Shadows of a November twilight are gathering in the two great drawing-rooms of the largest house in Portland Place, rooms that have the grandeur of space, and a certain gloomy splendour that has nothing in common with the caprices and elegances of a modern London drawing-room. The furniture is large and massive. There are tables in Florentine mosaic; cabinets of ebony inlaid with ivory; dower-chests painted by Paul Veronese or his pupils; the richness of arts that are dead; walls hung with Italian tapestry, the work of cloistered nuns whose fingers have been lying in the dust for three centuries; silver lamps suggestive of mortuary chapels.

"I love the Provana drawing-rooms because they are romantic, and I hate them because they give me the horrors," little Lady Susan Amphlett told people.

Romantic was one of her pet words. Her vocabulary was made up of pet words, a jargon of divers tongues, and she used them without mercy. She was very small, very whimsical and pretty, as neat and dainty as a Dresden shepherdess; but she got upon some people's nerves, and was occasionally accused of posing, though she was actually as spontaneous as a tropical parasite in a South American forest, a little egotist, who thought, spoke, and acted only on the impulse of the moment, and whose mind had no room for the idea of an external world, except as its people and scenery were of consequence to herself. The people she did not know or care about were non-existent. Romantic was her word for Madame Provana. She adored Madame Provana, with whom she had some thin thread of affinity, the kind of distant connection that pervades the peerage, and makes it perilous for an outsider to talk of any recent scandal in high life, lest he should fall upon a cousin of the delinquent's.

"Vera and I are connections. Her grandmother was a Disbrowe," Lady Susan told people. "But it is not on that account I adore her. I love her because she is romantic; and so few of the people one knows are romantic."

If asked where the romance came in, Susan was ready with her reasons.

"Can there be anything more romantic than the idea of a lovely, ethereal creature, who looks as if a zephyr might blow her off her feet, married to an ugly giant whose sole thought and business in this life is to heap up riches, a man who cares for nothing but money, whose brain is a ledger, and whose heart is a cheque-book? Can anything be more romantic, when one considers the woman she is and the man he is, and that they absolutely dote upon each other?"

"Provana may dote," someone would say; "but I question the lady's feelings. That an impassioned Italian should be fond of a pretty woman, young enough to be his daughter, and whom he married without a penny for the sake of her sweet looks, all the world can understand. But that Madame Provana worships her money-merchant is another story."

"Did not Desdemona dote upon Othello?" cried Susan. "At least Provana is not black, and adoration such as his would melt a statue. To be worshipped by a case-hardened money-dealer, a man who trades in millions, and holds the sinews of war when nations are spoiling for a fight, a man who is a greater master of finance than half the Chancellors of the Exchequer who have helped to make history! To see how he worships that child-wife of his! It is absolutely pathetic."

"Pathetic" was the pretty Susie's word for Mario Provana. She used the adjective at the slightest provocation. "You are absolute pathetic," she said, when he brought his wife a necklet of priceless cat's eyes set with brilliants, and handed her the velvet case across the tea-table as carelessly as if it had been a box of bonbons.

He was pathetic, impayable, stupendo, all the big adjectives in little Lady Susie's vocabulary.

Susan Amphlett was Susie, or Lady Susie, for everybody who knew her socially; and for a good many people who had never seen her little minois chiffonÉ nearer than in a photograph. People who spelled over the society papers in their snug suburban drawing-rooms, and loved to follow the flight of those migratory birds, the Mr. and Mrs. Willies and Jimmies, and Lady Bettys and Lord Tommys, who were always flitting from branch to branch, in the only world that seemed worth living in, when one read the Society papers—those shining-surfaced, richly-illustrated sixpennies, which brought the flavour of that other world across the muffin dishes and savoury sandwiches of suburban tea-tables.

Mr. Amphlett was something in the City! Or that was his description when people wanted to describe him. He was briefly described as "rolling," and yet a pauper, if you weighed him against that mountain of gold, Mario Provana, the international money-dealer.

"If ever Provana goes under, half Europe will have to go under with him," Susie's cousin, Claude Rutherford, ex-guardsman, ex-traveller, ex-artist, ex-lion-shooter, said, when he discussed the great financier with inquisitive outsiders.

Claude was in the Portland Place drawing-room this afternoon, lounging against the mantelpiece, near the lamp-lit tea-tables, at one of which Madame Provana presided, his tall, slender figure half lost in a deepening gloom, above that island of bright light made by the lamps on the tea-table.

It was easy for Claude to be lost in shadow, since there was so little of him to lose. Euclid's definition of a line, length without breadth, was his description; but his slender figure was a line that showed race in every inch. His scientific acquaintance called him a crystallisation. "Everything that was ever in the Disbrowes and the Rutherfords, good or bad, he has in its quintessence," the poet Eustace Lyon said of him. "Whatever the worst of the Rutherfords or the Disbrowes, from King Stephen downwards, ever did, Claude is capable of doing. Whatever the best of them ever accomplished he could do, if he had a mind to."

Unhappily, Claude had a mind to do nothing more with his life than lounge through it in placid idleness. He had done so much with life, that it seemed to him that the inconsiderable remnant at his disposal was not enough for action, and so nothing mattered. He had been a soldier, and had seen active service, not without a certain distinction. He had hunted lions and shot harmless elephants, with still more distinction; indeed, in the exploring, lion-annihilating line he had made himself almost a celebrity. He had painted and exhibited pictures that had pleased the public and the critics, and had been told that he might excel in the world of art; but though he loved art, he had not tried to excel. The success of a season satisfied him. Nothing pleased or interested him long. He had no staying power. He painted occasionally to distract himself, but in an amateurish way, and he no longer exhibited. His pictures had not work enough in them to be shown; and, indeed, rarely went beyond the impression of an hour; but the impression was vivid and vigorous, and always suggested how much the painter might have done, if he had cared. He had not long passed the third milestone on the road of life; but he had left off caring for things before his thirtieth birthday. Languor, light sarcasm, and unfailing good temper, were among the qualities that had made him everybody's favourite young man, the very first a smart hostess thought of when she was counting heads for a dinner-party. One incentive that has helped some indolent young men to success was wanting in this case. He was not obliged to earn his daily bread. The Rutherfords had coal-mines on the Scottish border, and were rich enough to provide for indolent scions of the family tree.

Six or seven years ago, before he left the Army, Claude Rutherford had been an arbiter of fashion among the men of his age. In those days he had taken the business of his outer clothing more seriously than the cultivation of a mind in which fancy had ever predominated over thought; and in those days that element of fancy had entered even into his transactions with tailor and bootmaker, and he had allowed himself some flights of imagination in form and colour. Of all the names given to golden youth the old-fashioned name of "exquisite" was the one that fitted Captain Rutherford. It seemed to have been invented for him. He was exquisite in everything, in his habiliments and his surroundings, in speech, and manner, in every detail of his butterfly life. But when he left the Grenadiers—to the infinite regret of his brother officers, who were all his fast friends—he flung foppery from him as it were a cast-off garment; and from the time he worked seriously at his easel, and began to exhibit his pictures, he had become remarkable for the careless grace of clothes that were scrupulously unoriginal, and in the rear rather than in the van of fashion, the sleeves and coat-tails and checks and stripes of the year before last. But he was still exquisite. The grace and the charm were in his own slender form, and not in the stuff that clothed him.

He was not handsome. He was not like David, ruddy and fair to see. He had very little colour, and his pale grey eyes were only brilliant in moments of mirth or strong feeling. He had a long, thin nose, and thin, flexible lips, and his mouth, which was supposed to be the Disbrowe mouth, and a speciality of that ancient race, was strong in character and expressiveness. His hair was light brown, with a natural wave in that small portion which modern barbers allow to remain on the masculine head. A rippling line above his brow indicated that Claude Rutherford might have been as curly as Absalom if he had let his hair grow.

In the afternoon shadows that small head and slim form contrasted curiously with the spacious brow of the tall and commanding figure at the other end of the mantelpiece, the imposing presence of Father Cyprian Hammond, at that time a famous personage in London society, the morals and manners whereof he had of late made it his chief business to satirise and denounce. But the people of pleasure and leisure, the butterflies and humming-birds of the world, the creatures of light and colour, have a keen relish for reproof and denunciation, though they may wince under the lash of irony. For them anything is better than not being talked about.

It had been asked of Father Cyprian why he, who was so scathing a critic of the follies and general worthlessness of the idle rich, was yet not infrequently to be met in their houses.

"If I did not go among my flock, I could not put my finger upon the festering spot," he said. "I am a student of humanity. If Lord Avebury could devote his days to watching bees and wasps, do you wonder that I am interested in watching my fellow-creatures? A professional beauty affords a nobler scope for observation than a queen bee; a gambler on the stock exchange offers more points of interest than the industrious ant. If insects are wonderful, is not the man or the woman who hazards eternal bliss for the trivial pleasures of a London season a creature infinitely more incomprehensible? And if, while I watch and listen, I can discover where these creatures are assailable, if I can find some penetrable spot in their armour of pride, I may be able to preach to them with better chance of being heard."

Father Cyprian was a conspicuous figure in that crowd of pretty women and "nice boys." Tall, even among guardsmen, he held himself like a soldier. He had a fair complexion, light brown hair, and blue eyes. A Saxon of the finest Saxon type, and coming of a family whose genealogical tree had put forth its earliest branches before the Heptarchy. It was the consciousness of superior race, perhaps, that made his fashionable flock tolerant of his stinging denunciation and unmeasured scorn of vice and folly in high places. Everything relating to him was superior. His vestments were superb, his chapel was a thing of beauty. The genius of a Bossuet would hardly have persuaded that world of the successful rich to listen to a withering analysis of its vices and pettinesses from the lips of some little Irish priest, reared in a hovel and nourished on potatoes and potheen; but it bowed the neck before Father Cyprian's good birth and grand manner.

Anglicans who met him in society, mostly in the houses of the powerful or the rich, talked of him as a worldling; but his own flock knew better. They knew that wherever the brilliant Jesuit might be seen, however light his manner or trivial his conversation, one deeply-seated purpose was at the back of his mind, the making of proselytes, the aggrandisement of his Church, that Invincible, Indestructible, Incomparable, Supreme, and Unquestionable Power, to which he had given the service and the devotion of his whole being. If he went much among statesmen and rulers it was because his Church wanted influence; if he cultivated the friendship of millionaires it was because his Church wanted money. For himself he wanted nothing, for he had been born to independence; and though he had given much of his fortune to the necessities of his Order, his income was still ample for the only scheme of life that was possible for him. He was not a man who could have lived in sordid surroundings, though he could go down into the nethermost depths of East-End poverty, and give his days and nights to carrying the lamp of Faith into dark places. He had a refinement of sense that would have made squalor, or even shabby-genteel ugliness, unbearable; and he had an ardent and artistic imagination which made some touch of beauty in his surroundings as needful to him as fresh air and cold water.

The attention of both these men, the priest and the man-about-town, was concentrated upon the lady of the house, who, just at this moment, was taking very little notice of either of them. She was surrounded by the smartest and prettiest women in the room, chief amongst them Lady Susan Amphlett, who was always to be found near Vera at these friendly tea-parties.

Vera let Lady Susan and the other women do almost all the talking. She sat looking straight before her, dreamily silent, amidst the animated chatter about trivialities that had ceased to interest her.

She was still as delicately slender as she had been six years ago at San Marco, when the parsons had called her ethereal, and the spinsters had called her half-starved; but those six years had made a transformation, and she was not the same Vera.

She had tasted of the Tree of Knowledge. She had enjoyed all the amusements and excitements that great cities can give to rich and beautiful women. She had been flattered and followed in Rome and Paris and London, had been written about in the New York Herald, and had been the fashion everywhere; a person whom not to know was to confess oneself as knowing nobody and going nowhere. Indeed, it was a kind of confession of outsiderism not to be able to talk of Madame Provana as "Vera."

She had accepted the position with a kind of languid acquiescence, taking all things for granted, after the first year, when everything amused her. In this sixth year of marriage, and wealth without limit, she was tired of everything, except the society of authors and painters and actors and musicians—the people who appealed to her imagination. She had inherited from her father the yearning for things that earth cannot give—the au delÀ, the light that never was on sea or land. "The glory and the dream."

She admired and respected Father Cyprian Hammond, and she liked him to talk to her, though she could divine that steadfast purpose at the back of his head, the determination to bring her into the Papal fold. She argued with him from her Anglican standpoint, and pleaded for that via media that might reconcile old things with new; and she felt the weakness of her struggle against that skilled dialectician; but she refused to be converted. Half the pleasure of her intimacy with this Eagle of Monk Street would be lost if she surrendered, and had to exchange the struggle for the attitude of passive submission.

His arguments sometimes went near to convincing her; but the Faith he offered did not satisfy those vague longings for the something beyond. It was too simple, too matter-of-fact to arrest her imagination. It offered little more than she had already in the ritual of her own Church. The change did not seem worth while.

She looked up suddenly in the midst of the silvery treble talk about theatres and frocks.

"Claude, do you ever keep a promise?" she asked.

"Always, I hope."

"You promised to bring Mr. Symeon to see me."

"Did I?"

"Indeed you did. Ages ago."

"Ages?"

"Well, nearly three weeks. It was at the Helstones' dinner."

"Three weeks. Mr. Symeon is not at the call of the first comer."

There was a little cry from the women, who had left off talking in order to listen.

"He calls Madame Provana the first comer!" exclaimed the youngest and pertest of the circle.

"I call myself the first comer where Symeon is concerned. I am not one of his initiated. I belong to the outer herd of wretches who eat butcher's meat and attach importance to dinner. Mr. Symeon condescends when he gives me half an hour of a life that is spent mostly in the clouds."

"I would give worlds to know him," said Lady Susan. "I have taken his quarterly, The Unseen, from the beginning, His articles upon the spiritual life are adorable, but I am not conceited enough to pretend to understand him."

"If people understood him, he would be less admired," said Rutherford.

"What does he do?" asked the youngest and flippantest. "I am always hearing of Mr. Symeon and his spook magazine; but what does he do? Is it thought-reading, slate-writing, materialisation? Does he float up to the ceiling, as Home did? My Grannie swears she saw him, yes, positively floating, in that large house by the Marble Arch."

"Mr. Symeon does nothing," replied Claude. "He is the high priest of the Transcendental. He talks."

"How disappointing!"

"Most people find that enough."

"They are bored?"

"No; they are fascinated. Mr. Symeon is more magnetic than Gladstone was. He must have stolen those green eyes of his from a mermaid. His disciples get nothing but his eyes and his talk; and they believe in him as Orientals believe in Buddha. I have heard people say he is Buddha—Gautama's latest incarnation."

"That's rather lovely!" exclaimed Miss Flippant. "I would give worlds to see him."

"We'll excuse you the worlds, even if you owned them," said Claude in his lazy voice. "You may see him within the next ten minutes, unless he is a promise-breaker. I had not forgotten your commands, Vera. I spent half a day in hunting Symeon, and did not leave him till he promised to come to tea with you. I believe tea is the most material refreshment he takes."

"You are ever so much better than I thought you," said Vera, with one look up at Rutherford, before she turned to gaze at the distant door, heedless of the talk that went on round her, until after some minutes a servant announced "Mr. Symeon."

Claude Rutherford left his station by the mantelpiece and went to meet the visitor.

The spacious rooms were mostly in shadow by this time, all the lamps being so tempered by artistic shades in sea-green silk that they gave faint patches of colour rather than light, and some people started at the sound of Mr. Symeon's name, almost as if they had seen a ghost.

It was a name that all cultured people knew, even when they did not know the man. Francis Symeon was a leader in the spiritual world, and there were no depths in the mysteries of occultism, from ancient Egypt to modern India, that he had not sounded. He was the editor and proprietor of The Unseen, a quarterly magazine, to which only the most advanced thinkers were allowed to contribute—a magazine which the subscriber opened with a thrill of anticipation, wondering what new revelation of the "life beyond" he was to find in those shining, hot-pressed pages, where the matter was often more dazzling than the gloss on the paper.

Vera watched with eager interest and a faint flush of pleasure as Rutherford and Symeon came through the shadows towards her.

"You see I have kept my promise, and here is Mr. Symeon, to answer some of those far-reaching questions with which you often bewilder my poor brain."

Vera left her table, where there had come a sudden lull in the soprano voices as Mr. Symeon drew near—a pause in the discussion of frocks and hats in the new comedy at the St. James's. She stood up to talk to Mr. Symeon, telling him how she had been reading the last number of The Unseen, and more especially his own contribution, an essay on the other life, as understood by Tennyson and Browning.

In that half-light which makes all beautiful things more beautiful, she had a spirit look, and might have seemed the materialisation of Mr. Symeon's thought, as she stood before him, fragile and slender, with glimmering lamplight on her cloud of brown hair, and on the simple white gown, of some transparent fabric, loosely draped over satin that flashed through its fleecy whiteness. Her only ornament was a necklace of aqua marina in a Tiffany setting.

"She wears that thing when she wants to look like a mermaid," Miss Pert whispered to her pal.

"No; she wears it to remind us that she has some of the finest jewels in London, and that she despises them," said the pal, who had reached that critical age which is described as "getting on," and was inclined to take a sour view of a young woman who had married millions.

Symeon and Vera talked for some time, she with a suppressed eagerness—earnest, almost impassioned; Symeon grave and reserved, yet obviously interested.

"We cannot talk of these things in a crowd," he said. "If I had known you had a party——"

"It is not a party. People come every afternoon in the winter, when there is not much for them to do; but if you will be so kind as to come early some day, at three o'clock, for instance, I will not be at home to anybody, unless it were Claude, who loves to hear you talk."

"I will come to-morrow," said Symeon; and then, with briefest adieu, he walked slowly through the crowd, acknowledging the greetings of a few intimates with a distant bend of his iron-grey head, and walking amongst the pretty faces and smart frocks as he might have done through so many sparrows pecking on a lawn.

Lady Susan came to Vera, excited and eager.

"Why didn't you keep him? I wanted you to introduce him to me. I have been pining to know him. I read every line of his Review. He is wonderful! I believe he has secrets that ward off age. You must ask me to meet him—at luncheon—a party of four, with Claude. Claude has been horrid about him."

"I value his friendship too much to introduce him to Tom, Dick, and Harry," said Claude. "Vera and he are elective affinities."

Father Cyprian and Claude Rutherford left the house together.

"May I walk with you as far as your lodgings?" Claude asked.

"By all means, and come in with me, if you can. It is early yet, and I have long wanted a talk with you."

"Serious?"

"Yes, even serious. When one cares as much for a young man as I do for you, there is always room for seriousness. You look alarmed, but there is no occasion. I don't preach long sermons, especially not to young men."

They walked to the end of the street in silence. They were old friends; and though Claude was the most lax among Papists, Cyprian Hammond had never lost hope of bringing him back to the fold. He was emotional and imaginative, and he had a heart. Sooner or later there would come a day when he would want the utmost the Church could do for him.

"You can't wonder if I am a little afraid," Claude said presently. "There has been some hard hitting from your pulpit within the last year."

"You have heard my moralities—I won't call them sermons?"

"Yes, I have heard; but I doubt if I have enjoyed your diatribes as much as the other sinners, especially the women of your flock. They love to be told they are a shade worse than Semiramis, if you will only imply that they are as fascinating as Cleopatra."

"Poor worms," said the priest with a long-drawn sigh. "They are such very poor creatures. Even their sins are petty."

"Would you prefer them if they were poisoners, like the Borgia?"

"No; but I might despise them less. And I should have more hope of their repentance. These creatures don't know they are sinners. They gamble, they squander their husbands' fortunes, shipwreck their sons' inheritance; and when the domestic ship goes down they are injured innocents, surprised to find that 'things are so expensive.' I have talked with them—not in the confessional—and I have sounded the shallows of their silly minds—there are no depths, unless it were a depth of self-love. They come to Mass, and sit fanning themselves and sniffing eau-de-Cologne, while I expostulate with them and try to turn their thoughts into new channels. And then they get tired of the creed in which they were brought up; tired of hearing hard things, and of tasting wormwood instead of honey."

"Is modern London so like Babylon?"

"I doubt if the city with a hundred gates was much worse. And your substitutes for the Church you have deserted—your Christian Science, Pragmatism, Humanism, your letters from the dead, your philanthropy—expressed in oranges and buns for workhouse children, and in fashionable bazaars; charities that overlap each other and pauperise more than they relieve; and all for want of that one tremendous Central Power that could harmonise every effort, bring every man and woman's work into line and rule. In the history of God's chosen people, the one unpardonable sin was the worship of strange gods. Their Creator knew that religion was the only basis of conduct, and that the worshippers of evil gods must themselves become infamous. But this is the age of strange gods. You all have your groves and high places, your Baal and Astarte, your Kali or your Siva, your shrines upon mountain tops and under green trees, your Buddha, your Nietzsche, your Spinoza, your Comte. You run after the teachers of fantastic things, the high priests of materialism. You worship anywhere but in your church; you believe anything but the faith of your forefathers."

They were at Father Cyprian's door by this time, in one of those wide streets west of Portland Place, and north of the world of fashion. Streets that may still be described as quiet, save for the ceaseless roar of traffic in the Marylebone Road, a sound diminished by distance, the ebb and flow of life in an artery of the great city. It was in a street parallel with this that the great Cardinal who defied the law of England had lived and died half a century before.

They had been walking slowly through the thickening mist of a fine November evening, a grey vapour, across which street lamps and lighted windows glimmered in faint flashes of gold, an atmosphere that Claude Rutherford loved, all the more, perhaps, because he had never been able to satisfy himself in painting it.

"What is the good of trying, when one must always fall short of Turner?" he had said to himself in those younger and more eager days when he still tried to do things.

Father Cyprian had talked with a kind of suppressed passion as they walked through solitary streets, and now he laughed lightly, as he turned the key in his door.

"You have had the sermon after all," he said.

"It didn't touch me. I am not an extravagant, bridge-playing woman, and I worship no strange god."

"I shall touch you presently; your withers are not unwrung."

"Suppose I say good night and give you the slip."

"You won't do that. I was your father's friend."

That was enough. Claude bent his head a little, as if at a sacred name, and followed the priest up the uncarpeted stone staircase to a large room on the first floor—the conventional London drawing-room, with its three long windows and chilling white linen blinds.

But, except the shape of the room and the white blinds, there was nothing to offend the eye that looked for beauty. The floor was cheaply covered with sea-blue felt, which echoed the colouring of the sea-blue walls, and the central space was occupied by a massive knee-hole desk of ebony, inlaid with ivory, evidently of Italian workmanship, and picturesque enough to please without being a chef d'oeuvre. There were only two objects of art in the spacious room, but each was supreme after its kind. A carved ivory crucifix of considerable size, mounted on black velvet, was centred on the wall facing the windows; and over the marble mantelpiece there hung a Holy Family by Fra Angelico. These, which were exquisite, were the only ornaments that Father Cyprian had given himself, in his ten years' residence in this house, where this spacious sitting-room, with a large bedroom for himself and a small room for his servant, comprised all his accommodation.

Six high-backed arm-chairs, covered with old stamped leather, and a massive gate-legged table, black with age, on which he dined, completed his furniture. To some visitors the sparsely-furnished room might have seemed cold and cheerless; but there was an air of repose in its simplicity that satisfied the artistic mind. It looked like a room designed for prayer and meditation; not a room for study, for the one bookcase, with its neat range of theological works, would not have sufficed for the poorest student. It looked like a room meant for solitude and thought, and for only the most serious, the most confidential conversation.

"I have always a sense of rest when I come into this room," Rutherford said, while Father Cyprian was lighting the candles in a bronze candelabrum on his desk.

"You should come here oftener, Claude. You might make a retreat here once or twice a week. Sit on the bank for a few hours, and let that tumultuous river of modern life go by you, while you think of the land where there is no tumult, only a divine repose, or an agony of regret. When did you make your last confession, Claude?"

"I have a bad memory, Father. Don't tax it too severely."

The priest was not to be satisfied by a flippant answer. He pressed the question with authority.

"What have I to confess? An empty, dissatisfied soul, a useless life; no positive wickedness, only negative worthlessness. I am not an infidel," Claude added eagerly. "If I were an unbeliever, I would not presume to claim your friendship. I should think it an insolence to cross your threshold. I have been slack, I have fallen into a languid acceptance of my own shortcomings."

"You have fallen in love with another man's wife," said the priest gravely. "That is the name of your sin."

The thin face paled ever so slightly, but there was no indignant protest; indeed, the head drooped a little, as if the sinner had whispered mea culpa.

"I have never made love to her," he said in a low voice. "But I am human, and can't help loving her."

"You can help going to her house. You can help hanging over her as she sits among her friends. When it comes to making love the Rubicon is passed, and the chances of retreat are as one in fifty. You are on the downward slope, Claude. Every time you enter that house you go there at the hazard of your soul."

"She has so few real friends. She is alone among a crowd. She and I were friends as children, or at least when she was a child. I should be a cur if I kept away from her, when she needs my friendship, just because of the risk to myself. I am too fond of her ever to hazard a situation that would mean danger for her. I know how much a woman in her position has to lose. She is not the kind of woman who could pass through the furnace of the divorce court, and hold up her head and be happy afterwards. She is a creature of spirit, not of flesh. Passion would never make amends to her for shame."

"Yet, knowing this, you make yourself her intimate companion!"

"I shall never betray myself. She will never know what you know. For her I am a feather-brained amateur of life; interested in many things, caring for nothing, a saunterer through the world, without much heart, and without any serious purpose. She often scolds me for my frivolity."

"I admit that she has a certain childlike innocence which might keep her unconscious of your feelings, till the fatal moment in which you will fling principle, prudence, honour to the winds and declare yourself her lover——"

"That moment will never come. The day I feel myself in danger I shall leave her for ever. In the meantime, if I am essential to her happiness, I shall stop."

"How can you be essential? She has crowds of friends, and a husband who adores her."

"A husband of fifty years of age, grave, silent, with his mind concentrated upon international finance; a man who is thinking of another Turkish loan while he sits opposite her, with his stony eyes fixed upon space—a man whose brain is a calculating machine and his heart a handful of ashes."

"Has she complained of him?"

"Never; but things have leaked out. She was not eighteen—little more than a child—when she married him. She gave herself to him in a romantic impulse, admiring his force of character, her heart touched by his affection for a dying daughter. To be so loved by that strong nature seemed to her enough for happiness. But that was six years ago, and she has lived six years in the world. The romance has gone out of her love. What can she have in common with such a man?"

"The bond of marriage—his love, and her sense of duty," answered the priest.

"She has a keen sense of a wife's duty: she preaches sermons upon her husband's goodness of heart, his fine character; and she ends with a sigh, and regrets that for some mysterious reason she has not been able to make him happy."

"She is too rich and too much indulged, and she is without a saving creed. Poor child, I would give much to save her from herself and from you."

"Don't be afraid of me, Father. Men of my stamp may be trusted. We are too feather-brained to be intense, even in sin. Good night. I hear the jingle of glass and silver, and I think it must be near your dinner-time. Good night!"

The priest gave him his hand, but not his blessing. That was withheld for a better moment.