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Once Aboard the Lugger-- The History of George and his Mary

by A. S. M. Hutchinson · English · Gutenberg #6410 · 622,947 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Once Aboard the Lugger-- The History of George and his Mary

Author: A. S. M. Hutchinson


        
Release date: September 1, 2004 [eBook #6410]
                Most recently updated: March 15, 2018

Language: English

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ONCE ABOARD THE LUGGER--

THE HISTORY OF GEORGE AND HIS MARY

By A. S. M. Hutchinson




CONTENTS.


 The Author's Advertisement Of His Novel


 BOOK I.

 _Of George._

 I. Excursions In A Garden
 II. Excursions In Melancholy
 III. Upon Modesty In Art: And Should Be Skipped
 IV. Excursions In A Hospital
 V. Upon Life: And May Be Missed
 VI. Magnificent Arrival Of A Heroine
 VII. Moving Passages With A Heroine
 VIII. Astonishing After-Effects Of A Heroine


 BOOK II.

 _Of his Mary._

 I. Excursions In The Memory Of A Heroine
 II. Excursions In Vulgarity
 III. Excursions In The Mind Of A Heroine
 IV. Excursions In A Nursery
 V. Excursions At A Dinner-Table


 BOOK III.

 _Of Glimpses at a Period of this History: Of Love and of War._

 I. Notes On The Building Of Bridges
 II. Excursions Beneath The Bridge
 III. Excursions In Love
 IV. Events And Sentiment Mixed In A Letter
 V. Beefsteak For 14 Palace Gardens
 VI. A Cab For 14 Palace Gardens


 BOOK IV.

 _In which this History begins to rattle._

 I. The Author Meanders Upon The Enduring Hills; And The Reader Will
 Lose Nothing By Not Accompanying Him
 II. An Exquisite Balcony Scene; And Something About Sausages
 III. Alarums And Excursions By Night
 IV. Mr. Marrapit Takes A Nice Warm Bath
 V. Miss Porter Swallows A Particularly Large Sweet
 VI. The Girl Comes Near The Lugger


 BOOK V.

 _Of Mr. Marrapit upon the Rack: Of George in Torment._

 I. Prosiness Upon Events: So Uneventful That It Should Be Skipped
 II. Margaret Fishes; Mary Prays
 III. Barley Water For Mr. Marrapit
 IV. The Rape Of The Rose
 V. Horror At Herons' Holt
 VI. A Detective At Herons' Holt
 VII. Terror At Dippleford Admiral
 VIII. Panic At Dippleford Admiral
 IX. Disaster At Temple Colney


 BOOK VI.

 _Of Paradise Lost and Found._

 I. Mrs. Major Bids For Paradise
 II. Mrs. Major Finds The Lock
 III. Mrs. Major Gets The Key
 IV. George Has A Shot At Paradise
 V. Of Twin Cats: Of Ananias And Of Sapphira
 VI. Agony In Meath Street
 VII. Mr. William Wyvern In Meath Street
 VIII. Abishag The Shunamite In Meath Street
 IX. Excursions In A Newspaper Office
 X. A Perfectly Splendid Chapter

 _Last Shots from the Bridge_




THE AUTHOR'S ADVERTISEMENT OF HIS NOVEL.

This book has its title from that dashing sentiment, “Once aboard the
lugger and the girl is mine!” It is not to be read by those who in their
novels would have the entertainment of characters that are brilliant or
wealthy, noble of birth or admirable of spirit. Such have no place in
this history. There is a single canon of novel-writing that we have
sedulously kept before us in making this history, and that is the law
which instructs the novelist to treat only of the manner of persons with
whom he is well acquainted. Hence our characters are commonplace folks.
We have the acquaintance of none other than commonplace persons, because
none other than commonplace persons will have acquaintance with us.

And there are no problems in this history, nor is the reader to be
tickled by any risks taken with nice deportment. This history may be
kept upon shelves that are easily accessible. It is true that you will
be invited to spend something of a night in a lady's bedroom, but the
matter is carried through with circumspection and dispatch. There shall
not be a blush.

Now, it is our purpose in this advertisement so clearly to give you the
manner of our novel that without further waste of time you may forego
the task of reading so little as a single chapter if you consider that
manner likely to distress you. Hence something must be said touching the
style.

We cannot see (to make a start) that the listener or the reader of a
story should alone have the right to fidget as he listens or reads; to
come and go at his pleasure; to interrupt at his convenience. Something
of these privileges should be shared by the narrator; and in this
history we have taken them. You may swing your legs or divert your
attention as you read; but we too must be permitted to swing our legs
and slide off upon matters that interest us, and that indirectly are
relevant to the history. Life is not compounded solely of action. One
cannot rush breathless from hour to hour. And, since the novel aims to
ape life, the reader, if the aim be true, cannot rush breathless from
page to page. We can at least warrant him he will not here.

These are the limitations of our history; and we admit them to be
considerable. Upon the other hand, the print is beautifully clear.

       *       *       *       *       *

As touching the title we have chosen, this was not come by at the cost
of any labour. Taken, as we have told, from that dashing sentiment,
“Once aboard the lugger and the girl is mine!” it is a label that might
be applied to all novels. It is a generic title for all modern novels,
since there is not one of these but in this form or that sets out the
pursuit of his mistress by a man or his treatment of her when he has
clapped her beneath hatches. This is a notable matter. The novelist
writes under the influences and within the limitations of his age, and
the modern novelist correctly mirrors modern life when he presents woman
as for man's pursuit till he has her, and for what treatment he may will
when he captures her. The position is deplorable, is productive of a
million wrongs, and, happily, is slowly changing; but that it exists
is clear upon the face of our social existence, and is even advertised
between the sexes in love: “You are mine” the man says, and means it. “I
am yours” the woman declares, and, fruit of generations of dependence,
freely, almost involuntarily, gives herself.

But of this problem (upon which we could bore you to distraction) we
are nothing concerned in our novel. Truly we offer you the pursuit of
a girl; but my Mary would neither comprehend this matter nor wish to
be other than her George's. From page 57 she waves to us; let us hurry
along.




  _.... Who so will stake his lot,
  Impelled thereto by nescience or whim,
  Cupidity or innocence or not,
  On Chance's colours, let men pray for him._
                         RALPH HODGSON.




BOOK I.

Of George.




CHAPTER I.

Excursions In A Garden.



I.

Mr. Christopher Marrapit is dozing in a chair upon the lawn; his darling
cat, the Rose of Sharon, is sleeping on his lap; stiffly beside him sits
Mrs. Major, his companion--that masterly woman.

As we approach to be introduced, it is well we should know something of
Mr. Marrapit. The nervous business of adventuring into an assembly of
strangers is considerably modified by having some knowledge of the first
we shall meet. We feel more at home; do not rush upon subjects which are
distasteful to that person, or of which he is ignorant; absorb something
of the atmosphere of the party during our exchange of pleasantries with
him; and, warmed by this feeling, with our most attractive charm of
manner are able to push among the remainder of our new friends.

Unhappily, the friendly chatter of the neighbourhood, which should
supply us with something of the character of a resident, is quite
lacking at Paltley Hill in regard to Mr. Marrapit. Mr. Marrapit
rarely moves out beyond the fine wall that encircles Herons' Holt,
his residence; with Paltley Hill society rarely mixes. The vicar,
with something of a frown, might tell us that to his divers parochial
subscription lists Mr. Marrapit has consistently, and churlishly,
refused to give a shilling. Professor Wyvern's son, Mr. William Wyvern,
has been heard to say that Mr. Marrapit always reminded him “of one
of the minor prophets--shaved.” Beyond this--and how little helpful it
is!--Paltley Hill society can give us nothing.

In a lower social grade of the district, however, much might be learned.
In the kitchens, the cottages, and the bar-parlours of Paltley Hill, Mr.
Marrapit is considerably discussed. Nicely mannered as we are,
servants' gossip concerning one in our own station of life is naturally
distasteful to us. At the same time it is essential to our ease on being
introduced that we should know something of this gentleman. Assuring
ourselves, therefore, that we shall not be prejudiced by cheap chatter,
let us hear what the kitchens, the cottages, and the bar-parlours have
to say.

Let it, at least, be written down; we shall know how to value such
stuff.

Material for this gossip, then, is brought into the kitchens, the
cottages, and the bar-parlours by Mr. Marrapit's domestic staff.

Mrs. Armitage, his cook, has given tales of his “grimness” to the
cottages where her comfortable presence is welcomed on Sunday and
Thursday afternoons. She believes, however, that he must be a “religious
gentleman,” because (so she says) “he talks like out of the Bible.”

This would seem to bear out Mr. William Wyvern's allusion to the minor
prophet element of his character.

It is the habit of Clara and Ada, his maids, squeezing at the gate from
positions dangerous to modesty into which their ardent young men have
thrust them--it is their habit, thus placed, to excuse themselves
from indelicate embraces by telling alarming tales of Mr. Marrapit's
“carrying on” should they be late. He is a “fair old terror,” they say.

The testimony of Mr. Fletcher, his gardener, gloomy over his beer in
the bar-parlours, seems to support the “stinginess” that the vicar has
determined in Mr. Marrapit's character. Mr. Fletcher, for example, has
lugubriously shown what has to be put up with when in the service of a
man who had every inch of the grounds searched because a threepenny
bit had been dropped. “It's 'ard--damn 'ard,” Mr Fletcher said on that
occasion. “I'm a gardener, I am; not a treasure-'unter.” Murmurs of
sympathy chorused endorsement of this view.

Finally there are the words of Frederick, son of Mrs. Armitage, and
assistant to Fletcher, whose pleasure it is to set on end the touzled
hair of the youth of Paltley Hill by obviously exaggerated stories of
Mr. Marrapit's grim rule.

“'E's a tryant,” Frederick has said.

Such is an epitome of the kitchen gossip concerning Mr. Marrapit; it is
wholesome to be away from such tattling, and personally to approach the
lawn whereon its subject sits.



II.

This lawn, a delectable sight on this fine July afternoon, is set about
with wire netting to a height of some six feet. By the energies of Mr.
Fletcher and Frederick the sward is exquisitely trimmed and rolled; and
their labours join with the wire netting to make the lawn a safe and
pleasant exercise ground for Mr. Marrapit's cats.

Back in the days of Mr. Marrapit's first occupancy of Herons' Holt,
this man was a mighty amateur breeder of cats, and a rare army of cats
possessed. Regal cats he had, queenly cats, imperial neuter cats; blue
cats, grey cats, orange cats, and white cats--cats for which nothing was
too good, upon which too much money could not be spent nor too much love
be lavished. Latterly, with tremendous wrenchings of the heart, he had
disbanded this galaxy of cats. Changes in his household were partly
the cause of this step. The coming of his nephew, George, had seriously
upset the peaceful routine of existence which it was his delight to
lead; and a reason even more compelling was the gradual alteration in
his attitude towards his hobby. This man perceived that the fancier's
eye with which he regarded his darlings was becoming so powerful as to
render his lover's eye in danger of being atrophied. The fancier's
eye was lit by the brain--delighted only in “points,” in perfection of
specimen; the lover's eye was fed by the heart--glowed, not with pride
over breed, but with affection for cats as cats. And Mr. Marrapit
realised that for affection he was coming to substitute pride--that
he was outraging the animals he loved by neglecting the less admirable
specimens for those perfectly moulded; that even these perfect types he
was abusing by his growing craze for breeding; polygamy in cats, he came
to believe, desecrated and eventually destroyed their finer feelings.

Therefore--and the coming of his nephew George quickened his
determination--Mr. Marrapit dispersed his stud (the word had become
abhorrent to him), keeping only four exquisite favourites, of which
the Rose of Sharon--that perfect orange cat, listed when shown at the
prohibitive figure of 1000 pounds, envy and despair of every cat-lover
in Great Britain and America--was apple of his eye, joy of his
existence.

It was the resolve to keep but these four exquisite creatures that
encompassed the arrival in Mr. Marrapit's household of Mrs. Major, now
seated beside him upon the lawn--that masterly woman. The fine cat-house
was pulled down, the attendant dismissed. A room upon the ground floor,
having a southern aspect, was set apart as bed-chamber and exclusive
apartment for the four favourites, and Mr. Marrapit sought about for
some excellent person into whose care they might be entrusted. Their
feeding, their grooming, constant attention to their wants and the sole
care of their chamber, should be this person's duties, and it was not
until a point some way distant in this history that Mr. Marrapit ceased
daily to congratulate himself upon his selection.

Mrs. Major, that masterly woman, was a distressed gentlewoman. The death
of her husband, a warehouse clerk, by acute alcoholic poisoning, seems
to have given her her first chance of displaying those strong qualities
which ultimately became her chief characteristic. And she was of those
to whom plan of action comes instantly upon the arrival of opportunity.
With lightning rapidity this woman welded chance and action; with
unflagging energy and with dauntless perseverance used the powerful
weapon thus contrived.

The case of her husband's death may be instanced. Her hysterical
distress on the day of the funeral (a matter that would have
considerably surprised the late Mr. Major) was exchanged on the
following morning for acute physical distress resulting from the means
by which, overnight, she had tried to assuage her grief. Noticing, as
she dressed, the subdued and martyrlike air that her face wore, noticing
also her landlady's evident sympathy with the gentle voice and manner
which her racking head caused her to adopt, Mrs. Major saw at once
the valuable aid to her future which the permanent wearing of these
characteristics might be. From that moment she took up the role of
distressed gentlewoman--advertised by tight-fitting black, by little
sighs, and by precise, subdued voice,--and in this guise sought
employment at an Agency. The agency sent her to be interviewed by
Mr. Marrapit. Ushered into the study, she, in a moment of masterly
inspiration, murmured “The sweet! Ah, the sweet!” when viciously
scratched by the Rose of Sharon, and upon those words walked directly in
to Mr. Marrapit's heart.

He required a lady--a _lady_ (Mrs. Major smiled deprecatingly) who
should devote herself to his cats. Did Mrs. Major like cats? Ah, sir,
she adored cats; her late husband--Words, at the recollection, failed
her. She faltered; touched an eye with her handkerchief; wanly smiled
with the resigned martyrdom of a true gentlewoman.

As so-often in this life, the unspoken word was more powerful than
mightiest eloquence. Mr. Marrapit is not to be blamed for the inference
he drew. He pictured the dead Mr. Major a gentleman sharing with his
wife a passion for cats; by memory of which fond trait his widow's
devotion to the species would be yet further enhanced, would be
hallowed.

There is the further thought in this connection that once more, as so
often in this life, the unspoken word had saved the lie direct. Once
only, in point of fact, had Mrs. Major seen her late husband directly
occupied with a cat, and the occasion had been the cause of their
vacating their lodgings in Shepherd's Bush precisely thirty minutes
later. Mr. Major, under influence of his unfortunate malady, with
savage foot had sped the landlady's cat down a flight of stairs; and the
landlady had taken the matter in peculiarly harsh spirit.

All this, however, lay deeply hidden beneath Mrs. Major's unspoken word.
The vision of a gentle Mr. Major that Mr. Marrapit conjured sealed
the liking he had immediately taken to Mrs. Major, and thus was she
installed.

The masterly woman, upon this July afternoon, desisted from her
crocheting; observed in the dozing figure beside her signs of movement;
turned to it, ready for speech.

This she saw. From the reluctant rays of a passing sun a white silk
handkerchief protected a nicely polished head--a little bumpy, fringed
with soft white hair. Beneath the head a long face, sallow of hue; in
either cheek a pit; between them a dominating nose carrying eyeglasses.
A long, spare body in an alpaca coat; long thin legs; brown morocco
slippers without heels--upon the lap the peerless Rose of Sharon.

“Time for the Rose to go in,” Mrs. Major softly suggested.

“The Rose,” said Mr. Marrapit, passing a hand gently over the creature's
exquisite form, “is, I fear, still ailing. Her sleep is troubled; she
shivers. Her appetite?”

“It is still poorly.” The expression was that of a true distressed
gentlewoman.

“She has need,” Mr. Marrapit said, “of the most careful attention, of
the most careful dieting. Tend her. Tempt her. Take her.”

“I will, Mr. Marrapit.” Mrs. Major gathered the Rose against her bosom.
“You will not stay long? It is growing chilly.”

“I shall take a brief stroll. I am perturbed concerning the Rose.”

“Let me bring you a cap, Mr. Marrapit.”

“Unnecessary. Devote yourself, I pray, to the Rose. I am anxious.
Nothing could console me should any evil thing come upon her. I am
apprehensive. I look to you. I will take a stroll.”

Outside the wire fence Mr. Marrapit and Mrs. Major parted. The masterly
woman glided swiftly towards the house; Mr. Marrapit, with bent head,
passed thoughtfully along an opposite path.

And immediately the sleeping garden awoke to sudden activity.



III.

First to break covert was Frederick, Mr. Fletcher's assistant.
Abnormally steeped in vice for one so young (this wretched boy was
but fourteen), with the coolness of a matured evil-doer Frederick
extinguished his cigarette-end by pressing it against his boot-heel;
dropped it amongst other ends, toilsomely collected, in a tin box;
placed the box in its prepared hole; covered this with earth and leaves;
hooked a basket of faded weeds upon his arm, and so appeared in Mr.
Marrapit's path with bent back, diligently searching.

Mr. Marrapit inquired: “Your task?”

“Weedin',” said Frederick.

“Weeding what?”

“Weeds,” Frederick told him, a little surprised.

Mr. Marrapit rapped sharply: “Say 'sir'.”

“Sir,” said Frederick, making to move.

Mr. Marrapit peered at the basket. “You have remarkably few.”

“There ain't never many,” Frederick said with quiet pride--“there ain't
never many if you keep 'em down by always doin' your job.”

Mr. Marrapit pointed: “They grow thick at your feet, sir!”

In round-eyed astonishment Frederick peered low. “They spring up the
minute your back's turned, them weeds. They want a weed destroyer what
you pours out of a can.”

“You are the weed-destroyer,” Mr. Marrapit said sternly. “Be careful.
It is very true that they spring up whenever _my_ back is turned. Be
careful.” He passed on.

“Blarst yer back,” murmured Frederick, bending his own to the task.



IV.

A few yards further Mr. Marrapit again paused. Against a laurel bush
stood a pair of human legs, the seat of whose encasing trousers stared
gloomily upwards at the sky. With a small twig he carried Mr.
Marrapit tapped the seat. Three or four raps were necessary; slowly it
straightened into line with the legs; from the abyss of the bush a back,
shoulders, head, appeared.

Just as the ostrich with buried head believes itself hid from
observation, so it was with Mr. Fletcher, needing peace, a habit to
plunge head and shoulders into a bush and there remain--showing
nothing against the sky-line. Long practice had freed the posture from
irksomeness. As a young man Mr. Fletcher had been employed in a public
tennis-court, and there had learned the little mannerism to which he now
had constant resort. In those days the necessity of freeing himself from
the constant annoyance of nets to be tightened, or of disputes between
rival claims to courts to be settled, had driven him to devise some
means of escape. It was essential to the safety of his post, upon
the other hand, that he must never allow it to be said that he was
constantly absent from his duties. Chance gave him the very means he
sought. Bent double into a bush one day, searching a tennis ball, he
heard his name bawled up and down the courts; he did not stir. Those who
were calling him stumbled almost against his legs; did not observe
him; passed on calling. Thereafter, when unduly pressed, it became Mr.
Fletcher's habit to bury head and arms in a bush either until the hue
and cry for him had lulled, or until exasperated searchers knocked
against his stern; in the latter event he would explain that he was
looking for tennis balls.

The habit had persisted. Whenever irritated or depressed (and this man's
temperament caused such often to be his fate), he would creep to the
most likely bush and there disappear as to his upper half. It is a fine
thing in this turbulent life thus to have some quiet refuge against the
snarlings of adversity.

Mr. Fletcher drew up now and faced Mr. Marrapit; in his hand a snail.

He said gloomily: “Another one”; held it towards his master's face.

Here is an example of how one deception leads to another. This was no
fresh snail; often before Mr. Marrapit had seen it. To lend motive to
his concealment Mr. Fletcher carried always with him this same snail;
needing peace he would draw it from his pocket; plunge to consolation;
upon discovery exhibit it as excuse.

“There is an abominable smell here,” said Mr. Marrapit.

Mr. Fletcher inhaled laboriously. “It's not for me to say what it is.”

“Adjust that impression. Yours is the duty. You are in charge here. What
is it?”

“It's them damn cats.”

“You are insolent, sir. Your insolence increases. It grows unendurable.”

Mr. Fletcher addressed the snail. “He asts a question. I beg not to
answer it. He insists. I tell him. I'm insolent.” He sighed; the tyranny
of the world pressed heavily upon this man.

Mr. Marrapit advertised annoyance by clicks of his tongue: “You are
insolent when you swear in my presence. You are insolent when you impute
to my cats a fault that is not theirs.”

“I ain't blamin' the cats. It's natural to them. Whenever the wind sets
this way I notice it. It's blamin' me I complain of. I don't draw the
smell. I try to get away from it. It's 'ard--damn 'ard. I'm a gardener,
I am; not a wind-shaft.”

Whenever Mr. Marrapit had occasion to speak with Mr. Fletcher, after the
first few exchanges he would swallow with distinct effort. It was wrath
he swallowed; and bitter as the pill was, rarely did he fail to force it
down. Mr. Fletcher spoke to him as no other member of his establishment
dared speak. The formula of dismissal would leap to Mr. Marrapit's
mouth: knowledge of the unusually small wage for which Mr. Fletcher
worked caused it to be stifled ere it found tongue. Thousands of
inferiors have daily to bow to humiliations from their employers; it
is an encouraging thought for this army that masters there be who,
restrained by parsimony, daily writhe beneath impertinences from
valuable, ill-paid servants.

Mr. Marrapit swallowed. He said: “To the smell of which I complain my
cats are no party. It is tobacco. The air reeks of tobacco. I will not
have tobacco in my garden.”

Twice, with a roaring sound, Mr. Fletcher inhaled. He pointed towards an
elm against the wall: “It comes from over there.”

“Ascertain.”

The gardener plunged through the bushes; nosed laboriously; his
inhalations rasped across the shrubs. “There's no smoking here,” he
called.

“Someone, in some place concealed, indubitably smokes. Yourself you have
noticed it. Follow the scent.”

Exertion beaded upon Mr. Fletcher's brow. He drew his hand across it;
thrust a damp and gloomy face between the foliage towards his master.

“I'd like to know,” he asked, “if this is to be one of my regular jobs
for the future? Was I engaged to 'unt smells all day? It's 'ard-damn
'ard. I'm a gardener, I am; not a blood-'ound.”

But Mr. Marrapit had passed on.

“Damn 'ard,” Mr. Fletcher repeated; drew the snail from his pocket;
plunged to consolation.



V.

A short distance down the garden Mr. Marrapit himself discovered the
source of the smell that had offended him. Bending to the left he came
full upon it where it uprose from a secluded patch of turf: from the
remains of a pipe there mounted steadily through the still air a thin
wisp of smoke.

Outraged, Mr. Marrapit stared; fuming, turned upon the step that sounded
on the path behind him.

The slim and tall young man who approached was that nephew George, whose
coming into Mr. Marrapit's household had considerably disturbed Mr.
Marrapit's peace. Orphaned by the death of his mother, George had
gone into the guardianship of his uncle while in his middle teens. The
responsibility had been thrust upon Mr. Marrapit by his sister. Vainly
he had writhed and twisted in fretful protest; she shackled him to her
desire by tearful and unceasing entreaty. Vainly he urged that his means
were not what she thought; she assured him--and by her will bore out the
assurance--that with her George should go her money.

And the will, when read, in some degree consoled Mr. Marrapit for the
sniffling encumbrance he took back with him to Herons' Holt after the
funeral. It was a simple and trustful will--commended George into the
keeping of her brother Christopher Marrapit; desired that George should
be entered in her late husband's--the medical--profession; and for that
purpose bequeathed her all to the said brother.

George was eighteen when Mr. Marrapit entered him at St. Peter's
Hospital in mild pursuit of the qualification of the Conjoint Board of
Surgeons and Physicians. “I am entering you,” Mr. Marrapit had said,
consulting notes he had prepared against the interview--“I am entering
you at enormous cost upon a noble career which involves, however, a
prolonged and highly expensive professional training. Your mother wished
it.”

Mr. Marrapit did not add that George's mother had expressly paid for
it. This man had the knowledge that Youth would lose such veneration for
Authority as it may possess were Authority to disclose the motives that
prompt its actions.

He continued: “For me this involves considerable self-denial and
patience. I do not flinch. From you it demands unceasing devotion to
your books, your studies, your researches. You are no longer a boy: you
are a man. The idle sports of youth must be placed behind you. Stern
life must be sternly faced.”

“I do not flinch,” George had replied.

“For your personal expenses I shall make you a small allowance. You will
live in my house. Your wants should be insignificant.”

In a faint voice George squeezed in: “I have heard that one can work far
better by living near the hospital in digs.”

“Elucidate.”

“Digs--lodgings. I have heard that one can work far better by living
near the hospital in lodgings.”

“Adjust that impression,” Mr. Marrapit had told him. “You are
misinformed.”

George struggled: “I should have the constant companionship of men
absorbed in the same work as myself. We could exchange views and notes
in the evenings.”

“In your books seek that companionship. With them compare your views.
Let your notes by them be checked. They are infallible.”

George said no more. At that moment the freedom of hospital as against
the restraint of school, was a gallant steed upon which he outrid all
other desires. The prospect of new and strange books in exchange for
those he so completely abhorred, was an alluring delight. It is not
until the bargain is complete that we discover how much easier to
polish, and more comfortable to handle, are old lamps than new.

Mr. Marrapit had referred to his notes: “In regard to the allowance I
shall make you. I earnestly pray no spur may be necessary to urge you
at your tasks. Yet, salutary it is that spur should exist. I arrange,
therefore, that in the deplorable event of your failing to pass any
examination your allowance shall be diminished.”

“Will it be correspondingly increased when I pass first shot?”

The fearful possibilities of this suggestion Mr. Marrapit had hesitated
to accept. Speculation was abhorrent to this man. Visions of success
upon success demanding increase upon increase considerably agitated him.
Upon the other hand, the sooner these successes were won, the sooner,
he reflected, would he be rid of this incubus, and, in the long-run, the
cheaper. He nerved himself to the decision. “I agree to that,” he had
said. “The compact is affirmed.”

It was a wretched compact for George.

But the sum had not yet been fixed. George, standing opposite his uncle,
twisted one leg about the other; twined his clammy hands; put the awful
question: “By how much will the allowance be increased or cut down?”

“By two pounds a quarter.”

George plunged: “So if I fail in my first exam. I shall get eleven
pounds at the quarter? if I pass, fifteen?”

Horror widened Mr. Marrapit's eyes; shrilled his voice: “What is the
colossal sum you anticipate?”

“I thought you said fifty-two pounds a year-a pound a week.”

“A monstrous impression. Adjust it. Four pounds a quarter is the sum.
You will have no needs. It errs upon the side of liberality--I desire to
be liberal.”

George twisted his legs into a yet firmer knot: “But two failures would
wipe it bang out.”

“Look you to that,” Mr. Marrapit told him. “The matter is settled.”

But it was further pursued by George when outside the door.

“Simply to spite that stingy brute,” vowed he, “I'll pass all my exams,
with such a rush that I'll be hooking sixteen quid a quarter out of him
before he knows where he is. I swear I will.”

It was a rash oath. When Youth selects as weapon against Authority some
implement that requires sweat in the forging Authority may go unarmed.
The task of contriving such weapons is early abandoned. In three months
George's hot resolve was cooled; in six it was forgotten; at the end
of three years, after considerable fluctuation, his allowance stood at
minus two pounds for the ensuing quarter.

Mr. Marrapit, appealed to for advance, had raved about his study with
waving arms.

“The continued strain of renewing examination fees consequent on your
callous failures,” he had said, “terrifies me. I am haunted by the
spectre of ruin. The Bank of England could not stand it.”

Still George argued.

With a whirlwind of words Mr. Marrapit drove him from the study:
“Precious moments fly even as you stand here. To your books, sir. In
them seek solace. By application to them refresh your shattered pocket.”

Shamefully was the advice construed. George sought and found solace in
his books by selling his Kirke, his Quain and his Stone to Mr. Schoole
of the Charing Cross Road; his microscope he temporarily lodged with Mr.
Maughan in the Strand; to the science of bridge he applied himself with
a skill that served to supply his petty needs.

Notwithstanding, his career at St. Peter's was of average merit. George
was now in the sixth year of his studies; and by the third part of his
final examination, was alone delayed from the qualification which would
bring him freedom from his uncle's irksome rule.



VI.

His attempt at this last examination had been concluded upon this July
day that opens our history, and thus we return to Mr. Marrapit, to
George, and to the line of smoke uprising from the tobacco.

Mr. Marrapit indicated the smouldering wedge.

George bent forward. “Tobacco,” he announced.

“My nose informed me. My eyes affirm. Yours?”

“I am afraid so.”

“My simple rule. In the vegetable garden you may smoke; here you may
not. Is it so hard to observe?”

“I quite forgot myself.”

Mr. Marrapit cried: “Adjust that impression. You forgot me. Consistently
you forget me. My desires, my interests are nothing to you.”

“It's a rotten thing to make a fuss about.”

“That is why I make a fuss. It _is_ a rotten thing. A disgusting and a
noisome thing. Bury it.”

Into a bed of soft mould George struck a sullen heel; kicked the tobacco
towards the pit. Mr. Marrapit chanted over the obsequies: “I provide you
with the enormous expanse of my vegetable garden in which to smoke. Yet
upon my little acre you intrude. I am Naboth.”

Ahab straightened his back; sighed heavily. Naboth started against the
prick of a sudden recollection:

“I had forgotten. Your examination?”

George half turned away. The bitterest moment of a sad day was come. He
growled:

“Pipped.”

“_Pipped?_”

“Pilled.”

“_Pilled?_”

“Spun.”

“_Spun?”_

“Three months.”

Mr. Marrapit put his hands to his head: “I shall go mad. My brain reels
beneath these conundrums. I implore English.”

The confession of defeat is a thousandfold more bitter when made to
unkind ears. George paled a little; spoke very clearly: “I failed. I was
referred for three months.”

“I am Job,” groaned Mr. Marrapit. “I expected this. The strain is
unendurable. It is unnatural. The next chance shall be your last. What
is the fee for re-examination?”

“Five guineas.”

“My God!” said Mr. Marrapit.

He tottered away up the path.




CHAPTER II

Excursions In Melancholy.



I.

Gloom brooded over Herons' Holt that evening. Gloom hung thickly about
the rooms: blanketed conversation; veiled eyes that might have sparkled;
choked appetites.

Nevertheless this was an atmosphere in which one member of the household
felt most comfortable.

Margaret, Mr. Marrapit's only child, was nineteen; of sallow complexion,
petite, pretty; with large brown eyes in which sat always a constant
quest--an entreaty, a wistful yearning.

Hers was a clinging nature, readily responsive to the attraction of any
stouter mind. Enthusiasm was in this girl, but it lay well-like--not
as a spring. To stir it the influence of another was wanted; of itself,
spontaneous, it could not leap. Aroused, there was no rush and surge
of emotion--it welled, rose deeply; thickly, without ripple; crestless,
flinging no intoxicating spume. Waves rush triumphant, hurtling forward
the stick they support: the pool swells, leaving the stick quiescent,
floating.

Many persons have this order of enthusiasm; it is a clammy thing
to attract. A curate with a glimpse at Shelley's mind once roused
Margaret's enthusiasm for the poet. It welled so suffocatingly about him
that he came near to damning Shelley and all his works; threw up his hat
when opportunity put out a beckoning finger and drew him elsewhere.

Margaret walked in considerable fear of her father; but she clung to him
despite his oppressive foibles, because this was her nature. She loved
church; incense; soft music; a prayer-book tastefully bound. She “wrote
poetry.”

Warmed by the gloom that lay over Herons' Holt upon this evening, she
sat brooding upon her cousin George's failure until a beautiful picture
was hatched. He had gone to his room directly after dinner; during the
meal had not spoken. She imagined him seated on his bed, hands deep in
pockets, chin sunk, brow knitted, wrestling with that old devil despair.
She knew that latterly he had worked tremendously hard. He had told her
before the examination how confident of success he was, had revealed how
much in the immediate prospect of freedom he gloried. She recalled
his gay laugh as he had bade her good-bye on the first day, and the
recollection stung her just as, she reflected, it must now be stinging
him.... Only he must a thousand times more fiercely be feeling the burn
of its venom....

Margaret moved impatiently with a desire to shake into herself a
profounder sense of her cousin's misfortune. By ten she was plunged in a
most pleasing melancholy.



II.

She was of those who are by nature morbid; who deceive themselves if
they imagine they have enjoyment from the recreations that provoke
lightness of heart in the majority. Only the surface of their
spirits ripples under such breezes; to stir the whole, to produce
the counterpart of a hearty laugh in your vigorous animal, a feast on
melancholy must be provided. This is a quality that is common among the
lower classes who find their greatest happiness in funerals. The sombre
trappings; white handkerchiefs against black dresses; tears; the mystery
of gloom--these trickle with a warm glow through all their senses. They
are as aroused by grief, unpleasant to the majority, as the drunkard is
quickened by wine, to many abhorrent.

Thus it was with Margaret, and to her the shroud of melancholy in which
she was now wrapped brought an added boon--arrayed in it she was best
able to make her verses. Not of necessity sad little verses; many of her
brightest were conceived in profoundest gloom. With a pang at the heart
she could be most merry--tinkling out her laughing little lines just as
martyrs could breathe a calm because, rather than spite of, they were
devilishly racked.



III.

But this was no hour for tinkling lines. A manuscript returned by the
last post emphasised her gloom.

Kissing her father good-night, Margaret crept to her room, aching with
desire to write.

She undressed, read a portion of the _Imitation_, then to her table by
the open window.

Two hours brought relief. Margaret placed her poem in an envelope
against its presentation to George in the morning, then from her window
leaned.

From her thoughts at once George sped; they rushed across the sleeping
fields to cling about the person of that Mr. William Wyvern who had
spoken of Mr. Marrapit as reminding him of a minor prophet--shaved.
This was Margaret's nightly practice, but to-night this girl was most
exquisitely melancholy, and with melancholy her thoughts of her William
were tinged. She had not seen him that day; and now she brooded upon the
bitter happening that had forced all her meetings with her lover to be
snatched--fugitive, secret.

For Mr. William Wyvern was not allowed at Herons' Holt. When love first
sent its herald curiosity into William's heart, the young man had sought
to relieve its restlessness by a visit ostensibly on George, really upon
Margaret, and extremely ill-advised in that at his heels gambolled his
three bull-terriers.

Korah, Dathan, and Abiram these were named, and they were abrupt dogs to
a point reaching brusqueness.

At the door, as William had approached, beamed Mr. Marrapit; upon the
drive the queenly Rose of Sharon sat; and immediately tragedy swooped.

The dogs sighted the Rose. Red-mouthed the shining pack flew at her.
Dignity fell before terror: wildly, with streaming tail, she fled.

Orange was the cat, white the dogs: like some orange and snow-white
ribbon magically inspired, thrice at enormous speed they set a belt
about the house. With tremendous bounds the Rose kept before her
pursuers--heavily labouring, horrid with thirsty glee. Impotent in the
doorway moaned Mr. Marrapit, his dirge rushing up to a wail of grief
each time the parti-coloured ribbon flashed before his eyes.

With Mr. Fletcher the end had come. Working indoors, aroused by the din,
the gardener burst out past his master just as the ribbon fluttered into
sight upon the completion of its fourth circuit. Like a great avalanche
it poured against his legs; as falls the oak, so pressed he fell.

Each eager jaw snapped once. Korah bit air, Dathan the cat's right ear.
She wrenched; freed; sprang high upon the porch to safety, blood on her
coat.

Abiram put a steely nip upon Mr. Fletcher's right buttock.

William called off his dogs; stood aghast. Mr. Marrapit stretched
entreating arms to his adored. Mr. Fletcher writhed prone.

The torn Rose slipped to Mr. Marrapit's bosom. Clasping her he turned
upon William--“You shall pay for this blood!”

William stammered: “I'm very sorry, sir. If--”

“Never again enter my gates. I'll have your curs shot!”

Curs was unfortunate; the evil three were whelped of a mighty strain.

“If your fool of a man hadn't got in the way, the cat would have
escaped,” William hotly cried. Indignant he turned. Banishment was
nothing then; in time it came to be a bitter thing.

Mr. Marrapit had raged on to Mr. Fletcher, yet writhing.

“You hear that?” he had cried. “Dolt! You are responsible for this!” He
touched the blood-flecked side, the abrased ear; clasped close the Rose;
called for warm water.

Mr. Fletcher clapped a hand to his wound as shakily he rose.

“I go to rescue his cat!” he said; “I'm near worried to death by 'ounds.
I'm a dolt. I'm responsible. It's 'ard,--damn 'ard. I'm a gardener, I
am; not a dog muzzle.”

A dimness clouded Margaret's beautiful eyes as this bitter picture--she
had watched it--was again reviewed. She murmured “Oh, Bill!”; stretched
her soft arms to the night; moved her pretty lips in a message to her
lover; snuggled between the sheets and made melancholy her bedfellow.



IV.

By seven she was up and in the fresh garden. George was before her.

She cried brightly: “Why, how early you are!” and ran to him--very
pretty in her white dress: at her breast a rose, the poem fluttering in
her hand.

“Yes; for once before you.”

George's tone did not give back her mood, purposely keyed high. She
played on it again: “Turning a new leaf?”

He drummed at the turf with his heel: “Yes--for to-day.” He threw out a
hand towards her: “But in the same old book. I've had eight--nine years
of it, and now there are three more months.”

“Poor George! But only three months, think how they will fly!”

He was desperately gloomy: “I haven't your imagination. Each single day
of them will mean a morning--here; a night--here.”

“Oh, is it so hard?”

“Yes, now. It's pretty deadly now. You know, when I wasn't precisely
killing myself with overwork, I didn't mind so much. When it was three
or four years, anyway, before I could possibly be free, a few extra
months or so through failing an exam, didn't trouble me. But this
is different. I was right up against getting clear of all this”--he
comprehended garden and house in a sweep of the hand--“counted it a dead
certainty--and here I am pitched back again.”

“But, George, you did work so hard this time. It isn't as though you
had to blame yourself.” She put a clinging hand into his arm. “You
can suffer no--remorse. That is what makes failure so dreadful--the
knowledge that things might have been otherwise if one had liked.”

George laughed quite gaily. Gloom never lay long upon this young man.

“You're a sweet little person,” he said. “You ought to be right, but
you are wrong. When I didn't work I didn't mind failing. It's when I've
tried that I get sick.”

Margaret's eyes brightened. There was melancholy here.

“Oh, I know what you mean. I know so well. I have felt that. You mean
the--the haunting fear that you may never be able to succeed; that you
have not the--the talent, the capacity.” She continued pleadingly:
“Oh, you mustn't think that. You can--you _will_ succeed next time, you
know.”

“Rather!” responded George brightly.

Margaret was quite pained. She would have had him express doubt,
despondently sigh; would have heartened him with her poem. The confident
“rather!” jarred. She hurried from its vigour.

She asked: “What had you intended to do?”

“I was to have got a _locum tenens_. I think it would have developed
into a permanency. A big, rough district up in Yorkshire with a man who
keeps six horses going. His second assistant--a pal of mine--wants to
chuck it.”

“Why?”

“Why? Oh, partly because he's fed up with it, partly because he wants a
practice of his own.”

“Ah! ... But, George, don't you want a practice of your own? You don't
want to be another man's assistant, do you?”

George laughed. “I can't choose, Margi. You know, if you imagine there
are solid groups of people all over England anxiously praying for the
arrival of a doctor, you must adjust that impression, as your father
would say. These things have to be bought. I've got about three pounds,
so I'm not bidding. They seldom go so cheap.”

Margaret never bantered. She had no battledore light enough to return
an airy shuttlecock. Now, as always, when this plaything came
buoyantly towards her she swiped it with heavy force clean out of the
conversational field.

She said gravely: “Ah, I know what you mean. You mean that father ought
to buy you a practice--ought to set you up when you are qualified. I
can't discuss that, can I? It wouldn't be loyal.”

“Of course not. I don't ask you.”

They moved towards the sound of the breakfast bell.

“You think,” Margaret continued, “that father ought to buy you a
practice because your mother left him money for the purpose?”

“I know she left him nearly five thousand pounds for my education
and all that. I think I may have cost him three thousand, possibly
four--_so_ I think I am entitled to something, _but_ I shan't get it,
_therefore_ I don't worry. My hump is gone; in three months I shall be
gone. Forward: I smell bacon!”

Margaret smiled the wan smile of an invalid watching vigorous youth at
sport. Firmly she banged the shuttlecock out of sight.

“How bright you are!” she told him. “Look, here is a little poem I wrote
for you last night. It's about failure and success. Don't read it now.”

George was very fond of his cousin. “Oh, but I must!” he cried. “I think
this was awfully nice of you. He's not down yet. Let's sit on this seat
and read it together.”

“Oh, not aloud. It's a silly little thing--really.”

“Yes--aloud.”

He smoothed the paper. She pressed against him; thrilled as she regarded
the written lines. George begged her read. She would not--well, she
would. She paused. Modesty and pride gathered on her cheeks, tuned her
voice low. She read:

  “So you have tried--So you have known
  The burning effort for success,
  The quick belief in your own prowess and your skill,
  The bitterness of failure, and the joy
  Of sweet success.”

“'Burning effort,'” George said. “That's fine!”

“I'm glad you like that. And 'quick belief'--you know what I mean?”

“Oh, rather.”

The poet warmed again over her words.

  “So you have tried--
  So you have known
  The blind-eyed groping towards the goal
  That flickers on the far horizon of Attempt,
  Gleaming to sudden vividness, anon
  Fading from sight.”

“Sort of blank verse, isn't it?” George asked.

“Well, sort of,” the poet allowed. “Not exactly, of course.”

“Of course not,” George agreed firmly.

Margaret breathed the next fine lines.

  “So you have tried--
  So you have known
  The bitter-sweetness of Attempt,
  The quick determination and the dread despair
  That grapple and possess you as you strive
  For imagery.”

George questioned: “Imagery...?”

“That verse is more for me than you,” the poet explained. “'For
imagery'--to get the right word, you know.”

“Rather!” said George. “It does for me too--in exams, when one is
floored, you know.”

“Yes,” Margaret admitted doubtfully. “Ye-es. Don't interrupt between the
verses, dear.”

Now emotion swelled her voice.

  “Success be yours!
  May you achieve
  To heights you do not dream you'll ever touch;
  The power's to your hand, the road before you lies--
  Forward! The gods not always frown; anon
  They'll kindly smile.”

“Why, that's splendid!” George cried. He put a cousinly arm about
the poet; squeezed her to him. “Fancy you writing that for me! What a
sympathetic little soul you are--and how clever!”

Breathless she disengaged herself: “I'm so glad you like it. It's a
silly little thing--but it's _real_, isn't it? Come, there's father.”

She paused against denial of the poem's silliness, affirmation of its
truth; but George, moody beneath Mr. Marrapit's eye, glinting behind the
window, had moved forward.

Margaret thrust the paper in her bosom, tucked in where heart might warm
against heart's child. Constantly during breakfast her mind reverted to
it, drummed its rare lines.




CHAPTER III.

Upon Modesty In Art: And Should Be Skipped.


Yet Margaret had called her poem silly. Here, then, was mock-modesty by
diffidence seeking praise. But this mock-modesty, which horribly abounds
to-day, is only natural product of that furious modesty which has come
to be expected in all the arts.

Modesty should have no place in true art. The author or the painter,
the poet or the composer should be impersonal to his work. That which he
creates is not his; it is a piece of the art to which he is servant, and
as such (and such alone) he should regard it. His in the making and the
moulding, thereafter it becomes the possession of the great whole to
which it belongs. If it adorns that whole he may freely admire it; for
he is impersonal to it.

Unquestionably (or unconsciously) we accept this principle in regard to
human life. The child belongs not to the mother who conceived it but to
the race of which it is an atom. It hinders or it betters the race. The
race judges it. By the race it is honoured or condemned; and to it the
mother becomes impersonal. As it bears itself among its fellows, so she
judges it--as the artist's work bears itself in the great art it joins,
so should he judge it. And if the mother joins in his fellows' praise of
her child, and if she proclaims her pride in it, is she called wanting
in modesty?--and if the artist joins in praise of his work, and if he
freely names it good, must he then be vain, boastful? The race grants
that the mother who gave it this specimen of its kind has a first right
to show her pride--to the artist who gives a fair specimen to his art we
should allow a like voice.

For in demanding modesty--in naming impersonality conceit--we have
produced also mock-modesty; and because, as a people, we have little
appreciation of the arts, hence little knowledge, hence no standard by
which to judge, we continually mistake the one form of modesty for the
other. Modesty we suspect to be mock-modesty, and mock-modesty we take
to be pleasing humility.

Coming to literature alone, the author should be impersonal to his work
and must not cry that the writer is no judge of his own labour. Letters
is his trade; and just as the mason well knows whether the brick he has
laid helps or hinders, beautifies or insults the house, so the writer
should be full cognisant whether his work helps make or does mar the
edifice called literature. Nor must the term literature be denied to the
ruck of modern writing. All that is written to interest or to instruct
goes to make the literature of our day. We have introduced new
expressions just as we have contrived new expressions in architecture;
and as in the latter case so in the former the bulk of these is
ephemeral. Nevertheless they are a part of literature, and all efforts
in them better or sully the pages which in our day we are adding to the
book of literature. From this book the winds of cycles to come will blow
all that is unworthy--only the stout leaves will endure; but, no less
because you write for the supplement than if you have virtue sufficient
for the bound volume, remember that in every form of writing there
are standards of good, and that every line printed helps raise or does
tarnish the letters of our day.




CHAPTER IV.

Excursions In A Hospital.



I.

By the half-past nine train George went to town; an hour later was at
St. Peter's.

From the bar of the Students' Club a throng of young men of his year
loudly hailed him. He joined them; took with a laugh the commiserations
on his failure; wrung the hands of those who had been successful.

The successful young gentlemen were standing drinks-each man his
round. There was much smoke and much laughter. Amusing experiences were
narrated. You gathered that all who had passed their examination had
done so by sheer luck, by astonishing flukes. Not one had ever worked.
Each had been “ragged” on a subject of which he knew absolutely nothing.
To the brilliancy with which he had gulled or bluffed his examiner, to
the diplomacy with which he had headed him off the matters of which he
knew absolutely less than nothing-to these alone were his success due.

Such is ever Youth's account of battle with Age. Youth is a devil of
a smart fellow, behind whom Age blunders along in the most ridiculous
fashion. Later this young blood takes his place in the blundering ranks
and then does learn that indeed he was right--Age knows nothing. For
with years we begin to realise our ignorance, and the lesson is not
complete when the grave slams the book. A few plumb the depths of their
ignorance before death: these are able to speak--and these are the
teachers of men. We get here one reason why giants are fewer in our day:
with the growth of man's imaginings and his inventions there is more
vanity to be forced through; the truths of life lie deeper hid; more
phantasms arise to lure us from the quest of realities; the task of
striking truth accumulates.



II.

Soon after midday the party broke up. Its members lunched early;
visiting surgeons and physicians went their rounds at half-past one.

George strolled to the Dean's office.

A woebegone-looking youth in spectacles stood before the table; opposite
sat the Dean. He looked up as George entered, and nodded: he was fond of
George.

“Come along in,” he said; “I shan't be a minute.”

He turned to the sad youth. “Now your case, Mr. Carter,” he said, “is
quite unique. In the whole records of the Medical School”--he waved at
a shelf of fat volumes--“in the whole records of the Medical School we
have nothing in the remotest degree resembling it. You have actually
failed twice in--in--”

The Dean searched wildly among a litter of papers; baffled, threw out an
emphasising hand, and repeated, “_Twice_! Other hospitals, Mr. Carter,
may have room for slackers--we have not. We have a record and a
reputation of which we are proud. You are in your second year. How old
are you?”

A faint whisper said, “Nineteen.”

The Dean started. “Nineteen! Oh, dear me, dear me! this is worse than
I thought--far worse. I am afraid, Mr. Carter, I shall have to write to
your father.”

Guttural with emotion, Mr. Carter gasped: “I mean to work--indeed I do.”

Again the Dean frantically searched on his desk to discover the subject
in which Mr. Carter had failed; again was unsuccessful. Deep thought
ravelled his brow. His fingers drummed indecision on the table. It was a
telling picture of one struggling between duty and kindliness--masterly
as the result of long practice.

“Mr. Carter,” the Dean summed up, “I will consider your case more fully
to-night. Against my better judgment I may perhaps decide not on this
occasion to communicate with your father. But remember this. At the very
outset of your career you have strained to breaking-point the confidence
of your teachers. Only by stupendous efforts on your part can that
confidence be restored. These failures, believe me, will dog you from
now until you are qualified--nay, will dog your whole professional
career. That will do.”

In a convulsion of relief and of agitation beneath this appalling
prospect the dogged man quavered thanks; stumbled from the room.



III.

George laughed. “Same old dressing-down,” he said. “Don't you ever alter
the formula?”

“It's very effective,” the Dean replied. “That's the sixth this morning.
Unfortunately I couldn't remember in what subject that boy had failed;
so he didn't get the best part--the part about that being the one
subject of all others which, if failed in, predicted ruin.”

“It was biology in my case,” George told him. “I trembled with funk.”

“I think most of you do. It's fortunate that all you men when you first
come up are afraid of your fathers. It gives us a certain amount of hold
over you. If the thing were done properly, both at the 'Varsities and
the hospitals, there would be a system of marks and reports just as at
schools. You are only boys when you first come up, and you should be
treated as boys; instead, you are left free and irresponsible. It ruins
dozens of men every year.”

“Perhaps that's why I'm here now,” George responded. “You know I got
ploughed?”

The Dean told George how sorry he had been to hear it. He questioned:
“Bad luck, I suppose? I thought it was a sitter for you this time.”

“Yes, rotten luck.”

“It's unfortunate, you know. You would have got a house appointment. I'm
afraid you will miss that mow. There will be a crowd of very hot men
up with you in October, junior to you, who will get the vacancies. What
will you do?”

George shrugged and laughed.

The Dean frowned; interpreted the shrug. “Well, you should care,” he
said. “You ought to be looking around you. Won't your uncle help you to
buy a partnership?”

“We are on worse terms than ever after this failure. Not he.”

“And you're not trying to be on good terms, I suppose?”

“Not I.”

“You are a remarkably silly young man. You want balance, Leicester, you
want balance. It would be the making of you to have some serious purpose
in life. You will run against something of the kind soon--you'll get
engaged, perhaps, and then you'll regret your happy-go-lucky ways.” He
fumbled amongst a pile of correspondence and drew out a letter. “Now,
look here, I was thinking of you only a few moments ago. Here's a letter
from a man who--who--where is it?--Ah, yes--If you could raise 400
pounds by the time you are qualified I could put you on to a splendid
thing.”

“Not the remotest chance,” said George. “The serious purpose must wait.
I--”

The Dean waved a hand that asked silence; consulted the letter. “This is
from a man in practice at a place called Runnygate--one of these rising
seaside resorts--Hampshire--great friend of mine. He's got money, and
he's going to chuck it--doesn't suit his wife. I told him I'd find a
purchaser if he would leave it with me. Merely nominal--only 400
pounds. He says that in a year or so there'll be a small fortune in the
practice, because a company is taking the place over to develop it. You
shall have first refusal. Come now, pull yourself together, Leicester.”

George laughed. He stood up. “Thanks, I refuse now. What on earth's the
good?”

“Rubbish,” said the Dean. “Think over that serious interest in life. You
never know your luck.”

George moved to the door. “I know my luck all right,” he laughed. “Never
mind, I'm not grumbling with it.”




CHAPTER V.

Upon Life: And May Be Missed.


In the ante-room, as it were, of a very short chapter, we must make
ready to receive our heroine. She is about to spring dazzling upon our
pages; will be our close companion through some moving scenes. We must
collect ourselves, brush our hair, arrange our dress, prepare our nicest
manner.

And as in ante-rooms there are commonly papers laid about to beguile the
tedium, and as the faint rustle of our heroine's petticoats is warning
that George's assertion that he knew his luck is immediately to be
disproved, let us make a tiny little paper on the folly of such a
statement.

For of his luck man has no glimmer of prescience. Day by day we
rattle the box, throw the dice; but of how these will fall we have no
knowledge. We only hope with the gambler's feverishness; and it is this
very hazard that keeps us crowding and pushing to hold our place at
the tables where fortune spins. Grow we sick of the game, sour with our
luck, weary of the hazard, and relinquish we our place at the table, we
are pushed back and out--elbowed, thrown, trampled.

We are all treasure-seekers set on a treasure-island in a boundless sea.
Cruelly marooned we are--flung ashore without appeal, and here deserted
until the ship that disembarked us suddenly swoops and the press-gang
snatches us again aboard--again without heed to our desire. Whence the
ship brought us we do not know, and whither it will carry us we do not
know; there is none to prick a return voyage disclosing the ultimate
haven, though pilots there be who pretend to the knowledge--we cannot
test them.

But the marooners, when they land us, give us wherewith to occupy our
thoughts. This is a treasure-island. Each man of us they land with a
pick; the inhabitants tell us of the treasure, and, being acclimatised,
we set to work to dig and delve. Some work in shafts already sunk, some
seek to break new ground, but what the pick will next turn up no one
knows.

And it is this uncertainty, this hazard, that keeps us hammer, hammer,
hammering; that keeps us, some from brooding against the marooners,
their wanton desertion of us, our ultimate fate at their hands; others
from making ready against the return voyage as entreated by the pilots.

Certainly, when the pick strikes a pocket, we turn to carousing; cease
cocking a timid eye at the horizon.

And now our heroine is beckoning.




CHAPTER VI.

Magnificent Arrival Of A Heroine.



I.

Until three o'clock George sat in an operating theatre. An unimportant
case was in process: occasionally, through the group of dressers,
surgeons and nurses who filled the floor, George caught a glimpse of the
subject. He watched moodily, too occupied with his thoughts--three more
months of dependency--to take greater interest.

One other student was present. Peacefully he slumbered by George's side
until the ring of a dropped forceps awakened him. Noting the cause,
“Clumsy beast,” said this Mr. Franklyn; and to George: “Come on,
Leicester; my slumber is broken. Let's go for a stroll up West.”

In Oxford Street a pretty waitress in a tea-shop drew Mr. Franklyn's
eye; a drop of rain whacked his nose. He winked the eye; wiped the nose.
“Tea,” said he; “it is going to rain.”

He addressed the pretty waitress: “I have no wish to seem inquisitive,
but which table do you attend?”

The girl jerked her chin: “What's that to you?”

“So much,” Mr. Franklyn earnestly told her, “that, until I know, here,
beautiful but inconvenient, in the doorway I stand.”

“Well, all of 'em.” She whisked away.

“You're badly snubbed, Franklyn,” George said. “This rain is nothing.”

A summer shower crashed down as he spoke; a mob of shoppers, breathless
for shelter, drove them inwards.

“George,” said Mr. Franklyn, seating himself, “your base mind thinks I
have designs on this girl. I grieve at so distorted a fancy. The child
says prettily that she attends 'all of 'em.' It is a gross case of
overwork into which I feel it my duty more closely to inquire.”

George laughed. “Do you always spend your afternoons like this?”

“As a rule, yes. I have been fifteen years at St. Peter's awaiting that
day when through pure ennui the examiners will pass me. It will be a sad
wrench to leave the dear old home.” He continued, a tinge of melancholy
in his voice: “You know, I am the last of the old brigade. The medical
student no longer riots. His name is no longer a byword; he is a rabbit.
Alone, undismayed, I uphold the old traditions. I am, so to speak,
one of the old aristocracy. Beneath the snug characteristics of the
latter-day student--his sweet abhorrence of a rag, his nasty delight
in plays which he calls 'hot-stuff,' his cigarettes and his
chess-playing--beneath these my head, like Henley's, is bloody but
unbowed. Forgive a tear.”

The shower ceased; the tea was finished; the pretty waitress was
coyly singeing her modesty in the attractive candle of Mr. Franklyn's
suggestions. George left them at the game; strolled aimlessly towards
the Marble Arch; beyond it; to the right, and so into a quiet square.

Here comes my heroine.



II.

The hansom, as George walked, was coming towards him--smartly, with
a jingle of bells; skimming the kerb. As it reached him (recall that
shower) the horse slipped, stumbled, came on its knees.

Down came the shafts; out shot the girl.

The doors were wide; the impetus took her in her stride. One tiny foot
dabbed at the platform's edge; the other twinkled--patent leather and
silver buckle--at the step, missed it, plunged with a giant stride for
the pavement.

“Mercy!” she cried, and came like a shower of roses swirling into
George's arms.

Completely he caught her. About his legs whipped her skirts; against him
pressed her panting bosom; his arms--the action was instinctive--locked
around her; the adorable perfume of her came on him like breeze from a
violet bed; her very cheek brushed his lips--since the first kiss it was
the nearest thing possible to a kiss.

She twisted backwards. Modesty chased alarm across her face--caught,
battled, overcame it; flamed triumphant.

Fright at her accident drove her pale; shame at the manner of her
descent--leg to the knee and an indelicacy of petticoats--agitated she
had glimpsed it as she leapt--flushed her crimson from the line of her
dress about her throat to the wave of her hair upon her brow.

She twisted back. “Oh, what must you think of me?” she gasped.

He simply could not say.




CHAPTER VII.

Moving Passages With A Heroine.



I.

George could not say.

His senses were washed aswim by this torrent of beauty poured unexpected
through eyes to brain. It surged the centres to violent commotion, one
jostling another in a whirlpool of conflict. Out of the tumult alarm
flashed down the wires to his heart--set it banging; flashed in wild
message to his tongue--locked it.

The driver in our brains is an intolerable fellow in sudden crisis. He
loses his head; distracted he pulls the levers, and, behold, in a moment
the thing is irrevocably done; we are a coward legging it down the
street, a murderer with bloody hand, a liar with false words suddenly
pumped.

A moment later the driver is calm and aghast at the ruin he has
contrived. Why, before God, did he pull the leg lever?--the arm
lever?--the tongue lever? In an instant's action he has accomplished
calamity; where sunshine laughed now darkness heaps; where the prospect
smiled disaster now comes rolling up in thunder.

These are your crises. Again, as now with George, the driver becomes
temporarily idiot--stands us oafishly silent, or perhaps jerks out some
stupid words; remembers when too late the quip that would have
fetched the laugh, the thrust that would have sped the wound. He is an
intolerable fellow.

“Oh, what must you think of me?”

That pause followed while the driver in George's brain stood gapingly
inactive; and then came laughter to him like a draught of champagne. For
the girl put up her firm, round chin and laughed with a clear pipe of
glee--a laugh to call a laugh as surely as a lark's note will set a
hedge in song; and it called the laugh in George.

He said: “I am thinking the nicest things of you. But have you dropped
from the skies?”

“From a _cab_,” she protested.

She turned to the road; back to George in dismay, for the catapult, its
bullet shot, had bolted up the street--was gone from view.

“Oh!--I _was_ in a cab?” she implored.

George said: “It _looked_ like a cab. But a fairy-car, I think.”

A pucker of her brows darkened the quick mirth that came to her eyes.
She cried: “Oh, don't joke. She will be killed.”

“You were not alone?”

“No--oh, no! What has happened to her?”

“We had better follow.”

She corrected his number. “Yes, I had better. Thank you so much for your
help.” She took a step; faltered upon it with a little exclamation of
pain; put a white tooth on her lip.

“You have hurt your foot?” George said.

“My ankle, I think. Oh dear!” and then again she laughed.

It came even then to George that certainly she would have made her
fortune were she to set up a gloom-exorcising bureau--waiting at the end
of a telephone wire ready to rush with that laugh to banish the imps of
melancholy. Never had he heard so infectious a note of mirth.

“Oh, what must you think of me?” she ended. “I simply cannot help
laughing, you know--and yet, oh dear!”

She put the tips of the fingers of a hand against her lower lip, gazed
very anxiously up the road, and then again she gave that clear pipe of
laughter.

“I can't help it,” she told him imploringly. “I simply cannot help
laughing. It is funny, you know. She was scolding me--”

“_Scolding_!” George exclaimed.

That beauty should be scolded!

“Scolding--yes. Oh, I'm only a--well, scolding me, and I was wishing,
_wishing_ I could escape. And then suddenly out I shot. And then I look
around and she's--” A wave of her hand expressed a disappearance that
was by magic agency.

“But, _scolding_?” George said. “Need you trouble? She will be all
right.”

“Oh, I must. I live with her.”

“Will she trouble about you?”

“I think she will return for me. Please, _please_ go--would you
mind?--to the corner, and see if there has been an accident.”

From that direction a bicyclist approached. George hailed. “Is there a
cab accident round the corner?”

The youth stared; called “Rats!”; passed.

George interpreted: “It means No. Do you think if you were to take my
arm you could walk to the turning?”

Quite naturally she slipped a white glove around his elbow. The contact
thrilled him. “No nice girl, you know, would do this,” she said, “with a
perfect stranger.”

George bent his arm a little, the better to feel the pressure of those
white fingers. “I am not really perfect,” he told her.

She took his mood. “Nor I really nice,” she joined. “In fact, I'm
horrible--they tell me. But I think it is wise to follow, don't you?”

“Profoundly wise. Who says you are horrible?”

She gave no answer. Glancing, he saw trouble shade her eyes, tremble her
lips.

That beauty should know distress!

Very slightly he raised his forearm so that the lock of his elbow felt
her hand. He had no fine words. This George was no hero with exquisite
ways. He was a most average young man, and nothing could he find but
most painfully average words.

“I say, what's up?” he asked.

She spoke defiantly; but some stupid something that she hated yet could
not repress trembled her lips, robbed her tone of its banter. “What's
up?” she said. “Why, _you_ would say something was up if you'd just been
shot plump out of a cab, wouldn't you?”

“Yes, but you were laughing a minute ago.” He looked down at her,
but she turned her face. “Now, now, I believe--” He did not name his
thought.

She looked up. Her pretty face was red. He saw little flutters of
eyelids, flutters round the eyes, flutters at the mouth. “Oh,” she said,
“oh, yes, and I don't know why. I'm--I believe--” She tried to laugh,
but the little flutterings clouded the smile like soft, dark wings
flickering upon a sunbeam.

“I believe--it's ridiculous to a perfect--imperfect--stranger--I believe
I'm nearly--crying.”

And this inept George could only return: “I say--oh, I say, can I help
you?”

She stopped; from his arm withdrew her hand. “Please--I think you had
better go. Please go. Oh, I shall hate myself for behaving like this.”

So unhappy she was that George immediately planned her a backdoor of
excuse. “But you have no occasion to blame yourself,” he told her.
“You've had an adventure--naturally you're shaken a bit.”

She was relieved to think he had misunderstood her agitation. “Yes, an
adventure,” she said, “that's it. And I haven't had an adventure for
years, so naturally--But, please, I think you had better go. If my--my
friend saw me with you like this she would be angry--oh, very angry.”

“But why? She saw you fall. She saw me save you.”

“You don't understand. She is not exactly my friend; she is my--my
employer. I'm a mother's-help.”

The mirth that never lay deep beneath those blue eyes of hers was
sparkling up now; the soft, dark wings were fluttering no longer.

She continued: “A mother's-help. Doesn't that sound wretched? I'm
terribly slow at learning the mother's-help rules, but I'm positive
of this rule--mothers' helps may not shoot out of cabs and leave the
mother; it's such little help--you must see that?”

“But you will be less help still if you stay here for ever with your
hurt ankle--you must see that? I must stay with you or see you to your
home.”

When she answered, it was upon another change of mood. The soft, dark
wings were fluttering again; and it was the banter of George's tone
that had recalled them. For this was an adventure--and she had not known
adventure for years; for these were flippant exchanges arising out of
gay young hearts, and they recalled memories of days when such harmless
bantering was of her normal life; for there had been sympathy in
George's stammering inquiries, and it recalled the time when she lived
amidst sympathy and amidst love.

The soft, dark wings fluttered again: “I am very grateful to you for
helping me,” she told him. “You must not think me ungrateful; only, I
think you had better go. In my position I am not free to--to do as I
like, talk where I will. You understand?” Her voice trembled a little,
and she repeated: “You understand?”

George said, “I understand.”



II.

And that was all that passed upon this meeting. A cab swung round the
opposite corner; pulled up with a rattle; turned towards them; was
alongside. Within, a brow of thunder sat.

The cabman called, “I knowed you was all right, miss,” raised the trap,
and cheerfully repeated the information to his fare: “I knowed she was
all right, mum.”

The mum addressed gave no congratulation to his prescience. He shut the
lid; winked at George; behind his hand communicated, “Not 'arf angry,
she ain't.”

The girl ran forward; agitation bound up her hurt ankle. “Oh!” she
cried, “I am so glad you are safe!”

The thunder-figure addressed said: “Please get in. I have had a severe
shock.”

“This gentleman--” The girl half turned to George.

“Please get in--instantly.”

Scarlet the girl went. “Thank you very much,” she said to George;
climbed in beside the cloud of wrath.

Her companion slammed the door; dabbed at George a bow that was like a
sharp poke with a stick; called, “Drive on.”

George stepped into the road, held half a crown to the driver: “The
address?”

The man stooped. With a tremendous wink answered, “Fourteen Palace
Gardens, St. John's Wood.”

Away with a jingle.




CHAPTER VIII.

Astonishing After-Effects Of A Heroine.



I.

George did not return to St. Peter's that afternoon; watched the cab
from view; walked back to Waterloo; thence took train to Paltley Hill
with mind awhirl.

Recovering from stunning shock the mind first sees a blur of
events--formless, seething, inextricably tangled. Deep in this boiling
chaos is one fact struggling more powerfully than the rest to cool and
so to shape itself. It kicks a leg free here, there an arm, then another
leg. Its exertions cause the whole more furiously to agitate--the brain
is afire. Very suddenly this struggling fact jumps free. Laid hold of it
is a cold spoon which, plunged back into the seething cauldron, arrests
the turmoil of its contents.

Or again, recovering from sudden shock the mind first sees a great
whirling, blinding cloud of dust which hides and wreathes about the
sudden topple of masonry that has provoked it. Here the slowly emerging
fact may be likened to a clear gangway through the ruin up which the
fevered owner may walk to investigate the catastrophe's cause and
extent.

So now with George. If not dazed by stunning shock, he was at least
awhirl by set back of the swift sequence of events which suddenly
had buffeted him; and it was not until strolling up from Paltley Hill
railway station to Herons' Holt that one cooling fact emerged from which
he might make an ordered examination of what had passed.

The address that the cabman had given him was this fact--14 Palace
Gardens, St. John's Wood. Here was the gangway through the pile of
disorder, and here George resolutely made a start of examining events in
place of wildly beating about through the dust of aimless conjectures.

He visualised this Palace Gardens residence. A gloomy house, he
suspected,--prison-like; its inhabitants warders, the girl their
captive. A beautiful picture was thus presented to this ridiculous
young man. For if the girl were indeed captive, warder-surrounded, how
gratefully her heart must press towards him who was no turnkey! The more
irksomely her captors held her, the more warmly would she remember him.
Subconsciously he hoped for a rattle of chains, a scourging with whips.
Every bond, every stroke would speed her spirit to the recollection of
their meeting.

But this delectable picture soon faded. Love--and this ridiculous George
vowed he was in love--love is a mental see-saw. The nicely-balanced
mind is set suddenly oscillating: now up, commandingly above the world,
intoxicated with the rush and the elevation; now down to depths made
horribly deep by contrast, wretchedly jarred by the bump.

A new thought impelled a downward jolt of this kind. Failing a gloomy
14 Palace Gardens, supposing the girl to be happily situated, it was
horribly improbable that she would give him a moment's thought. This was
a most chilling idea. Shivering beneath the douche, George's mind ran
back along the episode of their meeting to discover arguments that would
build up the chains and the whips.

Memories banked high on either side. In search of his desire George
gathered them haphazard, closely examined each.

It was an unsatisfactory business. Here was a memory. She had said
so-and-so. Yes; but, damn it, that might mean anything. He flung it
down; took another. She had said so-and-so. Yes; but, damn it, that
might have meant nothing.

This was very disturbing. He must systematically go through the whole
pile of memories--upon an ordered plan reconstruct each step of the
episode.

At first attempt it was a wretched business. Never was builder set to
work with bricks so impossible as the bricks of conversation with which
this reconstruction must be done. Each that the girl had supplied
might dovetail in as he would have it go; upon the other hand it fitted
equally well when twisted into the form in which, for all he knew, she
might have constructed it. The bricks George had himself supplied he
found even more disconcerting--they were stupid, ugly, laughable. He
shoved them in, and they grinned at him--mocked him. None the less
he persevered--he must get his answer; he must see both what she had
thought of him and if she were likely still to be thinking of him. And
at last the whole passage was reconstructed. He examined it, and once
more down came the see-saw with a most shattering bump: he had made
himself an idiot, and stood champion idiot if he believed she were
likely to remember him.

With a crash George sent the whole pile flying. Let him wander blindly
in the dust of imaginings rather than be tortured by the grim austerity
of ordered facts. More than this, there was one most comfortable memory
to which he desperately clung--that falter in her voice when she had
said “You understand?” Whenever, during that evening, doubt stirred and
bade him recognise himself for a fool, George flattened the ugly spectre
with the arm he contrived out of this memory.

It was a lusty weapon.

But a fresh vexation that lies in wait for all new lovers tore him when
he got to bed. In the darkness he set his mind solely to recalling the
girl's face. The picture tantalisingly eluded him. Generalities he could
recall. She was fair, very, very fair; her hair was shining golden; but
how was it arranged? In desperation he squirmed off to her eyes--blue;
no, grey; no, blue. Damn it, he would forget whether she were black or
white in a minute. Her chin? Ah, he had that!--white and firm and round.
And her nose?--small, and a trifle tip-tilted. And her mouth?--her
mouth, oh, heaven, he could not fix her mouth! The distracted young man
tossed upon his pillow and went elsewhere. Distinctly he could remember
her little feet with those silver buckles, quite different from any
other feet. And she held herself slim and supple. Held herself? Why,
good heavens! she was tall, and he had been thinking of her as short!
This was appalling! He might meet her and pass her by. He might ... he
rushed into troubled slumber.



II.

The night gave him little rest. Whilst his body lay heavy, his brain,
feverishly active, chased through the hours glimpses of the queen of
his adventure. By early morning he was prodded into consciousness, and
awaked to find himself instantly confronted with a terrible affair. Into
his life, so he assured himself, had come a serious interest such as
that which the Dean had hoped for him.

Here, lying abed with fresh morning smiling in through the open window,
for the first time he looked forward, following the face he had pursued
through his dreams, into the future. Its chambers he found ghastly
barren. He visualised it as a vast unfurnished house. To the merry eye
with which two days ago he had looked upon the world, the picture,
had he then conjured it, would have given him no gloom. He would have
thought it a fine thing, this empty house that was his own--empty, but
representing freedom.

The matter was different now. Into this empty house had danced the girl.
Her gay presence discovered its barrenness. There was not a chair on
which she could sit, not a dish in the larder.

George recalled that tight little practice at Runnygate that might be
had for 400 pounds; went down to breakfast rehearsing a scene with his
uncle; was moody through the meal.



III.

The breakfast dragged past its close. Mr. Marrapit spoke. “The moments
fly,” he observed.

Margaret said earnestly: “Oh, yes, father.”

“I was addressing George.”

“Ur!” said George, suddenly aroused.

Mr. Marrapit looked at his watch; repeated his observation.

George read his meaning. “I thought of going up by the later train
to-day,” he explained.

“A dangerous thought. Crush it.” Mr. Marrapit continued: “Margaret, Mrs.
Major, I observe you have concluded”; and when the two had withdrawn
addressed himself again to George: “A dangerous thought. You recall our
conversation of the day before yesterday?”

“Perfectly.”

“Yet by later trains, by idleness, you deliberately imperil your
future?”

George did not answer the question. This was the very opportunity for
which he had wished. “I would like to talk about my future,” he said.

“I dare not dwell upon it,” replied Mr. Marrapit.

“I have to. I shall pass all right this time. I want to know--the fact
is, sir, I know I have slacked in the past; I am a man now, and I--I
regret it. I fully realise my responsibilities. You may rely that I
shall make a certainty of the October examination.”

“Commendable,” Mr. Marrapit criticised.

“I want to know what help I may expect when I qualify.”

“I cannot tell you.” Mr. Marrapit threw martyrdom into his tone. “I
am so little,” he said, “in your confidence. Your expectations when
qualified may be enormous. I am not favoured with them.” He sighed.

George said: “I mean what help I may expect from you.”

The piece of toast rising to Mr. Marrapit's mouth slowly returned
towards his plate: “Reiterate that. From _me_?”

“From you,” said George.

The toast dropped from trembling fingers. “_I_?” Mr. Marrapit dragged
the word to tremendous length. “I? Is it conceivable that you expect
money from me?”

“I only ask.”

“I only shudder. Might I inquire the amount?”

“The Dean told me of a practice I could have for 400 pounds.”

“Tea!” exclaimed Mr. Marrapit on a gasp. “I must steady myself! Tea!” He
paused; gulped a cup; with alarmed eyes stared at George.

The affair was going no better than George had expected. He remembered
the face that was dear to him; nerved himself to continue. “I would pay
it back,” he said. “Will you lend me the 400 pounds?”

“I must have air!” Mr. Marrapit staggered to the window. “I reel before
this sudden assault. For nine years at ruinous cost I have supported
you. Must I sell my house? Am I never to be free? Must I totter always
through life with you upon my bowed back? I am Sinbad.”

“There's no need to exaggerate or make a scene.”

“Did I impel the scene?”

“I only asked you a question,” George reminded.

“You have aroused a spectre,” Mr. Marrapit answered.

“Well, I may understand that I need expect nothing?”

“I dare not answer you. I am shaken. I tremble.”

George rose. Though what hope he had possessed was driven by his uncle's
attitude, he was as yet only upon the threshold of his love. Hence the
refusal of what he suddenly desired for that love's sake was not so
bitter an affair as afterwards it came to be. “This is ridiculous,” he
said; moved to the door.

“To me a tragedy,” Mr. Marrapit declaimed from the window, “old as
mankind; not therefore less bitter--the tragedy of ingratitude. At
stupendous cost I have supported, educated, clothed you. You turn
upon me for more. How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a
thankless child! I am Lear.”

George tried a thrust: “I always understood my mother left you ample for
me.”

“Adjust that impression. She left me less than a sufficiency--nothing
approaching amplitude. To the best of my ability I have fulfilled
my task. It has been hard. I do not complain. I do not ask you for
repayment of any excess that may have been incurred. But I am embittered
by yet further demands. I have been too liberal. Had I meted out strict
justice as I have striven to mete out kindness, my grey hairs would not
be speeding in poverty to the grave. I am Wolsey.”

Upon Wolsey George slammed the door; started for the station.



IV.

Palace Gardens, St. John's Wood, was his aim. There could be no work,
nor even thought of work, until again he had met his lady. Yet how to
meet her cost him another of the wrestles with conjecture that had been
his lot since the cab carried her away.

At first it was easy work. He would call, he decided, with polite
inquiries; and as he pictured the scene his spirits rose. The
thunder-figure that had poked a bow at him from the cab would come
dragonish into the drawing-room where he waited. Her he would charm with
the suavity of his manners; she would doff the dragon's skin; would
say (he had read the scene in novels), “You would like to see Miss
So-and-so?”

The girl would come in ....

With her appearance in his thoughts George's mind swung from coherent
reasoning into a delectable phantasy ....

A sudden thought swept the filmy clouds-landed him with a bump upon hard
rock. He was not supposed to know their address. How, to the dragon,
could he explain the venal trick by which he had acquired it? Now he
beheld a new picture. Himself in the drawing-room; to him the dragon;
her first words, “How did you know where we lived?”; his miserable
answer.

This was very unpleasant. As a red omnibus took him on towards St.
John's Wood he decided that the meeting must be otherwise effected. The
girl must sometimes go out. She had called herself a mother's-help; it
suggested children; and, if children, doubtless her task to take them
walking. Well, he would take up a post near to the house, and wait--just
wait.

And then there came a final thought that struck him cold and staring.
What if she did not live at the house?--was merely about to visit there
when the accident befell the cab?

It was a sorely agitated young man that stepped off the 'bus and struck
up Palace Gardens.




BOOK II.

Of his Mary.




CHAPTER I.

Excursions In The Memory Of A Heroine.



I.

AS that cab swung round the corner bearing away the nameless haunter of
George's dreams, she to the red wrath beside her turned, and, “Oh, Mrs.
Chater,” she said, “I hope you are not hurt!”

By a mercy Mrs. Chater was not hurt. By a special intervention of
Providence she had escaped a fearful death. Whether she would ever
recover from the shock was another matter. Whether the shock would prove
to be that sudden strain on her heart which she had been warned would
end fatally, might at any moment be proved. Much anybody, except her
darling children, would care if she were brought home dead in this very
cab. Never had she known a heart to act as hers was acting now--thumping
as if it would burst, first quickly then slowly. Perhaps Miss Humfray
would feel it, and give her opinion.

Where the girl now laid her small hand five infant Chaters had been
nourished; the massive bosom was advertisement that they had done
well. Beneath the mingled gusts of hysteria and of wrath it violently
contracted and dilated; but the heart, terrificly though Mrs. Chater
said it throbbed, lay too deep to be discerned.

The agitated woman panted, “Can it go on like that?”

“I'm afraid I hardly--” Miss Humfray shifted her hand.

“_Stupid!_ Take off your glove!”

The white kid clung to the warm flesh. Nervous and clumsy the girl
struggled with it.

“Miss _Humfray!_ How slow you are! _Pull_ it!”

Mrs. Chater grabbed the turned-back wrist. A crack answered the jerk,
and the glove split away in her hand. “_There!_ Not my fault. Next time,
perhaps, you will buy gloves sufficiently large. Oh, my poor heart! Now,
feel. _Press!_”

The girl bit her lip. Humiliation lumped in her throat. She pressed, as
bid, into that heaving blouse; said she could feel it. It was not very
violent, she thought. Perhaps if Mrs. Chater lay back and closed her
eyes--

“_I_ was not able to jump out, you see,” said Mrs. Chater, sinking.

“Oh, you don't think I _jumped_ out--and left you? I _wouldn't_.
Besides, it is the most dangerous thing to do. That would have prevented
me in any case. I was thrown. I thought I was going to be killed.”

“You were with a young man.”

“He caught me.”

The words came faintly. Nearly the girl was crying. That lump in her
throat seemed to be squeezing tears from her eyes--silly tears. She
did not want Mrs. Chater's sympathy, yet could not but reflect what
disregard for her the utter absence of inquiry showed. Bitter thoughts
yet more dangerously squeezed the tears. She was a paid _thing_, that
was all--not even a servant. Mrs. Chater was on kindly terms with her
servants--had experienced the servant problem and craftily evaded it by
the familiarity that was too useful to produce contempt--knew her maids'
young men, entered into their quarrels with their young men, read their
young men's letters.



II.

Gazing through the cab window, pressed into her corner, the girl felt
herself friendless, outcast, alone. Again she told herself that she did
not want Mrs. Chater's sympathy; yet it was the studied withholding of
it--studied or callous because so natural, the merest conventionalism,
to have asked, “Were you hurt?”--that made her acutely feel her
position.

A paradox, she thought, not to want a thing and yet to be wounded
because it was not hers. A ridiculous paradox--and brightly she tried to
smile at the silliness of it; blinking the tears that were swelling now,
her face turned against the window towards the pavement.

A tall, slim girl was passing, holding the arm of a nice-looking little
old man with a grey moustache and military air. The tall, slim girl
was laughing down at him, and he looked to be chuckling merrily, just
as--Her mind swung off, and the tears must be blinked again.

They reminded her, those two, of herself and her father. Such familiar
friends as they looked so she had been with Dad who idolised her
and whom she had idolised. Just like that--arm in arm, joking,
“ragging”--she used to walk with him round about the home in
Ireland--the world to one another and none else in the world, except the
mother who was so intimately and inseparably of them that years past her
death they still spoke of her as if she were alive.

Thus, long after her death, it would be: “Dad, we can't go home by the
hill; mother never lets Grizzle do that climb after a long day.” And:
“Mary, your mother won't like you being so late; we must turn back.”
 And: “Mary, there's the pig by mother's almond tree; run and shoo him.”

Partly this refusal to recognise that, though dead, Mother was actually
gone from them, no longer was sharing their little jokes and duties, was
because death came with such steady, appreciable, unfrightening steps.
First the riding stopped, and then the walks made shorter and shorter;
then the strolls in the garden stopped, and then carrying the couch out
under the trees--and none of them very fearful, because prepared: it was
to be--almost the very day could have been named. Thus, when it came,
though the blow swooped heavy, terrific, she never seemed actually to
have left them.

“Well, now, dear dears,” she had said with a little smile and a little
sigh, “we have been happy ... only a little way away....”

But with Dad it was different. Somehow, looking back on it, one had
supposed that nothing would ever touch the cheery little man; that
she and he would go on and on and on--well, till they grew very old
together.

Nothing could ever touch him....

“What a wicked beauty, eh, Mary?” he had said when the man brought round
the half-broken filly that its owner “funked.”

And she had laughed and said: “Yes, an angel in a temper--what a run you
will have, Dad!” and had waved from the gate as the angel in a temper
curveted away around the corner.

Nothing could ever touch him....

And then the man on a bicycle--with a dent in his hat, she noticed.

“If you can come quickly, missy. Top of the Three Finger field he lays.”

Bare-backed she had galloped Grizzle there, and as she sped could not
for the life of her think of aught else than the dent in the man's hat;
rode up Three Finger Lane wondering how it came there; approached the
little group wondering why he did not push it out.

Just as she galloped up they took off their hats. Someone who had been
on his knees stood upright--she saw the stain of wet earth where he had
been kneeling; forgot the dented hat; wondered if he knew of the Marvel
Cleaning Pad that had done so wonderfully with Dad's breeches when he
took a toss last Friday.

Dad...! Of course...! It was to see Dad that she was here.

Somebody tried to dissuade her ... better wait till they brought him
home ... could do no good--now.

“Why? Why not see him? Let me pass, Mr. Saunders.”

Well, the filly lay across him ... he had begged them not to move her
because of the pain.... Better come away.

She pushed through them.... Yes, better perhaps not to have seen ... all
crumpled up....

Recollecting, she could feel distinctly in her knees the creepy damp as
the moisture of the marshy ground penetrated her skirts, bending over
the twisted face.



III.

Thereafter a blank of days in which events must have occurred but
to which memory brought no lamp until the faint crunch as the coffin
touched the earth seven feet down....

Multitudinous papers after that. Wearying, sickening masses of
documents; interminable writing of signature; interminable making of
lists. And then the word LOT. “Lot I,” “Lot 2,” “Lot 50,” “Lot 200”--a
hammerlike word to thump the brain at night, frightening sleep,
producing grotesque nightmares, as “Lot 12, a polished oak coffin,
finished plain, brass Handles.”

No! No! That was not to be sold!--leaden hands holding her down;
stifling hands at her mouth to stay her shouting “Stop!”

Then sudden consciousness--only a dream! Bolt upright in bed staring
into the darkness. A dream? How much of it a dream? Was it all a dream?
The fevered brain would fetch her from her bed, groping to Dad's
room, striking a match--no familiar form upon the bed; a big white
ticket--“Lot 56.”

Back to the hot, crumpled couch, there, tossing, to lie attempting a
grasp, a realisation of what it all meant....



IV.

A dark little office in Dublin.... So much the “Lots” had fetched, so
much the balance at the bank; no investments, it was to be feared; no
insurance, my dear Miss Humfray; so much the bills and other claims on
the estate.... “Don't wish to be bothered with figures? Of course not,
my dear.... And then we come to the balance--I'm afraid a few pounds,
practically nothing....”



V.

On the steamer bound for Holyhead.... During the crossing the stifling
weight that had benumbed her intellect ever since the man with the dent
in his hat came riding up the drive seemed suddenly to lift. Whipped
away perhaps by the edged wind that rushed past her from England to
Ireland sinking in the sea--a wind to cut you to the bone; discovering
sensation in every marrow; stinging her to clear thought.... That
idyllic life with Mother and Dad--the world to one another and none else
in the world beside--had been rather the creation of circumstance than
of design. Dad's people were furious when he married Mother; in defiance
of hers, Mother married Dad. Relations on either side had shrieked their
disapproval of the match, then left the couple to their own adventures.
A thing to laugh at in those days, but bringing now to the child that
was left the realisation of not a support in the world.

Her mother's sisters had written after the funeral inviting her to come
to them in England “while she looked about her.” She could recall every
sentence of that letter. It had burned. Each word, each comma was fresh
before her eyes as the cab jolted on to Palace Gardens.

“It would have been our pleasure constantly to have entertained you
during your mother's life-time,” they had written, “but she wilfully
flouted our desires at her marriage and thereafter utterly ignored us.
The fault for the rift between us was of her making, not ours; we sent
her an Easter card one year, and had no reply; though we have no
doubt that your father, not that we would say a word against him now,
influenced her against her better judgment. However....”

She had written back a hysterical letter.

“Your letter came just after I had returned from burying my dear, dear
father, who worshipped my darling mother. If I were begging in the
street, starving, dying, I would not touch a crumb or a penny of
yours. You are wicked--yes, you are wicked to write to me as you have
written....”



VI.

She could not stay in Ireland. Her only friends there lived about the
dear home that was now no longer a home but a “desirable residence with
some acres of garden and paddock.” Her only friends there were friends
who had been shared with Mother and Dad--whose presence now would be
constant reminder of that happy participation now lost. One and all
offered her hospitality, but she must refuse. “No, no silly idea of
being a burden to you, dear, dear Mrs. Sullivan--only I can't, can't
live anywhere near where we used to live.”

Years before a great friend of hers had married an English clergyman;
had written often to her from London of the numerous activities in which
she was engaged--principal among them a kind of agency and home for
gentlewomen. “Governesses, dear, and all that kind of thing ... poor
girls, many of them, who have suddenly had to earn a living.”

The correspondence had died, as do so many, from the effects of undue
urgency at the outset; but she had the address, and was certain there of
welcome and of aid. “Poor girls who have suddenly had to earn a living.”
 The words took on a new meaning: she was of these.

From Euston she drove to the address. Her friend had gone. Yes, the
present occupant remembered the name. The present occupant had been
there two years; had taken over the lease from the former tenant because
the lady was ill and had been ordered abroad. That was all the present
occupant knew; saw her to the door; closed it behind her.

Alone in London. “Alone in London”--it had been one of Dad's jokes; he
had written a burlesque on it, and they had played it one Christmas
to roars of fun. O God! what a thing at which to laugh now that the
realisation struck and one stood on the pavement in the dark with this
great city roaring at one!

Cabmen, she had heard, were brutes; but the man who had brought her
to the house must be appealed to.... Where could she get the cheapest
lodging of some kind?

How did he know? What was she wanting to pay? ...

The great city roared at her. Her head swum a little. An idler or two
took up a grinning stand: the thing looked like a cab-fare dispute....
What was she wanting to pay? ... Well, as little as possible. “I have
never been in London before, and I don't know anybody. My friend here
has gone. I have just arrived from Ireland.” She began to cry.

He from his box in a moment. “From Ireland!”

Why, he was from Ireland! ... Not likely she was from Connemara? ... She
was? ... From Kinsloe? ... Why, he knew it well; he was from Ballydag!

He rolled his tongue around other names of the district; she knew them
all; could almost have laughed at the silly fellow's delight.

Why, the honour it would be if she would come and let his missus make
her up a bed! “Don't ye cry, missie. Don't ye take on like that. It's
all right ye are now.” He put a huge, roughly great-coated arm about
her--squeezed her, she believed; helped her into the cab.



VII.

Missus in the clean little rooms over the rattling mews was no less
delighted. From Kinsloe? Why, missie saw that canary?--that was a
present from Betty Murphy in Kinsloe, not three months before!

The canary, aroused by the attention paid it, trilled upward in a
mounting ecstasy of shrillness that went up and up and up through her
head ... louder and louder ... shriller and yet more shrill ... bird and
cage became misty, swum around her.... Missus and Tim must have carried
her to the bed in which she awoke.



VIII.

Friends in Ireland had given her the addresses of friends in London
on whom she must call. She visited some houses; then in a sudden wild
despair tore the list. Either these people were dense of comprehension
or she clumsy of explanation. To make them realise her position she
found impossible. They were warmly kind, sympathetic--cheery in that
lugubrious fashion in which we are taught to be “bright” with the
afflicted. But when she spoke of the necessity to find employment they
would warmly cry, “Oh, but you must not think of that yet, Miss Humfray
... after all you have been through.... You must keep quiet for a
little.”

One and all gave her the same words. An impulse took her to kick over
the tea-table--anything to arouse these people from their stereotyped
mood of sympathy with a girl suddenly bereaved,--and to cry, “But don't
you _understand_? I am living over a mews--over a _mews_ with twelve
pounds and a few shillings, and then _nothing_--nothing at all.”

Wise, perhaps, had she indulged the outburst without the action; wiser
had she written to some of the friends in Ireland, asked to go back to
one of them for a while. But the dull grief beneath which she still lay
benumbed prevented her from other course than tonelessly accepting
the proffered sympathy; and the thought of returning to Ireland was
impossible. She tore the list of London friends; appealed to Tim and
Missus.

Tim was helpful. He had taken fares to an Agency in Norfolk Street--an
Agency for “Disturbed Gentlewomen,” he called it; there took her one
morning.

“Distressed Gentlewomen,” she found the brass plate to read--“The
Norfolk Street Agency for Distressed Gentlewomen.”

A lymphatic-looking young woman, assisting the growth of a singularly
stout face by sucking a sweet, and wearing brown holland sleeve
protectors hooked up with enormous safety-pins, received her in the room
marked “Enquiries”; put her into that labelled “Waiting.” Here were two
copies of the _Christian Herald_, some emigration pamphlets, a carafe
of water covered by an inverted tumbler dusty with disuse, and three
elderly females--presumably gentlewomen, possibly distressed, but not
advertising either condition.

In due time her turn for the room marked “Private”; interrogation by
Miss Ram, a short, thin lady in black, who bowed more frequently than
she spoke, possessing a range of inclinations of the head each of which
had unmistakable meaning.

Position sought?--Oh, anything; governess, companion. Last
situation?--None; she was inexperienced. Capabilities?--Equally lacking,
as discovered by a probing cross-examination. Salary required?--Oh,
anything; whatever was usual; a _home_--that was the chief object in
view.

Miss Ram entered the details in a severe-looking book with a long
thin pen--could hold out but faint hopes. The applicants whom she was
accustomed to suit were “in nine and ninety cases out of one hundred
cases” accomplished in the domestic or scholastic arts. However. Yes,
Miss Humfray should call every morning. Better still, stay in the
waiting-room. Be On the Spot--that was the first requisite for success,
as Miss Humfray would find whether in a situation or awaiting a
situation; be On the Spot.



IX.

On the Spot. A nightmare week in the dingy waiting-room ... thoughts
probing the mind, stabbing the heart.... Nine till one, a cup of tea
and a roll at an A.B.C. shop, an aimless walk in the park; two till six,
good-night to the stout young woman named Miss Porter in “Enquiries,”
 home to the rattling mews and to Missus.

On the Spot. Occasional interviews. “Miss Humfray, a lady will see you.”
 ... “Oh, too young--far too young.” ... “Thank you, that will do, Miss
Humfray.” ... “Oh, not my style at all.” ... “Thank you, that will do,
Miss Humfray.”

On the Spot. Fortunately On the Spot one day--a Mrs. Eyton-Eyton, as
nursery governess, Streatham.

For a week very much On the Spot with Mrs. Eyton-Eyton. Nursery
governess was a comprehensive word in the Eyton-Eyton vocabulary;
covered every duty that in a nursery must be performed. One must do
the nursery fire, sweep the nursery floor, bring up and carry down the
nursery meals--servants, you see, object to waiting upon one whom, as
Mrs. Eyton-Eyton with a careless laugh pointed out, they regard as one
of themselves. Quickly the lesson was appreciated that while a servant
must never be “put upon,” the same consideration need not be extended to
a lady. Servants are rare in the market, young ladies cheap.



X.

The lesson of dependence, subserviency, Mary found harder in the
learning; did not study it; therein reaped disaster.

She arrived on a Tuesday. Upon that day of the following week Mrs.
Eyton-Eyton paid to the nursery one of her rare visits, beautifully
gowned, the hired victoria waiting to take her a round of calls.

Lunch, delayed not to disturb the midday sleep of Masters Thomas and
Richard Eyton-Eyton, was not cleared--Master Thomas still struggling
with a plate of sago pudding.

Betwixt her children Mrs. Eyton-Eyton--beautifully gowned, hired
victoria in waiting--took her seat; Mary hovered behind--and catastrophe
swooped. Master Thomas grabbed for a glass of milk; Mary strove to
restrain him. There was an awkward struggle, her elbow--or his--caught
the plate of pudding, tipped the sticky mass into the silken lap of Mrs.
Eyton-Eyton, beautifully gowned, hired victoria in waiting.

Infuriated, Mrs. Eyton-Eyton turned upon Mary. “Oh, you little fool!”

The rebuke that should have been taken with downcast eyes, murmured
apologies, was otherwise received.

“Mrs. Eyton! How dare you call me a fool!”

Pause of blank amazement; sago-messed table-napkin in the scented hand;
sago creeping down the silken skirt. That a nursery governess--not even
a servant--should so presume!

“Miss Humfray! You forget yourself!”

“No!-No! It is you who forget yourself. How dare you speak to me like
that!”

Another moment of utter bewilderment; small Eyton-Eytons gazing
round-eyed; the girl white, heaving; the woman dully red. Then “Pack
your boxes, Miss!”



XI.

She was upon the platform at Victoria Station, a porter asking commands
for her box, before she realised what she had done. A few pounds in her
purse, and infinitely worse off now than a week before. Then she had no
“character”; now employment was to be sought with Mrs. Eyton-Eyton as
her “last place.” She would not go back to Missus and Tim. Though they
had tried to conceal it, secretly, she had seen, they were relieved
when she left. They had not accommodation for her; latterly she had
dispossessed of his bed a sailor son on leave from his ship.

She left her box in the cloak-room; turned down Wilton Road from the
station; penetrated the narrow thoroughfares between Lupus Street and
the river; secured a bedroom with Mrs. Japes at six shillings a week.

Miss Ram at the Agency would have no more to do with her; had received a
furious letter from Mrs. Eyton-Eyton; showed in the ledger a cruel line
of red ink ruled through the page that began “Name: Mary Humfray,” and
ended “Salary:--”

“But I don't know a soul in London.”

“You had a very comfortable place. You threw it away. I have a
reputation for reliable employees which I cannot afford to risk.”

A bow closed the interview.



XII.

It was her landlady's husband, an unshaven, shifty-looking horror, who
dealt her, as it seemed to her then, the last furious blow.

Returning one evening after an aimless search for employment in shops
that had earned her rude laughter for her utter inexperience and her
presumption in supposing her services could be of any value, she found
Mrs. Japes in convulsive tears, speechless.

What was the matter? Hysterical jerks of the head towards the stairs. Up
to her room--the cause clear in her rifled box, its contents scattered
across the floor, the little case in which with her pictures of Mother
and Dad she kept her money gone.

A little raid by Mr. Japes, it appeared, in which Mrs. Japes's property
had also suffered.... He had done it before ... a bad lot ... had done
time ... the rent overdue and the brokers coming in ... she'd best go
... of course she could tell the police.

Of course she did not tell the police. The whole affair bewildered and
frightened her.

To another lodging three streets away.... Initiation by the new landlady
into the mysteries of pawnshops; gradual thinning of wardrobe....
Answering of advertisements found in the public library in Great Smith
Street.... Long, feet-aching trudges to save omnibus fares.... Always
the same outcome. ... Experience?--None. References?--None.... “Thank
you; I'm afraid--I'm sure it's all right, but one has to be so careful
nowadays. Good morning.” ... Always the same outcome.... The idea of
writing to Ireland was hardly conceived. ... That life, those friends,
seemed of a period that was dead, done, gone--ages and ages ago....



XIII.

Again it was a man who dealt the deeper blow--a gentlemanly-looking
person of whom in Wilton Road one evening she asked the way to an
address copied from the _Daily Telegraph_. Why, by an extraordinary
coincidence he was going that way himself, to that very house!--flat,
rather. Yes, it was his mother who was advertising for a lady-help.
Might he show her the way? ... It would be very kind of him.

Through a maze of streets, he chatting pleasantly enough, though putting
now and then curious little questions which she could not understand....
Hadn't he seen her at the Oxford one night? ... Assuredly he had not;
what was the Oxford?

He laughed, evidently pleased. “Gad, you do keep it up!” he cried.

So to a great pile of flats; up a circular stair.

“You understand why I can't use the lift?” he said. “They're beastly
particular here.”

She did not understand; supposed it was some question of expense. Thus
to a door where he took out a latch-key.

It was then for the first moment that a sudden doubt, a horror, took
her, trembling her limbs.

She looked up at the figures painted over the door.

“Why, it is the wrong number!” she cried.

He had turned the key. “Lord! you do keep it up!” he laughed, his hand
suddenly about her arm.

Then she knew, and dragged back, sweating with the horror of the thing.

“Ah, let me go--let me go!”

“Oh, chuck it, you little ass!” His arm was about her waist now,
dragging her; his face close.

With a sudden twist and thrust that took him by surprise she wrenched
from his grasp; was a flight of stairs away before he had recovered his
wits; across the hall and running--shaking, hysterical--down the street.



XIV.

Thereafter men were a constant horror to her--adding a new and most
savage beast to the wolves of noise, of desolation and of despair that
bayed about her in this grinding city. Unable longer to face them, she
went again to Miss Ram at the Agency--almost upon her knees, crying,
trembling, pitching her tale from the man with the dent in his hat to
the man in Wilton Road.

Miss Ram was moved to the original depths that lay beneath her grim
exterior; had never realised the actual circumstances; would do what she
could; no need to be frightened.

Two days later Mary was unpacking her box at 14 Palace Gardens. No
sharpness, no slight now could prick her spirit; she had learned too
well; she would not face those streets again.

That was eighteen months, close upon two years ago. Wounds were
healing now; old-time brightness was coming back to laugh at present
discomforts. It was only now and again--as now--that she, driven by some
sudden stress, allowed her mind backwards to wander--bruising itself in
those dark passages.

The cab stopped. She with a start came to the present; gulped a sob; was
herself.

Mrs. Chater said: “Run in quickly and mix me a brandy-and-soda.”




CHAPTER II.

Excursions In Vulgarity.


A violent dispute with the cabman set that disturbed heart yet more
wildly thumping in Mrs. Chater's bosom; the sight of her husband
uneasily mooning in the dining-room heated her wrath to wilder
bubblings.

Mr. Chater--a 'oly dam' terror in Mincing Lane, if his office-boy may be
quoted--was an astonishingly mild man in his own house.

He said brightly, noting with a shiver the gusty stress of his wife's
deportment: “You _drove_ up, my dear?--And quite right, too,” he hastily
added, upon a sudden fear that his remark might be interpreted as
reproach.

“How do you know?” Mrs. Chater's nose went into the brandy-and-soda.

“I saw you from the window,” her husband beamed. He repeated, “The
window,” and nervously pointed at it. There was a strained atmosphere in
the room, and he was a little frightened.

“_Oh!_” Out from the brandy-and-soda came the nose; down went the glass
with an emphasising bang: “_Oh!_”

Mr. Chater gave a startled little jump. He saw, immediately he had
spoken, the misfortune into which his admission had plunged him; the
bang of the glass twanged his already apprehensive nerves, and he jerked
out, “Certainly, my dear,” without any clear grasp as to what he was
affirming.

“If you had been a _man_,” said Mrs. Chater, speaking with a slow and
extraordinary bitterness--“if you had been a _man_, you would have come
out and helped me.”

“But you had got out when I came to the window, my dear.”

“With the _cabman_, I mean.” Mrs. Chater fired the word with alarming
ferocity. “With the _cabman_. Did you not see that violent brute
insulting me?”

It was precisely because he had observed the episode that Mr. Chater had
kept well behind the curtain; but he did not adduce the fact.

“I certainly did not,” he affirmed.

“Ah! I expect you took precious good care not to. You've done the same
thing before. Never to my dying day shall I forget the figure you cut
outside Swan and Edgar's last Christmas. Making me--”

Mr. Chater implored: “Oh, my dear, don't drag that up again!”

“But I _do_ drag it up!” Mrs. Chater a little unnecessarily cried. “I
_do_ drag it up, and I shall always drag it up--making me a fool as you
did! I was ashamed of you. I was--”

Mr. Chater nervously wiped his moist palms with his pocket handkerchief:
“I've told you over and over again, my dear, that I never understood
the circumstances. There was a great crowd, and I was very much pushed
about. If I had known the circumstances--”

Mrs. Chater hurled back the word at him: “Circumstances!”

“My dear,” the agitated man replied, ticking off the points on soft
fingers, “my dear, I had gone to the window of Swan and Edgar's, leaving
you, as you expressly desired, to pay the man _yourself_. When I came
_back_ to you, what I gathered was that the man was entitled to a
further _sixpence_ and that you had no _change_.”

Mrs. Chater lashed herself with the recollection: “Nothing of the kind!”
 she burst. “Nothing of the kind! What did the man say to you when you
asked what was the matter?”

“I quite forget.”

“You do not forget.”

“My dear, I really and truly do forget.”

“For the hundredth time, then, let me tell you. He said that if you
pushed your ugly mug into it he would knock off your blooming head.”

“Did he say _mug?_” asked Mr. Chater, assuming the air of one who,
knowing this at the time, would have committed a singularly ferocious
murder.

“Well you know that he _did_ say mug--_ugly_ mug. Was _that_ a thing for
a man of spirit to take quietly? Was _that_ a thing for a wife to
hear bawled at her husband in the open street with the commissionaire
grinning behind his hand? To my dying day I shall never forget my
humiliation when you handed him sixpence.”

The unhappy husband murmured: “I do so wish you could, my dear.”

Mrs. Chater shook, handled her troops with the skill of a perfect
tactician, and hurled in the attack upon another quarter.

She said: “Ah, now insult me! Insult me before Miss Humfray! That's
right! _That's_ right! That's what I'm accustomed to. We all have our
cross to bear, as the vicar said last Sunday, and open insult from my
husband is mine. I can't complain; I married you with my eyes open.”

Mrs. Chater revealed this secret of her girlhood in a voice which
implied that most young women go through the ceremony with their eyes
tightly closed, mixed a second brandy-and-soda for her shattered nerves,
swallowed it with the air of one draining a poison flask by way of happy
release from martyrdom, banged down the glass, and, before her amazed
husband could open his lips, hammered in the attack from a third
quarter.

“Little you would have cared,” cried she, “if a miracle had not saved my
life this afternoon!”

Mr. Chater stood aghast. “My dearest! Saved you! From what?”

His dearest bitterly inquired: “What does it matter to you? You take no
interest. If my battered corpse--” Swept to tremendous heights by
the combined forces of her agitation, her imagination, and her two
brandys-and-sodas, she rose, pointed though the window. “If my battered
corpse had been carried up those steps by two policemen this very
afternoon, what would you have done, I wonder?”

Mr. Chater, apprehension creeping among the roots of his hair, affirmed
that he would have dropped dead in the precise spot at which he happened
to be standing at the moment.

Mrs. Chater trumpeted “Never!”--dropped to her chair, and continued.
“You would have been glad.” Her voice shook. “Glad--and in all this wide
world only my Bob and my blessed lambs in the nursery would have wept
o'er my body.”

Of so melancholy a character was the picture thus presented to her mind,
augmenting her previous agitation, that the tumult within her welled
damply through her eyes, with noisy distress through her lips.

Patting her distressed back, imploring her to calm, Mr. Chater begged
some account of the catastrophe from which she had escaped.

Between convulsive sobs she told him, he bridging the hiatuses of
emotion with “Oh-dear-oh-dears,” in which alarm and sympathy were nicely
mingled.

Painting details with a masterly hand, “And there was I alone,” she
concluded--“alone, at the mercy of a wild horse and a drunken cabman.”

“But Miss Humfray was with you?”

“Miss Humfray managed to jump out and leave me.”

Through all this scene--in one form or another a matter of daily
occurrence, and therefore not to arouse interest--Mary had stood waiting
its cessation and her orders. Mr. Chater turned upon her. Naturally
disposed to be kind to the girl, he yet readily saw in his wife's
statement a way of escape from the castigation he had been enduring.
As the small boy who has been kicked by the bully will with delighted
relief rush to the bully's aid when the kicks are at length turned to
another, urging him on so that he may forget his first prey, so Mr.
Chater, delighted at his fortune, eagerly joined in turning his wife's
wrath to Mary's head. For self-preservation, at whatever cost to
another, is the most compelling of instincts: its power great in
proportion as we have allowed our fleshly impulses to master us. If,
when they prompt, we coldly and impersonally regard them, find
them unworthy and crush them back humiliated, they become in time
disciplined--wither and die. In proportion as we permit them, upon the
other hand, they come in time to drive us with a fierceness that cannot
be checked.

Mr. Chater had disciplined no single impulse that came to him with his
flesh.

In pious horror he turned upon the girl.

“Managed to jump out!” he exclaimed, speaking as one re-echoing a horror
hardly to be believed.

“Managed to jump out! Miss Humfray, I would not have thought it of you!”

She cried: “Mr. Chater, I fell!”

Disregarding, and with a deeper note of pained reproach, he continued:
“So many ties, I should have thought, would have bound you to my wife
in such an emergency--the length of time you have been with us;
the unremitting kindness she has shown you, treating you as one of
ourselves, in sickness tending you, bountifully feeding and clothing
you, going out of her way to make you happy. Oh, Miss Humfray!”

The strain on his invention paused him. Mrs. Chater, moved by this
astonishing revelation of her love, assumed an air in keeping--an air
of some pain but no surprise at such ingratitude. She warmed to this
husband who, if no hero in the matter of ferocious cabmen, could at
least champion her upon occasion.

Mary cried: “But I did not jump out! Indeed I did not, Mr. Chater; I
fell.”

Mrs. Chater said _“Fell!”_ With sublime forbearance she added, “Never
mind; the incident is past.”

“Mrs. Chater, you must know that I fell out. I was leaning out--you had
asked me to see the name of the street--when the horse stumbled.”

“It is curious,” said Mrs. Chater, with a pained little smile, “that you
managed to 'fall out' before the horse could recover and bolt.”

“Very, very curious,” Mr. Chater echoed.

How hateful they were, the girl felt. She broke out: “I--”

“Miss Humfray, that is enough. Help me upstairs. I will lie down.”

Mr. Chater jumped brightly to the bell. “My dear, do; I will send you a
hot-water bottle.”

His wife recalled the shortcomings for which she had been taking him to
task. “Send a fiddlestick,” she rapped; “on a boiling day like this!”

She took Mary's arm; leaning heavily, passed from the room.




CHAPTER III.

Excursions In The Mind Of A Heroine.


Her mistress disrobed, head among pillows, slippered, coverleted,
eau-de-Cologne on temples, with closed eyes inviting sleep to lull the
tumults of the day. Mary climbed to her room.

About her mouth there was a ridiculous twitching; and as she watched it
in the mirror she strove to wrap herself in the armour in which she had
learned to take buffetings.

To be dispassionate was the salve she had schooled herself to use upon
a wounded spirit--to regard this Mary with the comically twitching face
whom now she saw in the glass as a second person whose sufferings might
be coldly regarded and dissected.

It is a most admirable accomplishment. Nothing is so easy as to be
philosophic upon the cares of another--nothing so easy as to wax
impatient with an acquaintance who allows himself to be overridden by
troubles and pains which appear to us of trifling moment. If, then, we
can school ourselves to regard the figure that bears our name as one
person, and our ego as another, we have at least a chance of chiding
that figure out of all the fancied sufferings it may undergo.

With some success Mary had studied the art; now gave that
Mary-in-the-glass who stood before her a healthy reproof.

“The ridiculous thing you did,” Mary-in-the-glass was told--“the
ridiculous thing you did to make yourself miserable was to go thinking
about--about Ireland.”

The mouth of Mary-in-the-glass ominously twitched.

“There you go again. And it is so absolutely forbidden to think about
that. Whatever's the use of it?”

Mary-in-the-glass could adduce no reason, and must be prodded.

“Does it do you any good? Does it do _them_ any good, do you suppose, to
know that you can never think of them without making yourself unhappy?”

Mary-in-the-glass attempted a weak quibble; was instantly snapped.

“I'm not saying you are _never_ to think of them. Goodness knows what
I should do if I did not. It's all right to think of them when you are
happy and they can share the happiness with you; but, when you choose
to be idiotically miserable, that's the time you are not to go whining
anywhere near them--understand? You only make them unhappy and make your
troubles worse. Troubles! if you can't see the fun of Mrs. Chater, you
must be a wretched sort of person. Her face when the cab brought her
back! And trying to feel her heart! And her rage with that little worm
of a Mr. Chater! Can't you see the fun of it instead of crying over it?”

Mary-in-the-glass could. The successive recollections induced the
prettiest dimples on her face. She was at once forgiven.

Indeed, to snuggle back into her and to merge into her again was just
now very desirable to the censorious Mary-outside-the-glass. For, merged
in her sentimental and romantic personality, a most delectable line of
thought could be pursued--a delectable line, since along this trail was
to be encountered that stranger who had caught her in her wild ejection
from the cab.

Sinking in a chair, Mary adventured upon it; she was instantly met.

Mary-outside-the-glass essayed her best to prevent the interview.
“Poof!” Mary-outside-the-glass, that cold young person, sneered. “Poof!
You little idiot! A stranger with whom you spoke for five minutes, whom
you will never again see, and from whose recollections you have most
certainly passed unless to be recalled as a joke--perhaps to some
other girl!” (A nasty dig that, but they are monsters these
Marys-outside-the-glass.) “Why, you must be a donkey to think about
him! For goodness' sake come away before you make yourself too utterly
ridiculous! You won't. Well, perhaps you will try to recall the figure
you must have cut in his eyes? Do you remember what you must have looked
like as you shot out of the cab like a sack of straw? Pretty sight, eh?
And can you imagine the expression on your face as you banged into his
arms? Charming you must have looked, mustn't you? And can you by any
means realise the idiot you must have looked when Mrs. Chater came
up and swept you off like an escaped puppy, recaptured and in for a
whipping? Striking figure you cut, didn't you? You didn't happen to
peep back through the little window at the back of the cab and see him
laughing, I suppose? Ah, you should have looked....”

And so on. This was the attitude of that cold, calculating,
dispassionate Mary-outside-the-glass. But Mary smothered the
voice--would not hear a word of it. Completely she became
Mary-in-the-glass, that sentimental young woman, and in that personality
tripped along the path of thought where stood her stranger.

Delectably she relived the encounter. Paced down the street, took again
his arm; without a fault recalled his words, without a check gave her
replies; recalled the pitch of his voice to the nicest note, struck
again the light in his eyes.

Now why? She had met other men; in Ireland had thrice wounded her tender
heart by negations that had caused three suitors most desperate
anguish. None had awakened in her a deeper interest; and yet here was
a stranger--suddenly encountered, as suddenly left--who in her mind had
appropriated a track which she was eager to make a well-beaten path.
Why?

But Mary-in-the-glass, that sentimental young woman, was no prober of
emotions. They veiled the hard business of commonplace life; and amid
them mistily she now floated afar into dim features where her stranger,
stranger no more, walked with her hand in hand.

There was attempt at first to construct an actual re-encounter.
Mary-in-the-glass, that romantic young woman, very speciously pointed
out that in London when once you see a man you may reasonably suppose
that you will again meet him. For in London one does not aimlessly
wander; one has some set purpose and traverses a thousand times the same
streets, crossing daily at the same points as though upon the pursuit
of a chalked line. Mary-in-the-glass, therefore, constructing a
re-encounter, happened to be strolling along the scene of the accident,
and lo! there was he!

Unhappily this vision was transient. Mary-outside-the-glass, that cold
young woman, got in a word here that erased the picture. The square
where the cab crashed was too far afield to take the children for
their walk; holiday was a boon rarely granted and never granted at
the particular hour of the catastrophe--the only time of day at which,
according to the chalked-line theory, she might reasonably expect to
find the stranger in the same spot.

But Mary did not brood long upon this melancholy obstacle; drove away
Mary-outside-the-glass; became again Mary-in-the-glass. And they are
impossible creatures these Marys-in-the-glass. They will approach
an unbridged chasm across which no Mary-out-side could by any means
adventure, and, floating the gulf, will deliriously roam in the fields
beyond.

So now. And in that dream-world of the musing brain Mary with her
stranger sublimely wandered. With her form and his she peopled all
the favourite spots she knew; contrived others and strolled in
them; introduced other persons, and marked their comment on her dear
companion.

It was he whom she made to do mighty deeds in those misty fields; of
herself hers were merely a girl's gentle fancies, held modest by
her sex's natural desire to be loved for itself alone--not for big
behaviour.




CHAPTER IV.

Excursions In A Nursery.


The loud bang of a door was the gong that called Mary back from
those pleasant fields. They whirled from her, leaving her in sudden
realisation of the material.

She glanced at the clock.

“Goodness!” cried she, and fell to scattering her outdoor finery at a
speed dangerous under any but the deftest fingers. Into a skirt of black
and a simple blouse she slipped, and down, skimming the stairs, to where
her charges bided their bedtime.

Opening the nursery door she paused upon the threshold with a little
“Oh!” of surprise. There was a reek of cigar smoke; its origin between
the lips of a burly young man who stood drumming a tune upon the
window-pane.

Mr. Bob Chater turned at her entry. “I've been waiting for you a long
time,” he said.

She asked, “Whatever for?” and in her tone there was a chill.

“Didn't I tell you yesterday that I was coming to see the kids tubbed?”

“I didn't think you meant it.”

Mr. Bob Chater laughed. “Well, now you see that I did. I've been looking
forward to this all day.”

Plainly she was perturbed. She said: “Mr. Chater, I really would rather
you did not, if you don't mind.”

“Well, but I do mind, d'you see? I mind very much indeed. It would be
the bitterest disappointment.”

His playfulness sat ill upon him. This was a stout young man,
black-eyed, dark-moustached, with a thick and heavy look about him.

She would not catch his mood. “I am sure when I ask you--”

“Well, you're jolly well wrong, you know,” he laughed; “'cause I ain't
going.”

Mary flushed slightly; moved to the hearthrug where sat David and
Angela, her small charges, watching, from their toys, the scene.

It occurred to Mr. Bob Chater that she was annoyed.

“I say, be decent to a fellow, Miss Humfray,” he said. “Look here, I
hadn't seen the kids for two years when I came back yesterday. They
hardly remember their kind big brother.” He addressed the small girl
whose round eyes, moving from speaker to speaker since Mary had entered,
were now upon him. “Do you, Angela?” he asked.

“I--hate--you,” Angela told him, in the slow utterance of one giving
completest effect to a carefully weighed sentiment.

With equal impressiveness, David, seated beside her, lent his authority
to the statement. “I--hate--you--too,” he joined.

Mr. Bob Chater laughed a little stupidly.

Mary cried: “Oh, Angela! Oh, David! How can you speak like that!”

“He is perfectly abom'able,” Angela said, unmoved. “He made Davie cry.
He trod on Davie's beetle.”

The cracked corpse of a mechanical beetle, joy of David's heart, was
produced in evidence; its distressed owner reddening ominously at this
renewed recollection of the calamity.

Mary took the sad pieces tenderly. “Silly children! He never meant to
break it. Oh, such silly children!”

Angela protested, “He did! He did! He put his foot over it while it was
running, and stopped it. He told David to get it away if he could, and
David bit his leg, and he said 'Damn you!' and crushed it crack.”

Mary whipped a glance at the murderer. She ignored the evidence.
“To-morrow!” said she. “Why, what fun! To-morrow we'll play hospital
like we did when Christabel broke her arm. We'll make Mr. Beetle just as
well as ever he was before!”

“I'll be doctor!” cried David, transported into delight.

“Yes, and Angela nurse. Look, we'll put poor Mr. Beetle on the
mantelpiece to-night, right out of the draughts. If he got a draught
into that crack in his back, goodness knows what wouldn't happen. He
must eat slops like Christabel did. _What_ fun! Now, bed--_bustle!_”

Their adored Mary had restored confidence. They clung about her.

“It was a pure accident,” explained Mr. Bob Chater, gloomily watching
this scene. “I'll buy you another to-morrow.”

“There!” Mary cried. “Think of that!”

David reflected upon it without emotion. He regarded his big brother
sullenly; sullenly said, “I don't want another.”

Mary cried brightly: “Rubbish! Come, kiss your brother good-night, and
say 'thank you!' Both of you. Quick as lightning!”

They hung back.

Mary had obtained so complete a command of their affections that her
word was the wise law which, ordinarily, they had come unquestioningly
to accept. In their short lives David and Angela had experienced a
procession of nurses, of nursery-governesses, of lady-helps, each one of
whom received or gave her month's notice within a few weeks of arrival,
and against whom they had conducted a sullen or a violent war. From the
first it had been different with Miss Humfray. As was their custom (for
this constant change tried tempers) upon the very day of her arrival
they had met her with frank hostility, had declared mutiny at her
first command. But her reception of this attitude they found a new and
astonishing experience. She had not been shocked, had not been angry,
had ventured no threat to tell their mother. Instead, at the outbreak of
defiance, she went into the gayest and most infectious laughter, kissed
them--and they had capitulated before they realised the event.

A second attempt at mutiny, made upon the following day, met with a
reception equally novel. Again this pretty Miss Humfray had laughed, but
this time had fully sympathised with their view of the point at issue
and had made of the affair a most entrancing game. She, behold, was a
pirate captain; they were the rebellious crew. In five minutes they had
marooned her upon the desert island represented by the hearthrug; had
rowed away with faces which, under her instructions, were properly
stern; and only when she waved the white flag of truce had they
taken her aboard again. Meanwhile the subject of the quarrel had been
forgotten.

Never a dispute arose thereafter. They idolised this pretty Miss
Humfray: whatsoever she said was clearly right.

Here, however, was a dangerous conflict of opinion. They hung back.

“Quickly,” Mary repeated. “Kiss him, and say thank-you quickly, or there
will be no story when you are in bed.”

It was a terrific price to pay; their troubled faces mirrored the
conflict of decision.

David found solution. In his slow, solemn voice, “You kiss him first,”
 he said. Miss Humfray always took their medicine first, and David argued
from the one evil necessity to this other.

Mr. Bob Chater laughed delightedly. “That's a brilliant idea!” he cried;
came two strides towards Mary; put a hand upon her arm.

So sudden, so unexpected was his movement, that by the narrowest chance
only did she escape his purpose. A jerk of her head, and he had mouthed
at the air two inches from her face.

She shook her arm free. “Oh!” she cried; and in the exclamation there
was that which would have given a nicer man pause.

Mr. Bob Chater was nothing abashed. A handsome face and a bold air
had made conquests easy to him. It was an axiom of his that a girl who
worked for her living by that fact proclaimed flirtation to be agreeable
to her--at all events with such as he. Chance had so shaped affairs that
this was the first time his theory had found disproof. He saw she was
offended; so much the more tickling; conquest was thereby the more
enticing.

He laughed; said he was only “rotting.”

Mary did not reply. The command to kiss their brother went by default;
she hurried her charges through the door to the adjoining night nursery.

When they were started upon undressing she came back.

“You're going to let me see you tub them?” Bob asked her.

Busy replacing toys in cupboards, she did not reply.

“You're not angry, are you?”

She gave him no answer.

Bob Chater discarded the laugh from his tone. “If you are angry, I'm
very sorry. You must have known I was only fooling. It was only to make
the kids laugh.”

So far as was possible she kept her back to him.

The continued slight pricked him. His voice hardened. “When I have the
grace to apologise, I think you might have the grace to accept it.”

Mary said in low tones: “If you meant only to make them laugh, of course
I believe you. It is all right.”

“Good. Well, now, may I see them tubbed?”

“I have told you I would rather not.”

“Dash it all, Miss Humfray, you're rather unkind, aren't, you? Here have
I been away nearly two years--I've been travelling on the Continent for
the firm-you know that, don't you?”

She said she had heard Mr. and Mrs. Chater talking of it.

“Well, and yet you won't let me come near my darling little sister and
my sweet little brother to tell 'em all about it?”

“But I'm not keeping you from them, Mr. Chater. You have had plenty of
time.”

“Time! Why, I only got back yesterday!”

“You have been in here this afternoon.”

“Ah, they were shy. They're better when you are here.”

She had finished her task, and she turned to him. “Mr. Chater, you know
I could not keep David and Angela from you even if I dreamed of doing
such a thing. Only, I say I would rather you did not come in while I
bath them, that is all.”

“Yes, but why?”

“Mrs. Chater would not like it for one thing, I feel sure.”

“Oh, that's all rot. Mother wouldn't mind--anyway, I do as I like in
this house.”

From all she had heard of Mrs. Chater's beloved Bob, Mary guessed this
to be true. Long prior to his arrival she had been prejudiced against
him; acquaintance emphasised the prophetic impression.

“Another night, then,” she said.

He felt he was winning. No girl withstood him long.

“No, to-night. Another thing--I want to know you better. This
arrangement is all new to me. There was a nurse here in your place when
I went. I've hardly spoken to you. Have you ever been abroad?”

“No.”

“Well, I'll tell you--and the kids--some of my adventures while you're
tubbing 'em. Lead on.”

She was at the night-nursery door. Evidently this man would not see her
conventional reason for not wishing him at the tubbing. Angela had grown
a biggish girl since he went away.

She said, “Please not to-night.”

“I'm jolly well coming,” he chuckled.

The lesson of dependence was wilfully forgotten. Mary agreed with Angela
and David: she hated this Bob.

“No,” she said sharply, “you are not.”

He had thrown his cigar into the grate; taken out another; stooped to
the hearth to scratch a match. His back was to her; to him all her tone
conveyed was that a “rag” was on hand.

“We'll see,” he laughed; struck the match.

She stepped swiftly within the door; closed it.

Bob Chater laughed again; ran across.

The lock clicked as she turned the key.

“Let me in!” he cried, rattling the handle. “Let me in!”

The splash of water answered him.

He thumped the panel. “Open the door!”

“Now, Angela,” he heard her say, “quick as lightning with that chimmy.”

Bob's face darkened; he damned beneath his breath. Then with a laugh
he turned away. “I'm going to have some fun with that girl,” he told
himself; and on the way downstairs, her pretty face and figure in his
mind, pleased himself with vicious anticipation.




CHAPTER V.

Excursions At A Dinner-Table.



I.

Two distressing reasons combined to compel Mrs. Chater to give
Mary place at the evening meal. There was the aggravating fact that
mothers'-helps, just as if they were ordinary people, must be fed; there
was also the contingency that servants most strongly objected to serving
a special meal--even “on a tray”--to one who was not of the family, yet
who had airs above the kitchen.

Except, then, when there were guests Miss Humfray must be accommodated
at late dinner. Mrs. Chater considered it annoying, yet found in it
certain comfortable advantages--as sympathy from friends: “Mustn't it
be rather awkward sometimes, Mrs. Chater?” A plaintive shrug would
illustrate the answer: “Well, it is, of course, very awkward sometimes;
but one must put up with it. That class of person takes offence so
easily, you know; and I always try to treat my lady-helps as well as
possible.”

“I'm sure you do, Mrs. Chater. How grateful they should be!” And this
time a sad little laugh would illustrate: “Oh, one hardly expects
gratitude nowadays, does one?”

Mary at dinner must observe certain rules, however. Certain dishes--a
little out of season, perhaps, or classed as luxuries--were borne
triumphantly past her by a glad parlour-maid acting upon a frown and
a glance that Mrs. Chater signalled. Certain occasions, again, when
private matters were to be discussed, were heralded by “Miss Humfray,”
 in an inflexion of voice that set Mary to fold her napkin and from the
room.

The girl greeted these early dismissals with considerable relief.
Dinner was to her a nightly ordeal whose atmosphere swept appetite
sky-high--took the savour from meats, dried the throat.



II.

Descending to the dining-room upon this evening, her normal shrinking
from the meal was considerably augmented. On the previous night--the
first upon which Mr. Bob Chater's legs had partnered hers beneath the
table--his eyes (like some bold gallant popping out on modesty whenever
it dared peep from the doorway) had captured her glance each time
she ventured look up from her plate. The episode of the nursery was
equivalent to having slapped the gallant's face, and the re-encounter
was proportionately uncomfortable.

Taking her place she was by sheer nervousness impelled to meet his
gaze--so heavily freighted it was as to raise a sudden flush to
her cheek. Her eyes fled round to Mrs. Chater, received a look that
questioned the blush, drove it duskier; through an uncomfortable
half-hour she kept her face towards her plate.

It was illuminative of the relations between husband and wife that Mrs.
Chater carved; her husband dealt the sweets. The carving knife is the
domestic sceptre of authority: when it is wielded by the woman, the man,
you will find, is consort rather than king.



III.

Upon the previous evening Mr. Bob Chater had led the conversation.
To-night he was indisposed for the position--would not take it despite
his mother's desperate attempts to board the train of his ideas and
by it be carried to scenes of her son's adventures. A dozen times she
presented her ticket; as often Bob turned her back at the barrier.

It was a rare event this refusal of his to carry passengers. So loudly
did he whistle as a rule as to attract all in the vicinity, convinced
that there was an important train by which it would be agreeable to
travel.

For Mr. Bob Chater was a loud young man, emanating a swaggering air
that the term “side” well fitted. To have some conceit of oneself is
an excellent affair. The possession is a keel that gives to the craft a
dignified balance upon the stream of life--prevents it from being sailed
too close to mud; helps maintain stability in sudden gale. Other craft
are keelless--they are canoes; bobbing, unsteady, likely to capsize in
sudden emergency; prone to drift into muddy waters; liable to be swept
anywhither by any current. Others, again--and Mr. Bob Chater was of
these--are over-freighted upon one quarter or another: they sail with a
list. Amongst well-trimmed boats these learn in time not to adventure,
since here they are greeted with ridicule or with contempt; yet among
the keelless fleets they have a position of some authority; holding
it on the same principle as that by which among beggars he who has a
coin--even though base--is accounted king.

Bob Chater's list was ego-wards. His mighty “I”--I am, I do, I say, I
know, I think--bulged from him, hanging from his voice, his glance, his
gesture, his walk. In it Mrs. Chater bathed; to be carried along in the
train of his mighty “I” was delectable to her. But to-night she could
not effect the passage.

A final effort she made to get aboard. “And in St. Petersburg!” she
tempted. “I wonder if you ever saw the _Tsar_ when you were in St.
Petersburg?”

Bob drove her back: “St. Petersburg's a loathsome place.”

Mrs. Chater tried to squeeze through. “So _gay_, they say.”

Bob slammed the gate. “I wish you'd _tell_ me something instead of
expecting _me_ to do all the talking. I want to hear all that's been
going on here while I've been away, but I'm hanged if I can find out.”

A little mortified, Mrs. Chater said: “I've hardly seen you, dear,
except at meals”--then threw the onus for her son's lack of local
gossip upon her husband. Addressing him, “You've been with Bob all the
morning,” she told him. “I wonder you haven't given him all the news.
But, there! I suppose you've done nothing but question him about what
business he's done!”

Mr. Chater, startled at the novelty of being drawn into table
conversation while his son and his wife were present, dropped his
spoon with a splash into his soup, wiped his coat, frowned at the
parlour-maid, cleared his throat, and, to gain time to determine whether
he had courage to say that which was burning within him, threw out an
“Eh?” for his pursuing wife to Worry.

Mrs. Chater pounced upon it; shook it. “What I said was that I suppose
you've been doing nothing but question poor Bob about what he has done
for the firm while he's been away.”

Mr. Chater nerved himself to declare his mind. “There wasn't very much
to question him about,” he said.

His words--outcome of views forcibly expressed by his partners in
Mincing Lane that morning--were the foolhardy action of one who pokes a
tigress with a stick.

The tigress shook herself. “Now, I wonder what you mean by _that_?” she
challenged.

Mr. Chater dropped the stick; precipitantly fled. “Of course it was all
new to Bob,” he granted, throwing a bone.

Very much to his alarm the tigress ignored the bone; rushed after him.
“All you seem to think about,” cried she, “is making the boy slave. He's
never had a proper holiday since he left school, and yet the very first
time he goes off to see the world you must be fidgeting yourself to
death all the time that he's not pushing the firm sufficiently; and
immediately he comes back you must start cross-examining just as if he
was an office-boy--not a word about his health or his pleasure. Oh, no!
of course not!”

Squirming in misery, Mr. Chater remarked that he had his partners to
consider. “I'm only too glad that Bob should enjoy himself--only too
glad. But you must remember, my dear, that part of his expenses for this
trip was paid for by the firm--the _firm_. He was to call on foreign
houses--”

The tigress opened her mouth for fresh assault. Mr. Chater hurriedly
thrust in a bone. “I don't say he hasn't done a great deal for us--not
at all; I'd be the last to say that. What I say is that in duty to my
partners I must take the first opportunity to ask him a few questions
about it. Bob sees that himself; don't you, Bob?”

“Oh, do let's keep shop off the table,” Bob snarled. “Fair sickens me
this never getting away from the office.”

“There you are!” Mrs. Chater cried. “There you are! Always business,
business, business--that's what _I_ complain of.”

With astounding recklessness Mr. Chater mildly said: “My dear, you
started it.”

Mrs. Chater quivered: “Ah, put it on me! Put it on me! Somehow you
always manage to do that. Miss Humfray, when you've _quite_ finished
your soup _then_ perhaps Clarence can take the plates.”

Mary's thoughts, to the neglect of her duty, had crept away beneath
cover of these exchanges. Now she endured the disaster of amid silence
clearing her plate with four pairs of eyes fixed upon her. Clarence
removed the course; Mr. Chater, leaping as far as possible from the
scene of his ordeal, broke a new topic.

He enticed tentatively: “I saw a funny bit in the paper this morning.”

The tigress paused in the projection of another spring; sniffed
suspiciously. “Oh!”

“About that young Lord Comeragh,” Mr. Chater hurried on, delighted
with his success. “He was up at Marlborough Street police-court this
morning--at least his butler was; of course his lordship wouldn't go
himself--charged with furiously driving his motorcar; and who do you
think was in the car with him at the time? Ah!”

Mrs. Chater, naming a young lady who nightly advertised a pretty leg
from the chorus of a musical comedy, announced that she would not be
surprised if that was the person. Being told that it was none other, and
that Mr. Chater had heard in the City that morning that Lady Comeragh
was taking proceedings and had named the nicely-legged young lady the
cause of infidelity, became highly astonished and supremely diverted.

Conversation of a most delectable nature was by this means supplied. A
pot of savoury gossip, flavoured with scandal, was upon the table; and
Mary, lost to sight behind the cloud of steam that uprose as the three
leaped about it, finished her dinner undisturbed.

A nod bade her leave before dessert. As she passed out the signaller
spoke. “I want to see you,” Mrs. Chater said. “Wait for me in the
drawing-room.”

The command was unusual, and Mary, waiting as bid, worried herself with
surmises upon it. She prayed it did not mean she was to soothe Mr.
Bob Chater's digestion with lullabies upon the piano; that it boded an
unpleasant affair she was assured.

She did not err. Mrs. Chater came to her, dyspeptic-flushed, sternly
browed.

“Miss Humfray, I have one thing to say to you, no more. No explanations,
no excuses, please. I hear you have been trying to entertain my son
in the nursery this evening. If that, or anything like it, occurs
again--You understand?”

“Mrs. Chater--”

A massive hand signalled Stop. “I said 'not a word.' That is all. Good
night.”

And Mary, crimson, to her room.




BOOK III.

Of Glimpses at a Period of this History: of Love and of War.




CHAPTER I.

Notes On The Building Of Bridges.


Within the limits of this short section of our story we shall cram two
months of history, taking but a furtive peep or two at our personages as
they plod through it.

This is well within our power, since the position of the novelist in
regard to his characters may be compared with that of the destiny which
in the largest comedy moves to and fro mankind its actors. As destiny
moves its puppets, so the novelist moves his--upraising, debasing;
favouring, tormenting; creating, wiping from the page.

And of the pair the novelist is the more just. Has villainy in a
novel ever gone unpunished? Has virtue ever failed of its reward?
Your novelist is of all autocrats the most zealous of right and wrong.
Villain may through two-thirds of his career enjoy his wicked pleasures,
exceedingly prosper despite his baseness; but ever above him the cold
eye of his judge keeps watch, and in the end he is apportioned the most
horrible deserts that any could wish. Virtue may by the gods be hounded
and harried till the reader's heart is wrung. But spare your tears;
before Finis is written, down swoops the judge; the dogs are whipped
off; Virtue is led to fair pastures and there left smiling.

Contrasted with this autocrat of the printed page, the destiny whose
comedy began with the world and is indefinitely continued makes sorry
show. Here the wicked exceedingly flourish and keep at it to the end of
their chapter; here virtue, battling with tremendous waves of adversity,
is at last engulfed and miserably drowned. Truly, their fit rewards are
apportioned, we are instructed, after death. But there is something of a
doubt; the novelist, in regard to his characters, takes no risks.

Upon another head, moreover, the novelist shows himself the more kindly
autocrat. There is his power, so freely exercised, to bridge time.
Whereas destiny makes us to watch those in whom we are interested plod
every inch and step of their lives-over each rut, through each swamp,
up each hill,-the novelist, upon his characters coming to places dull or
too difficult, immediately veils from us their weary struggles. Destiny
will never grant such a boon: we must watch our friends even when they
bore us, even when they cause us pain. Yet this boon is the commonest
indulgence of the novelist-as it now (to become personal) is mine.

I bridge two months.

And you must imagine this bridge as indeed a short and airy passage
across a valley, down into which the persons of our story must carefully
climb, across which they must plod, and up whose far side they must
laboriously scramble to meet us upon the level ground. For we are
much in the position, we novel readers, of village children curiously
watching a caravan of gipsies passing through their district. The
gipsies (who stand for our characters) plod wearily away along a bend
of dusty road. The children cease following, play awhile; then by a
short-cut through the fields overtake the travellers as again they come
into the straight.

So now with you and me. We have no need to follow our gipsies down
the valley that takes two months in the traversing: we skip across the
bridge.

But, leaning over, we may take a shot or two at them as here and there
they come into view.




CHAPTER II.

Excursions Beneath The Bridge.



I.

Thus we see the meeting again of George and Mary.

When the agitated young man on the day following the cab accident
had alighted from the omnibus at the bottom of Palace Gardens he was
opposite No. 14 by half-past ten; waiting till eleven; going, convinced
she did not live there; returning, upon the desperate hope that indeed
she did; waiting till twelve--and being most handsomely rewarded.

Her face signalled that she saw him, but her eyes gave no
recognition--quickly were averted from him; the windows behind her had
eyes, she knew.

My agitated George, who had made a hasty step at the red flag that
fluttered on her cheeks, as hastily stepped away beneath the chill of
her glance; in tremendous perturbation turned and fled; in tremendous
perturbation turned and pursued. In Regent's Park he saw her produce a
brilliant pair of scarlet worsted reins, gay with bells; heard her hiss
like any proper groom as tandemwise she harnessed David and Angela,
those restive steeds.

The equipage was about to start--she had cracked her whip, clicked her
tongue--when with thumping heart, with face that matched the flaming
reins, hat in hand he approached; spoke the driver.

Her steeds turned about; with wide, unblinking eyes, searched his face
and hers.

“Your faces are very red,” Angela said. “Are you angry?”

“You have got very red faces,” David echoed. “Are you in a temper?”

Mary told them No; George said they were fine horses; felt legs; offered
to buy them.

His words purchased their hearts, which were more valuable.

After the drive they would return to the stable, which was this seat,
Mary told him; she could not stay to speak to him any longer. George
declared he was the stable groom and would wait.

Away they dashed at handsome speed, right round the inner circle;
returned more sedately, a little out of breath. There had been,
moreover, an accident: leader, it appeared, had fallen and cut his
knees.

“I shied at a motor,” David explained, proud of the red blood now that
the agony was past.

George unharnessed them; dressed the wounds; scolded the coachman
because no feed had been brought for the horses; promised that to-morrow
he would bring some corn--bun corn.

“Will you come to-morrow?” Angela asked.

George glanced at Mary. “Yes,” he told them.

“Every to-morrow?”

“Every to-morrow.”

Tremendous joy. Well delighted, they ran to a new game.

Every to-morrow ran but to three: George and Mary had by then exchanged
their histories. The pending examination was discussed, and Mary simply
would not speak to him if, wasting his time, he came daily to idle with
the children (so she expressed it). She would abandon the Park, she told
him--would take her charges to a Square gardens of which they had the
entry, where George might not follow.

George did not press the point. As he wrestled out the matter in the
hours between their meetings she was a fresh incentive to work. But once
a week he must be allowed to come: here he was adamant, and she gladly
agreeable. Saturday mornings was the time arranged.

Mary had been fearful at this first re-encounter that it would be the
last. The children would certainly tell their mother; Mrs. Chater would
certainly make an end to the acquaintance.

“Ask them not to tell,” George had suggested.

Impossible to think of such a thing: it would be to teach them deceit.

“Well, I'll ask them.”

“But that would be just as bad. No--if they tell, it cannot be helped.
And after all--”

“Well, after all...?”

“After all--what would it matter?”

George said: “It would matter to me--a lot.”

He glanced at her, but she was looking after Angela and David. He asked:
“Wouldn't it matter to you?”

She flushed a little; answered, with her eyes still averted towards the
children, “Why--why, of course I should mind. I mean--”

But there are meanings for which it is difficult to find clothes in
which they may decently take the air; and here the wardrobe of Mary's
mind stood wanting.

George enticed. “Do you mean you would be sorry not to--not to--”

He also found his wardrobe deficient.

Then Mary sent out her meaning, risking its decency. “Why, yes, I would
be sorry not to see you again; why should I mind saying so? I have liked
meeting you.” And, becoming timid at its appearance, she hurried after
it a cloak that would utterly disguise it. “I meet so few people,” she
said.

But George was satisfied; she had said she would mind--nay, even though
she had not spoken it, her manner assured him that indeed she would
regret not again meeting him. It was a thought to hug, a memory to spur
his energies when they flagged over his studies; it was a brush to paint
his world in lively colours.

Nor, as the future occurred, need either have had apprehension that the
children would tell their mother and so set up an insurmountable barrier
between them. A previous experience had warned Angela that it were
wise to keep from her mother joys that were out of the ordinary run of
events.

Returning homeward that day, a little in advance of Mary, she therefore
addressed her brother upon the matter.

“Davie, I hope that man will come to-morrow.”

“I hope it, too.”

“We won't tell mother, Davie.”

“Why?”

“Because mother'll say No.”

“Why?”

“Because she _always_ says No, stupid.”

“Why?”

“Oh, Davie, you _are_ stupid! I don't know why; I only _know_. Don't you
remember that lady that used to talk to Miss Humf'ay and play with us?
Well, when we told mother, mother said No, didn't she? and the lady
played with those abom'able red-dress children that make faces instead.”

“Will he play with the abom'able red-dress children that make faces if
we tell mother?”

“Of _course_ he will.”

“Why?”

“They always _do_, stupid.”

“Why?”

Angela ran back. “Oh, Miss Humf'ay, Davie is so _irrating!_ He will say
_Why_ ....”

There is a lesson for parents in that conversation, I suspect.



II.

Leaning from our bridge we may content ourselves with a hurried shot
at George, laboriously toiling at his books, sedulously attending his
classes, with his Mary spending glorious Saturday mornings that, as
they brought him nearer to knowledge of her, sent him from her yet more
fevered; and, straining towards another point, we will focus for an
instant upon Margaret his cousin, and Bill Wyvern, her adored.

Mr. William Wyvern had most vigorously whacked about among events since
that evening when his Margaret had composed her verses for George. At
that time a fellow-student with George at St. Peter's Hospital, he had
now abandoned the profession and was started upon the literary career
(as he named it) that long he had wished to follow. The change had been
come by with little difficulty. Professor Wyvern--that eminent biologist
whose fame was so tremendous that even now a normally forgetful Press
yet continued to paragraph him while he spent in absent-minded seclusion
the ebb of that life which at the flood had so mightily advanced
knowledge--Professor Wyvern was too much attached to his son, too docile
in the hands of his loving wife, to gainsay any wish that Bill might
urge and that Mrs. Wyvern might support.

Bill achieved his end: the stories he had had printed in magazines,
secretly shown to his proud mother, were now brought forth and chuckled
over with glee by the Professor. The famous biologist struggled through
one of the stories, vowed he had read them all, cheerily patted Bill's
arm with his shaky old hand, and cheerfully abandoned the hope he had
held of seeing his son a great surgeon.

It was Bill's burning ambition to obtain a post upon a paper. Not until
later did he learn that it is the men outside the papers who must have
a turn for stringing sentences; that those inside are machines, cutting
and serving the material with no greater interest in it than has the
cheesemonger in the cheese he weighs and deals. Meanwhile, the glimpse
we may take of him shows Bill Wyvern urging along his pen until clean
paper became magic manuscripts; living upon a billow of hope when the
envelopes were sped, submerged beneath oceans of gloom when they were
returned; trembling into Fleet Street deliciously to inhale the thick
smell of printer's ink that came roaring up from a hundred basements;
with goggle eyes venerating the men who with assured steps passed in
and out the swing-doors of castles he burned to storm; snatching brief
moments for the boisterous society of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, those
rare bull-terriers; and finally, expending with his Margaret moments
more protracted--stealthy meetings, for the most part--in Mr. Marrapit's
shrubbery.



III.

But two more peeps from our bridge need we take, and then our characters
will be ready to meet us upon the further side.

A glance from here will reveal to us Mrs. Major, that masterly woman,
inscribing in her diary:

“_Getting on with Mr. M. Should sue. Precip. fat._”

Fill out the abbreviations to which Mrs. Major, in her diary, was prone,
and we have:

“_Getting on with Mr. Marrapit. Should succeed. Precipitancy fatal._”

Succeed in what? To what would precipitancy of action be irreparable?
Listen to a conversation that may enlighten us--spoken upon the lawn
of Herons' Holt; Mr. Marrapit in his chair making a lap for the Rose of
Sharon; Mrs. Major on a garden seat, crocheting.

A stealthy peep assuring her that his eyes were not closed, Mrs. Major
nerved herself with a deep breath; with a long sigh let it escape in the
form, “A year ago!”--dropped hands upon her lap and gazed wistfully at
the setting sun. She had seen the trick very successfully performed upon
the stage.

Mr. Marrapit turned his eyes upon her.

“You spoke, Mrs. Major?”

With an admirable start Mrs. Major appeared to gather in wandering
fancies. “I fear I was thinking aloud, Mr. Marrapit. I beg pardon.”

“Do not. There is no occasion. You said 'A year ago.'”

“Did I, Mr. Marrapit?”

“Certainly,” said Mr. Marrapit.

A pause followed. The wistful woman felt that, were the thing to be done
properly, the word lay with her companion. To her pleasure he continued:

“To-day, then, is an anniversary?”

“It is.”

“Of a happy event, I trust?”

Mrs. Major clasped her hands; spoke with admirable ecstasy. “Oh, Mr.
Marrapit, of a golden--golden page in my life.”

“Elucidate,” Mr. Marrapit commanded.

Mrs. Major put into a whisper:

“The day I came here.”

Mr. Marrapit slowly moved his head towards her.

Her eyes were averted. “The time has passed swiftly,” he said.

Mrs. Major breathed: “For me it has flown on--on--” She searched wildly
for a metaphor. “On wings,” she concluded.

Again there was a pause, and again Mrs. Major felt that for this passage
to have fullest effect the word lay with Mr. Marrapit. But Mr. Marrapit,
himself considerably perturbed, did not speak. The moments sped. Fearful
lest they should distance beyond recovery the sentiments she felt she
had aroused, Mrs. Major hastened to check them.

She said musingly: “I wonder if they are right?”--sighed as though
doubtful.

“To whom do you refer?”

“Why, the people who say that time flies when it is spent in pleasant
company.”

“They are correct,” Mr. Marrapit affirmed.

“Oh, I do not doubt it for my part, Mr. Marrapit. I never knew what
happiness was until I come here--came here. But if--” The masterly woman
paused.

“Continue” Mr. Marrapit commanded.

The hard word was softly spoken. Mrs. Major's heart gave two little
thumps; her plan clear before her, pushed ahead. “But if to you also,
Mr. Marrapit, the time has seemed to fly, then--then Mr. Marrapit, my
company has--has been agreeable to you?”

Certainly there was a softness in Mr. Marrapit's tones as he made
answer.

“It has, Mrs. Major,” he said, “it has. Into my establishment you have
brought an air of peace that had for some time been lacking. Prior to
your arrival, I was often worried by household cares that should not
fall upon a man.”

Earnestly Mrs. Major replied: “Oh, I _saw_ that. I strove to lift them.”

“You have lifted them. You have attended not only my cats but my
kitchen. I am now able often to enjoy such evenings as these. This peace
around us illustrates the tranquillity you have brought--”

The tranquillity was at that moment disastrously shattered. A bed of
shrubbery lay within a few feet of where they sat. What had appeared
to be a gnarled stump in its midst now quivered, broadened, fell into a
line with the straightening back of Mr. Fletcher.

Mr. Marrapit was startled and annoyed. “What are you doing there, sir?”

“Snailin',” said Mr. Fletcher gloomily; exhibited his snail.

“Snail elsewhere. Do not snail where I am.”

“I snails where there's snails.”

“Cease snailing. You must have been there hours.”

“What if I have? This garden's fair planted with snails.”

“Snail oftener. Depart.”

Mr. Fletcher moved a few steps; then turned. “I should like to ast if
this is to be part of my regular job. First you says 'cease snailin','
then you says 'snail oftener,' then you says 'snail elsewhere.'
Snails take findin'. They don't come to me; I has to go to them. It's
'ard--damn 'ard. I'm a gardener, I am; not a lettuce-leaf.”

He gloomily withdrew.

Mr. Marrapit's face was angrily twitching. The moment was not propitious
for continuing her conversation, and with a little sigh Mrs. Major
withdrew.

But it was upon that night that she inscribed in her diary:

_“Getting on with Mr. M. Should suc. Precip. fat.”_



IV.

A last peep, ere we hurry across the bridge, will disclose to us Mr. Bob
Chater still pressing upon Mary the attentions which her position, in
relation to his, made it so difficult for her to escape. Piqued by her
attitude towards him, he was the more inflamed than ordinarily he would
have been by the fair face and neat figure that were hers. Yet he made
no headway; within a month of the date of his return to Palace Gardens
was as far from conquest as upon that night in the nursery.

To a City friend, Mr. Lemuel Moss, dining at 14 Palace Gardens with him
one night, he explained affairs.

“Dam' pretty girl, that governess of yours, or whatever she is,” said
Mr. Moss, biting the end from a cigar in the smoking-room after dinner.
“Lucky beggar you are, Bob. My mater won't have even a servant in the
place that wouldn't look amiss in a monkey-house. Knows me too well,
unfortunately,” and Mr. Moss, taking a squint at himself in the
overmantel, laughed--well enough pleased.

Bob pointed out that there was not so much luck about it as Mr. Moss
appeared to think. “Never seen such a stand-offish little rip in all my
life,” he moodily concluded.

“What, isn't she--?”

Bob understood the unvoiced question. “Won't even let a chap have two
minutes' talk with her,” he said, “let alone anything else.”

Mr. Moss stretched himself along the sofa; rejoined: “Oh, rats! Rats!
You don't know how to manage 'em--that's what it is.”

“I know as well as you, and a dashed sight better, I don't mind
betting,” Bob returned with heat. In some circles it is an aspersion
upon a man's manliness to have it hinted that a petticoat presenting
possibilities has not been ruffled.

“Well, it don't look much like it. I caught her eye in the passage when
we were coming downstairs, and you don't tell me--not much!”

“Did you though?” Bob said. Himself he had never been so fortunate.

“No mistake about it. Why, d'you mean to say you've never got as far as
that, even?”

“Tell you she won't look at me.”

Mr. Moss laughed. Enjoyed the “score” over his host for a few moments,
and then:

“Tell you what it is, old bird,” said he, “you're going the wrong way
about it. I know another case just the same. Chap out Wimbledon way.
His people kept a girl--topper she was, too--dark. He was always messing
round just like you are, and she was stand-offish as a nun. One night
he came home early, a bit screwed--people out--girl in. Met her in the
drawing-room. Almost been afraid to speak to her before. Had a bit of
fizz on board him now--_you_ know; didn't care a rip for anybody. Gave
her a smacking great kiss, and, by Gad!--well, she _was_ all right. Told
him she'd always stood off up to then because she was never quite sure
what he meant--afraid he didn't mean anything, and that she might get
herself into no end of a row if she started playing around. Same with
this little bit of goods, I'll lay.”

Bob was interested. “Shouldn't be surprised if you're right,” he said;
and moodily cogitated upon the line of action prescribed.

Mr. Moss offered to bet that where girls were concerned he was never
far wrong. “Slap-dash style is what they like,” he remarked, and with a
careless “It's all they understand” dismissed the subject.

It remained, however, in Bob's mind throughout the evening; sprang
instantly when, after breakfast upon the following day, he caught a
glimpse of Mary as he prepared for the City.

Standing for a moment in the hall, it occurred to him that this very
evening offered the opportunity he sought. Mr. and Mrs. Chater were
to dine at the house of a neighbour. The invitation had included
Bob--fortunately he had refused it. Returning to the morning-room, “I
shan't be in to-night,” he told his mother.

“Then I needn't order any dinner for you?”

“No.” He hung about irresolute, then lit a cigar, and between the puffs,
“Shall you be late?” he asked carelessly.

“Sure to be,” Mrs. Chater told him. “It's going to be a big bridge
drive, you know. We shan't get back before midnight. Don't sit up for
us, dear.”

Bob inhaled a long breath from his cigar, exhaled it deliciously. The
chance for the slap-dash style was at hand.

“Oh, I'll be later than you. Lemmy Moss has got a bachelors' party on.
We're going to have a billiard match.”

“That's capital then, dear. I shall let the servants go to Earl's
Court--I've promised them a long time.”

Bob whistled gaily as he mounted his 'bus for the City. The opportunity
was surely exceptional.

At eight o'clock he returned; noiselessly let himself in.

The gas in the hall burned low. Beneath the library door gleamed a
stronger light. Bob turned the handle.

Mary was curled in a big chair with a book. Certainly the opportunity
was exceptional.

At the noise of his entry she sprang to her feet with a little cry. “Oh,
dear!” she exclaimed: “what a fright you gave me!”

Bob pushed the door. He laughed. “Did I?”; came towards her. “Are you
all alone? What a shame!”

“Minnie is in the kitchen, I think. Mrs. Chater said you wouldn't be in
to-night.”

“Why do you think I came?”

“I don't know.”

“I came to see you.”

She gave a nervous little laugh and made to pass him.

Bob fell back a pace, guarding the door. “Don't you think that was
thoughtful of me?”

“I don't know what you mean. There was no need.”

“What! No need! You all alone like this when all the rest are enjoying
themselves!”

“So was I. A long evening with a book.”

She had fallen back as he, speaking, had slowly advanced.

Now the great chair in which she had been seated was alone between them.

“Oh, books! Books are rot.” He stepped around the chair.

She fell back; was cornered between the hearth and a low table.

Bob dropped into the chair; boldly regarded her; his eyes as expressive
of his slap-dash intentions as he could make them: “Look here, I want
you to enjoy yourself for once. I'm going to take you to a music-hall or
somewhere.”

He stretched a foot; touched her.

She drew back close against the mantelpiece, her agitation very evident.

“Well, don't that please you?”

“You know it is impossible.”

Bob paid no regard. This was that same diffidence with which the chap
near Wimbledon had had to contend.

“We'll come out of the show early and have a bit of supper and be back
before half-past eleven. Who's to know? Now, then?”

“It's very kind of you. I know you mean it kindly--”

“Of course I do--”

“But I'd rather not.”

“Are you afraid?”

She was desperately afraid. Her face, the shaking of her hand where it
was pressed back against the wall, and the catch in her voice advertised
her apprehension. She was afraid of this big young man confidently
lolling before her.

She said weakly: “It would not be right.”

Bob sat up. “Is that all?” he laughed. His hands were upon the arms of
the chair, and he made to pull himself up towards her.

She saw her mistake. “No,” she cried hurriedly--“no; I would not go with
you in any case.”

A shadow flickered upon Bob's face. “What do you mean?”

“I mean what I say. Please let me pass.”

“I want to be friends with you. Why can't you let me?”

“Please let me pass. Mr. Chater.”

Bob lay back. He said with a laugh, “Well, I'm not stopping you, am I?”

She hesitated a moment. The passage between the table and the long
chair was narrow. But truly he was not stopping her--so far as one might
judge.

She took her skirts about her with her left hand; stepped forward; was
almost past the chair before he moved.

Then he flung out a hand and caught her wrist, drawing her.

“Now!” he cried, and his voice was thick.

She gave a half-sound of dismay--of fear; tried to twist free. Bob
laughed; pulled sharply on her arm. She was standing sideways to
him--against the sudden strain lost her balance and half toppled across
the chair.

As Bob reflected, when afterwards feeding upon the incident, had he not
been as unprepared as she for her sudden stumble, he would have made--as
he put it--a better thing of it. As it was, her face falling against
his, he was but able to give a half kiss when she had writhed herself
free and made across the room.

But that embrace of her had warmed Bob's passions. Springing up, he
caught her as she fumbled with the latch; twisted her to him.

For a moment they struggled, he grasping her wrists and pressing towards
her.

With the intention of encircling her waist he slipped his hold. But
panic made her the quicker. Her outstretched arms held him at bay for
a breathing space; then as he broke them down she dealt him a swinging
blow upon the face that staggered him back a step, his hand to his
cheek.

Mrs. Chater opened the door.

“Oh, he kissed me! He kissed me!” Mary cried.

Bob said very slowly, “You--infernal--little--liar.”

Mrs. Chater glowered upon Mary with cruel eyes. “It was a fortunate
thing,” she said coldly, “that a headache brought me home. Go to your
room, miss.”

We may hurry across the bridge.




CHAPTER III.

Excursions In Love.



I.

Saturday was the day immediately following this scene.

George, on a 'bus carrying him towards Regent's Park, was in spirit
at one with the gay freshness that gave this September morning a
spring-like air.

A week of torrid heat, in which London crawled, groaned, and panted, had
been wiped from the memory by an over-night thunderstorm that burst the
pent-up dams of heaven and loosed cool floods upon the staring streets.
No misty drizzle nor gusty shower it had been, but a strong, straight,
continuous downpour, seemingly impelled by tremendous pressure. Dusty
roofs, dusty streets, dusty windows it had scoured and scrubbed and
polished; torrents had poured down the gutters--whenever temporarily the
pressure seemed to relax, the ears of wakeful Londoners were sung to by
the gurgle and rush of frantic streams driving before them the collected
debris of many days.

Upon this morning, in the result, a tempest might have swept the town
and found never a speck of dust to drive before it. The very air had
been washed and sweetened; and London's workers, scurrying to and from
their hives, seemed also to have benefited by some attribute of the
downpour that tinted cheeks, sparkled eyes, and, rejuvenating limbs,
gave to them a new sprightliness of movement.

George, from his 'bus, caught many a bright eye under a jaunty little
hat; gave each back its gleam from the depths of gay lightness that
filled his heart. Nearing the Park he alighted; made two purchases. From
a confectioner bun-corn for David and Angela, those ramping steeds;
from a florist the reddest rose that an exhaustive search of stock could
discover.

Mary had from him such a rose at their every meeting. She might not wear
it back to Palace Gardens--it would not flourish beneath Mrs. Chater's
curiosity; but while they were together she would tuck it in her bosom,
and George tenderly would bear it home and set it in a vase before him
to lend him inspiration as he worked.

It is almost certain that such a part is one for which flowers were
especially designed.



II.

Those splendid steeds, David and Angela, having been duly exercised,
groomed, and turned out to browse upon bun-corn, George rushed at once
upon the matter that was singing within him.

Where he sat with his Mary they were sheltered from any but chance
obtrusion. She had taken off her gloves, and George gave her hands, as
they lay in her lap, a little confident pat. It was the tap of the baton
with which the conductor calls together his orchestra--for this was a
song that George was about to tune, very confident that the chords of
both instruments that should give the notes were in a harmony complete.

He said: “Mary, do you know what I am going to talk about?”

She had been a little silent that morning, he had thought; did not
answer now, but smiled.

He laid a hand upon both hers. “You must say 'yes.' You've got to say
'yes' about twenty times this morning, so start now. Do you know what
I'm going to talk about?”

“Yes.”

“No objections this time?”

“Yes.”

He laughed; gave her hand a little smack of reproof. (You who have loved
will excuse these lovers' absurdities.) “No, no; you are only to say
'yes' when I tell you. No objections to the subject this morning?”

His Mary told him “No.”

“Couldn't have a better morning for it, could we?”

She took a little catch at her breath.

George dropped the banter in his tone. “Nothing wrong to-day, is there,
dear? Nothing up?”

How sadly wrong everything in truth was she had determined not to
tell him until she more certainly knew its extent. She shook her head;
reassuringly smiled.

“Well, that's all right--there couldn't be on a morning like this. Now
we've got to begin at the beginning. Mary, I planned it all out last
night--all this conversation. We've got to begin at the beginning--Do
you know I've never told you yet that I love you? You knew it, though,
didn't you, from the first, the very first? Tell me from when?”

“George, this is awfully foolish, isn't it?”

“Never mind. It's jolly nice. It's necessary, too. I've read about it.
It's always done. Tell me from when you knew I loved you.”

“After last Saturday.”

“Oh, Mary! Much earlier than _that_! You must have!”

“Well, I thought perhaps you--you cared after that first day when you
came here.”

“Not before that?”

She laughed. “Come, how _could_ I? Why, I'd hardly seen you.”

“Well, I did, anyway,” George told her. “I loved you from the very
minute you shot out of the cab that day. There! But even this isn't the
proper thing. I've been promising myself all night to say four words to
you--just four. Now I'm going to say them: Mary, I love you.”

She looked in his eyes for a moment, answering the signal that shone
thence; and then she laughed that clear pipe of mirth which was so
uniquely her own possession.

“Oh, I say, you mustn't do that,” George cried. He was really perturbed.

“I can't help it. You are so utterly foolish.”

“I'm not. It's the proper thing. I tell you I've planned it all out. I
love you. I've never said it to you before. Now it's your turn.”

“But what on earth am I to say?”

“You've got to say that you love me.”

“You're making a farce of it.”

“No, I tell you I've planned it all out. I can't go on till you've said
it.”

“You can't expect me to say: 'George, I love you.' It's ridiculous. It's
like a funny story.”

“Oh, never mind what it's like. Do be serious, Mary. How can I be sure
you love me if you won't tell me?”

For the first moment since its happening the thought of Bob Chater and
of Mrs. Chater passed completely from Mary's mind. She looked around:
there was no soul in sight. She listened: there was no sound. She
clasped her fingers about his; leaned towards him, her face upturned....

He kissed her upon the lips....

“The plans,” said George after a moment, “have all gone fut. I never
thought of that way.”

“It's much better,” Mary said.

“The other's not a patch upon it,” said George.



III.

You must conjecture of what lovers think when, following their first
kiss, they sit silent. It is not a state that may be written down in
such poor words as your author commands. For the touch of lips on lips
is the key that turns the lock and gives admission to a world dimly
conceived, yet found to have been wrongly conceived since conceived
never to be so wonderful or so beautiful as it does prove. Nor, ever
again, once the silence is broken and speech is found, has that world an
aspect quite the same. For the door that divides this new world from the
material world can never from the inside be closed. It is at first--for
the space of that silence after the first kiss--pushed very close by
those who have entered; but, soon after, the breath of every rushing
moment blows it further and further ajar. Drab objects from the outer
world drift across the threshold and obtrude their presence--vagabond
tramps in a rose-garden, unpleasant, marring the surroundings, soiling
the atmosphere. Cares drift in, worldly interests drift in; in drift
smudgy, soiled, unpleasant objects brushing the door yet wider upon
its hinges till it stands back to its furthest extent and the
interior becomes at one with the outer world. The process is gradual,
indiscernible. When completed the knowledge of what has been done dawns
suddenly. One knocks against an intruder especially drab, starts into
wakefulness to rub the bruise, and looking around exclaims, “And this is
love!”

Well, it was love. But a rose-garden will not long remain beautiful if
no care is taken of what may intrude.

If we but stand sentinel at the door, exercising a nice discretion, the
garden may likely remain unsoiled, its air uncontaminated.



IV.

George said that though across the first portion of the scheme he had so
laboriously planned he had been shot at lightning speed by the vehicle
of Mary's action, its latter portion yet remained to be discussed.
“We've got to marry, dearest--and as quick as quick. We can't go on like
this--seeing each other once a week. No, not even if it were once a day.
It's got to be always.”

“Always and always, dear,” Mary said softly.

Women are more intoxicated than men by the sudden atmosphere of that
new world. The awe of it was still upon her. The light of love comes
strongly to men, with the sensation of bright sunshine; to women as
through stained glass windows, softly.

She continued: “Fancy saying 'always' and being glad to say it! I never
thought I could. Do you know--will this frighten you?--I am one of those
people who dread the idea of 'always.' I never could bear the idea of
looking far, far ahead and not seeing any end. It frightened me. Ever
since father died, I've been like that--even in little things, even in
tangible things. When we go to the seaside in the summer I never
can bear to look straight across the sea. That gives me the idea of
always--of long, long miles and miles without a turn or a stop. I
want to think every day, every hour, that what I am doing can't go
on--mustchange. It suffocates me to think otherwise. I want to jump out,
to scream.”

Then she gave that laugh that seldom failed to come to her relief,
and said: “It's a sort of claustrophobia--isn't that the word?--on a
universal scale. But why is it? And why am I suddenly changed now? Why
does the thought of always, always, endless always with you, bring a
sort of--don't laugh, dear--a sort of bliss, peace?”

This poor George of mine, who was no deep thinker, nevertheless had the
reason pat. He said:

“I think because the past has all been unhappy and because this, you
know, means happiness.”

She gave a little sigh; told him: “Yes, that's it--happiness.”



V.

And now they fell to making plans as mating birds build nests. Here a
bit of straw and there a tuft of moss; here a feather, there a shred
of wool--George would do this and George would do that; here the
house would be and thus would they do in the house. Probabilities were
outraged, obstacles vaulted.

Castles that are builded in the air spring into being quicker than
Aladdin's palace--bricks and mortar, beams and stones are featherweight
when handled in the clouds; every piece is so dovetailed, marked and
numbered that like magic there springs before the eye the shining
whole--pinnacled, turreted, embattled.

Disaster arrives when the work is completed. “There!” we say, standing
back, a little flushed and out of breath with the excitement of the
thing. “There! There's a place in which to live! Could any existence be
more glorious?” And then we advance a step and lean against the walls
to survey the surrounding prospect. It is the fatal action. The material
body touches the aerial structure and down with a crash the castle
comes--back we pitch into the foundations, and thwack, bump, thwack,
comes the masonry tumbling about us, bruising, wounding.



VI.

George had built the castle. Mary had sat by twittering and clapping her
hands for glee as higher and higher it rose. He knew for a fact, he told
her, that his uncle had not expended upon his education much more than
half the money left him for the purpose. He was convinced that by
hook or by crook he could obtain the 400 pounds that would buy him the
practice at Runnygate of which the Dean had told him. They would have
a little house there--the town would thrive--the practice would
nourish--in a year--why, in a year they would likely enough have to be
thinking of getting a partner! And it would begin almost immediately!
In three weeks the examination would be held. He could not fail to
pass--then for the 400 pounds and Runnygate!

And then, unhappily, George leaned against this castle wall; provoked
the crash.

“Till then, dear,” he said, “you will stay with these Chater people.
I know you hate it; but it will be only a short time, a few weeks at
most.”

Instantly her gay twittering ceased. Trouble drove glee from her eyes.
Memory chased dreams from her brain. Distress tore down the gay colours
from her cheeks. She clasped her hands; from her seat half rose.

“Oh!” she cried; and again, “Oh! I had forgotten!”

“Forgotten? Forgotten what?”

“Dearest, I should have told you at the beginning, but I could not. I
wanted to wait until I knew. I have not seen her yet this morning.”

My startled George was becoming pale. “Knew what? Seen whom? What do you
mean?”

She said, “No, I won't tell you. I won't spoil all this beautiful
morning we have spent. I will wait till next week.”

“Mary, what do you mean? Wait till next week? No. You must tell me now.
How could I leave you like this, knowing you are in some trouble? What
has happened? You must tell. You must. I insist.”

“Ah, I will.” Her agitation, as her mind cast back over the events of
the previous night, was enhanced by the suddenness of the change from
the sunshine in which she had been disporting to the darkness that now
swept upon her. She was as a girl who, singing along a country lane, is
suddenly confronted from the hedgeside by some ugly tramp.

She said, “You know that young Mr. Chater?”

Dark imaginings clouded upon George's brow. “Yes,” he said. “Yes;
well--?”

“Last night--” And then she gave him the history of events.

This simple George of mine writhed beneath it.

It was a poison torturing his system, twisting his brow, knotting his
hands. Her presence, when she finished, did not stay his cry beneath
his rackings: he was upon his feet. “By Gad,” he cried, “I'll thrash the
life out of him! The swine! By Gad, I'll kill him!”

She laid a hand upon his arm. “Georgie, dear,” she pleaded. “Don't,
don't take it like that. I haven't finished.”

Roughly he turned upon her. “Well, what else? What else?”

“I haven't seen him since. He went away early this morning for the
week-end. And I have not seen Mrs. Chater again either. I am to see her
this afternoon. She sent me word to take the children as usual and that
she would see me at three.”

My poor George bitterly broke out: “Oh! Will she? That's kind of her!
That's delightful of her! Are you going to see her?”

“Of course I shall see her.”

“'Of course'! 'Of course'! I don't know what you mean by talking in that
tone. You won't stay there another minute! That's what you'll tell her
if you insist upon seeing her. If you had behaved properly you'd have
walked out of the house there and then when it happened last night.”

Spite of her trouble Mary could not forbear to laugh. “Dearest, how
could I?”

But this furious young man could not see her point. His fine passion
swept him above contingencies.

“Well, then, this morning,” he laid down. “The first thing this morning
you should have gone.” He supplied detail: “Packed your box, and called
a cab and gone.”

His dictatory air drew from her another sad little laugh.

“Oh, George, dear,” she cried, “gone where?”

It was a bucket of water dashed upon his flames, and for a moment they
flickered beneath it--then roared again: “_Where? Anywhere!_”

“Oh!” she cried, “you are stupid! You don't see--you don't understand!
Easy to say 'anywhere,' but where--_where_? I have no money. I have no
friends--I--”

The knowledge of her plight and her outlook crowded upon her speech;
broke her voice.

Her distracted George in a moment had her hands in his. “Oh, my dear,”
 he cried, “what a fool I am! What a beast to storm like that! I was
so wild. So mad. Of course you had to think before you moved. You were
right, of course you were right. But, my darling, I'm right now. You see
that, don't you? You can't stay a moment longer with those beasts.”

And then he laughed grimly. “Especially,” he added, “after what I'm
going to do to Master Bob.”

She too laughed. The thought of Bob learning manners beneath the tuition
of those sinewy brown hands that were about hers was very pleasant to
her. But it was a pleasure that must be denied--this she saw clearly as
the result of weary tossings throughout the night; and now she set about
the task of explaining it to George.

She said: “Oh, my dear, you're not right. Georgie, I can't go--if Mrs.
Chater will let me stay I must stay.”

He tried to be calm, to understand these women, to understand his Mary.
“But why?” he asked. “Why?”

“Dearest, because I must bridge over the time until you are ready to
take me. You see that?”

“Of course. But why there? You can easily get another place.”

“Oh, easily! If you had been through it as I have been! The first thing
they ask you for is a reference from your former situation. Think what a
reference Mrs. Chater would give me!”

He would not agree. He plunged along in his blundering, man fashion:
“In time you could get a place where they would not ask questions--or
rather--yes, of course this is it. Tell them frankly all that happened.
Who could see you and not believe you? Tell them everything. There must
be some nice people in the world.”

“There may be. But they don't want helps or governesses--in my
experience.” The little laugh she gave was sadly doleful.

He was still angry. “You can't generalise like that. There are thousands
who would believe you and be glad to take you. Suppose you have to wait
a bit--well, you have a little money that she must give you; and I--oh,
curse my poverty!--I can borrow, and I can sell things.”

The help that a man would give a woman so often has lack of sympathy; he
is unkind while meaning to be kind. George's obdurateness, coming when
she was most in need of kisses, hurt her. Trouble welled in her eyes.

“I wouldn't do that,” she said. “For one thing, we want all our money.
Why throw it away to get me out of a place in which I shall only be
for a few weeks longer? Another thing--another thing--” She dragged
a ridiculous handkerchief from her sleeve; dabbed her brimming eyes.
“Another thing--I'm afraid to risk it. I'm afraid to be alone and
looking for a place again. There--now you know. I'm a coward.”

She fell to sniffing and sobbing; and her wretched George, cursing
himself for the grief he had evoked, cursing Bob Chater, cursing Mrs.
Chater, cursing his uncle Marrapit, put his arms about her and drew her
to him. She quivered hysterically, and he frantically moaned that he
was a beast, a brute, unworthy; implored forgiveness; entreated calm; by
squeezing her with his left arm and with his right hand dabbing her eyes
with her handkerchief, screwed to a pathetic little damp ball, strove to
stem the flood that alarmingly welled from them.



VII.

It was an awful position for any young man; and just as my poor George,
distinguished in nothing, inept, bewildered, was in a mood murderous to
the whole world save this anguished fairy, a wretched old gentleman
must needs come sunning himself down the path, making for this seat with
hobbling limbs.

He collapsed upon it, and then, glancing to his right, was struck with
palpitations by sight of the heaving back of a young woman over whose
shoulder glared at him with hideous ferocity the face of a young man.

“Dear me, dear me,” said he; “nothing wrong, sir, I trust?”

“Go away!” roared my distracted George.

“Eh?” inquired the old gentleman, horribly startled.

“Go away! Go away!”

The fire of those baleful eyes, of that bellowing voice, struck terror
into the aged heart. He clutched his stick.

“Oh dear, oh dear,” said he; hobbled away at a speed dangerous to his
life and limbs to seek protection of a park-keeper.

The sobs grew longer, less hysterical: changed into long “ohs” of
misery; died away.

“There, there,” said George, patting, dabbing. “There, there.”

With a final frantic sniff she recovered her self-possession.

“I'm a little f--fool,” said she.

“I'm a brute,” said George.

The bitter knowledge nerved each to better efforts. Calm reigned.

Mary said, “Now you must listen and believe, dear.”

“Let me have your hand, then.”

She gave it with a little confiding, snuggling movement, and she
continued: “You must believe, because I have thought it all out, whereas
to you it is new. If I were a proper-spirited girl”--she rebuked his
negation with a gesture--“if I were a proper-spirited girl I know I
should leave Mrs. Chater at once--walk out and not care what I might
suffer rather than stay where I had been insulted. Girls in books would
do it. Oh, Georgie, this isn't books. This is real. I have been through
it, and I would die sooner than face it again. You know--I have told
you--what it is like being alone in cheap lodgings in London. Afraid of
people, dear. Afraid of men, afraid of women. I couldn't, could not go
through it again. And after all-don't you see?--if Mrs. Chater will
let me stay, what have I to mind? I shall be better off than before, if
anything. Mrs. Chater has always been--well, sharp. She may be a little
worse--there's nothing in that. But this Bob Chater, since he came, has
been the worst part of it. And as things are now, his mother watchful
and he--what shall I say? angry, ashamed--why, he will pay no further
attention to me. Come, am I not right? Isn't it best?--if only she will
let me stay.”

“I don't like it,” George said. “I don't like it.”

“Dearest, nor I. But we can't, can't have what we like, and this will be
the best of the nasty things. For so short a time, too. I'm quite bright
about it. Am I not? Look at me.”

George looked. Then he said, “All right, old girl.”

She clapped her hands. “Only one thing more. You mustn't seek out--you
mustn't touch the detestable Bob.”

With the gloom of one relinquishing life's greatest prize George said,
“I suppose I mustn't.” He added, “I tell you what, though. You mustn't
interfere with this. I'll save it up for him. The day I take you out and
marry you I'll pull him out--and pay him.”

They parted upon the promises that Mary would write that evening to tell
him of the result of her interview with Mrs. Chater, and that, in the
especial circumstances, he might come to see her in the Park for just
two minutes on Monday morning.

And each went home, thinking, not of that portending interview with Mrs.
Chater, but upon the love they had declared.




CHAPTER IV.

Events And Sentiment Mixed In A Letter.



I.

At ten o'clock that night Mary took up her pen.

“First, my dear, to tell you that it is all right. I may stay. I had
lunch with the children in the nursery, and just as we had finished
a maid came to say that Mrs. Chater would see me in the study. Down I
crawled, wishing that I was the heroine of a novel who would have passed
firmly down the stairs and into the room, 'pale, but calm a

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