IT was some ten days after the events of the thunderstorm, and Evelyn, who had returned to London the day after, was in his studio working at the portrait of Philip. The last ten days had passed for him like an evil dream—a dream, too, unfortunately from which there was no prospect whatever of waking. Indeed, as the dream went on it seemed to gain in its ghastly vividness; every day that passed repeated the effect of it, and stamped its reality deeper. But with good sense that did him credit, instead of brooding desolately over his lot, or driving himself half-mad with the thought of Madge, he turned with a sort of demented fury to his work, and day after day painted till he could no longer see, not leaving off till his brain was dull and almost incapable of further thought. But though nervous, excitable and highly-strung, he was luckily also very strong, and believed that he was capable, at any rate, of going on at this frightful high pressure anyhow till the marriage had taken place. When that was accomplished, he felt that the tension of the suspense would be lightened; he might himself, it is true, drop like a stone in the sea, but the struggle would then be over, he would not battle any longer to try to keep afloat. In the inside pocket of his coat he kept the note that he had received from Lady Ellington; it was soiled and wilted with much handling and re-reading, and simple and straightforward (from a literary point of view) as it was, he had tried fifty interpretations on each of those very intelligible sentences. But not one contained a grain of comfort for him.

But though the whole fibre of his spiritual being was in so great and agonising a state of unrest, he found that his eye and his hand had lost not one particle of their powers of vision and execution. Sometimes, it is true, it was rather hard to get to work; it seemed scarcely worth while putting in a light or a shadow, but when once he had begun there was no abatement in the brilliance of his skill, and though he only felt a vague, far-away satisfaction in what he was doing, he brought all his keenness of observation, all his dexterity of handling to his work. Again, when his sitters were there, there was the same merciful necessity of normal behaviour, and probably there was only one person who saw him during these days who suspected that there was anything wrong. This was Philip. But of what was wrong he had not the faintest inkling.

Philip himself, so said the world in general, had become wonderfully softened since his engagement. He had gained enormously in geniality, a quality of which the world had not considered him particularly lavish before, and he did not in these new days take himself quite so seriously as he had been used to. Why he had fallen in love with Madge originally nobody quite knew, for there was no very obvious common ground between them. But the ways of love are past finding out, and even as when two tiny carbon poles of an electric battery are brought near to each other a light altogether disproportionate to their size illuminates the night, so it was with Philip. And certainly now the miracle was easier of explanation; there apparently had been in him the germ of a quite different Philip to that which he showed the world—a Philip admirably kind and gentle, the very man who would so easily fall in love with anyone possessed of half Madge’s perfectly obvious attractions. All this was said in general talk, but in whispers it had begun to be said that Madge was not so desperately in love with him, and for this Gladys Ellington was not, as a matter of fact, directly responsible, though no doubt she would have been if she had thought she would not be found out. It was rather Madge’s own manner which suggested it. She too, like Philip, had been much humanised, coincidentally anyhow, with their engagement; but later, during these last ten days in fact, she really seemed to have hired a snail-shell and curled herself up in it. Her trousseau—this alone was immaterial—did not seem to give her the smallest pleasure, and yet her indifference to that was not the indifference which might have been the fruit of her private intense happiness, which could conceivably have made even these confections seem tasteless. In fact, it was not only the trousseau that she appeared to find tasteless; she found everything tasteless, and really, to judge from her mode of behaviour when she was with Philip, you would have thought that she was an icicle just being introduced to an eligible snowflake.

Philip on this particular day had sat for Evelyn for nearly a couple of hours, grumbling at the length of his detention, but in a manner that did not suggest active discontent. He intended, in fact, to give Madge the picture on their wedding day, if it could be finished, and to further that desirable object he was willing really to sit for as long as Evelyn required. The latter, various and numerous as were the moods to which he usually treated his sitters, seemed to-day to have gone through them all; he was, in fact, more like himself than Philip had lately seen him.

“Until one really looks at a man’s face,” he had been saying, “one never knows how ugly he is. I always used to think you passably good-looking. But you are awful, do you know? Men’s faces generally are like chests of drawers—square, don’t you know, and covered with knobs that suggest handles. And you are balder than when I began to paint you.”

“I am sure I apologise. And do you really think you can finish it by the twenty-eighth? I shall be immensely grateful if you can.”

“The twenty-eighth? Ah! yes, the happy day.”

Thereat another mood came over him, and for the spate of surprising remarks which he had been pouring forth there was exchanged a frowning, brush-biting silence. This lasted another twenty minutes, and Philip, as thanks for his offerings on the altar of conversation, got only grunts, and once a laboriously polite request to stand still. But eventually he hit on a subject that produced a response.

“And Madge’s portrait?” he said. “Have you decided to yield to our ignorance perhaps, but anyhow our desire, and consider it finished?”

Evelyn stopped dead in the middle of a stroke, and a new and frightfully disconcerting mood suddenly appeared to possess him.

“How can you ask me if I yield,” he said hotly, “when you have told me I can’t have any more sittings? I yield as a man yields who is pinioned and hung. I only yield to force. As for the portrait, it is there, face to the wall. I will not send it to you, but you may fetch it away without opposition on my part. I never want to see it again. Oh! I make one condition—it must never be exhibited.”

“Ah! my dear fellow,” said Philip, “I cannot take it if you feel like that about it.”

“Leave it then.”

Philip was very deeply hurt somehow by this. Evelyn’s absolute insistence on his taking it as a present from him had much touched him, though he had tried to combat it. But this ending of the affair was intolerable. He could not leave matters like this. And now while he was debating what to do, Evelyn spoke again, resuming his painting with rapid, unerring strokes.

“I must say this, too,” he said. “I had an inspiration for that portrait quite unlike any I have ever had before. It is, even as it stands, my masterpiece, but you—you and Miss Ellington anyhow—have prevented me from completing what is my best, and would have been far better. Far better? It would have been on a different plane altogether. I am sorry if this hurts you, but it is only right you should know. I don’t say it is your fault; I don’t say it is anybody’s fault. But there the picture stands; I give it you with all the completeness with which I originally gave it you, and with all—all the best wishes.”

He paused a moment.

“But I won’t send it you,” he said, “since I don’t think it ought to be sent. Yet take it with my love, my best love, Philip. And I should be obliged if you would say no more at all about it. Turn your face a bit more to the left, there’s a good fellow; you have shifted slightly.”

He painted on for some little time in silence, and Philip, complying with his request that nothing more should be said about it, answered his next question, some common topic, and himself introduced another. But all the time his thoughts were busy enough on the tabooed subject. For a second time, as at the opera a few nights ago, the vague suspicion crossed his mind that Evelyn was in love with Madge, and had somehow betrayed this to her; but now, as then, he formulated this thought only to give it instant dismissal. That being so, he was morally bound to do Evelyn justice, to accept without either comment or reservation the fact that he really required another sitting from Madge, and to do his utmost, whatever her unwillingness and whatever the cause of it, to make her sit to him again. Both the Philip known to the few intimates and the Philip so much respected by the world at large had a very strong sense of fairness, and the fair thing quite certainly was this. It was impossible to deny an artist another sitting if he felt like this about it; it was doubly impossible to deny it to a friend. Even if the picture had been an order, a commission, it would have been but shabby treatment, now that he knew how Evelyn felt about it, not to do his very utmost to get Madge to give him another sitting; but the picture was not that, it was a present, given too, as he had said, “with his love.” He could not really doubt that when it was put to Madge like this, she would see it as he himself did.

The task itself of talking to her on the subject, it was distasteful to him, for she had been mysteriously indeed, but unmistakably in earnest, about it a few nights ago at the opera. Whatever the cause (and he consciously turned back from even conjecturing at the cause), she had, so she thought, at any rate, an adequate reason for not wishing to continue the sittings, even when the artist’s point of view was presented to her, and he foresaw that he might find himself in an opposition to her that would be painful to both of them. Nor had the change in her, which the world compared to the action of a snail retiring into its shell, escaped him. She had been for the last ten days or so reserved, silent, and apt to be startled. More than once he had asked her if anything was wrong, and the vehemence of her assertion that nothing was wrong had rather surprised him. But here, again, he had to pull himself up, and studiously refrain from conjecturing that Evelyn was in any way connected with any private worry of hers. Besides she had said that nothing was wrong; he was bound to accept that. For this reason he rejected the notion of consulting Lady Ellington about it; that would imply a distrust of the girl herself.

He was going to see her as soon as this sitting was over, and since he had thoroughly made up his mind that he must do his best to persuade her to do as he desired about the portrait, he determined not to put it off, but to speak to her to-day. But he judged it better not to tell Evelyn what he was going to do, because on the one hand his mission might fail of success, and on the other because he had been asked to allude no further to the question. So for the remainder of the sitting they talked, neither quite naturally, since both were thinking of the one subject that could not be talked about, on strictly public topics. But every minute was an age of discomfort, and Philip, at any rate, was heartily glad when it was over, and he was out again in the hot, sunny streets.

Madge scarcely knew how the days had passed since that afternoon in the New Forest, for it seemed to her that all the values of life were altered, as if a totally new scheme of things must be made, for that which existed at present was not possible. Day after day, too, brought the twenty-eighth nearer—that date before which something which would upset and reverse her whole world must assuredly occur. For she was pledged then to do that which she knew she could not do, the impossibility of which was every hour more vividly impressed on her. She had herself promised her mother to do nothing whatever, unless Evelyn made some further advance; what she did not know was how very skilfully he had been debarred from that. But already the promise she had herself given had begun to lose for her its moral validity, it was only in a second-hand sort of way that she considered it binding, for one thing only she felt was really binding on her, and that the impossibility of fulfilling her pledge to Philip. That was outside her power; by what step she would make that known, she did not yet consider. A way must be found; what the way was seemed to her, if she considered it at all, very immaterial.

For side by side with that impossibility, and not less securely throned, was another certainty, namely, that Evelyn must repeat what he had said before; no man could leave it like that. And in those days she knew what it was to start and change colour when the door-bell rang, to frame any excuse, or no excuse, to go downstairs and see what the post had brought, to watch at balls and parties the arrival of fresh-comers, and glance across the crowded rooms in a sort of yearning certainty that now at last she would see one face among the crowd, which would come slowly closer and closer through the throng, until it was by her. Then—even the trivial, commonplace little details were imagined by her—he would ask her for a dance, or take her out to some unfrequented room. Philip at the time would probably be with her; he would certainly smile and nod at Evelyn, and resign her to him for “just ten minutes.” But the days went on, and none of these visions were realised; he appeared no more at houses where she had often seen him. Often, too, people asked her about the progress of her portrait, and to these she replied that it was finished. Finished! These moments were lit with a certainty and a sure hope, but there were others, black ones. What if he had spoken without thought, excitedly, carried away by some moment’s passion, bitterly regretted since? Supposing he did not really love her, supposing it had been just the flame and the blaze of a moment.

There was no preparation possible for the crash that was inevitable. No gradual estrangement from Philip, ending in a quarrel, was to be thought of; she could not scheme and soften things; the granite of the bouleversement could not be kneaded into dough. More than once he had asked her if anything was the matter, and on the last occasion, as we have seen, she had denied it with vehemence—the vehemence of one who is sick with a deadly, devouring sickness, whose instinct, feverish and irresistible, is to hold on to the last, affirming her health. But her own vehemence had startled not only him, but herself, and she had vowed to show more self-control, and exhibit that self-control in its most difficult demonstration—merely that of appearing quite normal, and not exercising or, indeed, needing any self-control at all. More especially was this difficult when she was alone with him—the half-hinted caress, the look of love in those honest eyes, had to be somehow telegraphed back; some resemblance that would pass muster as a response had to be sent by her. It was all so mean, and the only comfort, and that cold, was that it could not now last long. For the one supreme impossibility remained—she could not be at his side on the twenty-eighth. Some thing, Fate or her own action dictated by it, would interfere with that, but about it she felt a sort of cold irresponsibility. Meantime, since responsibility was not as yet definitely fallen on her, the need for normal behaviour was paramount.

To-day Philip was coming to tea; he was going to return to dinner, and they, with her mother, were going to the theatre. After that there was a dance; from the hours between five and the small hours of the next day she would scarcely be alone a moment. And it was in loneliness that she could best bear the hopeless tangle—that tangle which, so it seemed to her now, could never be unravelled, but must be cut with a knife. A small knot more or less no longer made any difference, and it was with apathy almost, certainly without strong feeling of any kind, that she heard from Lady Ellington that she would perhaps be late for tea, and in consequence that Philip and herself would be alone together. An hour or two more of make-believe did not seem to her now to matter much; the hours that there could be of that were definitely limited, and, since limited, it was possible to deal with them. For it is only the endless succession of impossible hours, this knowledge that they will continue as long as life itself, that brings despair. But above all, till the crash came, she must be normal. She must give no sign of the storm that was raging within her, and though the depths and lowest abysses of her nature were upheaved by wild billows yet somehow the surface must be kept calm. It was one of the forces outside her own control which had taken possession of her, and with a sort of shudder she thought of the duck-and-drake discussions she had held with Evelyn about incontrollable forces, making these things of vital import the subject for a jest and an epigram. But she knew now, as she had not known then, what such a force meant.

This dismal drawing-room, with its frippery hanging over the window to hide it from the gaze of the square, its grand piano, its window at the opposite end, which commanded a small sooty yard! A hundred drawing-rooms east and west of it were exactly like it, yet on this had Fate—that cruel, velvet-pawed cat—pounced, selecting it at random, to make it the scene of one of her mean little dramas, at which one cannot laugh for fear of tears, at which one cannot cry because other people laugh. And here Madge sat alone, Lady Ellington not having yet returned, the silver urn occasionally lifting its lid with the infinitesimal pressure of the steam beneath, with all the mocking accessories of comfortable life round her, waiting for the inevitable explosion. It might be to-day, it might be to-morrow, it might be any day up to the twenty-eighth. But by that time it must have come; yet the same carpet would be trodden on, the same pictures would cast incurious eyes on to a human tragedy, the same everything would preserve its mute, inanimate composure. That composure she, too, had now to rival; she must be as suitable as the sofa.

Her greeting of him, anyhow, was good enough.

“At last!” she said. “Philip, it is weeks since I set eyes on you. Where have you been, and what have you done with yourself all this time? Now, don’t say it has only been business. I don’t believe you do any, and I shall send a detective to get on your track. Ah! you wouldn’t like that, I can see it; you gave what novelists call an involuntary shudder.”

Then she broke down a little.

“Tea,” she asked. “You like it weak, don’t you?”

Philip settled himself in the chair she had indicated. He, too, like Madge, was inclined to temporise, though his reasons for so doing were different, for his inevitable errand was unpleasant, and the present so extremely the reverse. Her temporisation on the other hand, was that of postponing the inevitable for the sake of the impossible.

“Well, it is good anyhow to see you again,” he said. “Yes, business chiefly has stood in my way. But I won’t be dishonest; I spent nearly two hours this afternoon over the portrait.”

“What portrait?” asked Madge, with a swiftness that she could not help. But she would gladly have recalled it. For the present, however, it appeared that Philip did not notice her vehemence.

“Mine,” he said quietly. “I am sitting to Evelyn, you know. He hopes to have it finished by the twenty-eighth. You shall see it then, but not till then.”

“Yes, keep it for then,” she said, again bracing herself to keep up some sort of attitude which should be natural in a girl to a man she was shortly going to marry. “It must come as a surprise to me, Philip. But only tell me: it is good, isn’t it? I shan’t be disappointed?”

Now, this portrait of himself seemed to Philip more magical work than even that of Madge. He knew himself pretty well, but this afternoon, when he was allowed to see it, he felt that Evelyn somehow must have been inside him to have done that. Brilliant as Madge’s portrait was (the artist himself indeed considering it quite his high-water mark), it was yet but a mood of Madge that he had caught so correctly and delineated so unerringly—that mood of reassuring laughter at the worries and the sorrows of life. But in his own portrait he felt that he himself was there.

“No, I promise you that you will not be disappointed,” he said, “though I daresay it will make you jump. It isn’t on the canvas at all, it seems to me; it is stepping right out of it. And there is there,” he added, “not only this poor business man, but the man who loves you. He has put that in. My goodness, how could he have known what that was like?”

Madge gave a sudden little start, but recovered herself immediately. She could not meet this seriously; it had to be laughed off.

“Well, I don’t know what it is like,” she said, “because with all my faults, I’ve really never loved myself. I never think of myself except as rather a little brute. It’s better to do that oneself, isn’t it, not to leave it to others. Not that it prevents them doing it also.”

Philip had possessed himself of Madge’s left hand, the hand that he never ceased to wonder at. It was always cool, never hot, never cold, and the skin of it was like a peach. The fingers were long and tapered to almond-shaped nails, and for all its slimness and delicacy it was yet a strong hand. And mechanically she returned the touch of his, which half unconsciously lingered at the base of the fourth finger as if showing the place where so soon the plain circlet of gold would be.

“Ah! it is always a pity if anybody thinks one a brute,” he said. “It often must happen, but I think one should try to make such occasions rare, so long as one does not have to sacrifice principle to them. I mean, if anyone thinks one a brute, and one can convince him of the contrary, it is usually worth while.”

For a moment it flashed through Madge’s brain what was coming. Considering what her mind was full of, it was not surprising. And it came.

“I want to ask a favour of you, dear,” he said. “I call it a favour because it is a real favour—it implies your doing something that I know you don’t want to do. It also will make somebody cease to think you a brute, and instead of sacrificing a principle in its performance—you will satisfy one, and that a very good one, the principle of fairness.”

Madge had left the sofa where they were sitting together during this, and simply in order to be doing something instead of inertly listening, poured herself out another cup of tea. So her back was turned to Philip when she replied:

“You state it as if I couldn’t help saying ‘Yes,’” she said, her voice trembling a little. “What is it, Philip?”

“Merely this, that you give Evelyn another sitting,” he said. “I had no idea how strongly and keenly he felt about it till this afternoon. Shall I tell you about it?”

“Yes, do.”

“Well won’t you come and sit here again?”

She did not dare, for she felt too uncertain of herself, and as she poured the milk into her tea, her hand was no longer master of itself, and the saucer was flooded.

“Ah! what a mess,” she cried. “Go on, Philip.”

“He feels that you are treating him shabbily,” he said. “Mind, he never said that; he never would. But it was clear to me. He believes that his portrait of you is the best piece of work he is ever likely to do, and though I may disagree with him, that says nothing against his right to his opinion, which is probably correct. Well, he wants one more sitting——”

“Did he say that this afternoon?”

“No, but he did before, and this afternoon he told me I might fetch it away if I liked, and he would offer no opposition, but that he would not send it. I can’t take it like that; neither you nor I can take it if that is his feeling about it. It isn’t as if I paid for it; it is a present—a most generous, splendid present. So will you be very kind, Madge, and though he bores you, just go back once? Indeed, it is only fair that you should. After all, it is only for an hour or so, and really, I don’t believe he bores you much.”

Though in the next moment Madge thought of so much, the pause was not long, for her thoughts flashed lightning-wise through her mind. First came the dramatic wonder that it should be Philip—Philip of all people in the huge world, who should be asking her to do this. If it had been anybody else the thing would not have been so astounding, but it was he. Then came the thought of her mother, and the promise she had given her. Even before this that promise, set in the scales with larger issues, had weighed light: now it just kicked the beam. But then, after that, and stronger than all else, came the sense of solution, of a riddle answered. How often had she puzzled over the manner in which it would turn out that the twenty-eighth should be to her a day without significance. Here was the answer, different from all her imaginings, and told her by Philip himself. And of imaginings and puzzlings she had had enough, and she did not put her brain to the task of imagining what that sitting would be like, how he would speak, what he would say. Simply, she was going to meet him again. And her voice when she answered was perfectly calm, without vibration. She felt indeed now so certain of herself that she came and sat by Philip again.

“Yes, if he feels it like that,” she said, “and if you feel it like that, I will do as you wish. As you say, an hour or two doesn’t matter much. I will write to him; it had better be as soon as possible—to-morrow if he has time. I have rather an empty day to-morrow.”

She got up again.

“I will write now, I think,” she said, “because I must eat a little, just a little, humble pie, and as I have no relish for that, I will get it done with as soon as possible. Now, what shall I say? Let me think.”

Her pen travelled with remarkable ease over the paper; the humble pie, it appeared, was being consumed without much difficulty. Once only she stopped for a word, then the scream of the quill underlined her own name.

“Will this do?” she asked, and read:

Dear Mr. Dundas.—I feel that I have no right whatever, since you wish me to give you another sitting, to refuse it. This has been pointed out to me quite clearly by Philip, who is with me now, and I see that it is not fair either on you or the portrait. I wonder if to-morrow would suit you? I could come any time between three and six. If three will do, pray do not trouble to answer, and I will assume the affirmative.

Philip’s habit of considering business letters led him to pause.

“Yes, that is amende honorable,” he said at length. “It will do excellently. But if you are bored, Madge, why not take your mother with you, or I would meet you there?”

“Oh, no, he would think it so odd,” she said lightly. “You see, I am accustomed to go alone. And he has told me that he hates other people in the studio while he is painting.”

She directed the note and rang the bell.

“There is one thing more, Philip,” she said, “and that is that I don’t want my mother to know I am going. You see, I told her, too, that I was not going to sit again, and if one goes back on one’s word, well, the fewer people who know about it the better. Everyone hates a changeable person who doesn’t know her own mind.”

Philip willingly gave his assurance on this point, for though it seemed to him rather a superfluous refinement, he was, on the whole, so pleased to have met with no opposition that he was delighted to leave the matter settled without more discussion. Then, since it was already time for him to go home and dress for the early dinner before the theatre, he got up.

“Ah! Madge,” he said, lingering a moment. “You don’t know, and you can’t guess, how divinely happy you make me. In the big things I knew it was so, but in little things it is so also. You are complete all through.”

This struck her like a blow. She could scarcely look at him, it was even harder to return his caress.

“Oh, don’t think too well of me,” she said, “and—and go now, or you will be late.”

Then, after he had gone, Madge felt tired as she had never felt tired before. The fact that the tension was over showed her what the tension had been; she had struggled, and while she struggled the need for effort had postponed the effect of weariness which the effort produced. She could go on living her ordinary life, and had not this occurred she could still have gone on, but it was only now, when the need for going on was over, that she knew how utterly weary she was. Yet with the weariness there was given her a draught of wine; it would no longer be “to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow,” but to-morrow only. She knew as surely as she knew how tired she was, that to-morrow would see her with him, and the rest she was content to leave; no imagination or picturing of hers was necessary. It would be as it would be.

After Philip had left her, there was still half an hour before she need go to dress, but the thought that her solitude might be disturbed here by anyone who called, or by her mother, who would be returning any minute, caused her to go upstairs to her own room, where, till the advent of her maid at dressing-time, she would be alone.

Thus it was scarcely a minute after her lover had gone that she went upstairs. As she mounted the steps to the storey above, she heard the front-door bell ring, congratulated herself on having just escaped, and went more softly, and closed the door of her bedroom very gently behind her.

The ring at the bell which she had heard was her mother returning. The footman who had taken Madge’s note, who had also just let Philip out, let her in, having laid down the note in question on the hall table, meaning to put a stamp on it, and drop it into the letter-box. Madge’s handwriting was unmistakable; it was brilliantly legible, too, and the address leaped from the envelope.

Now, Lady Ellington, as both her friends and her possible enemies would have at once admitted, was a very thorough woman. She did not, in fact, when she desired or designed anything, neglect any opportunity of furthering that desire or design, or on the other hand, neglect to remove any obstacle which might possibly stand in the way of its realisation. She had excellent eyes, too—eyes not only of good sight, but very quick to observe. Yet even a short-sighted person might easily have involuntarily read the address, so extremely legible was it. And Lady Ellington, with her excellent sight, read it almost before she knew she had read it. The footman in question had meantime just gone out to deliver her order to the chauffeur for the motor this evening, and before he had got back again into the hall, Lady Ellington was half-way upstairs with the note in her hand.

William—the footman—had a week before received a month’s warning on the general grounds of carelessness and inattention. Whether justified or not before they were justified now, for on re-entering he thought no more at all about the note he had to post, but stared at himself in a looking-glass, and hoped the next butler might be more agreeable to a sensitive young fellow, than the one he at present served under. He was a student of the drama, and smiled to himself in the glass, detecting in that image a likeness to Mr. George Alexander. So he smiled again. And as befits so vacant-minded a young man, he vanishes from this tale after a short and inglorious career. His career he himself regarded in a different fashion.

Lady Ellington went into the drawing-room on her way upstairs. Philip, she knew, since she had passed him fifty yards from the house had gone, and Madge, so it appeared, had gone too. But the tea was still there. For herself, she had already had tea, but she took the trouble to rinse out a cup, pour a little boiling water into it, and proceeded to lay the note face upwards over it. Thorough in every way, she took the precaution of sitting close to the table, ready at any moment to snatch the note away and be discovered sipping hot water—a practice to which she was known to be addicted, and to which she attributed much of her superlative health and freedom from all digestive trouble. How well founded that belief was may be judged from the fact that she digested without qualms of any kind what she was doing now. The good purpose that lurked behind assimilated apparently any meanness. In fact, the good purpose was of the nature of the strongest acid; the meanness ceased to exist—it was absorbed, utterly eaten away.

She was in no hurry, for there was still plenty of time before she need dress, and she waited till the flap of the envelope began to curl back of its own accord as the gum that fastened it was made fluid again by the steam. This happened very soon, because it was not yet really dry. Then, taking precaution against the sheet inside being touched by it, she drew it out and read. The clear, neat handwriting—she had taken great pains with Madge’s early tuition in this art—was as intelligible as print, and she only needed to read it through twice before she placed it back again in its envelope, pressed the flap back, and left it to cool and dry. Yet during this very short process her own ideas were also cool and dry, and the reasoning sound and effective. So she put a stamp on the envelope, and went downstairs herself, and dropped it into the letter-box.

That was necessary, since in her note Madge had stated that she would be at the studio at three unless she heard to the contrary. Therefore there was no object to be gained in merely sequestrating the note, since Madge proposed to go there unless stopped. For Lady Ellington knew well that no plan, however well-founded, could be quite certain of success; uncertainty, the possibly adverse action of Fate might work against it, and thus to let this note go—of which she had mastered the contents—was to provoke an accident the less, since, on her present scheme, she had not stopped it. For the fewer dubious things one does on the whole, the less is the risk. It is the unfortunate accident of guilt which in nine cases out of ten hangs a man. So though she had been guilty—in a way—when she wrote to Evelyn, implying Madge’s acquiescence in her letter, she had the more excellent reason now, especially since she had completely mastered the contents of this note, in not taking the more questionable step of stopping it. For she knew for certain, and at the moment did not require to know more, the immediate movements of the enemy; if Madge heard nothing, she would go to the studio to-morrow at three. But no one under any circumstances could prevent her mother making her appearance there too.

Again, it is true, some sort of reply might come. But the fact of a reply coming was equivalent to Evelyn’s saying that he could not be there at three to-morrow, which rightly she put down as being a negligible contingency. And in this case again, if Lady Ellington could not keep watch over Madge’s movements during the next ten days she felt she would be really ashamed of herself. And as she had never been that yet, she saw no reason why she should begin now. She was probably right—the chances were immensely at this moment in favour of her not beginning to be ashamed of herself. For the beginnings of shame are searchings of the heart; Lady Ellington never searched her heart, she only did her best.

The evening passed in perfect harmony; and though she had a good deal to think about, she could yet spare time to be characteristically critical about the play. That was easy, since it was a very bad one, and the deeper consolations of her brain were devoted all the time to certain contingencies. This note had been posted by half-past seven; it would be received that night. Supposing there was a reply to it, it was almost certain that the answer would come at the second morning post, the one that rapped towards the end of breakfast time. If so, and if that reply was received by Madge, she had merely, in the most natural manner possible, to suggest complete occupations for the day, challenging and inquiring into any other engagement. But she did not seriously expect this—no reply was the almost certain rejoinder. In this case, Lady Ellington would be quite unoccupied after lunch.

The ramifications went further. Madge had consented to give Mr. Dundas another sitting after she had declared she would not take the next step. It was better, therefore, to meet guile with guile, and not suggest a suspicion or possibility of it till the last moment. She would go out to lunch to-morrow herself, with regrets to Madge, leaving her free to spend the afternoon as she chose, without asking questions. She herself, however, would leave lunch early, and manage to be at Mr. Dundas’s by three o’clock, five minutes before perhaps; it was always well to be on the safe side.

Lady Ellington’s applause at the end of the second act was rather absent-minded. Her thoroughness made her examine her own position a little more closely, and there was one point about it which she did not much like, namely, the fact that she had written to Mr. Dundas from Brockenhurst, implying Madge’s concurrence in what she said. It would be rather awkward if any hint of that ever reached Madge; it really would be difficult to explain. Explanation, in fact, was impossible, since there was none. But it followed from this, as a corollary, that he must not see Madge alone; the chances then were enormous of the whole thing coming out. Yet how again would she be able to explain her own presence at Evelyn’s house in the King’s Road at three o’clock that afternoon? It was childish to say she happened to be passing. Then a solution occurred to her—one which was extraordinarily simple, and extremely probable—Philip had told her that Madge was sitting again. So probable, indeed, was this, that she could, almost without effort, persuade herself that he had done so.

Lady Ellington was happily unconscious at this moment what an extremely tangled web she was weaving, and how impossible it was for her to disentangle it, for not having had the privilege of overhearing Madge’s conversation with Philip, she had, by no fault of hers, no idea that he was pledged to secrecy. True, he had not actually mentioned, a thing which he might be expected to have done, the fact that Madge was going to sit again, but no doubt a little well-turned conversation might make him do so. Madge, at the end of the third act, was talking to a neighbour in the stalls, and she herself turned to Philip.

“A stupid act, rather,” she said. “Those two laid their plans so badly.”

Then, with a sudden sense of the inward humour of her words:

“It isn’t enough to open people’s letters,” she said, “you must hear their conversations too. I should really have made an excellent villain, if I had studied villainy. I should have hidden behind the curtains, and under the tables, and listened at key holes, for the private conversations of other people, and carefully looked in such places, and hung a handkerchief over the key-hole before indulging in any of my own.”

Philip laughed.

“Yes, I think you would be thorough in all you did,” he said, “and certainly, whatever your line was, I should ‘pick you up’ first, as schoolboys say, to be on my side.”

“Ah! I am certainly on your side,” said she. “Now, what have you done with yourself all day? I like to hear always exactly what people have done. A few weeks of what people have done gives you the complete key to their character.”

“Is that why you ask?” said he.

“No, because I know your character. I ask merely from interest in you.”

“Well, I rode before breakfast,” said he, “and got down to the city about half-past ten. I worked till half-past two, dull work rather—but, by-the-bye, hold on to your East Rand Mining, I think they are going better—then I ate three sandwiches and a piece of cake; then I sat to Evelyn for two hours, then I went round to see Madge, dressed, dined, and didn’t think much of the play.”

“And your portrait?” asked Lady Ellington. “Is it good?”

“Ah! all he does is good,” said Philip. “A man like that cannot do a bad thing. But it is more than good. It’s Mary Jane’s top-note.”

“I thought Madge was his top-note,” said Lady Ellington.

“Well, I think he has gone a semitone higher,” said he. “Of course I am the worst person to judge, but it seems to me that he is even more sure in this than he was in her portrait. Haven’t you seen it?”

Lady Ellington was quite quick enough to catch at this.

“No, but I should so much like to,” she said. “Do you think he would let me see it?”

“I’m sure he would.”

Philip paused a moment.

“Send him a note, or I will,” he said. “I shouldn’t go to-morrow, if I were you, because I know he is busy.”

“Ah! what a pity,” said Lady Ellington, lowering her voice a little. “I have nothing to do to-morrow afternoon.”

“I know he is busy,” repeated Philip. “He told me so.”

“And Madge’s portrait,” she said, “when shall we see that? It is quite finished, is it not?”

Suddenly the preposterous idea occurred to Philip that he was being pumped. No doubt it was only Madge’s rather ridiculous request that her mother should not know that she was going to sit again that suggested it, but still it was there. On this point also he had given his promise to her, and he went warily in this time of trouble.

“I fancy he is going to work a little more at it,” he said, anxious to tell the truth as far as possible. “Indeed, he told me so to-day. But he said that if I sent for it in a couple of days it would be ready for me to take.”

It was quite clear, therefore—indeed, the letter that had so providentially come into her hands told her that—that Philip knew that Madge was going to sit again to-morrow. The letter anyhow had told her that she was going to sit again; Philip’s suggestion that she herself should not go to see his portrait to-morrow was quite sufficiently confirmatory of the rest. He had not told her, it is true, that Madge was going to do this, but it would answer her purpose well enough. There was only one thing more to ask.

“I think Madge said she would not sit for him again,” she observed.

“Yes, I know she did,” said he, “because I was the bearer of that message from her. I thought it was a mistake, I remember, at the time.”

It was on the tip of Lady Ellington’s tongue to say, “And have told her so since,” but she remembered how terribly this would fall below her usually felicitous level of scheming. So, as the curtain went up at this moment, she turned her attention to the stage. Had it not gone up, she would have diverted the talk into other channels; the raising of the curtain was not a deliverance to her.

“Let us see what these second-rate schemers make of it all,” she said.

The act was played to a tragic end, and Philip helped her on with her cloak.

“No, they committed an initial fault,” she said; “they didn’t lay their original schemes well enough.”

But though the play was a disappointment, she pondered over it all the way home.

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