TO know one’s duty and to do it are often different things. Sir Harry’s duty, as he knew, was to regard his wild oats as sown, to marry Dorothy, and to go home quietly to Lancashire. In London, he competed on equal terms with men far richer than himself at a pace disastrously too hot for his means, but the competition had been, socially, a triumph for him and to go back now of all times, when temporarily he was under a cloud, was a duty against which his pride fought hard.

He hadn’t compromise in him and compromise, in this case was unthinkable. It was either Lancashire with Dorothy, or London without her. Dorothy in London was not to be thought of: no countrybred wife for him unless on the exceptional terms of her bringing him a great fortune, and what she was to bring was well enough in Lancashire but a bagatelle to be lost or won at hazard in a night in London. Decidedly, she would be a blunder in London: if a man of his standing in society put his head under the yoke, it had to be for a price much greater than Dorothy could pay. He would lose caste by such a marriage.

There remained the sensible alternative, the plan to be good and dutiful, to abandon London, ambition, youth, and to become a dull and rustic husband. Long ago, his father and Luke Vcrners had come to an understanding on the matter, eminently satisfying to themselves, and he had let things remain, vaguely, at that. Certainly he broke no promise of his own making if he avoided Dorothy for ever: and here he was going under escort (and it seemed to him a subtly possessive escort) of Luke Verners to call on Dorothy, to, it was implied, clarify the situation and, he supposed, to declare himself. Well, that was too cool and however things happened they were not going to happen quite like that. He didn’t mind going to survey Dorothy: indeed, Almack’s being closed to him just now by his own action, he must have some occupation; but this Dorothy—positively he remembered her obscurely through a haze of other women—this Dorothy must needs be extraordinary if she were to reconcile him to a duty he resented. It might be necessary to teach these good people their place. Luke seemed to Sir Harry uninstructed in the London perspective and in the importance of being Whitworth.

It was unfortunate that Mrs. Verners clucked over him like a hen who has found a long-lost chicken. Her inquiries after his health seemed to him even more assured in their possessiveness than Luke’s attitude of a keeper. Mrs. Verners was the assertion of motherhood, and on every score but that of hard duty, he was prepared to depreciate Dorothy, when she came in, to the limits of justice and perhaps beyond them. Dorothy might be a miracle, but Mrs. Verners as a mother was a handicap that would discount anything.

Then Dorothy came in, carrying in her arm a kitten with an injured paw. From her room she had heard it crying in Albemarle Street, had run out and for the last ten minutes had been doctoring it somewhere at the back of the house. Mrs. Verners was alarmed: Dorothy was still flushed with running, or, perhaps, with tenderness; her hair was riotous; she was thinking of the kitten, she had the barest curtsy for Sir Harry, she was far from being the great lady her mother would have had her in this moment of meeting with him. And he incontinently forgot that he was there on a sort of compulsion, he nearly forgot that it was his duty to like her. Emotionally, he surrendered at sight to a beautiful unkempt girl who caressed a kitten and, somehow, brought cleanliness into the room. “Good God!” said Sir Harry, his manners blown to pieces along with his hesitations by one blast of honesty.

If they could have been married there and then, it was not Whitworth who would have been backward. All that was best in him was devotedly and immediately hers, and that best was not a bad best either: if he could forget London and his craving to be a figure in the town, a courtier and a modish rake, he had the making of a faithful husband to such a woman, satisfied with her, with country sports and the management of his estate, a good father, and a hearty, genial, eupeptic, hard drinking but hard exercising representative of the permanent best in English life—the outdoor gentleman.

If he could forget—and just now he utterly forgot, with one swift backward glance at London women. What were they to her? Dressmakers’ dummies, perruquiers’ blocks, automata directed by a dancing-master, cosmetical exteriors to vanity, greed, vice, if they were not, like some he hated most, conceited bluestockings parading an erudition that it didn’t become a woman to possess. Whereas, Dorothy! He felt from her a whiff of moorland air, and a horse between his legs and the clean rush past him of invigorating wind and all the zest of a great run behind the hounds with the tang of burning peat in his nostrils and the scent of heather coming down from, the hills. It wasn’t quite—it wasn’t yet, by years—the case of the rouÉ worn by experience who seeks a last piquant emotion in religion or (what seems to him almost its equivalent) in a fresh young girl, but his situation had those elements, with the added glamor of discovering that his duty was not merely tolerable but delicious.

“Good God,” he said again, quite irrepressibly in the spate of his emotion, then realizing that he was guilty of breach of decorum, lapsed to apologetic amenities from which they were to gather that his ejaculations referred to the kitten.

His polite murmur roused Dorothy to self-consciousness. “What a hoyden Sir Harry must be thinking me,” she said confusedly.

“They are wrong,” said Sir Harry, “who call red roses the flower of Lancashire. That flower is the wild heather. That flower is you.”

“Yes,” said Dorothy with whimsical resignation, “the commonest flower that blooms.”

“But a rarity in London,” he said, “and, bloom like yours, rare anywhere. In London, Madam, we have a glass-house admiration for glass-house flowers that wilt to ruin at a breath of open air. I have been guilty of the bad taste to share that admiration. I have been unpardonably forgetful of the flower of Lancashire.” And he bowed to Dorothy in as handsome apology as a laggard lover could make. “We heard a word at the club, Mr. Verner, which, as you observed, had the faculty of annoying me. It annoyed me because in a club one thinks club-wise and club-wisdom is opaque. I should not be annoyed now.”

“Are we to know what the word was?” asked Mrs. Verners not too discreetly.

Sir Harry raised his eyebrows slightly. Decidedly, he thought again, a clucking hen, but his management of her could wait: this was his hour of magnanimity. “At the club, Madam,” he said, “we were allowed to hear a Mr. Seccombe recommending me to visit my estates.” Sir Harry looked at Dorothy. “And it is in my mind that Seceombe counseled well.”

Considering the man and remembering the wager with Godalming, that was an admission even more handsome than his apology. It fell short, but only short, of actual declaration and perhaps that might have come had not Mrs. Verners attempted to force a pace which was astonishingly fast. She saw her expedition turning in its first engagement to triumphant victory, but she wanted the spoils of victory, she wanted a spade to be called unmistakably a spade, she wanted his declaration in round terms before he left that room.

“We are to see you back in Lancashire?” she said insinuatingly.

Sir Harry shuddered at her crude persistence, but, gallantly, “I have good reason to believe so,” he replied, scanning the reason with an admiration qualified now by wonder if she would become like her mother.

“And you will come to stay?”

“That I cannot say,” he was goaded to reply. Damn the woman! She was arousing his worst, she was reawakening his rebellion to the thought that he had had his fling, she was tempting him to continue it in the hope that when his fling was ended, Mrs. Verners would have, mercifully, also ended. He took his leave with some abruptness, treading a lower air than that of his expectancy.

But Dorothy held her place with him. For wife of his, this was the one woman and Mrs. Verners, in retrospect, diminished to the disarmed impotence to hurt of a spikeless burr.

He weighed alternatives—Dorothy, heather, the moors, domesticity, estates, his place in the county against the stews of St. James, the excitement of gambling on a horse, a prizefighter or the dice, the hot perfumes of balls, Ranelagh, the clubs, women. He even threw in Prinny and his place at Court, and against all these Dorothy, and what she stood for, held the balance down. He formed a resolution which he thought immutable.

He assumed, and Mrs. Verners had fed that assumption, that there were to be no difficulties about Dorothy and, fundamentally, she meant to make none. She had looked away from Hepplestall when she met him on a road, and many times since then she had looked back in mind to Hepplestall, but Sir Harry was her fate and she did not quarrel with it. He had, though, been bearishly slow in accepting her as his fate and she saw no reason in that to smooth his passage to the end now that, clearly, he was in the mood to woo. His careless absence had been one long punishment for her: let her now see how he would take the short punishment of being impaled for a week or two on tenterhooks about her.

He came again, heralded by gifts, with hot ardor to his wooing. He brought passion and buttressed that with his self-knowledgeable desire to force the issue, to make a contract from which there could be no retreat: and thereby muddied pure element with lower motive. He complimented her upon a new gown.

“It pleases you?” she asked.

“Much less than the wearer.”

“You are a judge of ladies’ raiment, are you not, Sir Harry?”

“No more than becomes a man of taste.”

“One hears,” she said, “of Lady Betty Standish who was at choosing patterns with her dressmaker, and of a gentleman shown into the room that chose her patterns for her, and of the bills that Lady Betty sent to the gentleman, and of how he paid them.”

“You have heard of that?” he said. “Well, there are women in town capable of such bad taste as that.”

“The bad taste of allowing you to choose her gowns? But were you not competent to choose?”

“The bad taste,” he said, “of sending the bills to me. Would you have had me decline to pay them?”

“Again,” she said, passing no judgment, “there is a story of a merchant that lived in Hampstead and drove one night with a plump daughter in a coach to eat a dinner in the City. The coach was stopped on the Heath by a highwayman who wanted nothing of the merchant, but was most gallant to his daughter.”

“I kissed the girl,” said Sir Harry. “It was done for a wager and I won it. A folly, and a harmless one,” but he wondered, if she had heard of these, if there were less innocent escapades that she had heard of. There was no lack of them, nor, it appeared, of babblers eager to gossip, to his disservice, about a man on whom the Regent frowned.

“One hears again,” she said, “that at Drury Lane Theater,”—he blushed in good earnest: would she have the hardihood to mention a pretty actress who—? and then he breathed again as she went on—“there was once an orange wench—”

“That was a bet I lost,” he said. “I was to dress as a woman and stand with my basket like the rest, and I was not to be identified. I was identified and paid. But what are these but the freaks we all enjoy in London? Vain trifles, I admit it, in the telling. Not feats to boast of, not incidents that I take pleasure in hearing you refer to, but, I protest, innocent enough and relishable in the doing.”

“Perhaps,” she said. “And while you relished them in London, did you give thought to what I did at home?”

“You? To what you did? What did you do?” Sir Harry was flabbergasted at her question.

“I was at home, Sir Harry.” She spoke without bitterness, without emphasis, and when he looked sharply at her, she seemed to interpret the look as an invitation and rose. “My mother, I think, is ready to accompany us if you care to take me walking in the Park.”

Decidedly a check to a gentleman who proposed to make up for past delays by a whirlwind wooing. She was at home, while he ruffled it in London. And where else should she be? What did she imply? At any rate, she had embarrassed him by the unexpectedness of her attack. Of course she was at home, and of course he was a reveler in London. He was man, she woman, and he hoped she recognized the elementary distinction. Whatever her object, whether she had the incredible audacity to accuse him—him, open-handed Harry—of something only to be defined as meanness, or whether she was only being witty with him, she had certainly discouraged the declaration he came to make.

Mrs. Vemers found him a moody squire of dames in the Park, while his sudden puzzlement gave Dorothy a mischievously happy promenade. He brought them, after the shortest of walks, to their door.

“You have been very silent, Sir Harry,” Mrs. Verners told him, with her incurable habit of stating the obvious. “Are you not well to-day?”

“Perfectly, I thank you, Madam.”

“Oh, Lud, mother, it is but that you do not appreciate Sir Harry’s capacity for disguise. In the past, he has been—many things. To-day we are to admire him in the character of a thunderstorm.”

“Indeed?” he said. “Thunderstorms break.”

“But not on me,” said Dorothy, and ran into the house.

Sir Harry turned away with the scantest bow to Mrs. Verners. This was a new flavor and he wanted to taste it well, to make sure that he approved a Dorothy who could be a precipitate hoyden rushing out-of-doors to an injured kitten and a woman of wit that stabbed him shrewdly. She had variety, this Dorothy; she wasn’t the makings of a dull, complacent wife. Well, and did he want dullness and complacency? He was going to Lancashire, to a life that a Whitworth must live as an example to others: there was to be nothing to demand a wife’s complacency. And as to dullness, heaven save him from it—and heaven seemed, by making Dorothy Verners, to have answered that prayer. He decided to be more in love with Dorothy than before—which, as she wasn’t willing to fly into his arms when he crooked a beckoning finger, was only natural; and went into a shop from which he might express to her the warmth of his sentiment at an appropriate cost. She should see if he was mean!

In the shop he found my Lord Godalming who was turning over some bright trinkets intended for a lady who was not his wife. Godalming was surly, eyeing Whitworth as he called for the best in necklaces that the shopman had to show. “Oh, yes,” said his lordship, “bring out the best for Sir Harry Whitworth. Jewels for Sir Harry and paste for me. I am only a lord.”

“What’s put you out, Godalming?”

“Ain’t the sight of your radiant face enough to put me out? I hate happiness in others.”

“Then I can offer you the consolation of knowing that my happiness will not be visible to you long. I propose very shortly to go North, my lord, and to stay there.” Godalming flopped back against the counter like a fainting man who must support himself and, indeed, his astonishment was genuine enough. “Go North?” he gasped. “Are you gone stark mad?”

“I have flattered myself to the contrary,” said Sir Harry, with complacency. “I have believed that I have recovered my senses.”

“Rot me if I understand you,” said his lordship.

“Yet you find me in the article of choosing a necklace.”

“Damme, Whitworth, are there no women nearer than the North Pole? Is there no difference between gallantry and lunacy?”

“I am thinking of marriage, my lord.”

“Oh, Lud, yes, we’ve all to come to that. But we don’t come to it happily. We don’t think of it with our faces like the August sun. I’m the last man to believe your smirking face covers thoughts of marriage. I know too well what it does cover.”

“Indeed? And what?”

“What? Burn me if you are not the most exasperating man alive. Have you no recollections of a wager?”

“I am bound to make you an admission, Godalming. Occupied with other matters, I had for the moment forgot our wager. But you need have no fears. I pay my debts.”

“Pay? Where in the devil’s name have you been hiding yourself if you don’t know you’ve won the wager?”

“Won it?” cried Sir Harry.

“What else are you happy for?”

“I give you my word I did not know of this, Godalming.”

“The news has been about the town these last two hours. A courier has ridden in from Brighton summoning you to Prinny’s table to-morrow. He is tired of his shoe buckle and vows that you are right about it. They say he wrote you the recall with his own gouty hand. There’s condescension, damn you, and you let me be the one to tell you news of it, me that loses a thousand by it!”

“I have been some hours absent from my rooms,” apologized Sir Harry. “But this! This!” And if his face glowed before, it blazed now in the intoxication of a great victory. He wasn’t thinking of the wager he had won, and still less of the lady who was his to win: he was thinking of a fat, graceful, capricious Prince who used his male friends as he used his female, like dirt, who drove a coach with distinction and hadn’t another achievement, who had taken Harry Whitworth back into a favor that was a degradation; and Harry Whitworth thought of his restoration to that slippery foothold as a triumph and a glimpse of paradise! The Regent had forgiven him and nothing else mattered.

He savored it a while, then became conscious of a shopman with a tray of jewels, and of why he came into the shop. He had the grace to lower his voice from Godaiming’s hearing as he said, “You must have finer ones than these. I desire the necklace to be of the value of one thousand guineas.”

He chose, while Godalming bought his pretentious trifle, and gave Dorothy’s address. Then, “I believe that I am now entitled to the freedom of Almack’s Club, my lord,” he said. “Do you go in that direction?” And Godalming, who was not a good loser, was too sensitive to the social ascendency of the man whom the Regent forgave to decline his proffered company. The wind blowing South for Whitworth, it wasn’t desirable that word of Godalming’s wagering on its remaining North should be carried to royal ears: he had better, on all counts, make light of his loss and be seen companionably with this child of fortune.

Not to mention the simpler fact that Godalming was a thirsty soul and that such a reversal of fortune as had come to Harry was only to be celebrated with high junketing. Indirectly, in his person of loser of the wager, Godalming was the host and it wasn’t proper for a host to be absent from his own table.

Intrinsically, a wager of a thousand guineas was nothing to lift eyebrows at: Mr. Fox once played for twenty-two hours at a sitting and lost £500 an hour, and the celebration of a victory was what the victor cared to make it. Sir Harry had more than the winning of a bet to celebrate, he had a rehabilitation and proposed to himself the considerable feat of making Almack’s drunk. It was afternoon, but any time was drinking time, and only the darkness of mid-winter lasted long enough to cloak their heroic debauchery. Men were not rare who kept their wits and were steady on their legs after the sixth bottle, and why indeed cloak drunkenness at all, if at the seventh bottle a gentleman succumbed? There was no shame in falling in a good fight: the shame was to the shirker and the unfortunate born with a weak head, a puny three-bottle man.

This is to generalize, which, perhaps, is better than a particular description in this squeamish day of the occasion when Harry Whitworth made his re-appearance at Almack’s resolved to write his name large in the Bacchanalian annals of the Club. He was to dine in the Pavilion at Brighton with his Royal Highness next night, and, by the Lord, Almack’s was to remember that he had come into his own again.

Some crowded hours had passed when the memorialist at the table’s head unsteadily picked up a glass and saying mechanically, “A glass of wine with you, sir,” found himself isolating from a ruddy haze the flushed face of Mr. Verners.

“Verners!” he cried. “Verners! What’s the connection? Dorothy, by Gad! Going Brighton kiss Prinny’s hand to-morrow, Verners. Going your house kiss Dorothy’s hand to-night. Better the night, better the deed. Dorothy first, Prinny second. Gentlemen, Dorothy Verners!”

There wasn’t more sobriety in the whole company than would have sufficed to add two and two together, and nobody noticed, let alone protested, when the host reeled from the table, linked his arm in that of Mr. Verners and left the room. Mr. Verners’ mind was a blessed blank gently suffused with joy. Incapable of thought, he felt that he had on his arm a prisoner whose capture was to do him great honor. The servants put them tenderly in a coach for the short drive to Albemarle Street.

“I shall call you Father,” said Sir Harry, and the singular spectacle might have been observed, had the night been light and the coach open, of an elderly gentleman endeavoring to kiss the cheek of a younger, his efforts frustrated by the jolting of the coach, so that the pair of them pivoted to and fro on their bases like those absurd weighted toy eggs the pedlars sell, and came, swaying in ludicrous rhythm, to the Verners’ lodging.

During the afternoon the necklace had been delivered, and if Dorothy was no connoisseur of jewels she was sufficiently informed to know that here was a peace-offering of royal value. She had twitted Sir Harry with his follies, she had watched him draw the right conclusion from her recital of some of them—the conclusion that she resented his preference for such a life to coming, long ago, to where she and duty and she and love were waiting for him—she had mocked him at her door, and had mocked his sullen face when she compared him with a thunderstorm: and she wondered if she had not gone too far, been too severe. Mrs. Verners lectured her unsparingly on her waywardness, and Dorothy inclined to think that she deserved the lecture. Then the necklace came and if a gift like that was not as plain a declaration as anything unspoken could be, Dorothy was no judge, or her mother either. The lecture ended suddenly, turned to a gush of admiration of such magnificence. Harry had won forgiveness, Dorothy decided, and if he came next day in wooing vein it wasn’t she who would check his ardor a second time. One need not be called a materialist because a symbol that is costly convinced at once, when a cheap symbol would be ineffective.

She was ready for Sir Harry, but not for this Sir Harry. The giver of princely gifts should live up to his princedom, not in the sense of His Royal Highness, George, but in the romantic sense. She had been idealizing Harry since the precious token came and he came—like this, lurching, thick-voiced, beastly. True, a gentleman lost nothing of gentlemanliness by appearing flushed with wine before ladies; but there were degrees and his was a condition beyond the most indulgent pale. Old husbands—Mr. Verners is the example—might have no surprises for their wives, but to come a-wooing in his cups was outrage.

Mrs. Verners made an effort. “Dorothy,” she whispered, “remember the necklace. Don’t be too nice.” Dorothy remembered nothing but that this beast that had been a man was reeling towards her, making endearing noises, with the plain intention of kissing her. Her whole being seemed to concentrate itself to defeat his intention: she hit him, and hit hard, upon the face and Sir Harry sat stupidly on the floor. Then, defying her mother with her eye, she remembered the necklace.

His man, undressing him that night, found an exceptional necklace round his neck beneath his ruffles. He thought of Sir Harry and his condition, of the obliterating effect of much alcohol, of theft and of the hanging that befell a convicted thief and, after balancing these thoughts, he stole the necklace. There were no inquiries made.