HUGH, as has been indicated before, was a confirmed Cockney, and previous to his marriage was accustomed to spend some nine months out of the year in the beloved town. Since then, however, up to the time when they came up from Mannington in April for the final rehearsals before the opera, he had been as confirmed a country-lover as he had been before a lover of his town, and for him as well as for his wife the environment of their life at Mannington, with its down and garden, its little local interests, and the triumphant march of intellectuality led by Mrs. Owen and his brother-in-law, with Ambrose going before and Perpetua following after, seemed as ideal a setting as the human heart could desire or devise. Their intention, therefore, had been to go back there as soon as the Wagner season was over, and spend the rest of the summer as sensible people should, breathing the air of green and liquid things instead of the thick soup of dust and petrol vapour which in June and July supplies the place of normal air for those whom pleasure or business keeps in town. But Hugh, as Edith saw, was revelling in it all—in the bustle and fuss and hurry and festival of the season—and when his last engagement was fulfilled she determined to say nothing to him about their original plan of going down to Mannington immediately, but leave it for him to propose.

Indeed, his success—this storming of London, for it was no less than that—was extraordinarily sweet to him, and it would have been unnatural had it not been so. He was the lion, the desired guest of the year, and only the very serious or the cynical, or the aged, can even affect indifference to such a welcome as was his. London, in fact, did its very best to spoil him, but without the slightest success, and so far from making him pompous or conceited, it did not even make him self-conscious. He was frankly, almost riotously delighted that everyone was so eager to see him; he found their friendliness enchanting, and he danced and dined, and was a centre wherever he went, without losing one jot of his simplicity. Yet that to him, artist as he was to his finger-tips, was less than the exquisite pleasure that the appreciation of those who knew gave him. If it was pleasant to be the lion, it was even pleasanter to be the nightingale. And if he was delighted at it all, not less delighted was his wife. She was absurdly proud of him; “bursting with pride,” as Peggy told her one day when Hugh had motored them down to Cookham for the afternoon, ending up a brilliantly successful drive by going full into one of the wooden gate-posts and reducing it to match-wood.

“Yes, bursting, bursting, Edith!” she had said. “And I believe you would turn up your nose at Raphael in your present state of mind.”

Edith considered this.

“Yes, I think I should,” she said.

“I’m bound to say you don’t show it in public, anyhow,” said Peggy. “And really, do you know, Hugh is a very remarkable person. Why, I could tell you of half a dozen women who openly and rapturously adore him, and he just laughs, and sits with them in dark corners two and three at a time, and asks silly riddles. Now, is that natural, or is it very, very clever? And you are remarkable, too, dear. You just smile at him in the midst of his harem, and ask if he is coming away now, or shall you send the carriage back.”

“Peggy, you’re rather coarse,” said Edith.

“No, I’m not, but London is. Oh, dear! did you see Julia Sinclair just swooning at him at dinner last night? I thought I should have died. She looked just like a bird of Paradise with a pain inside.”

Edith could not help exchanging notes.

“Mrs. Barrington is even funnier,” she said. “She takes the line of being a mother to Hugh, and tells me he doesn’t wrap up enough. And that darling of mine thinks they are all so kind and friendly.”

“So they are,” said Peggy.

Edith got grave again.

“And he is just exactly the old simple Hugh all the time. Oh, Peggy! I almost want the years to run on quickly in order to show you how wrong you were. Yet in the same breath I want it to be to-day always, not to-morrow, not next week, not next month even.”

This set Peggy off on to the obvious train of thought which this suggested.

“When are you going down to Mannington?” she said.

“I don’t know; I haven’t the slightest idea. But I can’t suggest it to Hugh, when he is having such a splendid time.”

Tea arrived at this moment, a fact of which Peggy was rather glad, for it gave her manual occupation so that she could think over in a natural silence what she wanted to say.

“But you are quite well?” she asked.

“Gorgeously well! But I——”

“Ah, you’re tired!” put in Peggy quickly.

“Yes, frightfully tired. But—oh! Peggy, it is only my happiness that makes me tired.”

“Happiness doesn’t make one tired,” said Peggy decisively. “That won’t do!”

She fidgeted with the tea-cups a moment.

“Oughtn’t you to go down into the country and just rest and live?” she asked.

“No; I am told to go down at the end of the month, and then—not exert myself. I shall do exactly as I am told to do, and you needn’t be afraid.”

“Then what tires you?” asked Peggy again.

Edith took up her tea-cup, and while she thought over what she would say made a natural pause just as Peggy had done, with the manual occupation of putting in sugar and milk. All the time she knew perfectly well what tired her, and that was the inward necessity, for it was no less than that, of living up to the level of youth which Hugh enjoyed without question or effort, simply because he was young. Her resolution after the dawn of nightmare, the hopeless dawn, had been exactly that. She had, by this inward necessity, to play at youth. She could do it, and did it admirably. But what was natural and instinctive to the young was obtained by her with effort. She did it wonderfully well; nobody guessed that it was an effort to her, and but admired the vitality to which years brought no diminution. But she knew, though nobody else knew, that the effort was there. And though Peggy’s question had struck to the root of the matter, there was nothing further from Edith’s mind than to tell her.

“But it is my happiness that tires me,” she said. “It is this living in a flame.”

But Peggy was not satisfied.

“Then were you tired all the time at Mannington?” she asked.

Edith laughed.

“Oh, Peggy, what a good inquisitor you would have made!” she said. “No, I wasn’t, and I shan’t be when I get down there again. But you know we have been living at rather high-pressure up here as well, and I will allow that that may have had something to do with it. It is rather exciting to see your husband go up like a rocket in the way Hugh has done.”

Peggy did not want to insist on this too much, or call Edith’s attention to the fact that she was concerning herself about her sister’s fatigue, for she meant secretly to speak to Hugh about it; a thing which Edith would certainly have forbidden her to do if she guessed that such a plan was in her mind. So she slid quietly off the topic, seeming to yield.

“After all, I think that it is a sort of disgrace not to get rather tired every day,” she said. “One hasn’t done as much as one should in a day if one is not more than ready to go to sleep at the end of it. But it’s a bad plan to have a deposit of tiredness on board, to which one adds every day.”

It required no great exertion of diplomacy on Peggy’s part to secure a quiet stroll with Hugh after tea, and hardly more to introduce the subject of their move to Mannington.

“You will be leaving London at once, I suppose,” she said. “I remember you meant to go down as soon as your engagement was over.”

“Why, I believe we did!” said Hugh; “but I suppose we both forgot. I don’t think the thought of Mannington ever occurred to either of us. London is such fun, isn’t it? And, do you know, we are such swells. People are asked to meet us! And if Edith got proud she made it a rule to go to the opera and hear me sing, and if I got proud I went to ‘Gambits.’ Wasn’t it a good plan?”

“But she can’t go and hear you now,” remarked Peggy.

“No but I can go to ‘Gambits.’ Peggy, I believe that play will be crammed night after night until the Day of Judgment. And even then the audience won’t know, and Gabriel will have to come on to the stage and say: ‘I beg your pardon, ladies and gentlemen, but the last trump sounded ten minutes ago.’ I wish I had written ‘Lohengrin.’”

“Yes—you weren’t born soon enough. But if you are going to stop on in London, you will come to my big dance, won’t you, the week after next?”

“Rather! That is to say, unless I am having a rest-cure. Do you know, Edith is much the most indefatigable person I ever saw. She never seems to be tired at all.”

Peggy did not reply at once. A whole new situation burst on her at that guileless remark. She herself knew, from Edith’s own lips an hour ago, that she was “frightfully” tired, but yet Hugh, who knew her best and loved her most, asserted the opposite. Edith told Peggy how tired she was; she not only did not tell Hugh, but she produced on him the impression of being indefatigable. And with that the purport of Edith’s nightmare in the gray dawn suggested itself to her mind. Why should she not tell Hugh she was tired? Or why should she not appear so to him?... Was Edith “keeping it up”? But she answered before the pause was noticeable.

“I know; she is very strong,” she said. “But, Hugh, don’t you think people are sometimes tired without knowing it? Gallant people, I mean, like Edith, who would never give in?”

Hugh’s face completely changed. The glow and boyishness of it died out, leaving the face of a thinking man. Also he chucked away a cigarette he had only just lit into the long herbaceous border.

“Go on!” he said. “Go on!”

Peggy thought “God forgive me for being such a liar.” Then she went on:

“It is only a guess of mine,” she said. “But I thought to-day that she looked most awfully tired. And I really suspect that she is. You see, Hugh, the excitement of it all has prevented you feeling it. One never feels tired if one is excited, and you are naturally still excited at the splendid success you have had. But the excitement was over for Edith when you had the success. Remember I only say she looked very tired to-day. Nothing more.”

Hugh was silent a moment.

“Oh, Lord, what a selfish devil I am!” he said. “It never occurred to me. She has always been so keen about everything. But if you are right, why didn’t she tell me she was tired?”

Peggy looked him straight in the face.

“Just because you were not,” she said.

Hugh stopped, frowning.

“She has been stopping up here, and tiring herself out for me?” he said. “Why, it makes me hideous.”

“It’s only my conjecture,” said Peggy lying with extraordinary naturalness.

“I wonder if you are right. What a beast I am never to have thought of it! I have often thought she looked tired, but she always behaved so untiredly. I’m awfully obliged to you for having told me. Thanks, awfully, Peggy!”

Then he remembered another thing he had intended to say to her.

“I have felt unfriendly to you,” he said, “for your advice to her about our marriage. I should like to say that I know you only desired our happiness.”

“Yes, dear Hugh—you may be quite sure of that,” said she gently.

They began walking toward the house again.

“Of course, we’ll go down to Mannington to-night,” he continued. “I’ll have my motor round at once. I can telegraph to London, and the servants can catch the last train down. Oh! I forgot—you have to get back to town. Would it do if I just drove you to the station, and you took a train?”

Peggy sat down on a garden bench and began to laugh.

“I never heard such a bad plan,” she said.

“Plans, plans?” broke in Hugh. “What’s the use of plans? We want to get Edith down into the country.”

“But that’s just where plans come in,” said Peggy. “Why, if you do that, she will say that I have been suggesting it to you (which is perfectly true), and she will trouble me to mind my own business, and refuse to leave London at all.”

“What are we to do then?” asked Hugh.

“That’s just what we’ve got to make a plan about. It’s obvious that since she won’t leave London while she thinks you want to stop, you must seem not to want to stop.”

“Yes, I see—I see!” said Hugh. “Shall I tell her now?”

“Certainly not. She would instantly connect me with it. Do it about next Wednesday, and by degrees. Oh, good gracious! a woman could do it so easily, and you will probably make a hash of so simple a thing.”

“I have lots of tact,” said Hugh confidently.

“Yes, but it’s visible tact, which is as bad as none. The only tact worth having is the tact that you can’t see—the invisible tact.”

The weather in London this year was, contrary to the habit of June, extraordinarily hot, and Hugh made use of it a day or two later, with tact that for a mere man showed signs of invisibility. He and Edith returning home from a concert had been put down in the Park, to walk up the shaded alley by the ladies’ mile, and be waited for at the end by their carriage. The rhododendrons were in full flower, making up for fifty weeks sombreness of foliage by the incredible brilliance of their brief blossoming, and the trees were pyramids of pink and red blossoms. The herbaceous bed, too, at the corner of the Serpentine was a flaming mass of colour, and Hugh saw his opportunity.

“Oh! it’s all very well to say that it is a beautiful bed,” he said in answer to Edith’s commendation, “but it’s all out of place. All gardens and flowers are out of place in London; and if I was the Commissioner for gardening, or whoever does it, I should have made numbers of tin flowers, brilliantly painted, so that you could wash and dust them.”

“Then you would show execrable taste,” said his wife. “Why, it is just the fact that you can turn out of Piccadilly and in a moment be in this beautiful garden that makes London so perfect.”

“I don’t think it’s perfect at all,” said he. “Why, when I looked at that bed the other day, I positively felt home-sick. I don’t now because you are here, but alone it made me feel home-sick. One ought never to come into the Park, if one is living in town.”

Edith transferred her eyes from the bed to his face.

“Now we’re going to play the truth game, two questions each,” she said; “and I’ll begin.”

“Oh, we always toss!” said Hugh, really invisibly tactful.

“Well, we are not going to. Question one: Would you like to go down to Mannington?”

“Yes.”

“Then, dear, why didn’t you say so?”

“Is that the second question?” asked he.

Edith thought.

“I wish I’d made it three questions instead of two,” she said. “I suppose I mayn’t now?”

“Certainly not.”

“Well, then, it isn’t a question. Question two: Did Peggy tell you that I said I was tired?”

Hugh nearly heaved a sigh of relief, but just suppressed it. It was a tremendous piece of luck that the question took this form.

“No, she didn’t,” he said. “Now it’s my turn: Have you been wanting to go to Mannington?”

“Yes.”

“Then why didn’t you say so?”

“Is that a question?” asked she.

“Certainly.”

“Well, it was because I thought you were enjoying yourself so much, and wanted to stop here.”

Hugh nodded with moral purpose at her, as people nod at children.

“Then I hope this will be a lesson to you,” he said.

Here a man with a leather bag slung round his neck and a book of tickets came up and demanded twopence because they had sat on two green chairs. Hugh searched his pockets in vain for any coin, and Edith was equally destitute. So they had to get up and move on, underneath a searching and scornful eye, which mewed Hugh to sudden and passionate expostulation.

“Don’t look at me like that,” he said. “I haven’t got any money, and I didn’t know they were your chairs.”

Edith laughed silently and hopelessly at this, and they continued their walk.

“Oh! and we shall be able to sit in our own garden without paying a penny to anybody,” he said. “Edith, how heavenly it will be looking! Do you remember the last day there—how the sky wept and howled? Let’s go down at once, this evening.”

“But we are dining out, aren’t we?”

“Yes, but so we are to-morrow and the next day, and for weeks. I’m ill—you are ill; we are all ill.”

But Edith maintained that there was a certain decency to be observed, and it was not till three days later that they left town. And if, during those three days, Hugh so abandoned himself to the crowded festivities of June that sometimes she almost wondered if he could be home-sick for the country, she, on the other hand, felt so inspirited by the thought of getting away from these same festivities, that he sometimes wondered whether Peggy had been right, when he saw the animation of her enjoyment. Thus they were both acting a part, and Peggy, that arch-conspirator, observed with extraordinary complacency the result of her machinations.

The arch-conspirator, in fact, was delighted when they left London—a fact that she gathered only second-hand because they did not appear at a big party she gave that evening. Indeed, from the evidence that showed on the surface, she was more than half-inclined to think that she had been really wrong, utterly astray in disapproving of the marriage. A year later, anyhow, here was Edith tiring herself out and concealing the fact with the utmost success from her husband, so that he should not be curtailed of his London days, which he enjoyed with all the exuberance of his youth and his success; while he, on the other hand, on the first hint of his wife’s fatigue went away, merely with self-cursing at his own slowness of perception, into the country. Whatever structure might be reared, there was no doubt about the foundation: each was devoted to the other, and each had shown an instantaneous and instinctive necessity to sink self for the other’s sake.

Yes, perhaps she was altogether wrong; a year ago, had Peggy been compelled to forecast the future as she saw it then, it would have been a very different future to that which was now present, and to the promise of the present. The two had spent six months at Mannington alone, and the upshot was this mutual devotion. The disruption of age which, according to the measure of years, existed between them, had shown no sign of wider tearing. Indeed, instead, Hugh had grown so much more manly, so much less boyish, while, if anything Edith had grown younger. Instead of her acquiescence in the minor joys of life, the pleasure of seed-time and flower, the pleasure in the river and the downs, the pleasure in the microscopic intrigues of Mannington, which a year ago had been sufficient to enable her to look forward to a quiet, uneventful future which should still be full of the appropriate enjoyments of middle-age, she had recaptured youth. All the tenderness for green and living things (in which class, it must be feared, Peggy put Canon Alington, his wife, Perpetua, and Ambrose) was still there, but love had come, too—fresh, seething, effervescent love. And on Hugh’s side there was no less. He, too, cursing at his blind selfishness, had gone down in mid-season to Mannington because Edith was tired.

“Bless him!” said Peggy, and in the same breath she explained to some Serene Transparency that her brother-in-law was not going to sing, unfortunately, because among other reasons he did not happen to be present.

Peggy had done this sort of thing—standing, that is to say, at the top of a staircase, while names were shouted out to her—so often that the mere mechanism of “receiving” occupied her thoughts very little, and her real thinking self was left free to pursue the windings of its ways unhindered.

There were many things about Hugh and Edith that seemed to her to be matters for that pleasant smile which was so often on her face. The year, she allowed, did not seem to have emphasised the difference of their age, but rather to have diminished it. They were devoted to each other, and, please God, before many weeks were over Edith would see her husband with her first-born in his arms. Yet her shrewdness was not quite content: it was like some wise old hound of the hearth that is restless, sometimes pricking an uneasy ear, sometimes looking out with a whine at the gathering dusk. But she knew the cause of her uneasiness, and surely it was a very little thing, for it was only that Edith had produced the effect on Hugh of being indefatigable, whereas in reality she was very tired. She was keeping it up; she was feeling her age while she was ceaseless and successful in her efforts to conceal it from him. Did she, then, fear exactly what had prompted Peggy to dissuade her from this marriage? The year that had gone had brought great happiness to both, the year to come might bring more. But would it bring more of this, this difficulty which must grow greater with years?

Hugh and Edith had gone down to Mannington by motor, and even to the confirmed Cockney there appeared to be certain points about the country in this month of buttercup and briar-rose. Until after they had passed Goring their road led through the delectable lowlands of the Thames, with glimpses of the silver wood-embowered river, and the sense of green and liquidness so characteristic of Peggy’s home at Cookham. But soon after the ascent began, and as the car climbed on its second speed the big hill that casts Thames valley below it, a breath of livelier air assailed them. For the thick lush growth of the valley, a more austere greenness welcomed their home-coming. Thick meadows, golden with buttercup, and spired with meadow-sweet, no longer enframed the flying riband of the road. The copses and elm-pointed hedgerows were left behind, and seen as from some eminence of balloon, and instead the empty ball-room of the downs, where fairies dance in rings of emerald green, and the yellowing grass of the chalk-hills bordered their way. Now and again, with a rest for the racing engines, they would descend into the country of the briar-rose and the dense hedgerow again, but as often with the grate of the low-speed they climbed higher yet, till the Wiltshire downs lay round and held them like the interlacing of the strong, braced muscles of the earth. Hill after hill huddled into the sunset, flocks of sheep driven westward toward the folds of eventide, and at last they reached the top of the high ridge from which descent began again into the valley of the upper waters of the Kennet. On each side stretched the great empty downs over which blew, unbreathed and untainted, the cool thin air of the heights, and Edith, with head thrown back, let it stream into her lungs, so that it seemed to be flowing through her. But her heart led her eyes onward, and there, three hundred feet below them and half a dozen miles away, she could see the happy valley of her home and her heart, where all last winter she had lived in Indian summer. There was the loop of the river outside Mannington, lying like a silver thread in the richer green of its water-meadows, and there were the trees, small as the vegetation of a child’s box of toys, which held her house. Mannington itself, nestling in a wrinkle at the base of the hills, was invisible, but she could see her own house, standing outside the town, and the gray protective tower of St. Olaf’s. And at the sight the past surged and bubbled in her heart like wine.

Just on the top of the ridge Hugh, who had been driving with the chauffeur by him while Edith sat behind, stopped the car. She, of course, made the usual remark:

“Oh! what has gone wrong?” she asked.

“Nothing. It’s running as sweet as barley-sugar. But we’re at the top. We shall just toboggan all the way down. Look, there is the loop of the river and the house.”

Hugh jumped out on to the road.

“Through pleasures and palaces though we may roam,” he remarked, “there’s no place like Chalkpits. I’m going to come and sit behind with you. How clean and empty it all is! Just think of the wood-dust and the smell and the crowd of Piccadilly at this hour! Yes, Dennison, you drive, please!”

Hugh stepped over the low door into the body of the car, and sat down by Edith, while the car gathered speed again. Soon they came to the top of the long incline that led without break down to their very gates, and the driver stopped the engines and in silence they slid down the empty, unhedged road, like some great bird dropping through the viewless slopes of air toward its nest. Every moment Edith’s content broadened and deepened; here in the gentler activities of the country, in long garden-hours, in the absence of crowds, in days spent quietly, and nights that did not begin with dawn, she felt that there would be no need of making those continuous efforts, which Hugh must never know to be efforts, and which had so tired her. They had tired her body and mind alike; the effort had been physically exhausting, but the mental force, the willpower to make them appear spontaneous, the natural expression of an abundant vitality had been even more tiring. And now the thought that they and all need of them was over, unloosened from her neck completely for the first time those fingers of nightmare which had touched her on that morning of gray dawn, and though but lightly pressed had always been there. Often indeed their touch had been scarcely perceptible, but she had known all those tiring weeks of London that had followed, that at any moment they might tighten to a strangling hold. She had fought and wrestled with them incessantly and successfully, in so far that she had not yielded an inch, and that Hugh had never so much as suspected that they were there. But now, when they had stopped at the top of the ridge, when home came in sight, and Hugh climbed in beside her, it seemed that the possession dropped off her, and that they left it behind on the road, a malignant little figure, silent, and still watching them as they bowled down the smooth incline, but unable to come further, exorcised by the sight of the home in which it had never yet shown its face. And as a bend in the road cut them off from the sight of the ridge where they seemed to have left it, she turned to Hugh with a sigh of utter content.

“Oh Hughie, what a home-coming!” she said. “I like to think that the trees are all decked out in their midsummer clothes to receive us, and the sun has been specially polished up to welcome us. Oh! and there’s the copse above which we climbed one morning, when I told you who Andrew Robb was. Do you remember?”

“No,” said Hugh gravely. “And there is the terrace where I told you something the next morning, and I can’t remember what that was, either.”

“And here’s the motor-car in which I tell you that there now sits the silliest boy in the world!” remarked his wife.

It was within a week of midsummer, and after they had dined they strolled out again into the garden to find that the reflections of sunset still lingered in the west, in bars and lines of crimson cloud floating like burning islands on a lake of saffron yellow. In that solemn and intense light everything seemed to glow with a radiance of its own: the huge, sunburned shoulder of the down above them seemed lit from within by some living flame and smouldered in the still evening air. An intenser green than ever the direct sunlight kindled burned in the towers of elm, and westward the river lay in pools of crimson. Then gradually, but in throbs and layers of darkness, the night began to flow like some clear incoming tide over the scene, drinking up the colours, as Edith had seen it once at Cookham, like some shy, wild beast. Stars were lit in the remote zenith, and again over the water-meadows below the skeins of mist spread their diaphanous expanses. And in the soft, confidential dusk Edith spoke of the event which was coming to the father of her child. New secrets of her woman’s sweet soul were given him; one thing only she kept back, that which Peggy had guessed, and was even now thinking of as the two walked gently up and down the garden-paths between the fragrance of the night-scented beds.

“And it will be then,” she said, “that our souls will be absolutely one, and I think it is that more than anything which a first-born child means to its mother. At least, so it seems to me. I cannot imagine two people being nearer to each other than we are, dear, but I know we shall be nearer yet. Hughie, I want you to promise me one thing.”

“It is promised.”

“That you won’t be afraid, you won’t be nervous about it. That would just blunt the edge of the joy that these few weeks of waiting hold for me, if I thought that anxiety and suspense were to be yours just when my joy was being fulfilled.”

“Ah! but how can I help—” began he.

“It is that you have promised to help. There is nothing to fear. I know that in a way that I can’t explain to you—the knowledge, somehow, is bone of my bone. I must see you with my child in your arms. That is God’s will. And I want nobody to be here except you—not Peggy even. I must tell Peggy, and I hope she won’t think it very selfish or unkind of me. But I don’t want anybody else but you.”

Edith laughed.

“Perhaps we will allow her to stay at Canon Alington’s,” she added.

She stopped, and pointed at a white garden seat that glimmered in the dusk.

“I sat down there that morning and cried,” she said. “I was frightened, I think, at the happiness that was coming to me. Hughie, I could almost sit down there again now and cry. But this time your arms would be round me, and so I could not cry long. Also, I am getting used to happiness. It was a stranger to me then, and—well, happiness is all right when you know it, but you’ve got to know it first.”

Then she turned and faced him, and took both his hands in hers.

“My man!” she said.