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The Invader: A Novel

by Margaret L. Woods · English · Gutenberg #28162 · 455,401 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Invader: A Novel

Author: Margaret L. Woods


        
Release date: February 23, 2009 [eBook #28162]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/28162

Credits: Produced by Sankar Viswanathan, David Clarke, and the
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE INVADER: A NOVEL ***




Produced by Sankar Viswanathan, David Clarke, and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
(This file was produced from images generously made
available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)







                              The Invader

                                A NOVEL



                                   By

                           Margaret L. Woods





                          New York and London

                      Harper & Brothers Publishers

                                  1907




                 Copyright, 1907, by HARPER & BROTHERS.

                          Published May, 1907.

       *       *       *       *       *




TO

Hilda Greaves

AND THE DUMB COMPANIONS OF TAN-YR-ALLT
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED BY THEIR
GRATEFUL AND AFFECTIONATE
FRIEND

       *       *       *       *       *




THE INVADER

CHAPTER I


Dinner was over and the ladies had just risen, when the Professor had
begged to introduce them to the new-comer on his walls. The Invader, it
might almost have been called, this full-length, life-size portrait,
which, in the illumination of a lamp turned full upon it, seemed to take
possession of the small room, to dominate at the end of the polished-oak
table, where the light of shaded candles fell on old blue plates, old
Venetian glass, a bit of old Italian brocade, and chrysanthemums in a
china bowl coveted by collectors. Every detail spoke of the
connoisseurship, the refined and personal taste characteristic of Oxford
in the eighties. The authority on art put up his eye-glasses and
fingered his tiny forked beard uneasily.

"There's no doubt it's a good thing, Fletcher," he said, presently--"really
quite good. But it's too like Romney to be Raeburn, and too like Raeburn to
be Romney. You ought to be able to find out the painter, if, as you say,
it's a portrait of your own great-grandmother--"

"He did say so!" broke in Sanderson, exultantly. "He said it was an
ancestress. Fletcher, you're a vulgar fraud. You've got no ancestress.
You bought her. There's a sale-ticket still on the frame under the
projection at the right-hand lower corner. I saw it."

Sanderson was a small man and walked about perpetually, except when
taking food: sometimes then. He was a licensed insulter of his friends,
and now stood before the picture in a belligerent attitude. The
Professor stroked his amber beard and smiled down on Sanderson.

"True, O Sanderson; and at the same time untrue. I did buy the picture,
and the lady was my great-grandmother once, but she did not like the
position and soon gave it up. This picture must have been done after she
had given it up."

"Is this a conundrum or blather, invented to hide your ignominy in a
cloud of words?" asked Sanderson.

"It's a _hors d'oeuvre_ before the story," interposed Ian Stewart,
throwing back his tall dark head and looking up at the picture through
his eye-glasses, his handsome face alive with interest. "'Tak' awa' the
kickshaws,' Fletcher, 'and bring us the cauf.'"

The Professor gathered his full beard in one hand and smiled
deprecatingly.

"I don't know how the ladies will like my ex-great-grandmother's story.
It was a bit of a scandal at the time."

"Never mind, Mr. Fletcher," cried a young married woman, with a face
like a seraph, "we're all educated now, and scandal about a lady with
her waist under her arms becomes simply classical."

"Not so bad as that, Mrs. Shaw, I assure you," returned the Professor;
"but I dare say you all know as much as I do about my great-grandmother,
for she was the well-known Lady Hammerton."

There were sounds of interest and surprise, for most of the party knew
her name, and were curious to learn how she came to be Professor
Fletcher's great-grandmother. Mr. Fletcher explained:

"My great-grandfather was a distinguished professor in Edinburgh a
hundred years ago. When he was a widower of forty with a family, he was
silly enough to fall in love with a little miss of sixteen. He taught
her Latin and Greek--which was all very well--and married her, which was
distinctly unwise. She had one son--my grandfather--and then ran away
with an actor from London. After that she made a certain sensation on
the stage, but I suspect she was clever enough to see that her real
successes were personal ones; at all events, she made a good marriage as
soon as ever she got the chance. The Hammerton family naturally
objected. You'll find all about it in those papers which have come out
lately. I believe, ladies, they were almost as much scandalized by her
learning as by her morals."

"She told Sydney Smith years after, I think," observed Stewart, "that
she had to be a wit lest people should find out she was a blue. There's
a good deal about her in the Englefield _Memoirs_. She travelled
extraordinarily for a woman in those days, and most of the real
treasures at Hammerton House come from her collections."

"I thought they were nearly all burned in a great fire, and she was
burned trying to save them," said Mrs. Shaw.

"A good many were saved," returned Fletcher; "she had rushed back to
fetch a favorite bronze, was seen hurling it out of the window--and was
never seen again."

"She must have been a very remarkable woman," commented Stewart,
meditatively, his eyes still fixed on the picture.

"Know nothing about her myself," remarked Sanderson; "Stewart knows
something about everybody. It's sickening the way he spends his time
reading gossip and calling it history."

"Gossip's like many common things, interesting when fossilized,"
squeaked a little, white-haired, pink-faced old gentleman, like an
elderly cherub in dress-clothes. He had remained at the other end of the
room because he did not care for pictures. Now he toddled a little
nearer and every one made way for him with a peculiar respect, for he
was the Master of Durham, whose name was great in Oxford and also in the
world outside it. He looked up first at the pictured face and then at
Milly Flaxman, a young cousin of Fletcher's and a scholar of Ascham
Hall, who had taken her First in Mods, and was hoping to get one in
Greats. The Master liked young girls, but they had to be clever as well
as pleasing in appearance to attract his attention.

"It's very like Miss Flaxman," he squeaked.

Every one turned their eyes from the picture to Milly, whose pale cheeks
blushed a bright pink. The blush emphasized her resemblance to her
ancestress, whose brilliant complexion, however, hinted at rouge.
Milly's soft hair was amber-colored, like that of the lady in the
picture, but it was strained back from her face and twisted in a minute
knot on the nape of her neck. That was the way in which her aunt Lady
Thomson, whose example she desired to follow in all things, did her
hair. The long, clearly drawn eyebrows, dark in comparison with the
amber hair, the turquoise blue eyes, the mouth of the pictured lady were
curiously reproduced in Milly Flaxman. Possibly her figure may have been
designed by nature to be as slight and supple, yet rounded, as that of
the white-robed, gray-scarfed lady above there. But something or some
one had intervened, and Milly looked stiff and shapeless in a green
velveteen frock, scooped out vaguely around her white young throat and
gathered in clumsy folds under a liberty silk sash.

Mrs. Shaw cried out enraptured at the interesting resemblance which had
escaped them all, to be instantly caught by the elderly cherub in the
background, who did not care about art, while the Professor explained
that both Milly's parents were, like himself, great-grandchildren of
Lady Hammerton. The seraph now fell upon Milly, too shy to resist, had
out her hair-pins in a trice and fingered the fluffy hair till it made
an aureole around her face. Then by some conjuring trick producing a
gauzy white scarf, Mrs. Shaw twisted it about the girl's head, in
imitation of the lady on the wall, who had just such a scarf, but with a
tiny embroidered border of scarlet, twisted turban-wise and floating
behind.

"There!" she cried, pushing the feebly protesting Milly into the full
light of the lamp the Professor was holding, "allow me to present to you
the new Lady Hammerton!"

There was a moment of wondering silence. Milly's pulses beat, for she
felt Ian Stewart's eyes upon her. Neither he nor any one else there had
ever quite realized before what capacities for beauty lay hid in the
subdued young face of Milly Flaxman. She had nothing indeed of the
charm, at once subtle and challenging, of the lady above there. She,
with one hand on the gold head of a tall cane, looking back, seemed to
dare unseen adorers to follow her into a magic, perhaps a fatal
fairyland of mountain and waterfall and cloud; a land whose dim mists
and silver gleams seemed to echo the gray and the white of her floating
garments, its autumn leaves to catch a faint reflection from her hair,
while far off its sky showed a thin line of sunset, red like the border
of her veil. Milly's soft cheeks and lips were flushed, her eyes bright
with a mixture of very innocent emotions, as she stood with every one's
eyes, including Ian Stewart's, upon her.

But in a minute the Master took up Mrs. Shaw's remark.

"No," he said, emphatically; "not a new Lady Hammerton; only a rather
new Miss Flaxman; and that, I assure you, is something very preferable."

"I'm quite sure the Master knows something dreadful about your
great-grandmother, Mr. Fletcher," laughed Mrs. Shaw.

"I think we'd better go before he tells it," interposed Mrs. Fletcher,
who saw that Milly was feeling shy.

When the ladies had left, the men reseated themselves at the table and
there was a pause. Everyone waited for the Master, who seemed meditating
speech.

"My mother," he said--and somehow they all felt startled to learn the
fact that the Master had had a mother--"my mother knew Lady Hammerton in
the twenties. She was often at Bath."

The thin, staccato voice broke off abruptly, and three out of the five
other men present being the Master's pupils, remained silent, knowing he
had not finished. But Mr. Toovey, a young don overflowing with mild
intelligence, exclaimed, deferentially:

"Really, Master! Really! How extremely interesting! Now do please tell
us a great deal about Lady Hammerton."

The Master took no notice whatever of Toovey. He sat about a minute
longer in his familiar posture, looking before him, his little round
hands on his little round knees. Then he said:

"She was a raddled woman."

And his pupils knew he had finished speaking. What he had said was
disappointingly little, but uttered in that strange high voice of his,
it contained an infinite deal more than appeared on the face of it. A
whole discreditable past seemed to emerge from that one word "raddled."
Ian Stewart, to whose imagination the woman in the picture made a
strange appeal, now broke a lance with the Master on her account.

"She may have been raddled, Master," he said, "but she must have been
very remarkable and charming too. Hammerton himself was no fool, yet he
adored her to the last."

The Master seemed to hope some one else would speak; but finding that no
one did, he uttered again:

"Men often adore bad wives. That does not make them good ones."

Stewart tossed a rebel lock of raven black hair back from his forehead.

"Pardon me, Master, it does make them good wives for those men."

"Oh, surely not good for their higher natures!" protested Toovey,
fervently.

The Master took three deliberate sips of port wine.

"I think, Stewart, we are discussing matters we know very little about,"
he said, in a particularly high, dry voice; and every one felt that the
discussion was closed. Then he turned to Sanderson and made some remark
about a house which Sanderson's College, of which he was junior bursar,
was selling to Durham.

Fletcher, the only married man present, mourned inwardly over his own
masculine stupidity. He felt sure that if his wife had been there she
would have gently led Stewart's mind through these paradoxical
matrimonial fancies, to dwell on another picture; a picture of marriage
with a nice girl almost as pretty as Lady Hammerton, a good girl who
shared his tastes, and, above all, who adored him. David Fletcher felt
himself pitiably unequal to the task, although he was as anxious as his
wife was that Stewart should marry Milly. Did not all their friends wish
it? It seemed to them that there could not be a more suitable couple. If
Milly was working so terribly hard to get her First in Greats, it was
largely because Mr. Stewart was one of her tutors and she knew he
thought a good deal of success in the Schools.

There could be no doubt about Milly Flaxman's goodness; in fact, some of
the girls at Ascham complained that it "slopped over." Her clothes were
made on hygienic principles which she treated as a branch of morals, and
she often refused to offer the small change of polite society because it
weighed somewhat light in the scales of truth. But these were foibles
that the young people's friends were sure Ian Stewart would never
notice. As to him, although only four and thirty, he was already a
distinguished man. A scholar, a philosopher, and an archæologist, he had
also imagination and a sense of style. He had written a brilliant book
on Greek life at a particular period, which had brought him a reputation
among the learned and also found readers in the educated public. His
disposition was sweet, his character unusually high, judged even by the
standard of the academic world, which has a higher standard than most.
Obviously he would make an excellent husband; and equally obviously, as
he had no near relations and his health was delicate, it would be a
capital thing for him to have a home of his own and a devoted wife to
look after him. Their income would be small, but not smaller than that
of most young couples in Oxford, who contrived, nevertheless, to live
refined and pleasant lives and to be well-considered in a society where
money positively did not count.

But if Fletcher did not succeed in forwarding this matrimonial scheme in
the dining-room, his wife succeeded no better when the gentlemen came
into the drawing-room. She rose from a sofa in the corner, leaving Milly
seated there; but Mr. Toovey made his way straight to Miss Flaxman,
without a glance to right or left, and bending over her before he seated
himself at her side, fixed upon her a patronizing, a possessive smile
which would have made some girls long for a barbarous freedom in the
matter of face-slapping. But Milly Flaxman was meek. She took Archibald
Toovey's seriousness for depth, and as his attentions had become
unmistakable, had several times lain awake at night tormenting herself
as to whether her behavior towards him was or was not right. Accordingly
she submitted to being monopolized by Mr. Toovey, while Ian Stewart
turned away and made himself pleasant to an unattractive lady-visitor of
the Fletchers', who looked shy and left-alone. When Mrs. Fletcher tried
to effect a change of partners, Ian explained that he found himself
unexpectedly obliged to attend a College meeting at ten o'clock. In a
place where there are no offices to close and business engagements are
liable to crop up at any time in the evening, there was no need for
extravagance of apology for this early departure.

He changed his shoes in the narrow hall and put on his seedy-looking
dark overcoat, quite unconscious that Mrs. Fletcher had had the collar
mended since he had taken it off. Then he went out into the damp
November night, unlit by moon or star. But to Stewart the darkness of
night, on whatever corner of earth he might chance to find it descended,
remained always a romantic, mysterious thing, setting his imagination
free among visionary possibilities, without form, but not for that void.
The road between the railing of the parks and the row of old lopped
elms, was ill-lighted by the meagre flame of a few gas-lamps and hardly
cheered by the smothered glow of the small prison-like windows of Keble,
glimmering through the bare trees. There was not a sound near, except
the occasional drip of slow-collecting dews from the branches of the old
elms. Afar, too, many would have said there was not a sound; but there
was, and Ian's ear was attuned to catch it. The immense inarticulate
whisper of night came to him. It came to him from the deserted parks,
from the distant Cherwell flowing through its willow-roots and
osier-islands, from the flat meadow-country beyond, stretching away to
the coppices of the low boundary hills. It was a voice made up of many
whispers, each imperceptible, or almost imperceptible in itself; whisper
of water and dry reeds, of broken twigs and dry leaves fluttering to the
ground, of heaped dead leaves or coarse winter grass, stirring in some
slight movement of the air. It seemed to his imagination as though under
the darkness, in the loneliness of night, the man-mastered world must be
secretly transformed, returned to its primal freedom; and that could he
go forth into it alone, he would find it quite different from anything
familiar to him, and might meet with something, he knew not what,
secret, strange, and perhaps terrible.

Such fancies, though less crystallized than they must needs be by words,
floated in the penumbra of his mind, coming to him perhaps with the
blood of remote Highland ancestors, children of mountains and mist. His
reasonable self was perfectly aware that should he go, he would find
nothing in the open fields at that hour except a sleeping cow or two,
and would return wet as to the legs, and developing a severe cold for
the morning. But he heard these far-off whisperings of the night
playing, as it were, a mysterious "ground" to his thoughts of Milly
Flaxman. The least fatuous of men, he had yet been obliged to see that
his friends in general and the Fletchers in particular, wished him to
marry Milly, and that the girl herself hung upon his words with a
tremulous sensitivity even greater than the enthusiastic female student
usually exhibits towards those of her lecturer. In the abstract he
intended to marry; for he did not desire to be left an old bachelor in
college. He had been waiting for the great experience of falling in
love, and somehow it had never come to him. There were probably numbers
of people to whom it never did come. Should he now give up all hope of
it, and make a marriage of reason and of obligingness, such as his
marriage with Miss Flaxman would assuredly be? Thank Heaven! as her
tutor he could not possibly propose to her till she had got through the
Schools, so there were more than six months in which to consider the
question.

And while he communed thus with himself, the mysterious whispers of the
night came nearer to him, in the blackness of garden trees, ancient
trees of College gardens brooding alone, whispering alone through the
dark hours, of that current of young life which is still flowing past
them; how for hundreds of years it has always been flowing, and always
passing, passing, passing so quickly to the great silent sea of death
and oblivion, to the dark night whose silence is only sometimes stirred
by vague whispers, anxious yet faint, dying upon the ear before the
sense can seize them.




CHAPTER II


Parties in Oxford always break up early, and Milly had a good excuse for
carrying her aching, disappointed heart back to Ascham at ten o'clock,
for every one knew she was working hard. Too hard, Mr. Fletcher said,
looking concernedly at her heavy eyes, mottled complexion, and the
little crumples which were beginning to come in her low white forehead.
Her cousins, however, had more than a suspicion that these marks of care
and woe were not altogether due to her work, but that Ian Stewart was
accountable for most of them.

The Professor escorted her to the gates of the Ladies' College; but she
walked down the dark drive alone, mindful of familiar puddles, and
hearing nothing of those mysterious whispers of night which in Ian
Stewart's ears had breathed a "ground" to his troubled thoughts of her.

She mounted the stairs to her room at the top of the house. It was an
extremely neat room, and by day, when the bed was disguised as a sofa,
and the washstand closed, there was nothing to reveal that it served as
a bedroom, although a tarnished old mirror hung in a dark corner. The
oak table and pair of brass candlesticks upon it were kept in shining
order by Milly's own zealous hands.

Milly found her books open at the right place and her writing materials
ready to hand. In a very few minutes her outer garments and simple
ornaments were put away, and clothed in a clean but shrunk and faded
blue dressing-gown, she sat down to work. The work was Aristotle's
_Ethics_, and she was going through it for the second time, amplifying
her notes. But this second time the Greek seemed more difficult, the
philosophic argument more intricate than ever. She had had very little
sleep for weeks, and her head ached in a queer way as though something
inside it were strained very tight. It was plain that she had come to
the end of her powers of work for the present--and she had calculated
that only by not wasting a day, except for a week's holiday at Easter,
could she get through all that had to be done before the Schools!

She put Aristotle away and opened Mommsen, but even to that she could
not give her attention. Her thoughts returned to the bitter
disappointment which the evening had brought. Ian Stewart had been next
her at dinner, but even then he had talked to her rather less than to
Mrs. Shaw. Afterwards--well, perhaps it was only what she deserved for
not making it plain to poor Mr. Toovey that she could never return his
feelings. And now the First, which she had looked to as a thing that
would set her nearer the level of her idol, was dropping below the
horizon of the possible. Aunt Beatrice always said--and she was
right--that tears were not, as people pretended, a help and solace in
trouble. They merely took the starch out of you and left you a poor
soaked, limp creature, unfit to face the hard facts of life. But
sometimes tears will lie heavy and scalding as molten lead in the brain,
until at length they force their way through to the light. And Milly
after blowing her nose a good deal, as she mechanically turned the pages
of Mommsen, at length laid her arms on the book and transferred her
handkerchief to her eyes. But she tried to look as though she were
reading when Flora Timson came in.

"At it again, M.! You know you're simply working yourself stupid."

Thus speaking, Miss Timson, known to her intimates at Ascham as "Tims,"
wagged sagely her very peculiar head. A crimson silk handkerchief was
tied around it, turban-wise, and no vestige of hair escaped from
beneath. There was in fact none to escape. Tims's sallow, comic little
face had neither eyebrows nor eyelashes on it, and her small figure was
not of a quality to triumph over the obvious disadvantages of a tight
black cloth dress with bright buttons, reminiscent of a page's suit.

Milly pushed the candles farther away and looked up.

"I was wanting to see you, Tims. Do tell me whether you managed to get
out of Miss Walker what Mr. Stewart said about my chances of a First."

Tims pushed her silk turban still higher up on her forehead.

"I can always humbug Miss Walker and make her say lots of indiscreet
things," Tims returned, with labored diplomacy. "But I don't repeat
them--at least, not invariably."

There was a further argument on the point, which ended by Milly shedding
tears and imploring to be told the worst.

Tims yielded.

"Stewart said your scholarship was A 1, but he was afraid you wouldn't
get your First in Greats. He said you had a lot of difficulty in
expressing yourself and didn't seem to get the lead of their philosophy
and stuff--and--and generally wanted cleverness."

"He said that?" asked Milly, in a low, sombre voice, speaking as though
to herself. "Well, I suppose it's better for me to know--not to go on
hoping, and hoping, and hoping. It means less misery in the end, no
doubt."

There was such a depth of despair in her face and voice that Tims was
appalled at the consequence of her own revelation. She paced the room in
agitation, alternately uttering incoherent abuse of her friend's folly
and suggesting that she should at once abandon the ungrateful School of
_Literæ Humaniores_ and devote herself like Tims, to the joys of
experimental chemistry and the pleasures of practical anatomy.

Meantime, Milly sat silent, one hand supporting her chin, the other
playing with a pencil.

At length Tims, taking hold of Milly under the arms, advised her to "go
to bed and sleep it off."

Milly rose dully and sat on the edge of her bed, while Tims awkwardly
removed the hair-pins which Mrs. Shaw had so deftly put in. But as she
was laying them on the little dressing-table, Milly suddenly flung
herself down on the bed and lay there a twisted heap of blue flannel,
her face buried in the pillows, her whole body shaken by a paroxysm of
sobs. Tims supposed that this might be a good thing for Milly; but for
herself it created an awkward situation. Her soothing remarks fell flat,
while to go away and leave her friend in this condition would seem
brutal. She sat down to "wait till the clouds rolled by," as she phrased
it. But twenty minutes passed and still the clouds did not roll by.

"Look here, M." she said, argumentatively, standing by the bed. "You're
in hysterics. That's what's the matter with you."

"I know I am," came in tones of muffled despair from the pillow.

"Well!" Tims was very stern and accented her words heavily,
"then--pull--yourself--together--dear girl. Sit up!"

Milly sat up, pressed her handkerchief over her face, and held her
breath. For a minute all was quiet; then another violent sob forced a
passage.

"It's no use, Tims," she gasped. "I cannot--cannot--stop. Oh, what
would--!" She was going to say, "What would Aunt Beatrice think of me if
she knew how I was giving way!" but a fresh flood of tears suppressed
her speech. "My head's so bad! Such a splitting headache!"

Tims tried scolding, slapping, a cold sponge, every remedy inexperience
could suggest, but the hysterical weeping could not be checked.

"Look here, old girl," she said at length, "I know how I can stop you,
but I don't believe you'll let me do it."

"No, not that, Tims! You know Miss Burt doesn't--"

"Doesn't approve. Of course not. Perhaps you think old B. would approve
of the way you're going on now. Ha! Would she!"

The sarcasm caused a new and alarming outburst. But finally, past all
respect for Miss Burt, and even for Lady Thomson herself, Milly
consented to submit to any remedy that Tims might choose to try.

She was assisted hurriedly to undress and put to bed. Tims knew the
whereabouts of the prize-medal which Milly had won at school, and
placing the bright silver disk in her hand, directed her to fix her eyes
upon it. Seated on her heels on the patient's bed, her crimson turban
low on her forehead, her face screwed into intent wrinkles, Tims began
passing her slight hands slowly before Milly's face.

The long slender fingers played about the girl's fair head, sometimes
pressed lightly upon her forehead, sometimes passed through her fluffy
hair, as it lay spread on the pillow about her like an amber cloud.

"Don't cry, M.," Tims began repeating in a soft, monotonous voice.
"You've got nothing to cry about; your head doesn't ache now. Don't
cry."

At first it was only by a strong effort that Milly could keep her
tear-blinded eyes fixed on the bright medal before her; but soon they
became chained to it, as by some attractive force. The shining disk
seemed to grow smaller, brighter, to recede imperceptibly till it was a
point of light somewhere a long way off, and with it all the sorrows and
agitations of her mind seemed also to recede into a dim distance, where
she was still aware of them, yet as though they were some one else's
sorrows and agitations, hardly at all concerning her. The aching tension
of her brain was relaxed and she felt as though she were drowning
without pain or struggle, gently floating down, down through a green
abyss of water, always seeing that distant light, showing as the sun
might show, seen from the depths of the sea.

Before a quarter of an hour had passed, her sobs ceased in sighing
breaths, the breaths became regular and normal, the whole face slackened
and smoothed itself out. Tims changed the burden of her song.

"Go to sleep, Milly. What you want is a good long sleep. Go to sleep,
Milly."

Milly was sinking down upon the pillow, breathing the calm breath of
deep, refreshing slumber. Tims still crouched upon the bed, chanting her
monotonous song and contemplating her work. At length she slipped off,
conscious of pins-and-needles in her legs, and as she withdrew, Milly
with a sudden motion stretched her body out in the white bed, as
straight and still almost as that of the dead. The movement was
mechanical, but it gave a momentary check to Tims's triumph. She leaned
over her patient and began once more the crooning song.

"Go to sleep, M.! What you want is a good long sleep. Go to sleep,
Milly!"

But presently she ceased her song, for it was evident that Milly Flaxman
had indeed gone very sound asleep.




CHAPTER III


Tims was proud of the combined style and economy of her dress. She was
constantly discovering and revealing to an unappreciative world the
existence of superb tailors who made amazingly cheap dresses. For two
years she had been vainly advising her friends to go to the man who had
made her the frock she still wore for morning; a skirt and coat of tweed
with a large green check in it, a green waistcoat with gilt buttons, and
green gaiters to match. In this costume and coiffed with a man's wig, of
the vague color peculiar to such articles, Tims came down at her usual
hour, prepared to ask Milly what she thought of hypnotism now. But there
was no Milly over whom to enjoy this petty triumph. She climbed to the
top story as soon as breakfast was over, and entering Milly's room,
found her patient still sleeping soundly, low and straight in the bed,
just as she had been the preceding night. She was breathing regularly
and her face looked peaceful, although her eyes were still stained with
tears. The servant came in as Tims was looking at her.

"I've tried to wake Miss Flaxman, miss," she said. "She's always very
particular as I should wake her, but she was that sound asleep this
morning, I 'adn't the 'eart to go on talking. Poor young lady! I expect
she's pretty well wore out, working away at her books, early and late,
the way she does."

"Better leave her alone, Emma," agreed Tims. "I'll let Miss Burt know
about it."

Miss Burt was glad to hear Milly Flaxman was oversleeping herself. She
had not been satisfied with the girl's appearance of late, and feared
Milly worked too hard and had bad nights.

Tims had to go out at ten o'clock and did not return until
luncheon-time. She went up to Milly's room and knocked at the door. As
before, there was no answer. She went in and saw the girl still sound
asleep, straight and motionless in the bed. Her appearance was so
healthy and natural that it was absurd to feel uneasy at the length of
her slumber, yet remembering the triumph of hypnotism, Tims did feel a
little uneasy. She spoke to Miss Burt again about Milly's prolonged
sleep, but Miss Burt was not inclined to be anxious. She had strictly
forbidden Tims to hypnotize--or as she called it, mesmerize--any one in
the house, so that Tims said no more on the subject. She was working at
the Museum in the early part of the afternoon, only leaving it when the
light began to fail. But after work she went straight back to Ascham.
Milly was still asleep, but she had slightly shifted her position, and
altogether there was something about her aspect which suggested a
slumber less profound than before. Tims leaned over her and spoke
softly:

"Wake up, M., wake up! You've been asleep quite long enough."

Milly's body twitched a little. A responsive flicker which was almost a
convulsion, passed over her face; but she did not awake. It was evident,
however, that her spirit was gradually floating up to the surface from
the depths of oblivion in which it had been submerged. Tims took off her
Tam-o'-Shanter and ulster, and revealed in the simple elegance of the
tweed frock with green waistcoat and gaiters, put the kettle on the
fire. Then she went down-stairs to fetch some bread and butter and an
egg, wherewith to feed the patient when she awoke.

She had not long left the room when the slumberer's eyes opened
gradually and stared with the fixity of semi-consciousness at a stem of
blossoming jessamine in the wall-paper. Then she slowly stretched her
arms above her head until some inches of wrist, slight and round and
white, emerged from the strictly plain night-gown sleeve. So she lay,
till suddenly, almost with a start, she pulled herself up and looked
about her. The gaze of her wide-open eyes travelled questioningly around
the quiet-toned room which two windows at right angles to each other
still kept light with the reflection of a yellow winter sunset. She
pushed the bedclothes down, dropped first one bare white foot, then the
other to the ground and looked doubtfully at a pair of worn felt
slippers which were placed beside the bed, before slipping her feet into
them. With the same air as of one assuming garments which do not belong
to her, she put on the faded blue flannel dressing-gown. Then she walked
to the southern window. None of the glories of Oxford were visible from
it; only the bare branches of trees through which appeared a huddle of
somewhat sordid looking roofs and the unimposing spire of St. Aloysius.
With the same air, questioning yet as in a dream, she turned to the
western window, which was open. Below, in its wintry dulness, lay the
garden of the College, bounded by an old gray wall which divided it from
the straggling street; beyond that, a mass of slate roofs. But a certain
glory was on the slate roofs and all the garden that was not in shadow.
For away over Wytham, where the blue vapor floated in the folds of the
hills, blending imperceptibly with the deep brown of the leafless woods,
sunset had lifted a wide curtain of cloud and showed between the gloom
of heaven and earth, a long straight pool of yellow light.

She leaned out of the window. A mild fresh air which seemed to be
pouring over the earth through that rift in heaven which the sunset had
made, breathed freshly on her face and the yellow light shone on her
amber hair, which lay on her shoulders about the length of the hair of
an angel in some old Florentine picture.

Miss Burt in galoshes and with a wrap over her head was coming up the
garden. She caught sight of that vision of gold and pale blue in the
window and smiled and waved her hand to Milly Flaxman. The vision
withdrew, trembling slightly as though with cold, and closed the
window.

Tims came in, carrying a boiled egg and a plate of bread and butter.
Tims put down the egg-cup and the plate on the table before she relaxed
the wrinkle of carefulness and grinned triumphantly at her patient.

"Well, old girl," she asked; "what do you say to hypnotism now? Put
_you_ to sleep, right enough, anyhow. Know what time it is?"

The awakened sleeper made a few steps forward, leaned her hands on the
table, on the other side of which Tims stood, and gazed upon her with
startling intentness. Then she began to speak in a rapid, urgent voice.
Her words were in themselves ordinary and distinct, yet what she said
was entirely incomprehensible, a nightmare of speech, as though some
talking-machine had gone wrong and was pouring out a miscellaneous stock
of verbs, nouns, adjectives and the rest without meaning or cohesion.
Certain words reappeared with frequency, but Tims had a feeling that the
speaker did not attach their usual meaning to them. This travesty of
language went on for what appeared to the transfixed and terrified
listener quite a long time. At length the serious, almost tragic,
babbler, meeting with no response save the staring horror of Tims's too
expressive countenance, ended with a supplicating smile and a glance
which contrived to be charged at once with pathos and coquetry. This
smile, this look, were so totally unlike any expression which Tims had
ever seen on Milly's countenance that they heightened her feeling of
nightmare. But she pulled herself together and determined to show
presence of mind. She had already placed a basket-chair by the fire
ready for her patient, and now gently but firmly led Milly to it.

"Sit down, Milly," she said--and the use of her friend's proper name
showed that she felt the occasion to be serious--"and don't speak again
till you've had some tea. Your head will be clearer presently, it's a
bit confused now, you know."

The stranger Milly, still so unlike the Milly of Tims's intimacy, far
from exerting the unnatural strength of a maniac, passively permitted
herself to be placed in the chair and listened to what Tims was saying
with the puzzled intentness of a child or a foreigner, trying to
understand. She laid her head back in its little cloud of amber hair,
and looked up at Tims, who, frowning portentously, once more with lifted
finger enjoined silence. Tims then concealing her agitation behind a
cupboard-door, reached down the tea-things. By some strange accident the
methodical Milly's teapot was absent from its place; a phenomenon for
which Tims was thankful, as it imposed upon her the necessity of leaving
her patient for a few minutes. Shaking her finger again at Milly still
more emphatically, she went out, and locked the door behind her. After a
moment's thought, she reluctantly decided to report the matter to Miss
Burt. But Miss Burt was closeted with the treasurer and an architect
from London, and was on no account to be disturbed. So Tims went up to
her own room and rapidly revolved the situation. She was certain that
Milly was not physically ill; on the contrary, she looked much better
than she had looked on the previous day. This curious affection of the
speech-memory might be hysterical, as her sobbing the night before had
been, or it might be connected with some little failure of circulation
in the brain; an explanation, perhaps, pointed to by the extraordinary
length of her sleep. Anyhow, Tims felt sceptical as to a doctor being of
any use.

She went to her cupboard to take out her own teapot, and her eye fell
upon a small medicine bottle marked "Brandy." Milly was a convinced
teetotaller; all the more reason, thought Tims, why a dose of alcohol
should give her nerves and circulation a fillip, only she must not know
of it, or she would certainly refuse the remedy.

Pocketing the bottle and flourishing the teapot, Tims mounted again to
Milly's room. Her patient, who had spent the time wandering about the
room and examining everything in it, as well as she could in the
fast-falling twilight, resumed her position in the chair as soon as she
heard a step in the passage, and greeted her returning keeper with an
attractive smile. Tims uttering words of commendation, slyly poured some
brandy into one of the large teacups before lighting the candles.

"Now, my girl," she said, when she had made the tea, "drink this, and
you'll feel better."

Milly leaned forward, her round chin on her hand, and looked intently at
the tea-service and at the proffered cup. Then she suddenly raised her
head, clapped her hands softly, and cried in a tone of delighted
discovery, "Tea!"

"Excuse me," she added, taking the cup with a little bow; and in two
seconds had helped herself to three lumps of sugar. Tims was surprised,
for Milly never took sugar in her tea.

"That's right, M., you're going along well!" cried Tims, standing on the
hearth-rug, with one hand under her short coat-tails, while she gulped
her own tea, and ate two pieces of bread and butter put together. Milly
ate hers and drank her tea daintily, looking meanwhile at her companion
with wonder which gradually gave way to amusement. At length leaning
forward with a dimpling smile, she interrogated very politely and quite
lucidly.

"Pardon me, sir, you are--? Ah, the doctor, no doubt! My poor head, you
see!" and she drew her fingers across her forehead.

Tims started, and grabbed her wig, as was her wont in moments of
agitation. She stood transfixed, the teacup at a dangerous angle in her
extended hand.

"Good God!" she ejaculated. "You are mad and no mistake, my poor old
girl."

The "old girl" made a supreme effort to contain herself, and then burst
into a pretty, rippling laugh in which there was nothing familiar to
Tims's ear. She rose from her chair vivaciously and took the cup from
Tims's hand, to deposit it in safety on the chimney piece.

"How silly I was!" she cried, regarding Tims sparklingly. "Do you know I
was not quite sure whether you were a man or a woman. Of course I see
now, and I'm so glad. I do like men, you know, so much better than
women."

"Milly," retorted Tims, sternly, settling her wig. "You are mad, you
need not be bad as well. But it's my own fault for giving you that
brandy. You know as well as I do that I hate men--nasty, selfish,
guzzling, conceited, guffawing brutes! I never wanted to speak to a man
in my life, except in the way of business."

Milly waved her amber head gracefully for a moment as though at a loss,
then returned playfully, "That must be because the women spoil you so."

Tims smiled sardonically; but regaining her sense of the situation, out
of which she had been momentarily shocked, applied herself to the
problem of calling back poor Milly's wandering mind.

"Sit down, my girl," she said, abruptly, putting her arm around Milly's
body, so soft and slender in the scanty folds of the blue dressing-gown.
Milly obeyed precipitately. Then drawing a small chair close to her,
Tims said in gentle tones which could hardly have been recognized as
hers:

"M., darling, do you know where you are?"

Milly turned on her a face from which the unnatural vivacity had fallen
like a mask; the appealing face of a poor lost child.

"Am I--am I--in a _maison de santé_?" she asked tremulously, fixing her
blue eyes on Tims, full of piteous anxiety.

"A lunatic asylum? Certainly not," replied Tims. "Now don't begin
crying again, old girl. That's how the trouble began."

"Was it?" asked Milly, dreamily. "I thought it was--" she paused,
frowning before her in the air, as though trying to pursue with her
bodily vision some recollection which had flickered across her
consciousness only to disappear.

"Well, never mind that now," said Tims, hastily; "get your bearings
right first. You're in Ascham College."

"A College!" repeated Milly vaguely, but in a moment her face
brightened, "I know. A place of learning where they have professors and
things. Are you a professor?"

"No, I'm a student. So are you."

Milly looked fixedly at Tims, then smiled a melancholy smile. "I see,"
she said, "we're both studying--medicine--medicine for the mind." She
stood up, locked her hands behind her head in her soft hair and wailed
miserably. "Oh, why won't some kind person come and tell me where I am,
and what I was before I came here?"

Tears of wounded feelings sprang to Tims's eyes. "Milly, my beauty!" she
cried despairingly, "I'm trying to be kind to you and tell you
everything you want to know. Your name is Mildred Flaxman and you used
to live in Oxford here, but now all your people have gone to Australia
because your father's got a deanery there."

"Have they left me here, mad and by myself?" asked Milly; "have I no one
to look after me, no one to give me a home?"

"I suppose Lady Thomson or the Fletchers would," returned Tims, "but you
haven't wanted one. You've been quite happy at Ascham. Do try and
remember. Can't you remember getting your First in Mods. and how you've
been working to get one in Greats? Your brain's been right enough until
to-day, old girl, and it will be again. I expect it's a case of collapse
of memory from overwork. Things will come back to you soon and I'll help
you all I can. Do try and recollect me--Tims." There was an unmistakable
choke in Tims's voice. "We have been such chums. The others are all
pretty nasty to me sometimes--they seem to think I'm a grinning, wooden
Aunt Sally, stuck up for them to shy jokes at. But you've never once
been nasty to me, M., and there's precious few things I wouldn't do to
help you. So don't go talking to me as though there weren't any one in
the world who cared a brass farthing about you."

"I'm sure I'm most thankful to find I have got some one here who cares
about me," returned Milly, meekly, passing her hand across her eyes for
lack of a handkerchief. "You see, it's dreadful for me to be like this.
I seem to know what things are, and yet I don't know. A little while ago
it seemed to me I was just going to remember something--something
different from what you've told me. But now it's all gone again. Oh,
please give me a handkerchief!"

Tims opened one of Milly's tidy drawers and sought for a handkerchief.
When she had found it, Milly was standing before the high
chimney-piece, over which hung a long, low mirror about a foot wide and
divided into three parts by miniature pilasters of tarnished gilt. The
mirror, too, was tarnished here and there, but it had been a good glass
and showed undistorted the blue Delft jars on the mantel-shelf, glimpses
of flickering firelight in the room, amber hair and the tear-bedewed
roses of a flushed young face. Suddenly Milly thrust the jars aside,
seized the candle from the table, and, holding it near her face, looked
intently, anxiously in the glass. The anxiety vanished in a moment, but
not the intentness. She went on looking. Tims had always perceived
Milly's beauty--which had an odd way of slipping through the world
unobserved--but had never seen her look so lovely as now, her eyes wide
and brilliant, and her upper lip curved rosily over a shining glimpse of
her white teeth.

Beauty had an extraordinary fascination for Tims, poor step-child of
nature! Now she stood looking at the reflection of Milly without
noticing how in the background her own strange, wizened face peered dim
and grotesque from the tarnished mirror, like the picture of a witch or
a goblin behind the fair semblance of some princess in a fairy tale.

"I do remember myself partly," said Milly, doubtfully; "and yet--somehow
not quite. I suppose I shall remember you and this queer place soon, if
they don't put me into a mad-house at once."

"They sha'n't," said Tims, decisively. "Trust to me, M., and I'll see
you through. But I'm afraid you'll have to give up all thought of your
First."

"My what," asked Milly, turning round inquiringly.

"Your First Class, your place, you know, in the Final Honors School,
Lit. Hum., the biggest examination of the lot."

"Do I want it very much, my First?"

"Want it? I should just think you do want it!"

Milly stared at the fire for a minute, warming one foot before she spoke
again. Then:

"How funny of me!" she observed, meditatively.




CHAPTER IV


Tims's programme happened to be full on the following day, so that it
was half-past twelve before she knocked at Milly's door and was
admitted. Milly stood in the middle of the room in an attitude of
energy, with her small wardrobe lying about her on the floor in
ignominious heaps.

"Tell me, Tims," said Milly, after the first inquiries, "are those
positively all the clothes I possess?"

"Of course they are, M. What do you want with more?"

"Are they in the fashion?" asked Milly, anxiously.

Tims stared.

"Fashion! Good Lord, M.! What does it matter whether you look the same
as every fool in the street or not?"

"Oh, Tims!" cried Milly, laughing that pretty rippling laugh so strange
in Tims's ears. "I was quite right when I made a mistake, you're just
like a man. All the better. But you can't expect me not to care a bit
about my clothes like you, you really can't."

Tims drew herself up.

"You're wrong, my girl, I'm a deal fonder of frocks than you are. I
always think," she added, looking before her dreamily, "that I was
meant to be a very good dresser, only I was brought up too economical."
Generally speaking, when Tims had uttered one of her deepest and truest
feelings, she would glance around, suddenly alert and suspicious to
surprise the twinkle in her auditor's eye. But in the clear blue of
Milly Flaxman's quiet eyes, she had ceased to look for that tormenting
twinkle, that spark which seemed destined to dance about her from the
cradle to the grave.

Presently she found herself hanging up Milly's clothes while Milly paid
no attention; for she alternately stood before the glass in the dark
corner, and kneeled on the hearth-rug, curling-tongs in hand. And the
hair, the silky soft amber hair, which could be twisted into a tiny ball
or fluffed into a golden fleece at will, was being tossed up and pulled
down, combed here and brushed there, altogether handled with a zeal and
patience to which it had been a stranger since the days when it had been
the pride of the nursery. Tims the untidy, as one in a dream, went on
tidying the room she was accustomed to see so immaculate.

"There!" cried Milly, turning, "that's how I wear it, isn't it?"

"Good Lord, no!" exclaimed Tims, contemplating the transformed Milly.
"It suits you, M., in a way, but it looks queer too. The others will all
be hooting if you go down-stairs like that."

Milly plumped into a chair irritably.

"How ever am I to know how I did my hair if I can't remember? Please do
it for me."

Tims smiled sardonically.

"I'll lend you my hair," she said; "the second best. But _do_ your hair!
You really are as mad as a hatter."

Milly shrugged her shoulders.

"You can't? Then I keep it like this," she said.

An argument ensued. Tims left the room to try and find a photograph of
Milly as she had been.

When she returned she found her friend standing in absorbed
contemplation of a book in her hand.

"This is Greek, isn't it?" she asked, holding it up. Her face wore a
little frown as of strained attention.

"Right you are," shrieked Tims in accents of relief. "Greek it is. Can
you read it?"

"Not yet," replied Milly, flushing with excitement, "but I shall soon, I
know I shall. Last night I couldn't make head or tail of the books. Now
I understand right enough what they are, and I know some are in Greek
and some in English. I can't read either yet, but it's all coming back
gradually, like the daylight coming in at the window this morning."

"Hooray! Hooray!" shouted Tims. "You'll be reading as hard as ever in a
week if I don't look after you. But see here, my girl, you've given me a
nasty jar, and I'm not going to let you break your heart or crack your
brain in a wild-goose chase. You can't get that First, you know; you're
on a fairly good Second Class level, and you'd better make up your mind
to stay there."

"A fairly good Second Class level!" repeated Milly, still turning the
leaves of the book. "That doesn't sound very exhilarating--and I rather
think I shall do as I like about staying there."

Tims began to heat.

"Well, that's what Stewart said about you. I don't believe I told you
half plain enough what Stewart did say, for fear of hurting your
feelings. He said you are a good scholar, but barring that, you weren't
at all clever."

Milly looked up from her book; but she was not tearful. There was a curl
in her lip and the light of battle in her eye.

"Stewart said that, did he? Now if I were a gentleman I should
say--'damn his impudence'--and 'who the devil is Stewart'; but then I'm
not. You can say it."

Tims stared. "Oh, come, I say!" she exclaimed. "I don't swear, I only
quote. But my goodness, when you remember who Stewart is, you'll
be--well, pained to think of the language you're using about him."

"Why?" asked Milly, her head riding disdainfully on her slender neck.

"Because he's your tutor and lecturer--and a regular tiptop man at Greek
and all that--and you--you respect him most awfully."

"Do I?" cried Milly--"did perhaps in my salad days. I've no respect
whatever for professors now, my good Tims. I know what they're like.
Here's Stewart for you."

She took up a pen and a scrap of paper and dashed off a clever ludicrous
sketch of a man with long hair, an immense brow, and spectacles.

"Nonsense!" said Tims; "that's not a bit like him."

She held the paper in her hand and looked fixedly at it. Milly had been
wont seriously to grieve over her hopeless lack of artistic talent and
she had never attempted to caricature. Tims was thinking of a young
fellow of a college who had lately died of brain disease. In the earlier
stages of his insanity, it had been remarked that he had an originality
which had not been his when in a normal state. What if her friend were
developing the same terrible disease? If it were so, it was no use
fussing, since there was no remedy. Still, she felt a desperate need to
take some sort of precaution.

"If I were you, M.," she said, "I'd go to bed and keep very quiet for a
day or two. You're so--so odd, and excited, they'd notice it if you went
down-stairs."

"Would they?" asked Milly, suddenly sobered. "Would they say I was mad?"
An expression of fear came into her face, and its strangely luminous
eyes travelled around the room with a look as of some trapped creature
seeking escape.

There was an awkward pause.

"I'm not mad," affirmed Milly, swallowing with a dry throat. "I'm
perfectly sensible, but any one would be odd and excited too who
was--was as I am--with a number of words and ideas floating in my mind
without my having the least idea where they spring from. Please, Tims
dear, tell me how I am to behave. I should so hate to be thought queer,
wanting in any way."

Tims considered.

"For one thing, you mustn't talk such a lot. You never have been one for
chattering; and lately, of course, with your overwork, you've been
particularly quiet. Don't talk, M., that's my advice."

"Very well," replied Milly, gloomily.

Tims hesitated and went on:

"But I don't see how you're going to hide up this business about your
memory. I wish you'd let me tell old B., anyhow."

"I won't have any one told," cried Milly. "Not a creature. If only
you'll help me, dear, dear Tims--you will help me, won't you?--I shall
soon be all right, and no one except you will ever know. No one will be
able to shrug their shoulders and say, whatever I do, 'Of course she's
crazy.' I should hate it so! I know I can get on if I try. I'm much
cleverer than you and that silly old Stewart think. Promise me, promise
me, darling Tims, you won't betray me!"

Tims was not weak-minded, but she was very tender-hearted and
exceedingly susceptible to personal charms. She ought not, she knew she
ought not, to have yielded, but she did. She promised. Yet in her
friend's own interest, she contended that Milly must confess to a
certain failure of memory from over-fatigue, if only as a pretext for
dropping her work for a while. It was agreed that Milly should remain in
bed for several days, and she did so; less bored than might have been
expected, because she had the constant excitement of this or that bit of
knowledge filtering back into her mind. But this knowledge was purely
intellectual. With Tims's help she had recovered her reading powers, and
although she felt at first only a vague recognition of something
familiar in the sense of what she read, it was evident that she was fast
regaining the use of the treasures stored in her brain by years of
dogged and methodical work. But the facts and personalities which had
made her own life seemed to have vanished, leaving "not a wrack behind."

Tims, having primed her well beforehand, brought in the more important
girls to see her, and by dint of a cautious reserve she passed very well
with them, as with Miss Burt and Miss Walker. Tims seemed to feel much
more nervous than Milly herself did when she joined the other students
as usual.

There were moments when Tims gasped with the certainty that the
revelation of her friend's blank ignorance of the place and people was
about to be made. Then Mildred--for so, despising the soft diminutive,
she now desired to be called--by some extraordinary exertion of tact and
ingenuity, would evade the inevitable and appear on the other side of
it, a little elated, but otherwise serene. It was generally marked that
Miss Flaxman was a different creature since she had given up worrying
about her Schools, and that no one would have believed how much prettier
she could make herself by doing her hair a different way.

Miss Burt, however, was somewhat puzzled and uneasy. Although Milly was
looking unusually well, it was evident that all was not quite right with
her, for she complained of a failure of memory, a mental fatigue which
made it impossible for her to go to lectures, and she seemed to have
lost all interest in the Schools, which had so lately been for her the
"be-all" as well as the "end-all here." Miss Burt knew Milly's only near
relation in England, Lady Thomson, intimately; and for that reason
hesitated to write to her. She knew that Beatrice Thomson had no
patience with the talk--often silly enough--about girls overworking
their brains. She herself had never been laid up in her life, except
when her leg was broken, and her views on the subject of ill-health were
marked. She regarded the catching of scarlet-fever or influenza as an
act of cowardice, consumption or any organic disease as scarcely, if at
all, less disgraceful than drunkenness or fraud, while the countless
little ailments to which feminine flesh seems more particularly heir she
condemned as the most deplorable of female failings, except the love of
dress.

Eventually Miss Burt did write to Lady Thomson, cautiously. Lady Thomson
replied that she was coming up to town on Thursday, and could so arrange
her journey as to have an hour and a half in Oxford. She would be at
Ascham at three-thirty. Mildred rushed to Tims with the agitating news
and both were greatly upset by it. However, Aunt Beatrice had got to be
faced sometime or other and Mildred's spirit rose to the encounter.

She had by this time provided herself with another dress, encouraged to
do so by the money in hand left by the frugal Milly the First. She had
got a plain tailor-made coat and skirt, in a becoming shade of brown;
and with the unbecoming hard collar _de rigueur_ in those days, she wore
a turquoise blue tie, which seemed to reflect the color of her eyes. And
in spite of Tims's dissuasions, she put on the new dress on Thursday,
and declined to screw her hair up in the old way, as advised.

Accordingly on Thursday at twenty-five minutes to four, Mildred
appeared, in answer to a summons, in the quiet-colored, pleasant
drawing-room at Ascham, with its French windows giving on to the lawn,
where some of the girls were playing hockey, not without cries. Her
first view of Aunt Beatrice was a pleasant surprise. A tall, upstanding
figure, draped in a long, soft cloak trimmed with fur, a handsome face
with marked features, marked eyebrows, a fine complexion and bright
brown eyes under a wide-brimmed felt hat.

Having exchanged the customary peck, she waited in silence till Mildred
had seated herself. Then surveying her niece with satisfaction:

"Come, Milly," said she, in a full, pleasant voice; "I don't see much
signs of the nervous invalid about you. Really, Polly," turning to Miss
Burt, "she has not looked so well for a long time."

"She's been much better since she dropped her work," replied Miss Burt.

"Taking plenty of fresh air and exercise, I suppose"--Aunt Beatrice
smiled kindly on her niece--"I'm afraid I've kept you from your hockey
this afternoon, Milly."

"Oh no, Aunt Beatrice, certainly not," replied Milly, with the extreme
courtesy of nervousness. "I never play hockey now."

Lady Thomson turned to the Head with a shade of triumph in her
satisfaction.

"There, Polly! What did I tell you? I was sure there was something else
at the bottom of it. Steady work, methodically done, never hurt anybody.
But of course if she's given up exercise, her liver or something was
bound to get out of order."

"No, really, I take lots of exercise," interposed Milly; "only I don't
care for hockey, it's such a horrid, rough, dirty game; don't you think
so? And Miss Walker got a front tooth broken last winter."

Lady Thomson looked at her in a surprised way.

"Well, if you've not been playing hockey, what exercise have you been
taking?"

"Walks," replied Milly, feebly, feeling herself on the wrong track; "I
go walks with Ti--with Flora Timson when she has time."

Aunt Beatrice looked at the matter judicially.

"Of course, games are best for the physique. Look at men. Still, walking
will do, if one takes proper walks. I hope Flora Timson takes you good
long walks."

"Indeed she does!" cried Milly. "Immense! She walks a dreadful pace, and
we get over stiles and things."

"Immense is a little vague. How far do you go on an average?"

Mildred's notions of distance were vague. "Quite two miles, I'm sure,"
she responded, cheerfully.

Aunt Beatrice made no comment. She looked steadily and scrutinizingly
at her niece, and in a kind but deepened voice told her to go up to her
room, whither she, Lady Thomson, would follow in a few minutes, just to
see how the Mantegnas looked now they were framed.

As soon as the door had closed behind Mildred, she turned to Miss Burt.
"You're right, in a way, Polly, after all. There is something odd about
Milly, but I think it's affectation. Did you hear her answer? Two miles!
When to my knowledge she can easily walk ten."

Meantime, Mildred mounted slowly to her room. She had tidied it under
Tims's instructions and had nothing to do but to sit down and think
until Lady Thomson's masculine step was heard outside her door.

Aunt Beatrice came in and laid aside her hat and cloak, showing a dress
of rough gray tweed, and short--so far a tribute to the practical--but
otherwise made on some awkward artistic or hygienic principle. Her
glossy brown hair was brushed back and twisted tight, as Milly's used to
be, but with different effect, because of its heaviness and length.

"Why have you crammed up one of your windows with a dressing-glass?"
asked Aunt Beatrice, putting a picture straight.

"Because I can't see myself in that dark corner," returned Mildred,
demurely meek, but waiting her opportunity.

"See yourself! My dear child, you hardly ever want to see yourself, if
you are habitually neat and dressed sensibly. I see you've adopted the
mannish style. That's a phase of vanity. You'll come back to the
beautiful and natural before long."

Mildred leaned back in her chair and clasped her hands behind her head.

"I don't think so, Aunt Beatrice. I've settled the dress question once
and for all. I've found a clean, tidy, convenient style of dress and I
can't waste time thinking about altering it again."

"You don't seem to mind wasting it on doing your hair," returned Aunt
Beatrice, smiling, but not grimly, for she enjoyed logical fencing, even
to her opponent's fair hits.

"If I had beautiful hair like yours, I shouldn't need to," replied
Mildred. "But you know how endy and untidy mine always was."

Aunt Beatrice, embarrassed by the compliment, looked at her watch. "It
seems as if we women can't escape our fate," she said. "Here we are
gabbling about dress when we've plenty of important things to talk over.
Miss Burt wrote to me that you were overworked, run down, nerves out of
order, and all the usual nonsense. I'm thankful to find you looking
remarkably well. I should like to know what this humbug about not being
able to work means."

"It means that--well, I simply can't," returned Mildred, earnestly this
time. "I can't remember things."

"You must be able to remember; unless your brain's diseased, which is
most improbable. But I ought to take you to a brain specialist, I
suppose."

Milly changed color. "Please, oh please, Aunt Beatrice, don't do that!"

Lady Thomson, in fact, hardly meant it; for her niece's appearance was
unmistakably healthy. However, the threat told.

"I shall if you don't improve. I can't understand you. Either you're
hysterical or you've got one of those abominable fits of frivolity which
come on women like drink on men, and destroy their careers. I thought we
had both set our hearts on your getting another First."

"But, Aunt Beatrice, they say I can't. They say I'm not clever enough."

"Oh, that's what they say, is it?" Lady Thomson smiled in calm but deep
contempt. "How do they explain the idiots who have got Firsts? Archibald
Toovey, for instance?" Her eyes met her niece's, and both smiled.

"Ah, yes! Mr. Toovey," returned Milly, who had met Archibald Toovey at
the Fletchers', and converted his patronizing courtship into imbecile
raptures.

"But that quite explains your losing an interest in your work. Just for
once, I should like to take you away before the end of term. We would go
straight to Rome next Monday. We shall meet the Breretons there, and go
fully over the new excavations and discoveries, besides the old things,
which will be new, of course, to you. Then we will go on to Naples, do
the galleries and Pompeii, and come back by Florence and Paris before
Christmas. By that time you will be ready to settle down to your work
steadily again and forget all this nonsense."

Mildred's face had lighted up momentarily at the word "Rome." Then she
sucked her under lip and looked at the fire. When Lady Thomson's
programme was ended, she made a pause before she said, slowly:

"Thank you so much, dear Aunt Beatrice. I should love to go, but--I
don't think--no, I don't think I'd better. You see, there's the
expense."

"Of course I don't expect you to pay for yourself. I take you."

"How very kind and sweet of you! But--well, do you know, you've
encouraged me so about that. First, I feel now as though I could sit
down and get it straight away. I will get it, Aunt Beatrice, if only to
make that old Professor look foolish."

Lady Thomson, though disappointed in a way, felt that Milly Flaxman was
doing credit to her principles, showing a spirit worthy of her family.
She did not urge the Roman plan; but content with a victory over "nerves
and the usual nonsense," withdrew triumphant to the railway station.

Tims came in when she was gone and heard about the Roman offer.

"You refused, when Aunt Beatrice was going to plank down the dollars?
M., you are a fool!"

"No, Tims," Mildred answered, deliberately; "you see, I don't feel sure
yet whether I can manage Aunt Beatrice."




CHAPTER V


Oxford is beautiful at all times, beautiful even now, in spite of the
cruel disfigurement inflicted upon her by the march of modern vulgarity,
but she has three high festivals which clothe her with a special glory
and crown her with their several crowns. One is the Festival of May,
when her hoary walls and ancient enclosures overflow with emerald and
white, rose-color and purple and gold, a foam of leafage and blossom,
breaking spray-like over edges of stone, gray as sea-worn rocks. And all
about the city the green meadows and groves burn with many tones of
color, brilliant as enamels or as precious stones, yet of a texture
softer and richer, more full of delicate shadows than any velvet mantle
that ever was woven for a queen.

Another Festival comes with that strayed bacchanal October, who hangs
her scarlet and wine-colored garlands on cloister and pinnacle, on wall
and tower. And gradually the foliage of grove and garden, turns through
shade of bluish metallic green, to the mingled splendor of pale gold and
beaten bronze and deepest copper, half glowing and half drowned in the
low, mellow sunlight, and purple mist of autumn.

Last comes the Festival of Mid-winter, the Festival of the Frost. The
rime comes, or the snow, and the long lines of the buildings, the
fret-work of stone, the battlements, carved pinnacles and images of
saints or devils, stand up with clear glittering outlines, or clustered
about and overhung with fantasies of ice and snow. Behind, the deep-blue
sky itself seems to glitter too. The frozen floods glitter in the
meadows, and every little twig on the bare trees. There is no color in
the earth, but the atmosphere of the river valley clothes distant hills
and trees and hedges with ultramarine vapor. Towards evening the mist
climbs, faintly veiling the tall groves of elms and the piled masses of
the city itself. The sunset begins to burn red behind Magdalen Tower,
all the towers and aery pinnacles rise blue yet distinct against it. And
this festival is not only one of nature. The glittering ice is spread
over the meadows, and, everywhere from morning till moonlight, the
rhythmical ring of the skate and the sound of voices sonorous with the
joy of living, travel far on the frosty air. Sometimes the very rivers
are frozen, and the broad, bare highway of the Thames and the
tree-sheltered path of the Cherwell are alive with black figures,
heel-winged like Mercury, flying swiftly on no errand, but for the mere
delight of flying.

It was early on such a shining festival morning that Mildred, a willowy,
brown-clad figure, came down to a piece of ice in an outlying meadow.
Her shadow moved beside her in the sunshine, blue on the whiteness of
the snow, which crunched crisp and thin under her feet. She carried a
black bag in her hand--sign of the serious skater, and her face was
serious, even apprehensive. She saw with relief that except the sweepers
there was no one on the ice. A row of shivering men, buttoned up to the
chin in seedy coats, rose from the chairs where they awaited their
appointed prey, and all yelled to her at once. She crowned the hopes of
one by occupying his seat, but the important task of putting on the
bladed boots she could depute to none. Tims, whom no appeal of
friendship could induce to shiver on the ice, had told her that Milly
was an expert skater. She was, in fact, correct and accomplished, but
there was a stiffness and sense of effort about her style, a want of
that appearance of free and daring abandonment to the stroke of the
blade once launched, that makes the beauty of skating. Mildred knew only
that she had to live up to the reputation of a mighty skater, and was
not sure whether she could even stand on these knifelike edges. She
laced one boot, happy in the belief that at any rate there would be no
witness to her voyage of discovery. But a renewed yelling among the men
made her lift her head, and there, striding swiftly over the crisp snow,
came a tall, handsome young man, with a pointed, silky black beard and
fine, short-sighted black eyes, aglow with the pleasure of the frosty
sun.

It was Ian Stewart. The young lady whom he discovered to be Miss Flaxman
just as he reached the chairs, was much more annoyed than he at the
encounter. Here was an acquaintance, it seemed, and one provided with
the bag and orange which Tims had warned her was the mark of the
serious skater. They exchanged remarks on the weather and she went on
lacing her other boot in great trepidation. The moment was come. She did
not recoil from the insult of being seized under her elbows by two men
and carefully planted on her feet as though she were most likely to
tumble down. So far as she knew, she was likely to. But, lo! no sooner
was she up than muscles and nerves, recking nothing of the brain's blind
denial, asserted their own acquaintance with the art of balance and
motion. Wondering, and for a few minutes still apprehensive, but
presently lost in the pleasure of the thing, Mildred began to fly over
the ice. And the dark, handsome man who had taken off his cap to her
became supremely unimportant. Unluckily the piece of flood-ice was not
endless and she had to come back. He was circling around an orange, and
she, throwing herself instinctively on to the outside edge, came down
towards him in great, sweeping curves, absorbed in the delight of this
motion, so new yet so perfectly under her control. Ian Stewart,
perceiving that the girl was absolutely unconscious of his presence,
blushed in his soul to think that he had been induced to believe himself
to be of importance in her eyes.

"Miss Flaxman," he said, skating up to her, "I see you have no orange.
Can't we skate a figure together around mine?"

"I've forgotten all about figures," replied Mildred, with truth.

"Try some simple turns," he urged. "There are plenty here," and he held
up a book in his hand like the one she had found in her own black bag.
But it had "Ian Stewart, Durham College," written clearly on the
outside.

"So that's Stewart!" thought Milly; and she could not help laughing at
her own thoughts, which had created him in a different image.

Stewart did not know why she laughed, but he found the sound and sight
of the laugh new and charming.

"It's awfully kind of you to undertake my education in another branch,
Mr. Stewart," she answered, pouting, "in spite of having found out that
I'm not at all clever."

She smiled at him mutinously, sweeping towards the orange with head
thrown back over her left shoulder. Momentarily the poise of her head
recalled the attitude of the portrait of Lady Hammerton, beckoning her
unseen companions to that far-off mysterious mountain country, where the
torrents shine so whitely through the mist and the red line of sunset
speaks of coming night.

Stewart colored, slightly confused. This brutal statement did not seem
to him to represent the just and candid account he had given Miss Walker
of Miss Flaxman's abilities.

"Some one's been misreporting me, I see," he returned. "But anyhow, on
the ice, Miss Flaxman, it's you who are the Professor; I who am the
pupil. So I offer you a fair revenge."

Accordingly, Mildred soon found herself placed at a due distance from
the orange, with Stewart equally distant from it on the other side.
After a few minutes of extreme uneasiness, she discovered that although
she had to halt at each fresh call, she had a kind of mechanical
familiarity with the simple figures which he gave her.

Stewart, though learned, was human; and to sweep now at the opposite
pole to his companion, now with a swing of clasping hands at the centre
of their delightful dance, his eyes always perforce on his charming
partner, and her eyes on him, undeniably raised the pleasure of skating
to a higher power than if he had circled the orange in company with mere
man.

So they fleeted the too-short time in the sparkling blue and white
world, drinking the air like celestial wine.

The Festival of the Frost had fallen in the Christmas Vacation, and
Oxford society in vacation is essentially different from that of
Term-time, when it is overflowed by men who are but birds of passage,
coming no one inquires whence, and flitting few know whither. The party
that picnicked, played hockey, danced and figured on their skates
through the weeks of the frost, was in those days almost like a family
party. So it happened that Ian Stewart met the new Miss Flaxman in an
atmosphere of friendly ease that years of term-time society would not
have afforded him. How new she was he did not guess, but supposed the
change to be in his own eyes. Other people, however, saw it. Her very
skating was different. It had gained in grace and vigor, but she was
seldom seen wooing the serious and lonely orange around which Milly had
acquired the skill that Mildred now enjoyed. On the contrary, she
initiated an epidemic of frivolity on the ice in the shape of waltzing
and hand-in-hand figures in general.

Ian Stewart, too, neglected the orange and went in for hand-in-hand
figures that season. Other things, too, he neglected; work, which he had
never before allowed to suffer measurably from causes within his
control; and far from blushing for his idleness, he rejoiced in it, as
the surest sign of all that for him the Festival of Spring had come in
the time of nature's frost.

It was not only the crisp air, the frequent sun, the joyous flights over
the ringing ice that made his blood run faster through his veins and
laughter come more easily to his lips; that aroused him in the morning
with a strange sense of delight, as though some spirit had awakened him
with a glad reveille at the window of his soul. He, too, was in Arcady.
That in itself should be sufficient joy; he knew he must restrain his
impatience for more. Not till the summer, when the lady of his heart had
ceased to be also his pupil, must he make avowal of his love.

Mildred on her part found Stewart the most attractive of the men with
whom she was acquainted. As yet in this new existence of hers, she had
not moved outside the Oxford circle--a circle exceptional in England,
because in it intellectual eminence, not always recognized, when
recognized receives as much honor as is accorded to a great fortune or
a great name in ordinary society. Stewart's abilities were of a kind to
be recognized by the Academic world. He was already known in the
Universities of the Continent and America. Oxford was proud of him; and
although Mildred had no desire to marry as yet, it gratified her taste
and her vanity to win him for a lover.




CHAPTER VI


Mildred had had no desire to spend her vacations with Lady Thomson, and
on the ground of her reading for the Schools, had been allowed to spend
them in Oxford. Tims, who had no relations, remained with her. She had
for Mildred a sentiment almost like that of a parent, besides an
admiration for which she was slightly ashamed, feeling it to be
something of a slur on the memory of Milly, her first and kindest
friend.

Mildred had recovered her memory for most things, but the facts of her
former life were still a blank to her. She had begun to work for her
First in order to evade Aunt Beatrice; but the fever of it grew upon
her, either from the ambient air of the University or from a native
passion to excel in all she did. Her teachers were bewildered by the
mental change in Miss Flaxman. The qualities of intellectual swiftness,
vigor, pliancy, whose absence they had once noted in her, became, on the
contrary, conspicuously hers. Once initiated into the tricks of the
"Great Essay" style, she could use it with a dexterity strangely in
contrast with the flat and fumbling manner in which poor Milly had been
wont to express her ideas. But in the region of actual knowledge, she
now and again perpetrated some immense and childish blunder, which made
the teachers, who nursed and trained her like a jockey or a race-horse,
tremble for the results of the Greats Examination.

All too swiftly the date of the Schools loomed on the horizon; drew
near; was come. The June weather was glorious on the river, but in the
town, above all in the Examination Schools, it was very hot. The sun
glared pitilessly in through the great windows of the big T-shaped room,
till the temperature was that of a greenhouse. The young men in their
black coats and white ties looked enviously at the girl candidate, the
only one, in her white waist and light skirt. They envied her, too, her
apparent indifference to a crisis that paled the masculine cheek. In
fact, Mildred was nervous, but her nerves were strung up to so high a
pitch that she was sensitive neither to temperature nor to fatigue, nor
to want of sleep. And at the service of her quick intelligence and ready
pen lay all the stored knowledge of Milly the First.

On the last day, when the last paper was over, Tims came and found her
in the big hall, planting the pins in her hat with an almost feverish
energy. Although it was five o'clock, she said she wanted air, not tea.
The last men had trooped listlessly down the steps of the Schools and
the two girls stood there while Mildred drew on her gloves. The sun
wearing to the northwest, shone down that curve of the High Street which
all Europe cannot match. The slanting gold illumined the gray face of
the University and the wide pavement, where the black-gowned victims of
the Schools threaded their sombre way through groups of joyous youths in
flannels and ladies in summer attire. On the opposite side cool shadows
were beginning to invade the sunshine, to slant across the old houses,
straight-roofed or gabled, the paladian pile of Queen's, the mediæval
front of All Souls, with its single and perfect green tree, leading up
to the consummation of the great spire of St. Mary's.

Already, from the tall bulk of the nave, a shadow fell broad across the
pavement. But still the heat of the day reverberated from the stones
about them. They turned down to the Botanical Gardens and paced that
gray enclosure, full of the pride of branches and the glory of flowers
and overhung by the soaring vision of Magdalen Tower. Mildred was
walking fast and talking volubly about the Examination and everything
else.

"Look here, old girl," said Tims at last, when they reached for the
second time the seat under the willow trellis, "I'm going to sit down
here, unless you'll come to tea at Boffin's."

"I don't want to sit down," returned Mildred, seating herself; "or to
have tea or anything. I want to be just going, going, going. I feel as
though if I stop for a minute something horrid will happen."

Tims wrinkled her whole face anxiously.

"Don't do that, Tims," cried Mildred, sharply. "You look hideous."

Tims colored, rose and walked away. She suddenly thought, with tears in
her eyes, of the old Milly who would never have spoken to her like
that. By the time she had reached the little basin in the middle of the
garden, where the irises grew, Mildred had caught her up.

"Tims, dear old Tims! What a wretch I am! I couldn't help letting off
steam on something--you don't know what I feel like."

Tims allowed herself to be pacified, but in her heart there remained a
yearning for her earlier and gentler friend--that Milly Flaxman who was
certainly not dead, yet as certainly gone out of existence.

It was towards the end of the last week of Term, and the gayeties of
Commemoration had already begun. Mildred threw herself into them with
feverish enjoyment. She seemed to grudge even the hours that must be
lost in the unconsciousness of sleep. The Iretons, cousins from India,
who had never known the former Milly, took a house in Oxford for a week.
She went with them to three College balls and a Masonic, and spent the
days in a carnival of luncheon and boating-parties. She attracted plenty
of admiration, and enjoyed herself wildly, yet also purposefully;
because she was trying to get rid of that haunting feeling that if she
stopped a minute "something horrid would happen."

Stewart meantime was finding love not so entirely beautiful and
delightful a thing as he had at first imagined it. In his dreamy way he
had overlooked the fact of Commemoration, and planned when Term was over
to find Mildred constantly at the Fletchers' and to be able to arrange
quiet days on the river. But if he found her there, she was always in
company, and though she made herself as charming to him as usual, she
showed no disposition to forsake all others and cleave only to him. He
was not a dancing man, and suffered cruelly on the evenings when he knew
her to be at balls, and fancied all her partners in love with her.

But on the Thursday after Commemoration, the Fletchers gave a strawberry
tea at Wytham, as a farewell festivity to their cousins. And Ian Stewart
was there. With Mrs. Fletcher's connivance, he took Mildred home alone
in a canoe, by the deep and devious stream which runs under Wytham
woods. She went on talking with a vivacious gayety which was almost
foolish. He saw that it was unreal and that her nerves were at high
tension. His own were also. He did not intend to propose to her that
day; but he could no longer restrain himself, and he began to speak to
her of his love.

"Hush!" she cried, with a vehement gesture. "Not to-day! oh, not to-day!
I can't bear it!" She put her head on her knee and moaned again, "Not
to-day, I'm too tired, I really am. I can't bear it."

This was all the answer he could get, and her manner left him in
complete uncertainty as to whether she meant to accept or to refuse him.

Tims had been at the strawberry tea too, and came into Mildred's room in
the evening, curious to know what had happened. She found Mildred
without a light, sitting, or rather lying in a wicker chair. When the
candle was lighted she saw that Mildred was very pale and shivering.

"You're overtired, my girl," she said. "That's what's the matter with
you."

"Oh, Tims," moaned Mildred. "I feel so ill and so frightened. I know
something horrid's going to happen--I know it is."

"Don't be a donkey," returned Tims. "I'll help you undress and then you
turn in. You'll be as jolly as a sandboy to-morrow."

But Mildred was crying tremulously. "Oh, Tims, how dreadful it would be
to die!"

"Idiot!" cried Tims, and shook Mildred with all her might. Mildred's
tiny sobs turned into a shriek of laughter.

"My goodness!" ejaculated Tims; "you're in hysterics!"

"I know I am," gasped Mildred. "I was laughing to think of what Aunt
Beatrice would say." And she giggled amid her tears.

Tims insisted on her rising from the chair, undressing, and getting into
bed. Then she sat by her in the half-dark, waiting for the miserable
tears to leave off.

"Don't cry, old girl, don't cry. Go to sleep and forget all about it,"
she kept repeating, almost mechanically.

At length leaning over the bed she saw that Mildred was asleep, lying
straight on her bed with her feet crossed and her hands laid on her
bosom.




CHAPTER VII


About noon on Friday Milly Flaxman awoke. She lay very quiet, sleepy and
comfortable, her eyes fixed idly on a curve in the jessamine-pattern
paper opposite her bed. The windows were wide open, the blinds down and
every now and again flapping softly, as a capricious little breeze went
by, whispering through the leafy trees outside. There seemed nothing
unusual in that; she always slept with her windows open. But as her
senses emerged from those mists which lie on the surface of the river of
sleep, she was conscious of a balmy warmth in the room, of an impression
of bright sunshine behind the dark blinds, and of noises from the
streets reaching her with a kind of sharpness associated with sunshine.
She sat up, looked at her watch, and was shocked to find how late she
had slept. She must have missed a lecture. Then the recollection of the
dinner-party at the Fletchers', the verdict of Mr. Stewart on her chance
of a First, and her own hysterical outburst returned to her,
overpowering all outward impressions. She felt calm and well now, but
unhappy and ashamed of herself. She put her feet out of bed and looked
round mechanically for her dressing-gown and slippers. Their absence was
unimportant, for no sense of chill struck through her thin night-gown
to her warm body, and going to the window, she drew up the blind.

The high June sun struck full upon her, hot and dazzling, but not so
dazzling that she could not see the row of garden trees through whose
bare branches she had yesterday descried the squalid roofs of the town.
They were spreading now in a thick screen of fresh green leaves. She
leaned out, as though further investigation might explain the
phenomenon, and saw a red standard rose in full flower under her window.
The thing was exactly like a dream, and she tried to wake up but could
not. She was panic-stricken and trembling. Had she been very, very ill?
Was it possible to be unconscious for six months? She looked at herself
in a dressing-glass near the window, which she had never placed there,
and saw that she was pale and had dark marks under her eyes, but not
more so than had been the case in that yesterday so strangely and
mysteriously removed in time. Her slender white arms and throat were as
rounded as usual. And if she had been ill, why was she left alone like
this? She found a dressing-gown not her own, and went on a voyage of
discovery. But the other rooms on her floor were dismantled and
tenantless. The girls were gone and the servants were "cleaning" in a
distant part of the College. She felt incapable of getting into bed
again and waiting for some one to come, so she began dressing herself
with trembling hands. Every detail increased the sense of strangeness.
There were a number of strange clothes, ball-dresses and others,
hanging in her cupboard, strange odds and ends thrust confusedly into
her bureau. She found at length a blue cotton frock of her own, which
seemed just home from the wash. She had twisted up her hair and was
putting on the blue frock, when she heard a step on the stairs, and
paused with beating heart. Who was coming? How would the mystery be
resolved? The door opened and Tims came in--the old Tims, wrinkled face,
wig, and old straw hat on one side as usual.

"Tims!" cried Milly, flying towards her and speaking with pale lips.
"Please, please tell me--what has happened? Have I been very ill?" And
she stared in Tims's face with a tragic mask of terror and anxiety.

"Now take it easy--take it easy, M., my girl!" cried Tims, giving her a
great squeeze and a clap on the shoulder. "I'm jolly glad to see you
back. But don't let's have any more of your hysterics. No, never no
more!"

"Have I been away?" asked Milly, her lips still trembling.

"I should think you had!" exclaimed Tims. "But nobody knows it except
me. Don't forget that. Here's a note for you from old B. Read it first
or we shall both forget all about it. She had to go away early this
morning."

Milly opened the note and read:

     "DEAR MILLY,--I am sorry not to say good-bye, but glad you
     are sleeping off your fatigue. I want to tell you, between
     ourselves, not to go on worrying about the results of the
     Schools, as I think you are doing, in spite of your
     pretences to the contrary. I hear you have done at least one
     brilliant paper, and although I, of course, know nothing
     certain, I believe you and the College will have reason to
     rejoice when the list comes out.

     "Yours affectionately,

     "MARY BURT."

"What does it mean?--oh, what can it mean?" faltered Milly, holding out
the missive to Tims.

"It means you've been in for Greats, my girl, and done first-rate. But
the strain's been a bit too much for you, and you've had another
collapse of memory. You had one in the end of November. You've been
uncommonly well ever since, and worked like a Trojan, but you've not
been quite your usual self, and I'm glad you've come right again, old
girl. Let me tell you the whole business."

Tims did so. She wanted social tact, but she had the tact of the heart
which made her hide from Milly how very different, how much more
brilliant and attractive Milly the Second had been than her normal self.
She only made her friend feel that the curious episode had entailed no
disgrace, but that somehow in her abnormal condition she had done well
in the Schools, and probably touched the top of her ambition.

"But I don't feel as though it had been quite straightforward to hide it
up so," said Milly. "I shall write and tell Miss Burt and Aunt Beatrice,
and tell the Fletchers when I go to them."

"You'll do nothing of the kind, you stupid," snapped Tims. "You'll be
simply giving me away if you do. What is the good? It won't happen
again unless you're idiot enough to overwork yourself again. Very likely
not then; for, as an open-minded, scientific woman, I believe it to have
been a case of hypnotism, and in France and the United States they'd
have thought it a very interesting one. But in England people are so
prejudiced they'd say you'd simply been out of your mind; although that
wouldn't prevent them from blaming me for hypnotizing you."

While Tims spoke thus, there was a knocking without, and a maid
delivered a note for Miss Flaxman. Milly held it in her hands and
studied it musingly before opening the envelope. Her pale, troubled face
colored and grew more serious. Tims had not mentioned Ian Stewart, but
Milly had not forgotten him or his handwriting. Tims knew it too. She
restrained her excitement while Milly turned her back and stood by the
window reading the note. She must have read them several times over, the
two sides of the sheet inscribed with Stewart's small, scholarly
handwriting, before she turned her transfigured face towards the
anxiously expectant Tims.

"Tims, dear," she said at length, smiling tremulously, and laying
tremulous hands on Tims's two thin shoulders--"dear old Tims, why didn't
you tell me?"

"Tell you what?" asked Tims, grinning delightedly. Milly threw her arms
round her friend's neck and hid her happy tears and blushes between
Tims's ear and shoulder.

"Mr. Stewart--it seems too good to be true--he loves me, he really does.
He wants me to be his wife."

Most girls would have hugged and kissed Milly, and Tims did hug her, but
instead of kissing her, she banged and slapped her back and shoulders
hard all over, shaking the while with deep internal chuckles. It hurt,
but Milly did not mind, for it was sympathy. Presently she drew herself
away, and wiping her damp eyes, said, smiling shyly:

"He's never guessed how much I care about him. I'm so glad. He says he
doesn't wonder at my hesitation and talks about others more worthy to
love me. But you know there isn't any one except Mr. Toovey. Poor Mr.
Toovey! I do hope I haven't behaved very badly to him."

"Never mind Toovey," chuckled Tims. "Anyhow, Milly, I've got a good load
off my mind. I didn't half like having put that other girl into your
boots. However, you've come back, and everything's going to be all
right."

"All right!" breathed Milly. "Why, Tims, darling, I never thought any
one in the world could be half so happy as I am."

And Tims left Milly to write the answer for which Ian Stewart was so
anxiously waiting.

       *       *       *       *       *

The engagement proceeded after the manner of engagements. No one was
surprised at it and every one was pleased. The little whirlpool of talk
that it created prevented Milly's ignorance of the events of the past
six or seven months from coming to the surface. She lay awake at night,
devising means of telling Ian about this strange blank in her life. But
she shrank from saying things that might make him suspect her of an
unsound mind. She had plainly been sane enough in her abnormal state,
and there was no doubt of her sanity now. She told him she had had since
the autumn, and still had, strange collapses of memory; and he said that
quite explained some peculiarities of her work. She tried to talk to him
about French experiments in hypnotism, and how it was said sometimes to
bring to light unsuspected sides of a personality. But he laughed at
hypnotism as a mixture of fraud and hysteria. So with many searchings of
heart, she dropped the subject.

She was staying at the Fletchers' and saw Ian every day. He was all that
she could wish as a lover, and it never occurred to her to ask whether
he felt all that he himself could have wished as such. He was very fond
of Milly and quite content with her, but not perfectly content with
himself. He supposed he must at bottom be one of those ordinary and
rather contemptible men who care more for the excitement of the chase
than for the object of it. But he felt sure he was really a very lucky
fellow, and determined not to give way to the self-analysis which is
always said to be the worst enemy of happiness.

Miss Flaxman had been the only woman in for Greats, and as a favor she
was taken first in _viva voce_. The questions were directed to probing
her actual knowledge in places where she had made one or two amazing
blunders. But she emerged triumphant, and went in good spirits to
Clewes, Aunt Beatrice's country home in the North, whither Ian Stewart
shortly followed her. Beyond the fact that she wore perforce and with
shame, not having money to buy others, frocks which Lady Thomson
disapproved, she was once more the adoring niece to whom her aunt was
accustomed. And Lady Thomson liked Ian. She never expected men to share
her fads.

In due time came the announcement of the First, bringing almost as many
congratulatory letters as the engagement. And on August 2d Milly sailed
for Australia, where she was to spend two or three months with her
family.

In October the newspapers announced that the marriage of Miss Mildred
Beatrice Flaxman, eldest daughter of the Dean of Stirling, South
Australia, with Mr. Ian Stewart, Fellow of Durham College, Oxford, would
take place at Oxford in the second week in December.




CHAPTER VIII


"Madame dort toujours!" The dark-eyed, cherry cheeked, white-capped
chamber-maid of the Hôtel du Chalet made the statement to the manager,
who occupied a glass case in the hall. "She must have been very tired
yesterday, pauvre petite!"

The manager answered phlegmatically in French with a German accent:

"So much the better if she sleeps. She does not eat. When the gentleman
went out he wanted sanveeches to put in his pocket. One does not want
sanveeches when one sleeps."

"All the same, I wish she would wake up. It's so odd to see her sleeping
like that," returned the cherry-cheeked one; and passed about her
duties.

The _déjeuner_ was over, and those guests who had not already gone out
for the day, were tramping about the bare, wooden passages and
staircase, putting on knitted gloves and shouting for their companions
and toboggans. But it was not till all had gone out and their voices had
died away on the clear, cold air, that the sleeper in No. 19 awoke. For
a while she lay with open eyes as still as though she were yet sleeping.
But suddenly she started up in bed and looked around her with frowning,
startled attention. She was in a rather large, bare bedroom with
varnished green wood-work and furniture and a green pottery stove. There
was an odd, thick paper on the wall, of no particular color, and a
painted geometrical pattern in the centre of the ceiling. It was a neat
room, on the whole, but on the bed beside her own a man's waistcoat had
been thrown, and in the middle of the floor a pair of long, shabby
slippers lay a yard apart from each other and upside down. There were
other little signs of masculine occupation. A startled movement brought
her sitting up on the bedside.

"Married!" she whispered to herself. "How perfectly awful!"

A fiery wave of anger that was almost hate swept through her veins,
anger against the unknown husband and against that other one who had the
power thus to dispose of her destiny, while she lay helpless in some
unfathomed deep between life and death. Swifter than light her thoughts
flew back to the last hours of consciousness which had preceded that
strange and terrible engulfment of her being. She remembered that Mr.
Stewart had tried to propose to her on the river and that she had not
allowed him to do so. Probably he had taken this as a refusal. She knew
nothing of any love of Milly's for him; only was sure that he had not
been in love with her, Mildred, when she first knew him; therefore had
not cared for her other personality. Who else was possible? With an
audible cry she sprang to her feet.

"Toovey! Archibald Toovey!"

The idea was monstrous, it was also grotesque; and even while she
plunged despairing fingers in her hair, she laughed so loud that she
might have been heard in the corridor.

"Mrs. Archibald Toovey! Good Heavens! But that girl was perfectly
capable of it."

Then she became more than serious and buried her face in her hands,
thinking.

"If it is Mr. Toovey," she thought, "I must go away at once, wherever I
am. I can't have been married long. I am sure to have some money
somewhere. I'll go to Tims. Oh, that brute! That idiot!"--she was
thinking of Milly--"How I should like to strangle her!"

She clinched her hands till the nails hurt her palms. Two photographs,
propped up on the top of a chest of drawers, caught her eye. She
snatched them. One was a wedding group, but there was no bridegroom;
only six bridesmaids. It was as bad as such things always are, and it
was evident that the dresses were ill-fitting, the hats absurd. Tims was
prominent among the bridesmaids, looking particularly ugly. The other
photograph might have seemed pretty to a less prejudiced eye. It was
that of a slight, innocent-looking girl in a white satin gown, "ungirt
from throat to hem," and holding a sheaf of lilies in her hand. Her hair
was loose upon her shoulders, crowned with a fragile garland and covered
with a veil of fine lace.

"What a Judy!" commented Mildred, throwing the photograph fiercely away
from her. "Fancy my being married in a dressing-gown and having Tims
for a bridesmaid! Sickening!"

But her anxiety with regard to the bridegroom dominated even this just
indignation. Somehow, after seeing the photographs, she was convinced he
must be Archibald Toovey. She determined to fly at once. The question
was, where was she? Not in England, she fancied. The stove had been
thrice-heated by the benevolent cherry-cheeked one, and the atmosphere
of the room was stifling. This, together with the cold outside, had
combined to throw a gray veil across the window-panes. She hastily put
on a blue Pyrenean wool dressing-gown, flung open a casement and leaned
out into the wide sunshine, the iced-champagne air. The window was only
on the first floor, and she saw just beneath a narrow, snowy strip of
ground, on either side and below it snow-sprinkled pinewoods falling,
falling steeply, as it were, into space. But far below the blue air
deepened into a sapphire that must be a lake, and beyond that gray
cliffs, remote yet fairly clear in the sunshine, rose streaked with the
blue shadows of their own buttresses. Above the cliffs, white and sharp
and fantastic in their outline, snowy mountain summits showed clear
against the deep blue sky. Between them, imperceptibly moving on its
secular way, hung the glacier, a track of vivid ultramarine and green,
looking like a giant pathway to the stars. Mildred guessed she was in
Switzerland. She knew that it should be easy to get back to England, yet
for her with her peculiar inexperience of life, it would not be easy. At
any rate, she would dash herself down some gray-precipice into that
lake below rather than remain here as the bride of Archibald Toovey.
Just as she was registering a desperate vow to that effect a man came
climbing up the woodland way to the left, a long-legged man in a
knickerbocker suit and gaiters. He stepped briskly out of the pinewood
on to the snowy platform below, and seeing her at the window, looked up,
smiling, and waved his cap, with a cry of "Hullo, Milly!" And it was not
Archibald Toovey.

Mildred, relieved from the worst of fears, leaned from the window
towards him. A slanting ray caught the floating cloud of her amber hair,
her face glowed rosily, her eyes beamed on the new-comer, and she broke
into such an enchanting ripple of laughter as he had never heard from
those soft lips since it had been his privilege to kiss them. Then
something happened within him. Upon his lonely walk he had been overcome
by a depression against which he had every day been struggling. He had
been disappointed in his marriage, now some weeks old--disappointed,
that is, with himself, because of his own incapacity for rapturous
happiness. Yet a year ago on the ice at Oxford, six months ago in the
falling summer twilight on the river, under Wytham Woods, he had thought
himself as capable as any man of feeling the joys and pains of love. In
the sequel it had seemed that he was not; and just as he had lost all
hope of finding once again that buried treasure of his heart, it had
returned to him in one delightful moment, when he stood as it were on
the top of the world in the crisp, joyous Alpine air, and his eyes met
the eyes of his young wife, who leaned towards him into the sunshine and
laughed. He could not possibly have told how long the golden vision
endured; only that suddenly, precipitately, it withdrew. A "spirit in
his feet" sent him bounding up the bare, shallow hotel stairs, two steps
at a time, dropping on every step a cake of snow from his boots, to melt
and make pools on the polished wood. The manager, who respected none of
his guests except those who bullied him, called out a reprimand, but
received no apology.

Stewart strode with echoing tread down the corridor towards No. 19,
eager to hold that slender, girlish wife of his in his arms and to press
kisses on the lips that had laughed at him so sweetly from above. The
walls of the hotel were thin, and as he approached the door he heard a
quick, soft scurry across the room on the other side, and in his swift
thought saw Milly flying to meet him, just relieved from one absurd
anxiety about his safety and indulging another on the subject of his wet
feet. A smile of tender amusement visited his lips as he took hold of
the door-handle. Exactly as he touched it, the key on the other side
turned. The lock had been stiff, but it had shot out in the nick of
time, and he found himself brought up short in his impulsive career and
hurtling against a solid barrier. He knocked, but no one answered. He
could have fancied he heard panting breaths on the other side of the
ill-fitting door.

"Mayn't I come in, darling?" he asked, gently, but with a shade of
reproach in his voice.

"No, you can't," returned Milly's voice; hers, but with an accent of
coldness and decision in it which struck strangely on his ear. He
paused, bewildered. Then he remembered how often he had read that women
were capricious, unaccountable creatures. Milly had made him forget
that. Her attitude towards him had been one of unvarying gentleness and
devotion. Vaguely he felt that there was a kind of feminine charm in
this sudden burst of coldness, almost indifference.

"Is anything the matter, dear?" he asked. "Aren't you well?"

"Quite well, thank you," came the curt voice through the door. Then
after a minute's hesitation: "What do you want?"

Ian smiled to himself as he answered:

"My feet are wet. I want to change."

He was a delicate man, and if he had a foible which Milly could be said
to execrate, it was that of "sitting in wet feet." He expected the door
to fly open; but it did nothing of the kind. There was not a trace of
anxiety in the grudging voice which replied, after a pause:

"I suppose you want dry shoes and stockings. I'll give them to you if
you'll wait."

He stood bewildered, a little pained, not noticing the noisy opening and
shutting of several ill-fitting drawers in the room. Yet Milly always
put away his things for him and should have known where to find them.
The door opened a chink and the shoes and stockings came flying through
on to the passage floor. He had a natural impulse to use his masculine
strength, to push the door open before she could lock it again, but
fortunately he restrained it. He went down-stairs slowly, shoes and
stockings in hand; threw them down behind the big green stove in the
smoking-room and lighted a meditative pipe. It was evidently a fact that
women were difficult to understand; even Milly was. He had been
uniformly kind and tender to her, and so far she had seemed more than
content with him as a husband. But beneath this apparent happiness of
hers had some instinct, incomprehensible to him, been whispering to her
that he did not love her as many men, perhaps most, loved their young
wives? That he had felt for her no ardor, no worship? If so, then the
crisis had come at the right moment; at the moment when, by one of those
tricks of nature which make us half acquiesce in the belief that our
personality is an illusion, that we are but cosmic automata, the power
of love had been granted to him again. Yet for all that--very
fortunately, seeing that the crisis was more acute than he was aware--he
did not fancy that his way lay plain before him. He began to perceive
that the cementing of a close union between a man and woman, two beings
with so abundant a capacity for misunderstanding each other, is a
complex and delicate affair. That to marry is to be a kind of Odysseus
advancing into the palace of a Circe, nobler and more humane than the
enchantress of old, yet capable also of working strange and terrible
transformations. That many go in there carrying in their hands blossoms
which they believe to be moly; but the true moly is not easy to
distinguish. And he hoped that he and Milly, in their different ways,
had found and were both wearing the milk-white flower. Yet he knew that
this was a matter which must be left to the arbitrament of time.




CHAPTER IX


On their return to Oxford the young couple were fêted beyond the common.
People who had known Milly Flaxman in earlier days were surprised to
think how little they had noticed her beauty or guessed what a fund of
humor, what an extraordinary charm, had lurked beneath the surface of
her former quiet, grave manner. The Master of Durham alone refused to be
surprised. He merely affirmed in his short squeak that he had always
admired Mrs. Stewart very much. She was now frequently to be found in
the place of honor at those dinners of his, where distinguished visitors
from London brought the stir and color of the great world into the
austere groves, the rarefied atmosphere of Academe.

Wherever she appeared, the vivid personality of Mrs. Stewart made a kind
of effervescence which that indescribable entity, a vivid personality,
is sure to keep fizzing about it. She was devoutly admired, fiercely
criticised, and asked everywhere. It is true she had quite given up her
music, but she drew caricatures which were irresistibly funny, and was a
tremendous success in charades. Everything was still very new to her,
everything interesting and amusing. She was enchanted with her house,
although Milly and Lady Thomson had chosen it, preferring to a villa in
the Parks an old gray house of the kind that are every day recklessly
destroyed by the march of modern vulgarity. She approved of the few and
good pieces of old furniture with which they had provided it; although
Lady Thomson could not entirely approve of the frivolity and
extravagance of the chintzes with which she helped the sunshine to
brighten the low, panelled rooms. But Aunt Beatrice, girt with
principles major and minor, armed with so Procrustean a measure for most
of her acquaintance, accepted Mildred's deviations with an astonishing
ease. The secret of personal magnetism is not yet discovered. It may be
that the _aura_ surrounding each of us is no mystic vision of the
Neo-Buddhists, but a physical fact; that Mildred's personality acted by
a power not moral but physical on the nerves of those who approached
her, exciting those of some, of the majority, pleasurably, filling
others with a nameless uneasiness, to account for which they must accuse
her manners or her character.

To Ian Stewart the old panelled house with the walled garden behind,
where snowdrops and crocuses pushed up under budding orchard boughs, was
a paradise beyond any he had imagined. He found Mildred the most
adorable of wives, the most interesting of companions. Her defects as a
housekeeper, which Aunt Beatrice noted in silence but with surprise,
were nothing to him. He could not help pausing sometimes even in the
midst of his work, to wonder at his own good fortune and to reflect
that whatever the future might have in store, he would have no right to
complain, since it had been given to him to know the taste of perfect
happiness.

Since his marriage he had been obliged to take more routine work, and
the Long Vacation had become more valuable to him than ever. As soon as
he had finished an Examination he had undertaken, he meant to devote the
time to the preparation of a new book which he had in his mind. Mildred,
seemingly as eager as himself that the book should be done, had at first
agreed. Then some of her numerous friends had described the pleasures of
Dieppe, and she was seized with the idea that they too might go there.
Ian, she said, could work as well at Dieppe as at Oxford or in the
country. Ian knew better; besides, his funds were low and Dieppe would
cost too much. For the first time he opposed Mildred's wishes, and to
her surprise she found him perfectly firm. There was no quarrel, but
although she was silent he felt that she did not yield her opinion and
was displeased with him.

Late at night as he sat over Examination papers, his sensitive
imagination framed the accusations of selfishness, pedantry,
scrupulosity, which his wife might be bringing against him in the
"sessions of silent thought;" although it was clearly to her advantage
as much as to his own that he should keep out of money difficulties and
do work which counted. She had no fixed habits, and he flung down pipe
and pen, hoping to find her still awake. But she was already sound
asleep. The room was dark, but he saw her by the illumination of
distant lightning, playing on the edge of a dark and sultry world. His
appointed task was not yet done and he returned to the study, a long,
low, dark-panelled room, looking on the garden. The windows were wide
open on the hushed, warm, almost sulphurous darkness, from which frail
white-winged moths came floating in towards the shaded lamp on his
writing-table. He sat down to his papers and by an effort of will
concentrated his mind upon them. Habit had made such concentration easy
to him as a rule, but to-night, after half an hour of steady work, he
was mastered by an invading restlessness of mind and body. The cause was
not far to seek; he could hear all the time he worked the dull, almost
continuous, roar of distant thunder. All else was very still, it was
long past midnight and the town was asleep.

He got up and paced the room once or twice, grasping his extinguished
pipe absently in his hand. Suddenly a blast seemed to spring out of
nowhere and rush madly round the enclosed garden, tossing the gnarled
and leafy branches of the old orchard trees and dragging at the long
trails of creepers on wall and trellis. It blew in at the windows, hot
as from the heart of the thunder-cloud, and waved the curtains before
it. It rushed into the very midst of the old house with its cavernous
chimneys, deep cellars, and enormous unexplored walls, filling it with
strange, whispering sounds, as of half articulate voices, here menacing,
there struggling to reveal some sinister and vital secret. The blast
died away, but it seemed to have left those voices still muttering and
sighing through the walls that had sheltered so many generations, such
various lives of men. Ian was used to the creaking and groaning of the
wood-work; he knew how on the staircase the rising of the boards, which
had been pressed down in the day, simulated ghostly footsteps in the
night. He was in his mental self the most rational of mortals, but at
times the Highland strain in his blood, call it sensitive or
superstitious, spoke faintly to his nerves--never before so strongly, so
over-masteringly as to-night. A blue blaze of crooked lightning
zigzagged down the outer darkness and seemed to strike the earth but a
little beyond the garden wall. Following on its heels a tremendous clap
of thunder burst, as it were, on the very chimneys. The solid house
shook to its foundations. But the tide of horrible, irrational fear
which swept over Ian's whole being was not caused by this mere
exaggerated commonplace of nature. He could give no guess what it was
that caused it; he only knew that it was agony. He knew what it meant to
feel the hair lift on his head; he knew what the Psalmist meant when he
said, "My bones are turned to water." And as he stood unable to move,
afraid to turn his head, abject and ashamed of his abjectness, he was
listening, listening for he knew not what.

At length it came. He heard the stairs creak and a soft padding footstep
coming slowly down them; with it the brush of a light garment and
intermittently a faint human sound between a sigh and a sob. He did not
reflect that he could not really have heard such slight sounds through a
thick stone wall and a closed door. He heard them. The steps stopped at
the door; a hand seemed feeling to open it, and again there was a
painful sigh. The physical terror had not passed from him, but the
sudden though that it was his wife and that she was frightened or ill,
made him able to master it. He seized the lamp, because he knew the
light in the hall was extinguished, rushed to the door, opened it and
looked out. There was no one there. He made a hasty but sufficient
search and returned to the study.

The extremity of his fear was now passed, but an unpleasantly eery
feeling still lingered about him and he had a very definite desire to
find himself in some warm, human neighborhood. He had left the door open
and was arranging the papers on his writing-table, when once again he
heard those soft padding feet on the stairs; but this time they were
much heavier, more hurried, and stumbled a little. He stood bent over
the table, a bundle of papers in his hand, no longer overcome by mortal
terror, yet somehow reluctant once more to look out and to see once
more--nothing. There was a sound outside the door, louder, hoarser than
the faint sob or sigh which he had heard before, and he seized the lamp
and turned towards it. Before he had made a step forward, the door was
pushed violently back and his wife came in, leaning upon it as though
she needed support. She was barefooted and dressed only in a long
night-gown, white, yet hardly whiter than her face. Her eyes did not
turn towards him, they stared in front of her, not with the fixed gaze
of an ordinary sleep-walker, but with purpose and intensity. She seemed
to see something, to pursue something, with starting eyes and
out-stretched arms; something she hated even more than she feared it,
for her lips were blanched and tightened over her teeth as though with
fury, and her smooth white forehead gathered in a frown. Again she
uttered that low, fierce sound, like that he had heard outside the door.
Then, loosing the handle on which she had leaned, she half sprung, half
staggered, with uplifted hand, towards an open window, beyond which the
rush of the thunder shower was just visible, sloping pallidly across the
darkness. She leaned out into it and uttered to the night a hoarse,
confused voice, words inchoate, incomprehensible, yet with a terrible
accent of rage, of malediction. This transformation of his wife, so
refined, so self-contained, into a creature possessed by an almost
animal fury, struck Ian with horror, although he accepted it as a
phenomenon of somnambulism. He approached but did not touch her, for he
had heard that it was dangerous to awaken a somnambulist. Her voice sank
rapidly to a loud whisper and he heard her articulate--"My husband!
Mine! Mine!"--but in no tone of tenderness, rather pronouncing the words
as a passionate claim to his possession. Then suddenly she drooped, half
kneeling on the deep window-seat, half fallen across the sill. He sprang
to catch her, but not before her forehead had come down sharply on the
stone edge of the outer window. He kneeled upon the window-seat and
gathered her gently in his arms, where she lay quiet, but moaning and
shuddering.

"My husband!" she wailed, no longer furious now but despairing. "Ian! My
love! Ian! My life!--my life! My own husband!"

Even in this moment it thrilled him to hear such words from her lips. He
had not thought she loved him so passionately. He lifted her on to a
deep old sofa at the end of the room, wrapped her in a warm Oriental
coverlet which hung there, and held her to his heart, murmuring love and
comfort in her cold little ear. It seemed gradually to soothe her,
although he did not think she really awoke. Then he put her down,
lighted the lamp outside, and, not without difficulty, carried her up to
bed. Her eyes were half closed when he laid her down and drew the
bedclothes over her; and a minute or two later, when he looked in from
his dressing-room, she was evidently asleep.

When he got into bed she did not stir, and while he lay awake for
another hour, she remained motionless and breathing regularly. He
assured himself that the whole curious occurrence could be explained by
the electrical state of the atmosphere, which had affected his own
nerves in a way he would never humiliate himself by confessing to any
one. Those mysterious footsteps on the stairs which he had heard,
footsteps like his wife's yet not hers; that hand upon the door, that
voice of sighs, were the creation of his own excited brain. In time he
would doubtless come to believe his own assurances on the point, but
that night at the bottom of his heart he did not believe them.




CHAPTER X


Next morning, if Ian himself slept late, Milly slept later still. The
strained and troubled look which he had seen upon her face even in sleep
the night before, had passed away in the morning, but she lay almost
alarmingly still and white. He was reassured by remembering that once
when they were in Switzerland she had slept about sixteen hours and
awakened in perfect health. He remained in the house watching over her,
and about four o'clock she woke up. But she was very pale and very
quiet; exhausted, he thought, by her strange mental and physical
exertions of the night before.

She came down to tea with her pretty hair unbecomingly twisted up, and
dressed in a brownish-yellow tea-gown, which he fancied he remembered
hearing her denounce as only fit to be turned into a table-cloth. He did
not precisely criticise these details, but they helped in the impression
of lifelessness and gloom that hung about her. It was a faint, gleamy
afternoon, and such sun as there was did not shine into the study. The
dark panelling looked darker than usual, and as she sat silent and
listless in a corner of the old sofa, her hair and face stood out
against it almost startling in their blondness and whiteness. She was
strangely unlike herself, but Stewart comforted himself by remembering
that she had been odd in her manner and behavior, though in a different
way, after her long sleep in Switzerland. After he had given her tea, he
suggested that they should walk in the garden, as the rain was over.

"Not yet, Ian," she said. "I want to try and tell you something. I can
do it better here."

Her mouth quivered. He sat down by her on the sofa.

"Must you tell me now?" he asked, smiling. "Do you really think it
matters?"

"Yes--it does matter," she answered, tremulously, pressing her folded
hands against her breast. "It's something I ought to have told you
before you married me--but indeed, indeed I didn't know how dreadful it
was--I didn't think it would happen again."

He was puzzled a moment, then spoke, still smiling:

"I suppose you mean the sleep-walking. Well, darling, it is a bit
creepy, I admit, but I shall get used to it, if you won't do it too
often."

"Did I really walk?" she asked--and a look of horror was growing on her
face. "Ah! I wasn't sure. No--it's not that--it is--oh, don't think me
mad, Ian!"

"Tell me, dearest. I promise I won't."

"I've not been here at all since you've been living in this house. I've
not seen you, my own precious husband, since I went to sleep in
Switzerland, at the Hôtel du Chalet--don't you remember--when we had
been that long walk up to the glacier and I was so tired?"

Stewart was exceedingly startled. He paused, and then said, very gently
but very firmly:

"That's nonsense, dearest. You have been here, you've been with me all
the time."

"Ah! You think so, but it was not _I_--no, don't interrupt me--I mean to
tell you, I must, but I can't if you interrupt me. It was awfully wrong
of me not to tell you before; but I tried to, and then I saw you
wouldn't believe me. Do you remember a dinner-party at the Fletchers',
the autumn before we were engaged--when Cousin David had just bought
that picture?"

"That portrait of Lady Hammerton, which is so like you? Yes, I remember
it perfectly."

"You know I wanted my First so much and I had been working too hard, and
then I was told that evening that you had said I couldn't get it--"

"Silly me!"

"And I felt certain you didn't love me--"

"Silly you!"

"Don't interrupt me, please. And I wasn't well, and I cried and cried
and I couldn't leave off, and then I allowed Tims to hypnotize me. We
both knew she had no business to do it, it was wrong of us, of course,
but we couldn't possibly guess what would happen. I went to sleep, and
so far as I knew I never woke again for more than six months, not till
the Schools were over."

"But, my darling, I skated with you constantly in the Christmas
Vacation, and took your work through the Term. I assure you that you
were quite awake then."

"I remember nothing about it. All I know is that some one got my First
for me."

"But, Mildred--"

"Why do you call me Mildred? That's what they called me when I woke up
last time; but my own name's Milly."

Stewart rose and paced the room, then came back.

"It's simply a case of collapse of memory, dear. It's very trying, but
don't let's be fanciful about it."

"I thought it was only that--I told you, didn't I, something of that
sort? But I didn't know then, nobody told me, that I wasn't like myself
at all those months I couldn't remember. Last night in my sleep I
knew--I knew that some one else, something else--I can't describe it,
it's impossible--was struggling hard with me in my own brain, my own
body, trying to hold me down, to push me back again into the place,
whatever it was, I came out of. But I got stronger and stronger till I
was quite myself and the thing couldn't really stop me. I dare say it
only lasted a few seconds, then I felt quite free--free from the
struggle, the pressure; and I saw myself standing in the room, with some
kind of white floating stuff over my head and about me, and I saw myself
open the door and go out of the room. I wasn't a bit surprised, but I
just lay there quiet and peaceful. Then suddenly it came to me that I
couldn't have seen myself, that the person, the figure I had seen go
out of the door was the other one, the creature I had been struggling
with, who had stolen my shape; and it came to me that she was gone to
steal you--to steal your heart from me and take you away; and you
wouldn't know, you would think it was I, and you would follow her and
love her and never know it was not your own wife you were loving. And I
was mad with anger; I never knew before what it meant, Ian, to be as
angry as that. I struggled hard to get up, and at last I managed it, and
I came down-stairs after her, but I couldn't find her, and I was sure
that she had gone and had taken you away with her. And you say I really
did come down-stairs."

"Yes, darling, and if you had been awake instead of asleep, as you
obviously were, you would have seen that this nightmare of yours was
nothing but a nightmare. You would have seen that I was alone here,
quietly arranging my papers before going to bed. You gave me a fright
coming down as you did, for there was a tremendous thunderstorm going
on, and I am ashamed to say how queer my own nerves were. The electrical
state of the atmosphere and a very loud clap of thunder just overhead,
account for the whole business, which probably lasted only a few seconds
from beginning to end. Be reasonable, little woman, you are generally
the most reasonable person I know--except when you talk about going to
Dieppe."

Milly gave him a strange look.

"Why am I not reasonable when I talk about going to Dieppe?"

He drew her to him and kissed her hair.

"Never mind why. We aren't going to excite ourselves to-day or do
anything but make love and forget nightmares and everything
disagreeable."

She drew herself away a little and looked with frightened eyes in his.

"But I can't forget, Ian, that I don't remember anything that has
happened since we were on our honeymoon in Switzerland. And now we are
in Oxford, and I can see it's quite late in the summer. How can I forget
that somehow I am being robbed of myself--robbed of my life with you?"

"Wait till to-morrow and you'll remember everything right enough."

But Milly was not to be convinced. She was willing to submit on the
question of last night's experiences, but she assured him that Tims
would bear her out in the assertion that she had never recovered her
recollection of the months preceding her engagement. Ian ceased trying
to convince her that she was mistaken on this point; but he argued that
the memory was of all functions of the brain the most uncertain, that
there was no limit to its vagaries, which were mere matters of nerves
and circulation, and that Dr. Norton-Smith, the nerve and brain
specialist to whom he would take her, would probably turn out to have a
dozen patients subject to the same affliction as herself. One never
hears of half the ills that flesh is heir to until the inheritance falls
to one's own lot.

Milly was a common-sense young woman, and his explanation, especially as
it was his, pacified her for the time. The clouds had been rolling away
while they talked, the space of deep blue sky overhead growing larger,
the sunshine fuller. There was a busy twittering and shaking of little
wings in the tall pear-tree near the house, where the tomtits in their
varied liveries loved to congregate. July was not far advanced and the
sun had still some hours in which to shine. Ian and Milly went out and
walked in the Parks. The tennis-club lawns were almost deserted, but
they met a few acquaintances taking their constitutional, like
themselves, and an exchange of ordinary remarks with people who took her
normality for granted, helped Milly to believe in it herself. So long as
the blank in her memory continued, she could not be free from care; but
she went to sleep that night in Ian's arms, feeling herself protected by
them not only from bodily harm, but from all those dreadful fears and
evil fantasies that "do assault and hurt the soul."




CHAPTER XI


Ian had been so busy persuading Milly to view her own case as a simple
one, and so busy comforting her with an almost feminine intuition of
what would really afford her comfort, that it was only in the watches of
the night that certain disquieting recollections forced their way into
his mind. It was of course now part of his creed that he had loved Milly
Flaxman from the first--only he had never known her well till that
Christmas Vacation when they had skated so much together. Later on, such
disturbing events as engagement and marriage had seemed to him enough to
explain any changes he had observed in her. Later still, he had been too
much in love to think about her at all, in the true sense of the word.
She had been to him "all a wonder and a wild desire."

Now, taking the dates of her collapses of memory, he made, despite
himself, certain notes on those changes. It is to be feared he did not
often want to see Miss Timson; but on the day after Milly's return to
the world, he cycled out to visit her friend. Tims was spending the
summer on the wild and beautiful ridge which has since become a suburb
of Oxford. It was doubtful whether he would find her in, as she was
herself a mighty cyclist, making most of her journeys on the wheel,
happy in the belief that she was saving money at the expense of the
railway companies.

The time of flowers, the freshness of trees, and the glory of gorse and
broom was over. It was the season of full summer when the midlands,
clothed with their rich but sheenless mantle of green, wear a
self-satisfied air, as of dull people conscious of deserved prosperity.
But just as the sea or a mountain or an adventurous soul will always
lend an element of the surprising and romantic to the commonest corner
of earth, so the sky will perpetually transfigure large spaces of level
country, valley or plain, laid open to its capricious influences. Boars
Hill looks over the wide valley of the narrow Og to the downs, and up to
where that merges into the valley of the Upper Thames. By the sandy
track which Ian followed, the tree still stood, though no longer alone,
whence the poet of _Thyrsis_ looking northward, saw the "fair city with
her dreaming spires"; less fair indeed to-day than when he looked upon
it, but still "lovely all times," in all its fleeting shades, whether
blond and sharp-cut in the sunshine or dimly gray among its veiling
trees. The blue waving line of the downs, crowned here and there by
clumps of trees, ran far along the southwestern horizon, melting
vaporously in the distance above "the Vale, the three lone weirs, the
youthful Thames." Over the downs and over the wide valley of ripening
cornfields, of indigo hedgerow-elms and greener willow and woodland, of
red-roofed homesteads and towered churches, moved slowly the broad
shadows of rolling clouds that journeyed through the intense blue above.
Some shadows were like veils of pale gray gauze, through which the world
showed a delicately softened face; others were dark, with a rich,
indefinable hue of their own, and as they moved, the earth seemed to
burst into a deeper glow of color behind them. Close by, the broken
hill-side was set here and there with oak and thorn, was everywhere deep
in bracken, on whose large fronds lay the bluish bloom of their
maturity. It all gained a definiteness of form, an air of meaning by its
detachment from the wide background floating behind.

Following steep and circuitous lanes, Ian arrived at the lodging-house
and found Tims on the porch preparing to start on her bicycle. But
flattered and surprised by his visit, she ordered tea in the bright
little sitting-room she was inhabiting. He was shy of approaching the
real object of his visit. They marked time awhile till the thunderstorm
became their theme. Then he told something of Milly's sleep-walking, her
collapse of memory; and watched Tims meantime, hoping to see in her face
merely surprise and concern. But there was no surprise, hardly concern
in the queer little face. There was excitement, and at last a flash of
positive pleasure.

"Good old M.!" she observed. "I'm glad she has got back; though I'm a
bit proud of the other one too. I expect you feel much the same, old
boy, don't you?"

The speech was the reverse of soothing, even to its detail of "old boy."
He looked at his teacup and drew his black brows together.

"I'm afraid I don't understand, Miss Timson. I suppose you think it a
joke, but to me it seems rather a serious matter."

"Of course it is; uncommon serious," returned Tims, too much interested
in her subject to consider the husband's feelings. "Bless you! _I_ don't
want to be responsible for it. At first I thought it was a simple case
of a personality evolved by hypnotism; but if so it would have depended
on the hypnotist, and you see it didn't after the first."

"I don't think we need bother about hypnotism"--there was a note of
impatience in Ian's voice--"it's just a case of collapse of memory. But
as you were with her the first time it happened, I want to know exactly
how far the collapse went. There were signs of it every now and then in
her work, but on the whole it improved."

"You never can tell what will happen in these cases," said Tims. "She
remembered her book-learning pretty well, but she forgot her own name,
and as to people and things that had happened, she was like a new-born
babe. If I hadn't nursed her through she'd have been sent to a lunatic
asylum. But it wasn't that, after all, that made it so exciting. It was
the difference between Milly's two personalities. You don't mean to say,
old chap, you've lived with her for seven months and can't see the
difference?"

Tims looked at him. She held strong theoretical views as to the
stupidity of the male, but circumstances had seldom before allowed her
to put them to the test. Behold them more than justified; for Ian was
far above the average in intelligence. He, for a fraction of a minute,
paused, deliberately closing the shutter of his mind against an
unpleasant search-light that shot back on the experiences of his
courtship and marriage.

"Well, I suppose I'm not imaginative," he returned, with a dry laugh. "I
only see certain facts about her memory and want more of them, to tell
Norton-Smith when I take her up to see him."

"Norton-Smith!" exclaimed Tims. "What is the good? Englishmen are all
right when it's a question of filling up the map of Africa, but they're
no good on the dark continent of ourselves. They're cowards. That's
what's the matter with them. Don't go to Norton-Smith."

Stewart made an effectual effort to overcome his irritation. He ought to
have known better than to turn to an oddity like Tims for advice and
sympathy.

"Whom ought I to go to, then?" he asked, good-humoredly, and looking
particularly long as he rose from the depths of the low wicker chair. "A
medicine-man with horns and a rattle?"

"Well," returned Tims with deliberation, pulling on a pair of thread
gloves, "I dare say he could teach Norton-Smith a thing or two. Mind
you, I'm not talking spiritualistic rot; I'm talking scientific facts,
which every one knows except the English scientific men, who keep on
clapping their glass to the blind eye like a lot of clock-work Nelsons.
The effects of hypnotism are as much facts as the effects of a bottle of
whiskey. But Milly's case is different. In my opinion she's developed an
independent double personality. It's an inconvenient state of things,
but I don't suppose it'll last forever. One or the other will get
stronger and 'hold the fort.' But it's rather a bad business anyhow."
Tims paused and sighed, drawing on the other glove. "I'm--I'm fond of
them both myself, and I expect you'll feel the same, when you see the
difference."

Ian laughed awkwardly, his brown eyes fixed scrutinizingly upon her.

"So long as the fort holds somebody, I sha'n't worry," he said, lightly.

They went out, and as he led his own bicycle towards the upper track,
Tims spun down the steep drive, and, turning into the lane, kissed her
hand to him in farewell from under the brim of her perennially crooked
hat.

"That Timson girl's more than queer," he mused to himself, going on.
"There's a streak of real insanity in her. I'm afraid it's not been good
for a highly strung creature like Mildred to see so much of her; and why
on earth did she?"

He tried to clear his mind of Tims's fantastic suggestions; of
everything, indeed, except the freshness of the air rushing past him,
the beauty of the wide view, steeped in the romance of distance. But
memory, that strange, recalcitrant, mechanical slave of ours, kept
diving, without connivance of his, into the recesses of the past twenty
months of his life, and presenting to him unsolicited, circumstances,
experiences, which he had thrust away unclassified--his own surprise,
almost perplexity, when Mildred had brought him work for the first time
after her illness that autumn Term before last; his disappointment and
even boredom in his engagement and the first three weeks of his
marriage; then the change in his own feelings after her long sleep at
the Hôtel du Chalet; besides a score of disquieting trifles which meant
nothing till they were strung on a thread. He felt himself beginning to
be infected with Flora Timson's mania against his will, against his
sober judgment; and he spun down Bagley Hill at a runaway speed, only
saved by a miracle from collision with a cart which emerged from
Hincksey Lane at the jolting pace with which the rustic pursues his
undeviating course.




CHAPTER XII


Milly, too, had not been without a sharp reminder that the leaves in her
life so blank to her, had been fully inscribed by another. She hardly
yet felt mistress of the house, but it was pleasant to rest and read in
the low, white-panelled drawing-room, which lowered awnings kept cool,
although the afternoon sun struck a golden shaft across the flowering
window-boxes of its large and deeply recessed bow-window. The whole room
was lighter and more feminine than Milly would have made it, but at
bottom the taste that reigned there was more severe than her own. The
only pictures on the panels were a few eighteenth century colored
prints, already charming, soon to be valuable, and one or two framed
pieces of needlework which harmonized with them.

Presently the door-bell rang and a Mr. Fitzroy was announced by the
parlor-maid, in a tone which implied that she was accustomed to his
name. He looked about the age of an undergraduate and was
extraordinarily well-groomed, in spite of, or perhaps because of, being
in a riding-dress. His sleek dark hair was neatly parted in the middle
and he was clean shaven, when to be so smacked of the stage; but his
manners and expression smacked of nothing of the kind.

"I'm awfully glad to find you at home, Mrs. Stewart," he said. "I've
been lunching at the Morrisons', and, you know, I'm afraid there's going
to be a row."

The Morrisons? They lived outside Oxford, and Milly knew them by sight,
that was all.

"What about?" she asked, kindly, thinking the young man had come for
help, or at least sympathy, in some embarrassment of his own.

"Why, about your acting Galatea. Jim Morrison's been a regular fool
about it. He'd no business to take it for granted that that was the part
I wanted Mrs. Shaw for. Now it appears she's telling every one that
she's been asked to play the lead at the Besselsfield theatricals; and,
by Jove, he says she is to, too!"

Milly went rather pale and then quite pink.

"Then of course I couldn't think of taking the part," she said, gasping
with relief at this providential escape.

Mr. Fitzroy in his turn flushed. He had an obstinate chin and the cares
of stage-management had already traced a line right across his smooth
forehead. It deepened to a furrow as he leaned forward out of his low
wicker chair, clutching the pair of dogskin gloves which he held in his
hand.

"Oh, come, I say now, Mrs. Stewart!" and his voice and eye were
surprisingly stern for one so young. "That's not playing fair. You
promised me you'd see me through this show, and you know as well as I
do, Mrs. Shaw can no more act than those fire-irons."

"But I--" Milly was about to say "I've never acted in my life"--when she
remembered that she knew less than any one in her acquaintance what she
had or had not done in that recent life which was not hers. "I shouldn't
act Galatea at all well," she substituted lamely; "and I shouldn't look
the part nearly as well as Mrs. Shaw will."

"Excuse me, Mrs. Stewart, but I'm certain you're simply cut out for it
all round, and you told me the other day you were particularly anxious
to play it. You promised you'd stick to me through thick and thin and
not care a twopenny--I mean a straw--what Jim Morrison and Mrs. Shaw--"

In the stress of conversation they had neither of them noticed the
tinkle of the front-door bell. Now the door of the room, narrow and in
the thickness of an enormous wall, was thrown open and Mrs. Shaw was
announced.

Fitzroy, forgetful of manners in his excitement, stooped forward and
gripping Milly's arm almost hissed:

"Remember! You've promised me."

The words filled Milly with misery. That any one should be able to
accuse her of breaking a promise, however unreal her responsibility for
it, was horrible to her.

Mrs. Shaw entered, no longer the seraph of twenty months ago. She had
latterly put off the æsthetic raiment she had worn with such peculiar
grace, and her dress and coiffure were quite in the fashion of the
hour. The transformation somewhat shocked Milly, who could never help
feeling a slight austere prejudice against fashionably dressed woman.
Then, considering how little she knew Mrs. Shaw, it was embarrassing to
be kissed by her.

"It's odd I should find you here, Mr. Fitzroy," said Mrs. Shaw, settling
her rustling skirts on a chintzy chair. "I've just come to talk to Mrs.
Stewart about the acting. I'm so sorry there's been a misunderstanding
about it."

Her tone was civil but determined, and there was a fighting look in her
eye.

"So am I, Mrs. Shaw, most uncommonly sorry," returned Fitzroy, patting
his sleek hair and feeling that his will was adamant, however pretty
Mrs. Shaw might be.

"Of course, I shouldn't have thought of taking the part away from Mrs.
Stewart," she resumed, glancing at Milly, not without meaning, "but Mr.
Morrison asked me to take it quite a fortnight ago. I've learned most of
it and rehearsed two scenes already with him. He says they go capitally,
and we both think it seems rather a pity to waste all that labor and
change the part now."

Fitzroy cast a look at Mrs. Stewart which was meant to call up
reinforcements from that quarter; but as she sat there quite silent, he
cleared his throat and begun:

"It's an awful bore, of course, but I fancy it's about three weeks or a
month since I first asked Mrs. Stewart to play the lead--isn't it, Mrs.
Stewart?"

Milly muttered assent, horribly suspecting a lie. A flash of indignant
scorn from Mrs. Shaw confirmed the suspicion.

"Mrs. Stewart said something quite different when I spoke to her about
it at tennis on Friday. Didn't you, Mildred?" she asked.

Milly crimsoned.

"Did I?" she stammered. "I'm afraid I've got a dreadfully bad
memory--for--for dates of that kind."

Mrs. Shaw smiled coldly. Mr. Fitzroy felt himself deceived in Mrs.
Stewart as an ally. He had counted on her promised support, on her wit
and spirit to carry him through, and her conduct was simply cowardly.

"The fact is, Mrs. Shaw," he said, "Jim Morrison's not bossing this show
at all. That's where the mistake has come in. My aunt, Lady Wolvercote,
is a bit of an autocrat, don't you know, and she doesn't like us fellows
to arrange things on our own account. If she knew you I'm sure she'd see
what a splendid Galatea you'd make, but as it is she's set her heart on
getting Mrs. Stewart from the very first."

Had he stopped here his position would have been good, but an indignant
instinct, urging him to push the reluctant Mrs. Stewart into the proper
place of woman--that natural shield of man against all the social
disagreeables he brings on himself--made Fitzroy rush into the fatal
detail.

"My aunt told you so at the Masonic; didn't she, Mrs. Stewart?"

Milly, under the young man's imperious eye, assented feebly, but Mrs.
Shaw laughed. She perfectly remembered Mildred having mentioned on that
very occasion that she did not know Lady Wolvercote by sight.

"I'm afraid I've come just a few minutes too soon," she said, dryly.
"You and Mr. Fitzroy don't seem to have talked things over quite
enough."

The saying was dark and yet too clear. Milly, the meticulously truthful,
saw herself convicted of some horrible falsehood. She blushed violently,
gasped, and rolled her handkerchief into a tight ball. Mr. Fitzroy
ignoring the insinuation, changed his line.

"The part we really wanted you to take, Mrs. Shaw, was that of a nymph
in an Elizabethan masque which Lumley has written, with music by Stephen
Bampton. It's to be played in the rose garden and there's a chorus of
nymphs who sing and dance. We want them to look perfectly lovely, don't
you know, and as there can't be any make-up to speak of, it's awfully
difficult to find the right people."

Mrs. Shaw disdained the lure and mentally condemned his anxiously civil
manner as "soapy."

"I shall ask Mr. Morrison to go to Lady Wolvercote at once," she said,
"and see whether she really wishes me to give up the part. Time's
getting on, and he says he won't be able to have many more rehearsals."

There was a sound as of a carriage stopping in the street below, the
jingling of bits, and a high female voice giving an order. Fitzroy,
inwardly exasperated by Mrs. Shaw's resistance and the abject conduct of
his ally, sprang to his feet.

"I believe that's my aunt!" he exclaimed. "She wants me to call at
Blenheim on the way home, and I suppose the Morrisons told her where I
was."

He managed to slip his head out between the edge of an awning and the
mignonette and geraniums of a window-box.

"It's my aunt, right enough. May I fetch her up, Mrs. Stewart?" He was
down the stairs in a moment and voluble in low-voiced colloquy with the
lady in the barouche.

Lady Wolvercote was organizing the great fancy fair for the benefit of
the County Cottage Hospitals, and had left the dramatic part of the
programme to her nephew to arrange. She was a tall, slight woman, of the
usual age for aunts, and pleasant to every one; but she took it for
granted that every one would do as she wished--naturally, since they
always did in her neighborhood. As she stumbled up the stairs after
Charlie Fitzroy--it was a dark staircase and narrow in proportion to its
massive oak balusters--she felt faintly annoyed with him for dragging
her into the quarrels of his middle-class friends, but confident that
she could manage them without the least trouble.

Milly was relieved at the return of Mr. Fitzroy with his aunt. She had
had an unhappy five minutes with Mrs. Shaw, who had been saying cryptic
but unpleasant things and calling her "Mildred"; whereas she did not so
much as know Mrs. Shaw's Christian name.

Seeing Mrs. Shaw, beautiful, animated, well-dressed, and Milly neatly
clothed, since her clothes were not of her own choosing, but with her
hair unbecomingly knotted, the brightness of her eyes, complexion, and
expression in eclipse, Lady Wolvercote wondered at her nephew's choice.
But that was his affair. She began to talk in a rather high-pitched
voice and continuously, like one whose business it is to talk; so that
it was difficult to interrupt without rudeness.

"So you're going to be kind enough to act Galatea for us at our fancy
fair, Mrs. Stewart? We want it to be a great success, and Lord
Wolvercote and I have heard so much about your acting. My nephew said
the part of Galatea would suit you exactly; didn't you, Charlie?"

"Down to the ground," interpolated, or rather accompanied, Fitzroy. "We
shall have the placards out on Wednesday, and people are looking forward
already to seeing Mrs. Stewart. There'll be a splendid audience."

"Every one has promised to fill their houses for the fair," Lady
Wolvercote was continuing, "and the Duke thinks he may be able to get
down ----," she mentioned a royalty. "You're going to help us too,
aren't you, Mrs. Shaw? It's so very kind of you. We've got such a pretty
part for you in a musical affair which Lenny Lumley wrote with somebody
or other for the Duchess of Ulster's Elizabethan bazaar. There's a
chorus of fairies--nymphs, Charlie? Yes, nymphs, and we want them all
to be very pretty and able to sing, and there's a charming dance for
them. I'm afraid that silly boy, Jim Morrison, made some mistake about
it, and told you we wanted you to act Galatea. But of course we couldn't
possibly do without you in the other thing, and Mrs. Stewart seems quite
pointed out for that Galatea part. Jim's such a dear, isn't he? And such
a splendid actor, every one says he really ought to go on the stage. But
we none of us pay the least attention to anything the dear boy says, for
he always does manage to get things wrong."

Mrs. Shaw had been making little movements preparatory to going. She had
no gift for the stage except beauty, but that produces an illusion of
success, and she took her acting with the seriousness of a Duse.

"I'm sorry I didn't know Mr. Morrison's habits better," she replied.
"I've been studying the part of Galatea a good deal and rehearsing it
with him as well. Of course, I don't for a moment wish to prevent Mrs.
Stewart from taking it, but I've spent a good deal of time upon it and
I'm afraid I can't undertake anything else. Of course, it's very
inconvenient stopping in Oxford in August, and I shouldn't care to do it
except for the sake of a part which I felt gave me a real opportunity--"

"But it's a very pretty part we've got for you," resumed Lady
Wolvercote, perplexed. "And we were hoping to see you over at
Besselsfield a good deal for rehearsals--"

It seemed to her a "part of nature's holy plan" that the prospect of
Besselsfield should prove irresistibly attractive to the wives of
professional men.

"Thanks, so much, but I'm sure you and Mr. Fitzroy must know plenty of
girls who would do for that sort of part," returned Mrs. Shaw.

Milly here broke in eagerly:

"Please, Lady Wolvercote, do persuade Mrs. Shaw to take Galatea; I'm
sure I sha'n't be able to do it a bit; and I would try and take the
nymph. I should love the music, and I know I could do the singing,
anyhow."

She rose because Mrs. Shaw had risen and was looking for her parasol and
shaking out her plumes. But why did Mr. Fitzroy and Mrs. Shaw both stare
at her in an unvarnished surprise, touched with ridicule on the lady's
side?

"No, no, Mrs. Stewart, that won't do!" cried he, in obvious dismay. At
the same moment Mrs. Shaw ejaculated, ironically:

"That's very brave of you Mildred! I thought you hated music and were
never going to try to sing again."

She and Fitzroy had both been present on an occasion when Mildred, urged
on by Milly's musical reputation, had committed herself to an experiment
in song which had not been successful.

"Thank you very much," Mrs. Shaw went on, "for offering to change, but
of course Lady Wolvercote must arrange things as she likes; and, to
speak frankly, I'm not particularly sorry to give the acting up, as my
husband was rather upset at my not being able to go to Switzerland with
him on the 28th. No, please don't trouble; I can let myself out.
Good-bye, Lady Wolvercote; I hope the fair and the theatricals will be a
great success. Good-bye, Mr. Fitzroy, good-bye."

Lady Wolvercote's faint remonstrances were drowned in the adieus, and
Mrs. Shaw sailed out with flying colors, while Milly sank back abjectly
into the seat from which she had risen. Every minute she was realizing
with a more awful clearness that she, whose one appearance on the stage
had been short and disastrous, was cast to play the leading part in a
public play before a large and brilliant audience. She hardly heard
Fitzroy's bitter remarks on Mrs. Shaw--not forgetting Jim Morrison--or
Lady Wolvercote exclaiming in a voice almost dreamy with amazement:

"Really it's too extraordinary!"

"I'm very sorry Mrs. Shaw won't take the part," said Milly, clasping and
unclasping her slender fingers, "for I know I can't do it myself."

Fitzroy was protesting, but she forced herself to continue: "You don't
know what I'm like when I'm nervous. When we had _tableaux vivants_ at
Ascham I was supposed to be Charlotte putting a wreath on Werther's urn,
and I trembled so much that I knocked the urn down. It was only
card-board, so it didn't break, but every one laughed and the tableau
was spoiled."

Fitzroy and his aunt cried out that that was nothing, a first
appearance; any one could see she had got over that now. Pale, with
terrified eyes, she looked from one to the other of her tormentors, who
continued to sing the praises of her past prowess on the boards and to
foretell the unprecedented harvest of laurels she would reap at
Besselsfield. The higher their enthusiasm rose, the more profound became
her dejection. There seemed no loop-hole for escape, unless the earth
would open and swallow her, which however much to be desired was hardly
to be expected.

The ting of a bicycle-bell below did not seem to promise assistance, for
cyclists affected the quiet street. But it happened that this bicycle
bore Ian to the door. He did not notice the coronet on the carriage
which stood before it, and assumed it to belong to one of the three or
four ladies in Oxford who kept such equipages. Yet in the blank state of
Milly's memory, he was sorry she had not denied herself to visitors,
which Mildred had already learned to do with a freedom only possible to
women who are assured social success. Commonly the sight of a carriage
would have sent him tiptoeing past the drawing-room, but now, vaguely
uneasy, he came straight in. He looked particularly tall in the frame of
the doorway, so low that his black hair almost touched the lintel;
particularly handsome in the shaded, white-panelled room, into which the
dark glow of his sunburned skin and brown eyes, bright with exercise,
seemed to bring the light and warmth of the summer earth and sky.

Milly sprang to meet him. Lady Wolvercote was surprised to learn that
this was Mrs. Stewart's husband. She had no idea a Don could be so
young and good-looking. Judging of Dons solely by the slight and
slighting references of her undergraduate relatives, she had imagined
them to be weird-looking men, within various measurable distances of the
grave.

"Lady Wolvercote and Mr. Fitzroy want me to act Galatea at the
Besselsfield theatricals," said Milly, clinging to his sleeve and
looking up at him with appealing eyes. "Please tell them I can't
possibly do it. I'm--I'm not well enough--am I?"

"We're within three weeks of the performance, sir," put in Fitzroy.
"Mrs. Stewart promised she'd do it, and we shall be in a regular fix now
if she gives it up. Mrs. Shaw's chucked us already."

"Yes, and every one says how splendidly Mrs. Stewart acts," pleaded Lady
Wolvercote.

Stewart had half forgotten the matter; but now he remembered that
Mildred had been keen to have the part only a week ago, and a little
pettish because he had advised her to leave it alone, on account of Mrs.
Shaw. Now she was hanging on him with desperate eyes and that worried
brow which he had not seen once since he had married her.

"I'm extremely sorry, Lady Wolvercote," he said, "but my wife's had a
nervous break-down lately and I can't allow her to act. She's not fit
for it."

"Ah, I see--I quite understand!" returned Lady Wolvercote. "But we'd
take great care of her, Mr. Stewart. She could come and stay at
Besselsfield."

Fitzroy's gloom lifted. His aunt was a trump. Surely an invitation to
Besselsfield must do the job. But Stewart, though apologetic, was
inflexible. He had forbidden his wife to act and there was an end of it.
The perception of the differences between the two personalities of Milly
which had been thrust to-day on his unwilling mind, made him grasp the
meaning of her frantic appeals for protection. He relieved her of all
responsibility for her refusal to act.

Lady Wolvercote observed, as she and her nephew went sadly on their way,
that Mr. Stewart seemed a very, very odd man in spite of his presentable
manners and appearance; and Fitzroy replied gloomily that of course he
was a beast. Dons always were beasts.




CHAPTER XIII


The diplomatic incident of the theatricals was not the only minor
trouble which Milly found awaiting her. The cook's nerves were upset by
a development of rigid economy on the part of her mistress, and she gave
notice; the house parlor-maid followed suit. No one seemed to have kept
Ian's desk tidy, his papers in order, or his clothes properly mended. It
was a joy to her to put everything belonging to him right.

When all was arranged to her satisfaction: "Ian," she said, sitting on
his knee with her head on his shoulder, "I can't bear to think how
wretched you must have been all the time I was away."

Ian was silent a minute.

"But you haven't been away, and I don't like you to talk as though you
had."

Wretched? It would have been absurd to think of himself as wretched now;
yet compared with the wonderful happiness that had been his for more
than half a year, what was this "house swept and garnished"? An empty
thing. Words of Tims's which he had thought irritating and absurd at the
time, haunted him now. "_You don't mean to say you haven't seen the
difference?_" He might not have seen it, but he had felt it. He felt it
now.

There was at any rate no longer any question of Dieppe. They took
lodgings at Sheringham and he made good progress with his book. Yet not
quite so good as he had hoped. Milly was indefatigable in looking up
points and references, in preventing him from slipping into the small
inaccuracies to which he was prone; but he missed the stimulus of
Mildred's alert mind, so quick to hit a blot in logic or in taste, so
vivid in appreciation.

Milly meantime guessed nothing of his dissatisfaction. She adored her
husband more every day, and her happiness would have been perfect had it
not been for the haunting horror of the possible "change" which might be
lurking for her round the corner of any night--that "change," which
other people might call what they liked, but which meant for her the
robbery of her life, her young happy life with Ian. He had taken her
twice to Norton-Smith before the great man went for his holiday.
Norton-Smith had pronounced it a peculiar but not unprecedented case of
collapse of memory, caused by overwork; and had spent most of the
consultation time in condemning the higher education of women. Time,
rest, and the fulfilment of woman's proper function of maternity would,
he affirmed, bring all right, since there was no sign of disease in Mrs.
Stewart, who appeared to him, on the contrary, a perfectly healthy young
woman. When Ian, alone with him, began tentatively to bring to the
doctor's notice the changes in character and intelligence that had
accompanied the losses of memory, he found his remarks set aside like
the chatter of a foolish child.

If maternity would indeed exorcise the Invader, Milly had lost no time
in beginning the exorcism. And she did believe that somehow it would;
not because the doctor said so, but because she could not believe God
would let a child's mother be changed in that way, at any rate while she
was bearing it. To do so would be to make it more motherless than any
little living thing on earth. Milly had always been quietly but deeply
religious, and she struggled hard against the feeling of peculiar
injustice in this strange affliction that had been sent to her. She
prayed earnestly to God every night to help and protect her and her
child, and the period of six or seven months, at which the "change" had
come before, passed without a sign of it. In April a little boy was
born. They called him Antonio, after a learned Italian, a friend and
teacher of Ian's.

The advent of the child did something to explain the comparative
seclusion into which Mrs. Stewart had retired, and the curious dulling
of that brilliant personality of hers. The Master of Durham was among
the few of Mrs. Stewart's admirers who declined to recognize the change
in her. He had been attracted by the girl Milly Flaxman, by her gentle,
shy manners and pretty face, combined with her reputation for
scholarship; the brilliant Invader had continued to attract him in
another way. The difference between the two, if faced, would have been
disagreeably mysterious. He preferred to say and think that there was
none; Mrs. Stewart was probably not very well.

Milly's shyness made it peculiarly awkward for her to find herself in
possession of a number of friends whom she would not have chosen
herself, and of whose doings and belongings she was in complete
ignorance. However, if she gave offence she was unconscious of it, and
it came very naturally to her to shrink back into the shadow of her
household gods. Ian and the baby were almost sufficient in themselves to
fill her life. There was just room on the outskirts of it for a few
relations and old friends, and Aunt Beatrice still held her honored
place. But it was through Aunt Beatrice that she was first to learn the
feel of a certain dull heartache which was destined to grow upon her
like some fell disease, a thing of ceaseless pain.

She was especially anxious to get Aunt Beatrice, who had been in America
all the Summer Vacation, to stay with them in the Autumn Term as Lady
Thomson had been with them in May, and Milly did not like to think of
the number of things, all wrong, which she was sure to have noticed in
the house. Besides, what with theatricals and other engagements, it was
evident that a good many people had been "in and out" in the Summer
Term--a condition of life which Lady Thomson always denounced. Milly was
anxious for her to see that that phase was past and that her favorite
niece had settled down into the quiet, well-ordered existence of which
she approved.

Aunt Beatrice came; but oh, disappointment! If it had been possible to
say of Lady Thomson, whose moods were under almost perfect control,
that she was out of temper, Milly would have said it. She volunteered no
opinion, but when asked, she compared Milly's new cook unfavorably with
her former one. When her praise was anxiously sought, she observed that
it was undesirable to be careless in one's housekeeping, but less
disagreeable than to be fussy and house-proud. She added that
Milly--whom she called Mildred--must be on her guard against relaxing
into domestic dulness, when she could be so extremely clever and
charming if she liked. Milly was bewildered and distressed. She felt
sure that she had passed through a phase of which Aunt Beatrice ought to
have disapproved. She had evidently been frivolous and neglectful of her
duties; yet it seemed as though her aunt had been better pleased with
her when she was like that. What could have made Aunt Beatrice, of all
women, unkind and unjust?

In this way more than a year went by. The baby grew and was
short-coated; the October Term came round once more, and still Milly
remained the same Milly. To have wished it otherwise would have seemed
like wishing for her death.

But at times a great longing for another, quite another, came over Ian.
It was like a longing for the beloved dead. Of course it was mad--mad!
He struggled against the feeling, and generally succeeded in getting
back to the point of view that the change had been more in himself, in
his own emotional moods, than in Milly.

October, the golden month, passed by and November came in, soft and
dim; a merry month for the hunting men beside the coverts, where the
red-brown leaves still hung on the oak-trees and brushwood, and among
the grassy lanes, the wide fresh fields and open hill-sides. No ill
month either for those who love to light the lamp early and open their
books beside a cheerful fire. But then the rain came, a persistent,
soaking rain. Milly always went to her district on Tuesdays, no matter
what the weather, and this time she caught a cold. Ian urged her to stop
in bed next morning. He himself had to be in College early, and could
not come home till the afternoon.

It was still raining and the early falling twilight was murky and brown.
The dull yellow glare of the street-lamps was faintly reflected in the
muddy wetness of pavements and streets. He was carrying a great armful
of books and papers under his dripping mackintosh and umbrella. As he
walked homeward as fast as his inconvenient load allowed, he became
acutely conscious of a depression of spirits which had been growing upon
him all day. It was the weather, he argued, affecting his nerves or
digestion. The vision of a warm, cosey house, a devoted wife awaiting
him, ought to have cheered him, but it did not. He hoped he would not
feel irritable when Milly rushed into the hall as soon as his key was
heard in the front door, to feel him all over and take every damp thread
tragically. Poor dear Milly! What a discontented brute of a husband she
had got! The fault was no doubt with himself, and he would not really be
happy even if some miracle did set him down on a sunny Mediterranean
shore, with enough money to live upon and nothing to think of but his
book. Mildred used to say that she always went to a big dinner at Durham
in the unquenchable hope of meeting and fascinating some millionaire who
had sense enough to see how much better it would be to endow writers of
good books than readers of silly ones.

With the recollection there rang in the ears of his mind the sound of a
laugh which he had not heard for seventeen months. Something seemed to
tighten about his heart. Yes, he could be quite happy without the
millionaire, without the sunny skies, without even the pretty,
comfortable home at whose door he stood, if somewhere, anywhere, he
could hope to hear that laugh again, to hold again in his arms the
strange bright bride who had melted from them like snow in
spring-time--but that way madness lay. He thrust the involuntary longing
from him almost with horror, and turned the latch-key in his door.

The hall lamp was burning low and the house seemed very chilly and
quiet. He put his books down on the oak table, threw his streaming
mackintosh upon the large chest, and went up to his dressing-room, to
change whatever was still damp about him before seeking Milly, who
presumably was nursing her cold before the study fire. When he had
thrown off his shoes, he noticed that the door leading to his wife's
room was ajar and a faint red glow of firelight showed invitingly
through the chink. A fire! It was irresistible. He went in quickly and
stirred the coals to a roaring blaze. The dancing flames lit up the
long, low room with its few pieces of furniture, its high white
wainscoting, and paper patterned with birds and trellised leaves. They
lit up the low white bed and the white figure of his sleeping wife. Till
then he had thought the room was empty. She lay there so deathly still
and straight that he was smitten with a sudden fear; but leaning over
her he heard her quiet, regular breathing and saw that if somewhat pale,
she was normal in color. He touched her hand. It was withdrawn by a
mechanical movement, but not before he had felt that it was warm.

A wild excitement thrilled him; it would have been truer to say a wild
joy, only that it held a pang of remorse for itself. So she had lain at
the Hôtel du Chalet when he had left her for that long walk over the
crisp mountain snow. And when he had returned, she--what She? No, his
brain did not reel on the verge of madness; it merely accepted under the
compulsion of knowledge a truth of those truths that are too profound to
admit of mere external proof. For our reason plays at the edge of the
universe as a little child plays at the edge of the sea, gathering from
its fringes the flotsam and jetsam of its mighty life. But miles and
miles beyond the ken of the eager eye, beyond the reach of the alert
hand, lies the whole great secret life of the sea. And if it were all
laid bare and spread at the child's feet, how could the little hand
suffice to gather its vast treasures, the inexperienced eye to perceive
and classify them?

Alone in the firelit, silent room, with this tranced form before him,
Ian Stewart knew that the woman who would arise from that bed would be a
different woman from the one who had lain down upon it. By what
mysterious alchemy of nature transmuted he could not understand, any
more than he could understand the greater part of the workings of that
cosmic energy which he was compelled to recognize, although he might be
cheated with words into believing that he understood them. Another woman
would arise and she his Love. She had been gone so long; his heart had
hungered for her so long, in silence even to himself. She had been dead
and now she was about to be raised from the dead. He lighted the
candles, locked the doors, and paced softly up and down, stopping to
look at the figure on the bed from time to time. Far around him, close
about him, life was moving at its usual jog-trot pace. People were going
back to their College rooms or domestic hearths, grumbling about the
weather or their digestions or their colds, thinking of their work for
the evening or of their dinner engagements--and suddenly a door had shut
between him and all that outside world. He was no longer moving in the
driven herd. He was alone, above them in an upper chamber, awaiting the
miracle of resurrection.

In the visions that passed before his mind's eye the face of Milly,
pale, with pleading eyes, was not absent; but with a strange hardness
which he had never felt before, he thrust the sighing phantom from him.
She had had her turn of happiness, a long one; it was only fair that
now they two, he and that Other, should have their chance, should put
their lips to the full cup of life. The figure on the bed stirred,
turned on one side, and slipped a hand under the pure curve of the young
cheek. He was by the bed in a moment; but it still slept, though less
profoundly, without that tranced look, as though the flame of life
itself burned low within.

How would she first greet him? Last time she had leaned into the clear
sunshine and laughed to him from the cloud of her amber hair; and a
spirit in his blood had leaped to the music of her laugh, even while the
rational self knew not it was the lady of his love. But however she came
back it would be she, the Beloved. He felt exultantly how little, after
all, the frame mattered. Last time he had found her, his love had been
set in the sunshine and the splendor of the Alpine snows, with nothing
to jar, nothing to distract it from itself. And that was good. To-day,
it was opening, a sudden and wonderful bloom, in the midst of the murky
discomfort of an English November, the droning hum of the machinery of
his daily work. And this, too, was good.

Yes, it was better because of the contrast between the wonder and its
environment, better because he himself was more conscious of his joy. He
sat on the bed a while watching her impatiently. In his eyes she was
already filled with a new loveliness, but he wanted her hair, her amber
hair. It was brushed back and imprisoned tightly in a little plait tied
with a white ribbon--Milly's way. With fingers clumsy, yet gentle, he
took off the ribbon and cautiously undid the plait. Then he took a comb
and spread out the silk-soft hair more as he liked to see it, pleased
with his own skill in the unaccustomed task. She stirred again, but
still she did not wake. He was pacing up and down the room when she
raised herself a little on her pillow and looked fixedly at the opposite
wall. Ian held his breath. He stood perfectly still and watched her.
Presently she sat up and looked about her, looked at him with a faint,
vague smile, like that of a baby. He sat down at the foot of the bed and
took her hand. She smiled at him again, this time with more definite
meaning.

"Do you know who it is, sweetheart?" he said in a low voice. She nodded
slightly and went on smiling, as though quietly happy.

"Ian," she breathed, at length.

"Yes, darling."

"I've been away a long, long time. How long?"

He told her.

She uttered a little "Ah!" and frowned; lay quiet awhile, then drew her
hand from Ian's and sat up still more.

"I sha'n't lie here any longer," she said, in a stronger voice. "It's
just waste of time." She pushed back the clothes and swung her feet out
of bed. "Oh, how glad I am to be back again! Are you glad I'm back, Ian?
Say you are, do say you are!"

And Ian on his knees before her, said that he was.




CHAPTER XIV


Ian was leaning against the high mantel-piece of his study. Above it,
let into the panelling, was an eighteenth-century painting of the Bridge
and Castle of St. Angelo, browned by time. He was wondering how to tell
Mildred about the child, and whether she would resent its presence. She,
too, was meditating, chin on hand. At length she looked up with a sudden
smile.

"What about the baby, Ian? Don't you take any notice of it yet?"

He was surprised.

"How do you know about him?"

She frowned thoughtfully.

"I seem to know things that have happened in a kind of way--rather as
though I had seen them in a dream. But they haven't happened to me, you
know."

"Was it the same last time?"

"No; but the first time I came, and especially just at first, I seemed
to remember all kinds of things--" She paused as though trying in vain
to revive her impressions--"Odd things, not a bit like anything in
Oxford. I can't recall them now, but sometimes in London I fancy I've
seen places before."

"Of course you have, dear."

"And the first time I saw that old picture there I knew it was Rome, and
I had a notion that I'd been there and seen just that view."

"You've been seeing pictures and reading books and hearing talk all your
life, and in the peculiar state of your memory, I suppose you can't
distinguish between the impressions made on it by facts and by ideas."

Mildred was silent; but it was not the silence of conviction. Then she
jumped up.

"I'm going to see Baby. You needn't come if you don't want."

He hesitated.

"I'm afraid it's too late. Milly doesn't like--" He broke off with a
wild laugh. "What am I talking about!"

"I suppose you were going to say, Milly doesn't like people taking a
candle into the room when Baby is shut up for the night. I don't care
what Milly likes. He's my baby now, and he's sure to look a duck when
he's asleep. Come along!"

She put her arm through his and together they climbed the steep
staircase to the nursery.

Mildred had returned to the world in such excellent spirits at merely
being there, that she took those awkward situations which Milly had
inevitably bequeathed to her, as capital jokes. The partial and external
acquaintance with Milly's doings and points of view which she had
brought back with her, made everything easier than before; but her
derisive dislike of her absent rival was intensified. It pained Ian if
she dropped a hint of it. Tims was the only person to whom she could
have the comfort of expressing herself; and even Tims made faces and
groaned faintly, as though she did not enjoy Mildred's wit when Milly
was the subject of it. She gave Milly's cook notice at once, but most
things she found in a satisfactory state--particularly the family
finances. More negatively satisfactory was the state of her wardrobe,
since so little had been bought. Mildred still shuddered at the
recollection of the trousseau frocks.

Once more Mrs. Stewart, whose social career had been like that of the
proverbial rocket shot up into the zenith. But a life of mere amusement
was not the fashion in the circle in which she lived, and her active
brain and easily aroused sympathies made her quick to take up more
serious interests.

It seemed wiser, too, to make no sudden break with Milly's habits.
Still, Emma, the nurse, opined that Baby got on all the better since
Mrs. Stewart had become "more used to him like"--wasn't always changing
his food, taking his temperature, wanting him to have bandages and
medicine, forbidding him to be talked to or sung to, and pulling his
little, curling-up limbs straight when he was going to sleep. He was a
healthy little fellow and already pretty, with his soft dark
hair--softer than anything in the world except a baby's hair--his
delicate eyebrows and bright dark eyes. Mildred loved playing with him.
Sometimes when Ian heard the tiny shrieks of baby laughter, he used to
think with a smile and yet with a pang of pity, how shocked poor Milly
would have been at this titillation of the infant brain. But he did not
want thoughts of Milly--so far as he could he shut the door of his mind
against them. She would come back, no doubt, sooner or later; and her
coming back would mean that Mildred would be robbed of her life, his own
life robbed of its joy.

At the end of Term the Master of Durham sent a note to bid the Stewarts
to dine with him and meet Sir Henry Milwood, the rich Australian, and
Maxwell Davison, the traveller and Orientalist. Ian remarked that
Davison was a cousin, although they had not met since he was a boy.
Maxwell Davison had gone to the East originally as agent for some big
firm, and had spent there nearly twenty years. He was an accomplished
Persian and Arabic scholar, and gossip related that he had run off with
a fair Persian from a Constantinople harem and lived with her in Persia
until her death. But that was years ago.

When the Stewarts entered the Master's bare bachelor drawing-room, they
found besides the Milwoods, only familiar faces. Maxwell Davison was
still awaited, and with interest. He came, and that interest did not
appear to be mutual, judging from the Oriental impassivity of his long,
brown face, with its narrow, inscrutable eyes. He was tall, slight,
sinewy as a Bedouin, his age uncertain, since his dry leanness and the
dash of silver at his temples might be the effect of burning desert
suns.

Mildred was delighted at first at being sent into dinner with him, but
she found him disappointingly taciturn. In truth, he had acquired
Oriental habits and views with regard to women. If a foolish Occidental
custom demanded that they should sit at meat with the lords of creation,
he, Maxwell Davison, would not pretend to acquiesce in it. Mildred, to
whom it was unthinkable that any man should not wish to talk to her,
merely pitied his shyness and determined to break it down; but Davison's
attitude was unbending.

After dinner the Master, his mortar-board cap on his head, opened the
drawing-room door and invited them to come across to the College Library
to see some bronzes and a few other things that Mr. Davison had
temporarily deposited there. He had divined that Maxwell Davison would
be willing to sell, and in his guileful soul the little Master may have
had schemes of persuading his wealthy friend Milwood to purchase any
bronzes that might be of value to the College or the University. Of the
ladies, only Mildred and Miss Moore, the archæologist, braved the chill
of the mediæval Library to inspect the collection. Davison professed to
no artistic or antiquarian knowledge of the bronzes. They had come to
him in the way of trade and had all been dug up in Asia Minor--no, not
all, for one he had picked up in England. Nevertheless he had succeeded
in getting a pretty clear notion of the relative value of his
bronzes--the Oriental curios with them it was his business to
understand. He could not help observing the sure instinct with which
Mrs. Stewart selected what was best among all these different objects.
She had the _flair_ of the born collector. The learned archæologists
present leaned over the collection discussing and disputing, and took no
notice of her remarks as she rapidly handled each article. But Davison
did, and when at length she took up a small figure of Augustus--the
bronze that had not come from Asia Minor--and looked at it with a
peculiar doubtful intentness, he began to feel uncomfortable.

"Anything wrong with that?" he asked, in spite of himself.

She laughed nervously.

"Oh, Mr. Davison, please ask some one who knows! I don't. Only I--I seem
to have seen something like it before, that's all."

Sanderson, roaming around the professed archæologists, took the bronze
from her hands.

"I'll tell you where you've seen it, Mrs. Stewart. It's engraved in
Egerton's _Private Collections of Great Britain_. I picked that up the
other day--first edition, 1818. I dare say the book's here. We'll see."

Sanderson took a candle and went glimmering away down the long, dark
room.

"What can this be?" asked Mildred, taking up what looked like a glass
ball.

"Please stand over here and look into it for five minutes," returned
Davison, evasively. "Perhaps you'll see what it is then."

He somehow wanted to get rid of Mildred's appraisal of his goods.

"Mr. Davison, your glass ball has gone quite cloudy!" she exclaimed, in
a minute or two.

"That's all right. Go on looking and you'll see something more," he
returned.

Presently she said:

"It's so curious. I see the whole room reflected in the glass now, but
it's much lighter than it really is, and the windows seem larger. It all
looks so different. There is some one down there in white."

Sanderson came up the room carrying a large quarto, open.

"Here's your bronze, right enough," he said, putting the book down on
the table. "It's under the heading, _Hammerton Collection_."

He pointed to a small engraving inscribed, "Bronze statuette of
Augustus. _Very rare._"

"But some fellow's been scribbling something here," continued Sanderson,
turning the book around to read a note written along the margin. He read
out: "'A forgery. Sold by Lady Hammerton to Mr. Solomons, 1819. See case
Solomons _versus_ Hammerton, 1820.'"

The turning of the book showed Mildred a full-page engraving entitled,
"The Gallery, Hammerton House." It represented a long room somewhat like
the one in which they stood, but still more like the room she had seen
in the crystal; and in the middle distance there was a slightly sketched
figure of a woman in a light dress. Half incredulous, half frightened,
she pored over the engraving which reproduced so strangely the image she
had seen in Maxwell Davison's mysterious ball.

"How funny!" she almost whispered.

"You may call it funny, of course, that Lady Hammerton succeeded in
cheating a Jew, which is what it looks like," rejoined Sanderson, bent
on hunting down his quarry; "but it was pretty discreditable to her
too."

"Not at all," Maxwell Davison's harsh voice broke in. "That was
Solomons's look out. I sha'n't bring a lawsuit against the fellow who
sold me that Augustus, if it is a forgery. A man's a fool to deal in
things he doesn't understand."

"What is this glass ball, Mr. Davison?" asked Miss Moore, in her turn
taking up the uncanny thing Mildred had laid down.

"It's a divining-crystal. In the East certain people, mostly boys, look
in these crystals and see all sorts of things, present, past, and to
come."

Miss Moore laughed.

"Or pretend they do!"

"Who knows? It isn't of any interest, really. The things that have
happened have happened, and the things that are to happen will happen
just as surely, whether we foresee them or not."

Miss Moore turned to the Master.

"Look, Master--this is a divining-crystal, and Mr. Davison's trying to
persuade me that in the East people really see visions in it."

The Master smiled.

"Mr. Davison has a poor opinion of ladies' intelligence, I'm afraid. He
thinks they are children, who will believe any fairy tale."

Davison had drawn near to Mildred as the Master spoke; his eyes met hers
and the impassive face wore a faint, ironical smile.

"The Wisdom of the West speaks!" he exclaimed, in a low voice. "I'd
almost forgotten the sound of it."

Then scrutinizing her pale face: "I'm afraid you've had a scare. What
did you see?"

"I saw--well, I fancy I saw the Gallery at Hammerton House and my
ancestress, Lady Hammerton. It was burned, you know, and she was burned
with it, trying to save her collections. I expect she condescended to
give me a glimpse of them because I've inherited her mania. I'd be a
collector, too, if I had the money."

She laughed nervously.

"You should take Ian to the East," returned Davison. "You could make
money there and learn things--the Wisdom of the East, for instance."

Mildred, recovering her equanimity, smiled at him.

"No, never! The Wisdom of the West engrosses us; but you'll come and
tell us about the other, won't you?"




CHAPTER XV


Maxwell Davison settled in Oxford for six months, in order to see his
great book on Persian Literature through the press. His advent had been
looked forward to as promising a welcome variety, bringing a splash of
vivid color into a somewhat quiet-hued, monotonous world. But there was
doomed to be some disappointment. Mr. Davison went rather freely to
College dinners but seldom into general society. It came to be
understood that he disliked meeting women; Mrs. Stewart, however, he
appeared to except from his condemnation or rule. Ian was his cousin,
which made a pretext at first for going to the Stewarts' house; but he
went because he found the couple interesting in their respective ways.
Some Dons, unable to believe that a man without a University education
could teach them anything, would lecture him out of their little
pocketful of knowledge about Oriental life and literature. Ian, on the
contrary, was an admirable producer of all that was interesting in
others; and in Davison that all was much. At first he had tried to keep
Mrs. Stewart in what he conceived to be her proper place; but as time
went on he found himself dropping in at the old house with surprising
frequency, and often when he knew Ian to be in College or too busy to
attend to him.

He had brought horses with him and offered to give Mildred a mount
whenever she liked. Milly had learned the rudiments of the art, but she
was too timid to care for riding. Mildred, on the other hand, delighted
in the swift motion through the air, the sensation of the strong
bounding life almost incorporated with her own, and if she had moments
of terror she had more of ecstatic daring. She and Davison ended by
riding together once or twice a week.

Interesting as Mildred found Maxwell Davison's companionship, it did not
altogether conduce to her happiness. She who had been so content to be
merely alive, began now to chafe at the narrow limits of her existence.
He opened the wide horizons of the world before her, and her soul seemed
native to them. One April afternoon they rode to Wytham together. The
woods of Wytham clothe a long ridge of hill around which the young
Thames sweeps in a strong curve and through them a grass ride runs
unbroken for a mile and a half. Now side by side, now passing and
repassing each other, they had "kept the great pace" along the track,
the horses slackening their speed somewhat as they went down the dip,
only to spring forward with fresh impetus, lifting their hind-quarters
gallantly to the rise; then given their heads for the last burst along
the straight bit to the drop of the hill, away they went in passionate
competition, foam-flecked and sending the clods flying from their
hurrying hoofs.

A mile and a half of galloping only serves to whet the appetite of a
well-girt horse, and the foaming rivals hardly allowed themselves to be
pulled up at the edge of a steep grassy slope, where already here and
there a yellow cowslip bud was beginning to break its pale silken
sheath. At length their impatient dancing was over, and they stood
quiet, resigned to the will of the incomprehensible beings who
controlled them. But Mildred's blood was dancing still and she abandoned
herself to the pleasure of it, undistracted by speech. Beyond the
shining Thames, wide-curving through its broad green meadows, and the
gray bridge and tower of Eynsham, that great landscape, undulating,
clothed in the mystery of moving cloud-shadows, gave her an agreeable
impression of being a view into a strange country, hundreds of miles
away from Oxford and the beaten track. But Maxwell's eyes were fixed
upon her.

The wood about them was just breaking into the various beauty of spring
foliage, emerald and gold and red; a few trees still holding up naked
gray branches among it; here and there a white cloud of cherry blossom,
shining in a clearing or floating mistily amid bursting tree-tops below
them. They turned to the right, down a narrow ride, mossy and winding,
where perforce they trod on flowers as they went; for the path and the
wood about it were carpeted with blue dog-violets and the pale soft
blossoms of primroses, opening in clusters amid their thick fresh
foliage and the brown of last year's fallen leaves. The sky above wore
the intense blue in which dark clouds are seen floating, and as the
gleams of travelling sunshine passed over the wooded hill, its colors
also glowed with a peculiar intensity. The horses, no longer excited by
a vista of turf, were walking side by side. But the beauty of earth and
sky were nothing to Maxwell, whose whole being was intent on the beauty
of the woman in the saddle beside him; the rose and the gold of cheek
and hair, the lithe grace of the body, lightly moving to the motion of
her horse.

She turned to him with a sudden bright smile.

"How perfectly delightful riding is! I owe all the pleasure of it to
you."

"Do you?" he asked, smiling too, but slightly and gravely, narrowing on
her his inscrutable eyes. "Well, then, will you do what I want?"

"I thought you were a fatalist and never wanted anything. But if you
condescend to want me to do something, your slave obeys. You see I'm
learning the proper way for a woman to talk."

"I want you to remove the preposterous black pot with which you've
covered up your hair. I'll carry it for you."

"Oh, Max! What would people think if they met me riding without my hat?
Fancy Miss Cayley! What she'd say! And the Warden of Canterbury! What
he'd feel!"

She laughed delightedly.

"They never ride this way. It's the 'primrose path,' you see, and
they're afraid of the 'everlasting bonfire.' I'm not; you're not. You're
not afraid of anything."

"I am. I'm afraid of old maids and--most butlers."

Maxwell laughed, but his laugh was a harsh one.

"Humbug! If you really wanted to do anything you'd do it. I know you
better than you know yourself. If you won't take your hat off it's
because you don't really want to do what I want; and when you say pretty
things to me about your gratitude for the pleasure I'm giving you,
you're only telling the same old lies women tell all the world over."

"There! Catch my reins!" cried Mildred, leaning over and holding them
out to him. "How do you suppose I can take my hat off if you don't?"

He obeyed and drew up to her, stooping near, a hand on the mane of her
horse. The horses nosed together and fidgeted, while she balanced
herself in the saddle with lifted arms, busy with hat-pins. The task
accomplished, she handed the hat to him and they cantered on. Presently
she turned towards him, brightening.

"You were quite right about the hat, Max. It's ever so much nicer
without it; one feels freer, and what I love about riding is the free
feeling. It's as though one had got out of a cage; as though one could
jump over all the barriers of life; as though there were nobody and
nothing to hinder one from galloping right out into the sky if one
chose. But I can't explain what I mean."

"Of course you don't mean the sky," he answered. "What you really mean
is the desert. There's space, there's color, glorious, infinite, with an
air purer than earthly. Such a life, Mildred! The utter freedom of it!
None of this weary, dreary slavery you call civilization. That would be
the life for you."

It was true that Mildred's was an essentially nomadic and adventurous
soul. Whether the desert was precisely the most suitable sphere for her
wanderings was open to doubt, but for the moment as typifying freedom,
travel, and motion--all that really was as the breath of life to her--it
fascinated her imagination. Maxwell, closely watching that
sunshine-gilded head, saw her eyes widen, her whole expression at once
excited and meditative, as though she beheld a vision. But in a moment
she had turned to him with a challenging smile.

"I thought slavery was the only proper thing for women."

"So it is--for ordinary women. It makes them happier and less
mischievous. But I don't fall into the mistake--which causes such a deal
of unnecessary misery and waste in the world--the mistake of supposing
that you can ever make a rule which it's good for every one to obey.
You've got to make your rule for the average person. Therefore it's
bound not to fit the man or woman who is not average, and it's folly to
wish them to distort themselves to fit it."

"And I'm not average? I needn't be a slave? Oh, thank you, Max! I am so
glad."

"Confound it, Mildred, I'm not joking. You are a born queen and you
oughtn't to be a slave; but you are one, all the same. You're a slave to
the 'daily round, the common task,' which were never meant for such as
you; you're a slave to the conventional idiocy of your neighbors. You
daren't even take your hat off till I make you; and now you see how nice
it is to ride with your hat off."

They had been slowly descending the steep, stony road which leads to
Wytham Village, but as he spoke they were turning off into a large field
to the right, across which a turfy track led gradually up to the woods
from which they had come. The track lay smooth before them, and the
horses began to sidle and dance directly their hoofs touched it. Mildred
did not answer his remarks, except by a reference to the hat.

"Don't lose it, that's all!" she shouted, looking back and laughing, as
she shot up the track ahead of him. He fancied she was trying to show
him that she could run away from him if she chose; and with a quiet
smile on his lips and a firm hand on his tugging horse, he kept behind
her until she was a good way up the field. Then he gave his horse its
head and it sprang forward. She heard the eager thud of the heavy hoofs
drawing up behind, and in a few seconds he was level with her. For a
minute they galloped neck and neck, though at a little distance from
each other. Then she saw him ahead, riding with a seat looser than most
Englishmen's, yet with an assurance, a grace of its own, the
hind-quarters of his big horse lifting powerfully under him, as it sped
with great bounds over the flying turf. Her own mare saw it, too, and
vented her annoyance in a series of kicks, which, it must be confessed,
seriously disturbed Mildred's equilibrium. Then settling to business,
she sprang after her companion. Maxwell heard her following him up the
long grass slope towards the gate which opens into the main ride by
which they had started. He fancied he had the improvised race well in
hand, but suddenly the hoofs behind him hurried their beat; Mildred flew
past him at top speed and flung her mare back on its haunches at the
gate.

"I've won! Hurrah! I've won!" she shouted, breathlessly, and waved her
whip at him.

Maxwell was swearing beneath his breath, in a spasm of anger and
anxiety.

"Don't play the fool!" he cried, savagely, as he drew rein close to her.
"You might have thrown the mare down or mixed her in with the gate,
pulling her up short like that. It's a wonder you didn't come off
yourself, for though you're a devil to go, you know as well as I do
you're a poor horse-woman."

He was violently angry, partly at Mildred's ignorant rashness, partly
because, after all, she had beaten him. She, taking her hat from his
hand and fastening it on again, uttered apologies, but from the lips
only; for she had never seen a man furious before, and she was keenly
interested in the spectacle. Maxwell's eyes were not inscrutable now;
they glittered with manifest rage. His harsh voice was still harsher,
his hard jaw clinched, the muscles of his lean face, which was as pale
as its brownness allowed it to be, stood out like cords, and the hand
that grasped her reins shook. Mildred felt somewhat as she imagined a
lion-tamer might feel; just the least bit alarmed, but mistress of the
brute, on the whole, and enjoying the contact with anything so natural
and fierce and primitive. The feeling had not had time to pall on her,
when going through the gate, they were joined by two other members of
the little clan of Wytham riders, and all rode back to Oxford together

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