upon the table and fingering the broken bread upon the cloth.

"At times, when I can rise above the immediate injustice and cruelty which pursue me," he went on, "I glory in my martyrdom. I range myself alongside those heroes of literature and art, who, because they were ahead of the age in which they lived, were scorned and repudiated by their contemporaries; but they found their revenge in the worship of succeeding generations. My time will come just as theirs did. It must—I tell you it must. I know that. I am safe of eventual recognition; but I want it now, while I am alive, while I can glut myself with the joy of it. I want to see the men who lord it over me, just because they have influence and money, who affect to despise me because they are green with envy and fear of me, brought to their knees, flattened so that I can wipe my boots on them. And—and"—he looked full at Dominic Iglesias, spreading out both hands across the narrow table, his pale prominent eyes blood-shot, his face working—"I want to see someone else—a woman—brought to her knees also. I want to make her feel what she has lost—curse her!—and have her come back whining."

"And if she did come back," Iglesias asked, almost sternly, "what would you do? Forgive her?"

De Courcy Smyth's hands dropped with a queer little thud on the table.

"I don't know. I suppose so. If she wanted to she could always get round me." Then he turned on Iglesias with hysterical violence. "But what do you know? Why do you ask that? Are you among her patrons? I trusted you. I believed you were a gentleman in feeling—and it is a dirty trick to get me in here and fill me up with food and liquor, when you must have seen my nerves were all to pieces, and then spring this upon me. Oh! hell!" he cried, "is there no comfort anywhere? Is everyone a traitor?"

And seeing his utter abjectness, Iglesias' heart went out to the unhappy man in immense and unqualified pity.

"I am grieved," he said gently, "if I have pained you unnecessarily. But truly I have sprung nothing upon you. How could I do so? I know nothing whatever of your circumstances save that which you yourself have told me during the last hour."

"Then why did you ask that question about—about her?"

"Because," Dominic answered, "I am ready to fight for you, in as far as you will allow me to do so; but I do not fight against women."

"You must have had uncommonly little experience of them then," Smyth answered with a sneer.

To this observation Mr. Iglesias deemed it superfluous to make any answer. A silence followed. The restaurant was empty, but for the waiters, who stood in a little knot about the door amusing themselves by watching the movement of the street. Looking round to make sure no one was within hearing, Smyth rose unsteadily to his feet.

"You meant what you said just now, Mr. Iglesias—that you were ready to fight for me?" he asked ungently yet cringingly.

"Certainly I meant it," Dominic replied, "the proviso I have made being respected."

"Yes, yes, of course—but what do you understand by fighting for me? Money?"

Dominic had risen, too. He remained for a moment in thought.

"Within reasonable relation to my means, yes," he said.

"I only want my chance," the other asserted. "The rest will follow as a matter of course. You would risk nothing, Mr. Iglesias. It would be an investment, simply an investment. The play is not finished yet—I have been too disheartened and disgusted recently to be able to work at it. But it is great, I tell you, great. When it is done will you give me my chance, and take a theatre for me and finance a couple of matinées?"

Again Dominic Iglesias thought for a moment, and again, driven by that strange necessity of fellowship—though knowing all the while he was putting his hand to a very questionable adventure—he replied in the affirmative.

CHAPTER IX

On that same evening, and at the same hour at which Dominic Iglesias bound himself to the practical assistance of a personally unsavoury and professionally unsuccessful playwright, a conversation was in progress between two persons of more exalted social station in the drawing-room of a pleasant house in Chester Square. The said drawing-room, mid-Victorian in aspect, was decorated in white and gold and unaggressive green. The ground of the chintz was very white, sprinkled over with bunches of shaded mauve roses unknown to horticulture. Lady Constance Decies' tea-grown was white and mauve also. For she was still in half-mourning for her father, the late Lord Fallowfeild, who had died some eighteen months previously at a very venerable age, and with a touching modesty as though his advent in another world might savour of intrusion. He had always been a humble-minded man. He remained so to the last.

The windows stood open to the balcony. And the effect of the woman, and of the soft lights and colours surrounding her, was reposeful. For at the age of fifty Lady Constance, though stately, was a mild and very gentle person upon whom the push of the modern world had laid no hand. All the active drama of her life had been crowded into a few weeks of the early summer of her eighteenth year; since which, now remote, period she had enjoyed a tranquil existence, happy in the love of her husband and the care of her children. Her pretty brown hair was beginning to turn grey upon the temples. Her eyes, set remarkably far apart, had a certain vagueness and a great innocence of expression. She was naturally timid, and cared but little for any society beyond that of her near relations. To-night she was particularly content, mildly radiant even, thanks to the presence of her favourite brother, the present Lord Fallowfeild, and his avowed admiration of her younger daughter—a maiden of nineteen, who stood before her, with shining eyes, in all the delicate splendour of a spotless ball-dress.

"Yes, darling, you look very sweet," she said. "Just lean down—the lace has got caught in the flowers on your berthe. That's right. Don't keep your father too late."

"And in all things be discreet"—this from Lord Fallowfeild. "It's been my motto through life, as your mother knows. And you couldn't have a brighter example of the excellent results of it than myself. Good-night, my dear. Enjoy yourself," and he patted her on the cheek, avoiding the kiss which she in all innocence proffered him. "Pretty child, Kathleen, uncommonly pretty," he continued as the door closed behind the graceful figure. "It strikes me, Con, your girls have all the good looks of the family in the younger generation, with the exception of Violet Aldham. But she's getting pinched, a bit pinched and witch-like. Then she makes up too much. I have no prejudice against a woman's improving upon nature where nature's been niggardly. But it is among the things that'll keep. It's a mistake to begin it too early. In my opinion Violet has begun it too early—might quite well have given herself another ten years' grace.—Maggie's girls are gawky, you know; and, between ourselves, so terribly flat, poor things, both fore and aft. Upon my word, I'm not surprised they don't marry."

"I am afraid Maggie feels it a good deal," said Lady Constance. Satisfaction mingled with pity in her soul. The disabilities of other women's children are never wholly distressing to a tender mother's heart. "You see, she's so anxious the girls should not marry the bishop's chaplains; and yet really they hardly see any other young men. I think it is a very difficult position, that of a bishop's wife."

Lord Fallowfeild smiled, settling himself back in the corner of the wide sofa and crossing his long legs. He had thought more deeply on a good many subjects than the majority of his acquaintance supposed; with the consequence that he occasionally surprised his fellow-peers by the acuteness of his observations in debate. Lord Fallowfeild, it may be added, took his recently acquired office of hereditary legislator with a commendable mixture of humour and seriousness.

"Their position is an anomalous one," he said; "and an anomalous position is inevitably a difficult one—ought to be SO; in my opinion. But that's not to the point. We were talking, not about the episcopal ladies, but about this little business of Kathleen's. So you believe Lady Sokeington has views and intentions?"

"I know that she has. But you see, Shotover," Lady Constance went on, returning to the name which that gentleman had rendered somewhat notorious in earlier years by a record in sport, in debts, in amours, and in irresistible sweetness of temper—"I want to be quite sure he is really good. Because the affair has not gone very far yet and it might be put a stop to—at least I hope and think it might—without making darling Kathleen too dreadfully unhappy. You do believe he really is good?"

Lord Fallowfeild leaned forward and rubbed a hardly perceptible atom of fluff off his left trouser leg just above the ankle.

"My dear Con," he answered, "you are very charming, but you are a trifle embarrassing, too, you know. Haven't you learned, even at this time of day, that very few men in our world are good in a good woman's sense of the word?"

Lady Constance's smooth forehead puckered into fine little lines.

"Shotover, dear," she said, "you're not getting embittered, I hope?"

"Me? Bless you, no, never in life!" he returned, smiling very reassuringly at her. "Don't worry yourself under that head. I quarrel with nobody and nothing, not even the consequences of my past iniquities. It is a very just world, take it all round, and has been kinder to me than I deserve."

"Oh! but you do nothing, you—you are what—you won't think me rude, Shotover?—what the boys call 'very decent' now."

Lady Constance spoke hurriedly, her colour rising in the most engaging manner.

"As decent as I know how, you dear soul," he said, taking her hand in his. "But that makes no difference to one's knowledge of one's own ways, in the past, or of the ways of other men."

"But Alaric Barking?"

"Neither better nor worse than the rest."

Then Lord Fallowfeild shut his small and beautiful mouth very tight, as though he would be glad to avoid further cross-questioning. Lady Constance's forehead remained puckered.

"It's dreadfully difficult when one's girls grow up," she said plaintively. "One can be comfortable about them, poor darlings, and enjoy them when they are in the nursery—even in the schoolroom, though governesses are worrying. They know so much about quantities of subjects which seem to me not to matter. One never refers to them in ordinary conversation; and if one should be obliged to it is so easy to ask somebody to tell one. And yet they manage to make me feel dreadfully uncomfortable and ignorant because I know nothing about them. But when they grow up——"

"Who, the governesses?" Lord Fallowfeild inquired. "I never supposed they stood in need of that process—thought they started out of the egg all finished, as you might say, and ran about at once like chickens."

"No, no, the girls, poor darlings," Lady Constance replied. "One does get dreadfully anxious about them, Shotover, really one does—specially if one has escaped something very frightening oneself and has been very happy—lest they should fall in love with the wrong people, or lest they should be anything which one did not know beforehand and then everything should turn out dreadful. I should be so miserable. I don't think I could bear it. I know it is wrong to say that, because if one was really good, one would accept whatever God sent without murmuring. So I could for myself, I think. In any case I should earnestly try to. But for the children it is so much harder. If they were unhappy I should feel ashamed of having had them—as if I'd done something horribly selfish; because, you see, there can be nothing so delightful as having children."

She looked at Lord Fallowfeild in the most pathetic manner, the corners of her mouth a-shake. And he took her hand and held it again, touched by the sincerity of her confused utterance, and the great mother-love resident in her. Touched, perhaps, by the age-old problem of man and maid, also.

"Dear little Con, dear little Con," he said, "I'm awfully sorry you should be worried, but I'm afraid we've got to look facts in the face. And it's no kindness for me to lie to you about these matters. I don't pretend to say what's right or what's wrong; I only say what it is. We can't make society, and the ways of it, all over again even to save Kathleen a heartache. I don't want to seem a brute, but she must just take her chance along with the rest of you. Marriage always has been a confounded uncertain business, and will always remain so, I suppose. The sort of remedies excited persons suggest to mitigate the dangers of it are a good deal worse than the disease, in my opinion. Every woman has to take her chance. Every man has to take his, too, you know—and the chance strikes some of us as such an uncommonly poor one, that, upon my honour, it seems safest to wash one's hands of it altogether."

"But you're not unhappy, Shotover, dear? You're not lonely?" Lady Constance inquired anxiously.

"Abominably so sometimes, Con. But I manage, oh! I manage. I have my consolations"—he smiled at her, perhaps a trifle shamefacedly. "But now about Kathleen," he went on, "as I say, she must take her chance along with the rest of you, poor little dear. After all, you took your chance when you married Decies, and it has not turned out so badly, you know."

Lady Constance became radiant once more, as some mild-shining summer moon emerging from behind temporarily obscuring clouds.

"Oh! but then," she said, "of course that was so entirely different."

Lord Fallowfeild patted her hand, his head bent, looking at her somewhat merrily.

"Was it, my dear, was it?—I wonder," he said.

She withdrew her head with a certain dignity. Notwithstanding her softness and tenderness, there were occasions—even with those she loved best—when Lady Constance could delicately mark her displeasure.

"I think you are a little embittered, Shotover," she asserted.

He leaned back, still smiling, and shaking his head at her.

"Old and wise—unpleasantly old, and not quite such a fool as I used to be, that's all," he answered.

For a time there was silence, both brother and sister thinking their own thoughts. Then the latter spoke. Like many gentle persons, she was persistent. She always had been so.

"I should be so grateful if you would tell me, because I think I ought to know, and then I should try to turn the course of darling Kathleen's affections before it all becomes too pronounced. Is there any entanglement, anything amounting to what one calls an impediment, in—well—you understand—against Alaric Barking?"

Lord Fallowfeild got up, took a turn across the room, came back, and stood in front of her.

"I wish you wouldn't, Con," he said. "Upon my soul, I wish you wouldn't. It's a nasty thing for an old man, who has gone the pace in his day pretty thoroughly, to give away a lad who may have made a slip just at the start, and who is doing his best to get his feet again and run straight. Alaric Barking's a good fellow. I like him. I never have been and never shall be partial to that family. Your sister Louisa cried up their virtues and their confounded solvency, in the old days, till she made them a positive nuisance. She's not a happy way of inculcating a moral economic lesson, hasn't Louisa. But I own I'm fond of this boy. He's far the best of the whole lot—gentlemanlike, and a sportsman, and good-looking—unusually so for one of that family—and, my dear, he's downright honestly in love with Kathleen. I've watched him—did so when he was down at Ranelagh one day last month with her and Victoria Sokeington—and I know the real thing when I see it."

"But—but, I am afraid, Shotover, you mean me to understand there is some impediment?" Lady Constance repeated.

"Oh! well, hang it all, I'm awfully sorry, but if you are determined to have it, Connie, perhaps there is. Only for heaven's sake don't be in too much of a hurry. Between ourselves, I happen to know the boy's doing his best to shake himself free in an honourable manner. So don't rush the business. Like the dear tender-hearted creature you are, have a little mercy on the poor beggar. Let the whole affair drift a little. It may straighten out."

Lady Constance meditated for a minute or so.

"It's very dreadful that there should be any impediment," she said.

"I'll back Alaric to agree with you there," Lord Fallowfeild answered.

"You'll do what you can, Shotover, won't you, to help Kathleen? I never forget how you helped me once!"

Lord Fallowfeild's handsome face expressed rather broad amusement.

"I'm afraid the two cases are hardly parallel, my dear," he said.

CHAPTER X

"The play's on the other side, the crowd's on the other side, all the fun's on the other side, and I am on this side with nothing more lively than you, you little shivering idiot, for company."

Poppy St. John drew the spaniel's long silky ears through her fingers slowly.

"I am bored, Cappadocia," she said, with a yawn which she made not the slightest effort to stifle, "bored right through to my very marrow. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, how I do wish something would happen!"

Poppy sat, propped up with scarlet silk cushions, in a cane deck-chair, on the white-railed balcony upon which the first-floor bedroom windows opened. Around her were strewn illustrated magazines and ladies' papers; but unfortunately the stories in the former appeared to her every bit as silly as the fashion-plates in the latter. Both had equally little to do with life as the ordinary flesh and blood human being lives it. She was filled with a rebellious sense of the banality of her surroundings this afternoon. Even from her coign of vantage upon the balcony, whence wide prospects disclosed themselves, everything looked foolish, pointless, of the nature of an unpardonably stale joke.

The said balcony, divided into separate compartments by the interposition of wooden barriers, extended the whole length of the terrace of twenty-seven houses. And these were all precisely alike, with white wood and stucco "enrichments," as the technical phrase has it. Cheap stained and leaded glass adorned the upper panels of the twenty-seven front doors, which were approached by twenty-seven flights of steps—thus securing a measure of light and air to the twenty-seven basements. The front doors were set in couples, alternating with couples of bay windows. There was a determination of cheap smartness, a smirking self-consciousness about the little houses, a suggestion of having put on their best frocks and high-heeled shoes and standing very much on tiptoe to attract attention. The balconies, narrow where the upper bays encroached on them, wide where the house fronts were recessed above the twin front doors, broke forth into a garland of flower-boxes. Cascades of pink ivy-leaf geranium, creeping-jenny, and nasturtiums backed by white or yellow Paris daisies, flowed outward between the white ballusters and masked the edge of the woodwork. The effect, though pretty, was not quite satisfactory—being suggestive of millinery, of an over-trimmed summer hat.

Immediately below was the roadway, bordered by an asphalt pavement on either side, then the high impenetrable oak paling, which had baffled Dominic Iglesias' maiden effort at participation in the amusements of the rich. From Poppy's balcony, however, the palings offered no impediment to observation. All the green expanse of the smaller polo-ground was visible. So was the whole height of the grove of majestic elms on the right and the back of the club house; and, and the left, between massifs of shrubbery, a vista of lawns sloping towards the river peopled by a sauntering crowd.

It was upon this last that Poppy directed her gaze. To the naked eye the units composing it showed as vertical lines of grey, brown, and black, blotted with bright delicate colour, and splashed here and there with white, the whole mingling, uniting, breaking into fresh combinations kaleidoscope fashion. Through the opera-glasses figures of men, women, and horses detached themselves, becoming quaintly distinct, neat as toys, an assemblage of elegant highly finished marionnettes. There was a fascination in watching the movement of these brilliant, clear-cut silent little things upon that amazingly verdant carpet of grass. But it was a fascination which, for Poppy, had by now worn somewhat thin. The interest proved too far away, too impersonal. Indeed it may be questioned whether any who have not within themselves large store of resignation, or of hope, can look on at gaiety, in which they have no share, without first sadness and then pretty lively irritation. And of those two most precious commodities, resignation and hope, Poppy had but limited reserve stock at present. So she pulled the little dog's ears rather hard and lamented:

"Oh! my good gracious me, if only something would happen!"

Then, the words hardly out of her mouth, she shot the much-enduring Cappadocia off her lap and, restoring her elbows on the rails, leaned right out over the balcony.

"Come here, dear beautiful lunatic, come here," she cried. "For pity's sake don't pass by!"

Perhaps fortunately this very unconventional invitation was lost upon Dominic Iglesias, soberly crossing the road with due observance of the eccentricities of the drivers of motor-cars and riders of bicycles. Looking up, he was aware of a vision quite sufficiently indicative of welcome, without added indiscretion of words.—The white balustrade, the trailing fringe of nasturtiums, succulent leaves and orange-scarlet blossoms; the woman's bust and shoulders in her string-coloured lace gown, her small face, curiously vivid in effect, capped by the heavy masses of her black hair, her singular eyes full of light, the red of her lips and tinge of stationary pink in her cheeks supplemented by a glow of quick excitement. A few weeks ago the ascetic in Iglesias might have taken alarm. Now it was different. He had his idea, and, walking in the strength of it, dared adventure himself in neighbourhoods otherwise slightly questionable.

Five minutes later Poppy advanced across the little drawing-room to meet him.

"Well," she said, "of course you might have come sooner. But, equally of course, you might never have come at all, so I won't quarrel with you about the delay, though I would like you to know it has worried me a good deal."

"Has it? I am sorry for that," Dominic answered gravely.

"Yes, be sorry, be sorry," she repeated. "It is comfortable to hear you say so."

She looked at him with the utmost frankness, took his hand and led him to a settee filling in the right angle between the fireplace and the double doors at the back of the room.

"Sit down," she said, "and let us talk. Have another cushion—so—and if you're good I'll give you tea presently. And understand, you needn't be careful of yourself. I'll play perfectly fair with you. I've been thinking it all out during this time you didn't come; and I never go back on my word once given. So, look here, you needn't account for yourself in any way. I don't even want to know your name—specially I don't want to know that. It might localise you, and I don't want to have you localised. Directly a person is localised it takes away their restfulness to one. One begins to see just all the places where they belong to somebody else, notice-boards struck up everywhere warning one to keep off the grass. And that's a nuisance. It raises Old Nick in one, and makes one long to commit all manner of wickedness which would never have entered one's head otherwise."

Poppy held her hands palm to palm between her knees, glancing at Dominic Iglesias now and again sideways as she spoke. The bodice of her dress, cut slightly en coeur, showed the nape of her neck, and the whole of her throat, which was smooth and rounded though rather long. Her make altogether was that not uncommon to London girls of the lower middle-class: small-boned and possibly anæmic, but prettily moulded, and with an attraction of over-civilisation as of hot-house-grown plants. Just now her head seemed bowed down by the weight of her dark hair, as she sat gathered together, making herself small as a child will when concentrating its mind to the statement of some serious purpose.

"I've knocked about a lot," she went on. "It's right you should know that. And there's not very much left to tell me about a number of things not usually set down in conversation books designed for débutants. But just on that account I may be rather useful to you in some ways.—Don't go and be offended now, there's a dear, good man," she added coaxingly. "Because judging by what you told me the other day, there's no doubt that, under some heads, you are very much of a débutant."

"I suppose I am," Iglesias said slowly. It was very strange to him to find himself in so sudden and close an intimacy with this at once so wise and so artificial woman creature. But he had his idea. Moreover, increasingly he trusted her.

"Of course you are," she asserted. "That's just where the beauty of it all comes in. You're the veriest infant. One has only to look into your face to see that.—Don't go and freeze up now. You belong to another order of doctrine and practice to that current in contemporary society."

Poppy gazed at the floor, still making herself small, the palms of her hands pressed together between her knees.

"And that's just why you can be useful to me, awfully useful, if you choose—I don't mean money, business, anything of the kind. I'm perfectly competent to manage my own affairs, thank you. But you're good for me, somehow. You rest me."

She began to rock herself gently backwards and forwards, but without taking the heels of her shoes off the ground.

"Yes, you rest me, you rest me," she repeated.

"I am glad," Iglesias said. He felt soberly pleased, thankful almost.

Again Poppy glanced at him sideways.

"Yes, I believe you are," she said. "And that shows things have happened to you—in you, more likely—since we last met. You have come on a great piece."

"I doubt if I have come on, so much as gone back, to influences of long ago," he answered; "to things which had been overlaid by the dust of my working years almost to the point of obliteration."

"Was it pleasant to go back?" Poppy asked.

"Not at all. The going was painful. It required some courage to brush off the dust."

"It usually does require courage—at least that's my experience—to brush off the dust."

Dominic Iglesias made no immediate answer. He was a little startled at his companion's acute reading of him, a little touched by her confidence. Her words seemed to suggest the possibility of a relationship which fitted in admirably with the development of his idea. He sat looking away across the room, and, doing so, became aware that the said room possessed unexpected characteristics, calculated to elucidate his impressions of its owner's character. It was a man's room rather than a woman's, innocent of furbelows and frills. Two low, wide settees, well furnished with cushions and upholstered in dark yellowish-red tapestry, fitted into the corners on either side the double doors. A couple of large armchairs and a revolving book-table occupied the centre of the room. An upright piano, in an ebonised case, draped across the back with an Indian phulkari—discs of looking-glass set in coarsely worked yellow eyelet holes forming the border of it—stood at right angles to the wall just short of the bay window. In the window, placed slant-wise, was a carved black oak writing-table, a long row of photographs stuck up against the back shelf of it. The walls were hung with a set of William Nicolson's prints, strong, dark, distinct, slightly sinister in effect; a fine etching of Jean François Millet's Gleaners; and, in noticeable contrast to this last, a mezzotint of Romney's picture of Lady Hamilton spinning. Upon the book-table were a silver ash-tray and cigarette-box. The air was unquestionably impregnated with the odour of tobacco, which the burning of scent-sticks quite failed to dissemble.

While Mr. Iglesias thus noted the details of his surroundings, his companion observed him, closely, intently. Suddenly she flung herself back against the piled-up cushions.

"Let the dust lie, let it lie," she cried, almost shrilly. And as Dominic turned to her, surprised at her vehemence, she added, "Yes, it's safest so. Let it lie till it grows thick, carpeting all the surface, so that, treading on it, one's footsteps are muffled, making no sound!"

Poppy jumped up, crossed swiftly to the writing-table, swept the long row of photographs together and pushed them into a drawer.

"There you go, face downwards, every man Jack of you," she said. "And, for all I care, there you may stay."

Then she turned round, confronting Dominic Iglesias, who had risen also, her head carried high, her teeth set.

"You may not grasp the connection of ideas—I don't the very least see how you should, and I've no extra special wish that you should. But you must just take my word for it that's one way of thickening the dust, in my particular case, and not half a bad way either!"

She pushed the heavy masses of her hair up from her forehead, crossed the little room again and stood before Iglesias smiling, her hands clasped behind her back.

"Yes, you rest me," she said, "you do, even more than I expected. I wanted awfully to see you; and yet I was half afraid if I did we mightn't pull the thing off. But we are going to pull it off, aren't we?"

This direct appeal demanded a direct answer; and Iglesias, looking down at her, felt nerved to a certain steadiness of resolve.

"Yes, we are," he said gravely. "That, at least, is my purpose. I have very few friends. I should value a new one." Then he added, with a certain hesitancy, "I am glad you are not disappointed."

"Ah! you have come on—not a question about it," Poppy cried. "Sit down again. You needn't go yet. And we are through with disturbances for this afternoon anyhow. An anti-cyclone, as the weather reports put it, is extending over all our coasts. I feel quite happy. Let me enjoy the anti-cyclone while it lasts—and I'll give you your tea."

But of that tea Dominic Iglesias was fated not to drink. A ring at the bell, a parley at the front door, followed by the advent of an elderly parlourmaid bearing a card on a small lacquer tray.

"His lordship says if you're engaged he could wait a little, ma'am. But he wants particularly to see you to-day."

Poppy took the card, glanced at it, and then at Dominic Iglesias.

"I'm afraid, I'm awfully afraid I shall have to let you go," she said. She took both his hands, and holding them, without pressure but with a great friendliness, went on: "Don't be offended, or you'll make me miserable. But he's an old friend; and he's been a perfect brick to me—stood by me through all my worst luck. I can't send him away. You won't be off ended?"

"No," Iglesias said.

"And you will come again? You make me feel all smooth and good. You promise you'll come?"

"Yes," Iglesias said.

In the narrow passage a tall, eminently well-dressed middle-aged gentleman stood aside to let him pass. Dominic Iglesias received the impression of a very handsome person, whose possible insolence of bearing received agreeable modification, thanks to the expression of kindly humorous eyes and a notably beautiful mouth.

Upon the centre table of the square first-floor sitting-room at Cedar Lodge a note awaited Mr. Iglesias, addressed in George Lovegrove's neat business hand.

"Dear old friend," it ran—"the wife asks you to take supper with us to-morrow night. Step across as early as you like. My cousin, Miss Serena Lovegrove, is paying us a visit. Yours faithfully, G. L.—N. B. Come as you are: no ceremony. G. L."

CHAPTER XI

"Hullo, girlie," called the red and green parrot, as it helped itself up the side of its zinc cage with beak as well as claws.

Serena Lovegrove had opened the door suddenly. Then, seeing that Mr. Iglesias alone occupied the room, neither her host nor hostess being present, she paused in the doorway, a large floppy yellow silk work-bag in her hands, undecided whether to retreat or to proceed. And it was thus that the bird, discovering her advent, announced it, while the pupils of his hard, round yellowish grey eyes dilated and contracted—"snapped," as Serena would have said—maliciously.

Serena was a tall, elegant, faded woman, dressed in black, her little upright head balanced upon a long thin stalk of neck. Though undeniably faded, there was, as now seen in the quiet evening light, a suggestion of youthfulness about her. He brown eyes, pretty though rather small, snapped even as did those of the parrot. Excitement—to-night she was very much excited—invariably produced in Serena an effect of clutching at her long-departed girlhood, an effect sufficiently pathetic in the case of a woman well on in the forties. And it was precisely this ineffectual throw-back to a Serena of seventeen or eighteen which lent a sharp edge of irony to the strident salutations of the parrot, as it called out again:

"Hullo, girlie! Polly's own pet girlie," then with a prolonged and ear-piercing whistle:—"Hi, four-wheeler! girlie's going out." And hoarsely, with a growl in its throat: "Move on there, stoopid, can't yer? Shut the door."

During the delivery of these final admonitions Mr. Iglesias had recognised the shadowy figure standing on the threshold and advanced. This decided Serena. Still twisting the ribbons of the yellow work-bag round her thin fingers, she drifted into the room.

"I think I have had the pleasure of meeting you once or twice before, Miss Lovegrove," Dominic said. His manner was specially gentle and courtly, for he could not but feel the poor lady was at a disadvantage, owing to the very articulate indiscretions of the parrot.

"Oh! yes," Serena answered. "Certainly we have met. But you are wrong as to the number of times. It is more than once or twice. Five times, I think; or it may have been six. No, it is five, because I remember you were expected, in the evening, the day before I went home the winter before last; and at the last moment you were unable to come. That would have made six. Now it is only five."

"You have an excellent memory," Iglesias said. "It is kind of you to remember so clearly."

"I wonder if it is—I mean, I wonder whether it is kind," Serena rejoined.

She was quite innocent of any intention of sarcasm. But her mind, like those of so many unoccupied, and consequently self-occupied persons, was addicted to speculation of a minor and vacuous sort. She was also liable—as such persons often are—to mistake cavilling for spirit and wit—a most tedious error!

"Still you are right in saying I have a good memory," she added. "People generally observe that. But then I was always taught it was rude to forget. Forgetfulness is the result of inattention. At school I never had any difficulty in learning by heart."

"You must have found that both a useful and pleasant talent."

"Perhaps," Serena replied negligently. She was determined not to commit herself, having arrived at the conclusion that Mr. Iglesias' address was too civil. "It was bad manners of him not to remember how often we had met," she said to herself, "and now he is trying to pass it off. But that won't do!" Serena had many and distinct views on the subject of manner and manners. She was never certain that civility did not argue a defect of sincerity. She agreed with herself to think that over again later. Meanwhile she would carefully remark Mr. Iglesias. "If he is insincere, as I fear he is, he is sure to betray it in other ways. Then I shall be on my guard." Forewarned is, of course, forarmed, and Serena felt very acute. Though against exactly what she was taking such elaborate precautions, it would have been difficult for her, or for anyone else, to have stated. However, just now it was incumbent upon her to make conversation. As is the way with persons not very fertile in ideas, she had recourse to the simple expedient of asking a leading question.

"Are you fond of animals?" she inquired.

"I am afraid I have very little knowledge of animals," Iglesias replied.

Serena laughed dryly. This was so transparent a subterfuge.

"What a very odd answer!" she said. "Because everybody must really know whether they like animals or not."

"I am afraid I stand by myself then, a solitary exception. I have had little or nothing to do with animals, and have therefore had no opportunity of discovering whether they attract me or not."

"How very odd!" Serena repeated.

She moved across to the centre-table where Mr. Lovegrove's books of picture postcards, the miscellaneous consequences of many charity bazaars, and kindred aesthetic treasures reposed, and deposited her work-bag in their company. Her movement revived the attention of the parrot, who had been nodding on its perch.

"Poor old girlie, take a brandy and soda? Kiss and be friends. Good-night, all," it murmured hoarsely, half asleep.

"If your question bore reference to that particular animal, I stand in no doubt as to my sentiments," Dominic remarked. "I am anything but fond of it. I think it an odious bird."

"Ah! you see you do know," Serena exclaimed. "I was sure you did." She felt justified in her suspicion of his sincerity. "But nobody would agree with you, Mr. Iglesias, because of course it is really a very clever parrot. They very seldom learn to say so many things."

"How fortunate!" Dominic permitted himself to ejaculate.

"I don't see why you should say it is fortunate."

"Do not its remarks strike you as somewhat impertinent and intrusive?"

"I wonder if an animal can be impertinent," Serena said reflectively.

But here to her vexation, for it appeared to her that she had just started a really interesting subject of discussion, Mrs. Lovegrove bustled into the room.

"Well, Mr. Iglesias," she began, "I am sure I am very delighted to see you, and so will Georgie be. He was remarking only yesterday we don't seem to see so much of you as we used to do. He's just a little behind time, is Georgie, having been kept by the dear vicar at a meeting about the Church Workers' Social Evenings Guild at the Mission Room in Little Bethesda Street. You wouldn't know where that is, Mr. Iglesias—though I can't help hoping you will some day—but Serena knows, don't you, Serena? It's where Susan—her elder sister, Miss Lovegrove"—this aside to Dominic—"gave an address once to the members of the Society for the Conversion of the Jews."

"No doubt I remember; but Susan is always giving addresses somewhere," Serena said loftily.

"And very good and kind of her it is to give addresses," Mrs. Lovegrove rejoined. "Even the dear vicar says what a remarkable gift she has as a speaker, and there's no question as to the worth of his praise."

"I wonder if it is—I mean I wonder if it is good and kind of Susan to give addresses," Serena remarked. "Because of course she enjoys giving them. Susan likes to have a number of people listening to her."

"But if the object is a noble one?"—this from Mrs. Lovegrove, a little nonplussed and put about.

"Still, if you enjoy doing anything, how can it be good and kind to do it?" Serena said argumentatively. "Susan is very fond of publicity. I think people very often deceive themselves about their own motives."

She looked meaningly at Dominic Iglesias as she spoke. And he looked back at her gravely and kindly, though with a slightly amused smile. His thoughts had travelled away—they had done so pretty frequently during the last twenty-four hours—to the smirking self-conscious little house on the verge of Barnes Common. Unpromising though it had appeared outwardly, yet within it he believed he had found a friend—a friend who was also an enigma. Perhaps, as he now reflected, all women are enigmas. Certainly they are amazingly different. He thought of Poppy. He looked at Serena. Yes, doubtless they all are enigmas; only—might Heaven forgive him the discourtesy—all are not enigmas equally well worth finding out.

George Lovegrove arrived. Supper, a somewhat heavy and hybrid meal, followed—"all comfortable and friendly," as Mrs. Lovegrove described it, "no ceremony and fal-lals, but everything put down on the table so that you could see it and please yourself."

Serena, however, was difficult to please. She picked daintily at the food on her plate. Her host observed her with solicitude.

"Do take a little more," he said, in an anxious aside, Mrs. Lovegrove being safely engaged in conversation with Mr. Iglesias, "or I shall begin to be nervous lest we aren't offering you quite what you like."

But Serena was obdurate.

"Pray don't mind, George," she said. "You know I never eat much. I am quite different from Susan, for instance. She always has a large appetite, and so have all her friends. Low Church people always have, I think. But I never care to eat a great deal, especially in hot weather."

Serena was really very glad indeed to come to London just now. Still, there were self-respecting decencies to be observed, specially in the presence of another guest. Relationship does not necessarily imply social equality; and, as Serena reminded herself, the family always had felt that poor George had married beneath him. Therefore it was well to keep the fact of her own superior refinement well in view. In the case of good George Lovegrove this was, however, a work of supererogation. For he had a, to himself, positively embarrassing respect for Serena's gentility—embarrassing because at moments it came painfully near endangering the completeness of his consideration for "the wife's feelings." The two ladies frequently differed upon matters of taste and etiquette, with the result that the good man's guileless breast was torn by conflicting emotions. For had not Serena's father been a General Officer of the Indian army? And had not Serena herself and her elder sister Susan—a person of definite views and commanding character—long been resident at Slowby in Midlandshire, an inland watering-place of acknowledged fashion? It followed that her pronouncements on social questions were necessarily final. Yet to uphold her judgment, as against that of the wife, was to risk mortifying the latter. And to mortify the wife would be to act as a heartless scoundrel. Hence situations, for George Lovegrove, difficult to the point of producing profuse perspiration.

That night Serena prepared for rest with remarkable deliberation. Clad in a blue and white striped cotton dressing-gown, she sat long at her toilet-table. And all the time she wondered—a far-reaching, mazelike, elaborately intricate and wholly inconclusive wonder. Hers was a nature which suffered perpetual solicitation from possible alternatives, hearing warning voices from the vague, delusive regions of the might-be or might-have-been. She had never grasped the rudimentary but very important truth that only that which actually is in the least matters. And so to arrive at what is, with all possible despatch—in so far as such arriving is practicable—and then to go forward, comprises the whole duty of the sane human being. Par from this, Serena's mind forever fitted batlike in the half-darkness of innumerable small prejudices and ignorances. She moved, as do so many women of her class, in a twilight, embryonic world, untouched alike by the splendour and terror of living.

Nevertheless, on this particular occasion, as she brushed her hair and inserted the tortoise-shell curling-pins which should secure to-morrow's decorative effects, she felt almost daring and dangerous. She wondered whether she had really enjoyed the evening or not; whether she had held her own and shown independence and spirit. She laboured under the quaint early-Victorian notion that, in the presence of members of the opposite sex, a woman is called upon always to play something of a part. She should advance, so to speak, and then retreat; provoke interest by a studied indifference; yield a little, only to become more elegantly fugitive. It may be doubted whether these wiles have even been a very successful adjunct to feminine charms. But in the case of so negative and colourless a creature as Serena, they were pathetically devoid of result. Play a part industriously as she might, the majority of her audience was wholly unaware that she was, in point of fact, playing anything at all! They might think her a little capricious, a little foolish, but that there was intention or purpose in her pallid flightiness passed the bounds of imagination. Never mind, if the audience had no sense of the position, Serena had, and she enjoyed it. Excitement possessed her, and her eyes snapped even yet as, thinking it all over, she fastened the curlers in her hair.

She wondered whether George and Rhoda—how intensely she disliked the name Rhoda!—had any special reason for asking her just now, and talking so much about Mr. Iglesias, or whether it was a coincidence.

"Of course it is not of the slightest importance to me whether they have or not," she reflected. "I think it would be rather an impertinence if they had. Still, I think I had better find out; but without letting Rhoda suspect, of course. If you give her any encouragement Rhoda is inclined to go too far and say what is rather indelicate. I always have thought Rhoda had a rather vulgar mind. I wonder if poor George feels that? I believe he does, before me. Once or twice to-night he was very nervous. How dreadfully coarse poor Rhoda's skin is getting! I wonder if Rhoda has given Susan a hint, and if that was what made Susan so gracious about my leaving home? But I don't believe she did—I mean that Susan suspected that George and Rhoda had any particular reason for inviting me. I wonder if I shall ever make Susan see that I am not a cipher? Of course if George and Rhoda really have any particular reason, and Susan comes to know it, that will show her that other people do not consider me a cipher. I wonder what most people would think of Mr. Iglesias? Of course he has only been a bank clerk; but then so has George. Only then he is a foreigner, and that makes a difference. I wonder whether, if anything came of it, Susan would make his being a foreigner an objection?"

But this was growing altogether too definite and concrete. With a sort of mental squeak Serena's thought flitted into twilight and embryonic regions.

"I think if they have any particular reason, it is rather scheming of George and Rhoda. I wonder if it is nice of them? If they have, I think it is rather deceitful. I wonder if they have said anything to Mr. Iglesias?"

Serena, with the aid of a curling-pin, was controlling the short fuzzy little hairs just at the nape of her neck; and this last wonder proved so absorbing a one that she remained, head bent and fingers aimlessly fiddling with the bars of the curler, till it suddenly occurred to her that she was getting quite stiff.

"If they have, I think it is very presuming of them," she continued wrathfully, stretching her arms, for they ached—"very presuming. How glad I am I was on my guard. I wonder if they saw I was on my guard? I believe George did. I wonder if that helped to make him nervous?"

Serena fastened in the last of the curlers. There was no excuse for sitting up any longer; yet she lingered.

"I must be more on my guard than ever," she said.

Meanwhile Dominic Iglesias, after sitting in the dining-room with his old friend while the latter smoked a last pipe, made his way across the Green in the deepening mystery of the summer night. The sky was moonless; and at the zenith, untouched by the upward streaming light of the great city, the stars showed fair and bright. A nostalgia of wide untenanted spaces, of far horizons, of emotions at once intimate and rooted in things eternal, was upon him. But of Serena Lovegrove, it must be admitted, he thought not one little bit.

CHAPTER XII

Only one of the trees from which Cedar Lodge derives its name was still standing. This lonely giant, sombre exile from Libanus, overshadowed all that remained of the formerly extensive garden and sensibly darkened the back of the house. Its foliage, spread like a deep pile carpet upon the wide horizontal branches, was worn and sparse, showing small promise of self-renewal. Yet though starved by the exhausted soil, and clogged by soots from innumerable chimneys, it remained majestic, finely decorative as some tree of metal, of age-old bronze roughened by a greenness of deep-eating rust. From the first moment of his acquaintance with Cedar Lodge it had been to Dominic Iglesias an object of attraction, even of sympathy. For he recognised in it something stoical, an unmoved dignity and lofty indifference to the sordid commonplace of its surroundings. It made no concessions to adverse circumstances, but remained proudly itself, owning for sole comrade the Wind—that most mysterious of all created things, unseen, untamed, mateless, incalculable. The wind gave it voice, gave it even a measure of mobility, as it swept through the labyrinth of dry unfruitful branches and awoke a husky music telling of far-distant times and places, making a shuddering and stirring as of the resurgence of long-forgotten hope and passion.

When Dominic entered into residence at Cedar Lodge, a pair of stout mauve-brown wood-pigeons—migrants from the pleasant elms of Holland Park—had haunted the tree. But they being, for all their dolorous cooings, birds of a lusty, not to say truculent, habit, grew weary of its persistent solemnity of aspect. So, at least, Dominic judged. He had been an interested spectator of the love-makings, quarrels, and reconciliations of these comely neighbours from his bedroom window daily while dressing. But one fine spring morning he saw them fly away and never saw them fly back again. Clearly they had removed themselves to less solemn quarters, leaving the great tree, save for fugitive visitations from its comrade the wind, to solitary meditation within the borders of its narrow prison-place.

Besides presenting in itself an object altogether majestical, the cedar performed a practical office whereby it earned Iglesias' gratitude. For its dark interposing bulk effectually shut off the view of an aggressively new rawly red steam laundry, with shiny slate roofs and a huge smoke-belching chimney to it, which, to the convulsive disgust of the gentility of the eastern side of Trimmer's Green, had had the unpardonable impertinence to get itself erected in an adjacent street. It followed that when, one wet evening, yellow-headed little Mr. Farge had advised himself to speak slightingly of the cedar tree, Iglesias was prepared to defend it, if necessary, with some warmth.

The conversation had ranged round the subject of the hour, namely, the possibility—as yet in the estimation of most persons an incredible one—of war with the Boer Republics, when the young man indulged in a playful aside addressed to Miss Hart, at whose right hand he was seated.

"If I could find fault with anything belonging to the lady at the head of the table," he said, "it would be the gloomy old party looking in at these back windows."

"What, the dear old cedar tree! Never, Mr. Farge!" protested Eliza.

"Yes, it would, though," he insisted, "when, as tonight, it is drip, drip, dripping all over the shop. No touch of Sunny Jim about him, is these now, Bert?"—this to the devoted Worthington sitting immediately opposite to him on Miss Hart's left.

"Truly there is not, if I may venture so far," the other young gentleman responded, playing up obediently. "And if anything could give me and Charlie a fit of the blues, I believe that old fellow would in rainy weather."

"Makes you think of the cemetery, does it not now, Bert?"

"You have hit it. Paddington—not the station though, Charlie, just starting for a cosey little trip with your best girl up the river."

"For shame, Mr. Worthington," Eliza protested again, giggling.

"Suggestive of the end of all week-ends, in short," de Courcy Smyth, who contrary to his custom was present at dinner that evening, put in snarlingly. "One last trip up the River of Death for you, with a ticket marked not transferrable, eh, Farge? Then an oblong hole in the reeking blue clay, silence and worms."

His tone was spiteful to the point of commanding attention. A hush fell on the company, broken only by the drifting sob of the rain through the branches of the great cedar. Mr. Farge went perceptibly pale. Mrs. Porcher sighed and turned her fine eyes up to the ceiling. Iglesias looked curiously at the speaker. Eliza Hart was the first to find voice.

"Pray, Mr. Smyth," she said, "don't be so very unpleasant. You're enough to give one the goose-skin all over."

"I am sorry I have offended," he answered sullenly. "But I beg leave to call attention to the fact that I did not start this subject. I was rather interested in the previous discussion, which gave an opportunity of intelligent conversation not habitual among us. Farge is responsible for the interruption, and for the cemeteries, and consequently for my comment. Still, I am sorry I have offended."

He shifted his position, glancing uneasily first at his hostess, and then at Dominic Iglesias, who sat opposite him in the place of honour at that lady's right hand.

"You have not offended, Mr. Smyth," Mrs. Porcher declared graciously. "And no doubt it is well for us all to be reminded of death and burial at times. Though some of us hardly need reminding"—again she sighed. "We carry the thought of them about with us always." And she turned her fine eyes languidly upon Mr. Iglesias.

"My poor sweet Peachie," the kind-hearted Eliza murmured, under her breath.

"But at meals, perhaps, a lighter vein is more suitable, Mr. Smyth," Mrs. Porcher continued. "At table the thought of death does seem rather disheartening, does it not? But about our poor old cedar tree now, Mr. Farge? You were not seriously proposing to have it removed?"

"Well, strictly between ourselves, I am really half afraid I actually was."

"You forget it sheltered my childhood. It is associated with all my past."

"Can a rosebud have a past?" Farge cried, coming up to the surface again with a bounce, so to speak.

Mrs. Porcher smiled, shook her head in graceful reproof, and turned once more to Dominic.

"I think we should all like to know how you feel about it, Mr. Iglesias," she said. "Do you wish the poor old tree removed?"

"On the contrary, I should greatly regret it's being cut down," he answered. "It would be a loss to me personally, for I have always taken a pleasure both in the sound and the sight of it. But that is a minor consideration."

"You must allow me to differ from that opinion," Mrs. Porcher remarked, with gentle emphasis. "We can never forget, can we, Eliza, who is our oldest guest? Mr. Iglesias' opinion must ever carry weight in all which concerns Cedar Lodge."

Here Farge and Worthington made round eyes at one another, while de Courcy Smyth shuffled his feet under the table. He had received a disquieting impression.

"Oh! of course, Peachie, dear," Miss Hart responded. She hugged herself with satisfaction. "The darling looks more bonny than ever," she reflected. "To-night what animation! What tact! She seems to have come out so lately, since that Serena Lovegrove has been stopping over the way. Not that there could be any rivalry between her and that poor thread-paper of a thing!"

Dominic Iglesias, however, received his hostess' pretty speeches with a calm which turned the current of the ardent Eliza's thoughts, causing her to refer, mentally, to the degree of emotion which might be predicated of monuments, mountains, stone elephants, and kindred objects.

"You are very kind," he said. "But on grounds far more important than those of any private sentiment the cutting down of the cedar calls for careful consideration. I am afraid you would find it a serious loss to the beauty of your property. What the house loses in light, it certainly gains in distinction and interest from the presence of the tree."

"Yes," Mrs. Porcher returned, folding her plump pink hands upon the edge of the table and looking down modestly. "It does speak of family perhaps."

"And in your case, dear, it speaks nothing more than the truth," Eliza declared. "Just as well a certain gentleman should reckon with Peachie's real position," she said to herself—"specially with that stuck-up Serena Lovegrove cat-and-mousing about on the other side of the Green. It does not take a Solomon to see what she's after!"

"I am afraid the verdict is given against you, Mr. Farge. The cedar tree will remain." Mrs. Porcher rose as she spoke.

The young man playfully rubbed his eyes with his knuckles, feigning tears. Then a scrimmage ensued between him and Worthington as to which should reach the dining-room door first and throw it open before the ladies. At this exhibition of high spirits de Courcy Smyth groaned audibly, while Mrs. Porcher, linking her arm within that of Miss Hart, lingered.

"You will join our little circle in the drawing-room to-night, will you not, Mr. Iglesias?" she pleaded.

Again the young men made round eyes at one another. De Courcy Smyth had come forward. He stood close to Iglesias and, before the latter could answer, spoke hurriedly:

"Can you give me ten minutes in private? I don't want to press myself upon you, but this is imperative."

Iglesias proceeded to excuse himself to his hostess, thereby causing Miss Hart to refer mentally to monuments and mountains once again.

"Thank you," Smyth gasped. His face was twitching and he swayed a little, steadying himself with one hand on the corner of the dinner-table.

"I loathe asking," he continued, "I loathe pressing my society upon you, since you do not seek it. It has taken days for me to make up my mind to this; but it is necessary. And, after all, you made the original offer yourself."

"I am quite ready to listen, and to renew any offer which I may have made," Iglesias answered quietly.

"We can't talk here, though," Smyth said. "That blundering ass of a waiter will be coming in directly; and whatever he overhears is sure to go the round of the house. All servants are spies."

"We can go up to my sitting-room and talk there," Iglesias replied.

Yet he was conscious of making the proposal with reluctance, pity struggling against repulsion. For not only was the man's appearance very unkempt, but his manner and bearing were eloquent of a certain desperation. Of anything approaching physical fear Dominic Iglesias was happily incapable. But his sitting-room had always been a peaceful place, refuge alike from the strain and monotony of his working life. It held relics, moreover, wholly dear to him, and to introduce into it this inharmonious and, in a sense, degraded presence savoured of desecration. Therefore, not without foreboding, as of one who risks the sacrifice of earnestly cherished security, he ushered his guest into the quiet room.

The gas, the small heart-shaped flames of which showed white against the dying daylight coming in through the windows, was turned low in the bracket-lamps on either side the high mantelpiece. Dominic Iglesias moved across and drew down the blinds, catching sight as he did so—between the tossing foliage of the balsam-poplars which glistened in the driving wet—of the unwinking gaselier in the Lovegroves' dining-room, on the other side of the Green. He remembered that he ought to have called on Mrs. Lovegrove and Miss Serena, and that he had been guilty of a lapse of etiquette in not having done so. But he reflected poor Miss Serena was a person whose existence it seemed so curiously difficult to bear actively in mind. Then he grew penitent, as having added discourtesy to discourtesy in permitting himself this reflection. He came back from the window, turned up the lights, drew forward an armchair and motioned Smyth to be seated; fetched a cut-glass spirit decanter, tumblers, and a syphon of soda from the sideboard and set them at his guest's elbow.

"Pray help yourself," he said. "And here, will you not smoke while we talk?"

Smyth's pale, prominent eyes had followed these preparations for his comfort with avidity, but now, the handsome character of his surroundings being fully disclosed to him, he was filled with uncontrollable envy. Silently he filled his glass, by no means stinting the amount of alcohol, gulped down half the contents of the tumbler, paused a moment, leaning his elbow on the table, and said:

"We were treated to a public exhibition of feminine cajolery in your direction, Mr. Iglesias, at the end of dinner. It occurs to me we might have been spared that. I have never had the honour of penetrating into your apartments before; but the aspect of them is quite sufficient indication as to who is the favoured member of Mrs. Porcher's establishment."

Dominic had remained standing. Hospitality demanded that he should do all in his power to secure his guest's material comfort; but there, in his opinion, immediate obligation ceased. In thus remaining standing he had a quaint sense of safeguarding the sanctities of the place. The man's tone was curiously offensive. Involuntarily Mr. Iglesias' back stiffened a little.

"I took these rooms unfurnished," he said. And then added: "May I ask what your business with me may be?"

Smyth had recourse to his tumbler again. His hand shook so that his teeth chattered against the edge of the glass.

"I am a fool," he said sullenly. "But my nerves are all to pieces. I cannot control myself. I have come here to ask a favour of you, and yet some devil prompts me to insult you. I hate you because I am driven to make use of you. And this room, in its sober luxury, emphasises the indignity of the position, offering as it does so glaring a contrast to my own quarters—here under the same roof, only one flight of stairs above—that I can hardly endure it. Life is hideously unjust. For what have you done—you, a mere Canaanite, hewer of wood and drawer of water to some grossly Philistine firm of city bankers—to deserve this immunity from anxiety and distress; while I, with my superior culture, my ambition and talents, am condemned to that beastly squeaking wire-wove mattress upstairs, and a job-lot of furniture which some previous German waiter has ejected in disgust from his bedroom in the basement? But there—I beg your pardon. I ought to be accustomed to injustice. I have served a long enough apprenticeship to it. Only—partly, thanks to you, I own that—I have seemed to see the dawning of hope again—hope of success, hope of recognition, hope of revenge; and just on that account it becomes intolerable to run one's head against this paralysing, stultifying dead wall of poverty and debt."—He bowed himself together, and his voice broke.—"I owe Mrs. Porcher money for my miserable bedsitting-room and my board, and I am so horribly afraid she will turn me out. The place is detestable; unworthy of me—of course it is—but I am accustomed to it. And I am not myself. I am terrified at the prospect of any change. In short, I am worn out. And they see that, those beasts of editors. The Evening Dally Bulletin has given me my congé. I have lost the last of my hack-work. It was miserable work, wholly beneath a man of my capacity; still it brought me in a pittance. Now it is gone. Practically I am a pauper, and I owe money in this house."

"I am sorry, very sorry," Iglesias said. "You should have spoken sooner. I could not force myself into your confidence; but, believe me, I have not been unmindful of my engagement. I have merely waited for you to speak."

His manner was gentle, yet he remained standing, still possessed by an instinct to thus safeguard the sanctities of the place. He paused, giving the other man time to recover a measure of composure: then he asked kindly, anxious to conduct the conversation into a happier channel: "Meanwhile, how is the play advancing? Well, I hope—so that you find solace and satisfaction in the prosecution of it."

Smyth moved uneasily, looking up furtively at his questioner.

"Oh! it is grand," he said, "unquestionable it is grand. You need have no anxiety under that head. Pray understand that anything that you may do for me in the interim, before the play is produced, is simply an investment. You need not be in the least alarmed. You will see all your money back—see it doubled, certainly doubled, probably trebled."

"I was not thinking of investments," Iglesias put in quietly.

"But I am," Smyth asserted. "Naturally I am. You do not suppose that I should accept, still less ask, you help, unless I was certain that in the end I should prove to be conferring, rather than incurring, a favour? You humiliate me by assuming this attitude of disinterested generosity. Let me warn you it does not ring true. Moreover, in assuming it you do not treat me as an equal; and that I resent. It is mean to take advantage of my sorrows and my poverty, and exalt yourself thus at my expense. Of course I understand your point of view. From your associations and occupations you must inevitably worship the god of wealth. One cannot expect anything else from a business man. You gauge every one's intellectual capacity by his power of making money. Well, wait then—just wait; and when that play appears, see if I do not compel you to rate my intellectual capacity very highly. For there are thousands in that play, I tell you—tens of thousands. It is only in the interim that I am reduced to this detestable position of dependence. I know the worth of my work, if——"

But Iglesias' patience was beginning to wear rather thin. He interposed calmly, yet with authority.

"Pardon me," he said, "but it is irrelevant to discuss my attitude of mind or my past occupations. It will be more agreeable for us, both now and in the future, to treat any matters that arise between us as impersonally as possible. Therefore, I will ask you to tell me, simply and clearly, how much you require to clear you from immediate difficulty; and I will tell you, in return, whether I am in a position to meet your wishes or not."

For a moment Smyth sat silent, his hands working nervously along the arms of the chair.

"You understand it is merely a temporary accommodation?"

"Yes," Iglesias answered. "I understand. And consequently it is superfluous to indulge in further discussion."

"You want to get rid of me," Smyth snarled. "Everyone wants to get rid of me; I am unwelcome. The poor and unsuccessful always are so, I suppose. But some day the tables will be turned—if I can only last."

And Dominic Iglesias found himself called upon to rally all his humanity, all his faith in merciful dealing and the reward which goes along with it. For it was hard to give, hard to befriend, so thankless and ungracious a being. Yet, having put his hand to the plough, he refused to look back. He had inherited a strain of fanaticism which took the form of unswerving loyalty to his own word once given. So he spoke gravely and kindly, as one speaks to the sick who are beyond the obligation of showing courtesy for very suffering. And truly, as he reminded himself, this man was grievously sick; not only physically from insufficient food, but morally from disappointment and that most fruitful source of disease, inordinate and unsatisfied vanity.

"I do not wish to get rid of you; I merely wish to take the shortest and simplest way to relieve you of your more pressing anxieties, and so enable you to give yourself unreservedly to your work. Want may be a wholesome spur to effort at times; but it is difficult to suppose any really sane and well-proportioned work of art can be produced without a sense of security and of leisure."

"How do you come to know that? It is not your province," Smyth said sharply.

Mr. Iglesias permitted himself to smile and raise his shoulders slightly.

"I come of a race which, in the past, has given evidence of no small literary and artistic ability. The experience of former generations affects the thought of their descendants, I imagine, and illuminates it, even when these are not gifted individually with any executive talent."

For some minutes Smyth sat staring moodily in front of him. At last he rose slowly from his chair.

"I am an ass," he said, "a jealous, suspicious, ungrateful ass. It is more than ever hateful to me to ask a favour of you, just because you are forbearing and generous. I wish to goodness I could do without you help; but I can't. So let me have twenty-five pounds. Less would not be of use to me. I should only have to draw on you again, and I do not care to do that. Look here, can I have it in notes?"

"Yes," said Mr. Iglesias.

"I prefer it so. There might have been difficulties in cashing a cheque. Moreover, it is unpleasant to me that your name, that any name, should appear. It is only fair to save my self-respect as far as you can."

Then, as Dominic put the notes into his hand, he added, and his voice was aggressive again and quarrelsome in tone: "I don't apologise. I don't explain. I do not even thank you. Why should I, since I simply take it as a temporary accommodation until my play is finished—my great play, which is going—I swear before God it is going—not only to cancel this paltry debt, but a far more important one, the debt I owe to my own genius, and justify me once and forever in the eyes of the whole English-speaking world."

With that he shambled out of the room, letting the handle of the door slip so that it banged noisily behind him.

For a while Dominic Iglesias remained standing before the fireplace. He was sad at heart. He had given generously, lavishly, out of proportion, as most persons reckon charitable givings, to his means. But, though the act was in itself good, he was sensible of no responsive warmth, no glow of satisfaction. The transaction left him cold; left him, indeed, a prey to disgust. Not only were the man's faults evident, but they were of so unpleasant a nature as to neutralise all gladness in relieving his distress. Mechanically Iglesias straightened the chair which his guest had so lately occupied, put away tumbler and spirit decanter, pulled up the blind and opened one of the tall narrow windows, set the door giving access to his bed-chamber wide, and opened a window there, too, so creating a draught right through the apartment from end to end. He desired to clean it both of a physical and a moral atmosphere which were displeasing to him. And, in so doing, he let in, not only the roar of London, borne in a fierce crescendo on the breath of the wind, but a strange multitudinous rustling from the sombre foliage and stiff branches of the lonely cedar tree. Two limbs, crossing, sawed upon one another as the wind took them, uttering at intervals a long-drawn complaint—not weakly, but rather with virility, as of a strong man chained and groaning against his fetters.

The sound affected Dominic Iglesias deeply, begetting in him an almost hopeless sense of isolation. The vapid talk at dinner, poor little Mrs. Porcher's misplaced advances—the fact of which it appeared to him equally idle to deny and fatuous to admit—the dreary scene with his unhappy fellow-lodger, the good deed done which just now appeared fruitless—all these contributed to make the complaint of the exiled cedar's tormented branches an echo of the complaint of his own heart. For a long while he listened to these voices of the night, the great city, the great tree, the wind and the wet; and listening, by degrees he rallied his patience in that he humbled himself.

"After all, I have been little else but self-seeking," he said, half aloud. "For I gave not to the man, but to myself. I clutched at a personal reward, if not of spoken gratitude yet of subjective content. It has not come. I suppose I did not deserve it."

And then, somehow, his thoughts turned to that other human creature who, though in a very different fashion to de Courcy Smyth the unsavoury, had claimed his help. He thought not of her over-red lips, but of her wise eyes; not of her irrepressible effervescence and patter, but of her serious moments and of the honesty and courage which at such moments appeared to animate her. About a fortnight ago he had called at the little flower-bedecked house on the confines of Barnes Common, but had obtained no response to his ringing. He supposed she was engaged, or possibly away. With a certain proud modesty he had abstained from renewing his visit. But now, listening to the roar of London and the complaint of the cedar tree, he turned to the thought of her as to something of promise, of possible comfort, of equal friendship, in which there should be not only help given, but help received.

CHAPTER XIII

Dominic Iglesias stood on Hammersmith Bridge looking upstream. The temperature was low for the time of year, the sky packed with heavy-bosomed indigo-grey clouds in the south and west, whence came a gusty wind chill with impending rain. The light was diffused and cold, all objects having a certain bareness of effect, deficient in shadow. The weather had broken in the storm of the preceding night; and, though it was but early September, summer was gone, autumn and the melancholy of it already present—witness the elms in Chiswick Mall splotched with raw umber and faded yellow. The tide had still about an hour to flow. The river was dull and leaden, save where, near Chiswick Eyot, the wind meeting the tide lashed the surface of it into mimic waves, the crests of which, flung upward, showed against the gloomy stretch of water beyond, like pale hands raised heavenward in despairing protest. Steam-tugs, taking advantage of the tide, laboured up-stream in the teeth of the wind, towing processions of dark floats and barges. Long banners of smoke, ragged and fleeting, swept wildly away from the mouths of the tall chimneys of Thorneycroft's Works, which rose black into the low, wet sky. The roadway of the huge suspension bridge quivered under the grind of the ceaseless traffic, while the wind cried in the massive pea-green painted iron-gearing above. There was a sense of hardly restrained tumult, of conflict between nature and the multiple machinery of modern civilisation, the two in opposition, alike victims of an angry mood. And Iglesias stood watching that conflict among the crowd of children, and loafers, and decrepit, who to-day—as every day—thronged the foot-way of the bridge.

Poppy St. John stood on the foot-way, too. She had crossed from the southern side. But, though by no means insensible to the spirit or the details of the scene around her, she was less engaged in watching the drama of the stormy afternoon than in watching Dominic Iglesias—as yet unconscious of her presence. His tall, spare, shapely figure, grave, clean-shaven face, and calm, self-recollected manner—which removed him so singularly from the purposeless neutral-tinted human beings close about him—delighted her artistic sense.

"If one had caught him young," she said to herself, "if one had only caught him young, heavenly powers, what a time one might have had, and yet stayed good—oh! very quite good indeed!"

Then she made her way between much undeveloped and derelict humanity.

"Look at me, dear man," she said, "look at me—really I am worth it. I got home late last night and I was possessed by a great longing to see you.—Excuse my shouting, but things in general are making such an infernal clatter.—I was determined to see you. I set my whole mind to making you come. And I felt so sure you must come that this afternoon I have journeyed thus far to meet you. And here you are, and here I am."

Poppy stood before him bracing her back against the hand-rail of the bridge.

"Tell me, are you glad?" she said.

And Dominic Iglesias, surprised, yet finding the incident curiously natural, answered simply:

"Yes, I am, very glad."

"That's all right," she rejoined; "because, after all, coming was a pretty lively act of faith on my part. I have superstitious turns at times; and the weather, and things that had happened, had made me feel pretty cheap somehow. I don't mind telling you as you are here that if you'd failed me there would have been the devil to pay. I should have been awfully cut up."

Iglesias still smiled upon her. Poppy presented herself under a new aspect to-day, and that aspect found favour in his sight. She was no longer the Lady of the Windswept Dust, arrayed in fantastic flowery hat and trailing skirts, but was clothed in trim black workman-like garments, which revealed the delicate contours of her figure and gave her an unexpected air of distinction. Yet, though charmed, the caution of pride—which, in his case, was also the caution of modesty—made him a trifle shy in addressing her. He paused before speaking, and then said, with a certain hesitancy:

"I fancy my attitude of mind last night was the complement of your own. I, too, had fallen on rather evil days. I wanted to see you. I came out this afternoon to find you. If I had failed to do so, it would have gone a little hard with me, too, I think."

Poppy looked at him questioningly, intently, for a minute, her teeth set. Then she whirled round, leaned her elbows on the hand-rail, pulled her handkerchief out of the breast pocket of her smartly fitting coat and dabbed her eyes with it, finely indifferent to possible comment or observation.

Iglesias remained immediately behind her, but a little to the right, so as to save her from being jostled by the passers-by. He had a sense of being only the more alone with her because of the traffic and the crowd; a sense, moreover, of dependence on her part and protection on his; a sense, in a way, of her belonging to him and he to her. And this was very sweet to him, solemnly sweet, as are all things of beauty and moment holding in them the promise of enduring result. Old Age ceased to threaten and Loneliness to haunt. Over Iglesias' soul passed a wave of thankful content.

Suddenly Poppy straightened herself up and faced him. Her lips laughed, but her eyes were wet.

"I'll play fair," she said; "by the honour of the mother that bore you, I'll play fair."

Then she laid her hand on his arm and pointed London-wards.

"Now, come along, dear man, for I have got to pull myself together somehow. Let us walk. Take me somewhere I've never been before, somewhere quiet—only let us walk."

Therefore, desiring to meet her wishes, a little way up the broad straggling street Dominic Iglesias turned off to the left into the narrow old-world lanes and alleys which lie between the river frontage and King Street West. The district is a singular one, suggestive of some sleepy little dead-alive seaport town rather than of London. Quaint water-ways, crossed by foot-bridges, burrow in between small low cottages and warehouses. Some of these have overhanging upper stories to them, are half-timbered or yellow-washed. Some are built wholly of wood. There is an all-pervading odour of tar and hempen rope. Small industries abound, though without any self-advertisement of plate-glass shop fronts. Chimney-sweeps and cobblers give notice of their presence by swinging signs. Newsvendors make irruption of flaring boards upon the pavement. Little ground-floor windows exhibit attenuated stores of tinware, string, and sweets. Modest tobacconists mount the image of a black boy scantily clothed or of a Highlander in the fullest of tartans above their doors. Cats prowl along walls and sparrows rise in flights from off the ill-paved roadways. But of human occupants there appear to be but few, and those with an unusual stamp of individuality upon them; figures a trifle strange and obsolete—as of persons by choice hidden away, voluntarily self-removed from the levelling rush and grind of the monster city. The small heavy-browed houses are very secretive, seeming to shelter fallen fortunes, obscure and furtive sins, sorrows which resist alleviation and inquiry. Seen, as to-day, under the low-hanging sky big with rain, in the diffused afternoon light, the place and its inhabitants conveyed an impression low-toned, yet distinct, finished in detail, rich though mournful in effect as some eighteenth-century Dutch picture. A linnet twittered, flitting from perch to perch of its cage at an open window. A boy, clad in an old mouse-brown corduroy coat, passed slowly, crying "Sweet lavender" shrilly yet in a plaintive cadence. Occasionally the siren of a steam-tug tore the air with a long-drawn wavering scream. Otherwise all was very silent.

And, as they threaded their way through the maze of crooked streets, Dominic Iglesias and Poppy St. John were silent also; but with the silence of intimacy and good faith, rather than with that of embarrassment or indifference. Each was very fully aware of the presence of the other. So fully aware, indeed, that, for the moment, speech seemed superfluous as a vehicle for interchange of thought. Then, as they emerged on to the open gravelled space of the Upper Mall with its low red-brick wall and stately elm trees, Poppy held out her hand to Mr. Iglesias.

"You are beautifully clever," she said. "You give me just what I wanted. I'm as steady as old Time now. But what a queer rabbit-warren of a place it is! How did you find your way?"

"I came here often, in the past," he said, "at a time when I was suffering grave anxiety. I could not leave home, after my office work was over, for more than an hour together. And in the dusk or at night, with its twinkling and evasive lights, the place used to please me, leading as it does to the river bank, the mystery of the ebbing and flowing tide, the ceaseless effort seaward of the stream, and those low-lying spaces on the Surrey side. It was the nearest bit of nature, unharnessed, irresponsible nature, which I could get to; and it symbolised emancipation from monotonous labour and everlasting bricks and mortar. I could watch the dying of the sunset, and the outcoming of the stars, the tossing of the pale willows—there on the eyot—in the windy dusk, undisturbed. And so I have come to entertain a great fondness for it, since it tranquillised me and helped me to see life calmly and to bring myself in line with fact, to endure and to forgive."

While he spoke Poppy's hand continued to rest passively in his.

"You are a poet," she said, "and you are very good."

Dominic Iglesias smiled and shook his head.

"No," he answered. "I am neither a poet nor am I very good. Far from that. I only tried to keep faith with the one clear duty which I saw."

Poppy moved forward across the Mall and stood by the river wall, looking out over the flowing tide. It was high now, and washed and gurgled against the masonry.

"You did and suffered all that for some woman," she said. "A man like you always breaks himself for some woman. I hope she was worth it—often they aren't. Who was she? The woman you loved? Your wife?"

"The woman I loved," Iglesias answered, "but not my wife."

Poppy looked at him sharply, her eyes full of question and of fear, as though she dreaded to hear very evil tidings.

"Not your mistress?" she said. "Don't tell me that. The Lord knows I've no right to mind. But I should mind. It would be like switching off all the lights. I couldn't stand it. So, if it's that, just let us part company at once. I've no more use for you.—I know where I am now. If I go up into St. Peter's Square I can pick up a hansom and drive back home—I suppose I may as well call it home, as I have no other. And as for you, if you've any mercy in you, never let me see you again. Never come near me. I have no use for you, I tell you. So leave me to my own devices—what those devices are is no earthly concern of yours."

She paused breathless, her eyes blazing, her face very white. She seemed to have grown tall, and there was a tremendous force in her of bitterness, repudiation, and regret.

"After all," she cried, "I don't so much as know your name; and so, thank heaven, it can't be so very difficult to forget you."

Her aspect moved Iglesias strangely, seeming as it did to embody the very spirit of the angry sky, of the gloomy river, all the sorrow of the dead summer and stormy autumn light. For a moment he watched her in silence. Then he took both her hands in his and held them, smiling at her again very gently.

"No, dear friend," he said, "the woman was not my mistress. She was my mother." His voice shook a little. "I never talk of her. But I think of her always. She was very perfect and very lovely. And she suffered greatly, so greatly that it unhinged her reason. Now do you understand? For years she was mad."

CHAPTER XIV

In the month of October immediately following two events took place which, though of apparently very different magnitude and importance, intimately and almost equally—as it proved in the sequel—affected Dominic Iglesias' life. The first was the declaration of war by the South African Republics. The second was the return of Miss Serena Lovegrove to town.

Now war is, unquestionably, not a little staggering to the modern civilised conscience; and this particular war possessed the additional unpleasantness of having in it, at first sight, an element of the grotesque. It is not too much to say that it struck the majority of the British public as being of the nature of a very bad joke. For it was as though a very small and very cheeky boy, after making offensive signs, had spat in the nation's face. Clearly the boy deserved sharp chastisement for his impudence. Nevertheless, the position remained an undignified and slightly ridiculous one; and the British public proceeded to safeguard its proper pride by treating the matter as lightly as possible. It assured itself—and others—that, given a reasonable parade of strength, the small boy, blubbering, his fists in his eyes, would speedily and humbly beg pardon and promise to mind his manners in future. A few persons, it is true, remembered Majuba Hill, and doubted the small boy's immediate reduction to obedience. A few others dared to suspect that English society was suffering from wealth apoplexy and the many unlovely symptoms which, in all ages of history, have accompanied that form of seizure, and to doubt whether blood-letting might not prove salutary. Dominic Iglesias was among these. His recent observations upon and excursions into the world of fashion, stray words let drop by Poppy St. John on the one hand, and by unhappy de Courcy Smyth on the other, had begotten in him the suspicion that the sobering and sorrowful influences of war might be healthful for the body politic, just as a surgical operation may be healthful for the individual body. Next to the Jew, the Dutchman is the most stubbornly tenacious of human creatures. He is a fighting man into the bargain. Iglesias could not flatter himself that the campaign would result in an easy walk-over for so much of the British army as a supine and annoyed Government condescended to place in the field. The whole affair lay heavy on his soul. It lay there all the heavier that a few days subsequent to the declaration of war Mr. Iglesias' thought was unexpectedly swept back into the arena of speculative finance.

In the portion of his morning paper allotted to business subjects, he had lighted on a long and evidently inspired article dealing with the flotation of a company just now in process of acquiring control over extensive areas in Southeast Africa. The prospects held out to investors were of the most golden sort. The land was declared to be not only remarkably rich in precious stones and precious metals, but also adapted for corn-growing on a vast scale—thus, both above and below the surface, promising prodigious wealth were its resources adequately developed.

Iglesias did not dispute the truth of these statements. The data quoted appeared trustworthy enough. Moreover, he was already fairly conversant with the enterprise, since Mr. Reginald Barking—that junior member of the great banking firm whose name has been mentioned in connection with strenuous modern business methods—was, to his knowledge, deeply interested in the promotion of it. That which troubled him, striking him as unsound and misleading, was the fact that the profits, as set forth in the newspaper article, were calculated—so at least it was evident to Iglesias—on the results of such development when completed, irrespective of the lapse of time required for such development; irrespective of possible and arresting accident; irrespective, too, of immediate and even protracted loss by the tying-up of huge sums of money which could yield but little or no return until the said process of development was an accomplished fact. To Iglesias' clear-seeing and logical mind the enterprise, therefore, presented itself as one of those gigantic modern gambles of which the incidental risks are emphatically too heavy, since they more often than not make rich men poor, and poor men paupers, before they come through—if, indeed, they even come through at all.

Reginald, in virtue of his youth, his energy, and relentless concentration of purpose, had rapidly become the ruling spirit of the house of Barking Brothers & Barking. Iglesias had no cause to love him, since to him he owed his dismissal. But that fact failed to colour his present meditations. Under the influence of his cherished and new-found charity, Dominic had little time or inclination for personal resentment. Too, the habits of the best part of a lifetime cannot be thrown aside in a day. Directly he touched business on the large scale, it became to him serious and imposing. And so the future of the firm and the issue of its operations, in face of current events, concerned him deeply, all the more that he gauged Reginald Barking's temper of mind and proclivities.

The young man's father—now happily deceased—had offered an instructive example of social and religious survival—survival, to be explicit, of the once famous Clapham Sect, and that in its least agreeable aspect. His theology was that of obstinately narrow misinterpretation of the Scriptures; his piety that of self-invented obligations; his virtue that of unsparing condemnation of the sins of others. His domestic morality was Hebraic—death kindly playing into his hands in regard of it. He married four times—Reginald, the only child of his fourth marriage, having the further privilege of being his only son. The boy was delicate and of a strumous habit. This fact, combined with his parents' ingrained conviction that a public school is synonymous, morally speaking, with a common sewer, caused his education to be conducted at home by a series of tutors as undistinguished by birth as by scholarship—tentative apologetic young men, the goal of whose ambitions was a wife and a curacy, failing which they resigned themselves to the post of usher in some ultra-Protestant school. Sport in all its forms, art and literature, being alike forbidden, the boy's hungry energy had found no reasonable outlet. He had been miserable, peevish, ailing, until at barely eighteen—after a discreditable episode with a scullery-maid—he had been shipped off to New York to learn business in the house of certain brokers and bill-discounters with whom Messrs. Barking Brothers had extensive financial relations. Life in the land of the Puritans was not, even at that time of day, inevitably immaculate. Freedom from parental supervision and the American climate went to the lad's head. He passed through a phase of commonplace but secret vice, emerging there-from with an unblemished social reputation; a blank scepticism in matters religious, combined with bitter animosity against the Deity whom he declared non-existent; and a fiercely driving ambition, not so much for wealth in itself, as for that control ever the destinies of men, and even of nations, with which wealth under modern conditions endows its possessor. He was a pale, dry, lizard-like young man, suggesting light without heat, and excitement without emotion. Early in his career he recognised that the great sources of wealth and power lie with the younger countries, in the development of their natural and industrial resources, of their railways and other forms of transport. The phenomenal advance of America, for example, was due to her enormous territory and the opportunities of expansion, with the bounds of nationality, which this afforded her people. But he also recognised that America was essentially for the Americans, and that it was useless for an outsider, however skilful, however even unscrupulous, to pit his business capacity against that of the native born. His dreams of power and speculative activity directed themselves, consequently, to the British Colonies, and to those as yet unappropriated spaces of the earth's surface where British influence is still only tentatively present.

Meanwhile he had espoused Miss Nancy Van Reenan, daughter of a famous transatlantic merchant prince, first cousin, it may be added, to the beautiful Virginia Van Reenan whose marriage with Lawrence Rivers, of Stoke Rivers in the county of Sussex, so fluttered the smartest section of New York society a few years ago. He returned to England in the spring of 1897, convinced that America had taught him, commercially speaking, all there was to know. This knowledge he prepared to apply to waking up the venerable establishment in Threadneedle Street, while employing the unimpeachable respectability and solvency of the said establishment as a lever towards the realisation of his own far-reaching ambitions. He brought with him from the United States, in addition to his elegant wife, two dry, pale children, whose contours were less Raphaelesque than gnat-like, and the acuteness of whose critical faculty was very much more in evidence than that of their affections. These bright little results of modernity and applied science—in the shape of the incubator—took their place in the social movement, at the ages of three and five respectively, with the hard and chilling assurance of a world-weary man and woman. They never exhibited surprise. They rarely exhibited amusement. They were radically disillusioned. They frequently referred to their nerves and their digestions, in the interests of which they consistently repudiated every form of excess.

With these rather terrible little gentry Dominic Iglesias was, happily for himself, unacquainted; but with their father he was very well acquainted, as has already been stated. Hence his fears. Folding his newspaper together, he laid it on the table and proceeded to walk meditatively up and down his sitting-room. The morning was keen with sunshine, the leaves of the planes and balsam-poplars fell in brown and yellow showers upon the Green, on the further side of which the details of the red and yellowish grey houses stood out in high relief of sharp-edged light and shadow. Mr. Iglesias had risen in a hopeful frame of mind. Of late it had become his habit to call weekly on Poppy St. John. Today was the one appointed for his visit. Since he had spoken to her about his mother his friendship with Poppy St. John had entered upon a new phase. It was no longer experimental, but absolute, the more so that she had in no way presumed upon his confidence. He felt very safe with her—safe to tell or safe to withhold as inclination should move him. And in this there was a strange and delicate lessening of the burden of his loneliness, without any encroachment on his pride. He had found, moreover, that behind her patter lay an unexpected acquaintance with public affairs and the tendencies of current events, so that it was possible to talk on subjects other than personal with her. He was coming to have much faith in her judgment as well as in her sincerity of heart. And, so, with the prospect of seeing her before him, Dominic had risen in the happiest disposition, had so remained till the newspaper article disturbed his mind. For what, as he asked himself, did it portend, this extravagant puff of the company's lad and the company's prospects, at this particular juncture? Why was it so urgently and eloquently forced upon the market just now? Was it but another proof of the contemptuous attitude adopted by Englishmen of all classes towards the Boer Republics? Or did it take its origin very much elsewhere—namely, in the fact that Reginald Barking had so deeply involved the capital and pledged the credit of the firm that it became necessary to make violent and doubtfully honest bid for popular support before the position of the said firm, through difficulty and accident induced by war, became desperate?

This last solution of the perplexing question aroused all Mr. Iglesias' loyalty towards his old employers. He saw before them the ugly possibility of failure and disgrace. The mere phantom of the thing hurt him as unseemly, as a shame and dishonour to those who in their corporate capacity had benefited him, and therefore as a shame and dishonour, at least indirectly, to himself. The thought agitated him. He needed to take council with someone; and so, pushed by a necessity of immediate action uncommon to him, he laid hands on hat and coat and set forth to talk matters over with his old friend and former colleague, George Lovegrove.

Out of doors the air was stimulating. The voice of London had a tone of urgency in it, as the voice of the young and strong who court the coming of stirring events.

"The moods of the monstrous mother are inexhaustible," Iglesias said to himself. "She is changeful as the great ocean. To-day she is virile, and shouts for battle—. well, it may be she will get her fill of that before many months are out!"

Then the thought of his afternoon visit returned upon him. If the air would remain as exhilarating, the sunshine as daring as now, these would heighten enjoyment.

Mr. Iglesias smiled to himself, an emotion of tenderness mingling with his anxiety. He felt very much alive, very ready to meet any demand which the future might make on him—battle for him, too, perhaps, and at this moment he welcomed the thought of it! Thus, a little exalted in spirit, Dominic walked on rapidly across the Green between the iron railings, conscious of colour, of light, and of sound; but unobservant of the details of his immediate surroundings, until a drifting female figure barred his path, undulating uncertainly before him. He moved to the right to let it pass. It moved to the right also. He moved to the left, it did so, too.

"I beg your pardon," he said.

"Oh!" cried Serena Lovegrove.

"I beg your pardon," Iglesias repeated, raising his hat. "Excuse me, I did not see who it was."

"How very odd!" Serena remarked. She stood still in the middle of the path. Her eyes snapped. Her silk petticoat rustled. Serena was very particular about her petticoats. It gave her great moral and social support to hear them rustle. "How very odd!" she said again. "Did you not know that I had come back?"

Dominic might truthfully have replied that he did not know that she had ever gone away; but he abstained.

"It must be a great pleasure to your cousins to have you with them," he said courteously.

Serena looked at the falling leaves.

"I wonder whether it is—I mean I wonder whether it is a pleasure to them, or whether they ask me out of a sense of duty." She paused, gazing at Mr. Iglesias. "Of course, I know George has a strong regard for me, and for Susan. It is only natural, as we are first cousins. But I am not sure about Rhoda. Of course we never heard of Rhoda until she married George."

"She has made him an excellent wife," Iglesias put in.

"I suppose she has," Serena said reflectively. "But I sometimes wonder whether, if George had married somebody else, it might not have been more satisfactory in some ways."

Serena felt very proud in making this remark. It elicited no reply, however, from Mr. Iglesias.

"I wonder if he really sees that Rhoda is on a different level from us, and won't admit it; or whether he doesn't see. If he doesn't see, of course that means a good deal."

"Do you usually go out walking in the morning?" Dominic inquired. The silence was becoming protracted. Courtesy demanded that he should break it.

Serena looked at him with heightened intelligence.

"We were always brought up to take a walk twice a day. Mamma was very particular about it. She believed that health had so much to do with regular exercise. Sometimes I wonder whether she did not carry that too far. But, of course, Susan is very strong, much stronger than I am. I believe she would have been strong in any case, even if mamma had not insisted on our taking so much exercise." Serena paused. "But I did not know you went out in the morning. That is, I mean I have never seen you go out before."

"Indeed," Iglesias exclaimed, a little startled at the close observation of his habits implied by this remark.

"No," she said; "of course one can see Cedar Lodge very plainly from George's house, and I often look out of window. I think it among the pleasures of London to look out of window. I have never seen you go out in the morning before." Again she paused, adding reflectively: "It really seems rather odd that neither George nor Rhoda should have told you that I had come back."

To this remark no suitable answer suggested itself. Moreover, Mr. Iglesias was growing slightly impatient. He wished she would see fit to move aside and let him pass.

"You will get cold standing here," he said. "You must not let me detain you any longer."

Serena's eyes snapped. She was excited. She was also slightly offended. "He is very abrupt," she said to herself; but she did not move aside and let him pass. "Yes, he is abrupt," she repeated; "still, he has a very good manner. If one didn't know that he had been a bank clerk, I wonder if one would detect it. I don't think it would be a thing that need be mentioned, for instance, at Slowby. Only Susan would be sure to make a point of mentioning it. Susan has an idea she owes it to herself to be truthful. Of course, it would be wrong to deny that anyone had been a bank clerk; but that is different from telling everybody. I wonder if Susan would feel obliged to tell everybody."

When she reached the near side of the Green, Serena looked back. Mr. Iglesias was in the act of entering the Lovegroves' front door, which the worthy George held open for him. Serena stood transfixed.

"So he was going there!" she said to herself. "How extraordinary not to mention it to me. What could have been his object in not mentioning it? I wonder if he has only gone to see George, or to see Rhoda as well. If he has gone to see Rhoda, then I think he has been exceedingly rude to me. And he has been very short-sighted, too, if he didn't want me to know, for he might have taken it for granted that of course I should look back. Unless he did do it on purpose, meaning to be rude. But—"

Serena resumed her walk. She was very much excited.

"Of course he may have done it on purpose that I should see, and understand that he meant something special—that he was going to speak to George and Rhoda about something in particular, which he could not say before me. He may have wanted to sound them. But then it is so very odd that he should have said that George had never told him I had come back. But I don't believe he ever did say that." Serena was growing more and more excited. She drifted along the pavement, in her rustling petticoats, with the most unusually animated expression of countenance.

"I remember—of course he did not say it. He avoided the question each time. How very extraordinary! I think he must mean me to understand something by that. I wonder if George will refer to it at luncheon. If he does I must find out from Rhoda, but without letting her suspect that I observed anything, of course."

Serena had quite ceased to be offended. Her fancy, indeed, had taken a most wildly ingenious flight. She felt very remarkable, very acute, quite dangerous, in short—and these sensations, however limited their justification by fact, were highly agreeable to her.

CHAPTER XV

The heavens remained clear, the air exhilarating, and Iglesias set forth on his weekly pilgrimage in a serene frame of mind. George Lovegrove's view had been reassuring.

"I know you are much more far-sighted than I am," he had said, his honest face beaming with combined cleanliness and affection, "so I always hesitate to set up my opinion against yours. It would be presumptuous. Still, you do surprise me. I never had an inkling of anything of the sort; and between ourselves—for I should never hint at the subject before the wife, you know—it might upset her, females are so sensitive—but between ourselves it would fairly unman me to think there could be any unsoundness in Barking Brothers & Barking. You know the phrase current in the city about them—'as safe as the Bank of England'? And I have always believed that. I know I left before Mr. Reginald had any active share in the business, and I never have cared about American speculation. It is all beyond me. Still I cannot suppose the senior partners would let him have too much his own way. Depend upon it, Sir Abel keeps an eye on him. And then as to this war, of course you have studied it all more deeply than I have the power to do; still I cannot help thinking you distress yourself unnecessarily. As I said to the wife when I first heard of it, it's suicidal. One can only feel pity for such poor ignorant creatures, rushing headlong on their ruin. Depend upon it, they will very soon come to their senses and deplore their own rash action. A very few weeks will see the finish of it all. I only hope there will not be much bloodshed first, for of course they couldn't stand up against English troops for an hour, poor things."

Encouraged by which cheerful optimism Dominic Iglesias began to think his fears exaggerated, as he descended from an omnibus top at Hammersmith Bridge that afternoon, crossed the river, and walked on down the long suburban road. The sky was sharply blue. Multicoloured leaves danced down from the trees in the villa gardens. Gaily clad children, pursued by anxious mothers and nursemaids, ran and shouted, the sunshine and fresh air having gone to their heads. Perched on the brick pier of an entrance gate, a robin uplifted its voice in piercingly sweet song. Autumn wore her fairest face, speaking of promise rather than of decay. It was good to be alive. Even to Mr. Iglesias' sober and chastened spirit horror of war, disgrace of financial failure, seemed remote and inconsiderable things, morbid delusions such as sane men brush aside scorning to give them harbourage so much as of thought.

Poppy was mirthful, too, in her greeting of him.

"My dear man," she cried, "the house is out of windows! You find us in the throes of a great domestic event. Cappadocia has done her duty by posterity. She has been brought to bed, if you'll excuse my mentioning it, of four puppies. Perfect little lambs, not a white hair among them. And she shows true maternal feeling, does Cappadocia. Whenever you go near her she tries to bite."

Poppy spoke very fast, holding his hand, looking him full in the face, her singular eyes very gentle in expression, yet all alight.

"Ah! it's good to see you. My stars, but it is good to see you," she said.

And Dominic, moved beyond his wont, stood silent for a space.

"You're not offended? Surely, at this time of the day, you're not going to stiffen up?" she asked.

He shook his head.

"No, no, dear friend," he said; "but this greeting is a little wonderful to me. Except my mother, years ago, nobody has ever cared whether I came or went."

"More fools they," Poppy answered, with a fine disregard of grammar. "But all that's over now. You know it's over. All the same I can't be altogether sorry it was so, because it gives me my chance.—Sit down; I'll expound to you. Let us talk.—You see, my beautiful innocent, with most men worth knowing—I am not talking about boys running about with the shell still on their heads and more affections to place than they can find a market for, but men. Well then, with most all of them, when one comes to discuss matters, one finds one's had such an awful lot of predecessors. At best one comes in a bad third—more often a bad three-and-twentieth—I mean nothing risky. Don't be nervous. But they have romantic memories of half-a-dozen women. And so, though they are no end nice and kind to one, play up and give one a good time and have a jolly good one themselves—trust 'em to take care of that—one knows all the while, if one knows anything, that the whole show's merely a réchauffé. Visions of Clara and Gladys, and dear little Emily, and Rosina, and Beatrice, and the lovely Lucinda—angels, every one of them, if you haven't seen them for ten years, and wouldn't know them again if you met them in the street—haunt the background of every man's mind by the time he's five-and-thirty, and cut entrancing capers against the sky-line, so that—when one comes to thrash the matter out—one finds the actually present woman, here in the foreground, hasn't really any look-in at all."

Poppy threw her head back against the yellowish red cushions of the settee, her teeth showing white as she laughed.

"Boys aren't worth having. They're too crude, too callow. Moreover, it isn't playing the game. One doesn't want to make a mess of their futures, poor little chaps. And grown men, except as I say of the very preëngaged sort, are not to be had. So don't you understand, most delightful lunatic, how it comes to pass that you and your friendship are precious to me beyond words? When you go I could cry. When you come I could dance."

Her tone changed, becoming defiant, almost fierce.

"And it is all right," she said, "thank heaven, right,—right, clean, and honest, and good for one's soul. Now I've done. Only we are very happy in our own quaint way, aren't we? And we can leave it at that. Oh, yes, we can very well leave it at that if"—she looked sideways at Mr. Iglesias, her expression half-humorous, half-pathetic—"if only it will stay at that and not play the mischief and scuttle off into something quite else."

She got up quickly, with a little air of daring and bravado.

"I must move about. I must do something—there, I'll make up the fire. No, sit still, dear man"—as Dominic prepared to rise also—"I like doing little odd jobs with you here. It takes off the company feeling, and makes it seem as if you belonged, and like the bicycle, had 'come to stay.'"

Poppy threw a couple of driftwood logs upon the smouldering fire. Around them sharp tongues of flame—rose and saffron, amber, sea-green, and heliotrope, glories as of a tropic sunset—leaped upward. She stood watching these, her left hand resting on the edge of the mantelpiece, her right holding up the front of her black skirt. Her right foot rested on the fender curb, thereby displaying a discreet interval of openwork silk stocking and a neatly cut steel-buckled shoe. The many-hued firelight flickered over her dark figure; over the soft lace jabot at her throat and ruffles at her wrists; over her pale profile; and glinted in the heavy masses of her hair. The room, facing east, was cold with shadow, which the thin fantastic colours of the flames appeared to emphasise rather than to relieve. And Iglesias, obedient to her entreaty, sat quietly waiting until it should again please her to speak. For he had begun to accept her many changes of mood as an integral element of her personality—a personality rich in rapid and subtle contradictions. Often he had no clue to the meaning of these many changes. But he did not mind that. Not absence of vulgar curiosity alone, but an unwilling sub-conscious shrinking from any too close acquaintance with the details of her life contributed to render him passive. He had a conviction, though he had never formulated it even in thought, that ignorance in relation to her made for security and content. And there was a refined charm in this—namely, that each to the other, even while friendship deepened, should remain something of an undiscovered country. Moreover, had she not told him that he rested her? To ask questions, however sympathetic, to volunteer consolation, however delicately worded, is to risk being officious; and to be officious, in however mild a degree, is to drive away the shy and illusive spirit of rest. And so Dominic Iglesias was coming, in the good nautical reading of that phrase, simply "to stand by" and wait where this woman was concerned. After all, it was but the reapplication of a lesson learned long ago for the support and solace of another woman, by him supremely loved. To act thus was, therefore, not only natural but poignantly sweet to him, as a new and gentle offering laid upon the dear altar of his dead. It rejoiced him to find that now, as of old, the demand created a supply of silent but sustaining moral force, ready to pass into the sphere of active help should necessity arise.

Nevertheless as the minutes passed, while daylight and firelight alike began to fade, Dominic Iglesias grew somewhat troubled and sad. And it was with a distinct movement of relief that he, at last, saw Poppy draw herself up, push the soft masses of her hair back from her forehead with a petulant gesture, and turn towards him. As she did so she let her hands drop at her sides, as though she had finished with and dismissed some unwelcome form of thought, while her face showed wan, and her eyes large and vague, as though they saw beyond and through all that which they actually looked on.

"There, there," she said harshly, with an angry lift of her head, "what a silly fool I am, wasting time like this when you are here. But my soul went out of my body; and I could afford to let it go, just because you were here, and I felt safe." Her tone softened. "Sure I don't bore you?" she asked.

Dominic shook his head, smiling.

"Very sure," he said.

"Bless you, then that's all right." Poppy strolled back and sat down languidly. "I've gone confoundedly tired," she said. "You see, I sat up half the night acting Gamp to Cappadocia—if you excuse my again alluding to the domestic event.—Oh! my being tired doesn't matter. My dear man, I'm never ill. I'm as strong as a horse. Let's talk of something more interesting—let's review the topics of the hour—only for the life of me I can't remember what the topics of the hour are! Yes, I know though—the management of the Twentieth Century Theatre has given Dot Parris a leading part. Does that leave you cold? Impossible! Why, in theatrical circles it's a world-shaking event. I own I'm curious to see how she does in legitimate drama, after her career in musical comedy and at the halls, myself. I'm really very fond of her, poor little Dot. She's going to call herself Miss Charlotte Colthurst in the future, I understand. Did you ever hear such cheek? But then she always had the cheek of the old gentleman himself, and that makes for success. Cheek does go an awfully long way towards bringing you through, don't you think so?"

"Probably," Dominic said. "My opportunities of exercising that particular form of virtue have been so limited that I am quite prepared to accept your ruling on the point."

Poppy laughed softly, looking at him with a great friendliness.

"Ah! but it wouldn't have been cheek in your case, anyhow. It would merely have been that you stepped into your right place, ascended any throne that happened to be right divine. I can see you doing it, so statelily and yet so innocently. It would be a perfectly delicious sight. I believe you will do it yet, some day, somehow, and make a lot of people sit up. But that reminds me, joking apart, there is a topic of the hour I wanted to ask you about. Tell me what you think of this war."

And Dominic Iglesias, once more obedient to her changing mood, replied with quiet sincerity:

"I am told I am an alarmist. I hope I may prove to be so, for in this matter I should much prefer the optimists to be in the right. But I confess I do not like the outlook. Both on public and private grounds this war makes me anxious."

Poppy's languor had vanished. She had grown very much alive again. Now she leaned forward, pressing her hands together, palm to palm, between her knees, and making herself small, as a child does when it is deeply in earnest and wants to think.

"You're right," she assented. "I'm perfectly certain all this cocksure Johnny-head-in-air business, 'sail to-day and see you again at tea tomorrow, so it's not worth while saying good-by'—you know the style?—is fatuous and idiotic. It is not bluff, because the English officer-man doesn't bluff. He hasn't the brains, to begin with, and then he is a very sound sort of an animal. He doesn't need to hide his fright for the simple reason that he's not frightened. A friend of mine was talking about it all yesterday. He thinks as you do, and he's no silly, though he is a member of the House of Lords.—After all, he can't help that, poor dear old chap," she added apologetically, looking sideways at Mr. Iglesias. "But there, you've seen him, I believe. You met him the first time you came here. Don't you remember, I had to turn you out because I had to see him on business, and you ran across him in the hall as you were going?"

"I remember meeting someone," Dominic said, rather loftily. He did not want to hear any more. The conversation had become displeasing to him, though he could have given no reason for his displeasure. But Poppy suddenly turned mischievous and naughty. She patted her hands gently together between her knees and swayed with rather impish merriment.

"Ah, of course you were much too grand to take any particular notice of him, poor brute. But he wasn't a bit too grand to take a lot of notice of you. He was fearfully impressed. Yes, I tell you he was. Don't be cross. I am speaking the veracious truth. I give you my word I'm not gassing. He was awfully keen to know who you were, and where you came from, and how I met you. And it was the sweetest thing out to be able to reply that I'd been introduced to you on a bench—a mighty uncomfortable one, too, with no back to it!—on Barnes Common by Cappadocia; and that as to your name and local habitation I hadn't the faintest ghost of a notion what they were. Are you cross? Don't be cross," Poppy pleaded.

"No, no, of course not," Mr. Iglesias answered, goaded from his habitual calm and speaking almost sharply.

Poppy patted her palms together again, swaying backwards and forwards. Her eyes were dancing.

"Oh! but you are, though," she cried. "You're just a wee bit jealous. You are—you know you are, and I'm not a scrap sorry. On the contrary, I'm enchanted. For it shows that you are human after all, and must have a name and address tucked away somewhere about you. I don't want to know what they are, but it's comfortable to be assured of their existence. It shows you don't drop straight down from heaven—as I was beginning to be afraid you did—once a week, into the Mortlake Road, and then go straight up again. It shows that I could get on to you by post, or telephone, or other means of communication common to mortals, if I was in a tight place and really wanted you, without walking as far as Hammersmith Bridge and waiting in the wind and the wet on the bare chance you might take it into your august head to materialise, and break out of paradise, and take a little stroll round our sublunary sphere."

For a moment Poppy laid her hand lightly on Mr. Iglesias' shoulder.

"Yes, be cross," she repeated. "Just as cross as ever you like, so long as you don't keep it up too protractedly. It's the most engaging piece of flattery I've come across for a month of Sundays. Only you needn't worry in this particular instance, dear man, I give you my word you needn't. It's a sheer waste of feeling. For Fallowfeild's always been perfectly decent with me. I know people think him an awfully risky lot, but they're noodles. He's racketed in his day—of course he has. But if he'd been more of a hypocrite, people would have talked less. As the man says in the play, it's not the sin but the being found out which makes the scandal. And Fallowfeild was too honest. He never pretended to be better than he was. He is a man of good nature who has done wrong things, which is quite different to being a man of bad nature who does wrong things, and still more different to being a man of weak nature who pretends to do right things. That last is the sort I hate most, and I speak out of beastly intimate experience."

She made a most expressive grimace, as though she had a remarkably disagreeable taste in her mouth.

"No salvation for that sort, I believe," she went on, "either here or hereafter. Now, are you better? You do believe it has always been perfectly square and above-board between Fallowfeild and me, don't you?"

"Unquestionably, I believe it," Dominic answered. He spoke slowly.

Poppy turned her head sharply and looked hard at him.

"Ah! but I don't quite like that," she said. "I've muddled it somehow—I see I have. I've hurt and offended you. You're farther off than you were ten minutes ago. In spirit you've got up and gone away. I have muddled it. I have made you distrust me."

"No," Dominic answered, "you have not made me distrust you; but you have perplexed me. It is the result of my own dulness, no doubt. My imagination is not agile enough to follow you, and so—"

He hesitated. That which he had in his mind was not easy to put into words without discourtesy. He would far rather have left it unsaid; but to do so would have been, in truth, to stand farther off, to erect a barrier which might prove insuperable to happy companionship in the future.

"Yes?" Poppy queried. Her voice shook just perceptibly. In the deepening dusk neither could see the other distinctly, and this contributed to Dominic's decision to speak.

"It pains me," he said at last, "if you will pardon my frankness, that you should think it necessary to account for yourself and justify yourself as you often appear to do."

"Yes?" Poppy queried again.

"That you should do so distresses and disturbs me."

"Yes," Poppy murmured.

"I am afraid I grow selfish," Iglesias went on gently; "but you have been good enough to tell me that my poor friendship is of value to you. Does it not occur to you that yours is of far greater value to me? And that for many and obvious reasons—these among others, that while you are young, and have a wide circle of acquaintances, and in a future to which, brilliant as you are, you may look forward with hope and assurance, I am absolutely alone in the world. Save for one old school-fellow, who has been very faithful to me, there is no one to whom it matters, except in the most superficial degree, whether I live or die."

"Ah!" Poppy said softly.

"Do not misunderstand me, I do not complain," Iglesias added. "I entertain no doubt but that the circumstances in which I find myself are the right and profitable ones for me, if I only lay to heart the lessons they teach, and use the opportunities which they afford me."

"I don't know about that—I doubt that," Poppy put in hastily.

"You doubt it because you are young," he answered, "and your circumstances are capable of alteration and development. Except under very exceptional conditions, resignation is no virtue in the young. It is more often an excuse for cowardice and sloth. But at my age the world changes its complexion. My circumstances are incapable of alteration and development. They are final. Therefore I do well to accept them unreservedly. The work of my life is done. I do not say that it has been a failure, for I fulfilled the main object I had in view. But it has certainly been obscure and inglorious. The sun will sink dimly enough into a bank of fog. My present is meagre in interest and activity. My future, a brief enough one in all probability, must of necessity be meagre likewise. Therefore your friendship is of supreme importance to me."

Iglesias paused. His voice was grave, distinct, weighted with feeling. He did not look at his companion; he could not trust himself to do so, for he had discovered in himself unexpected depths of emotion.

"And just on that account," he went on, "I grow childishly nervous, childishly apprehensive if anything arises which seems to cloud or, in however small a measure, to endanger the serenity of our intercourse."

He turned and looked at her.

"This constitutes no slight to you, dear friend."

"No," she said, "very certainly it is no slight. On the contrary, it is very beautiful; but it's an awful responsibility, too."

She sat quite still, her head carried high, her hands clasped in her lap.

"I've underrated the position, I see. I've only thought of myself so far and how you pleased me. But though I'm pretty cheeky, too—almost as cheeky as little Dot—I never had the presumption to put the affair the other way about."

Poppy began to sway slightly again and pat the palms of her hands together between her knees.

"It's been a game, the finest game I've ever played; and I swore by all my gods to play fair. But, as you look at it, our friendship amounts to a good deal more than a game. It goes very deep. And I'm not sure—. no, I'm not—whether I'm equal to it."

She glanced at Iglesias strangely through the clinging grey of the dusk.

"Dear unknown," she said, "I give you my word I'm frightened—I who've never been frightened at any man yet. In my own little way I've played pitch and toss with their hearts and made footballs of them—except that poor young fellow—I told you about him the first time we met—who gave me the scarf, and whose people wouldn't let him marry me. But this affair with you is different. It goes very far, it means—it means nothing short of revolution for me, of putting away and renouncing very much."

Poppy got up, stood pushing her hair back with both hands from her forehead. Then she moved across to the further side of the fireplace. Dominic had risen also. He stood on the near side of the hearth. He was penetrated with the conviction that a crisis was upon them both, involving all the happiness of their future relation to one another.

"You don't understand," Poppy cried passionately. "And I don't want you to understand—that's half the trouble. I want to keep you. Your friendship's the loveliest thing I've ever had. And yet I don't know. For I'm not one woman—I'm half-a-dozen women, and they all pull all sorts of ways so that I daren't trust myself. I want to keep you, I tell you, I want horribly to keep you. Yet I'm ghastly afraid I'm not equal to it. The price is too big."

As she spoke Poppy dashed her hand against the push of the electric bell, and held it there, ringing a prolonged alarum, in quick response to which Phillimore, the respectable elderly parlour maid, appeared, bearing two rose-shaded lamps. Noiselessly and deftly—as one accustomed to agitations, whose eyes did not see or ears hear if it should be unadvisable to permit them to do so—she drew the curtains, made up the fire, set out the tea-table. And with that change of scene and shutting out of the dusk, Poppy seemed to change also; gravity and strength of purpose departing from her, and leaving her—notwithstanding her sober dress—unreal, fictitious, artificial, the red-lipped carmine-tinted lady of the footlights, of the windswept dust and embroidered dragons again. She chattered, moreover, ceaselessly, careless of interruption, and of criticism alike.

"Here, let's hark back to the ordinary conduct of material existence," she said. "Tea? Won't you sit down? No—well, just as you like best. Take it standing. Let me see, what were we discussing when we got switched on to unexpectedly personal lines of conversation? The war—yes, I remember. I was just going to tell you that Fallowfeild believes it's going to be a nasty dragging unsatisfactory business. Everyone gasses about the Boers being a simple pastoral people. But Fallowfeild says their simplicity is just another name for guile, and that he anyway can't conceive a more disconcerting job than fighting a nation of farmers and huntsmen and gamekeepers in their own country, every inch of which they know. People say they've no military science. But so jolly much the better for them. They can be unfettered opportunists, with nothing to think of but outwitting the enemy and saving their property and their skins. The poor British Tommy will be no match for them; nor will the British officer-man either, till he's unlearned his parade-ground etiquette, and his haw-haw red-tape methods and manner, and learned their very primitive but very cute and foxy ones. By which time, Fallowfeild says, the mourning warehouses here at home will have made a record turnover, and there will be altogether too many new graveyards for comfort in South Africa."

Poppy paused in her harangue, for Dominic Iglesias had set down his cup, its contents untasted. He was sad at heart.

"Are you going?" she asked.

"Yes," he answered. "It grows late. It's time I went, I think."

"Perhaps it is." Poppy's eyes had become inscrutable. "I really ought to attend to my Gamping, and pass the time of day with Cappadocia. Her snappishness has scared the maids. They refuse to go within a measured furlong of her."

Poppy bent down over the tea-table, arranging the teacups with elaborate neatness.

"Good-by," she said. "I don't quite know when we shall meet again."

"Why?" Iglesias asked. The muscles of his throat were rigid. He had much ado to speak plainly and naturally. "Are you leaving home?"

"Home?" she answered. "Yes, I'm leaving it. Good-by again. Don't let me keep you. Certainly I'm leaving home. Indeed, I believe I have left it already—for good."

And she threw back her head and laughed.

Upon the doorstep a cold rush of air met Mr. Iglesias. Above, the sky was blue-black and very clear. The road was vacant and grey with frost. The flame of the gaslamps quivered, giving off a sharp brightness in the keen atmosphere. Mr. Iglesias turned up the collar of his coat and descended the steps. Just then a hansom emerged from the distance and drew up with a rattle and grind against the curb some twenty paces ahead. The occupant, a young man, flung back the doors with a thud, and stood a moment on the footboard paying the driver, who raised himself, leaning forward with outstretched hand across the glistening black roof of the cab. Then the young man turned round, swung himself down on to the asphalt pavement, and came forward as rapidly as a long motor-coat, reaching to his heels, would permit. He was tall and fair, well-favoured, preoccupied, not to say morose. He did not vouchsafe Mr. Iglesias so much as a glance as he brushed past him. The road was still vacant, and in the frosty air sounds carried. Mr. Iglesias distinctly heard him race up a neighbouring flight of steps, heard the click and turn of a latchkey in a lock, heard the slam of a front door pulled to violently. And so doing Dominic turned cold and a little faint. He would not condescend to look back; but he had recognised Alaric Barking, and was in no doubt which house he had entered.

"Keb, sir? 'Ere yer are, sir," the cabby called cheerily. "Very cold night. Just set one gentleman down, and 'appy to tike another up. Want to get back to my comfy little West End shelter, so I'll tike yer for 'alf fares, sir, though we are outside the blooming radius."

But Iglesias shook his head. The horse stood limply in a cloud of steam. Alaric Barking had evidently pushed the pace. But even had the animal been in better condition, Iglesias had no desire to drive in that particular cab. He would rather have walked the whole way to Cedar Lodge.

Opposite the Bell Inn, where the roads fork—one turning away through Mortlake, the other leading to Barnes Common, Roehampton, and Sheen—the row of smart little houses degenerates into shops. By the time he reached these Mr. Iglesias discovered that he was unaccountably tired. The keen air oppressed his chest, making his breath come short. It was useless to attempt to go home on foot. Then, with a sense of relief, he saw that on the far side of the road a couple of omnibuses stood, the horses' heads turned Londonwards. He crossed, climbed the stairway of the leading vehicle slowly, and sank into a seat. The 'bustop was unoccupied, yet Dominic was not by himself. Two companions had climbed the winding stairway with him and taken their places beside him, Old Age on his left hand, Loneliness on his right. All up the long suburban road, while the omnibus bumped and jolted and the fallen leaves whirled and scurried before the searching breath of the night wind Iglesias' two companions seemed to lean across him, talking. There were tones of mockery in their talk, while behind and through it, as some discordant refrain, he heard the ring of a young man's eager footsteps, the click and turn of a latchkey, and the slam of a door as it shut. On nearing the river the cold grew intense. Crossing the bridge, the waterside lights were reflected in the surface of the stream, which ran full and strong from the autumn rains, swirling seaward with an ebbing tide. To Iglesias' eyes the reflections converted themselves into fiery dragons, writhing in the heat of deadly conflict, as upon Poppy St. John's oriental scarf. A glare hung over London, palpitating as with multitudinous and angry life; and when the omnibus slowed up in Hammersmith Broadway the voice of the streets grew loud—the monstrous city, so it seemed to Dominic Iglesias, shouting defiance to the majestic calm and solemnity of the eternal stars.

CHAPTER XVI

"He says it is nothing serious, only a slight chill; and sends kind regards and many thanks for kind inquiries, and hopes to be out in a day or two, when he will call and thank you in person."

This from George Lovegrove to his wife, the latter arrayed in garments of ceremony and seated upon the Chesterfield sofa awaiting guests. It was her afternoon at-home.

"Well, I'm sure I hope it is no more than that, Georgie," she answered comfortably. "Chills are always going about in November, and very often gentlemen encourage them—especially bachelors—by not changing into their winter vests and pants early enough. A great deal of illness is contracted that way."

Here Serena rustled audibly. She stood by the window, holding the lace curtain just sufficiently aside to get a narrow and attenuated view of the fog-enshrouded Green. The outlook was far from inspiriting, and Serena was keenly interested in the conversation going forward between her host and hostess. But it was not in her programme to let this appear. She, while straining her ears to listen, therefore maintained an air of detachment. The word "pants" was, however, too much for her fortitude, and she rustled. "Really, Rhoda does use the most dreadfully unladylike expressions sometimes," she commented inwardly. "She never seems to remember that everyone is not married, though even if they were I should hope they would not mention those sort of things. Rhoda is wanting in refinement. I wonder if George notices that and feels it. If he does notice it, I think he ought to tell her about it, because—"

But here she fell to listening again, since the said George took up his parable once more.

"Still, I own I don't like his looks somehow. His face is so thin and drawn. It reminds me of the time his mother, poor Mrs. Iglesias, died. I told him, just jocularly, that his appearance surprised me, but he put it all aside—you know he has a very high aristocratic manner at times that makes you feel you have been intrusive—and then talked of other things."

"He has lived too solitary," Mrs. Lovegrove said judicially, "too solitary, and that tells on any one in middle life. I should never forgive myself if we left him to mope. You must just try to coax him over here to stay, Georgie, and I'll nurse him up and humour him, and fortunately Serena's here, you see, for pleasant company."

Mrs. Lovegrove looked meaningly at her spouse, while the figure at the window again rustled.

"I am sure you would exert yourself to help cheer poor Mr. Iglesias up, if he came over to stay, would you not now, Serena?" she inquired insinuatingly.

"Are you speaking to me, Rhoda?"

"Yes, about Mr. Iglesias coming here to stay."

Serena turned her head and answered over her shoulder.

"Of course you and George are quite at liberty to ask anyone here whom you like. And if Mrs. Iglesias came I should be perfectly civil to him. But I should not care, Rhoda, to bind myself to anything more than that, because I do not find him an easy person to get on with."

She turned to her contemplation of the fog with a renewed assumption of indifference. George Lovegrove's shiny forehead puckered into little lines. He looked anxiously at his wife. The good lady, however, laid a fat forefinger upon her lips and nodded her head at him in the most archly reassuring manner.

"That's funny," she said, "because Mr. Iglesias is quite the cleverest of all Georgie's gentlemen friends—except, of course, the dear vicar—and so I always took for granted anyone like yourself was sure to get on nicely with him, Serena. Even I hardly ever find him difficult to talk with."

"I never talk easily to strangers," Serena put in loftily.

"Oh! but you'd hardly call Mr. Iglesias a stranger."

"Yes, I should," Serena declared with emphasis. "I should certainly call him a stranger. I always call everyone a stranger till I know them intimately. It is much safer to do so. And it would be absurd to pretend that I know Mr. Iglesias intimately. You, of course, do, but I do not. You and George may have seen him frequently since I have been here, but I have really seen him very seldom, four or five times at the outside. He has generally appeared to call when I was likely to be out. I could not help observing that. It may be a coincidence, of course. But I cannot pretend that I have not thought it rather marked."

Serena had advanced into the centre of the room. She held herself erect. She enjoyed making a demonstration. "Rhoda may think I am a cipher," she said to herself, "but she is mistaken. She may think I can be hoodwinked and used as a mere tool, but I will let her see that I cannot." She felt daring and dangerous, and her eyes snapped. The rustling of her skirts and the emphatic tones of her voice aroused the parrot, which had been dosing on its perch, its head sunk between its shoulders and its breast-feathers fluffed out into a little green apron over its grey claws.

"Pollie's own pet girlie," it murmured drowsily, with dry clickings of its tongue against its beak, the words jolting out in foolish twos and threes. "Hi! p'liceman—murder! fire! thieves!—there's another jolly row downstairs."

Poor George Lovegrove gazed in bewilderment from Serena to the parrot, from the parrot to his wife, and then back to Serena again.

"You do surprise me! And I am more mortified than I can say that you should have the most distant reason, Serena—or Susan either—ever to feel the least slighted in this house. You do surprise me—I can't believe it has been the least intentional on Iglesias' part. But I would not have had anything of the kind happen for twenty pounds."

"Pray don't apologise, George," Serena cried, "or I shall feel quite annoyed. Of course everyone has a right to their own preferences; but I had been led to expect something different. As I say, it may only be a coincidence. Nothing may have really been meant. Only it has seemed rather marked. But in any case it has not been your fault, George."

"I am very glad you allow that, Serena," the good creature said humbly.

"Oh! yes. I quite excuse you of any intentional slight, George. I quite trust you. Still, nothing could be more unpleasant than for me to feel that my being here put any restriction upon your friends coming to the house. Of course I know Susan and I move in rather different society from Rhoda and yourself."

"Yes," he assented hurriedly, agonised as to the wife's feelings—"yes, yes."

"And so it is quite possible that I may not suit some of your acquaintances."

"Excuse me," he panted—"no, Serena, I cannot think that."

"I am not sure," she returned argumentatively. "Not at all sure, George. And nothing could be more unpleasant to me than to feel I was the least in the way. Of course, I should never have come back if I had supposed I should be in the way; but Rhoda made such a point of it."

Here the parrot broke forth into prolonged and earpiercing shriekings, flapping its wings violently and nearly tumbled backwards off its perch.

"Throw a handkerchief over the poor bird's cage, Georgie dear," cried Mrs. Lovegrove from the sofa. Her face was red. She had become distressingly hot and flustered.—"And just as I was flattering myself it was all turning out so nicely, too," she said to herself.—"No, not your own, Georgie dear"—this aloud—"you may need it later. The red bandana out of the right-hand corner of the top drawer of the work-table."

"I think it would be much simpler for me to go," Serena continued, her voice pitched in a high key to combat the cries of the parrot and the rattle of the table drawer, which George Lovegrove in his present state of agitation found it impossible to shut with accuracy and despatch.

"Of course, it may inconvenience Susan to have me return sooner than she expected. She is away speaking at a number of missionary meetings in the North. And the maids will be on board wages, and the drawing-room furniture will have been put into holland covers. She counted on my staying here till I go to my cousin, Lady Samuelson, in Ladbroke Square, the third week in December. But, of course, all that must be arranged. I can give up my visit. Lady Samuelson will be annoyed, and I don't know what excuse I can make to her. Still, I think I had really much better go; and then you can have Mr. Iglesias, or any other of your and Rhoda's friends, to stop here without my feeling that I am in the way. Nothing could be more odious to me than feeling I was encroaching or forcing myself upon you. Mamma would never have countenanced such behaviour. It is the sort of thing we were always brought up to have the greatest horror of. It is a thing I never have done and never could do. I hope you understand that, George. Nothing could be further from my thoughts when I accepted Rhoda's invitation to——"

"Miss Hart, please, ma'am," the little house-parlour-maid trumpeted, her face very pink from the exertion of attracting her mistress's attention and making herself heard. Mrs. Lovegrove bounced up from the sofa. Usually, it must be allowed, the great Eliza was rather at a discount. Now she was astonishingly welcome. Her hostess's greeting, though silent, was effusively cordial. She clutched at her guest's hand as one in imminent risk of drowning at a lifebelt. The said guest was in her sprightliest humour. She was also in a scarlet flannel blouse thickly powdered with gradated black discs. This, in conjunction with purple chrysanthemums in a black hat, her tawny hair and freckled complexion, did not constitute a wholly delicious scheme of colour; but to this fact Mrs. Lovegrove was supremely indifferent.

"Good-afternoon," Miss Hart said in a stage whisper, glancing towards Serena, still bright-eyed and erect. "Don't let me interrupt, pray. My conversation will keep. I will just sit and listen."

"Listen to what?" Serena cried, almost inarticulate with indignation.

"Why, to your recitation. Our gentlemen often treat us to a little in that line of an evening, Mrs. Lovegrove, after dinner. I dote on recitation. Pieces of a comic nature specially, when well delivered."

"I should never dream of reciting," Serena declared heatedly.

"No, really now," Miss Hart returned. "That seems quite a pity. It is such a pleasant occupation for a dull afternoon like this, do you not think so, Miss Lovegrove? I declare I was quite sure, from the moment I came into the hall—while I was taking off my waterproof—that your cousin was giving you a little entertainment of that kind, Mr. Lovegrove. Her voice was running up and down in such a very telling manner."

If glances could scorch, Miss Hart would unquestionably have been reduced to a cinder, for rage possessed Serena. She had worked herself up into a fine fume of anger over purely imaginary injuries. And now, that Eliza Hart, of all people in the world, should intervene with suggestions of comic recitations!

"Detestable person!" Serena said to herself. "Her conduct is positively outrageous. Of course she knew perfectly well I was doing nothing of the kind. Really, I believe anybody would feel her manner quite insulting. I wonder how George and Rhoda can tolerate her. It shows George has deteriorated much that he should tolerate her. I am not so surprised at Rhoda. Of course she never had good taste. I think I ought to go to my room. That would mark my displeasure. But then she may have come on purpose to say something particular. I wonder if she has done so? Of course if she has, she wants to get rid of me. That is her object. But she is mistaken if she thinks that I shall gratify her. I think I owe it to myself to make sure exactly what is going on. I will certainly stay. That will show her I am on the watch."

During this protracted, though silent, colloquy, Serena had remained standing in the middle of the room. Now she rustled back to the window, held aside the lace curtain and resumed her contemplation of the fog-enshrouded Green. Good George Lovegrove gazed after her in deep dejection and perplexity. Somebody, it appeared to him, had been extremely unreasonable and disagreeable; but who that somebody was for the very life of him he could not tell. The wife was out of the question; while to suppose it Serena approached high treason. Still he was very sure it could not be that most scrupulously courteous personage Dominic Iglesias. There remained himself—"Yet I wouldn't knowingly vex a fly," he thought, "and as to vexing Serena! Sometimes ones does wish females were not quite so sensitive."

Miss Hart, meanwhile, had taken the unaccustomed post of honour beside her hostess upon the sofa. She was enjoying herself immensely. She had a conviction of marching to victory.

"Yes," she said, "Mrs. Lovegrove, dear Peachie Porcher asked me just to run across as she has missed your last two afternoons, lest you should think her neglectful. I am well aware I am but a poor substitute for Peachie—no compliments now, Mr. Lovegrove, if you please!"

"Mrs. Porcher is in good health, I trust"—this from Rhoda.

"At present, yes, I am happy to say, thank you. But how long it will continue," Miss Hart spoke impressively—"at this rate I am sure I cannot tell."

"Indeed," George Lovegrove inquired anxiously. "You don't tell me so? Nothing wrong, I trust."

"Well, as I always tell her, her sense of duty amounts almost to a fault—so unselfish, so conscientious, it brings tears to my eyes often at times. I hope it is appreciated in the right quarter—I do hope that, Mr. Lovegrove."

Here Rhoda's bosom heaved with a generous sigh.

"There is much ingratitude in the world, Miss Hart, I fear," she said pensively.

Her husband looked at her in an anguish of apology—whether for his own sins or those of others he knew not exactly.

"So there is, Mrs. Lovegrove," Eliza responded warmly. "And nobody is a more speaking example of that truth than Peachie Porcher. When I think of all she went through during her married life, and yet so unsuspicious, so trusting—it is enough to melt an iceberg, that it is, Mrs. Lovegrove. Now, as I was saying to her only this morning, 'You must study yourself a little, get out in the air, take a peep at the shops, and have some amusement.' But her reply is always the same.—'No, Liz, dear,' she says, 'not at the present time, thank you. I know the duties of my position as mistress of Cedar Lodge. When any one of our gentlemen is ailing, my place is at home. I must remain in the house in case of a sudden emergency. I should not have an easy moment away from the place,' she says."

Miss Hart looked around upon her hearers demanding approbation and sympathy.

"Very affecting, is it not?" she inquired.

After a moment's embarrassed silence, George Lovegrove murmured a suitable, if timid, assent. His wife assumed a bolder attitude. Goaded by provocations recently received, she went over—temporarily—to the side of the enemy.

"I always have maintained Mrs. Porcher was full of heart," she declared, throwing the assertion across the room, much as though it was a stone, in the direction of the figure at the window.

Serena drew herself up with a rustle.

"I wonder exactly what Rhoda means by that?" she commented inwardly. "I think it very odd. Of course, she must have some meaning, and I wonder what it is. She seems to be changing her line. I am glad I stayed. I am afraid Rhoda is rather deceitful. I excuse George of deceit. I believe George to be true; but he is sadly influenced by Rhoda. I am rather sorry for George."

"So she is, Mrs. Lovegrove," Eliza Hart resumed—"Peachie's too full of heart, as I tell her. She is forever thinking of others and their comforts. She grudges neither time nor money, does not Peachie. There is nothing calculating or cheese-paring about her—not enough, I often think. Fish, sweetbreads, game, poultry, and all of the very best—where the profits are to come from with a bill of fare like that passes my powers of arithmetic, and so I point out to her. I hope it is appreciated—yes, I do hope that, Mr. Lovegrove"—there the speaker became extremely coy and playful. "A little bird sometimes seems to twitter to me that it is. And yet I am sure I don't know. The members of your sex are very misleading, Mr. Lovegrove. Do not perjure yourself now. You cannot take me in. And a certain gentleman is very close, you know, and stand-offish. It is not easy to get at his real sentiments, is it, now?"

Serena laid back her ears, so to speak. "I was quite right to stay," she reflected wrathfully.

"I think Mr. Iglesias is unusually considerate, Miss Hart," George Lovegrove said tentatively. "He is quite sensible of Mrs. Porcher's kind attentions. But naturally he is very tenacious of upsetting her household arrangements and giving additional trouble."

"And then the position of a bachelor is delicate, Miss Hart, you must admit," Mrs. Lovegrove chimed in. "That's what I always tell Georgie. It may do all very well in their younger days to be unattached, but as gentlemen get on in life they do need their own private establishments. I am sure I am sorry for them in chambers, or even in good rooms like those at Cedar Lodge. For it is not the same as a home, Miss Hart, and never can be. There must be awkwardnesses on both sides at times, especially when, it comes to illness."

Then the great Eliza gathered herself together, for it appeared to her her forecast had been just and that she was indeed marching to victory.

"Yes, there is no denying all that," she said, "and I am more than glad you see it in that light, Mrs. Lovegrove. Between ourselves, I have more and more ever since a certain gentleman gave up work in the City. It would be premature to speak freely; but, just between friends and under the rose, you being interested in one party and I in the other, there can be no harm in dropping a hint and ascertaining how the land lies. Of course if it came to pass, it would be to my own disadvantage, for I do not know how I should ever bear to part with Peachie Porcher. Still, I could put myself aside, if I felt it was for her happiness."

"You do surprise me," George Lovegrove exclaimed. He was filled with consternation, his hair nearly rising on his head. "I had no notion. Dear me, you fairly take away my breath." He could almost have wept. "To think of it!" he repeated. "Only to think of it! Miss Hart, you do surprise me."

"Oh! you must not run away with the notion anything is really settled yet," she replied. "And I could not say Mrs. Porcher really would, when it came to the point, after the experiences she had in her first marriage. She is very reserved, is Peachie. Still, she might. And very fortunate a certain gentleman would be if she did—it does not take more than half an eye to see that."

"Dr. Nevington, please, ma'am," announced the parlour-maid, and the fine clerical voice and clerical presence filled all the room. Thereupon Serena graciously joined the circle. She was unusually self-possessed and definite. She embarked in a quite spirited conversation with the newcomer. And when Eliza Hart, after a few pleasantries of a parochial tendency with the said newcomer—in whose favour she had vacated the place of honour upon the sofa—rose to depart, Serena bowed to her in the most royally distant and superior manner. Her amiability remained a constant quantity during the rest of the evening; and when an opportunity occurred of speaking in private to her cousin, she did so with the utmost cordiality.

"I do hope, George," she said, "you will not think any more of our little unpleasantness. I can truly say I never bear malice. I own I was annoyed, for I felt I had not been quite fairly treated by Rhoda. But, of course, I may have been mistaken. I am quite willing to believe so and to let bygones be bygones, and stay, as Rhoda pressed me to do, until I go to my cousin, Lady Samuelson, in December. Of course it would be more convenient to me in some ways. But I am not thinking of that. I am thinking of you and Rhoda. I should not like to disappoint her by leaving her when she wants me to help entertain your friend, Mr. Iglesias. Of course, I cannot pretend I take easily to strangers. Mamma was very particular whom we associated with, and so I have always been unaccustomed to strangers, and I cannot pretend I am partial to making new acquaintances. Still, I should be very sorry to seem unaccommodating, or to hurt you and Rhoda by refusing to stay and assist you."

"Thank you truly, Serena; I am sure you are very kind," the good man answered. And the best, or the worst, of it was he actually believed he was speaking the truth!

CHAPTER XVII

The easterly wind blew strong and shattering, bleak and dreary, against the windows of the bedchamber at the back of the house. The complaint of the cedar tree, as the branches sawed upon one another, was long-drawn and loud. These sounds reached Iglesias in the sitting-room, where he sat, alone and unoccupied, before the fire. For more than a week now he had been confined to the house. He had set the door of communication between the two rooms open, so as to gain a greater sense of space and that he might take a little exercise by walking the whole length of them. The cry of the wind and the moan of the sawing branches was very comfortless, yet he made no effort to shut it out. To begin with, he was so weak that it was too much trouble to move. To go on with, the melancholy sounds were not ill-suited to his present humour. For a great depression was upon him, a weariness of spirit which might be felt. Out of doors London shivered, houses and sky and the expanse of Trimmer's Green, with its leafless trees and iron railings, livid, a greyness upon them as of fear. Dominic had no quarrel with this either. Indeed it gave him a certain bitter satisfaction, as offering a not inharmonious setting to his own thought.

Though not robust he was tough and wiry, so that illness of such a nature as to necessitate his remaining within doors was a new and trying experience. Crossing Hammersmith Bridge on the 'bustop ten days previously, the chill of the river had struck through him. Yet this, in all reasonable probability, would merely have resulted in passing physical discomfort, but for the moral and spiritual hurt immediately preceding it. How far the mind has power to cure the body is still an open question. But that the mind can actively predispose the body to sickness is indubitable. To realise and analyse, in their several bearings, the causes and consequences of that same moral hurt Iglesias' pride and loyalty alike refused. In respect of them he set his jaw and sternly averted his eyes. Yet, though the will may be steady to resist and to abstain, the tides of feeling ebb and flow, contemptuous of control as those of some unquiet sea. They defy volition, notably in illness when vitality is low. Refuse as he might to go behind the fact, it remained indisputable that the Lady of the Windswept Dust had given him his dismissal. Out of his daily life a joy had gone, a constant object of thought and interest. Out of his heart a living presence had gone, leaving a void more harsh than death. And all this had happened in a connection peculiarly painful and distasteful to him; so that it was as though a foul miasma had arisen, and, drifting across the face of his fair friendship, distorted its proportions, rendering all his memories of it suspect. Further, in this discrediting of friendship his hope of the discovery of that language of the soul which can alone effect a true adjustment between the exterior and interior life had suffered violent eclipse. He had been thrown back into the prison-house of the obvious and the material. The world had lost its poetry, had grown narrow, sordid, dim, and gross. His own life had grown more than ever barren of opportunity and inept. In short, Dominic Iglesias had lost sight of the far horizon which is touched by the glory of the Uncreated Light; and, so doing, dwelt in outer darkness once again, infinitely desolate.

On the afternoon in question he had reached the nadir of disillusion and distrust. He leaned back in the red-covered chair, his shapely hands lying, palms downward, along the two arms of it, his vision of the room and its familiar contents blurred by unshed tears. It was an hour of supreme discouragement.

"Nothing is left," he said, half aloud, "nothing. The future is as blank as the present. If this is to grow old, then indeed those whom the gods love have need enough to die young."

For a space he listened to the shattering wind as it cried in the window-sashes, to the branches of the cedar sawing upon one another and moaning as in self-inflicted pain. Newsboys were calling early specials. The coarse cockney voices, strangled by the easterly blast, met and crossed one another, died away in a side street, to emerge again and again encounter. Such words as were distinguishable seemed of sinister import, agitating to the imagination. Then de Courcy Smyth's shuffling footsteps crossed the floor of the room overhead. The wire-wove mattress of his bed creaked as he sat on the edge of it, kicking off his slippers and putting on walking boots, as might be gathered from floppings followed by an equally nerveless but heavier tread. A door opened, closed, and the footsteps descended the stairs. On the landing without they paused for an appreciable time; but, to Mr. Iglesias's great relief, deciding against attempt of entry, continued their cheerless progress down to the hall below. Yet, just now Iglesias could have found it in his heart to envy the man, notwithstanding his unsavouriness of attitude and aspect. For in him ambition still stirred. He had still definite work to do, and the hope of eventual fame to support him during the doing of it; had the triumph of the theatre, the applause of an audience in the white heat of enthusiasm to dream of and strive after.

"But, for me, nothing," Iglesias repeated, "whether vital as of those far-away southern battle-fields, or fictitious and close at hand as of the stage. Not even the sting of poverty to whet appetite and give an edge to bodily hunger. Nothing, either of fear or of hope. The measure of my obscurity is the measure of my immunity from change of fortune, bad or good. I am worthless even as food for powder. Danger herself will have none of me, and passes me by."

With that he raised his hands and let them drop despairingly along the arms of the chair again, while the unbidden tears overflowed. For a minute or more he remained thus, weeping silently with bowed head. Then, a movement of self-contempt taking him, he regained his calm, sat upright, brushing away the tears.

And it was as though, in thus regaining a clearer physical vision, he regained a clearer mental vision likewise. Purpose asserted itself as against mere blind acquiescence. Iglesias looked up, demanding as of right some measure of consolation, some object promising help. So doing, his eyes sought a certain carven oak panel set in an ebony frame. From his earliest childhood he remembered it, for it had hung in his mother's bedchamber; and in those far-away years, while she still had sufficient force to disregard opposition and make an open practice of prayer, she had kneeled before it when engaged in her devotions. Waking at night—when as a baby-child, during his father's long absences, he slept in her room—Dominic had often seen the delicate kneeling figure, wrapped in some loose-flowing garment, the hands outstretched in supplication. Even then, in the first push of conscious intelligence, the carven picture had spoken to him as something masterful, for all its rigidity and sadness, and very strong to help. It had given him a sense of protection and security, so that his little soul was satisfied; and he could go to sleep again in peace, sure that his mother was in safe keeping while—as he said—she "talked to it." In the long interval which had elapsed since then he had lost touch with the spirit of it, though preserving it as among the most cherished of his family relics. His appreciation of it had become aesthetic rather than religious. But now, as it hung on the dimly white wall above his writing-table on the window side of the fireplace, the dreary London afternoon light took the surface of it, bringing all the details of the scene into prominence. Suddenly, unexpectedly, the old power declared itself. The picture came alive as to the intention and meaning of it. It spoke to him once again, and that with no uncertain voice.

Three tall narrow crosses uplifted against a cloudless sky. Below, a multitude of men, women, and horses, carved in varying degrees of relief. Some starting into bold definiteness, some barely indicated and as though imprisoned in the thickness of the wood; but all grave, energetic, and, whether inspired by compassion or by mockery, fierce. These grouped around a great web of linen—upheld by some of them at the four corners, hammock-wise, high at the head, low at the foot—wherein lay the corpse of a man in the very flower of his age, of heroic proportions, spare yet muscular, long and finely angular of limb, the articulations notably slender, the head borne proudly though bent, the features severely beautiful, the whole virile, indomitable even in the physical abjection of death.

In this Spanish presentment of the closing act of the Divine Tragedy the sensuous pagan element, which mars too many otherwise admirable works of religious art, was absent. Its appeal was to the intellect rather than to the emotions, inculcating effort rather than inviting any sentimental passion of pity. Its message was that of conquest, of iron self-mastery and self-restraint. This was bracing and courage-begetting even when viewed from the exclusively artistic standpoint. But now not merely the presentment of the event held Iglesias' attention, but the event presented, the thing in itself. His heart and intelligence grasped the meaning of it, not only as a matter of supreme historic interest in view of its astonishing influence upon human development during the last two thousand years; but as an ever-present reality, as an exposition of the Absolute, of that which everlastingly has been, and everlastingly will be, and hence of incalculable and immediate importance to himself. It spoke to him of no vague and general truth; but of a truth intimate and individual, coming to him as the call to enter upon a personal inheritance. Of obedience to the dictates of natural religion, and faithful practice of the pieties of it, Dominic Iglesias had, all his life, been a remarkable if unconscious exponent. But this awakening of the spirit to the actualities of supernatural religion, this crossing of that dark immensity of space which appears to interpose between Almighty God and the mind of man, was new to him. He had sought a language of the soul which might effect an adjustment between the exterior and interior life. Here, in the Word made Flesh, with reverent amazement he found it. He had sought it through the instrumentality of the things of time and sense; and they, though full with promise, had proved illusory. He had fixed his hope on relation to the creature. But here, all the while, close beside him, waiting till the scales should fall from his eyes and he should see and understand, had stood the Creator. Fair, very fair—while it lasted—was human friendship. But here, had he but strength and daring to meet it, was a friendship infinitely fairer, immutable, eternal—namely, the friendship of Almighty God.

The easterly wind still cried in the window-sashes, harsh and shattering. The branches of the exiled cedar tree sawed upon one another, uttering their long-drawn complaint. The voices of the newsboys, hoarse and raucous, shouting their sinister message, still came and went. The livid light of the winter afternoon grew more dreary as it sank into, and was absorbed by, the deepening dusk. But to Dominic Iglesias these things had ceased to matter. Dazzled, enchanted, confounded, alike by the magnitude and the simplicity of his discovery, he remained gazing at the carven panel; gazing through and beyond it to that of which it was the medium and symbol, gazing, clear-eyed and fearlessly, away to the far horizon radiant with the surpassing glory of the Uncreated Light.

CHAPTER XVIII

The Black Week had just ended; but the humiliation of it lay, as a dead weight, upon the heart of London. Three crushing reverses in eight days—Stormberg, Magersfontein, and finally Colenso! There was no getting rid of the facts, or the meaning of them in respect of incapacity, blundering, and reckless waste of personal valour. It was a sorry tale, and one over which Europe at large chuckled. It has been universally assumed that the English are a serious nation. This is an error. They are not serious, but indifferent, a nation of individualists, each mainly, not to say exclusively, occupied with his own private affairs. With the vast majority unity of sentiment is suspect, and patriotism a passive rather than an active virtue. But at this juncture, under the stress of repeated disaster, unity of sentiment and patriotism—that is, a sense of the national honour and necessity for the vindication of it—became strongly evident. London was profoundly and visibly moved. Not with excitement—that came later, manifesting itself in hysterical outcries of relief—but with a grim anger and sadness of astonishment that such things could indeed be. Strangers, passing in the street, looked one another in the eyes questioningly, a common anxiety forging unexpected bonds of kinship. The town was curiously hushed, as though listening, always listening, for those ugly messages rushed so perpetually by cable from overseas. Men's faces were strained by the effort to hear, and, hearing, to judge justly the extent and the bearings of both national and individual damage. Already mourning struck a sensible note in women's dress. If the Little Englander capered, he was careful to do so at home, or in meeting-places frequented only by persons likeminded with himself. It may be questioned whether he is not ever most courageous when under covert thus; since shooting out of windows or from behind hedges would appear to be his inherent, and not particularly gallant, notion of sport. The newsboys alone openly and blatantly rejoiced, dominating the situation—as on Derby Day or Boat-race Night—and putting a gilded dome to the horror by yelling highly seasoned lies when truth proved insufficiently evil to stimulate custom to the extent of his desires. Depression, as of storm, permeated the social atmosphere. Churches were full, places of amusement comparatively empty. To laugh seemed an indiscretion trenching on indecency.

Amid surrounding bravery of imperial purple, cream-colour, and gold, Poppy St. John sat at the extreme end of the first row of balcony stalls in the newly opened Twentieth Century Theatre. This was a calm and secluded spot, since the partition, dividing off the boxes, flanked it on the right. Partly on this account Poppy had selected it. Partly, also, because it afforded an excellent view of the left of the stage; and it was on the left—looking from the body of the house—that the principal action of the piece, as far as Dot Parris's part was concerned, took place. Poppy was unattended. She wanted an evening's rest, an evening free of conversation and effort; but she wanted something to look at, too, something affording just sufficient emotional stimulus to keep importunate thought at bay. This the theatre supplied. It had ceased long ago to tire her. She knew the ways of it from both sides of the footlights uncommonly well, and loved them indifferently much. She was a shrewd and cynical critic. Nevertheless, to go to the play was a sort of going home to her—a home neither very socially nor morally exalted, perhaps, but one offering the advantages of perfect familiarity.

Huddled in a black velvet fur-lined sacque, reaching to her feet and abundantly trimmed with jet embroidery and black lace, she settled herself in her place. The soft fur was cosey against her bare neck. She felt chilly. Later she might peel, thereby exhibiting the values of the rest of her costume. But it was not worth while to do so yet. The first piece was over, but the house was still a poor one. It might fill up. She hoped it would for Dot's sake; for few things are more disheartening than to play to empty benches. But, at present, the audience was altogether too sparse for it to be worth while to sacrifice comfort to effect. In point of fact, Poppy was cold from sheer fatigue. For the last month, to employ her own rather variegated phraseology, she had racketed, had persistently and pertinaciously been "going the pace." No doubt they do these things better in France; yet, as she reflected, provided you are unhampered by prejudice, are fairly in funds and know the ropes, even grimy fog-bound London is, in this particular connection, by no means to be sneezed at. And truly Poppy's autobiography during the said month would have made extremely merry reading, amounting in some aspects to a positive classic—though of the kind hardly suited as a basis of instruction for the pupils of a young ladies' school. Setting aside adventures of a more questionable character, a positively alarming good luck had pursued her, everything she touched turning to gold. Even in this hour of financial depression the market favoured her both in buying and selling. If she put money on a horse, that horse was sure to win. If she played cards—and she had played pretty constantly—she inevitably plundered her opponents. This last alone, of all her doubtful doings, really troubled her; for her opponents had frequently been youthful, and it was contrary to Poppy's principles to pluck the but half-fledged chick.

Barring this solitary deflection from her somewhat latitudinarian code of ethics, she had, on the face of it, ample cause for self-congratulation. Never had she been more gaily audacious in word or deed. Never had she been better company, keeping her audience—an almost exclusively masculine one—in a roar, all the louder perhaps because of inward defiance of the news from over-seas, the humiliation of which had now culminated in the disasters of the Black Week. Flame only shows the brighter for a sombre background. And Poppy, during this ill-starred period, had been as a flame to her admirers and associates—a fitful, prankish flame, full of provocation and bedevilment, the light of it inciting to all manner of wild doings and, in the end, not infrequently scorching those pretty shrewdly who were over-bold in warming themselves at the heat of it. For fires of the sort lighted by Poppy are not precisely such as contribute to the peace and security of the domestic hearth.

But now she was tired. The fun seemed fun no longer; so that, notwithstanding her successes, she found herself a prey to dissatisfaction, discontent, and a disposition to recall all the less happy episodes of her varied career. She yawned quite loudly, as she laid opera-glasses and play-bill upon the velvet cushion in front of her, and pulled the soft fur-lined garment up closer about her shoulders.

"The first act's safe to be poorish anyhow, and Dot does not come on till just the end of it. I wonder if I dare go to sleep?" she asked herself, gently rubbing her eyes. "It would be awfully nice to forget the whole blooming show, past, present, and to come, for a little while and plunge in the waters of oblivion. Oblivion with a capital O—a dose of that's what I want. Beautiful roomy consolation-stakes of a word, oblivion, if one could only believe in the existence of it—which, unluckily, some-how I can't."

Here the strains of the orchestra ceased. The lights were turned low in the body of the house. The curtain went up. As it did so a cold draught drew from regions behind the stage, laden with that indefinable odour of gas, glue, humanity, flagged stair and alleyways, paint, canvas, carpentry, and underground places the sun never penetrates, which haunts the working part of every theatre. Poppy smiled as she snuffed it, with a queer mingling of enjoyment and repulsion. For as is the smell of ocean to the seafarer, of mother-earth to the peasant, of incense to the priest, so is the smell of the theatre to the player. Nature may revolt; but the spell holds. Once an actor always an actor. The mark of the calling is indelible. Even to the third and fourth generation there is no rubbing it out.

"I suppose it would have been wiser if I had stuck to the profession," Poppy commented to herself. "I should have been a leading lady by now, drawing my thirty to forty pounds a week. I had the root of the matter in me. Have it still, worse luck; for it's the sort of root which asserts its continued existence by aching at times like that of a broken tooth. It was a wrench to give it all up. But then those rotten plays of his, inflated impossible stuff, which would never act—couldn't act!—and I carrying them round to manager after manager and using all the gentle arts I knew to get them accepted. Oh! it was very dignified, it was very pretty! And then his perpetual persecutions for money, his jealousy and spite, and his fine feelings, his infernal superiority—yes, that was what really did the job. Flesh and blood couldn't stand it. To prove to a woman, at three meals daily, that she couldn't hold a candle to you in birth, or brains, or education; and then expect her to slave for you—and make it jolly hot for her if she didn't, too—while you sat at home and caressed the delusion of your own heaven-born genius in the only decently comfortable chair in the house! No, it was not good enough—that it was not."

Poppy surveyed the stage, unseeing, her great eyes wide with unlovely memories.

"I wonder what's become of him," she said presently. "He hasn't dunned me for months. Has he found some other poor wretch to bleed? Must have, I imagine, for he always declared he was on the edge of starvation. Supposing that was true, though—supposing he has starved?"

Her thought sank away into a wordless reverie of the dreariest description. Suddenly she roused herself, clenching her hands in her lap.

"Well, supposing he has, what does it matter to me? If ever a man deserved to starve, he did, vain, lazy, cowardly, self-seeking jackal of a fellow. Why in the name of reason should I trouble about him—specially to-night? But then why, whenever I am a bit done, does the remembrance of him always come back?"

Poppy yawned again, staring blankly at the persons on the stage, hearing the sound of their speech but knowing only the sense of her own thought.

"Why? Because it's like him, because it's altogether in the part. He was always on the watch for his opportunity; wheedling or blackguarding, directly he saw one had no fight left in one, till he got his own way."

She leaned forward, resting her hands on the velvet cushion.

"I am confoundedly tired," she said. "All the same, it's rather horrible. If the thing came over again, which mercifully it can't, I should do precisely the same as I did. And yet I'm never quite sure which of us was really in the right. And, therefore, I suppose just as long as I live, whenever I'm dished—as I am to-night—I shall work the whole hateful business through again, and the remembrance of him will always come back."

She pushed the soft heavy masses of hair up from her forehead with both hands.

"In the main it was your own fault, de Courcy Smyth, and you know that it was. Most women would not have held out nearly as long as I did. So lie quiet. Let me be. Starve, if you've got as far on the downgrade as that. What do I care? I owe you nothing. You never gave me a child. So starve, if you must—yes, starve," she said.

Then she gathered herself back into her stall. Her expression changed.

"Ah, there's Dot. They're giving her a reception. Bless them—how awfully sweet! Hurrah for poor little Dot!" Her hands went up to applaud. And for the ensuing ten minutes her fatigue was forgotten. She became absorbed in the action of the piece.

CHAPTER XIX

Dot Parris earned a recall at the end of the first act, conquering by sheer force of personality that gloomy and half-hearted audience. And Poppy St. John—among whose many faults lack of generosity certainly could not be counted—standing up, leaned right out over the velvet-cushioned barrier of the dress circle, crying "Brava!" and clapping her hands. To achieve the latter demonstration with befitting resonance she had stripped off her gloves. Then as the lights were turned up and the curtain swung into the place, she proceeded to further stripping—namely, that of her black embroidered sacque, which she threw across the back of the empty stall beside her, thereby revealing a startling costume. For she was clothed in rose-scarlet from shoulder to foot; and that without ornament of any description to break up the daring uniformity of colour, save the stiff unstanding black aigrette in her hair, tipped with diamond points which flashed and glittered as she moved. The soft mousseline-de-soie of which her dress was made swathed her figure, cross-wise, without apparent fastening, moulding it to the turn of the hips. Thence the skirt flowed down in a froth of rose-scarlet gaugings and fluted frills, which trailed behind her far. The bodice was cut in a deep V back and front, showing her bare neck. Her arms were bare, too, from the elbow. Her skin, somewhat sallow by day, took on a delicate ivory whiteness under the electric light. By accident or design she had omitted to tinge her cheeks to-night; and the even pallor of her face emphasised the largeness of her eyes—luminous, just now, with sympathy and enthusiasm. For the artist in Poppy dominated all else, vibrant and alert. The glamour of the actor's life was upon her; the seamy side of it forgotten—its unworthy rivalries and bickerings, the slangings and prolonged weariness of rehearsals, its many disappointments, heart-burnings, and sordid shifts. These were as though they were not; so that the stage called her, even as the sea calls one, and mother-earth another, and religion a third.

"Pou-ah! aren't I just hot, though!" she said, half aloud, as she flung off her sacque. "And what a changeling imp of a creature Dot is, after all! An imp of genius.—well, she's every right to that, as one knows when one looks at James Colthurst's pictures. He'd genius. He didn't shirk living. My stars! there was a man capable of adding to the number of one's emotions! And she's inherited his gifts on her own lines. What a voice, what gestures! She is as clever as she can stick. Oh! she's a real joy of a demon of a thing, bless her; and she's nothing like come to her full strength yet."

Then growing aware that she herself and her vivid attire were beginning to attract more attention than, in the interests of a quiet evening, she desired, Poppy subsided languidly into her stall, and, picking up her opera-glasses, slowly surveyed the occupants of the house.

There to begin with was Bobby Saville in the second row of the stalls, flanked on either hand by a contingent of followers. His round dark head and the set of his tremendous shoulders were unmistakable. Saville was very far from being a model young man, yet Poppy had a soft spot in her heart for this aristocratic bruiser and bravo. His constancy to Dot Parris was really touching. With a dog-like faithfulness and docility, this otherwise most turbulent of his sex had followed the object of his affections from music-hall to comic opera, from comic opera to the high places of legitimate drama. And Dot meanwhile remained serenely invulnerable, tricking and mocking her high-born heavy-weight lover, telling him cheerfully she really had no use for him, though his intentions were strictly honourable. Twenty-five years hence, she added, when he was an elderly peer, and she had begun to grow broad in the beam, and the public had begun to grow tired of her, she might perhaps contemplate the thraldom of wedlock. But not yet awhile—no, thank you. Her art held all her love, satisfied all her passions; she had none to waste upon mankind. Two days hence, as Poppy knew, Bobby Saville would sail for South Africa, to offer an extensive target to Boer bullets. He had come to bid farewell, to-night, to the obdurate object of his affections. And his followers—some of whom were also bound for the seat of war—had come to support him during those pathetic proceedings.

In the boxes she recognised more than one woman whose rank of riches had rendered her appearance common property through the medium of the illustrated papers. But upon these social favourites she bestowed scant scrutiny. To her they did not matter, since she had a comfortable conviction that, given their chances, she might safely have backed herself to beat them at their own game. One large and gentle-looking lady did attract her, by the innocence of her mild eyes set noticeably wide apart, and by the beauty of her small mouth. Her light brown hair, touched with grey, rippled back from her low forehead under a drapery of delicate lace. She was calm, yet there was an engaging timidity in her aspect as she sheltered behind the farther curtain of the box. Beside her sat a young girl, white-clad, deliciously fresh in appearance, an expression of happy half-shy expectation upon her charming face. Behind them, in the shadow, kindly, handsome, debonnair, stood Lord Fallowfeild. His resemblance to the large and gentle lady declared them brother and sister. Poppy St. John watched the little party with a movement of tenderness. She perceived that they were very fond of one another; moreover they were so delightfully simple in bearing and manner, so excellently well-bred. But of what was the pretty maiden so shyly expectant? Of something, or somebody, far more immediately interesting to her than players or play—so Poppy judged.

Turning from the contemplation of these pleasant people with a sigh she could hardly have explained—even to herself—Poppy swept the dress circle with her opera-glasses. Presently she paused, and with a lift of surprise looked steadily again, then let both hands and glasses drop upon her rose-scarlet cap. Four rows up and back, on the far side, in a stall next the stepped gang-way, a man sat. His face was turned away, his shoulder being towards her, as he leaned sideways talking to the woman beside him—a slender, faded, yet elegant person of uncertain age, dressed in fluffy black. In the seat beyond, also leaning forward and taking part in the conversation, was another man of so whimsical an appearance as very nearly to make Poppy laugh aloud. She would unquestionably have done so had she been at leisure; but she was not at leisure. Her eyes travelled back to the figure beside the gang-way, which intrigued both her interest and her memory. Tall, spare, faultlessly dressed, yet with an effect of something exotic, aloof, unusual about him, he provoked her curiosity with suggestions of times and places quite other than of the present.

"Who is it?" Poppy said to herself. "Surely I know him. Who the Dickens is it?"

The conversation ceased. The man drew himself up, turned his head; and Poppy gave a little choking cry, as she found herself staring Dominic Iglesias straight in the face.

Whether he recognised her she did not know, did not want to know just yet. For she needed a minute or two to reckon with the position. It was so wholly unexpected. It affected her more deeply than she could have anticipated. Not without amusement she realised that she had never, heretofore, quite believed in him as an ordinary mortal, who ate and drank, went to plays, had relations with human beings other than herself, and conducted himself generally on the commonplace lines of modern humanity. Therefore to see him under existing circumstances was, in a sense, a shock to her. She did not like it. Absurd and unreasonable though it undoubtedly was to feel it so, yet his presence here struck her as in a way unseemly, derogatory. She had never thought of him in this connection, and it took a little time to get accustom to this aspect of him. Then she discovered, with half-humorous annoyance, that she was called upon to get accustomed to something else as well—namely, to her memories of the past month since she parted from him. For it was undeniable that the said memories took on a queer enough complexion in the light of this sudden encounter with Dominic Iglesias. If an hour ago they had been unsatisfactory, now they were very near odious. And that seemed hardly fair. Poppy turned wicked.

"For what's the worry, after all?" she asked herself. "Why on earth am I either disappointed or penitent? Is he no better than the rest of us, or am I no worse? And with what am I quarrelling, in any case—his being less of a saint, or I less of a sinner than I'd been pleased to imagine? I'm sure I don't know."

Instinctively her eyes sought that kindly worlding, Lord Fallowfeild. With him at least, as she reflected, one knew exactly where one was, since his feet were always very much upon the floor. But here again discomfiture, alas! awaited her. For another person, and evidently a welcome one, had joined that pleasant little party. Standing beside the large and gentle lady, speaking quickly, gaily, his face keen and eager, she beheld Alaric Barking. Lord Fallowfeild, smiling, patted the young man affectionately on the shoulder. And then, with a shudder of pain gnawing right through her, Poppy St. John, glancing at the graceful white-clad maiden, understood of whose coming this one had been so sweetly and gladly expectant.

To the strong there is something exhilarating in all certainty, even certainty of disaster. And it was very characteristic of Poppy that at this juncture no cry came to her lips, no sob to her throat. She shuddered that once, it is true. But then, setting her teeth, the whole daring of her nature rose to the situation, as a high-mettled horse rises to a heavy fence. What lay on the other side of that fence she did not know as yet, nor did she stop to consider. Desperate though it looked, she took it gallantly without fuss or funking.

"Well, there's no ambiguity about this affair, anyhow," she said grimly. "Of course it had to come sooner or later, and I knew it had to come. Well, here it is, that's all, and there's no use whining. And that's why he's been so jumpy lately: he had a bad conscience. Poor old chap, he must have been having a beastly bad time of it."

Poppy mused a little.

"Still, it's a facer," she added, "and a precious nasty one, too."

She stretched herself, shaking back her head, while the diamond points of her aigrette danced and glittered. Took a deep breath, filling her lungs; listened to herself, so to speak, noting with satisfaction that neither heart nor pulse fluttered.

"No serious damage," she commented. "I must have the nerves of a locomotive. Here I am perfectly sound, perfectly sober, standing at the parting of the ways, between the dear old devil of love and the deep sea of friendship. Poppy Smyth, my good soul, you've always been rather fatally addicted to drama. Are you satisfied at last? For just now, heaven knows, you've jolly well got your fill of it."

Then, for a space, she sat staring out into the house, thinking hard, intently, yet without words. The future, as she knew, hung in the balance, for herself and for others; but, as yet, she could not decide into which scale to throw the determining weight. Presently she looked steadily at Dominic Iglesias. He was again engaged in conversation, trying, with his air of fine old-world courtesy, suitably to entertain his strangely assorted neighbours. Poppy had an idea he found it rather hard work. She was not in the least sorry. That faded piece of feminine elegance, in fluffy black, bored her. She entertained a malicious hope that the said piece of feminine elegance bored Mr. Iglesias also. Finally, with rather bitter courage, she turned her eyes once more upon Lord Fallowfeild and his companions.

"Poor little girl, poor little girl," she said, quite gently, "so that's your heaven on earth, is it? I'm afraid a mighty big crop of wild oats is on show in your Garden of Eden. Still to you, apparently, it is a blissful place enough. Only the question is, do I intend to relinquish my rights in that particular property and make it over to you in fee simple, my pretty baby, or do I not? Shall I give it you, or shall I keep it? For it is mine to give or to keep still—very much mine, if I choose to make a fight for it, I fancy."

Yet even as she communed thus with herself, the white-clad maiden and the other occupants of the box became indistinct and shadowy. The buzz of conversation in the theatre had ceased; so had the strains of the orchestra. The lights had been turned low and the curtain had risen upon the second act.

About half-way through that act Poppy St. John got up, threw her velvet sacque over her arm, and, slipping past the three intervening stalls, made her way up the steps of the near gang-way to the swing-doors opening out to the couloir. Her movements, though studiously quiet, were, owing to the vivid hue of her attire, very perceptible even in the penumbra of the dress circle, provoking attention and smothered comment. The lady in fluffy black, for example, followed her with glances of undisguised and condemnatory interest, finally calling the attention of both her cavaliers to the progress of this glowing figure.

The New Century Theatre is one of those enterprises of trans-Atlantic origin, undertaken with the praiseworthy and disinterested object of teaching the Old World "how to do it," and is built and furnished regardless of expense. The couloirs are wide, lofty, richly carpeted; the walls of them encrusted with pale highly polished marbles, pilasters of which, with heavily gilded capitals, flank vast panels of looking-glass. The moulded ceilings are studded with electric lights, the glare of which is agreeably softened by pineapple-shaped globes of crystal glass. The scheme of colour, ranging from imperial purple through crimson and rose-pink to softest flesh tints, formed an harmonious setting to the rose-scarlet of Poppy's dress, with its froth of trailing frills and flounces, as she stood discoursing to a smart, black-gowned, white-aproned box-keeper.

"You understand, fourth row on the left, next the gang-way? Tell him a lady wishes particularly to speak to him between the acts. Then bring him to me here."

"Yes, madam, I quite understand," the young person replied, with much intelligence, scenting something in the shape of an adventure.

Poppy moved across and sat down on one of the wide divans, and so doing began to know, once more, how very tired she was. A new tiredness seemed, indeed, to have been added to the original one. That first was, at worst, bored and irritable. This was of a different, a more sad and intimate character.

"I feel as if I had been beaten all over," she said to herself. "Well, perhaps that's just what it is. I have been beaten. I wish I could sleep. Oh! dear, oh! dear, how I wish I could sleep."

Her thought fell away into the vague, the inarticulate, though she did not sleep. Still there was a temporary suspension of volition, of conscious mental activity, which, in a degree, rested her. Persons, passing now and again, looked with curiosity at the brilliant figure, and inscrutable eyes in the dead-white face. The smart box-keeper, moved by some instinct of pity, came back more than once, finally offering one of those unwholesome-looking cups of coffee and boxes of chocolate of which so few have the requisite audacity to partake. Poppy roused herself sufficiently to reject these terrible delicacies, while smiling at the conveyor of them. Then she relapsed into the vague again, and waited, just waited.

"There's the end of the act, madam," the young woman remarked at last encouragingly.

"All right," Poppy answered. "Go straight away and bring the gentleman here to me. I'm in a hurry. I want to get home."

The glass doors of the exits swished back and forth, letting out the confused stir and murmur of the house, letting out a crowd of men as well. And the aspect the said crowd presented to Poppy's overstrained nerves and exalted sensibility was repulsive. For it suggested to her a flight of gigantic black locusts, strong-jawed, pink-faced, and white-breasted, driven forth by a common hunger, rather cruelly active and intent. Her sense of humour was in abeyance, as was her usually triumphant common sense; so that her thought, going behind appearances and the sane interpretation of them, declined to that fundamental region in which the root laws of animal life become hideously bare and distinct. Out of the deep places of her own womanhood a hatred towards this crowd of men arose; that secular enmity which exists between the sexes asserting itself and, for the time being, obscuring both reason and justice. For upon what, as she asked herself bitterly, when all is said and done, do these male human locusts pasture, save on the souls and bodies of women, finding a garden before them, and, too often, leaving but a desert behind? Sex as sex became abhorrent to her, its penalties unpardonable, its pleasures as loathsome as its sins.

But from the black-coated throng the trim figure of the box-keeper just then detached itself; and a moment later Poppy, looking up, beheld Dominic Iglesias standing before her.

CHAPTER XX

"You sent for me, so I have come," Iglesias said, for Poppy St. John, usually so voluble, just now appeared speechless.

From the moment he had become aware of her presence in the theatre, Dominic had been sensible that she presented herself under a new aspect. Of the many different Poppys he had seen, this was by far the most powerful and dramatic. She stood out from the rest of the audience as some splendid tropic flower stands out from a thick-set mass of foliage, conspicuous in form and colour and in promise. There were handsome women, smart women, beautifully dressed women in plenty, but Poppy did not shade in with all these, making but part of a general effect. She remained unique, solitary; and this not merely on account of her vivid raiment. The effect of her told upon the mind quite as much as upon the sight. Yet she did not look out of place. She looked, indeed, preeminently at home. Out of doors, in the country sunshine, she had struck Dominic as a slight creature, unreal and fictitious. Here, amid highly artificial and conventional surroundings, she seemed to him the most natural and vital being present, retaining the completeness of her individuality, the energy and mystery of it alike, almost aggressively evident and untouched. Iglesias ceased to consider her in relation to his and her broken friendship, or in relation to that which he so reluctantly divined of her private life. He contemplated her in herself, finding an element of things primitive in her, which commanded his admiration, though it failed, so far, to touch his heart. And if this was the impression he received seeing her at a comparative distance, that impression was greatly intensified seeing her now at close quarters. The contrast between the subtle softness and the flare—as of a conflagration—of her dress, the weariness of her attitude, and the unfathomable melancholy of her eyes, stirred him profoundly.

"Yes," she answered quietly, almost coldly, "I know I sent. This was about the last place I should have expected to run across you. I flattered myself I was safe enough here. I didn't wish to meet you one little bit. Still, when I did see you, I wanted you. You're the most plaguey impossible person to rid oneself of somehow"—her voice and manner softened a little—"so I sent for you. I don't know why, because now I've got you I seem to have changed my mind. I have nothing to say."

"I can easily go," Iglesias remarked gravely.

"No, no, no," she replied, "why should you hurry? I'm sure those two freaks you're herding—the beetle turned hind-side before and the withered leaf—can't be frantically interesting. And I like to look at you. I never saw you before in evening dress, and you're more grand seigneur than ever. But something's happened to you. I can't tell off-hand what it is, whether you've come on or gone back. But you're altered."

"I have had an illness," Iglesias said simply; "and I have been very unhappy."

"Neither of those are good enough," Poppy answered. "The alteration is right inside you, in your soul. But you're well again now?" she added.

"Yes, I am well again now."

"And you're no longer unhappy?"

"No," he said. "I am sad, for life is sad; but I am no longer unhappy."

"That's a nice distinction," Poppy put in, with a rather scornful inflection. "What's cured your unhappiness? Not an affair of the heart? Please don't tell me it's anything to do with a woman, for I warn you I'm awfully off the affections to-night."

"You can make yourself quite easy on that point," Dominic said with a lift of the head, his native pride asserting itself.

"Ah! that's more like old times!" Poppy's voice softened again, so did the expression of her face. "Suppose you sit down, dear lunatic. This wait is a long one, I know. Dot Parris told me it was. Let the freaks play about together for a little. It will do them good. And I find I wanted you rather more than I knew at first. I'm beginning to have something to say after all. Words, only words, perhaps; still it's a soulagement to sit here with you like this." The corners of Poppy's mouth drooped and quivered. "I'm having an infernally bad time; and there's worse ahead."

"I am sorry. I am grieved," Iglesias said. For the charm had begun to work again, and friendship, as he began to know, although broken-winged, was very far from dead.

"We won't talk about that," she put in, "or I might make a fool of myself. Dear man, I think I'd better go home. I'm awfully tired. Still, I'm better for seeing you." She stood up. "Just help me on with my coat. Thanks—that's right. Oh! I say, there are the freaks on the prowl, looking for you!" Poppy's tragic eyes turned naughty, malicious, gay even for a moment. "What sport!" she said—"unhappy freaks! The withered leaf has intentions. I see that. She'd like to eat me without salt. Don't marry her—promise me you won't. Ah! heavenly, heavenly," she cried. "I need no promises, bless you. Your face is quite enough. Wretched withered leaf! But look here," she went on, as she gathered the soft warm garment about her, "I'm tired of your incognito. Give me your card. I may want you again. So let me have your name and address."

And Iglesias giving it to her as she requested, she studied it for a minute silently. Then she turned away.

"I want nothing more. Don't come down with me. One of the boys will get me a hansom. I'd rather be alone; so just go back to your flabbergasted freaks, beloved and no-longer-nameless one," she said.

CHAPTER XXI

Thin sunshine slanted in through the lace curtains of the dining-room window. Encouraged thereby, the parrot preened its feathers, making little snapping and clicking noises meanwhile with its tongue and beak. The grass of the Green, seen between the black stems of the encircling trees, glittered with hoarfrost, while the houses on the opposite side of it looked flat and featureless owing to the interposing veil of bluish mist. Tradesmen's carts clattered by at a sharp trot, the defined sound of them breaking up the all-pervading murmur of London, and dying out into it again as they passed. At the street corner, some twenty yards away, a German band discoursed doubtfully sweet music, the trombone making earnest efforts to keep the rest of the instruments up to their work by the emission of loud and reproachful tootings. It was a pleasant and cheery morning as December mornings go, yet constraint reigned at the Lovegrove breakfast-table.

The day of Serena's oft-discussed departure had dawned. A few hours hence she would remove herself and her boxes to her cousin Lady Samuelson's residence in Ladbroke Square. This should have proved a source of regret to her host and hostess; and they were conscience-stricken, confessing to themselves—though not to one another, since each accredited the other with more laudable sentiments than his or her own—that relief rather than regret did actually possess them. A secret from one another, and that a slightly discreditable one, was so foreign to the experience of the excellent couple that it lay heavy upon their hearts. Each, moreover, was aware of shame in the presence of Serena, as in that of a person upon whom they had inflicted an injury. Hence constraint, which the sunshine was powerless to dissipate.

"May I pass you the eggs, or bacon, or both, Serena?" George Lovegrove inquired, his childlike blue eyes meanwhile humbly imploring pardon for his lack of sorrow at her impending departure. Serena's manner was stiff and abstracted. This, combined with the rustling of her petticoats, filled him with anxiety. Was it possible that she knew?

"Thank you, George, only an egg. Not that one, please, it is much too large. I prefer the smallest. I am not feeling hungry."

"I should never call you much of a breakfast-eater, Serena," Mrs. Lovegrove observed in her comfortable purring voice, from behind the tea urn. She was desirous to pacify her guest. "Now I am rather hearty myself in the morning, always have been so. I do not know whether it is a good thing or not, as a habit. Still, I think to-day you should force yourself a little. You should always make provision against a journey. And then no doubt you are rather fatigued with packing and getting home so late from the theatre. I am pleased to think you had an outing your last night here, Serena. Georgie tells me the play was very comical."

"I dare say it was," Serena replied. "Of course George would be a much better judge of that than I am. Mamma was always very particular what we heard and saw when we were children, and I know I am inclined to think things vulgar which other people only find amusing."

"I did not remark any vulgarity, and do not think Mr. Iglesias would countenance anything of that kind in the presence of a lady. He would ascertain beforehand the nature of the piece to which he invited any lady"—this from George Lovegrove tentatively.

"Oh! of course I don't say there was anything vulgar. I should not like to commit myself to an opinion. I really have been to the theatre very seldom. Mamma never encouraged our going. And then, of course, old Dr. Colthurst, the rector of St. Jude's at Slowby, whose church we always attended, disapproved of the theatre. He had great influence with mamma. And he thought it wicked."

"Indeed," Mrs. Lovegrove commented. "I should be sorry to think that, as so many go. But he may have come across the evils of it personally. He had a son, an artist, who was very wild, I believe. And I remember to have heard our dear vicar speak of Dr. Colthurst as stern, but a true Protestant and a very grand preacher."

"I dare say he was—I don't mean that his son was wild—I know nothing about that, of course, but that Dr. Colthurst was a great preacher."

Serena spoke abstractedly, inspecting the yolk of her poached egg meanwhile as though on the watch for unpleasant foreign bodies.

"But," she continued, "I cannot, of course, be expected to remember his sermons, though I may have been taken to hear him. I suppose I certainly was taken, but I was quite too much of a child to remember. Susan remembers them, but then Susan was so very much older."

She ceased to contemplate her egg, and looked up at her hostess.

"Susan must be very nearly your age, Rhoda; or she may be a year or eighteen months younger. Yes, judging by the difference between her age and mine, she must be quite eighteen months younger. Of course, now, Susan thinks going to the play wicked. I often wonder whether that is not partly because she dislikes sitting still and listening when other people are doing something. Susan likes to take part in everything herself. I often wonder what she would do in church if it was not for the responses and the singing. I am sure she would never sit out a service where the congregation did not join in. Susan cannot bear a choral service. She calls it un-English and Romanising. I do not dislike it—I mean I do not dislike a choral service. But then I do not consider the theatre wicked. I am not prejudiced against it, as Susan is. Still, I cannot deny that I think you do hear very odd things and see very over-dressed people at the theatre."

Serena looked severely at her host, thereby heightening the anxiety which possessed him. For once again, as so often during the past eight or ten hours, a picture presented itself perplexing and fascinating to his mental vision—namely, that of his dear and honoured friend, the grave and stately Dominic Iglesias, helping an unknown lady, of remarkably attractive personal appearance, on with a wonderful black velvet garment—doing so in the calmest way in the world, too, as though it were an event of chronic occurrence—while the frills and furbelows of her voluminous skirts flowed in rosy billows about his feet. What did the picture portend, George Lovegrove asked himself, and still more, what did Serena suppose it portended?

"Do you, indeed?" Mrs. Lovegrove put in, in amiable response to her guest's last remark. She was sensible of being hurt by the allusion to her age. But then Serena was going, and she knew that fact did not distress her as deeply as it might have done. She therefore rose superior to wounded feelings. "It's many years since I've been much of a playgoer," she continued, "and people tell me it's all a good deal changed, and not for the better. I suppose the dressing nowadays is sadly extravagant. I am sure I don't know, and I should always be timid of condemning anybody or their amusements. But there, as I always do say, if you want to keep a happy mind there is so much it is well to be ignorant of."

"I wonder if it is—I mean I wonder if it is well to be ignorant of things," Serena said reflectively. "Of course, if people think you are willing to be ignorant, it encourages them in deceiving you. I think it is very wrong to be deceitful. Sooner or later it is sure to come out, and then it is very difficult to forgive people. Indeed, I am not sure it is right to forgive them."

With difficulty George Lovegrove restrained a groan. His food was as ashes in his mouth; his tea as waters of bitterness.

"Oh! I should be sorry to go as far as that, Serena," Mrs. Lovegrove remonstrated. "If you give way to unforgiving feelings you can never tell quite where they may carry you. But as I was going to say, though I am not much of a playgoer, I was very pleased to have Mr. Iglesias invite me. Only, as I explained to him, I am very liable to find the seats too narrow for comfort in places of amusement, and the atmosphere is often so very close, too. He was most polite and sympathising; but then that's Mr. Iglesias all over. He always is the perfect gentleman."

Serena paused, her fork arrested in mid-transit to her mouth.

"I am not sure that I agree with you, Rhoda," she said. "I am not sure whether I think Mr. Iglesias is really polite, or whether he only appears to be so because it suits his purpose. Of course you and George know him far better than I do. Perhaps you understand—I cannot pretend that I understand him. I may be wrong, but I often wonder whether there is not a good deal which is rather insincere about Mr. Iglesias."

After throwing which bomb, Serena gave her whole attention to her breakfast. Usually George Lovegrove would have waxed valiant in defence of his friend, but a guilty conscience held him tongue-tied. Not so Rhoda; strive as she might, those allusions to her age still rankled. And, under cover of protest against injustice to the absent, she paid off a little of her private score, to her warm satisfaction.

"Well, I am sure," she cried, "I never could have credited that anybody could question Mr. Iglesias's genuineness! I would sooner doubt Georgie, that I would, and fear him deceitful."

Again the good man came near groaning. It was as though the wife planted a poignard in his heart.

"And after you playing the piano to him so frequently the few days Mr. Iglesias stopped here, and seeming so comfortable together and friendly, and his inviting us all to the theatre! Really, I must say I do think you sadly changeable, Serena, that I do."

"No, I am not changeable, Rhoda," the other lady declared, both voice and colour rising slightly. "Nobody ever accused me of being changeable before, and I do not like it. I do not think you are at all justified in making such an accusation. But I am observant. I always have been so. Even Susan allows that I am very observant. I cannot help being so, and I do not wish to help it. I think it is much safer. It helps you to find out who you can really trust. And, of course, I observed a great deal that happened last night. I felt from the first that I owed it to myself to be particularly on my guard, because certain insinuations had been made—you know, Rhoda, you have made them more than once yourself—and some people might have thought that things had gone rather far when Mr. Iglesias was stopping here. I believe Mrs. Porcher and that dreadful Miss Hart did think it. I do not say that things did go far; I only say that people might naturally think that they had. On several occasions Mr. Iglesias' conduct did seem very marked. And, of course, nothing could be more odious to me than to be placed in a false position. One cannot be too careful, especially with foreigners. Mamma always warned us against foreigners when we first came out. I never had any experience of foreigners until I met Mr. Iglesias, here at your house. But, I am sorry to say, I believe now mamma was perfectly right."

As she ended her harangue, Serena with a petulant movement of her thin hands pushed her plate away from the table edge, leaving a vacant space before her. This was as a declaration of war. She scorned further subterfuge. She announced a demonstration. A bright spot of colour burned on either cheek, her small head, on its long stalk of neck, was carried very erect. It was one of those pathetic moments when—the merciless revelations of the morning sunshine notwithstanding—this slim, faded, middle-aged spinster appeared to recapture, and that very effectively, the charm and promise of her vanished youth. Excited by foolish anger, animated by a sense of insult wholly misplaced and imaginary, she became a very passably pretty person, the immature but hopeful Serena of eighteen looking forth from the eyes of the narrow-souled disappointed Serena of eight-and-forty.

"Of course, George may have some explanation of what happened last night," she went on, speaking rapidly. "If he has, I think it would be only fair that he should offer it to me. I took for granted he would do so this morning as soon as we met; or that he would send you to me, Rhoda, to explain if he felt too awkward about speaking himself. But as you both are determined to ignore what happened, I am forced to speak. I dare say it would be much more convenient to you, knowing you have made a mistake, to pass the whole thing over in silence. But I really cannot consent to that. If Mr. Iglesias meant nothing all along, then I think he has behaved disgracefully. If he did mean something at first, and then"—the speaker gasped—"changed his mind, he might at least have given some hint. He ought to have refused to stop here, of course."

"He did refuse," George Lovegrove faltered. This was really dreadful, far worse than anything he had anticipated—and he had not a notion what it was safe to say. "I do wish females' minds were a little less ingenious," he commented to himself. "They see such a lot which would never have entered my head, for instance."

"Still, Mr. Iglesias came," cried the belligerent Serena.

"Yes, I over-persuaded him. He was very unwilling, very so indeed, saying that staying out was altogether foreign to his practice. But I pointed out to him that you and the wife might feel rather mortified if he omitted to come, having taken such an interest in his illness and—"

"If you made use of my name, George, you took a great liberty."

"I am very distressed to hear you say that, Serena. Both the wife and I certainly supposed you wished him to come."

He looked imploringly at his spouse, asking support. But for once the large kindly countenance failed to beam responsive. A plaintive expression overspread its surface. Then the unhappy man stared despondently out into the misty morning sunshine, plastering down his shiny hair with a moist and shaky hand. Even the wife turned against him, making him feel an outcast at his own breakfast-table. He could have wept.

"I have been so very guarded throughout," Serena resumed, "that it is impossible you should have the slightest excuse for using my name. But, of course, if you have done so, my position is more than ever odious. There is nothing for me to do but to go. Fortunately I am going—and I am thankful. If I had followed my own inclinations, I should have gone long ago. Then I should have been spared all this, and nothing would have been said. Now all sorts of things may be said, because, of course, it must all look very odd. It shows how foolish it is to allow one's judgment to be overruled. I stayed entirely to oblige Rhoda. And I cannot but see I have been trifled with."

"No, no, Serena, not that—never that," her host cried distractedly. "If I have been in the wrong, I apologise from my heart. But trifling never entered my thoughts. How could it do so, with all the respect I have for you and Susan? I may have been clumsy, but I acted for the best."

"I am afraid I cannot agree," she retorted. "It is useless to apologise. I am sorry to tell you so, George, for I have trusted you until now; but I do feel, and I am afraid I always shall feel, I have been very unkindly treated by you and Rhoda."

She rose, rustling as she spoke, the parrot, meanwhile, leaving off preening its feathers, regarding her, its head very much on one side, with a wicked eye.

"No, please leave me to myself," she said. "I do not want anybody to help me, and if I do I shall ring for the maids. I want to compose myself before I go to Lady Samuelson's. After all this unpleasantness, it is much better for me to be alone."

"Good-bye, girlie, poor old girlie. Hi! p'liceman, bring a four-wheeler," shrieked the parrot, as Serena opened and closed the dining-room door, flapping wildly in the sunshine till the sand and seed husks on the floor of its cage arose and whirled upwards in a crazy little cloud.

George Lovegrove, who had risen to his feet, sank back into his chair, resting his elbows on the table and covering Ids face with his hands.

"I would rather have forfeited my pension," he murmured. "I would rather have lost a hundred pounds."

Then raising his head he gazed imploringly at his wife. And this time her tender heart could not resist the appeal. He had not been open with her, but she relented, giving him opportunity to retrieve his error. Moreover—but that naturally was a very minor consideration—she was bursting with curiosity.

"Georgie," she asked solemnly, "whatever did happen last night?"

"Mr. Iglesias met a lady friend. She sent for him to talk to her, in the lobby, between the acts," he answered, the red deepening in his clean fresh-coloured face.

"Not any of that designing Cedar Lodge lot?"

"Oh! dear no, not all," he replied, his childlike eyes full of gratitude. He blessed the magnanimity of the wife. But speedily embarrassment supervened. He found this subject singularly difficult to deal with. "Not at all of their class. I confess it did surprise me, for though I have always taken it for granted Dominic belonged to a higher circle by birth than that in which we have known him, I had no idea he had such aristocratic acquaintances. His looks and manner in public, last night, made him seem fitted for any company. Still, I was surprised."

"Did he not introduce you?"

"No. I cannot say he had a convenient opportunity, and the lady may not have wished it. I could fancy she might hold herself a little above us. But, between ourselves, I believe that was what so upset Serena."

"I am of opinion Mr. Iglesias is just as well without Serena," Mrs. Lovegrove declared. "I suppose she cannot help it, but her temper is sadly uncertain. I begin to fear she would be very exacting in marriage. But was the lady young, Georgie?"

The good man blushed furiously.

"Yes, under thirty, I should suppose, and very striking to look at. Serena had called my attention to her already. She thought her over-dressed. I am no judge of that, but I could see she was very beautiful."

"Oh! Georgie dear!" This in high protest. For the speaker belonged to that section of the British public in which puritanism is even yet deeply ingrained, with the dreary consequence that beauty, whether of person or in art, is suspect. To admit its existence trenches on immodesty; to speak of it openly is to skirt the edges of licence.

George Lovegrove, however, had developed unaccustomed boldness.

"So she was, my dear," he repeated, not squinting in the least for once. "She was beautiful, dark and splendid, with eyes that looked right through you, mocking and yet mournful. They made a noble couple, she and Dominic, notwithstanding the disparity of age. As they stood there together I felt honoured to see them both. And if Dominic Iglesias is to have friends with whom we are unacquainted—though I do not deny the thing hurt me a little at first—I am glad they should be so handsome and fine. It seems to me fitting, and as if he was in his true sphere at last."