Julia, after the light supper which she had been thankful to substitute for the long dinner of the past four years, wandered slowly through the fields drinking in that peace which descends upon Hertfordshire at nightfall, in all its perfection. She leaned her arms on a fence, enjoying the Wordsworthian landscape: the wide fields with their hayricks like houses, the quiet cattle, the slowly moving stream, the soft masses of wood melting into the low sky. The red band had faded behind the sharp church spire. The night moths fluttered. The stillness was too soft to be profound, too sweet to inspire awe.

But although she loved this twilight beauty and peace of England, of which she had had but a taste now and again, being usually at table during the most poetical hour of the English day, she felt a sudden antagonism to it to-night, as too perfect, too finished a thing for the world to possess while so many of its dark problems were unsolved. Although she had persistently refused to study the underworld under the escort of Bridgit, turning instinctively from all that would shatter the illusions among which she chose to live, she had not been able to shut out bare knowledge, and Nigel’s second and fourth books had been even more enlightening than his first. She smiled as she thought of Nigel, whom she had not seen since the end of her first matrimonial vacation. He had left England soon after and not returned. His father, incensed at his avowed Socialism, and mortified at the conspicuous failure of his third book, an exquisite bit of pure art, had definitely renounced him, and he was living quietly and happily in picturesque corners of Europe. Julia, knowing his passionate love of beauty, envied him the power to gratify it, his complete surrender to the artistic life. She wondered why he kept on writing of the grimy horrors of England, when he might give the world his dreams of the wonderland beyond the Channel. To be sure, that unique combination of the propagandist and the artist made for greatness, but his last book, which she had finished only an hour since, had darkened her mind, and unfitted her for surrender to the beauty and peace of the English twilight.

Why was the enlightened class so stupid? Why did it not eliminate poverty and the terrible pictures that must haunt every sensitive mind, instead of waiting for mob rule, and its inevitable sequence of a dictator and return to first principles? Socialism must come from above. When the laboring classes used the word they meant democracy, in which every man would have a chance to acquire riches; mere comfort and security, with no opportunity to loot the universal till, had no charms for them. Man is adventurous and greedy, and the lower his place in the scale, the more insensate his dreams.

Nigel’s books, in their cold impersonal realism, did not inspire her with any great respect or liking for the poor. She knew that he was employing his art and his seductive story-telling faculty not only in the cause of humanity, but to help avert a convulsion in which his own class would go down. She knew that if it came to open war, a blood-revolution, the theories and principles of which his reason approved would fly off on the red winds and he would get behind the guns on his own side. The intellectual aristocrat may serve the cause of general humanity in entire honesty and conviction, but the moment class is arrayed against class he will fight, not with the passions of his brain, but of his instincts, and with that almost fanatical contempt and hatred of the common people when daring to assert themselves he has inherited with his brain cells. Nigel had admitted this freely to Julia, confessed that while he was keen to devote every year of his life and every phase of his talent to eliminating poverty, he never heard of a laborer’s strike which inconvenienced the public that he did not burn at their impudence and long for their annihilation.

“But it is this duality that makes the game interesting,” he had concluded. “I only hope I shall never be put to the test. There are many other things I should enjoy writing about far more, but I always feel that I don’t matter in the least. If I was given a brain on top of my instincts, it was to advance the cause of humanity and civilization. At all events that is the way I see things, by such light as I possess.”

He had gone on to say that he had become an advocate of Socialism because, so far, it was the best solution the human mind had evolved, but that all the artist in him lamented its lack of appeal to any part of man but his brain. Unpicturesque, dry, hard, but growing more practical and expedient year by year, if it failed eventually, it would only be through lack of a soul.

Would Nigel be the man to find this soul? He had a measure of genius; why not? She felt proud of him that he could induce the thought, then, in a moment of hardly realized sex jealousy, wished that it might be discovered by some woman. Herself? Why not? But at this point she laughed aloud, and turned her face toward home. Banish the ugly facts of life. Enjoy this divine peace while it lasted.

She left the field and sauntered down the crooked lane full of sweet scents and haunted by the white night moths. Skirting the wall that surrounded White Lodge, she entered by the front gates, but, loath to leave the twilight, mounted a stump and leaned her arms on the coping. The heath, a wild rolling bit of nature, mysterious in the dusk, was deserted but for a gypsy caravan. She remained out every night until dusk had melted into dark, ravished by the serene beauty of this typical bit of England, believing that in time it would help her to solve the riddle of her mind. For her soul she asked nothing, believing her capacity for happiness in any form to have been killed long since, but demanding some mental compensation more personal and permanent than books. If she dreamed long enough in this wonderful English twilight, gave her imagination rein—who could tell? And there was something more than a possibility that this liberty to dream and develop might spin out indefinitely. Even if the war with those tiresome Boers should prove as brief as the duke and her South African acquaintance predicted, Harold, deprived of other diversions, might go out to South Africa for such excitement and sport as the campaign would be sure to afford. And big game might exert its fascinations for a year or more.

She lifted her head suddenly, then thrust it forward, and peered into the shadows on the other side of the avenue. The trees of the park were closely planted, and their aisles, dim at noon, were black at this hour. But something moved, a shadow in a shadow! Julia, who had rarely known a tremor of fear, felt her knees shake, her breath come short. It could hardly be a poacher, for the preserves were behind the house, nearly a quarter of a mile away; no poacher would be lurking by the park gates when he could slip into the coverts at a dozen points. There was a lodge at the gates, but it was untenanted. No one at the house could hear her, no matter how loudly she might call, and—and—she watched the shadows with dilating eyes—there was no doubt that a man moved within twenty yards of her.

Suddenly it occurred to her that it must be one of the gypsies come to beg, and watching for his opportunity. She caught at the tails of her flying courage, and stepped out into the avenue.

“What do you wish?” she asked firmly. “If you have come to beg, I have no money here, but you can go to the house and I will tell them to give you food.” Then, as there was neither answer nor movement, she added with a fair assumption of indifference, “You can follow me.”

She started up the avenue, walking deliberately, while filled with a wild desire to run. For still there came no answer from the depths of that black plantation, nor, for a moment or two, any movement. Then she heard the soft crackling of twigs under a light foot, and, glancing irresistibly over her shoulder, saw a moving shadow. She felt her skin turn cold, and once more that insidious trembling attacked her limbs. She realized with both horror and indignation that she was in the grip of fear, she who had gone through earthquake and hurricane! For a moment mortification routed terror, gave her a momentary respite, and she halted and called sharply:—

“Why don’t you come into the avenue? Come out at once and walk ahead of me.”

The steps halted. There was no other answer. “Peace!” That was no word for a dark plantation at night! It was a silence so profound and so awful that it seemed to shriek. Julia clenched her shaking hands, took a step forward and peered into the wood. A shadow detached itself from the darker background and swayed deliberately.

Courage fled. In full surrender to fear, the most awful sensation that the human nerves can experience, she dashed up the avenue. In the confusion of her brain she fancied that she was standing still, that her feet had turned to lead, that her breath had left her body. Then the confusion was cut by a flash of thought. It was no man there, but some evil spirit that haunted the plantation. As every house on Nevis and St. Kitts had its ghost, she had grown up in a firm and unconcerned belief in the visits of the dead to their ancient haunts, and Bosquith boasted seven ghosts. But she had never seen one, and to accept a popular creed and find yourself pursued by a hollow visitant in a lonely park, far from human support, induces mental states entirely unrelated. It might even be a vampire! Julia shrieked, sobbed, almost leaped, as she heard that light crackling of twigs not three yards behind her.

Suddenly the steps ran ahead of her. Her wide staring eyes saw that shadow within a shadow, barely outlined, flit past among the trees, then stop, sway again. She sprang back among the trees on her side of the avenue. The shadow came slowly forward, then turned suddenly and ran back into the depths. Julia crouched with chattering teeth. They were plainly audible. So was her panting breath.

Again there was silence. Julia’s body, by a mere reaction independent of her will, recovered its power of motion and darted up the avenue once more. Again that light crackling of autumn leaves. But her will showed a flicker of vitality, moved in the depths of her disorganized brain. She visualized it, as she had once seen it in a diagram, dragged it upward, ordered it to keep her from fainting, to hold her strength until she reached the garden. She could see the lights of the house. Her mind grew clearer. She realized that she was running like a deer. A few more steps! Then she heard those behind bear down upon her with the swiftness and noise of an express train. She was caught about the waist. As she lost consciousness she heard a loud guffaw.

She opened her eyes, realized that she lay on a garden bench, that a heavily breathing creature stood beside her. For a moment she dared not lift her eyes, seized again with a fear that seemed to distend every nerve in her body, even as she felt something vaguely familiar in the form beside her. There was another burst of intense amusement. She sprang to her feet with blazing eyes and confronted her husband.

“You!” she gasped. “You!”

France rocked to and fro with mirth. “Yes!” he finally ejaculated. “Gad! I’m as much out of breath as you are—holdin’ my sides! What a lark! Never knew it would be such fun to frighten anybody. Rippin’ sensation. And you were frightened dumb, by Jove! Hardly believed it of you, but suddenly thought I’d try.”

“You coward! You brute!” One has to be calm and detached to find original phrases. In moments of real emotion the time-worn and the ready-made dart out of the mind as naturally as thought of dinner above hunger. “For anything that calls itself a man—”

“No insults, my lady, or I’ll do worse. It’s you are the coward—only time I ever got a rise out of you! Didn’t know you had any kind of excitement in you, by gad!”

“You brute! You brute!”

Julia, as much astounded as indignant, and vaguely alarmed, as she had sometimes been in the early months of her married life, turned to walk to the house in a dignified retreat. But France caught her in his arms.

“No you don’t, my lady. Give me a kiss.”

Then, for the first time, passion flamed in Julia. The twilight turned crimson. She beat him on the chest, the face, the head. She kicked him, and strove to unite her hands about his neck and choke him. She longed for a knife, for a pistol. She seethed with hatred and the desire to do murder. And France only laughed, and brushed off her hands with his great hairy ones, while with one arm he clasped her hard and rained kisses on her unprotected face. And he never ceased laughing with an intense quiet amusement, his eyes glittering as they did when he went to hangings, when he once had happened to witness natives tortured in the Congo, as they did at certain performances in Paris calculated to gratify the primitive lusts of man. France had always envied those Eastern potentates that amused themselves with the death agonies of their slaves just before heads were sliced off; but for him and his sort there are still compensations to be found in the depths of civilization.