LADY DOVER’S letter to Madge was most elastic as regarded the date of their visit and thoroughly cordial, for she never did things by halves, and the welcome that would be given to her and Evelyn if he could possibly spare time to visit so remote a place was sincerity itself. About accepting it, she had her own view quite clearly formed, but her own pride, her pride, too, in her husband, prevented her from giving the slightest inkling of it to him. For she saw clearly that this visit was proposed by Lady Dover with the definite purpose of showing an act of friendliness after her marriage; it was clearly made with intention, and in her heart of hearts Madge was intensely grateful. To hint this, however, to Evelyn was impossible. But his frank eagerness to go made it unnecessary for her to consider any more the diplomatic reason for doing so.

“Oh, let’s go,” he said. “Surely Scotland is better than London. What is there here? Just a stuffy town, and Battersea Park, and nothing whatever to do.”

Madge knew that her own feeling of being hurt at this was unreasonable. This solitude of London had been unutterably dear to her, but she knew her own feeling to be unreasonable, since she never doubted—and rightly—how dear it had been to him. And why should he not want to be externally amused—to shoot, to fish, to do all those things that he delighted in? And echo answered “Why?”

It was at breakfast time that this letter arrived, and the bacon was undeniably less good than it would have been two days previously. Evelyn sniffed at it, and decided against it. But his sensitiveness to slightly passÉe bacon was sensitive to her feelings also.

“One doesn’t want meat food in the summer,” he said. “Tea and marmalade—how delicious!”

Madge handed him his tea.

“You dear,” she said. “It is high, and it’s my fault; I thought it would be good just for to-day. But it isn’t. Oh, Evelyn, it was nice of you to pretend you didn’t want any. But you can’t act before me. I always know you. So give it up.”

Evelyn gave a great shout of laughter.

“Madge and marmalade,” he said. “That’s good enough for me. In fact, I would leave out the marmalade if required. Oh, Madge, why can’t you be serious and talk about this. By the way, I’ll paint another sketch of you called ‘Bad bacon’; the yearning face of the young wife. You are young, you know, and you are my wife. Don’t chatter so, it confuses me. Now Lady Dover, if you will be silent one moment, lives at Golspie.”

“That’s where you are wrong,” said Madge. “You have to go to Golspie before you begin.”

“I don’t want to begin. I want to get there. Don’t you?”

Madge put on the woeful face that always introduced Ellesdee.

“I don’t like the ticket man at King’s Cross,” she said. “I don’t think he is what he seems.”

Evelyn had eaten by this time all the crust off a Hovis loaf.

“More crust,” he said. “There isn’t any. Very good; marmalade in a spoon. But I won’t distend my—my vie intÉrieure with crumb. About the ticket man. You are wrong if we are generous to Lady Dover with regard to the length of our visit. Why mince matters? Can we afford it? I say ‘Yes.’ Board wages for our enormous establishment here. Tickets for ourselves, third class—I wish there was a fourth or fifth—and what’s the dem’d total, as Mr. Mantalini said. Besides these”—Evelyn waved his hand like a man commanding millions—“these are temporary economies. The pink and butter-coloured is going to visit these classic abodes in October, and if orders don’t pour in like our own leaky roof, I’ll eat all the gamboge in my paintbox. I can’t say fairer. And as I don’t possess gamboge,” he added, “the bet finds no takers. I give you that information, for though I am poor, I am honest.”

Evelyn proceeded to eat marmalade with a spoon.

“It will be very chic, if you come to think of it,” he said. “Probably several ladies’ maids and valets will arrive with their respective owners by the same train. You, Madge, will flirt with one or two of the valets, and I with several of the ladies’ maids. The scene then is shifted to Golspie station. You squeeze the hands of the valets on the platform, and I gaze into the eyes of the ladies’ maids. The sumptuous motor has come for Lady Dover’s guests. We strive to subdue—quite ineffectually—our air of conscious superiority, and squeeze the hands of Dukes and Duchesses. Then they will know us in our true colours. Triumphal explosion of the motor-car. The valets and ladies’ maids are saved. Hurrah for the lower classes! Another cup of tea, please. Right up to the top. And the point is the fare to Golspie. Arrived there, we shall have no more food and drink to buy.”

The reasoning was inevitable; given that domestic economy could manage it, there was no reason that could reasonably indicate King’s Road instead. Yet, even after the A.B.C. had added its voice to the overmastering argument, Madge hesitated. She could not quite see her husband among the surroundings that awaited her there. She had been there before, and knew. How would he and that particular milieu suit each other? All this was secondary to her original desire to go; her private, incommunicable feeling that such a visit would poser them—for she could not have been Lady Ellington’s daughter so long without that point of view having soaked into her—was paramount, but the other was there, and the complication in her mind was that though she wished, taking the reasons all round, to leave this hot house which still was intertwined with exquisite and undying memories, she could not see how Evelyn should wish to leave this, not having her own worldly reasons for going to Golspie, without a pang. But since the question of whether economy would allow had been decided in favour of going, there was certainly no more to be said, and, so she told herself, no more to be thought.

But, since the logical conclusion is the one conclusion in the world that is absolutely without effect as regards results, she continued to think. For the ordinary mind is not in the least reasonable; it would cease to be reasonable the moment it was, and take its place among fixed stars and other unattainable objects. Logic, reason, are perhaps the most ineffective of human motives; they may be appealed to as a last resort; but if there is any impulse still alive, it, and not logic, will be seized on as a ground for action. Hence the divine uncertainty of human affairs. If the world was ruled by reason it would become duller than a week-old newspaper. But it is the fact that every human soul is so impredicable that lends the zest to existence. Finding out, in fact, not knowledge, is the spring that makes life fascinating. Whenever the element of certainty enters, it is the death’s head at the feast. Nobody cares for the feast any more. The champagne is flat.

So to Golspie they went, and Evelyn’s prophecy as regards the journey was sufficiently fulfilled to make anybody believe that there must have been something in it. He, at any rate, before they arrived at even Inverness, was engaged in conversation with an agreeable female opposite, a conversation which was not, however, so engrossing but that he could observe with secret glee the fact that Madge was reading the Scotsman, provided for her by an equally agreeable young man, who sat opposite, and hoped that his cigarette would not be disagreeable. Then, luck was really on his side that day, important people stepped out of first-class carriages at Golspie, and, by the usages of this cruel world, these acquaintances so pleasantly begun were rudely interrupted. A cart waited for their travelling companions, and the swift motor received them and the strangers, before whom their own travelling acquaintances were but dust and ashes.

It was, in fact, but a short week after Lady Ellington’s arrival at Glen Callan that her daughter and son-in-law got there, and though she would, as previously arranged, have gone on to her next house the day before their arrival, she put off her departure for two days in order to have the pleasure of seeing them. The party, in fact, was unaltered, and so was their way of life; Mr. Osborne’s flow of humour showed no signs of running dry, nor was the blank amazement with which Lord Ellington regarded him in the least abated. Mr. Dennison was getting steadily on towards the completion of his panorama of Sutherland, and Lady Dover found fresh lights and shadows on the purple heather every day.

Lady Ellington had carefully considered what her exact attitude towards Madge and her husband should be, and had come to the most sensible conclusion about it. Since the world had made up its mind to welcome them, and to draw a wet sponge over the past, it was clear that unless she wished to make an exception of herself, and not do in Rome what Rome did, she must extend to them not merely the welcome of the world, but the welcome of a mother also. And it was decidedly the best plan to make this thorough; astonished as Madge might be, it was better to astonish her than the world, and neither in public nor in private should she hear one word of reproach nor an uncordial accent. Lady Ellington had no desire to see private talks with her daughter; in fact, she meant rather to avoid them; but her whole policy was to accept what had happened, and welcome Madge in the flesh with the same unreservedness as she had shown in the letter she had written her a week ago, urging her to accept Lady Dover’s invitation. She was determined, in fact (now that Lady Dover had shown the way), to make the best of it, and, instead of bitterly counting up (and mentally sending the bill in to Madge) all that would have been at her command, had not the speculation with regard to Madge’s marriage failed, to make the most of the assets that remained to her. And the more she thought of them, unattractive as they had seemed at first, the more they seemed to her to have a promising air. Philip was immensely wealthy, and Evelyn was poor, that was unfortunately undeniable; but Evelyn—regarding him as a property—had certainly prospects which Philip had not, and though nothing could quite make up, to her mind, for the loss of much tangible wealth, yet Evelyn with his brilliant gifts might easily be a rich man, while even now he was a much more rising figure socially than the other. People talked about him, admired his cleverness and charm, asked to be introduced to him. All these merits, it is true, she had not seen in those days at Pangbourne, when she looked upon him merely as an impossible young artist, but since that impossible young artist had become an inevitable son-in-law, it was wise to take him into account. So her welcome to both was going to be unreserved.

They arrived, just as Lady Ellington had arrived, after the rest of the party had gone in to dinner, and their host and hostess came out into the hall as usual to meet them. Madge, it must be confessed, had gone through a bad quarter of an hour of anticipatory shyness as they got near; but this on arrival she found to have been a superfluous piece of self-inflicted discomfort, for Lady Dover was absolutely natural, and all that was required of her was that she should be natural too.

“Ah, dear Madge,” she said, “how nice to see you and Mr. Dundas. And we have such a surprise for you; your mother is here still. We persuaded her to delay her departure a couple of days in order just to have a glimpse of you. We call her Lady Salmon, and are eating a fish she caught only this afternoon.”

She turned to welcome her other guests, when Lady Ellington also followed her from the dining-room.

“My dearest Madge,” she cried, kissing her, “this is too delightful. How well you are looking. But did you only wear this thin cloak for your drive; surely that was rash? How are you, dear Evelyn? This is nice. I could not help coming out of dinner to have a glimpse of you. You have brought no maid, Madge?”

“Dear mother, I haven’t got one to bring.”

“No? Evelyn, she must have a maid. But Parkins, of course, shall attend to you here. Now you must go and dress.”

That her mother was still in the house had been absolutely a surprise to Madge, but her welcome fully endorsed the cordiality of her letter. She had not seen her since that afternoon in July when she had come to Evelyn’s studio, and whatever had caused this complete and radical change she was grateful to it. It, too, bore its meaning as clearly stamped as did Lady Dover’s greeting; whatever had happened, had happened but the past was over.

Everyone in the house, indeed taking the time from their hostess, welcomed them with a very special cordiality. Lady Dover, in her quiet, neat way, had dropped, casually enough, but letting the point of her observations be fully seen, little remarks to most members of her party on the very great pleasure she anticipated from the visit of the Dundases. They were both so charming, it was no wonder that everyone liked them. The meaning of this was explicit enough, and put without any hint of patronising, or, indeed, of doing a kindness; and though Lady Ellington had reflected that people followed Lady Dover’s lead just because she was ordinary and they were ordinary, it might be questioned whether she herself could have given the lead so gently, for it hardly appeared a lead at all, or so successfully, for everybody followed it. From the fragments of Lady Dover’s ordinary conversation already indicated, it may not unfairly be gathered that she perhaps lacked brilliance in her talk, and was not possessed of any particular intellectual distinction. But after all, the hardest art to practise is the art of living according to one’s tastes, a thing which she certainly succeeded admirably in doing, and the hardest medium to work in, more difficult by far than metal or marble or oils, is men and women. But her manipulation of them was masterly, and, to crown it, she did not seem to manipulate at all.

In this instance, certainly, the subtlest diplomatist could not with all his scheming have produced a more complete result. Mr. Dennison, as has been seen, had on the tip of his tongue a conclusion disparaging in the highest degree to Evelyn and his art. Gladys Ellington had let things even more bitter pass the tip of her tongue, Madge’s mother had felt not so long ago that the shipwreck was total, and that there was no salvage. Yet Lady Dover, with just a little repetition of the same sentence or two, had swept all these things away, as a broom with a couple of strokes demolishes all the weavings of spiders, and through the unobscured windows the sun again shines. In fact the volte-face of Society had been begun at any rate with immense precision and certainty; on the word of Lady Dover, who was in command, this particular company had turned right about with the instantaneousness which is the instinct of a well-drilled troop.

In effect the whole social balance of power was changed from the moment of their appearance. Evelyn, as natural in his way, but that a more vivacious one, than Lady Dover, gave a brilliant sketch of their arrival—third class—at Golspie Station, and the adjustment of social distinction consequent. Also, he had prophesied it, Madge would bear him out in that, and he reproduced admirably Madge’s face from behind the Scotsman which had been so kindly lent her. Mr. Osborne made one attempt to reconstitute himself the life and soul of the party when he addressed Gladys as Lady Grilse, and unfolded to Madge, who sat next him, the history of that remarkable piece of wit, meaning to follow it up by the sequel (sequels were usually disappointing, but this was an agreeable exception) of the true circumstances under which her mother had been called Lady Salmon. But Madge had cut the sequel short, without any ironical purpose, but simply because she wanted to listen to and contradict the libels Evelyn was telling of her conduct on the opposite side of the table.

“How very amusing,” she said. “You called her Lady Grilse (I see, do I not), because she had caught one. Evelyn, I said nothing of the kind; I only said that I rather liked the smell of a cigarette.”

But her quite literal and correct explanation of Mr. Osborne’s joke was fatal to the joke; it was a pricked bladder, it would never be repeated any more.

Then came the deposition of the Royal Academician. Mr. Dennison had finished his picture of the upper glen only that afternoon, and the occasion was therefore solemn. So was he.

“Yes, Lady Dover,” he was saying, “I only touched the canvas a dozen times to-day, yet I have done, as I said, a full day’s work. C’est le dernier pas qui coÛte; it is on those last touches that the whole thing depends. I knew when I went out this morning that I had not got what I meant; I knew, too, that it was nearly there, and it is that “nearly” that is yet so far. There was the shadow of a cloud, if you remember, over the bank of gorse.”

“Oh, I thought that shadow was quite perfect,” said Lady Dover. “I hope you have not touched it.”

“It has gone,” said Mr. Dennison, as if announcing the death of a near relation who had left him money, for though his voice was mournful, there was a hint of something comfortable coming. “Gone. I saw I could not do it so as to make it true.”

He looked up at this tragic announcement and caught Evelyn’s eye.

“Mr. Dundas, I am sure, will bear me out,” he said. “We poor artists are bound, however it limits us, to put down only what we know is true. We are not poets but chroniclers.”

“Oh, Evelyn, and you’ve been telling such lies about me,” said Madge, from the other side.

“Chroniclers,” resumed Mr. Dennison. “When we feel sure we are right we record our impression. But unless that certainty of vision comes to us, we must be honest, we must not attempt a vague impression merely. Is it not so?”

Evelyn’s face looked extraordinarily vital and boyish as he leaned forward.

“Oh, I don’t agree in the least,” he said. “I think we always ought to try to record just those suggestions—those vaguenesses—which you say you leave out. Look at ‘La Gioconda.’ What did Andrea mean us to think about that sphinx? I don’t know, nor do you. And, what is more certain than even that, nor did he know. Did he mean what Walter Pater said he meant? It again is quite certain he did not. No, I think every picture ought to ask an unanswerable riddle, any picture, that is to say, which is a picture at all, a riddle like ‘Which came first, the hen or the egg?’ Surely anything obvious is not worth painting at all.”

Mr. Dennison had clearly not thought of things in this light. It was not thus that the ordnance map of Sutherland would be made.

“An amusing paradox,” he said. “Nobody is to know anything about a picture, especially the man who painted it. Is that correct?”

His tone had something slightly nettled about it, and Evelyn’s imperturbable good humour and gaiety might perhaps represent the indifference of the nettles towards the hand they had stung.

“Yes, just that,” he said. “Take any of the arts. Surely it is because a play has a hundred interpretations that it is worth seeing, and because a hundred different people will experience a hundred different emotions that an opera is worth listening to. And the very fact that when we hear ‘The jolly roast beef of old England’ we are all irresistibly reminded of the jolly roast beef of old England shows that it is a bad tune.”

Mr. Dennison waved his hand in a sketchy manner.

“I have not the pleasure of knowing that tune,” he said; “but when I paint the upper glen here, I mean it to produce in all beholders that perception of its particular and individual beauty which was mine when I painted it. And when you exercise your art, your exquisite art, over a portrait, you, I imagine, mean to make the result produce in all beholders the beauty you saw yourself.”

Evelyn laughed.

“Oh, dear, no,” he said. “You see, I so often see no beauty in my sitters, because most people are so very plain. But I believe that the finest portraits of all are those which, when you look at them, make you feel as you would feel if you were on intimate terms and in the presence of the people they represent. Besides, people are so often quite unlike their faces; in that case you have to paint not what their faces are like but what they are like.”

Mr. Dennison’s tone was rising a little; that impressive baritone could never be shrill, but it was as if he wanted to be a tenor.

“Ah, that explains a great deal,” he said; “it explains why sometimes I find your portraits wholly unlike the people they represent. And the conclusion is that if I knew them better, I should find them more like.”

“That is exactly what I mean,” said Evelyn.

But here Lady Dover broke in.

“You must have some great talks, Mr. Dundas,” she said, “with Mr. Dennison; it is so interesting to hear different points of view. One cannot really grasp a question, can one, unless one hears both sides of it. I think Lady Ellington has finished. Let us go.”

But the verdict over this little passage of arms was unanimous; Mr. Dennison was no longer in anyone’s mind the pope and fountain-head of all art and all criticism thereon. His impressiveness had in the last ten minutes fallen into the disrepute of pomposity, his grave pronouncements were all discredited; a far more attractive gospel had been enunciated, far more attractive, too, was this new evangelist. And as Lady Dover passed him on the way out she had one more word.

“That is a delightful doctrine, Mr. Dundas,” she said. “You must really do a portrait of yourself, and if we think it is unlike, the remedy will be that we must see more of you.”

Evelyn drew his chair next to the Academician; he had heard the rise of voice and seen the symptoms of perturbation, to produce which there was nothing further from his intention.

“I’m afraid I talk awful rot,” he said, with the most disarming frankness.

Now Mr. Dennison was conscious of having been rather rude and ruffled, he was also conscious that Evelyn’s temper had been calmer than the moon. He felt, too, the charm of this confession, which was so evidently not premeditated but natural.

“But that does not diminish my pleasure in meeting you, Mr. Dundas,” he said.

Afterwards the same triumphant march continued. Mr. Dennison even showed to Madge how a couple of his most astounding conjuring tricks were done, and Lady Ellington talked to her son-in-law in a corner about Madge, until the council of war summoned them to debate. Then, when it was decided that Madge should join the fishmongers on the river, Mr. Osborne instantly suggested that she would be Mrs. Sea-Trout, and though a cavilling mind might find in this but a futile attempt to establish himself once more as the life and soul of the party, it was not indeed so, but meant merely as a compliment, a tribute to Madge. Then, when the council of war was over, more remarkable things happened, for the whole party played Dumb-Crambo till long after half-past ten, quite forgetful, apparently, how important it was to get a good rest after all the day spent in the open air. How such a subversion of general usage occurred no one knew, but certainly there was something in Evelyn which conduced to silly gaiety. And nobody was a whit the worse for it, while the effects of the moon-light on the hills opposite, which had nightly been the admiration of the whole party, went totally unheeded, and all the exquisite lights and shadows, the subtlety of which it had become the office of Mr. Dennison to point out and Lady Dover to appreciate, might never have been in view at all.

Lady Ellington went with Madge to her room when the women retired; she had not really meant to do so, but Lady Dover’s “Good night” had made this necessary.

“Dear Madge,” she had said, “I know your mother will want to talk to you, so I shall not come to see you to your room. I hope you have everything you want. Breakfast at a quarter to ten, or would you rather have it in your room after your journey? We have been so late to-night too. How excellent Mr. Dundas’s last charade was. Only Mr. Dennison guessed. Good night, dear.”

Lady Ellington was thus, so to speak, forced into Madge’s room; she carried with her her glass of hot water, she carried also, which was even more warming, the memory of the undisguised welcome that not only Madge but the impossible artist had received. She almost, in fact, reconsidered her valuation of wealth; had Philip Home appeared in Evelyn’s place this evening, she knew quite well he would not have been able to stir the deadly gentility of this house half so well as the impossible artist. He could not have piped so as to make them dance, yet this, this key to the sort of set which she knew really mattered most, the solid, stolid, respectable upper class, had been just rats to his piping. His natural enjoyment, his animal spirits, to put that influence at its lowest, had simply played the deuce with the traditions of the house, where she herself never ventured to lift her voice in opposition or amendment to what was suggested. But Evelyn’s “Oh, let’s have one more Dumb-Crambo” had revised the laws of the Medes and Persians, and another they had. Even at the formal council of war he had refused to say what he would like to do to-morrow, a thing absolutely unprecedented.

“Oh, may I go and shoot if it is fine,” he had said, “and do nothing at all if it is wet? Don’t you hate shooting, Lord Dover, if your barrels are covered with rain? And birds look so awfully far away in the rain. But I should love to shoot in any case,” he added. “My goodness, Madge, think of the King’s Road and the ’buses.”

Yet all this revolt against the established laws, so Lady Ellington felt, had somehow not transgressed those laws of propriety which she was so careful about here. Evelyn, from ignorance, no doubt, rode rough-shod, and no one resented his trespasses. Even Lord Dover had been stirred into speech, a thing he did not usually indulge in except on the subject of the grouse that had been shot and the fish that had been killed that day.

“My dear boy,” he said, “you shall do exactly what you like to-morrow. There is a rod for you on the river, or we should like another gun on the moor. Tell us at breakfast.”

All this Lady Ellington took up to Madge’s room with her hot water; that Lady Dover would be as good as her word, and that, having asked these two to Glen Callan, would give them a genuine welcome, she had never doubted, but what was surprising she was the extreme personal success of her once better-forgotten son-in-law. This stronghold and central fortress of what was correct and proper had received him as if he was almost a new incarnation of what was correct and proper, or if that was putting it too strongly, at any rate as if no question of his correctness and propriety had ever arisen. Surprising though it was, it was wholly satisfactory.

“We are so late, dear Madge,” she said, “that I can only stop a minute. Has it not been a delightful evening?”

The desire to say something salutary struggled long in her mind. She wanted so much to indicate that it was for the sake of her feelings, even in consequence of her own intervention, that so charming a welcome had been extended to Madge and her husband. And to be quite truthful, it was not the instinct for truth that prevented her, but the quite certain knowledge that Madge would not stand anything that suggested a hint of patronisation. Besides the house was Lady Dover’s, that person who, as Lady Ellington was beginning to learn, was natural because she happened to be natural, and was quite truthful, not because this was a subtler sort of diplomacy. That naked dagger of truth was an implement that required a deal of mail-coat to ward off. Any moment Lady Dover might wreck any scheming policy with one candid word, and the corresponding surprise and candour of her eyes. But the welcome had been so warm that Madge could not but be warmed by it, even to the point of confession.

“Oh, mother,” she said, “I have been disquieting myself in vain. All this last month I have been wondering secretly whether people were going to be horrid to us. How senseless it all was! I have been thinking all sorts of things.”

She put down her candle and drew a couple of chairs to the fire.

“I have had all sorts of thoughts,” she said. “You see, you did not write to me. I thought you might—well, might have washed your hands of me. I thought that people like Lady Dover would think I had been heartless and Evelyn worse than heartless. I was hopelessly wrong; everybody is as nice as possible. But, heavens, how I have eaten my heart out over that all this month in London!”

She poked the fire with a certain viciousness, feeling that she pricked these bubbles of senseless fear as she pricked the bubbling gas of the burning coal.

“All in vain,” she said; “I have been making myself—no, not miserable, because I can’t be otherwise than happy, but disquieted with all sorts of foundationless fears. I thought people would disregard—yes, it is that—would disregard Evelyn and me; would talk of the fine day instead. And then, you see, Evelyn would also have nothing to do, nobody would want to be painted by him. We should be miserably poor; he would have to paint all sorts of things he had no taste for just to get a guinea or two and keep the pot boiling. Ah, I shouldn’t have minded that—the poverty, I mean—but what I should mind would be that he should have to work at what he felt was not worth working at. Don’t you see?”

Never perhaps before had Madge so given herself away to her mother. Lady Ellington’s system had been to snip off all awkward shoots, and train the plant, so to speak, in such a way as should make it most suitable as a table ornament. The table for which it was destined, it need hardly be remarked, was an opulent table. There was to be no wasting of sweetness on the desert air; Mayfair was to inhale its full odour. And as things now stood, the destination of this flower was as likely to be Mayfair as ever. Lady Ellington respected success, nobody more so, nor was there anything she respected so much, and on a rapid review of the evening, the success she felt inclined to respect most was that of her impossible son-in-law. If a plebiscite for popularity had knocked at the doors of the occupied bedrooms, she had no doubt as to the result of the election. There was nothing left for her but to retract, wholly and entirely, all her own resentment and rage at the marriage. And since this had to be done, it was better done at once.

“Dearest Madge,” she said, “how foolish of you to make yourself miserable! Of course at first I was vexed and troubled at it all, and I was, and am still, very sorry for Philip. But though I did wish that certain things had not happened, and that others had—I mean I wish that you had been in love with Philip, for I am sure you would have been very happy, yet since it was not to be so, and since you fell in love with Evelyn, what other issue could I have desired?”

Suddenly, quick as a lizard popping out and in again of some hole in the wall, there flashed through Madge’s mind the impression—“I don’t believe that.” She could not be held responsible for it, for it was not a thought she consciously entertained. It just put its head out and said “Here I am.” What, however, mattered more was that this was her mother’s avowed declaration now; these were the colours anyhow she intended to sail under. She had been launched anew, so to speak, with regard to her attitude towards her daughter, and Lady Dover had christened her, and broken a bottle of wine over her for good luck.

But having made her declaration, Lady Ellington thought she had better be moving. From a child Madge had been blessed with a memory of hideous exactitude, which enabled her, if she choose, to recall conversations with the most convincing verbal accuracy, and Lady Ellington did not feel equal, off-hand, to explaining some of those flower-like phrases which had, she felt certain, fallen from her in her interview with Madge after the thunderstorm in the New Forest, if perchance the fragrance of them might conceivably still linger in her daughter’s mind. Nor did she wish to be reminded, however remotely (and as she thought of this she made the greater speed) of the letter from Madge to Evelyn which had lain in the hall one afternoon as she came in, with regard to which her maternal instinct had prompted her to take so strong a line. So she again referred to the lateness of the hour, “all owing to those amusing games,” and took the rest of her hot water to finish in her own room.

But she need not have been afraid; nothing was further from Madge’s intention than to speak of such things, and though she could not help knowing that she did not believe what her mother had said, she deliberately turned her mind away, and so far from exercising her memory over the grounds of her disbelief, she put it all away from her thoughts. Such generosity was easy, her present great happiness made it that.

She felt in no mood to go to bed, even after the night she had spent in the train, and from the thought of the vain disquietude she had felt about how people would behave to them, she passed in thought to another disquietude that she told herself was as likely to be as vain as that. For what was the sense of measuring and gauging and taking soundings into the manner of Evelyn’s love for her, and comparing it unfavourably, to tell the truth, with hers for him? For she knew quite well, the whole fibre of her being knew, that in so far as he was complete at all, his love for her was complete; there were no reservations in it; he loved her with all his soul and strength. Yet when the best thing in the world was given her, here she was turning it over, and wondering, so to speak, if the ticket to show its price was still on it, and if it was decipherable! It is ill to look thus at any gift, but when that gift is the gift of love, which is without money and without price, such a deed is little short, so she told herself now, of a desecration.

The next day bore out the reliability of Lord Dover’s aneroid, and there was no fear of Evelyn finding rain-drops on his gun-barrel. The Honourable Company of Fishmongers—Mr. Osborne was at it again—went to the river, Mr. Dennison to a further point of view up the glen, and the shooters to the moor. They started a little before the party for the river, and Madge saw them off at the door. They were to shoot over a beat of moor not far from the house, which would bring them close to the river by lunch-time, and it was arranged that both parties should lunch together. Gladys started with them, for she was going to fish up the river from the lower reaches; Lady Ellington and Madge would begin on opposite sides at the top. This would bring them all together about two o’clock at what was called the Bridge-pool, where Madge, fishing on this side, would cross, meeting Lady Ellington and Gladys, who would have worked up from below, while the shooters converged on them from the moor.

It would indeed have been a sad heart that did not rejoice on such a morning, while to the happy the cup must overflow. There had been a slight touch of early frost in the night, which, as Madge skirted the river bank, which was still in shadow, lay now in thick, diamond drops on the grass, ready when the sun touched it to hover for a moment in wisps of thin mist, and then to be drawn up into the sparkle of the day. Swift and strong and coffee-coloured at her feet the splendid river roared on its way, full of breakers and billows at the head of the pools, and calming down into broad, smooth surfaces before it quickened again into the woven ropes of water down which the river climbed to the next pool. Every pool, too, was a mystery, for who knew what silver-mailed monster might not be oaring his way about with flicks of the spade-like tail that clove the waters and sent him arrow-like up the stream? The mystery of it all, the romance of the gaudy fly thrown into this seething tumult of foam and breaker, its circling journey (followed by eager eye and beating heart) that might at any moment be interrupted by a swirl of waters unaccounted for by the stream, and perhaps the sight of a fin or a silver side; then a sudden check, the feeling of weight, the nodding of the tapering rod in assent, and the shrill scream of the reel—all this, all the possibility of every moment, the excitement and tension, all added effervescence to the vivid happiness that filled Madge and inspired all she did with a sort of rapture.

So step by step she made her way down the first pool; the broken water at the head gave no reply to the casting of the fly upon the waters, and with a little more line, and still a little more line as the pool grew broader, she went down to the tail. There, far out in mid-stream, was a big submerged rock, with a triangle of quiet water below it, and more line and more line went out before she could reach it. Then—oh, moment of joy!—the fly popped down on the far side of the rock, and with entrancing little jerks and oscillations of the rod, she drew it across the backwater. And then—she felt as if it must be so—the dark stream was severed, a fin cut the surface, the rod nodded, bent to a curve, with an accelerating whizz-z-z out ran the line, and a happy fishmonger looked anxiously, rapturously at her gillie.

A couple of hours later Madge had come to within a hundred yards of the Bridge-pool, her fish secure in the creel, and her aspirations for it reaching, somewhat sanguinely as she knew, as high as sixteen pounds. The Bridge-pool itself was this morning part of Lady Ellington’s water, for on Madge’s side it ran swirling and boiling round a great cliff of nearly precipitous rock, some fifty feet high, over which she had to pass before getting to the skeleton wire bridge which crossed the river just below the pool. She could see her mother half-way down the pool already, and called to her, but her voice was drowned by the hoarse bass of the stream as it plunged from rapid to rapid into the head of the pool below, and after trying in vain to make her hear, and communicate the glorious tidings of the fish, Madge followed her gillie up the steep, rocky pass which led over this cliff. As she mounted the stony stair, steep and lichen-ridden, the voice of the water that had been in her ears all morning, and rang there still like the tones of some secret, familiar friend, grew momently more faint, but another voice, the voice of the sunny noon, as friendly as the other, took its place, and grew more intense as the first faded. From the shadow and coolness and water-voices she emerged into the windy sunlight of the moor; bees buzzed hotly in the heather, making the thin, springlike stems of the ling quiver and nod beneath their honey-laden alightings, swallows and martins chided shrilly as they passed, and peewits cried that note which is sad or triumphant according to the mood of the hearer. Then as she gained the top of this rocky bastion, sounds more indicative of human presences were in the air, the report of a gun came from not far off, and immediately afterwards a string of shots. Though she had killed her salmon with such gusto only an hour or two before, Madge could not help a secret little joy at the thought that probably this particular grouse had run the gauntlet of all the guns and had escaped again for another spell of wild life on the heather. Then, following the gillie’s finger, she saw not half a mile away the shooting party, who were also approaching the general rendez-vous with the same coincident punctuality as she, while a quarter of a mile further down from this point of vantage she could see Gladys coming up. The shooters were walking in line across a very steep piece of brae that declined towards the river, three of them, but with the gillies and dog-men seeming quite a party. The hillside was covered with heather, and sown with great grey boulders.

Madge was a few minutes before the others; Gladys had still several hundred yards to go before she reached the bridge which was now but thirty yards off, while Lady Ellington had still the cream of the Bridge-pool in front of her, and she sat down on a big rock at the top of the cliff while the rest of the party converged. At this distance it was impossible to make out the identity of the shooters; they were but little grey blots on the hillside, but every now and then the muffled report of a shot or of two or three shots reached her, and though she had felt glad that one grouse had perhaps escaped the death-tubes, yet she felt glad another way that they seemed to be having good sport. Then her mind and her eye wandered; she looked up the glen down which she had come; she saw the river sparkling a mile away in torrent of sun-enlightened foam; above her climbed the heathery hill, crowned with the larches of the plantation round the house itself, and from the house the gleam of a vane caught her eye. Beside her sat the brown-bearded gillie, in restful Scotch silence, ready and courteous to reply should she speak to him, but silent till that happened. And “pop-pop” went the guns from the hillside opposite.

Suddenly he got up, looking across no longer vaguely, but with focussed eyes, and she turned. The little grey specks of men were closer, and it was possible now to see that there was some commotion among them. From the right a little grey speck was running down hill; from the left another was running up. And that was all.

Madge watched for a moment or two, still full of sunny thoughts. Then from the point of convergence of the little grey specks one started running towards the bridge by which she would cross. At that, faint as reflected starlight, an impulse of alarm came to her. But it was so slight that no trace of it appeared in her voice.

“What is happening, do you think?” she asked the gillie.

But the courteous Scotsman did not reply; he gazed a moment longer, and then ran down the steep descent to the bridge. And in Madge the faint feeling of alarm grew stronger, though no less indefinable, as she looked at the leaping little grey speck growing every moment larger. At last she saw who it was; it was Mr. Osborne jumping and running for all he was worth. At that she followed her gillie, and hurried after him across the wire bridge. And as if a drum had beat to arms, legions of fears no longer indefinable leaped into her brain in hideous tumult.

A hundred yards ahead her gillie had met the running figure, and in a moment he had slung off the creel and started to run towards her, leaving Mr. Osborne to drop down, as if exhausted, in the heather.

“What is it?” she cried as he approached.

“An accident, ma’am,” he said. “I don’t know what.”

Madge did not delay him, but went on towards Mr. Osborne. As she got near he sprang up from his seat.

“Ah, my dear Mrs. Dundas,” he said; “don’t go—don’t go!”

His panting breath made him pause a moment, but he looked at her face of agony and apprehension, and, clenching his hands, went on.

“No, not killed; there is nobody dead. But there has been an accident, a ricochet off one of those rocks. Someone has been—yes, my poor, dear lady, it is your husband. But don’t go; it is terrible.”

But before he could say more to stop her she had passed him, and was running up the hill.

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