“How soon can he come?” said Gwen, when Mrs. Fellowes returned after sending the message. “I have been counting up, it must be three weeks even if he is at the coast; if he is inland, it may be longer. Now the missionary is safe, he must be just hunting, he will be sure to get my message without much delay.”

She spoke rapidly and walked about the room with her boy in her arms.

“She hasn’t a doubt as to his reply to her message,” thought Mrs. Fellowes; “how absolutely she trusts him!”

“Will he wonder when he sees I am here—will he guess why I came?” she went on in her glad excitement. “Darling, sweet, beauty! What will he think of you?”

“Gwen, sit down, or let me take him, you are not perfectly strong yet.”

“I am,” she cried, with a happy laugh, “I am a giant refreshed with wine, a whole volume of new life has flowed into me, I could move the world at this moment, not to say carry this mite. I am a woman at last, a full, complete, proper woman, and it is magnificent. No other living woman can feel as I do; other women absorb these feelings as they do their daily bread and butter, and they have to them the same placid everyday taste, they slip into their womanhood; mine has rushed into me with a great torrent—I love my husband, I worship him, I adore him—do you hear, my dear?”

She stopped in her march, and turned on Mrs. Fellowes a radiant triumphant face.

“Ah, if I hadn’t you to tell all this to, I would go out into the fields and shout it aloud. And what are you crying for, I am not mad? I am, I suppose, what Humphrey would call natural, but somehow it makes me feel too big for the room. Hold the child while I open the windows.”

Mrs. Fellowes, as soon as she got hold of him, carried him off to the nursery, and simply insisted on Gwen’s lying down and holding her tongue.

“Do you want to bring a fever on yourself,” she demanded sternly, “and be a scarecrow when Humphrey comes? You are shockingly young, my Gwen!”

She was sane after that, and tried to behave as if nothing had happened to her, but the change in her was quite visible to the naked eye. Next day she buckled to her steward’s work with a whole-hearted dominance, that ensured success, and Mrs. Fellowes went home to her husband big with happy news.

When five weeks had passed, and she had neither message or sight of Humphrey, Gwen’s magnificent abandonment of joy had a break, and a trembling came into it, and into her eyes a wave of fear, and every time she came in from her work in the village or on the home farm, she betook herself to the baby to steady her nerves.

And then the press began to set flying little gnat-like biting doubts as to Strange’s unaccountable silence, after it was ascertained through a long-delayed scrap of a note to Mrs. Fellowes that he had joined an ivory expedition into an unsettled district. Then to add to her anxieties, the missionary, grateful for his intended capture, ran down to Strange Hall, and being rather an ass, and having been left with only the tail end of a constitution—a solemn and gloomy one—he gave her a most lurid and awful impression of those parts into which Humphrey had penetrated.

She put a brave front on, but she had a shocking time of it, and her usual song to her baby in exactly Humphrey’s tones was,

which the baby looked upon as a huge joke.

Week after week passed and not a word, and then whisperings of relief expeditions began to stir the papers, and Mrs. Fellowes was hurrying up wildly with her work to be able to get to Gwen.

At last she came over from the station in a fly, a day or two before she was expected, and found Gwen in Strange’s den, which showed tokens of her all over the place, playing with her child, now a big fellow who beat the record in the matter of crawling.

When the nurse took him at last, Gwen said to Mrs. Fellowes rather grimly,

“The county considers I should wear a widow’s cap, and sport crÊpe, and my horrible state of plumpness makes me to stink in their nostrils. Just look at my arms! I wish I could oblige them,” she went on wearily, “and bear my woe according to their rules of decency. Lady Mary rolled down on me and stayed a week, and never got out what she came to say until I was putting her into the railway carriage on her way back to London, then she produced her rebuke on the top of a sigh, and began a prayer, but the train started before she got well into it.

“‘My dear,’ she said, ‘I think that under the circumstances a plain black gown and a bonnet—hats to my mind are at present unseemly—and then, my dear Gwen, if by any means you could manage, ahem, not to add to your plumpness—people in our position must set an example—I assure you, for myself, I lost eight pounds and a half the first six months of my widowhood.’

“Then she began her rather irrelevant prayer.”

“Gwen, sit down, and I’ll make tea, and tell you about your father.”

Gwen leant back in her chair and put her hands to her hot head.

“I forget everything but myself and this fattening misery of mine. He is failing very much, is he not? His letters somehow have a fragile sound. They have a horrible habit of making me howl, I have got so maudlin I howl now quite easily; he has been at ‘Chavasse’ again, and to rather an awful extent.”

“Yes, he is failing day by day, and unfolding himself at the same time. I never quite realized before how beautiful and single-hearted his character is; he comes now to see me, or rather to sit and meditate in my presence, after he has been to your mother’s grave, and when he has sat and rested, he speaks of you. You can gather the way, I fancy, from his letters—oh, the quaintness, the pathetic grotesqueness of his remarks!”

“I have often wanted to ask you if Mr. Fellowes ever brings his professional capacity to bear on my father?” asked Gwen.

“Never. ‘Only God is fit to undertake the care of such a soul as his,’ John says, ‘neither he nor his soul are subject to ordinary laws, each lives out the life given it to live.’ Good gracious! fancy John or any other parson attempting to shove theology into such a nature, or to dig down after his beliefs! Gwen, darling, you may be in good condition, but how very tired you look!”

“Tired! Oh yes, I am, I cannot tell you how tired! At first I used to live in a whirl so as to tire myself, now there’s no need of it, I am just as tired when I get up as when I go to bed, and nothing will drive the days on, and the endlessness of life sickens one. I feel crÊpey enough to please anyone, goodness knows, but even if Humphrey never comes, I will neither wear crÊpe nor put on any of the trappings of decent widowhood, for I know he never got my message. If he is dead, he died knowing nothing, I am no honest widow of his, and I will wear hats to the end of the chapter, and possibly grow fat and outrival Lady Mary, who knows!

“You see, my life is a healthy one, I ride miles a day all over the farms, there isn’t a fact concerning manure I couldn’t tell you; as to drainage, I feel like turning into a pipe myself; I have even a medicine chest, and doctor the babies, Heaven help them! If I could only follow him as he would me, it would be less awful, but you see, there’s baby, my place is here, and I must just stand and wait like those wretched creatures in the hymn. As for those relief expeditions, though I send cheques, I look upon them as a farce, as if he wanted to be caught and brought home like a missionary!”

“It seems to me you are on the go from morning to night, what time do you leave yourself for sleeping?”

“Oh, any amount, more than I want.”

“How long did you sleep last night?”

“Oh, I forget. Are you too tired to drive to a farm about a mile away?”

“Tired! No, dear,” stooping down and kissing her, “but must you go? Lie down, and let me read to you.”

Anything in the shape of tenderness was just the one stroke too much for Gwen, she gave a quick dry sob and moved away.

“I can’t stand that sort of thing,” she said, “I told you I had got maudlin. Treat me as you would a nice orthodox Christian widow, who wears crÊpe and caps and gets just to the proper state of thinness, pulling herself up, however, just short of scragginess like a self-respecting creature. And now we must hurry, for I hear the carriage.”

She turned round as she was leaving the room, and laughed.

“I am altogether losing tone. Do you know that young Will Dyer—Sir William’s black sheep, whom I have been occupying my spare moments in being a mother to, and in trying to detach from the devil—began yesterday to make violent love to me?”

“I don’t wonder!”

“Good gracious me, why?”

“Look at your face! You are a woman now, my good Gwen.”

“And is this the first result? God help us! Is my one pride in life to become a thorn in my flesh?”

“That’s as you take it! It will, unless you are careful, be a very considerable thorn in other people’s. Good gracious, child, why even virtue in women is very much a matter of temperament, and where the temperament is, there will the opportunities be gathered together.”