THERE BEGINS CONFUSION.
I Henry VI.; iv.—i.

Alone in her own room, Edith relieved her overwrought feelings by a burst of tears, brief, indeed, but bitter. Like her husband, she felt that this incident, although not assuming the guise of a quarrel, was an opening wedge in the unity of their affection. Unlike Arthur, however, she thought of it with self-reproach and misgiving. She did not for an instant consider the possibility of having taken a different position in regard to Dr. Ashton, yet in a womanly, illogical way, she felt that she should have learned her husband's wishes before so vehemently declaring her own views.

She heard the artist and his guest go in to dinner, and the thought flashed upon her that this was the first time her husband had dined without her since their marriage. She wondered if he remembered it, and, remembering, regretted. She longed for companionship, for some friend into whose sympathetic ear she could pour her story, from whom she might ask advice. She reflected sadly how far she was removed from her intimate friends. Of her new acquaintances many had been most kind to her, but towards none of them, not even to her relatives, had she been so strongly drawn as to wish now to go to them for confidence and sympathy; unless, came a second thought, it were Mrs. Greyson. She was a widow, Edith reflected, and had evidently suffered much, while the strength of her character was evident from her dealing with the Italian girl. It would be no disloyalty to go to her; there had been no words spoken between husband and wife which could not be told a friend, and Edith felt that she needed the advice of a woman more versed in the intricacies of life than herself.

She dressed herself for walking, and slipped noiselessly out of the house.

Mrs. Greyson was at dinner, and was naturally surprised at seeing her caller, but she had both too much tact and too much breeding to ask explanations.

"I do hope you have not dined," she said. "I am so much alone that it is a perfect delight to me to have company. My dinner is a little like a picnic, but if you will only consider how great a favor you are doing me by sharing it, the consciousness of philanthropy ought to make it palatable."

Neither lady mentioned Arthur, although his name was uppermost in the thoughts of both. They sat down together in Helen's tiny dining-room, and served by her only maid, had a charming meal. The hostess exerted herself to entertain her guest, wisely judging that what Edith said in calmness she would be far less likely to regret than words uttered in the unguarded moments of her excitement. She told Mrs. Fenton stories of her studio life both in Boston and abroad, she led Edith on to speak of her own travels and experiences, until the latter almost forgot that she was dining in one house and her husband in another. It was not until the coffee was reached, coffee made as only Helen could make it, that the subject of the visit was really broached.

"How is Mr. Fenton?" Helen asked deliberately, believing the time had come for such a question.

The face of the other fell. She experienced a pang at the consciousness of having been gay and happy, forgetful of her husband and her trouble.

"He is well," she answered falteringly.

"Why did you not bring him with you?" continued Mrs. Greyson lightly, yet with a secret determination to know the cause of her guest's evident disturbance.

"He did not know I was coming," Edith responded in a low voice. "That is what I came to talk about. I thought you might understand; but it involves a third person, and perhaps I ought not to tell you. I am sure, though," she went on, gaining confidence now that the ice was broken, "that I can trust you. A friend of Arthur's came to dine to-night, and just as the door-bell rang, I found him to be the man I once saw commit murder in Paris."

"Murder!" exclaimed Helen, turning white. "Commit murder?"

"Consent to it," corrected Edith, unconsciously a little pleased to have produced so great an effect upon her usually self-possessed friend. "He looked on while Frontier took poison, without trying to prevent him."

"But that," Mrs. Greyson said slowly, "is hardly the same thing as murder."

"It is quite as bad," Edith protested earnestly. "It makes me shudder to think of his dining alone with Arthur at this moment. Who knows what might happen!"

"Nothing tragic, I think," Helen replied smiling. "He does not go about with pistols in his belt, I suppose.'

"It is awful to me," Edith continued, with increasing excitement, too much stirred to notice the sarcasm. "I told Arthur I could not sit down with a murderer, and just at that moment we heard his step, and I ran away upstairs; and then I felt dreadfully, and I came to you."

"I thank you for your confidence. But what do you mean to do? What will
Arthur tell him?"

"The truth, I hope."

"He is scarcely likely to say to the guest he has himself invited that you think him a murderer," answered her friend, smiling again, "and I am not sure that he would even look at this quite so severely as you do."

"How else can he look at it?" demanded Edith. "How else can any one look at it? Isn't it murder to take human life, and if one does not prevent suicide when he might, isn't it the same as if he did it himself?"

"We will not get into a discussion," Helen replied gently. "I feel about it as you do; though I believe very differently. But I see perfectly well how a man might be strictly honest in thinking that it was the privilege of any human being to lay aside his life when he is weary of it; and I do not presume to condemn others for feeling what I only think I believe."

"Think you believe!" cried the other in horror. "You do not think you believe that murder is right?"

"Assuredly not; but as there are so many related points upon which we do not agree, would it not be better to talk of this particular case than of general belief?"

"But it is impossible for any one to believe as you say," persisted
Edith; "simply impossible. No one can believe that wrong is right."

"But each has his own standard."

Against this Edith protested, but Helen returned no answer. She regretted being involved in such a debate, and resolved to let the discussion go no further. They sat in silence a moment, and then Edith again spoke.

"I do not know what to do," she said. "Of course Arthur cannot know that man any longer. You were in Paris at the time Frontier died, were you not? Did you ever know——"

She broke off suddenly, remembering that she had not intended disclosing the name of her guest.

"Dr. Ashton?" Helen returned, fixing her eyes upon her companion, and unconsciously speaking with a deliberation which gave especial weight to her words. "Yes; I know him. We went to Paris together."

"Together! Was he a friend of your husband? How did you know whom I meant?"

There was no perceptible pause before Helen answered; but meanwhile she determined to throw aside all concealment. She could no longer stand before Arthur Fenton's wife with the humiliation of even a tacit deception between them. She felt a spirit of defiance rising within her. Who was this woman that she assumed the right to judge them all by standards for whose narrowness only contempt was possible! At least she would rise above all conventional prejudices, and no longer tacitly ask, as by silence she had done, exemption from the harsh judgments of Mrs. Fenton's creed.

Helen was too womanly not to shrink from this disclosure, and she had been too thoroughly educated in the faith by which Edith lived not to understand just how her life would appear seen through the latter's belief. Disconnected with a question relating to the marriage relation and by implication casting reflection upon her delicacy and even purity of life as a woman separated from her lawful husband, Helen could have met with dispassionate reasoning whatever assault Edith made upon her. This point was too vital, it touched too closely the core of her woman's nature, and although she retained perfectly her self-control, there was a pulse of passion in her voice when she spoke.

"Dr. Ashton," she said unflinchingly, "is my husband."

"What?" cried Edith.

"We have not found it convenient to live together," Helen continued, with increasing calmness, a faint tinge of contempt creeping into her voice, "and so since my return from Europe I have taken my mother's name to avoid gossip. Dr. Ashton and I are very good friends still."

"And did Mr. Fenton know this?" asked the other, very pale.

"Certainly; although you understand that it is not a matter which we discuss with the world at large. I pass, I believe, as a widow; though I have never done or said any thing to give color to that idea."

It is doubtful if Helen fully comprehended the effect of these words upon her guest. Every fiber of Edith's being tingled. All her most sacred principles seemed outraged. She in some remote way felt, moreover, as if to hear without protest so lax notions of the responsibilities of marriage was to stain her womanhood and dim the luster of her modesty.

"How dared he introduce you to me?" she cried. "You are the wife of a murderer and you defend his crime; you pretend to be a widow, you ignore your marriage——"

"Stop," the hostess said with dignity. "We need not go over the ground. Mr. Fenton made us acquainted, I presume, because he agrees with me in seeing nothing wrong in my position, however unconventional it may be. You will see that if I had been ashamed of the fact I could easily have kept it from your knowledge."

But Edith made her no answer. She was too much overwhelmed by the various emotions which the disclosure of the evening had aroused.

Edith was, from Helen's point of view, fatally narrow, it is true; but the latter might have reflected that the limitations of her friend's vision were the faiths of the Christian world, and that her tenacity arose not from obstinacy but sincerity. It is an age when belief and doubt are brought face to face so sharply that the shock disturbs by its jar the most ordinary affairs of life.

Edith was pure, high minded, simple souled, and for the rest she was honest and earnest. Her creeds were vitalized by the warm fervor with which she clung to them, and what more could be demanded of her?

She quitted the dining-room, and soon Helen heard the outer door close behind her. The night gathered, and the lonely woman left behind sat long in sad reverie, until the door was again opened to admit Dr. Ashton.