The meeting in Mr. Symeon's library lasted all through the summer afternoon, till the edge of evening. The large and gloomy room was darkened by Venetian shutters, nearly closed over open windows. There was air, and the ceaseless sound of traffic; but the summer sun was excluded, and figures were seen dimly, as if they belonged to the shadow world.

Among those indistinct forms Vera recognised people she knew, people she would never have expected to find in a society of mystics: a statesman, a poet, three popular novelists, and half a dozen of the idlest women of her acquaintance, two of whom were the heroines of romantic stories, women over whose future friends watched and prophesied with the keen interest that centres in a domestic situation where catastrophe seems imminent.

Vera wondered, seeing these two. Had they come, like her, for a refuge from the tragedy of life? They had not come for an escape from sin; for, if their friends were to be believed, the border line had been passed long ago.

An hour of silence, broken now and then by deep breathing, as of agitation, and sometimes by a stifled sob, and then a flood of words, speech that was eloquent enough to seem inspired, speech that might have come from him who wrote "Christmas Eve," and "Easter Day," and "A Death in the Desert," the speech of a believer in all that is most divine in the promise of a future life. And after that burst of impassioned utterance there were other speakers, men and women, the men strong in faith, strong in the gift of tongues, possessed by the higher mind that spoke through organs of common clay; the women semi-hysterical, romantic, eloquent with remembered poetry. But in men and women alike there was sincerity, an intense belief in that close contact of disembodied mind, sincerity that carried conviction to an imaginative neophyte like Vera Provana.

Suddenly from the stillness there came a voice more thrilling than any Vera had heard in that long sÉance, a voice that was not altogether unfamiliar, but with a note more intense, more poignant than she knew. Gleaming through the shadows, she saw eyes that flashed green light, and a long, thin face of marble pallor, in which she knew the face of Lady Fanny Ransom.

And now came the most startling speech that had been heard that afternoon—the passionate advocacy of Free Love—love released from the dominion of law, the bonds of custom, the fear of the world; love as in Shelley's wildest dreams, but more transcendental than in the dreams of poets; the love of spirit for spirit, soul for soul, "pure to pure"—as Milton imagined the love of angels. All the grossness of earth was eliminated from that rarefied atmosphere in which Francis Symeon's disciples had their being. Their first and indispensable qualification was to have liberated thought and feeling from the dominion of the senses. While still wearing the husk of the flesh, they were to be spirits; and not till they had become spirits were they capable of communion with those radiant beings whose earthly vesture had been annihilated by death.

To Vera there was an awful beauty in those echoes of great minds; and her faith was strong in the belief that among this little company of aspiring mortals there hovered the spirits of the illustrious dead. She left Mr. Symeon's room with those others, who dispersed in absolute silence, as good people leave a church, with no recognition of each other, stealing away as from a service of unusual solemnity. They did not even look at each other, nor did they take leave of Mr. Symeon, who stood by one of the shuttered windows, gravely watching as his guests departed.

It was past seven, and the sun was low, as Vera went to her carriage, which was waiting for her in Burlington Gardens. She was stepping into it, when a too familiar voice startled her. She had been too deep in thought to see Claude Rutherford waiting for her at the gate of the "Albany."

"Send your carriage home, Vera, and walk through the Green Park with me. You must want fresh air after the gloom of Symeon's Egyptian temple."

"No, no. I am going straight home."

"Indeed you are not," and without further argument he took upon himself to give the order to the footman.

"Your mistress will walk home."

She would have resisted; but it was not easy to dispute with a man who had a way of taking things for granted, especially those things he wanted. It would have been easier to contend against energy, or even brute force, than against that nonchalant self-assurance of an amiable idler, who sauntered through life, getting his own way by a passive resistance of all opposing circumstances.

"I have been waiting nearly two hours," he said. "It would be hard if you couldn't give me half an hour before your dinner. I know you never dine before half-past eight."

"But I have to be punctual. Aunt Mildred is coming to dinner, and Susie Amphlett."

"It has only just struck seven. You shall be home before eight, and I suppose you can dress in half an hour."

"I won't risk not being in the drawing-room when Aunt Mildred comes."

"Lady Okehampton is a terror, I admit. You shall be home in good time, child. But I must have something for my two hours."

"How absurd of you to wait," she said lightly. "And how did you know I was at Mr. Symeon's?"

They were going through the "Albany" to Piccadilly. She had recovered from the shock of his appearance, and was able to speak with the old trivial air, the tone of comradeship, an easy friendliness, without the possibility of deeper feeling. It had seemed so natural before the consciousness of sin; and it had been so sweet. This evening, as she walked by his side, she began to think that they might still be comrades and friends, without the shadow of fear; that her agony of awakened conscience had been foolish and hysterical, imaginary sin, like the self-accusation of some demented nun.

"How did I know? Well, after calling at your house repeatedly, only to be told you were not at home, I lost my temper, and determined to find out where you were—at least for this one afternoon, when I knew of no high jinks in the houses of your friends; and so, having asked an impertinent question or two of your butler, I found that Symeon had been with you yesterday, and guessed that you might be at his occult assembly this afternoon. I had heard a whisper of such an assembly more than a week ago—so you see the process of discovery was not difficult."

"But why take so much trouble?"

"Why? Because you have treated me very badly, and I don't mean to put up with that kind of treatment. If it comes to why, I have my own 'why' to ask—a why that I must have answered. What ignorant sin have I committed that it should be 'Darwaza band' when I call in Portland Place? What has become of our cousinship; our memory of childish pleasures, the sea, the woods, the heather; the pony that ran away with you, while I stood with my blood frozen, telling myself, 'If he kills her I shall throw myself over the cliff'? What has become of our past, Vera? Is blood to be no thicker than water? Is the bond of our childish affection to go for nothing? Is it because I am a failure that you have cut me?"

"I have not cut you, Claude. How can you say such a thing?"

"Have you not? Then I know nothing of the cutting process. To be always out when I call—to take infinite trouble to avoid me when we meet in other people's houses! The cut direct was never more stony-hearted and remorseless."

"You must not fancy things," she said lightly.

They were in the Green Park by this time, the quiet Green Park, whence nursemaids and children had vanished, and where even loafers were few at this hour between afternoon and evening.

She spoke lightly, and there was a lightness at her heart that was new. It was sweet to be with him—sweet to be walking at his side on the old familiar terms, friends, companions, comrades, as of old. His careless speech, his supreme ease of manner, seemed to have broken a spell. She looked back and thought of her troubled conscience, and all the scheming and distress of the last two months, and she felt as if she had awakened from a fever dream, from a dreary interval of delirium and hysteria. What danger could there be in such a friendship? What had tragedy to do with Claude Rutherford? This airy trifler, this saunterer through life, was not of the stuff of which lovers are made. He was a man whom all women liked; but he was not the man whom a woman calls her Fate, and who cannot be her friend without being her destroyer. How could she ever have feared him? He was of her own blood. His respect for her race—the race to which he belonged—would hold him in check, even if there were no other restraining influences. The burden of fear was lifted; and her spirits rose to a girlish lightness, as she walked by her cousin's side with swift footsteps, listening to his playful reproaches, his facetious bewailing of his worthlessness. From this time forward she would treat him as a brother. She would never again think it possible that words of love, unholy words, could fall from his lips. No such word had ever been spoken; and was it not shameful in her to have feared him—to imagine him a lover while he had always shown himself her loyal kinsman? In this new and happy hour she forgot that it was her own heart that had sounded the alarm—that it was because she loved him, not because he loved her, that she had resolved upon ruling him out of her life.

Perhaps this evening, after the glamour of Mr. Symeon's assembly, she was "fey." This sudden rush of gladness, this ecstasy of reunion with the friend from whom she had compassed heaven and earth to hold herself aloof, seemed more than the gladness of common day. She trod on air; and when they pulled up suddenly at Hyde Park Comer, it was a surprise to find that they had not been walking towards Portland Place.

"We must make for Stanhope Gate and cross Grosvenor Square and Bond Street," Claude said gaily. "We have come a long way round, but a walk is a walk, and I have no doubt we both wanted one. Perhaps you would prefer a cab."

"No, I like walking, if there is time."

"Plenty of time. You walk like Atalanta, if that young person ever condescended to anything but a run."

"Do you remember our walks in the woods, and the afternoon we lost our way and could not get home for the nursery tea?"

"You mean when I lost my way, and you had to tramp the shoes off your dear little feet. Brave little minx, I shall never forget how plucky you were, and how you kept back the tears when your lips quivered with pain."

Once launched upon reminiscences of that golden summer there was no gap in their talk till the lions' heads were frowning at them on the threshold of Vera's home.

She was flushed with her walk, and the colour in cheeks that were generally pale gave a new brightness to her eyes. That long talk of her childish days had taken her out of her present life. She was a child again, happy in the present moment, without the wisdom that looks before and after.

"Good-bye," said Claude; and then, pausing, with his hand on the moody lion, "if you had some vague idea of asking me to dinner, it would be a kindness to give shape to the notion, for I shan't get a dinner anywhere else. My mother is in the country, and a solitary meal at a restaurant is worse than a funeral."

Vera hesitated, with a faint blush, not being able utterly to forget her determination to keep Claude Rutherford out of her daily life.

"Lady Okehampton expects to find me alone," she said.

"But you have Susie Amphlett?"

"Susie invited herself."

"As I am doing. Three women! What a funereal feast; as bad as Domitian's black banquet. Your aunt dotes upon me, and so does Susan. You will score by having secured me. You can say I threw over a long engagement for the sake of meeting them. I dare say there is some solemn dinner invitation stuck in my chimney glass. I often forget such things."

The doors were flung open, and the suave man in black and his liveried lieutenants awaited their mistress's entrance.

"A ce soir," said Claude, as he hailed a prowling hansom; and he was seated in it, smiling at her with lifted hat, before Vera had time to answer him.

"Mr. Rutherford will dine here this evening," she told the butler.