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The Bigamist

by F. E. Mills Young · English · Gutenberg #37261 · 476,364 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Bigamist

Author: F. E. Mills Young


        
Release date: August 29, 2011 [eBook #37261]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/37261

Credits: Produced by Nick Hodson of London, England


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BIGAMIST ***




Produced by Nick Hodson of London, England




The Bigamist
By F.E. Mills Young
Published by John Lane Company, New York.
This edition dated 1916.

The Bigamist, by F.E. Mills Young.

________________________________________________________________________

________________________________________________________________________
THE BIGAMIST, BY F.E. MILLS YOUNG.

CHAPTER ONE.

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

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

"Worried, Herbert?" she asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"No," he answered,--"no."

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

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

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

"You couldn't," he answered confidently.  "You are chained here to my
side with invisible, unbreakable bonds."

"Oh; there's the divorce court," she remarked with light-hearted
flippancy.

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

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

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

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

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

She pressed his hand sympathetically.

"There's certainly a little worry of some sort," she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You don't feel that now," he said banteringly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Now--yes," Pamela answered.  "So could I for you.  But--before we were
married...  I don't know..."

CHAPTER TWO.

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

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

"But," gasped Pamela, "did you _forget_ what day it is?"

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

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

He looked amused.

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

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

"I'll motor to the Mount Nelson and put him off, if you like," he
suggested.

But Pamela negatived this.

"He'd think it so queer," she objected.

"Not he.  But he would probably conclude I was henpecked."

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

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

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

She lifted her face to be kissed.

"Just one--on the lips," she said.  "You mustn't crumple me."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Then you haven't met her before? ...  They've been married five years."

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

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

"What's amiss between you and Dick?" he asked.

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

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

"If time stood still for her, perhaps," she conceded.  "But she won't
always be pretty."

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

"It may suggest it; it doesn't necessarily prove that it's there."

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

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

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

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

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

"_Ah! reponds a ma tendresse_..."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I'm sure you must," he replied.

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

"I should like to do that," he said.

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

"Do you ever visit Johannesburg?" he asked.

"I haven't been there yet."

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

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

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

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

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

"I don't fancy I belong to the marrying sort," he said.

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

"Yes!  Then I imagine the right person hasn't revealed herself."

"You should go in search of her," she said.

"I did once--five years ago."

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

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

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

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

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

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

Suddenly she laughed.

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

He scrutinised the smiling face with added interest.

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

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

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

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

"You enjoy by comparison," he returned.

"I suppose that's it--in a way; yes.  When you have followed my advice
you will do that too."

"The same prescription doesn't fit every case," he ventured.

"It doesn't cure every complaint," she allowed; "but it will cure
yours."

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

"Loneliness."

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

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

"Ah! the patient has to find that for himself."

"And suppose it happens to be out of his reach?--suppose it runs away?"

Pamela looked thoughtful.

"There's an endless supply of the remedy always at hand," she returned
presently.

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

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

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

CHAPTER THREE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Seen me before?" she repeated, surprised.  "Where?"

"Were you ever in Port Elizabeth?" he asked.

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

"I saw you there," he answered,--"five years ago."

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

"I don't remember," she said.

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

"Did you win?" she asked.

He smiled.

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

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

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

"How horrid of me!" she cried.

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

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

"I married just about that time," she said.

"So I heard."

She glanced at him curiously.

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

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

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

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

"Did you construct a story about me?"

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

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

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

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

"It shouldn't require a great mental strain," he returned.

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

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

"Do you still visit Port Elizabeth--for the tennis tournament?" she
asked.

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

Pamela looked amused.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Don't want it," Pamela pouted.

"But that's rude," remarked Pamela the first.  "You mustn't be naughty."

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

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

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

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

"Let's try again," he suggested, and cut a second and smaller slice.

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

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

"It is just as well," remarked Pamela the first, "that this doesn't
happen often."

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

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

He caught the reference.

"Through another defeat," he said, "yes."

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

"Not accustomed,--little people don't come my way; but I'm in sympathy
with them.  My tastes are infantile, you see."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He pinched her ear.

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER FOUR.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pamela put the letter into his hand.

"Read it," she said dully.

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

"It came by the post--just now."

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

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

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

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

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

"I couldn't tell you," he muttered...  "I loved you.  I dared not risk
losing you,--and I believed you would never know."

"It's--bigamy," she said, and caught her breath again sharply.

"Yes."

His voice was sullen.

"But that's punishable," Pamela said, and scrutinised him with wide,
distressed eyes...  "Isn't it?"

"Yes."

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

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

"But they can't be," she insisted.  "I'm not--"

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

"I'm not even _married_," she added, the horror of this truth revealing
itself in her tones.

"You are," he asserted sullenly.  "I married you..."

"But you couldn't," she persisted, "with your wife alive.  The law can
punish you for bigamy."

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

"No," she said.  "That wouldn't help me.  And... there's the child."

He frowned.

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

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

"It's yours and mine and hers," he said.  "She won't speak."

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

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

"But things can't go on as they have been," Pamela said piteously.  "I
can't stay here, now I _know_.  I--Don't you see, Herbert?--it wouldn't
be right.  I should feel--"

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

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

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

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

"It wouldn't be right," she said, and stirred restlessly...  "I don't
know...  I must think."

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

"I want to be alone," she said slowly...  "I want to think..."

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

CHAPTER FIVE.

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

He left the house and did not return until evening.

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

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

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

She broke off in her reflections, weeping passionately.

"I couldn't bear it," she moaned.  "I couldn't bear it."

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

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

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

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

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

Pamela looked at him with perplexed, miserable eyes.

"I haven't decided," she said, "anything."

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

"I don't know what to do," she moaned.  "I've thought, and thought...  I
can't see a way out."

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

"My dear!" he said.

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

"There seems only one thing to do," she resumed in an expressionless
voice...  "There _is_ only one thing,--no decent minded woman would
consider any other course."

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

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

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

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

"Don't!" she muttered, and put a hand quickly to her throat.  "I've been
thinking about it--like that all day."

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

"But the other thing,--to stay,--that's impossible too."

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

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

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

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

"But I can't," she insisted, "continue to live here--as your wife.  It's
not only a case of conscience, it's a matter of self-respect.  I should
_hate_ myself."

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

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

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

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

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

"Poor little woman!" he said.

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

"Oh!  I can't," she wailed...  "I can't."

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

"No," he said; "we couldn't do it...  Never to meet again! ...  We
couldn't do it, dear."

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

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

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

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

She regarded him with brimming eyes.

"Oh!  I wish," she said, "that I didn't love you so well."

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

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

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

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

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

"You are punishing me heavily, Pamela," he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER SIX.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"So you have come back?" she said.

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

"Couldn't stick it any longer, Pam," he said.  "I wanted you."

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

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

Arnott's clasp of her tightened.

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

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

"I was just going to have a lonely tea," she said, and rang the bell for
a fresh supply; "and now--there's you!"

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

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

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

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

"And you missed me?" he questioned.

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

"It was an experiment," he said presently.  "I wanted to see if we could
do it--and we can't...  We can't part."

"And we can't," Pamela repeated slowly.  "No, I don't think we can."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER SEVEN.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"No," he answered.

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

"Why not Herbert? ...  We've reproduced you."

She flushed faintly.

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

"Well, it was merely a suggestion," he returned easily.

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

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

"You don't dislike the name, I hope?" she asked.

"No.  I don't say I'd choose it.  It's rather Welsh, isn't it?"

"It's British," she replied, "anyway."

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

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

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

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

"It's pretty," he said...  "You like it?"

"It's beautiful," she replied.

"And my thanks?" he said.

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

CHAPTER EIGHT.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Oh, about an hour ago!  How well you look!"

"I've been enjoying myself.  I suppose that's why...  Dickie's late."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Why should one discourage anything so commendable?" he asked.

"That's no answer to my question," she observed.

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

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

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

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

"Middle-aged!" he protested.  "Come now!  I'm only thirty-five."

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

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

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

"I wish you wouldn't be so depressing," he expostulated.

"I'm not I'm merely lamenting your lost opportunities.  I'm for early
marriages, and big families, and bother the cost."

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

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

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

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

She sighed deeply, and became suddenly grave.

"All the rest have big families themselves," she added wistfully.  "I'm
just out of it."

"Children are mixed blessings," he said consolingly.

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

"Oh, don't!" he interposed hastily.

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

"Ye gods!" he murmured.  "Why didn't you invite the other six?"

"They aren't out," replied Mrs Carruthers.

He repressed a desire to smile.

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

He laughed outright.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER NINE.

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

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

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

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

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

"One doesn't forget--pleasant things," she returned.  "Besides, it is
only a little over a year and a half since we met, isn't it?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"No," she returned slowly.  "I don't go from home much.  You see, there
are the children."

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

"Oh, growing big--and naughty!  I am beginning to think of schoolroom
discipline for her."

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

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

"Blanche...  Oh, I know," he said.

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

"She is handsome," he observed.

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

"She is," he affirmed.

"It isn't a necessary qualification in a governess," she said.

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

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

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

"Do.  Come and dine--informally.  I'll ask the Carruthers."

He looked slightly dissatisfied.

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

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

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

"I've only a week," he said.  "I want to make the most of it."

"And when the week is up?"

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

"And you haven't followed my advice?" she said.

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

Carruthers sauntered towards them with every intention, Dare realised,
of ending the tete-a-tete.

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

Dare regarded the speaker coolly.

"That sounds like your joke, rather than Mrs Carruthers'," he remarked;
"it's so feeble."

Carruthers chuckled.

"Ask her," he returned.

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

"It's quite the best game, really," she said, and smiled at him.

"I admit it," he answered quietly, "when one is allowed to choose one's
partner."

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

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

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

"She isn't."

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

"You can't judge on a first acquaintance like that," she insisted.

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

"Then why haven't you married one of them?"

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

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

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

"George Dare," she answered.

He laughed.

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

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

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

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

"If you were not in love, you wouldn't talk in that exalted strain.
It's unlike you."

"I didn't know I was such a material beast," he retorted.

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

"You _are_ in love!" she cried triumphantly.  "It's no use...  Own up
that I'm right."

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

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

"And you never told me!" she said reproachfully.

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

"Old!" she echoed.

He smiled at the indignant incredulity in her voice.

"It's running Jacob's romance pretty close now," he said.

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

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

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

"She hadn't a personality for me," he replied.  "I fell in love with a
face."

His listener eyed him derisively.

"She hadn't any body, I suppose?" she said.

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

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

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

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

"One cannot regulate one's feelings," he protested, "to satisfy a silly
prejudice like that."

"But it's not fair to the girl," she urged.

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

"Oh!" said Mrs Carruthers, manifestly relieved.

"A stranger!  Then she doesn't count.  You have simply been wearying me
with your nonsense."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dare held the door open for Mrs Carruthers.

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

She placed her hand affectionately on his sleeve.

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

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

CHAPTER TEN.

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

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

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

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

"Pamela would be disappointed," she said.

"I believe she would," he agreed.

"George," she looked at him very gravely, and her tone was admonishing,
"I don't wish to annoy you,--but do you think you are acting wisely?"

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

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

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

"You haven't overstated the truth," he said quietly, a little defiantly,
she fancied.

She shook her head seriously.

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

"I am not doing her any harm," he said.

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

"You mean she cares less for her husband than she did?"

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

"I don't think you ought to have asked that," she returned.  He changed
colour.

"No," he said; "perhaps not.  In any case, there wasn't any need.  It's
fairly obvious."

"Leave her alone," she counselled.

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

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

"I can't do that," he said.  "But I promise you when I leave here I
won't come back."

"Then leave to-morrow," she advised.

"Not unless you turn me out."

"You know I won't do that," she said.  "But I don't like it, George.  I
am--disappointed in you."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"For many of us, no," he allowed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I should be scared to death," she declared.

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

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

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

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

"I don't think--I couldn't," she stammered nervously.

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

"I believe you are--yes."

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

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

"But there isn't any need," she began...

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

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

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

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

"How silly I am!" she murmured.  "I don't know what you must think of
me.  I don't know why I am crying."

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

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

"Mon coeur s'ouvre a ta voix."

"Oh!  Saint-Saens...  Yes, of course I will."

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

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

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

"I knew it," she cried triumphantly.  "Boy, you're straight."

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

"It's the least you can offer me," he said in explanation.

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

CHAPTER ELEVEN.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Language!"  Arnott sneered.

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

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

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

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

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

"I wonder!" said Pamela.

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

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

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

"Yes," she said.  "I know.  It's stupid of me.  I hate losing sight of
friends.  I have so few."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I think so," Pamela answered.  "Besides, you've disproved that in your
friendship with Connie."

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

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

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

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

"No," she answered simply.  "My husband was older than you when I--
when--"

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

"A man is never too old."

He laughed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"No," she replied.  "But--"

"But?" he prompted gently.

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

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

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

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

"Sing to us, Mrs Arnott," pleaded Carruthers,--"something soothing.  My
wife has been most extraordinarily aggravating."

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

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

"And they are?" he inquired.

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

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

She smiled encouragingly.

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

CHAPTER TWELVE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"She's quiet enough," he admitted.

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

"I don't see why a good European nurse," he began.

But she interrupted him firmly.

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

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

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

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

"You can't treat a girl like that as if she were a nursemaid," he
objected.

"Of course not.  One need not go to extremes either way."

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

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

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

He suddenly smiled.

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

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

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

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

"You don't mean that," she said quickly.

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

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

"Life," she answered quietly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"They make a difference," Pamela insisted.

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

Pamela smiled drearily.

"I suppose I should--now.  But I sometimes wish they hadn't come...
especially the boy," she added wistfully.

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

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

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

"Don't you?"

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

"Well," said Mrs Carruthers, "you can soon alter that."

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

She broke off with a laugh.

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

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

"And spoil their tempers," laughed Pamela.

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

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

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

CHAPTER THIRTEEN.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blanche explained.

"What a bore," he said.  "I particularly wanted her."

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

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

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

"I would rather have been motoring," she finished.

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

Pamela looked round in surprise.

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

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

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

"You come too," the little girl pleaded, tugging at Pamela's hand.

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

The child pouted her disappointment.

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

Arnott laughed.

"Suppose I come instead, kiddie?" he suggested.

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

"I want mummy," she announced.  "I don't want any one else."

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

"That will be jolly," said Pamela.

Little Pamela clapped her hands.

"That will be jolly," she echoed.

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

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

"I love you in the role," she said softly.  "I wish you played it more
often."

He laughed constrainedly.

"We'll see how it works," he answered guardedly.

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

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

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

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

"To-morrow?" demanded Pamela.

"We'll see," he returned, and drove the car round to the garage.

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

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

He laughed awkwardly.

"Odd ideas of happiness some people have," he commented.

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

"Why not?" he asked.

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

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

"I don't think that's necessary," she said.

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

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

"If you are sure you don't mind," she said.

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

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

He laughed, and got an arm about her waist.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Well, I'm going in for a whisky," he said.  "Dull people always give me
a thirst."

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

"Good-night,--mouse," he called softly.

She looked back over her shoulder and flushed warmly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You never seemed to care much," she said.

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

"Well, you don't take the trouble to hang over the piano any longer,"
she replied.

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

"I'll get a gramophone," he said.

Pamela laughed.

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

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

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

"Why not?" he said.  "She'll find the last job the most amusing."

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

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

He raised his glass, and took a long drink.

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

CHAPTER FOURTEEN.

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

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

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

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

"Oh, no, please!  I can't take it," she said.

For a moment he looked disconcerted.

"Why not?" he asked.

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

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

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

"Then I won't," he said.  "But I am sorry you won't let me."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Something very near it," he admitted.  "I believe, myself, I've been
dreaming."

"Pleasant dreams?" she demanded.

He took her chin in his hand.

"Confused," he answered.  "I'm not fully awake now...  Am I an old
fogey, Pam?"

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

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

"Buck up now, and talk to me," Pamela said.  "You've been very slow this
evening."

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

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

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

"No...  `A rag and a bone and a hank of hair' ...  How does the thing
go?"

"I don't think I want to hear any more of it," she said.

He laughed.

"Then don't grow any thinner.  You are getting to be all angles."

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

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

Arnott felt carelessly amused.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Oh! they are jolly little cards," he answered carelessly.  "I am
grateful to them in a sense.  They are the raison d'etre for this
excursion after all.  An old fogey like myself couldn't submit to the
indignity of paddling in the surf without the legitimate excuse of the
necessity for his presence in order to smack the little Arnotts with
their own spades when they become unruly.  It won't be all heaven, I
expect."

Pamela spent the next few days in preparing for the wonderful holiday,
assisted by her small excited family, and a silent and detached
governess, who looked on, while Pamela shopped extensively for every
one, with a furtive disapproval in her dark eyes, as though disliking
the idea of this change to the sea, and her compulsory participation in
it.

When Pamela presented her with a smart bathing costume she at first
declined the gift.

"I can't swim," she protested.  "And I'm afraid of the sea.  I shouldn't
like to bathe--really."

"Oh! but," said Pamela, feeling unaccountably disappointed, "we shall
all bathe.  You won't be afraid with Mr Arnott; he will teach you to
swim in no time.  It will be half the fun."

Blanche blushed at this suggestion that Arnott should teach her to swim,
and looked with greater disfavour than ever at the ridiculous garment in
Pamela's hand.

"I'm too big a coward to learn," she said.  "I should hate it.  Please
don't ask me."

Miss Maitland was, Pamela decided, a most unsatisfactory girl to deal
with.

She told Arnott of the difficulty, and held up the amazing garment of
navy alpaca and white braid for his inspection.

"It is so pretty," she said.  "And she looked at it as though it were
indecent."

He laughed.

"As a sex you are all more or less mock modest," he announced.  "You
will half undress of an evening, and blush to be discovered in a
perfectly decorous petticoat.  Pack the thing in with your own clothes,
and I'll undert

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