The Smart Set/Volume 11/Issue 2/We of Adam's Clay

by Cosmo Hamilton

 

We of Adam's Clay

By Cosmo Hamilton

Little Mrs. Blundell—the beautiful Betty Blundell—addressed her envelope to Captain Evelyn Blundell, R.N., before she commenced her letter, which, in itself, proves that little Mrs. Blundell is no different from ninety-nine women out of a hundred.

“My very ownest hubby-man,” she wrote, in her ridiculously pretty backward hand, with her fair, small head on one side, her lips pursed up, her blue eyes slightly closed, “my very ownest hubby-man, so you have got leave to come back to your lonely little wife at last, after three of the longest, dullest, most unhappy, most perfectly beastly years she has ever spent! Hurrah, once, hurrah, twice, hurrah, three times, and one more hurrah for luck! I can't tell you how delighted and how excited I am. I feel that if I were just an ordinary woman I should dash off and buy something I couldn't afford, or go in for a course of face-massage, or have my hair waved by a Paris specialist. But, then, I'm not, you know, darling, am I? The next six weeks will seem longer, even, than the longest of these three years, each of which has been an age in itself. My dear old boy, how brown and bearded and tobaccoey you will be, won't you? And how you will purr, and rub your daily thinning head against your poor little missus's shoulder! (How many esses in missus's? I don't know!)

“Darling, I have done as you asked me to do. It was rather a wrench to leave town and the few friends who helped to keep me bright and cheerful. But I love my man, oh, so dearly, dearie—you know that, don't you?—and I have let the flat for the rest of the Summer to my old chum, Milly Cator, who knows you. She's not lovely, but she's very jolly and very trustworthy.

“Also, like the best little wife in the world—and I am, aren't I, darling?—I have got exactly the rooms you described in which we are to spend our honeymoon number two. I'm sitting in one of them now, having arrived this afternoon in time for tea. You wanted to be five miles from any station. Well, this is ten. You pined to be in the midst of wild, solitary country, where the abominable swish of the sea is never heard. Very well, this is idiotically and insanely wild—almost dangerously so—as solitary as Bond street in August, and nearly as green as a certain Evelyn used to be if I ever danced twice in succession with any other man. Do you remember those dear, dear days?

“Of course, there is the usual village two miles off, which has the usual complement of Red Lions, Cats and Fiddles, and Rising Suns. And there is the usual green, whose daisies scraggy horses eat, never seeming to grow any less scraggy. Of course, there are the usual generally bootless children, with siren voices and neglected noses; the usual old men, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans everything; the usual women with curvature of the spine from so constantly bending over the furrows.

“No one has ever even heard of the sea—at least, they look as though they hadn't, which is pretty nearly the same thing. And I don't think there is a Salvation Army. I didn't hear anything of it as I drove through in a buggy which ought to have been a dog-cart, drawn by a horse which ought to have been a pony. At any rate, you may make your mind easy as to shops, for there is a boot-maker, a tallow-chandler, a postmaster, a fly-paper merchant, a fishmonger, an oil-man, a sweet-stuff manufacturer, a linen-draper, a tailor, a green-grocer, a baker, a tobacconist, and a butcher—his name is Winship, and let me warn you against knocking your head as you go in, down three wooden steps—and please see that you don't tread on the kittens.

“There is no bath-room here—do you mind my babbling on, darling? It's the next best thing to talking to you, which is the best thing in the whole wide world—but they tell me there is a hose, and that our nearest neighbor is a farmer a mile away.

“The good people are as good as usual, though not a whit better, have acres of kitchen garden, two children—boy and girl—a grandmother, a wire-haired terrier, who, or which, has its chin on my foot at this moment, and a great collection of pigs somewhere about.

“They are open-eyed at all my luggage—I mean the good people, not the pigs!—have never had lodgers before, have never been to London—though the good woman's brother is a plumber at Whitechapel, with twins and bronchitis—have no piano, no books, and nothing to read save a well-selected collection of texts, which hang in clusters over my bed. So far, I have committed murder only once, and that was superfluous, as it was merely a ladybird. I am not much of a naturalist yet.

“By the way, did I tell you our nearest neighbor is a farmer a mile away? How I am going to kill time until you come, I can't conceive! You know how I hate the country. I think I shall sit under a tree all day, and imagine that your head is on my knee. At any rate, I shall attend every service at the village church, to pray that nothing may happen to my dearest husband.

“And so, good-bye, darling. I shall write to you at the various places you say you will call at on your homeward voyage, and with all my love, every little bit of it, now and forever,

“Your own,
“Betty.

“P. S.—Hurry, hurry, hurry, '’cos I wants yer mighty badly, yes, I does, I does, I do!'”

II

“My Darling Milly:

“Before I do anything else, I feel I must write and thank you for being such a brick. If you hadn't taken my flat just when you did, old girl, I should have been regularly in the proverbial cart. But, of course, having been away, you don't know the circumstances which led to my being obliged to evacuate the untenable position, do you? Well, I'll tell you, if you will swear by all you hold sacred—if there is anything in the world you do hold sacred—to tear this letter up, directly you have read it.

“You remember, before you went away at the beginning of the season, Reggie Rawnsley bringing a man named Worthing—Valentine Worthing—to the flat to tea? Do you? The man with the face of a Greek god, and the body of a satyr, whom we had both noticed when he represented Cupid at the carnival at Prince's? That tea was the first of many teas, many dinners, many suppers. You know I always liked books I couldn't understand, and people—by people I mean men—it was impossible to see through at the first glance. I liked Valentine for that very reason. He puzzled me. I couldn't make out whether he knew nothing or everything. When I looked at his beautiful face, so open, so frank, so regular, so unlined, so—but it isn't the word I want—innocent, and then glanced down at his almost humped back, his claw-like hands, his withered little legs, I felt bound to get at the bottom of him, to study him, to find out to the last inch just what manner of man he was.

“I dropped Reggie Rawnsley, but it was more difficult than I thought. The silly boy said his heart would break, and told me I had made him loathe women—how absurd that every young man should say the same thing under the same circumstances!—and concentrated my attention on Valentine Worthing. When I look back upon the duel we fought, my heart palpitates as though I had been fool enough to run a mile. I retired from the world, gave up all engagements, and spent my days at the flat, and my evenings at places where society doesn't congregate. We were inseparable. He would be with me about midday, half an hour after his advance guard, preceded by a florist's shop-load of flowers. Till six o'clock he would sit at the piano, playing the most exquisite airs to me, and singing little strange, pathetic songs that crept into my veins and filled me with electricity, and made me cry like a baby. If he ever spoke—and he rarely did speak—he would say simple, boyish, enthusiastic things about art and literature and religion—the kind of things one can imagine a convent girl saying. Then, about six o'clock every evening he would climb off the music-stool, give a great sigh, touch my hand almost reverently with the tips of his fingers, and go home to dress.

“At eight o'clock the bell would ring, and I would go down and find him waiting for me in his brougham, scented and curled, no longer the Greek god, but an old, blasé man, with leering eyes, and a keen, witty, blasphemous, epigrammatic tongue. And we would dine together, and go to some out-of-the-way music-hall, and then have supper. During the whole time he would never cease talking, tearing every good, old-fashioned thing to shreds, heaping ridicule on chastity, faith, love, honesty; pouring scorn on the idea of a future life, and gradually filling me with dread, loathing and contempt.

“Then he would drive me home, stand for a moment gripping my hand in both his own, looking at me with eyes in which there was a kind of lurking sneer, and then leave me—trembling, limp, disgusted, with all my flesh cockled, as though a bat had touched my mouth with its wing.

“Every night, I determined I would never see him again; I even went so far ten or eleven times as to tell Jane on no account to let him come in again. But, every morning, he sent flowers with some little, simple, respectful greeting written upon a card, and, filled with curiosity to see what his mood would be, I would tell Jane to let him in the moment he arrived. And so it went on. Every day, he would play and sing, and make me cry; every night, he would fill me with nausea. And the extraordinary thing about him was that when he disgusted and frightened me most, then was his fascination most strong. But, at last, it had to end.

“One night, coming home in his carriage— Pouf! I can't write it; it makes me sick—even me! At any rate, when I got home I changed, packed up all my things, left the keys with Jane, and caught the workman's train—they must have taken me for a madwoman, although I own I looked awfully sweet, with a most becoming pallor on my cheeks, and my eyes wide open, and very blue—to Uxbridge.

“I waited at a hotel till a respectable time of day, and then drove over to my father-in-law's place, some miles out. He is a dean, you know, and most ridiculously rural. I thought that, if I put myself, metaphorically speaking, upon a diet of beer, the constant taste of absinthe would disappear.

“And then I got Evelyn's letter, in which he said he was coming home, and, of course, that was a blow. I did think he was pretty sure to give me another free year. However, I mustn't grumble. The three years he has been away have been the happiest years of my life. Do you remember my saying to you two minutes after he had left the house—his eyes were full of tears—as soon as I was able to stop sobbing, that I should live every moment of my life till he came back? My goodness, Milly, I have lived them, too, I have!

“You really were a dear to take the flat, directly I wired to you. Evelyn wanted me to get rooms in some very quiet country place, and wait for him for the honeymoon number two. (Goodness, how I laughed!) And here I am in about the most benighted, God-forgotten place upon the map, I verily believe. Of course, it's very lovely, and all that, but you know my idea of scenery—the sky-line of the Knightsbridge houses, as seen any morning from the Row. Really, I shouldn't have left town at all, but for Valentine Worthing.

“What I am going to do to kill time here I can't conceive. There is not even a resident parson in the place! There is, I am glad to hear, a farmer living a mile away. Perhaps, only perhaps, he may be worth studying. Well, ta-ta, old girl! I'll let you know how I get on. In six weeks' time all fun will be at an end, and I shall no longer be a—is free-agent a good word?

“Yours,
“Betty.”

III

Little Mrs. Blundell threw her pen down, rose, and stretched herself, yawning in a bored way, yawning as a martyr yawns.

For a moment, she stood in the middle of the little, slanting-ceilinged room, upon the square patch of hideously cheap carpet, and tried to imagine that she could hear the never-ending hansom jingling by, the sound of the shrill, impatient cab whistle, the jolting of omnibus wheels, the nasal voices of brisk tradesmen, the cockney twitterings of sparrows. And, with closed eyes, she tried to see the misshapen figure of Valentine Worthing perched upon a piano, flooding the air with minor chords, and piercing her heart with his plaintive notes. For a moment, with her arms flung out, her head thrown back, her eyes sparkling with excitement and dare-devilry, she tried to persuade herself that her husband had only a moment ago left her for three years—that for three long, delightful, unhampered years the world, the hitherto unexplored world, was hers to discover.

In the garden behind, a baby started crying, and reality forced its huge, hob-nailed boot into the door, and drove make-believe ignominiously out of the window. Before the baby had been hushed and soothed into silence, Mrs. Blundell's eyes were hard and discontented again.

It was all so quiet, so unexciting, so lethargic. In the place of all the dear familiar noises of London, there were only to be heard the soothing swish of the blades of corn rubbing shoulders under the gentle hand of the breeze; the quiet cooing of doves on the roof; the distant music of sheep-bells playing an unaccompanied quartet; the occasional crowing of some egotistical cock, and the murmur of admiration from the hens who formed his harem; the bumpings and dumpings of a bustling housewife about the kitchen below; the happy growlings of a bunch of puppies biting one another's ears; the intermittent song of a boy digging in the kitchen-garden; the all-pervading murmur of the Midsummer bee.

But above all these irritating sounds, there was one which got upon Betty Blundell's nerves until she felt like screaming or breaking something. It was the regular hush-hush-hush which came into the window at the other end of the room, the window which looked out upon the placid garden of the cottage.

For a moment, she stood listening to it, wondering what idiot could be doing it. Then, as it continued with almost the regularity of the swinging of a pendulum, she gave a gasp of anger, and, with the blood eddying about her brain, hurried across the room to the window to shout at the person who could be doing it only to upset her already tingling nerves.

With her beautiful face distorted with irritation, Betty put her head out of the open window, flinging aside the screen of honeysuckle which hung down over it.

Leaning anxiously over a cradle, her young eyes filled with maternal concern, looking down at the flushed and creased face of a great baby boy, stood a little, rough-shod girl of nine or ten. Her lips were wide apart, “hushing” loudly, as, with both hands, she dandled the cradle to and fro, beating time with one of her feet.

The lines of irritation gradually died out of Betty's face, and an expression of great interest came instead. With intense curiosity, she watched every movement the little girl made, noted every look that came into her eyes; how, after vigorously “hushing” for a quarter of an hour, she suddenly bent over the baby's face, and while still rocking the cradle as regularly as ever, listened eagerly to its breathing; how, apparently not quite satisfied that sleep had come, she touched, still rocking, but more gently now, the lids of the baby's eyes with the tips of her finger; how, with fierce eyebrows and threatening eyes, she raised a peremptory finger to one of the pups which, tumbling heels over head out of the house, made a wobbly dash toward her; and how, finally, “hushing” no longer, she stopped the rocking of the cradle, gave a tender touch to the blanket about the baby's ears, and crept quietly, standing still every now and then to listen, into the house.

“How extraordinary it is!” said Betty to herself. “She couldn't be more patient if the thing were her own. I wonder why I wasn't born a mother like that little country girl. Fancy me, a mother!”

IV

Suddenly, Betty Blundell's expression of settled boredom changed to one of wide-awake surprise and curiosity.

The bow-window in the front room, into which she had returned, peered through thickly climbing roses into the road. Along this road, swung one of the highest, broadest-shouldered, biggest-footed, best-looking men little Mrs. Blundell had ever seen.

As he came level with the window, his profile, slightly shaded by a dark tweed cap, stood out in clean-cut strength against the unclouded sky. As he moved, always with the same long, well-oiled stride, a pair of keen eyes scanned every other blade of rapidly yellowing corn with pride, affection and paternal anxiety.

Betty ran to the door quickly.

“Mrs. Weeks, Mrs. Weeks!” she cried.

From the distance came the sound of a flat-iron dropped, with evident fluster upon its metal stand, followed by a shuffling of heavy feet.

“Mrs. Weeks!”

“Yes'm.”

The voice, oily and deferential, and filled with concern, came from the narrow, winding stairs.

“Come quickly! I want to speak to you.”

Mrs. Blundell had thrown the window higher, had moved the bamboo table away, and was leaning out, framed in roses.

With panting breath, and with her apron twisted around her plump, bare arms, Mrs. Weeks hurried in.

“Mrs. Weeks,” said little Mrs. Blundell, her voice vibrating with excitement, “come to the window quickly, look out to the right, and tell me who that gentleman is.”

Flushed, billowy, shiny, Mrs. Weeks did as she was bid. Almost at once she drew in her head, turning a hearty laugh into a respectful cough.

“That be no genelman, ma'am. That be just furrmurr.”

“Do, you mean the usual kind of thing?”

“Same's always, ma'am.”

“Do you mean a man who grows potatoes and cabbages, and all that?”

“An' corrn, an' burrley, an' oerrts,” said Mrs. Weeks, with her Sunday smile, “an' that loike, that's it, ma'am.” Then, drawing her muscular, sunburnt arm from beneath its hiding-place, she pointed out of the window. “That's 'is corrn opposite, an' 'is furrm's down the road.” Whereupon, suddenly remembering that her arm was bare, she murmured a confused apology, blushed painfully, giggled, and thrust the member out of sight again.

Mrs. Blundell had said, “Really! Dear me!” in a vacant, polite way, and had gone back to the window.

With her dainty elbows on the sill, she leaned her chin on both her hands, and the clustering roses, tumbling into bloom over one another, scrambled to touch her hair. Her blue eyes followed the swinging figure of the big, muscular man until, passing between the two fields of corn which waved their heads toward him with affectionate deference, he grew smaller and smaller, became a smudge, a stain, a speck upon the enormous golden sea, and disappeared.

Round Mrs. Blundell's delicate mouth there crept a tinge of a smile. In her eyes, a growing expectation and curiosity mingled with relief and surprise.

“Oh, thanks, very much, Mrs. Weeks,” she said, putting stamps on her letters with an amount of care and precision which was almost irritating. “I thought I should just like to know, you know. I like to take an interest in every one who happens to live near me. I beg your pardon—Ashley is his name? Really, beyond just how-d'ye-do, and that kind of thing, he has not spoken to you for fifteen years! To whom does he speak, then? Nobody! Really! But he goes to London sometimes, I suppose? Not even once a year? Dear me, what a quaint person! Never once left the village, eh? Really! Married, and that kind of thing,I suppose? No? Then, who looks after him? ... Really? Surely she must be blind and deaf if she's as old as that? ... Your aunt? I beg your pardon. How very nice for him! No relations? How very sad! But I suppose he makes farming pay, if he works so hard? Yes, I should think so, too. But what does he do with his money if he never goes away? ... Buys books? Yes? And gives pensions to all the people in the village? Does he, really? What an exceedingly interesting and curious person, Mrs. Weeks.”

She laughed a ripple of effortless laughter, and, half turning her back to her landlady, commenced touching things on the bamboo, in the way civilized women have of letting one know that they have had enough of one. With that peculiar instinct which is born and not bred in women, Mrs. Weeks murmured that her iron would be getting cold, and made her way to the door.

“Oh, and Mrs. Weeks, I should like tea about nine o'clock, in a nice, big pot. The dinner was excellent. I am just going for a little walk.”

The heavy, pleased, fat steps of Mrs. Weeks sounded on the stairs. In the kitchen below began the deep rumble of a man's voice, the noise of a poker being thrust into a fire, and the pattering of children's feet upon the red-tiled floor. Without, the sparrows chattered in the ivy, a quiet breeze rubbed the leaves of the rose-trees together, the distant tinkle of a sheep-bell floated imperceptibly by.

Little Mrs. Blundell put her letters into the pocket of an expensively simple muslin frock, and crossed the sloping floor of her oak-beamed sitting-room, into her bedroom. She emerged from it after quite a little while, with a smile on her lips, and a very clever poppy-covered hat upon a head of hair which rivaled the ripest corn.

“No,” she said, aloud, standing on a chair to get a full-length glimpse of herself in the square of cheap looking-glass over the narrow mantelpiece, “no, I don't fancy it will be so difficult to kill time here, after all.”

And then, with her sweet face glowing, her eyes dancing, and carrying her head slightly on one side, like an analytical chemist starting on a new experiment, Betty Blundell tripped down-stairs, and took the turning to the right.

V

Many times a day, during the thirty-odd years of his outlandish life, had John Ashley passed along the road which ran, under the best-parlor window of Mrs. Weeks's cottage, from his farm to the village, at first, on a wiry, electrical pony, or with quick, eager, boyish steps; later, on a stout, unpretentious mare of slate-roofed hue, or with the steady, long, set-teeth swing which had brought something of the devil into Mrs. Blundell's big blue eyes.

No one had ever seen John Ashley driving. Some there were who said that it was because he considered it an invalid's mode of traveling; others, that his dog-cart was too shabby.

Only John Ashley knew the reason. He could not forget an evening, twelve years before, when his father, with slow drips of blood falling into the snow through a stained shirt tied about his head, had been carried into the house, for his son to sit dumbly and stare at before he was taken to a far more permanent and comfortable roof-tree in the shadow of the willow.

Since then alone, sometimes restlessly, impatiently, but always to the letter, his life had been spent in the carrying out of a promise made to his father a few nights before his death—a promise never to leave the village on any pretense, unless bound to do so on account of ill-health or misfortune.

He had, not unnaturally, asked his father the reason, before he gave his word. His father had set his glass down quickly, as though his arm had suddenly lost its strength. “Because,” he had answered, “in the country there are few men and women, and many trees. Trees tell no lies, and do not rob one of one's wife. Trees are our friends, whose sympathy and confidence are not false. Trees are the only Christians God gives life to—except dogs. In towns there are few trees, and many men and women. You will be safe only in the country.”

After his father's death, the reasons why he had asked this promise of his son were found carefully stated in an envelope marked “Private.” In language so restrained, so almost Biblical, as to emphasize more strongly the agony of the man as he wrote, the story was told—the usual story of his friend's treachery, his wife's dishonor, his own broken heart, his consequent disbelief in humanity. His wife had married him for love; wherefore, there being no such thing as love among men and women, he had fled to his trees. So it came to pass that John Ashley, at thirty-odd years of age, had never left his village. During the first seventeen of these years his father had steeped his mind in literature; had bred in him a love of nature which was now almost passionate; had taught him the cultivation of land, the rearing of live-stock; had been, indeed, his mother, sister, brother, friend, school-master, playmate, nurse.

Nature, his books, his fields, his animals and his memory, had been Ashley's only companions since his father's death. For twelve years, he had spoken merely to his farm-hands, to other farmers, to buyers, to his old pensioners in the village, and the few villagers themselves. He had never seen a woman of his own class.

With her characteristic nimbleness of mind, the beautiful Betty Blundell had filled in the spaces between the lines of information she had drawn from Mrs. Weeks. John Ashley was new. The study of a new thing, when it was male, was always interesting to her. The study of John Ashley would keep boredom, the worst of all evil spirits, at arm's length.

So little Mrs. Blundell, who hated walking, took the turning to the right.

VI

She followed the corn-lined road until, within a quarter of a mile from the village, it ran up a hill. Here, she branched off the road into a field, tree-topped, where there was a gap. Looking down upon a clump of irregular red roofs, grouped, chicken-wise, under the wing of their mother church, she stopped, tired, expectant, amused and resourceful.

The sun was setting. There was a sudden hush in the world. A solitary crow, flying quickly, left a harsh jar in the air. The silver tongue of the ancient church, wailing the death of one hour, singing the birth of another, instantly corrected it. That was all. The whole sky seemed to have been slashed at with a sharp knife. From under the surface of it, there welled up streaks of blood which trickled about the cuts, staining everything a deep crimson. Insidiously, the trees became tinted with it, the weeds, and bracken, and shaking grass, the thin white line of road, the corn on either side. The windows of the church and of the cottages in the village suddenly flared as though the rooms they lighted were on fire.

Little Mrs. Blundell saw none of this. Shading her eyes with a delicate little hand, she watched the road below, steadily, eagerly, impatiently. A speck on the white appeared, turned into two, grew into a tired horse and a weary man, and left the road for a meadow on the left. Then, nothing.

Another speck! Little Mrs. Blundell bent forward as though to give her eyes less distance to peer through. The silver bell marked off another quarter. A quick smile came suddenly to Betty's face. She could now recognize the height, the breadth, the slow, swinging stride of the man placed upon earth to amuse her until the novelty of him wore off, or until it became necessary to drop him for reasons of a diplomatic nature.

She watched him grow slowly larger, and suddenly stop. Leaning on a stile, which led to a foot-path from the road up the hill on which she stood, and back again behind her, he seemed to be watching something intently. Mrs. Blundell saw nothing to look at—no animal, no person. Surely he couldn't be looking at the sunset, a man who had seen nothing but sunsets since he was born! What a strange effect the country seemed to have upon people! Bother sunsets! Why didn't he come? The dew would fall presently, she supposed, and her muslin would be ruined.

Why on earth was he taking off his cap? Was there some woman in the field whom she couldn't see? Apparently not. He still had his chin tilted upward. Sentimental, forsooth, for all his inches! Artistic, too, she supposed. So much the better. He would appreciate the dip of her hat, the exquisite outline of her face, the great soul-depth of her deep-blue eyes. She gathered that he had never seen any other women than women with aprons round their arms, with rolling r's.

How should she break her presence to him? What method would be most effective? Everything depended, she argued, as to which way he came up the hill—whether by the road or the foot-path. She hoped the walk had not disorganized the tiny curls upon her forehead. With a wet finger she smoothed her eyebrows, lightly and expertly sent home the hairpins which had worked out of their places, and, bending down, shook the dust from the edge of her frock.

When she looked down the hill again, Ashley had moved. He was on the foot-path between the waving grasses. His hands were behind his back, and his lips were moving. Very likely, Mrs. Blundell supposed, with a smile, he was repeating something out of those wretched books upon which he wasted so much money.

The problem was how to be most effective. Should she sit down and wait till he appeared on the side of the hill, and then ask him the way to the post-office, or should she stand on the tip-top of the hill, blocking the path he was following, outlined against the sky, flecked with the now paling red?

On came the man of nature with the indefinable longings, head down, arms behind, with a long, slow, swinging stride.

Against the sky, directly in his way, with wide-open, simple eyes, waited the little woman of the world, like a white, new-risen moon.

VII

“... No words of mine, my dear Milly, can convey the very least idea of the intense enjoyment that moment gave me. Even now—I have been back three hours—I can feel in my back that pleasant thrill which an exquisite bar of music, or a big moment in a well-written play always causes. Do you know? A sort of tingling, a fillip to that part of one which is supremely emotional.

“I didn't look at him for some minutes—seconds, I suppose, in cold, accurate English. Apparently, my eyes were fixed on the sky with that hungry, dreamy, girlish look which it took me so long to acquire, and which has come in most usefully on many former occasions. Nevertheless, I saw him stop with a great gasp, and stand with his huge arms hanging loosely at his sides, looking at me as though I were a will-o'-the-wisp, a vapor, a live poem. I wore that muslin I got for the Ashbeys' garden-party, transparent at the neck and arms, and the poppy hat everybody raved about so, and copied—the beasts! All nature seemed to be helping me, too—the faint, red glow, the green at my feet, the clear gold behind me. But I wanted the extra satisfaction of seeing what he would do when I looked into his eyes. So—oh, my dear, how thankful I am that Providence decided I should be a girl!—I gave myself a little shake, as though I had suddenly fallen to earth, and, with one of my best wide-eyed looks of intense, fearless innocence, suddenly met his gaze.”

Little Mrs. Blundell put down her pen, knocked the ash off her cigarette, drew the soft folds of her night-dress more closely around her, and threw back her head with a quiet, silvery peal of laughter.

“I really thought he would have fallen down,” she wrote, after a moment, bending her dimpling face over the table again. “In all my life, in the whole course of my experience, I never felt so thoroughly contented with myself. It was like, I take it, a sudden, prolonged burst of applause from a packed theatre, or a eulogistic criticism in the pages of some really important paper. I wish you could have seen my wild man of the woods. His mouth fell open, his eyes seemed to start out of his head, and his heart jumped and beat and panted—I could see it in his neck.

“For just a second, I confess I was frightened. He is so big, so strong, so—so untutored, so much a child of nature, that, for a moment, I thought he might catch hold of me and—well, 1 took my eyes away, and went quickly past him down the hill.

“I was afraid to turn at first to see what he was doing, because, of course, I thought he would be looking after me. They usually do, you know. But, finally, as I didn't wish to lose any of the enjoyment of the thing, I stooped down, pretending to pick some grass, and looked back under my arm. My dear, he hadn't moved! There he was, just as I had left him, with his back to me, his arms still hanging at his sides, his shoulders heaving.

“If any one had given me a rope of pearls, I don't believe I could have been more pleased. You know, after one has been at it for three whole well-filled years, and begun to think that perhaps some of one's power has gone, it really is delightful to find, so convincingly, that the power is there in all its abundance. Don't you think so?

“As I looked, he moved, pulled himself together, and, staggering like a man who wakes from a sleeping draught, went away—never once looking back. I wonder if he still thinks I came from the sky? I say sky, because it sounds better than the other word I was thinking of. I remember being awfully pleased once because Reggie Rawnsley—dear old Reggie!—suddenly shook me quite violently, and told me I was an imp. Funny thing to be pleased about, wasn't it?”

VIII

Putting the letter into its envelope, little Mrs. Blundell took up a hand-glass, and, holding it in both her hands, with her elbows resting on the table, looked into it earnestly. There were four candles behind it, and, although the window was wide open, their wicks burned straight and unwaveringly.

The night was hot and breathless. No sound broke its deep stillness. The moon, in its first quarter, hung sharp against a sky clotted with stars. Beyond the narrow white road, and the wide stretch of sleeping corn, a line of poplars stood, with every branch cut clear against the pale blue. The scent of honeysuckle and syringa crept into the room.

She broke into a sudden laugh, and commenced, with the air of one who conscientiously goes through a form of daily exercise, to practise a series of facial expressions. She pursed up her mouth, opened her eyes wide, and raised her eyebrows.

“How can you?” she said, aloud.

Then she let her mouth become tremulous and her eyes tender.

“Must you really go?” she said.

And then, with the quickness of lightning, she closed her lips into a short, straight line, let her eyebrows meet in the middle, and half-closed her eyes.

“Pray, don't run away with the notion that I want you to stay,” she said, coldly.

She tried this expression several times, with slight alterations, additions and emendations, and then changed it to one of intense sympathy and interest and rapt attention.

“Tell me about yourself,” she said.

Apparently satisfied with that, she threw a gleam of challenge into her eyes, held back her head, with her lips slightly apart, and said, “No, I never allow any man to kiss me—except my husband.”

Slow, heavy steps passed along the hard road. With the quickness of a minnow, and with all its elastic grace, she darted to the window and leaned out.

It was Ashley, passing along, with his arms behind him, eyes to the ground.

Betty watched him until he became merged into the shadows, and the echo of his steps had died away.

Then she drew in her head, with laughing, eager eyes, gathered up her writing-case, and crossed to her bedroom. On the way, she stopped involuntarily before a calendar.

“Only ten days,” she said, “only ten days, and he is so—so unexplored. But he no longer looks at the sky, I notice.”

IX

It was the following evening upon which Betty wrote again:

“I slept badly. I don't think I ever remember to have slept badly before. It was a new experience, and so, I suppose, I ought not to grumble. On the contrary, as my whole life is devoted to the search of new experiences, I suppose I ought to be glad. As a matter of fact, I grumbled horribly until I got out of bed, and looked at myself in the glass.

“I dreamed the most uncomfortable thing. I dreamed that this person, this farmer, had choked me, and that he laid me down upon the crest of the hill—our hill—and covered me up with withered leaves. My husband ran up the hill, and stood looking at him, with the most peculiar expression in his eyes. Although I was dead, I saw and heard everything. From what I remember now—a good deal has happened since this morning—I think John Ashley was out of his mind. He sat by me, smiling foolishly. All the strong lines around his mouth seemed to have been loosened. He looked like some bronze statue, over which some one had put a thin layer of putty as a practical joke. I remember being a little shocked at his sudden alteration. But I could have laughed at the careful way in which he put the leaves all over me. He didn't shovel them over me; he placed them gently, one by one, as though he were dressing a dinner-table. They really looked rather becoming on my white dress. If Evelyn is in funds when he comes back—only nine days now!—I shall get Friola to build me a white evening frock, covered with copper-colored leaves. I am sure it would be rather effective, with bronze shoes and a wreath of the same leaves in my hair.

“But let me tell you how it seemed to me that Evelyn looked, before I forget. He looked like a man in blind-man's buff when the handkerchief is taken off his eyes, and he finds himself facing people he thought were all behind him.

“'So I've discovered you!' I heard him say to me. 'And he's choked you, has he? Well, it saves me the trouble, and serves you right.'

“I think I was more surprised than hurt. But as Evelyn turned away to go down the hill, lurching like a drunken man, I did all I could to cry out to him to come back, and kill Ashley horribly, and I couldn't. My tongue felt like a huge garden-roller. I strained, and tugged, and pushed, and couldn't move it. I suppose the effort woke me.

“I knew the whole thing was a dream, of course, but it seemed so real, so actual, that, for a moment or two, I was afraid to open my eyes, fearing I should see Ashley's inane face, and hear Evelyn—dear, fond, old bull-necked Evelyn—thudding down the hill.

“I ate three new-laid eggs this morning! They were like cream. I believe they were born on purpose for me. I must say, the whole place is most kind and obliging. It was very nice and fresh in the little sitting-room.

“I wished all the time that John Ashley could come in and see me. I must have looked so simple and harmless and wide-eyed. I wore that perfectly heavenly breakfast gown that I took from Edith Dinting to settle her bridge debts to me. Do you remember it?—hand-painted chiffon, and miles of lace—real lace—cut low at the neck, and falling away at the elbows—and, as you know, my arms are very beautiful.

“I couldn't help thinking, as I put on my morning frock, what small things are capable of changing one's entire mental attitude. Yesterday afternoon I loathed this place, with its quiet, its scents, its rural noises. I hated to feel off the map, and looked forward to the ten days here with that dread which, I imagine, a criminal experiences at the beginning of a term of ten years.

“Think of me this morning, then think of me last night. Already I eye the calendar suspiciously, to see that it doesn't cheat me out of a day. Oh, Milly, you don't know what it is to me deliberately to lay my little plans to fascinate a man—such a man!—or what exquisite pleasure it gives me to note the gradual effect they have upon him! I suppose a spider is the only animal which gets the same kind of satisfaction. Not that I wish to compare myself to an animal, although, my dear, I am not very different from most beautiful women, and it is a futile argument to say that this kind of game—it is a kind of game—isn't animal-like. Why, Eve did it!

“I must know men pretty well, I think. I walked straight to the top of the hill where I met John Ashley last evening. I knew that either he would be already there, or he would be there shortly.

“I found him already there! He was lying on his back, with his head on his hands, asleep. He looked like Gulliver, at full length. I never saw such a really superb person. I wondered, impishly, what he would say if I started running over him like a Lilliputian, and I longed to tack him down to the earth so that he couldn't move, and then tickle him with a blade of grass.

“He's wonderfully good-looking. His eyebrows are red, and his mustache is almost flaxen. It looks lighter than it really is because his skin is deeply tanned with the sun. His nose is too large, perhaps, but it is a good one, and shows breeding by its bridge. And I don't think I ever saw such a square, determined jaw. He was breathing as men breathe when they are in their second sleep—soundlessly. Indeed, I had to bend over him and listen, and look closely at his chest to make sure that he was only sleeping.

“I watched him for a long time, wondering what effect I should have upon him. He is such virgin soil. I have never met his kind before. Evelyn, poor, dear old Evelyn, was so easy to manage. One's few quite elementary tricks were sufficient. When I made up my mind that I couldn't stand home—its dull routine, constant economy, everlasting living with the gas turned down—and that I would become Mrs. Blundell as a stepping-stone to London, I just let my hand rest upon his knee as we drove to a dance in his uncle's hideously old-fashioned carriage. And afterward, when we were sitting out in the Summer-house, an imaginary spider had to be shaken out of my skirt, and I managed, before I sat down, to undo the button of my shoe. When he rose from fastening it, there was a glitter in his blue eyes, and his hands trembled. I took care, also, that three other people should get into the old carriage with us going home, so that it became necessary for us to be very close together for some time; and, whenever we passed over a more than usually rutty part of the road, I held his hand very tightly, without my glove, in a nervous, helpless way. He proposed to me while we waited on the steps for old Jane to open the door. His first kiss told me how effective these merely preliminary tricks had been. You must remember that Evelyn is one of those men—they form the vast majority—who are very easily moved. For instance, a very few glasses of wine goto his head. He quite bellows at all the obviously bellowy parts of a play. You see, he is inclined to be stout.

“With Reggie, it was quite different. He is slight and tall and dark, and such things would only have tended to disgust. With him, it was dangerous to take the initiative. He liked the will-o'-the-wisp method—the elusive, the invitation in the eye, the quickly erected fence. With him, the impossible was the only thing to be desired. One had to play one's subtle tricks in his case, one's second-grade tricks. And with Valentine Worthing, who is the third type of man—there are but three—who is an artist at one moment, a Goth at the next, a mixture of the most refined and the coarsest sensualism, epicure and animal, one had to combine tricks belonging to the first and the second grades, according to his mood. But one had to exaggerate both. It was a good deal more trouble, and I can't tell you how much more dangerous to one's self, and, consequently, how infinitely more enjoyable and worth one's while. Danger is the very backbone of the game—a game which is, of course, utterly spoiled when a goal is scored.

“But what am I to do with this huge, untutored instrument? What chords, what runs, what discords am I to strike on his untouched keys? He is sensual, but he must have caught something of the sensualism of Nature, who is the lightest female of us all. Any man can be celibate who has never had the opportunity of being anything else. Opportunity proves the mettle. I firmly believe that there would eventually be no such thing as animalism in men and women if we were taught to concentrate our whole power of creation upon things we had a taste for. The whole thing is merely an innate desire to create, and, if we all did things—wrote, painted, carved wood, bound books, made clothes—it doesn't matter what—our animalism would be put into the work we performed, and we should all become celibate. Nature knows that well enough, though, and she has no desire to be left alone in the world, as she found herself in the days before Adam and Eve trod upon her bosom. That is why, I suppose, animalism is called nature by people who dislike to be called or to think themselves animals.

“I think I must have stood by my boredom-dispeller for half an hour before I made up my mind that I should have to treat him as I treated Valentine Worthing. I came to the conclusion that there would be very little difference between these two men. They are both artists, both Goths, both epicures, both animals. It only happens that one has grown almost tired of creating, and the other hasn't yet begun to create at all. Therefore it means that I must combine the tricks of the first and second grades, just as lightly with Ashley as I exaggerated them with Worthing. And even, practised lightly, I shall, thank goodness, be playing with fire. But I don't intend to get burnt! A burnt child dreads the fire. I am Evelyn Blundell's wife!

“Finally, my young god began to show signs of waking—I think he must have been sitting where he saw me all night—and I walked away, keeping my back turned to him. I would have wagered any amount of money that he would speak to me, and I should have lost. When I looked around, he had gone. I could see him going rapidly down the hill to his farm. He was not running away from me, though; he was running away from himself.”

X

Betty, with a smile in which there was intense pleasure coupled with intense annoyance, watched the farmer until he was out of sight. She had meant to speak to him that morning, or arrange that he speak to her.

She remembered that letters arrived in the village at midday, and so she slowly retraced her steps. She made up her mind that she would sleep the afternoon away, and return to her spot in the evening. She was one of those women who always sleep in the afternoon, however busy they may be. She considered that it prevented wrinkles, and with her, as with most women, wrinkles were terrible things. She had a great dread of growing old, and she would do without new gowns, even, in order to have face-massage.

She found on the table of her little sitting-room a large packet from her friend, in which were enclosed all the letters which had been delivered at her flat since her absence. She noticed, with a smile, that the packet was addressed to “Miss” Blundell, and she thanked heaven that Milly was a woman of imagination. She herself had meant to tell her landlady that she was unmarried. She knew intuitively that Ashley was one of those queer, old-fashioned persons who wouldn't allow himself, from a sense of mistaken honor, to flirt with another man's wife, and this substitution on the part of Milly would save her the trouble of telling a lie.

Betty pushed aside all the letters which were in sufficiently good hand-writings to proclaim themselves bills, and pounced upon one written in the microscopic style of men who wish to be thought brainy. It was from Valentine Worthing, and bore the Regent-street postmark.

The sight of it sent a rush of blood to her cheeks. “Regent street!” she cried aloud, and kissed the postmark, ecstatically.

It contained only a few lines, with a ragged margin. Betty had expected to find many pages of the poetical, many pages full of baffled desire, beseechings and anger.

She read:

“You dear thing! How hopelessly you misread me. But I know you for what you are. Don't I know myself? Aren't we precisely alike? We were playing exactly the same game. I only wished to work you up to a pitch of emotion when you could refuse me nothing, and then say to you, 'No, thanks!' And all you wanted was to do the same to me, and refuse in the same way. There is a most euphonious name for us which is not included in the dictionary. Perhaps you know it?

“Tibi,
“Valentine.”

Betty Blundell's mouth took a hard, angry line, and she crushed the letter in her hand. Then her vanity pushed through her momentary humiliation, and she smoothed out the paper, and read it through again.

“How clever of him,” she said, “to try to turn the tables like that! Any idiot could see plainly enough how successful I must have been.”

And in this way, also, Betty proved herself no different from any other woman.

XI

Came old Jesse Sloke into Ashley's sitting-room once more. His crinkled face, like nothing so much as a dried pippin, was pursed up with amazement. His master's breakfast had been placed, as it had been placed every morning for fifteen years, upon the table. And it was untouched. Old Jesse had tottered up to Ashley's room at a quarter to seven, thinking, perhaps, that his master had not heard the call. He found the bed had not been slept in.

He looked at the clock for the twentieth time. It was some minutes after twelve. Such irregularity in the routine of the farm had never happened before. He had called his master at four-thirty in the Summer, and at six-thirty in the Winter, every morning for fifteen years, every morning since the old master had been put under the Scotch fir in the little churchyard. Every morning, for fifteen years, the breakfast had been put upon the table at half-past seven in the Summer and half-past eight in the Winter. Every morning, for fifteen years, luncheon had been ready at one, tea at five, and dinner at eight o'clock; and every evening, for fifteen years, the house had been locked up and every light out by nine-thirty.

What was the meaning of this? His annoyance gave way to anger. What right had the master to upset everything in this way? People got used to things. People—especially when they had crossed the meridian of their lives with one set of habits—couldn't tolerate sudden changes. The old man walked from the sitting-room into the hall, and back again, a hundred times, arguing in this way to himself. Each time he reëntered the room, his anger rose. It was too bad, he said to himself. He was up in time to call the master, why wasn't the master ready to be called? The breakfast had been got ready by his wife to the minute! Why wasn't the master ready for his breakfast? It was not fair! It was not just! If the master wished to begin being irregular, he should have been irregular years before. It wasn't giving him a chance. It would take him some time to shake himself out of his habits of regularity.

The sitting-room clock's thin voice struck one. The deeper, commoner, rougher voice of the kitchen clock hurried to announce the same hour.

Fright drove the old man's anger away. Something had happened to the master—the master he had loved and served, but never understood. He couldn't have been struck by lightning, for there had been no storm. He couldn't have been attacked by gipsies. He barely remembered to have seen gipsies in the neighborhood.

Whistling, with a brave attempt at gaiety and unconcern, in order that his fright might not spread itself to his wife, the old man passed through the open front door of the farm-house, and went along the path to the white gate.

There, with eyes sharpened with fear, he gazed up and down the road. The dust lay thick and white. In the air, myriads of golden specks danced lazily. Not a fleck of cloud broke the faint, endless blue of the sky. The birds were silent. Only the insects, drawn out of their lairs by the warmth, chattered and buzzed.

But nothing disturbed the great, soft anthem of the day. Nothing moved on the road.

The old man shuddered. Something had happened to the master. Involuntarily, he raised his twisted fingers, and clasped them together in front of his eyes, and called out, “Master, master!”

A distant sound of heavy steps was heard, and, with a cry of joy and relief, old Sloke saw the master coming toward the farm at full speed, running as a man runs who is pursued—as a man runs who is afraid.

He came nearer and nearer, at the end of his second breath, and at last swung through the gate, tore up the path and through the door, and flung himself, panting and dust-covered, into a chair.

The old man followed quickly. Putting his head into the sitting-room after a decent interval, he found his master panting still, with his head between his hands. Ashley had run rapidly, with all his strength, but he had not been able to out-distance himself.

And again the old man was right. Something had happened to the master. A woman was in his blood for the first time in his life.

XII

John Ashley felt the old man's sympathetic, uneasy eyes upon him, and, with an exclamation of rage Jesse Sloke had never heard the master use before, he rose, waved him away, shut the door with violence, and locked it.

With a feeling of shame, Ashley clutched himself by the throat, and tried to shake out of his eyes the face of the woman. He cursed himself for a fool, and repeated over and over again the words of his father's letter.

He leaned on the mantel, and looked at the photograph of his father, mutely, in an agony of self-reproach. He gazed, with the deepest sympathy and love, into the stern eyes, the lined face, the sunken cheeks. He recalled all the tenderness, all the care, all the solicitude, his father had daily shown him. The very tones of his voice rang in his ears. What a wretched son he would be to break a promise to such a man!

As he lifted the photograph to his lips, with a renewed feeling of strength, the face of the woman, the delicately cut, sweet face, with its large blue eyes and exquisite coloring, came between.

For several hours, with feverish eagerness, Ashley did everything he could think of to regain mastery over himself. He took down his favorite books one after another, and read with a concentration that was almost painful. All went well for a few minutes. She had gone, he said to himself. And, at that instant, the face looked out at him from the pages. He put the books back into their places, and endeavored to distract his attention by making a tour of the long, beamed, low-ceilinged room, looking at each familiar engraving and print as though he had never seen it before. There was not one in the room, big or little, out of which the face did not grow.

It was everywhere, no matter where he looked. It gazed down upon him from the beams, it gazed up at him from the worn carpet. He turned to the window, and looked out at the trim lawn, the beds of flaming colors, the quaintly cut hedges. Every diamond pane contained the face.

At last, worn out, he flung himself, face downward, upon the sofa, buried his eyes in the cushions, and broke into the wild sobbings of a boy.

He had realized that he would be obliged to break his promise. He had realized that it was too difficult, too impossible to keep. He had been living in a fool's paradise. Sooner or later, it was bound to come—this debacle, this great toppling over his head of the edifice he had built so carefully round himself. His father had imposed too great a sacrifice upon him. He was a man like other men. He had read of love, of lust, impatiently. But love sent the blood spinning through his veins, and beat like a sledge-hammer at his temples.

Presently he rose. His face was wet with his tears—the first tears he had shed since the death of his father.

A feeling of enormous relief passed over him. The struggle was over. He was in love. He gloried in it. It was delicious. His father must have made a hideous mistake. This woman was not one of those who betrayed. She had the face of an angel. He would meet her again, and speak to her. Some day, he might persuade her to marry him, and come to the farm. God! what a day! Books were all very well; pictures were all very well; nature, whose every mood he understood, was all very well. But what were they as compared with flesh and blood, the beauty, the grace, the mystery of a woman?

“Dead things!” he cried, flinging up his arms, “dead things! Give me life!”

But before he left the room, he crossed hurriedly to the mantel, and turned to the wall the picture of his father's face.

XIII

“I went out to my hill again this afternoon,” wrote little Mrs. Blundell, “but my man wasn't there. The grass was still flat and sorry for itself where his great body had been; and, having nothing better to do, I sat there to wait for him.

“I had plenty to think about. I had that morning received, among the batch you sent me from the flat, a most insolent, and yet a most ingenious, letter from Valentine Worthing. I wonder why men who wish people to think they are clever, always cultivate the same tiny writing, and sign their names so that they cannot possibly be made out? Valentine Worthing's handwriting is smaller and more slovenly than most. He said, in effect, that he had all along perfectly understood the game I had been playing with him, and that he had been playing precisely the same game with me. Of course, I don't believe this. It is so easy to guess the solution of a riddle after one has been told. My suddenly going away gave him the cue to my pastime. But I couldn't feel any annoyance with him. All I felt was that, after all, he was merely an ordinary, commonplace person, with the addition of a hideous deformity.

“What did anger me, I confess, were the letters from my tradespeople, asking me for immediate settlement. What a peculiar race tradespeople are! 'Immediate settlement' is the most ridiculous expression. Of course, naturally, like any one else who is expected to do with the pittance of a naval officer's wife, I am hideously in debt. My dressmaker's bill makes my blood run cold. What Evelyn will say I can conceive only too well. That account of Friola's alone would, if settled as it stands, swamp two years' pay! And I have repeatedly assured him that I have done extremely well on the allowance he made me. But I shall have to devote all my time and all my best smiles to get him to write to his uncle for the money. He'll complain, anyhow. He calls it eating the pie of humiliation to borrow money.

“It was really a perfect afternoon. A faint breeze had come up, and the air was cooler. It was so clear that, sitting on my hill, I could see for miles. I think I am getting almost to like this placid place. The feeling was an extraordinary one. I was so awfully alone. It was like waking to find one's self thrust back three or four hundred years, with nothing left of the life one knew but a memory. It seemed inconceivable, sitting there surrounded by trees and fields, fields and trees, and sky—sky—sky, that such things as streets and cabs and buildings and people existed anywhere. I sat for a half-hour, perfectly happy. Can you believe it, knowing me?

“It's odd, but do you know, Milly, except for this peculiar, ever-present desire to pose, and to tease people of the opposite sex, I believe I should be quite a dear—an artist or a painter or a poet. Sometimes—not often—I am sorry that I am not, and I am almost inclined to think of my father and mother with dislike for having grafted in me this thing Valentine said he understood. I suppose it is rather beastly. I am certain it will land me in hot water, sooner or later. I'll give it up, some day, perhaps, and develop some other kind of taste, and go in for being normal and healthy. But not yet—not while my man of the woods remains untamed. Unconsciously, he has flattered my vanity to such an extent that I am bound to go on. I am bound to try effects with this quaint, primeval giant. Fancy his running away like that!

“I shall never forget the look he gave me. It acted on my vanity like oil. I don't quite know how to describe it to you. I am sure there was fear in his eyes. And, of course, there was the wildest admiration. I am not sure there wasn't just a touch of reverence. Most beautiful women have tasted the delight of fascinating men at one time or another, even if they do not use their power often. It is a power. No king, no prime minister, no general, no despot, no slave-owner, can ever feel so utterly all-powerful as a beautiful woman who has a man cringing at her feet.

“I suppose I'm an awful fool to give myself away in black and white in this way, even to such a dear old oyster as you are. If ever you were to quarrel with me, goodness, wouldn't you have the whip in your hand! But you won't. I know that. I have to share my triumphs with some one. And writing letters to you is a far more satisfactory way of feeding my vanity than putting it down in a diary. I have the greatest contempt for women who keep diaries. They are such liars!

“Well, I waited for two hours on my hill in this ecstatic mood, and I believe I should have been there two hours longer but for a sudden clap of thunder, following a vivid flash of lightning. Without my noticing them, a great bank of clouds had been gathering behind me. I jumped up as the first drop of rain fell on my cheek. With it—what an odd thing the brain is!—came a sudden inspiration. Time was short, and, as Mahomet wouldn't come to the mountain, the mountain would have to go to Mahomet. Do you see? I made up my mind to take advantage of the storm, make my way quickly to his farm-house, run to the door with my best expression of timid fright, and beg for shelter.

“This I did, half regretting it when I found that I was bound to cover at least a mile and a half. My dear, the rain came down, literally, in buckets. Luckily I had on one of my oldest frocks, for it was wringing wet in no time. Every time a flash of lightning came, and the flame darted about among the trees, I wished I hadn't come.

“I was exhausted when, at last, I reached the farm. I wasn't sure it was his farm, but it was the only one about, so I ran up to the door, and rang the bell. It was opened by an old man, with a prim, crinkled face, who looked as though he saw a ghost. I begged him to let me sit somewhere out of the storm, giving him a faint, sweet smile. Gasping with surprise, and with a wistful attempt to be polite, he asked me to enter the master's room.

“My heart leaped within my breast. The blinds were down, the fire-irons and the mirror were covered up with a cloth. I stood for a moment, looking about me—such a lovely old room, beautifully furnished—and the old person murmured something about fetching his wife, and ran off.

“The old woman came almost at once, quite flustered with excitement.

“'Oh, poor lady!' she cried; 'and such a beautiful dress, too!' And then, talking all the time, she ran up-stairs, and presently came down with a towel and a man's dressing-gown and slippers. Shutting the door, she undid my frock, rubbed my hands and face, took off my hat, shoes and stockings, put on the dressing-gown—'the master's,' she said—his, Milly dear!—and then ran to the kitchen with my frock and shoes and stockings.

“Isn't my luck astounding? Here I was, not only in his own room, but in his own room in such a helpful costume! Think of it from the purely artistic point of view! The dressing-gown—evidently one John Ashley wore in his early youth—showed my neck, and my ankles and feet—my feet thrust into a pair of red slippers of the most elephantine description. The rain had made my always curly hair all the more curly. I felt like Trilby in the studio, and I'm sure I looked infinitely sweeter than she.

“Suddenly, I heard a deep voice, then two others excitedly joining in. The door opened, and the old woman came in, followed by—oh, what fortune is mine!—my untamed man of the woods, my primeval giant.”

XIV

Mrs. Blundell put her pen down, threw back her head, and burst into a peal of laughter. The silver notes of it danced about the little room long after she started writing again.

“For some time he stood in the doorway, his handsome, unusual head almost touching the frame-work, blushing like a schoolboy. I stood up, timid, shy, constrained, clutching the dressing-gown nervously about me, wordless, like an ingénue in a play. The old woman, with all the latent romance in her nature stirred, babbled the story of my arrival, while the old man got a word in here and there, whenever she was positively obliged to stop for breath. The situation was immensely amusing. What more picturesque introduction to him could I possibly have desired?

“'I will go and make some tea for the young lady, sir,' said the old woman, at last. 'Come, Jesse, quick!' The door closed upon them, and we were alone.

“Have you ever experienced that horrible desire to laugh in church, or at a funeral, or in the midst of some quite serious scene at the theatre? The feeling to laugh inordinately seized me then. Luckily, a sneeze came, and gave me relief, or I feel certain I should have fallen into the nearest chair and screamed.

“My dear Milly, his face was a picture. It was positively alight! His eyes danced and gleamed with pleasure and excitement. But he made no attempt to speak. He simply stood behind a tall-backed chair—quite a good chair, excellently carved, and so old!—leaning on the back of it, gazing at me.

“'I—I am so very sorry to put everybody to so much trouble,' I said, in that high-pitched, girlish voice which has always been one of my most valuable stocks-in-trade; 'I don't think I ever remember such a violent storm. I am dreadfully nervous when it lightens.'

“I paused, and glanced up at him. A smile passed over his face. It had the most extraordinary effect upon it. It looked as a field looks when a sudden shaft of sun sweeps across it. But he said nothing. I don't think he was nervous or shy, as we use those words ordinarily. He merely seemed infinitely delighted in a boyish kind of way.

“He made me feel as if I were a new horse, or the latest gun presented to him on his birthday.

“At first, his continuous, wide-eyed stare made me quite uncomfortable, and I don't think he listened to a single word of my small-talk. He simply stood there, in an easy, unself-conscious attitude, his deeply-tanned hands clasped round the back of the chair, devouring me.

“I babbled on. I said how very kind he was to take me in, how very sorry I was to put his servants to any inconvenience, and what a lovely old house it seemed to be. Quite twenty minutes of this one-sided conversation went on, and I confess I was a little relieved when the old couple brought in a tea-tray. I had begun to feel that I had exhausted every subject of a commonplace nature I ever thought about.

“'Shall I pour out the tea?' I asked, with a tiny, timid smile, when we were alone again.

“'Thank you,' he said.

“And, all the time, he stood in front of me, watching me intently, with an interest almost whimsical. If made the old occupation almost a new one; then I suddenly remembered that I was the first woman—gentlewoman—he had ever met.

“He bowed as he took his cup, and, instantly forgetting he had got it in his hand, watched me as I stirred my tea, and sipped it.

“Having nothing more to say, and not feeling the need of making conversation, I contented myself with returning his smile, when I caught his rapt eyes, and eating. My flight through the rain and the cooler air had made me ravenous, and the home-made cakes were perfectly delicious.

“While I ate and drank, I looked about me. Such a dear old room, Milly—just the sort of room one reads about in books and so rarely comes across. It was long and narrow—at least, its length gave it the appearance of narrowness, and was lined, five feet from the old oak floor, with bulging book-shelves, except where the great Dutch fireplace stood. And above the books, right up to the ceiling, hung pictures—pictures of all kinds and sizes—paintings, etchings, prints, engravings, all good and old, and in the best taste. I could see Carlyle in the shelves, and Shakespeare, Dickens, George Eliot, Thackeray, Swift, Addison, Gibbon, Milton, Byron, Keats, Goldsmith, and heaven knows who besides; at any rate, all the people one calls dry! There were, so far as I could see, no modern novels. And they all looked in that warm condition, that comfortable, bulgy state books get into that are frequently in hand. They didn't stare out at one in a stiff, proud, pained way, as they do from the shelves of those people who put them there, morocco-bound, for show. They beamed at me in a jovial, friendly way, like so many elderly uncles with rosy cheeks and white hair and portly stomachs. Dear old things, I loved them! And as to the pictures, they clung to the walls as though they had grown upon them, and never wished to leave them. Here a big one, there a little one—anyhow, all higgledy-piggledy, and yet exactly as they ought to be.

“At the far end of the room, a long, low window, diamond-paned, with shutters of black oak, threw the light over a deep window-seat, covered with a rose-bud chintz, very worn and dimmed, upon the polished oak floor. And through this, I could catch a glimpse of antediluvian Scotch firs standing in their peculiar, silent, dignified manner here and there upon a lawn. Behind them, and in front of a stained, but steady, red wall, were beds choking with masses of cloves and pinks and sweet-williams and London pride, and all those country-cousin flowers that have become the fashion again with us. And over the wall, the tops of many dusky red barns and out-houses peeped, in quite a curious way.

“The whole place fitted my giant like a glove. It was all, like him, so good to look at, so simple, so upright, so clean, picturesque and unconscious. It all, like him, seemed to be utterly behind the times, utterly unknowing, utterly unspoiled. And, as he stood there, tanned a brick-dust color, with his eyes clear and steady and childlike, his eyebrows and hair burnt copper, his back broad and straight, his long, well-set legs firm and strong, upon my honor, he seemed to be related to the Scotch firs, to the old, wonderful books, and the dark, beautiful prints.

“It wouldn't have surprised me in the least if, at night, when he sat at the little flap table at his dinner, shining with health and fresh air, with the light of the cranky lamp throwing his strong features upon the wall, these old books had popped out of the shelves and stood around him, with their glasses on their noses, and talked, while he said, 'Yes, sir,' and 'No, sir,' and 'Indeed, sir?' in his deep, vibrating voice.

“When I looked at him, after all these things had flashed through my mind, there he was, still standing in front of me, his untasted tea in his hand. Any other man would have been boorish, impossible. But, oddly enough, I looked for nothing else in my giant.

“Nothing that he could have said, of course, would have fed my vanity half so satisfactorily as this long, silent, meaning stare. Every second, the expression in his eyes changed. Wonder came, love came—that new-born, wonderful love, the first love.

“Oh, Milly, what a power it is—this gift to fascinate men! I know nothing in this world that gives me so keen, so delirious a pleasure as the exercise of it. I feel almost like a magician. It gives me the faculty of turning a man into a hungry animal—even such a man as this one, who is ashamed and fearful, and who, for choice, would forget everything except just that I am beautiful and dainty and ethereal.

“But the spell was at last broken. He put down his cup, and awoke. His smile became self-conscious and nervous. He fidgeted shyly, began sentences and left them unfinished. Luckily, the old woman came in and said my gown was dry, and the storm had passed. And so, with a smile as nervous as his own, and every bit as shy, I hurried after the old woman, out of the room and up-stairs to hers.

“It cost me half a sovereign. I would gladly have paid fifty times that amount for the afternoon.

“I dressed quietly, listening to the garrulous chatter of the well-meaning dame—my frock was utterly ruined—and then followed her down to the hall.

“'Good-bye, Mr. Ashley,' I said, giving him my hand, timidly; 'thank you so much!'

XV

“He took my hand for an instant, and then, letting it go, said, stammering:

“'May I—may I——?'

“'Oh, that's very kind of you! Indeed, I should be delighted. I think the storm has made me nervous.'

“'On the face of the old woman, as she watched us go out together, there was a peculiar smile in which I could read a reawakened romance, an almost pathetic hope. But the old man scowled at me. I was a new invention, and therefore a danger. I had the satisfaction of knowing that I was the first 'unvillagy' woman—I hate the word lady; it reeks of tram-cars and clearance sales and suburban tea-fights—who had ever been seen with 'the master.'

“The white dust of the morning had become mud. Pools had formed along the edge of the road. A kind of steam rose from the earth, and the heads of the corn, which before had been straining to catch whatever moisture the air contained, were bending down, looking gratefully at the soft earth at their feet. It was a couple of hours before sunset, and the sun, even then quite warm, fell softly upon everything. The delicious air was alive. Thousands, tens of thousands of gnats moved in thick battalions above our heads, and, to the right and left, the air was filled with the cheerful, lively voices of birds.

“The freshness of everything was contagious. We both walked on springs. For no reason at all we both laughed. A bird, which, after struggling wildly and tugging with all its might at a worm in a corn-field, let go and darted annoyedly away at our approach, brought the laugh to our lips. Our own shadows, his so long, mine so short, cast on the road in front of us, sent us into peals of mirth. We were like two school-children let loose after school. I believe if I had started running helter-skelter along the road, he would have chased me.

“All his shyness faded. With the pride of the proprietor, he pointed out to me the excellence of the crops, laughingly explaining the difference between corn and barley, barley and oats. He never referred to his first meeting me on the hill, but he referred to the hill, and told me—no doubt thinking what a diplomatic touch it was—that he always spent a certain amount of time there every day in the Summer, reading.

“'To-morrow,' he added, 'I shall be there in the afternoon.'

“The sun had begun to set when I got back to the cottage. My dear, we had taken two hours to walk two miles! This time he had done all the talking, and if I needed any convincing on the subject, he had convinced me as to his being the most interesting person I had ever met on whom to exercise my peculiar gifts. He had proved what a boy he was, and what a man he was, how immense was his knowledge of nature—and how infinitesimal of human nature; what an artist he was, and what a Goth.

“Oh, my dear, I feel I am going to have some of the most enjoyable days I shall ever have in my life!”

XVI

A smile was still playing around his mouth as Ashley swung into the road. He had removed his cap to Mrs. Blundell with the air of a Quixote. He had not forgotten to put it back. He kept his head bare to the soft breeze as a tribute to her, while he made his way unconsciously to the hill where he had seen her first.

He stood there, erect and firm, and watched the sun go down. A thousand voices sang to him. It was a new song, a song he had never heard before. It stirred, soothed and excited him. It made him smile and tremble. It filled him with fear and joy. Love had thrust her golden key into his long-closed heart, turned it in the rusty lock, and flung the door wide open.

He understood everything. He had not been living hitherto. He had thought that it was right that life should get everything out of him that was in him to devote to it. The whole aspect of things was suddenly changed. It was as though some one had suddenly planted him on his feet after he had been standing all his life on his head.

He was amazed to think that he could have spent all his years in such a position. Everything, for the first time, looked right. The sun became his servant instead of his master; the earth his very good friend, instead of a tyrant at whose every change of mood he shuddered. Everything that had seemed great, became tiny, minute, a matter of slight consequence. What did it matter now if frost spoiled his early roots, rain his crops? Nothing. Nothing mattered. Nothing of importance existed in the world except love—not the kind of love he had given to his father, not the love he had since poured out upon his books, not the love he felt for nature. Those were mild, gentle kinds of love, more suited to women. He had suddenly become awake. The only love that mattered to him was the love that was alive! The only thing worth living for was just to hold her—the woman—close against his heart.

For hours, he stood there, looking out, but seeing nothing, a rush of new thoughts tumbling over one another in his brain.

The sun touched his face with rosy hand, and went down. The moon slipped into her place, and smiled faintly upon him. The stars, like children when the school doors swing back, rushed into the open, in great clusters. One by one, the lights went out in the village beneath. The occasional faint shout ceased. Only the clock in the tower of the church remained awake. With relentless punctuality, though always with a suggestion of self-excuse, its mellow voice sang the death and birth of the hours.

XVII

“Another day gone of the few that are left to me, Milly,” little Mrs. Blundell wrote. “The rapidity with which they slip through my fingers is positively illegal. It's always the way when one is really having a good time.

“This afternoon, I went to the hill, feeling like a very girl. The sun was deliciously warm after the heavy storm, and all the leaves, grasses, trees and hedges smelled sweet. One felt that the wife of the clerk of the weather had made an inspection, found an accumulation of dust and cobwebs about, and had ordered her servants to turn the place inside out. The operation was inconvenient; the result refreshing.

“I danced out of the cottage with the best feeling toward the world and myself. I had every reason to be glad that I was alive, for I found that a frock I had intended to throw away came out looking pretty nearly new!

“When I arrived at the hill, my young god was standing up with his hands in his pockets, smiling. For a moment, I hardly recognized him. He looked like the younger brother of the John Ashley I had met the day before. All the lines had gone out of his face—all the sternness, the aloofness, the underlying discontent. He was a great boy.

“'So glad you've come,' he said, turning to me, eagerly. 'I began to think you had been carried into the air on the breeze, and borne away like a petal! Will you sit here, or here with your back to the tree? No, don't sit with your back to the tree; the moss will stain your dress.'

“I sat down on the smooth, spongy turf, and gave one of my best girlish laughs.

“'You can't have been waiting long,' I said.

“'Long?' he cried, flinging himself at my feet. 'Don't you call a thousand million years long?'

“He laughed as he said it, but I thought that a thousand million years couldn't have worked a greater change in his face and his manner than twelve hours had done.

“With his elbows in the grass and his chin in the palms of his brown hands, he lay looking up at me with his eyes full of a dancing light. This afternoon, unlike yesterday afternoon, it was he who did all the talking. I hardly said a word for an hour.

“He babbled about every conceivable thing under heaven, except the things of the moment. It was all perfectly charming, sometimes humorous, sometimes fanciful, always whimsical, because so utterly, almost impossibly, unworldly. From the few questions I put to him, I could see that he was quite outside the movement of things. He didn't even know whether the Liberals or the Tories were in power, and cared less. It was like the song of a thrush, whose little life had been spent within a whistle of its nest. And, all the time, his eyes were fixed on me with a look of such boyish adoration that instinctively, unconsciously, I slipped off my wedding-ring, and put it into my pocket.

“I could see that my methods with him would have to be most guarded and careful; that anything that wasn't extremely subtle and cunning would tend to jar upon him. Like all men who make the acquaintance of the little god late in life, he idealized. I wasn't a woman; I was an angel. I didn't stand on the rude earth by his side; I sat upon a cloud all carved and picked out with gems.

“It was all very new, very fascinating. I had had no experience quite like it. All the boys I had met in my earliest youth were boys who were cramming for the army. And you know the kind of boys they are—éditions de luxe of worldliness, first states of knowledge.

“For three wonderful hours, I was actually alone with this boy-monster, this baby-giant, behaving as any simple little girl would have done. For three hours, I was alone with an untried man, without experimenting upon him in the way that gives me such sheer delight. I made up my mind to try to be just a sweet, laughing, happy little maiden. I made up my mind to leave him with the remembrance of merely white love in his eyes, the delicious, wholesome love with which they were filled.

“But that imp beside me willed otherwise. Heavens! how deep-rooted one's habits become! I suddenly put my hand close against his. He babbled on, without noticing. I moved it slightly, and began talking lightly, airily, in his own manner. I saw him glance quickly at me. I saw a gleam come into his eyes.

“I gained my momentary triumph. But I was sorry immediately. In his case it seemed such a pity.”

XVIII

Evelyn Blundell was the kind of man men call “a good chap,” and women “a dear,” and justly so, as men go. He lied as often, but not more often, than any of us. He played an excellent game of bridge, and parted with money he couldn't afford to lose with invariable cheerfulness. He took chaff quite as well as he gave it, and grumbled continually at his profession. Like a healthy-minded Englishman, he roundly cursed whichever party was in government, and was willing, at any time, to teach any cabinet minister his job, whether it had to do with a subject of which he, Blundell, knew nothing or not. His temper was like a large check in fashionable tweed—violent, but quite ordinary when you get used to it. He had as infinite a capacity for martyrdom as most other men, and could draw generously upon a reserve fund of sentimentality at any moment. To look at, he was no different from ninety-nine men out of a hundred—men, I mean, of some breeding, decently educated. He had a fairly steady, fairly clean eye, plenty of hair of reddish tinge, crisp and inclined to kink; a straight, thin nose, with well-cut nostrils, a short upper lip, a surly mouth, and a square-cut chin, which showed plenty of pig-headedness, but very little strength.

Being thoroughly, soundly English—the Blundells dwelt in Kent ages before the Canterbury Pilgrims lowered the tone of the county—he possessed a keen sense of the ridiculous, but no sense of humor, and he was lucky enough to be able to convince himself that whatever he did, however low, foolish or mean, was done from motives in which none of these three things found a place. He was no more sensual than any other normal man, and no less. He was, at the same time, just as selfish, and there was no man on earth he got on better with, or appreciated more, than Evelyn Blundell.

His moral sense was sound. Not for a moment, however keen the temptation, would he have rendered any good girl the worse for knowing him. Not for a moment, however strong the invitation, would he have tampered with the wife of a friend. With the wife of a man with whom he was not on terms of friendship it was, of course, a totally different matter. In that he was a sailor, and consequently away from his wife for long periods of time, he regarded himself as exempted from a too-nice faithfulness.

In short, it is easy to claim for him the right to be called “a good chap” by men, and “a dear” by women.

As he neared the end of his homeward voyage, and read the bright, loving, trusting, eager letters of the little woman who was his wife, written from the tiny village in which she was counting the minutes that brought him nearer, all the sentimentality, all the desire to make a martyr of himself, bubbled up and stirred what was best in his nature. He read the bright, thrilling letters with tingling cheeks and dim eyes, and, casting them back over the three years' separation, called himself blackguard and beast, and other exaggerated terms of abuse. Implicitly believing that every word she wrote was true—was she not the woman he had married?—he worked himself into the not-altogether-unenjoyable belief that he was unworthy to polish her little shoes.

The beauty of the nights, the sentimental songs of the sailors, the **England-Home-and-Mother” feeling that infected every man on board, had naturally something to do with it. However that may be, he continually found himself—and reveled in the discovery—standing apart from his brothers, chewing the cud, between the whiffs of his cigar, of bitterness and shame. He found himself lying awake at night, and going without his usual amount of liquor.

“Poor little girl,” he repeated to himself, over and over again, looking at his wife's photograph in the moonlight; “poor little girl, how she loves me! What kind of man am I that she should adore me as she does? The three years I have been away must have appeared six to her. Yet, to me, it seems only yesterday. I've put in an excellent time, too, and done myself credit. What am I to say to her—a little woman so white, so pure, so faithful? It's all rot to suppose that because I've not been particular she ought not to have been. I am only a man, whereas she's my wife. But I rather wish— Oh, Lord! that's the worst of this beastly service! What's a fellow to do? Poor little girl, poor little girl! What arum thing it all is! It's rough luck—but there it is.”

XIX

Two telegrams were handed to Blundell when H.M.S. Gargantua put in. They ran as follows:

“Welcome, a thousand times. Betty

And

“Welcome; come to me at once. Milly.”

The first, which he had expected, gave him very little pleasure for that reason.

The second, totally unexpected, sent his heart beating half-a-dozen strokes faster to the minute.

Before he got into the train for London, he wired answers to them both. To the first:

“Safe and sound. Dying to see. Business keeps me to-morrow London. With you day after. Evelyn.”

And to the second:

“Thousand thanks. With you to-morrow lunch. Evelyn.”

“'Come at once—Milly,'” he said to himself as the train started. “What on earth——?”

Much against his will, a smile crept over his face, and he fingered the telegram with a sense of pleasurable excitement. “Surely, a little indiscreet! Milly's taken the flat, by a deuced curious coincidence, and, I expect, knows that Betty is in the country, pining to see me. It must be something very urgent to make her ask one to go at once, when one's wife— Illness, I should think; or else something has leaked out! Oh, my rotten past! Will those wild oats never die?”

He said these things tragically enough; but the smile remained.

“Of course, past or no past, I couldn't possibly refuse to lunch with her. In a sense—in fact, of course—it's business. I hate lying! No doubt something has gone wrong with the flat, and I am wanted to see about it. My own, sweet little Betty! 'Come at once—Milly.' Poor little girl! How glad she'll be to get me back again after all these years! 'Come at once—Milly.' I wonder if she's changed at all? She's quite a little woman now. What a heap we shall have to talk about! 'Come at once—Milly.' Miles from the station, eh? That's it, and no sea in sight. Beastly sea, how I loathe it! 'Come at once—Milly.' It makes me sick to think I sha'n't be able to look her fair and square in the eyes. I wonder if any of the others would suffer as I do under these circumstances? They've put in a jolly sight better time—I mean, been very much worse than I have during these three years. I suppose I'm a bit too sensitive. I suppose there are not a dozen chaps in the service who would understand the horrible shame I feel. 'Come at once—Milly.' Gad, I wish I'd run on the straight. She has all my love, though. No one has ever, or can ever, share that with her, the darling! What wonderful hair she's got! And how exquisitely beautiful and refined and dainty she is! 'Come at once—Milly.' It's a great nuisance not being able to dash off to her to-night. I do think Milly— However, poor old Mill, perhaps I can help her. She's in trouble. One couldn't possibly be hard-hearted enough to pay no attention to such a telegram as that. 'Come at once—Milly.' And I have been looking forward all these years to seeing Betty directly I landed. I wonder what's going on in town? By gad, I'll give myself a ripping little dinner—change of diet will do me good—and do a theatre or a music-hall. Something bright, with some good, swinging songs, will help to drive away these fearful blues. I don't think I've ever been so down on my luck in my life. A music-hall, I think, and I'll see if I can't find a pal. Might possibly drop in to supper at the Continental, afterward. Must do something to buck myself up. After all, what have I ever done that every one else doesn't do? 'Come at once—Milly.' Dearest little wife! Wife! What a lovely word it is! The most perfect, the most pregnant with meaning in the whole English language. 'Come at once—Milly.' Country's looking nice, by gad! Glorious place, England, although it's so frightfully effete. Heavens! to get to town once more, and hear the old familiar roar! I'm looking forward like a kid to getting inside a hansom again! 'Come at once—Milly.' ... Although, of course, I'm frightfully sick at being prevented like this from steaming down to Betty. My sweetheart! My own little wife. 'Come at once—Milly.' What a funny thing it was—Cator dying two weeks after Betty and I were married. 1 wonder if I should have married Milly if I hadn't met Betty? I don't suppose so. Men never marry the women they— And yet, she's a good sort. It was all because Cator was such a brute. She couldn't do without sympathy. The world would think pretty badly of us, I suppose. But they could never understand the feeling that inspired me. It was wrong, of course, but at least it gave her an interest in life, and nobody ever found out. But I'm glad I was safely married. 'Come at once—Milly.'”

Blundell took his wife's photograph out of his breast-pocket, and sat for a long time looking at it in a wistful way. Many miles were passed; many little farms tucked away in the creases of the hills, many golden fields of still corn, many hedges loaded with leaf, many villages, bustling lazily, fell behind, the engine beating out a refrain to which “Come at once—Milly,” fitted in constantly, before he found that he was looking at the photograph upside down.

He whisked it round quickly, with a slight addition to his color, kissed it, and put it back in his pocket. “Come at once—Milly.”

Sighing heavily, he shook open a paper, and ran his eye down the entertainment advertisements. “Come at once—Milly.”

“'A romantic drama in four acts, he read. “That means armor, cymbals, silly fights. No, thanks. 'A new and original farce in three.' The new and original references to mothers-in-law and twins, I heard in my childhood. Not at any price—not even on paper. 'Shakespeare.' Never can hear what they're saying. 'Pavilion.' That's good enough! And one needn't put in an appearance before ten. Wish Betty were in town! How ripping to go together! I hate enjoying myself alone. Not that I shall enjoy it; I feel much too—sick with myself.... 'Come at once—Milly.'”

XX

As his hansom cleared the station yard and made its way into the street, Blundell forgot both women—his wife and the other. London leaped up in front of him—London, with its peculiar smell, its peculiar noises, its peculiar buildings, its peculiar traffic, its peculiar sameness, the ugliest, worst-kept, worst-swept, narrowest, most interesting city in the world.

It was half-past six in the evening. There was no wind, no breeze. The air, churned over and over during the day, was dead and thick. The pavements were black with tired, spiritless people making their way home after work. Omnibuses, loaded on top, crawled in long lines up and down the congested streets. Shrill-voiced newsboys shouted, the insistent bells of motor-cars rang sharply, the never-ending crunching of wheels, the shuffling of thousands of feet, filled Blundell's ears like a familiar song. As he approached Northumberland avenue and the Metropole, the sharp notes of coach horns made him lean eagerly forward, and a peal of the bells of St. Martin's brought a tightness to his throat.

Blundell felt that it was worth while going away from London for three years to plunge back into it again. Its very ugliness impressed him. Its very narrowness struck him as curiously homely. Beyond a new building here and there, or an old one renovated and cleaned, everything was the same. The sounds were the same, the people were the same, the very smell was the same. As he passed rapidly along to his hotel, London got into his blood, and he felt an overwhelming desire—the desire that fills every man who has known it well, and been away from it for some time—to become one of the great crowd again.

With a sense of home upon him, he paid the cabman, booked a room, left his luggage with the hotel porters, hastily washed, and made his way into the street.

The day had been very hot. The sun, still warm, touched the tops of the buildings with a thin finger of gold, and made all the higher windows seem on fire.

He saluted in a shamefaced, sudden, self-conscious manner as he passed under the ineffably inadequate statue of Nelson, and made his way to the Haymarket. He threw a shilling to a crossing-sweep whose face he recognized, and stopped for a moment to read the bill outside the Haymarket Theatre. He went into the old-fashioned shop at the top of the street to get some cigarettes, and, smoking one with rare enjoyment—they were no better than the ones with which his case was filled, but they were the ones he used to smoke—swung on quickly to his club in Piccadilly.

The porter looked up from a half-penny racing paper and said, “Good evening, sir.” A member who had lunched with him the day before he went away, three years ago, gave him a “How-do?” as though he had seen him a few hours since. The waiter in the smoking-room answered his “Good evening” politely, uninterestedly, and brought him a whiskey-and-soda. There were the same faces, the same pictures, the same papers, containing pretty much the same matter. Nothing had altered; everything was the same. In ten minutes, it seemed ridiculous, impossible that he had been away three years. Three days seemed nearer the mark, or three minutes. With a curious, uncomfortable feeling, he went into the billiard-room. The two men who were playing when he left were still playing. He would have sworn that both were dressed in exactly the same clothes. He sat down and tried to imagine that he had really been on the Mediterranean. He tried to recall the sounds, the scents. He couldn't. He tried to remember the sing-songs on board under the deep sky in the moonlight. He couldn't.

“It's a dream,” he said to himself. “I've been lunching at the Berkeley, and have been away only a couple of hours.”

His cigarette went out, and he dived into his pocket for his match-box. He felt two pieces of thin paper. With some surprise he pulled them out. They were telegrams, one signed “Betty,” the other “Milly.” He read them with interest. “Queer!” he thought. “Why do they say welcome, and want me to go at once, as though I had been away? I saw them both a few hours ago.”

Then he shook himself, and laughed. “Lord!” he said, under his breath, “what a quaint city it is! I believe they must wash the streets down every morning with the waters of Lethe!”

XXI

Blundell had dined well, and his second cigar was more excellent than the first. He watched two turns, from his stall at the Alhambra, with some amusement—one devoted to a fat lady in blue tights who sang sentimental songs with a strong cockney accent, and the other to a troupe of Swiss acrobats, with greasy hair and oily smiles—and then went up to the promenade, rather hoping he might meet some one he knew. He had begun to feel strangely lonely and insignificant.

The dining-room of the Metropole had been well filled. He knew no one. They seemed to be mostly Americans, judging from the queerness of their clothes and hair, and people from Birmingham and Liverpool, judging from the commonplace cut of their faces.

After searching, without success, among the heterogeneous crowd which moved backward and forward, for a face he knew, he leaned over the velvet back of the seats, and listened, with a queer sense of being a mere atom, a unit, to the orchestra.

A selection from “I Pagliacci” rose above the babble of tongues, and its passion, its jealousy, its despair, touched the note of sentimentality within him, and made him long eagerly to see his wife again. Yet, as he listened, and as he conjured up in his mind the face and figure of his beautiful little wife, the only words the ringing music sang to him were, “Come at once—Milly—Milly.”

“How do you do?” said a soft voice at his elbow.

He started, instinctively raising his hat, and looked at the speaker.

Her face was rouged, and her hair was dyed. The shape of the face was delicately oval, and pathetically girlish and sweet, and the mouth was sensitive and refined. He gazed at her a full minute, and then, with astonishment and pity, cried, “Good heavens, you!”

The woman stared at him, unrecognizingly. Then her mouth suddenly quivered, and her eyes fell.

“Mr. Blundell!”

He caught up her white-gloved hand, and shook it warmly, rather overdoing a certain careless bonhomie in his endeavor to soften the shock he felt his words had conveyed.

“Come and sit down somewhere, and let us talk. I was hideously lonely a minute ago. It's delightful to see you again. It's five years. But I should know you anywhere. You haven't changed at all.”

She followed him in silence. They talked a little, but most of the time Blundell looked at her with deep pity in his eyes. Finally, his heart so weighed with the tragedy of it all, he said to her:

“If I were to—to lend you eight sovereigns, would you stay away from here for a week?”

“Yes.”

He hurriedly slipped the money into her hands, and made his way quickly through the crowd, down the wide stairs and into the street.

“What brutes we are!” he cried in his heart, “what brutes!”

XXII

{{sc|With his ante-breakfast cup of tea, Blundell found a letter from his wife.

“Darling old boy,” it read, “welcome, a thousand welcomes! I have no words to tell you how disappointed I was to get your telegram. I'm afraid I shall be obliged to cry myself to sleep to-night. But, of course, business must be attended to, mustn't it? Bother business! I want you to find this little note when you wake, so if I wish to catch the early post I must fly with it to the post-office. But I have just time to say what you already know—that I love you more than ever, and just long to see you with all my might. Wire me your train in any case, sweetheart.”

Blundell kissed the little note several ties, and repeated to himself, a pleasant warmth pervading him: “Dear little Betty! how she loves me! how she loves me! I'll get a red tie, I think. Milly likes me in a red tie.”

After his bath, having thoroughly wetted his hair, and parted it with immense precision in the centre of his head, he noticed with a sort of shock that no gold gleamed among the silver which lay, with a pipe-knife, a cigar-cutter, a silver cigarette-case, and the key of his room, on the dressing-table.

“What the devil——!”

The piquant face and smart figure of the girl he had met the previous evening floated in front of him.

“Ass!” he said aloud, “consummate ass! Now I sha'n't be able to get those cigars, and the present I wanted to give Betty.”

Having started the day badly, the tactics of his stud—next to a woman the most unnecessarily elusive institution on earth—didn't improve his temper. As he groped about under the dressing-table for it, his words were picturesque and ingenious, and when, after a quarter of an hour's hunt on his hands and knees, the lost article rolled out of the bottom of his trousers, they became positively phosphorescent.

At breakfast, his eggs were hard-boiled, and his coffee distinctly muddy. At the next table an American, with a more than usually horrid accent, read his mail aloud to his wife, and with blatant exultation announced to the whole world that, by the sale of certain shares, he was the richer by several hundred thousand dollars. Finally, the waiter upset the milk over the table, and Blundell, knowing that he would have paid the ground rent of the hotel for a year when he settled for the breakfast he had not eaten, rose, and stumped angrily down-stairs to the smoking-room.

It was half-past nine. It was necessary to kill more than three hours' time. Blundell felt no desire to leave the hotel. London was no longer in his blood. It was all too hopelessly lonely. No man who has been a somebody can stand being nobody—nothing, an atom. He loathed the place, its crowd, its din, its ugliness.

With an air of aggression, he lighted a pipe and collected all the morning papers he could lay his hands on. The first one, a half-penny paper, made him scoff loudly. It was composed of snippets of snobbery, badly worded letters from readers about such trivial matters as the post-office, the linnet that sang at midnight, and the methods of an effete government, and a leader, obviously written by a precocious provincial journalist, on a subject that it was impertinent of him to discuss. The only thing in it that arrested his attention was a notice of a play by a leading playwright produced the previous night at a leading West End theatre. The writer devoted the whole of his space to proving how much better he could have written the play himself, and mentioned in his last line that it was only saved from being hissed off the stage by the actors.

For the fun of the thing, Blundell read the notices in all the other papers, and was amused to see that none of them in the least agreed with the half-penny writer, or with anybody else. A big daily, in devoting two columns to exuberant eulogies of the play, mentioned that, alas! it was almost wrecked by the acting. A third paper stated, sweepingly, that both the play and the acting were beneath contempt. None of the critics made the least attempt to criticize, but each aired some personal grievance, and did his best to find fault.

As time went on, Blundell's anger and wounded pride slipped away, and a kind of excitement took their place. He began to finger his tie, and ask himself again and again what on earth Milly could possibly want to see him about.

“Women are such extraordinary people,” he said to himself; “they never forget. Their minds are like the boxes children keep under lock and key—filled with the utterly unessential things. They will lose their engagement-rings with three fairly respectable stones, and experience very little regret. But they wouldn't part with a rose given to them by some disreputable lover for all the gold of Ind.... Those were jolly days, by gad! Good old Milly! But what the dickens does she want to see me about? I suppose I ought to catch the train down to Betty to-night. Otherwise, I'd suggest taking Milly to a theatre. I'd like to do a theatre with her again, just for auld lang syne.”

XXI

Blundell walked as far as Hyde Park Corner. London was wearing its usual Midsummer appearance. The sun poured down upon Piccadilly. The omnibuses, loaded on top, made their way slowly up the hill. Cabs, empty, and likely to remain so, crawled, like tired flies, close to the curb, wearing holland covers, with fringes hanging over the front, and many of the horses wore bonnets. Most of the clubs were closed for new decorations.

At Hyde Park Corner, Blundell got into a cab, and drove to his flat in the Addison Road. A few actors ambled about the Row, uneasily, and the dried grass in Kensington Gardens was spotted with the white frocks of nursemaids and children. Parliament had risen, and London, more crowded than ever, was in that deplorable state that is known as “empty.”

Almost every shop in that strange and giddy and dangerous thoroughfare, Kensington High street, was undergoing its annual Summer sale, and hosts of women of all ages crowded round the shops, peering knowingly at the windows. Hammersmith sent its contingent; and West Kensington, poor but proud; Chelsea, and the lost regions on the wrong side of the water. Even to Blundell, there was a subtle pathos in the sight. He, also, knew the difficulty of keeping up appearances with very little to do it with.

His heart beat more quickly as he neared Uxbridge Mansions, Addison Gardens. He could remember the glow of pride which spread over him when he drove up to them with Betty, after their honeymoon. Their windows were small, but the bricks were red, and the bells were electric, and the board in the hall contained one honorable, and one surgeon-general. Betty thought everything very charming, and he remembered, with a laugh, that she put merely “Uxbridge Mansions, W.,” on her note-paper, and left “Addison Gardens, Hammersmith” out. It didn't do away with the fact that it was a bare three-shilling cab fare from the theatres. They had been very happy there together for three months.

The flat was on the third floor. There was a new porter in the old porter's clothes. Blundell knew it by the sack under each of his arms, and by the trousers, which, although turned up, were still too long by a couple of inches.

He instinctively felt for his latch-key. It seemed absurd to ring the bell of his own place like any stranger.

He asked for Mrs. Cator, and was shown into the little drawing-room he had taken such a pride in. He stood on the rug in front of the fireplace—it was a bargain from one of Hampton's sales—and surveyed the room. His thoughts flew back to the morning, several days before his marriage, when, with his best man, he had hung the pictures, pipe in mouth, coat off, sleeves rolled up, and had arranged the furniture, which Betty had afterward rearranged in the usual woman's way.

One of the pictures was crooked. With a lump of sentimentality in his throat, he crossed the room, and put it straight with the tip of his finger. The thin-legged writing-desk he had given Betty on her birthday—the first birthday, so far as he was concerned—was open. Many of Mrs. Cator's letters were lying upon it. In a pigeon-hole he saw a number of letters in his wife's handwriting. He took them up, and kissed them. Hearing a step in the passage, he slipped them, with a smile, into his pocket, and turned expectantly toward the door.

Milly Cator came forward with outstretched hand. “Evelyn,” she said, with a ring of pleasure in her honest voice, “how nice to see you again!”

Slightly chilled at the almost sisterly greeting, Blundell took her hand. “Thanks,” he said. “It is good to be home.”

He had rehearsed a very different scene. He quite expected that she would have flung her arms around his neck with tears, and he had intended to kiss her on her cheek, and pat her shoulder, and talk in a fatherly way of “what might have been.” As it was, Milly stood before him, beaming with health and cheerfulness, almost aggressively sane. He felt aggrieved. He felt as most of us feel when, upon opening a dainty parcel, tied carefully, sealed here and there, and marked “Fragile,” “With care,” a sample of patent medicine is discovered.

“How well and brown you are looking, dear old boy!” said Milly, sitting down. “You've evidently had a very good time.”

Blundell assumed a woebegone expression. “Does a man usually have a good time when he is away for three years from the woman he loves better than his life—only three months married to her? I've had a beastly time.”

Mrs. Cator's face flushed slightly, and her eye wandered uneasily to the pigeon-hole of the writing-desk.

“Oh,” she said, “yes, yes, of course. I forgot Betty for a moment.”

“I have never forgotten Betty for an instant,'” said Blundell. “When a man marries for love, you know, penal servitude is not worse than separation.”

There was a slight pause. Mrs. Cator, unable to clear her mind of some gladness that the man she had expected to wait for her freedom should have married a woman so unworthy as Betty, wondered what he would say if he could see the bundle of letters.

Blundell, not altogether with intention, began to frame other sentences likely to give pain to the woman who seemed to have forgotten that he had behaved badly to her.

The temptation to put the letters in Blundell's hands, and so, while killing his love for his wife, very possibly regain some of it herself, was very strong with Milly; because, being the man for whom she had sacrificed something more than her self-respect, Mrs. Cator still loved Blundell. It is the way of women.

“You'll stay to luncheon, of course,” she said, brightly.

“I can't; thanks very much,” said Blundell, who had made arrangements to do so; “I want to catch the afternoon train into the country. You see, if I hadn't—if I you hadn't—I should have gone down last night. But I wanted to be of use to you.”

Mrs. Cator fidgeted with her fingers. “It was kind of you to wait,” she said. “The fact is, Betty wanted me to see you to get you to take down a parcel—quite a small one—of things I have been getting for her in town. As you are in such a hurry, perhaps I had better get it for you at once.”

“Thanks,” said Blundell, rising, and opening the door.

Again Mrs. Cator's eyes traveled in the direction of the pigeon-hole. After a brief, sharp struggle, she rose with a smile, and went to the door.

“How glad she will be to get you back again!” she said, as she went out.

Blundell returned to the rug in front of the fireplace, in an extremely irritable frame of mind. For Milly's sake, he had stayed one night away from his wife, had been put to the expense of a hotel bill, extra cab-fares, and had thrown away eight guineas of his hard-earned money from purely mistaken ideas of philanthropy.

“And we might have had such a jolly afternoon and evening!” he said to himself.

In the little dining-room of the flat Mrs. Cator, with the tears streaming down her cheeks, spread out a telegram she had received the previous morning. It was from Betty, and ran as follows:

“Wire to Evelyn and ask him to see you to-morrow urgently. I do not want down to-night or to-morrow. Keep him. Very important. Be sure you wire me the train he decides to come by.”

With a bitter exclamation, Mrs. Cator opened the railway guide, and then, drawing a telegraph form from its case, wrote:

“He is leaving by the two-fifty-five. “Milly.”

This she gave to her maid, with the request that it might be sent at once. She then went to her bedroom, made a parcel of some hair-nets Betty had written for, carefully bathed her eyes with a wet sponge, and returned, studiously cheerful, to the drawing-room.

“Here it is,” she said, holding out the parcel. “Are you sure you haven't time to stay to luncheon?”

“Quite sure, thanks,” said Blundell; “I must get back to the Metropole, and put my things together. Glad to see you looking so well and happy.”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Cator, “I was never happier in my life, or so well. Perhaps I shall see something of you both before your leave is up.”

“Thanks, I hope so. Well—good-bye!”

“Good-bye!”

As the outer door closed upon him, Mrs. Cator slipped into a chair, with her hands over her eyes. “He's forgotten!” she cried.

Blundell put up his stick to hire a cab, flung the little parcel upon the seat, and got in after it, and slammed the doors together angrily.

“She's forgotten,” he thought.

XXIV

Blundell rose from the chair by the window of his bedroom in the Metropole. Big Ben struck nine. His bags lay open, and his clothes and shirts lay scattered about the room. He had stopped in the middle of his packing to read Betty's letters to her friend.

He had kissed them again before he commenced reading them. He felt the need of some balsam to his vanity. He didn't own it to himself, but his interview with Milly Cator had wounded his pride. The letters would tell him how keenly he had been missed by one dear little woman, and how deeply he was loved.

As he read, luncheon unthought of, dinner unthought of, the veins of anger, disgust, contempt and self-pity stood out in knots upon his forehead. The references to himself wounded him far more terribly than the indiscreet analysis of herself. This made him feel only righteously indignant, and utterly sorry for himself, although it elevated him in his own eyes, into the position of a man of high morality and unimpeachable rectitude.

Cramped and tired, he rose from his chair by the window, being unable to see. The light had faded.

For some time he stood in the little, stiffly furnished room in the dark. He knew that he had arrived at the end of a road which branched off in the shape of a Y into two others. Along one of these he could see himself and Betty, together, yet alone. Along the other there was no Betty to be seen.

It was a colossal moment. And for minutes he allowed himself the pleasure of standing outside himself, and looking at himself with the eyes of a friend—a friend who understood. Instead of the selfish, sensual, commonplace, sentimental, easy-going person he knew himself to be, he saw a good-looking man, white all through, bleeding from a deep wound in his heart—a wound inflicted by the wife he had so devotedly and faithfully loved—a wound no human hand could ever heal.

From the street below, a quick, metallic echo of hoofs came nearer, then died away, to be followed immediately by others. The sound of trains, an ugly sound, came also. In the passage outside his door, bells rang, and sometimes a key was pushed into the lock of other doors. Steps passed and repassed, muffled by the thick carpet.

Blundell, filled with pity, reëntered himself. “My God, what have I done to deserve this!—what? what? I have never quite lied to her. She has lied to me from the beginning of all things. I have never been actually unfaithful to her; I've only been badly tempted, and have fallen. She has been worse than unfaithful to me for three years. She is leading a life a thousand times more immoral than that poor devil of a woman I met last night.”

With a sudden movement, he switched on the electric light, drew his chair beneath it, and with blasphemy on his lips, and a desire to punish in his heart, went on reading.

XXV

“I slept the greater part of the afternoon away,” the next letter ran. “If nothing exciting is going forward, I always lay myself out for an afternoon's sleep. It is a sure way to prevent lines. When I say sleep, I don't mean a nap on a couch; that is really of little use. I mean a long, steady sleep from luncheon till tea-time, in bed, undressed as though it were night-time, with the blinds down, the window open, and the air playing on my face.

“That's one of the great disadvantages of being a mother. Unless the exchequer allows of an excellent nursery, far away at the other end of the house, a woman cannot get her proper sleep. Thank heaven, I am not a mother. I think a child would completely ruin my life. I have nothing of the maternal instinct. I never could stand a doll, even.

“But take the little girl in this cottage. There you have a born mother. Nature marked her out for a mother from her earliest infancy. But I do not understand such women. My marriage with Evelyn was merely one of convenience. You know Evelyn slightly, and therefore, no doubt, you think that he is a most excellent specimen of English manhood. I dare say you are right; in fact, I am sure you are. He is an excellent specimen of English manhood, or any other manhood, for that matter. I can well imagine that he would make a very useful kind of neighbor. If one flattered him sufficiently he would run one's little messages, roll one's lawn, take one's dog for walks, and make a cheerful and fairly efficient fourth at a game of bridge.

“But he is not the ideal man to have married, believe me. He takes everything as a matter of course, and, having got it, either sleeps or goes his way, whistling 'Annie Laurie,' or an air from the latest musical comedy. He wants his own way in everything, and nags when he doesn't get it. He demands a constant supply of good food, and grows horribly sulky and bad-tempered unless his vanity is fed at stated times also. He plays a good deal more enthusiastically than he works, and, being utterly devoid of a sense of humor, puts the wrong interpretation on badinage. And the worst of it is, I still live in an atmosphere of small means. Making both ends meet is not a pastime I care about. My métier is spinsterhood with unlimited money. I ought to travel, and see the world. I am not cultured, but I am intelligent, and that's a strange thing fora woman. Every one has a 'kink;' you know mine. I revel in it. But for all that, I am very capable of enjoying anything that is lofty. I feel that I could write books if I took the trouble. I should write about myself, of course. Most women do, one way or another. And because I can't be bothered to write books, I write these long, indiscreet letters to you. It's very unwise. But, you see, I can't very well write them to my mother or to Evelyn. My mother would be interested and horror-stricken; and I think Evelyn would hurt me. I think he would rise up with superb righteousness and hit me. You see, he is so essentially English. He considers that, being a man, he may do as he chooses, but that no wife has a right to be anything but a devoted idiot. It's a fine theory!

“I put in an excellent time this evening. My hero and I met again—you will never guess where. I don't mind a bit what the good woman down-stairs may think, and so I asked him in after dinner. He came about nine o'clock. It was a gorgeous evening, very hot and still and breathless—just the kind of evening that helps me immensely. I put the lamp out and brought in three candles from the bedroom. I have no stupid superstitions on the subject of three lights. I really think this caused the good woman more uneasiness than the fact that I was going to entertain a mere farmer. The impropriety part of it didn't appeal to her in the least. For me, 'a London lady,' to receive a country person was the point. I told her I wanted to ask him about the pensioners.

“I wore a soft, white, clinging gown, cut low at the neck, with short sleeves. I was 'discovered' lying on the sofa, under the window.

“He came in timidly. His mood had changed again. He was no longer just the delighted boy, or the man roused; he was the man in love.

“A man in love is always seen to the worst advantage. He sits in awkward positions, quiet, dull, sentimental. My monster was exactly like them all. I thought till this evening that it was impossible for him to look awkward. I was wrong. He not only looked more awkward than most men in love, but he looked more foolish.

“And yet, he was not uninteresting, because it was so palpably his first attack. I read to him for an hour. I chose Rossetti—not Dante Gabriel; his work is so mad, so tricky, so utterly unmeaning—but Christina. I read well for a woman. I understand the value of a semicolon. And, as I read, he sat and watched the movement of my lips, merely hanging on the sound of my voice. I might just as well have been reading the sorriest prose. I read because I had pretty well exhausted all topics of conversation.

“When I looked at him—I looked at him frequently—I could see a blaze in his eyes. I believe if I had put my hand on his, he would have seized me and kissed my breath away. I longed to do it. I longed, just as a child does when it is alone with a fire, to throw on a log and see the flare. But, my dear Milly, he has elevated me to the pedestal of a saint. I am no woman; I am a goddess! All men who love for the first time, all men of imagination, all unconscious poets, do this. Being just a woman, I like it, naturally. So would you. Every Jill has her Jack they say. But I believe the worshiper has the better time, until he has been disillusioned, and so ceases to worship. And, even then, it is the one who was worshiped who has the harder time. Ah, it is always the woman who pays!

“He bent over my hand when he was going, and kissed it lightly, with the simple grace and adoration of a schoolboy, and then hastened away.

“I took the candles into my bedroom, and undressed slowly. Honestly and truly, this man is the only one I have ever met who has come near to stirring what little power for loving there is in my heart. He is such a genuine soul. Indeed, he is a man at his best. I feel, at this moment, that I should like to go to the bank of some river, swim across it and back, and come out cleansed, just as much a woman as he is a man. Together, equally genuine, equally simple, equally human, equally in love, what a heaven would earth be for us!

“I think this is the only time in my life that I have wished painfully, with a sharp, hot pricking, that I could go back and begin all over again. I should be so different! I wonder, if I could go back, whether it would do any good. I am afraid not; I am afraid not, dear Milly.

“I think I hear him under the window of my sitting-room. I must go and see.”

XXVI

“I crept across the creaking room gingerly, because my feet were slipperless, gathered my night-robe close, shook my hair away from my face, and peeped behind the curtain.

“The window was open. The moon, sitting in a sky as clear as water, surrounded by a thousand thousand stars, flooded the earth with her light. I could count the loose stones on the road. I could see every sleepy ear of corn to the right and left, and far in front of me. I could see every leaf in every tree, lying still in sleep against the deep blue. They threw their shadows in front of them as though the sun and not the moon were shining. It was all quite still. I had a feeling that it would be unkind not to hold my breath, lest even my light breathing should waken everything. The beauty, the simplicity, the trustfulness of it all, made me forget for a little what brought me to the window.

“I heard a long sigh, and leaned slightly forward. There stood the man I wished I could love as no woman had ever loved a man before, leaning against a tree, looking up at my window.

“In a whisper the village clock struck one. Everything stirred slightly at the sound, murmured drowsily, and fell to sleep again.

“The moon shone directly into my window. I slipped from behind the curtain, and stood there in her light, with my hair all about my shoulders.

“I saw him spring a step forward, and stop. Across the stillness his breathing came to me—hot, quick, eager. My own heart raced. I felt as I had never felt in my life—a child, a girl, an ordinary sweet girl.

“Neither of us moved. I heard the quarter-hour strike. And then I said his name, faintly, once, twice and again. With his arms held out in front of him, with his eyes fixed on my face, he came slowly, slowly, until he stood under my window. I leaned over, and looked down at him, with my heart fluttering. I said his name again. And not like a man who knew what he was doing, he put his hands among the branches of the thick creeper on the wall, and came up to me, nearer, nearer. Our faces were close together. Our breath mingled, pantingly. He climbed a little higher, and sat upon the sill. Neither of us spoke. But presently his hands were on my shoulder, and I felt myself drawn forward. He held me tightly, and kissed my lips, my eyes, my forehead, my hair, again and again and again. It was the sweetest thing that had ever happened. For just that little time, I felt nearer to being a woman than ever in my life. My arms were slipping round his neck when a bat flapped against my face. I gave a cry of alarm, and drew back into the room, and put my hands over my eyes. When I took them away I was alone.

“And then I flung myself on my bed, and cried myself to sleep.”

XXVII

“To-day is the last of those I have to kill. I woke to it refreshed and rested. The episode of the first hour of the morning came back to me at once. But the feeling which the air, the moonlight, the sentiment, had given me, had departed. It only struck me as intensely funny. I was Betty Blundell, née Trevor, again. And I looked at myself standing in my night-robe and bare feet in the moonlight, allowing myself to be kissed by that dear, stupid boy, with astonishment. I laughed for minutes. But, at the same time, I had a lurking desire to thank my stars for the opportune arrival of that bat! He is a dear boy. I defy anybody to meet him and not feel a little tender about him. Goodness, how unwise it was!

“I found a letter from Evelyn waiting for me. He tells me they will put in this morning about midday for certain. Ah, well! thank heaven he will be going away again quite soon.

“I sent two wires by one of the children. I didn't want to see that inevitable smile flicker over that foolish woman's face at the post-office. One telegram was wifely, and welcomed Evelyn. The other you know, and I trust you have long since acted upon it. In fact, of course you have, for I received a telegram from Evelyn saying that he was putting up at the Metropole, and had business in London to-morrow. I wonder how well you knew him, my dear. I shall get you to tell me one of these days. He has often assured me, in his silly, sentimental way, that I am the only woman with whom he has ever been in love. I never believed him. I never believe anything of that kind that any man tells me.

“And so I shall have to-day and most of to-morrow to kill yet!

“I know exactly what kind of a mood Evelyn is in—not so much because of his letter as because I know him well. He has worked himself into a state of terrific remorse over the little unfaithfulnesses of the last three years. And he is saying to himself, with an air of great enjoyment and well-simulated sincerity, 'I am not worthy, I am not worthy!' And, all the while, he is pining to know what you want to see him about! What a shallow, sentimental, posing, self-indulgent pig he is! I can see him as I write this. (It is six o'clock, and I am getting this ready to post at seven, so that you may have it in the morning. It will be my last letter in regard to this episode.) He is getting a shirt out of his case, and is carefully examining it to see whether it is stiff enough, shiny enough to wear. He will dress himself carefully, wet his hair in his usual way, dine, with a self-conscious smirk, in a high collar, and go to a music-hall with a big cigar. He will take more whiskey-and-soda than is quite good for him during the evening, and either go back to his hotel in a sickly, silly way, or not, as the case may be.

“His letter prepares me for a very uncomfortable time. These last three years have, I can see, only enhanced his selfishness, his coarseness—what he calls his affection—and his bad temper. Well, I suppose I mustn't grumble. I married with my eyes open. It was the only way out.

“Just before luncheon I received another letter—a very different one. It was brought by a boy, and was unaddressed. It was to be given to 'the lady.' I'll copy it out. It was very funny:

“'I love you! I have loved you since the world began. I can't live unless you are my wife. I want you, beloved. I have nothing to offer you but love—that's all; but it is the greatest love that man ever offered to a woman. You kissed me last night; my lips are still trembling. Let me find you again on your hill, with the sun waiting behind you. I love you, and I have found you, after all.'

“I wish I could give you some idea of the writing—the great, honest, schoolboy writing—that shook with his eagerness. I wonder what he will say when I tell him that I am married, and that Evelyn arrives to-morrow.

“What do you think he will do? Will he hurt me, do you think? I remember I had a horrid dream in which leaves played a great part. My recollection of it is very hazy, but I believe he went mad, or something. However, even wild boys don't do that in these times. He will soon get over it, living as he does in the open air, and the incident will remain with him as pleasantly as it will with me.

“It's quite marvelous how quickly these days have gone. It seems a century ago that I used to sit and listen to Valentine Worthing. I am already fidgeting to get back to blessed London, and hear its murmur, and feel the pulse of it throbbing under my feet. What does a hansom look like? And how are they getting on with the new Walsingham House? And do the geraniums still hang outside the windows of the Berkeley? And is there any difference in the length of the skirt?

“Ten days? Oh, Milly, no, no! Ten solid years! My calendar lies to me. I am ten years older. I feel that everything in my dear London will be changed. Don't, don't tell me it has changed.

“There were so many pieces at the theatre I wanted to see. They will have been withdrawn ages ago, and forgotten; and new ones, with actors I never heard of, will have taken their places. I am sure my hair is streaked with gray. I shall be obliged, for the first time, to have it touched.

“I wish Evelyn would come. I wish I hadn't asked you to keep him in town another day. I no longer want anything to do with the farmer man. I want Evelyn. I want to coax him into leaving this place and going up to town. I want to be able to wake in the morning and hear the rumble of omnibuses, the jingle of cabs, the cries of paper boys. Bond street is in my blood again. I ache for a sight of Bond street.

“Hurry Evelyn away. Don't keep him. Make him come to me. I don't suppose you care two raps about him, whatever happened in the old days. Be a friend, and send him to fetch me away.

“This place is eerie. I can't hear a sound, and there's nothing to do.

“But I suppose I must tell you what just happened. It wouldn't be fair not to, after all I have told you, would it?

“I waited until five o'clock, and then I went to the hill—that beastly hill—I hope for the last, last time.

“My young god was waiting there. The instant he caught sight of me a silly smile broke out round his mouth, and a strange look came into his eyes. He didn't come and meet me, and so save me the trouble of climbing to the top. He waited for me, looking more utterly foolish than any man I have ever seen.

“I was in no mood for girlishness. All desire to go on playing had faded. I wanted to get rid of him, and to think of London; to sit quietly, and try with closed eyes to conjure up the sounds and scenes of that great city.

“He opened his arms as I came to the top, and stood there, beaming, half-shy, half-bold, wholly idiotic.

“'Beloved!' he cried.

“I slipped aside, quickly.

“My dear boy, don't, please!' I said, rather unkindly, I'm afraid. 'I've come only to thank you very much for helping me to pass the time till my husband came home. It has all been very jolly, and I hope that if ever you come to London you will look us up. I am sure that my husband will be only too glad to——'

“I stopped because something in his eyes frightened me. He bent forward and looked at me for a moment, and his face lost all its color. Then he tottered, swayed like a big tree struck by lightning, and, to my immense surprise, fell flat on his face in the grass.

“I fled! It was most uncomfortable and unusual.

“Of course, it was unexpected for him, but what did he mean by being quite too ridiculous?

“I must hurry up if I want to catch the post, and I do want to, awfully. You will get this before you see Evelyn. Just make some excuse; give him those hair-nets you said you would send me, and didn't, and pack him off by the afternoon train. But please send me a wire. Do this for me, Milly, like a dear, and count on me for a similar act of friendship at any future time.

“Yours,
“Betty.”

XXVIII

The following day was as hot in the country as it was in London. In the city the heat was annoying; in the country it was a joy.

Mrs. Blundell sang as she dressed. It was a pretty, birdlike voice, very true, very light, very well-tutored, but utterly without feeling.

She dressed carefully. It took her half an hour to decide which of her many frocks she should wear. She tried on one, and moved about the little, cramped room in it. She took it off, and tried on another. This she eventually discarded for the time, and went back for the first.

It was a white dress with baby ribbons. In slipping it over the head, one of the hooks caught in her hair-net. She fumbled patiently, deftly, with it for some moments, singing softly, and when the hook still refused to release itself, she stamped, and cried, sharply: “Bother everything that catches!”

She sang again when she had freed the hook by tearing her net.

Many times during breakfast she slipped to the window, and looked out toward the village for the boy who brought telegrams and butter, bacon and soap, from the conglomerate post-office. Each time she returned without having seen him, she sighed impatiently, and broke into a smile. Once or twice she flung her arms up, threw her head back, and cried under her breath, “London, London!”

She was arranging flowers in three colored vases, with glass legs, when a knock came at the door. She turned, eagerly.

“Come!” she said, dropping the flowers on the table.

Mrs. Weeks entered with a kind of deferential familiarity.

“Give me the telegram, Mrs. Weeks, quickly.”

“There beant no tallygrum, mum,” said Mrs. Weeks, with a smile.

Mrs. Blundell's hand fell to her side. She flushed angrily. “Oh, well, what is it, Mrs. Weeks, what is it?”

“I jest thought as how, mabbe, ye'd finished with your breakfus', mum,” apologized the good and somewhat flustered woman.

Mrs. Blundell was too excited to be irritable for any length of time. She took up the flowers again, and smiled pleasantly. “I expect my husband to-day, Mrs. Weeks,” she said, after a moment.

“Yes'm?”

In Mrs. Weeks's voice there was something of the interested sympathy which may always be noticed in the voices of women, whether they themselves are happily married or not, at the mention of the word husband. And she smiled warmly, and smirked a little, and sunk her voice a tone, romance oozing out of her every pore.

Mrs. Blundell smiled back, prettily, describing the woman, in her brain, as a hopeless fool.

“You must give us a very nice dinner, dear Mrs. Weeks. You must surpass yourself.”

Mrs. Weeks blushed with pleasure. “Yes'm,” she said. “'As 'e bin away fer long, mum?” she asked, after a pause.

“For three years.”

“Moy, that's a fair slice!”

“Yes, it is a long time.”

Mrs. Weeks picked up the end of her apron, and ran her finger slowly along the edges.

“Mabbe, ye'll be leavin' me now, mum?”

“Oh, dear, no, Mrs. Weeks,” said Mrs. Blundell, with the emphatic insincerity of the woman whose one desire is to be liked by everybody. “I adore this little place and its surroundings. We shall leave you only if my husband's business takes him to London.”

London! London! The word echoed in her heart.

“Aye,” replied Mrs. Weeks.

A step crunched below. Like a swallow, Mrs. Blundell again darted to the window, and looked eagerly out.

A wave of sympathy passed over Mrs. Weeks when she saw the look of disappointment on Betty Blundell's face. “Aye,” she thought, packing the plates, “it must be foine to be loved loike that.”

“Why the dickens doesn't he wire?” cried Mrs. Blundell, inwardly. “The fool!”

As Mrs. Weeks. left the room, Mrs. Blundell seized the time-table, and for the tenth time looked up the trains from London. (London! London!) One arrived at 3:45. It was the first, unless he changed and waited three-quarters of an hour at a junction half-way, in which case he would be——

She looked at her traveling clock. “No, he's missed it.”

The second one came in at half-past seven. “Good heavens!” she cried, “what a frightful time to fill! I do think Milly might have played the game. She got my letter this morning. What cats women are!”

A hundred times during the remainder of the day, Mrs. Blundell sprang up from the sofa, and went to the window. A hundred times she cried out, “Why doesn't he wire? why doesn't he come? Oh, this dull place!”

A hundred times she took up a book, and, allowing her thoughts to wander, conjured up the noises, the bustle, the undercurrent of London. (London! London!)

Mrs. Cator's telegram was handed to her in the afternoon. Betty Blundell rejoiced. But a restlessness still pervaded her. At seven o'clock, unable to sit still, to stand still, to read, to think, she started off to walk along the road which led to the station.

No telegram had come from Evelyn. The postman delivering the evening post had gone. There was no letter from Evelyn.

Telling herself that her husband was planning a surprise, Mrs. Blundell remained on the road till half-past eight, till nine, till half-past nine.

The sun went down in fiery silence. The harvest moon rose placidly. Birds chattered of their day's doings, and one by one fell asleep. The faint breeze, which had been teasing the grasses, grew tired, too. Even the gnats went home. Little Betty Blundell was alone.

The stillness got upon her nerves. With quick, angry steps, she returned to the cottage. Evelyn had missed the last train.

The dinner had been laid some time. The heat of the lamp had made the flowers—pansies, pinks, and sweet peas—hang limp. Mrs. Weeks had spent much time and thought in their arrangement. She had placed others on the mantelpiece, in vases collected from her own Sunday sitting-room. Her daughter had placed a big bowl filled with wild flowers on the dressing-table in the bedroom. With clean hands, the mother and her daughter had tidied up the room, packed the collection of books Mrs. Blundell had brought with her, in a little pile at the foot of the sofa, and tied the backs of the chairs up with clean antimacassars, trimmed with a staring blue ribbon. The little table Mrs. Blundell used to write upon had, also, been the subject of their earnest thought. The pens were arranged in parallel lines; the note-paper placed tidily on the blotting pad; the excellent writing-case—Blundell's birthday present—closed and fastened.

Mrs. Blundell came into the room, and flung her hat on to the sofa. The books toppled over with a clatter. She crossed to the writing-table, dashed the pens here and there, disarranged the note-paper, and flung open the writing-case. Then, snatching the flowers out of their vases, she pitched them out of the window. They lay trembling upon the road.

Mrs. Weeks tapped at the door.

“What is it?” cried Mrs. Blundell.

“If you please, mum, dinner has been cooked this half-hour. I'm afraid the chickenses is all frizzled up.”

“I don't want any dinner,” said Mrs. Blundell. “Go away.”

Leaving the perspiring woman in the middle of the room with her mouth open, Mrs. Blundell went out again and slammed the door.

XXIX

Early in the morning, furiously angry, Mrs. Blundell sent a telegram to her husband, and prepaid the reply. What right had he to stay at the Metropole, while she had to put up with two tiny, impossible rooms, in an out-of-the-way hole in the country? It was unjust; it was ridiculous. She was there, she argued, with dabs of angry color on her cheeks, only at his especial request. All this time, she might have been in London, or near London—at any rate, in civilization—having a good time.

At midday, a telegram and a note were brought up to her. The telegram was from Evelyn Blundell; the note from John Ashley.

:“Coming some time to-day,”

ran the first.

The second contained these eleven words:

“Meet me on the hill this evening for the last time.”

Anger left Mrs. Blundell. Determination took its place—a determination to get Blundell to take her away—to London, to Brighton, to Marlow, to Dieppe, anywhere away from the country—where there were people, things to dress for, things to see; a determination to make him pay for not having hurried to her side.

And she could make him pay, she said to herself, with a triumphant smile, in which there was not a little cruelty. She knew her husband well. She knew exactly the temper of him, the nature of him. Ah, yes, he should be made to pay!

She laughed as she thought about it, and, as she laughed, a song came back to her lips, and her eyes sparkled, and she moved about the room like a fairy, as slight, as exquisitely finished, as fresh and girlish as one of Romney's “Lady Hamiltons.”

She laughed a rippling laugh of amusement as she re-read John Ashley's little note. Yes, it would be good fun to see him again. After all, he was an unfledged man. He still existed as a subject for experiments, and it would be interesting to see what manner of mood he was in.

But she had plenty to do before the evening. Whether she ultimately decided on Brighton, Dieppe, St. Malo or London, dress was a difficulty. She would, she decided, run through her wardrobe, and see how she stood—decide which dresses would pass muster as they were, which could be made to pass muster with a little manipulation, and which would have to be replaced.

She gave little thought to her outstanding bills at the dressmaker's. After all, Blundell couldn't expect to get everything for nothing. And so, in the best of spirits, she spent a large portion of the morning and afternoon trying on her frocks, and peering critically at them, patting them here and there, and making notes on a sheet of writing-paper.

And she sang the while, as a bird sings, and flung her arms up gaily at the thought of leaving the country she so heartily disliked. Like a child, she even stood and looked out at the magnificent panorama, spread in front of the window.

Yet, after all, she had put in a fairly good time, she thought. John Ashley was very new. He had given her some excellent fun. He had proved to her, almost too convincingly, the fact that she had lost none of her power.

The evening came, as evenings have a knack of doing. She had been longer over her dress parade than she had intended to be. Evelyn would be in the cottage before she could return from the hill. It pleased her to think that he would be upset at not finding her waiting to give him welcome. She even dawdled a little in giving directions to Mrs. Weeks as to dinner, and, for the same purpose, made her way quite slowly through the fields.

She had no eyes for the delicate beauty of the evening, for the rich coloring of the corn, for the splashes in the hedges, for the whispers of the shaking grass, for the loud cantata of the birds.

“St. Malo, Dieppe, or London?” she asked herself, over and over again. “It's a bad time of year for London, but there are the theatres, and there's the Exhibition—that huge patch of gravel and painted canvas, popular chocolates and popular bands. But there there are people—people!”

She looked at her watch, resting one pretty foot on the lower step of a stile. By driving in the cart, Evelyn would by then be at the cottage. She laughed as she imagined his disappointed face.

Against the sky, erect and very still, stood Ashley, arms folded, chin low, watching her gravely as she went up the hill. The expression in his eyes was curiously cynical, curiously bitter.

With a kind of shock, Mrs. Blundell noticed that the youthful look she had so admired in him had gone. There were lines about his eyes and mouth, a peculiar slope about his shoulders.

He made no movement as she came nearer. Bare-headed, there he stood, with a never-changing expression, like a man turned into a statue. For the first time in her life, Mrs. Blundell felt insignificant, commonplace. She felt small and ignoble, by the side of this cold, impassive man, and all kinds of ridiculously feeble remarks surged in her brain.

“Good evening,” she said, finally, with a meaningless laugh she hated herself for. “What a beautiful evening!”

John Ashley merely continued looking at her, silently.

“We have certainly been very lucky in the weather,” she added, after a most uneasy pause. “Your crops will be very good, won't they?”

Again, she paused. Still Ashley remained silent, with his eyes going over her slowly.

She felt that he could see into her heart, and was aware of the emptiness of it; that he could see how poorly her nature compared with her appearance. She could feel a blush flooding her face. She bent down, and plucked some grass.

“You said you wanted to see me,” she said. “I thought you had always known that I was married. I've always worn my ring.”

She caught his eyes. She knew that he was aware that she was lying.

“My husband will be waiting for me. I think I'd better be——”

“Stop!” he said, quietly. “I have nothing to say, no reproaches to make. You have merely proved to me that my father knew what he was talking about. Before you go out of my life, will you kiss me once more?”

Immediately Mrs. Blundell became herself, and Ashley dwindled before her eyes.

“Oh, yes,” she said, “but you must really be quick about it.”

He opened his arms, and put them around her. He drew her slowly toward him, looking down into her eyes. Slowly he bent his head. She saw a gleam in his eyes, and, as she looked at them, her dream came back to her, and she felt his hands close round her throat. She tried to call out. She struggled wildly. He was killing her!

A coarse laugh rang through the quiet, scented air, and she found herself falling to the ground. She could breathe. The hands about her neck had relaxed.

XXX

When Mrs. Blundell looked up, she saw her husband and John Ashley gazing at each other. There was none of the mutual hatred she expected and hoped to see—only a kind of sympathy.

“Well, are you going to kill her?” said Blundell; “or isn't it worth while?”

There was a pause, during which John Ashley's eyes traveled contemptuously over the figure of the woman on the ground; then he said:

“No, it isn't worth while!” The man who had hoped he knew more than his father, turned on his heel.

A sudden feeling of fright seized Mrs. Blundell. She struggled to her knees, clasped her hands together, and cried out, “Evelyn! Evelyn!”

Again the coarse laugh rang out.

“Evelyn, before God, I have been faithful to you! Before God, Evelyn!”

But her husband was not looking at her. He was watching Ashley as he made his way stumblingly out of sight.

The beautiful Betty Blundell crept through the grass, and clasped her arms around her husband's knees. She was weeping now, and could not speak.

Suddenly, Evelyn drew a bundle of letters from his pocket, and flung them in her face. The veins swelled out on his forehead, and his face crimsoned.

Then, with a sneer, he turned on his heel, and went down the hill.