Stella found Lady Verny weeding. She drew the weeds up very gracefully and thoroughly, with a little final shake.

It was a hard, shivering March morning. Next to the bed upon which Lady Verny was working was a sheet of snowdrops under a dark yew-hedge. They trembled and shook in the light air like a drift of wind-blown snow.

Stella hovered irresolutely above them; then she said:

"Lady Verny, I am afraid I must go back to the town hall next week. I haven't been any use."

Lady Verny elaborately coaxed out a low-growing weed, and then, with a vicious twist, threw it into the basket beside her.

"Why don't you go and talk to Julian?" she asked. "He can't be expected to jump a five-barred gate if he doesn't know it's there."

Stella hesitated before she spoke; then she said with a little rush:

"What I feel now is that I'm not the person to tell him—to tell him it's there, I mean. I don't know why I ever thought I was. The person to tell him that would be some one he could notice like a light, not a person who behaves like a candle caught in a draft whenever he speaks to her."

"My dear," said Lady Verny, ruthlessly exposing, and one by one exterminating, a family of wireworms, "I fear you have no feminine sense. You have a great many other kinds,—of the mind, and no doubt of the soul. You should try to please Julian. You don't; you leave him alone, and in consequence he thinks he's a failure with you. Women with the feminine sense please a man without appearing to make the effort. The result is that the man thinks he's pleasing them, and a man who thinks that he has succeeded in pleasing an agreeable woman is not unaware of her."

"But I'm so afraid of him," pleaded Stella. "I don't believe you know how frightening he is."

"Yes," said Lady Verny; "he has lost his inner security. That makes a person very frightening, I know. He has become aggressive because he feels that something he has always counted on as a weapon has been withdrawn from him. It's like living on your wits; people who do that are always hard. I think you can give him the weapon back; but to succeed you must use all your own. You must go into a room as if it belonged to you. It's astonishing how this place suits you; but you must hold your head up, and lay claim to your kingdom."

"But I've never had a kingdom," objected Stella, "and I only want him to be interested in the idea of writing a book."

"Well, that's what I mean," said Lady Verny, decently interring the corpses of the worms. "At least it's part of what I mean. The only way to get Julian to write a book just now is to charm him. Men whose nerves and hearts are broken don't respond readily to the abstract. You can do what I can't, because I'm his mother. He's made all the concessions he could or ought to make to me. He promised not to take his life. Sometimes in these last few months I've felt like giving him his promise back. Now are you going to be afraid of trying to please Julian?"

"O Lady Verny," Stella cried, "you make me hate myself! I'll do anything in the world to please him; I'd play like a brass band, or cover myself with bangles like Cleopatra I Don't, don't think I'll ever be a coward again!"

"You needn't go as far as the bangles," said Lady Verny, smiling grimly. "Do it your own way, but don't be afraid to let Julian think you like him. He finds all that kind of thing rather hard to believe just now.

"He's been frozen up. Remember, if he isn't nice to you, that thawing is always rather a painful process. Now run along, and leave me in peace with my worms."

It cannot be said that Stella ran, but she went. She passed through the hall and down a passage; and wondered, if she had been an early-Christian martyr about to step into the arena, whether she wouldn't on the whole have preferred a tiger to Julian.

The door opened on a short passage at the end of which was an old oak doorway heavily studded with nails. She knew this must be Julian's room, because she heard Ostrog growling ominously from inside it. Julian presumably threw something at him which hit him, for there was the sound of a short snap, and then silence.

"Please come in," said Julian in a voice of controlled exasperation. Stella stepped quickly into the room, closing the door behind her.

It was a long, wide room with a low ceiling. There were several polar bear-skins on the floor, and a row of stuffed penguins on a shelf behind Julian's chair. Three of the walls were covered with bookcases; the fourth was bare except for an extraordinarily vivid French painting of a girl seated in a cafÉ. She had red hair and a desperate, laughing face, and was probably a little drunk. There was a famous artist's signature beneath her figure, but Stella had a feeling that Julian had known the girl and had not bought the picture for the sake of the signature.

Ostrog stood in front of her, growling, with every separate hair on his back erect.

"Keep quite still for a moment," said Julian, quickly. "Ostrog, lie down!" The dog very slowly settled himself on his haunches, with his red, savage eyes still fixed on Stella. "Now I think you can pass him safely," Julian added. "He has a peculiar dislike to human proximity, especially in this room. You can't write him down as one who loves his fellow-men, and I fear he carries his unsociability even further in respect to his fellow-women."

"It must be nice for you," said Stella, "to have some one who expresses for you what you are too polite to say for yourself."

Julian gave her a quick, challenging look.

"I beg your pardon," he said. "Why should you suppose any such thing?"

"I expect because it is true," said Stella, quietly. "Of course you don't growl or show your teeth, and your eyes aren't red; but nobody could suppose when you said 'Come in' just now that you wanted anybody to come in."

"The chances were all in favor of its being somebody that I didn't want," explained Julian, politely. "For once they misled me. I apologize."

Stella smiled; her eyes held his for a moment. She did not contradict him, but she let him see that she didn't believe him. "If he was ever really sorry," she thought, "he wouldn't apologize. When he's polite, it's because he isn't anything else."

"I came," she explained, "to ask you to lend me Professor Paulson's book on reindeer-moss. Will you tell me where it is and let me get it for myself, if Ostrog doesn't mind?"

To her surprise, Julian allowed her to find it for herself. Ostrog continued to growl, but without immediate menace. When she had found it, she took it across to Julian.

"Please don't run away," he said quickly, "unless you want to. Tell me what you intend to look up about the moss. I had a little tussle with Paulson over it once. He was an awfully able fellow, but he hadn't the health to get at his facts at first hand. That was unfortunate; second-hand accuracy leaks."

Stella sat down near him, and in a minute they were launched into an eager discussion. She had typed the book herself, and had its facts at her fingers'-end. She presented a dozen facets to her questions, with a light on them from her dancing mind.

Julian differed, defended himself, and explained, till he found himself at length in the middle of an account of his last expedition. He pulled himself up abruptly.

"By Jove!" he exclaimed, "what a dark horse you are! Do tell me how you come to know anything about such a subject. Did you smuggle yourself into an Arctic expedition as a stowaway, or have you been prospecting gold at Klondike with a six-shooter and a sleeping-sack? It's amazing what you know about the North."

"It is not so uncanny as you think," said Stella, quietly. "I was Professor Paulson's secretary. For five years I studied the fauna and flora of arctic regions. I used to help him examine the tests brought back by explorers. He taught me how to understand and check climate and weather charts. All the collected specimens went through my hands. I did the drawings for this book, for instance. You know, a secretary is a kind of second fiddle. Give him a lead, and he catches up the music and carries it through as thoroughly, though not so loudly, as the first violin. I like being a second fiddle and I like the North."

"That's odd," said Julian, drawing his heavy eyebrows together. "I had an idea I had met Professor Paulson's secretary before."

"You are quite right," said Stella; "you did meet her before."

Julian stared at her; his eyes hardened.

"Do you mean that it was you I met at Sir Francis Young's?" he asked her. "You are Miss Young's great friend, then, are you not?"

Stella turned her eyes away from him. She hated to see him guarding himself against her.

"I was her friend," she said in a low voice; "but I have not seen her or heard from her for six months, nor have I written."

Sir Julian still looked at her, but the sternness of his eyes decreased.

She sat meekly beside him, with her drooping head, like the snowdrops she had brought in with her from the March morning. She did not look like a woman who could be set, or would set herself, to spy upon him. He acquitted her of his worst suspicions, but his pride was up in arms against her knowledge.

"It's too stupid for me," he said, "not to have recognized you immediately; for I haven't in the least forgotten you or our talk. You said some charming things, Miss Waring; but fate, a little unkindly, has proved them not to be true."

Stella turned her eyes back to his. She no longer felt any fear of him. She was too sorry for him to be afraid.

"No," she said eagerly, "I was perfectly right. I said you were strong. Things have happened to you,—horrible things,—but you're there; you're there as well as the things—in control of them. Why, look at what you've been telling me—the story of your last expedition! It's so fearfully exciting, and it's all, as you say, first-hand knowledge. You brought back with you the fruits of experience. Why don't you select and sort them and give them to the world?"

He looked at her questioningly.

"Do you mean these old arctic scraps?" he said slowly. "They might have mattered once, but they're all ancient history now. The flood and the fire have come on us since then. All that's as dead—as dead and useless as a crippled man. Besides, no one can write a book unless it interests him. I'm not even interested."

Stella's eyes fell; her breath came quickly.

"But don't you think," she said, "you could be made a little interested again? You were interested, weren't you, when you were talking to me a few minutes ago?"

Sir Julian laughed good-naturedly.

"I dare say I was interested talking to you," he said. "You're such a changeling: you play chess like a wizard and know the North like a witch. I'm afraid, Miss Waring, that interest in your conversation isn't in itself sufficient to turn a man into an author."

Stella rose slowly to her feet. She opened her lips as if to speak to Julian, but he was looking past her out of the window, with a little bitter smile that took away her hopefulness. Ostrog escorted her, growling less and less menacingly, to the door. Stella did not look back at Julian, and she forgot to hold her head up as she went out of the room. After she had gone Julian discovered that she had dropped two of her snowdrops on the floor. He picked them up carefully and laid them on his desk.

"A curious, interesting girl," he said to himself; "an incredible friend for Marian to have had. I wonder what made my mother take her up?"