When Mrs. Waring got the sketches of her children—for Strange had used almost physical force to compel Dacre to run over to Paris to sit to Brydon—the very first minute she found herself alone with them she cried her heart out over the two, then she sat herself down and systematically adored them.

She had them hung in the library where she could see them from her writing-table and only for their weight she would have had them carried to her room every night.

Mr. Waring, in his emotionless way, valued his daughter’s gift, but this chronic passion of adoration was beyond him. He had already borne much with divine patience; he had seen his wife carried away from his side for hours at a stretch, to waste her mind and soul in the duties of an ordinary squire’s wife, and she had come back to babble of babies in a way that made his blood run cold. He had caught her thoughts wandering at moments when the crisis of a discovery was setting in, and with tears in her eyes that the subject under discussion could in no wise account for. Ah, he had suffered in a thousand indefinable ways!

But yet there were moments when he had her still, just as in the sweet old times, body and soul and brain, all to himself; when she still put out all the force of her keen fine intellect and saw, with her beautiful intuition, puzzles that had made his great man’s brain reel.

Through all time had ever any man such a wife, he would think, as he watched her softly frowning, pondering over a thought and bringing out the result with that charming diffidence, that wonderful veneration for the nice intricacies of truth that characterized her, looking withal so young, so soft, so serene.

No wonder that the man’s heart clave unto her!

And now those pictures! That sublimely haughty young woman—that big strong soldier with pluck of a most soulless British order stamped all over him, came in and robbed him of the better part of himself.

They still sat side by side, hand in hand, and worked together, but they were no longer one. No wonder indeed, that untimely age fell upon the man and forced him with its chill hand down on his stick, a little heavier as each day passed!

Mrs. Waring did not go out every day, her restless yearning often took her no farther than the children’s old nursery, where she would sit by their little chests of drawers and finger their old yellowing baby clothes with a shy sad wistful wonderment; she had never put a stitch into one of them, and their shapes and intricacies were sealed mysteries to her.

Mary, now grown aged and gray, looked upon the state of affairs with much dissatisfaction, and seemed likely to continue to do so, for things instead of getting better got worse. Mr. and Mrs. Fellowes did all they could to turn her gentle persistent grief into a more healthy channel and were by no means careful to spare her any plain speaking, but it seemed impossible to get her to fit her new sweet sad experience into her old life and to make a whole of it.

It is a frightful grind to get a great heartful of fresh emotions, of new sorrows and joys, into a middle-aged woman, and not to cause a general disruption. It seemed rather hard, however, that Mr. Waring should half perish in his wife’s own particular earthquake. But though his grief lay down with him at night and rose with him day by day, he cherished her with ever-increasing tenderness, and never by word or look expressed the smallest atom of reproach.

Towards the end of July a little fleecy cloud of hope, no bigger than a man’s hand, appeared upon the horizon, and Mr. Waring grasped it with nervous despair.

After repeated puttings off, Gwen was coming for certain in a week or two, to remain until the shooting took them North.

“Perhaps now,” the poor man thought, “perhaps now she will find what she wants, and can rest and be satisfied, and our life will return to us. This maternal feeling must certainly be a very powerful and a very precious factor in a woman’s making, or such an one as my wife would not be so touched and shaken by its advent and growth in her. It is a mystery, in truth, thus to come so late, born out of due season as it were, and so strongly to take possession of her. I certainly never should have classed her among the true mothers, the producing women; they should be of a more robust, a more animal type altogether. It is a most remarkable case, with curious complications. It is the daughter—the feminine part of her—my wife yearns and pants for, the masculine element seems to affect her but little; when our son Dacre visits us I have in vain looked for any symptoms of satisfaction or restfulness.

“I feel so unusually depressed and aged, this afternoon,” he went on, slowly, laying down his fruitless pen, and gazing with sad eyes out of the window, “even my ordinary lucidity of brain seems clouding and thickening. It cannot be that I have already reached the ultimatum, and that the period of decadence is now upon me—that cannot surely be! Only just forty-seven,” he cried softly, and his face sank down in his hands on the study table.

He raised it again, and went over to his cabinet and touched his heaps of manuscript one by one with loving lingering tenderness, but a little shakily.

“This but just begun!” he murmured; “this but just wanting the verification of an experiment or two; these, notes for a new work, the most comprehensive, the most exact we have yet made—ah! this book would have been very close up to the truth, nearer to it than anything yet produced.—She looked with such keen, such very youthful pleasure to the lighter task of compilation; that youthfulness in her intellectual pleasures is a very precious gift of my wife.

“Here is a little satirical skit she wrote in a playful moment, how charming it is, how delicate! Ah, my sweet young wife! More notes—more—and so few worked out to their final conclusion! Must I then take these symptoms as those of untimely decay,” he whispered sitting down again, “I, who looked to long years of honest labour in which I might have forged on farther than my fellows, and have erected some fresh finger-posts on the road to everlasting truth? To stop now, when the world is crying and wailing in the darkness of its ignorance, when men grasp any scrap of verified knowledge as a drowning man a straw, and must I be swept down the hill before I have breasted the crest? Must I sink to oblivion with my work but just begun, and with the heat of battle strong upon me—and she—my wife, my own, my helpmeet——Do none of these things strike and touch her, does this overmastering strange tumult of new emotions shut her heart to the awful beauty of truth?

“It is strange,” he repeated, “strange, and very sad. The swift-running smooth course of life has been paralyzed for me, I am oppressed with torturing doubts, and—and—I believe it is not age, it is not the years which have stunned my powers, I believe it is this new phase of her life; then comes the consideration: is this a passing phase, or is it permanent? I cannot face the question!” he cried with a groan, holding his head in both hands to steady it.

Then he took his hat and stick, and made mechanically for the Rectory.

She always came from that direction, and always sadder than when she went forth.

But to-day she was different. When she saw her husband she did not keep to her ordinary soft listless movements, and then when she reached him, slip her hand into his mechanically from mere reflex action, and strike out eagerly into an infant anecdote.

She started and flushed, and ran towards him with outstretched hands, and looked wistfully up in his face, and her mouth trembled as, for the first time, the great change in the man flashed itself into her, and her heart stood still and her brain reeled.

“Henry!” she cried, “My Henry, you are tired!”

He stooped wonderingly closer to her. “Dearest, no!”

She gazed with sickening dread up into his face.

“Ah, yes, you are tired and sad. Mr. Fellowes has been telling me so much, making things clear, and—and—yes, you are older, and I never saw it until this instant.”

“My love, I am well!” he said, caressing her softly.

“It is I who have done this, Henry”—she silenced his protest with a soft imperious motion—“they saw it weeks ago; I am a bad wife now, as I have been a bad mother—ah, that is very sad!”

She laid her head down on their clasped hands and with a little shudder broke into soft sobbing.

“You are a most true, most noble wife,” he whispered, “my helpmeet in all things!”

“I have gone away and neglected you, and you have grown older.”

“Come home, my best beloved, come home and rest.”

“If I only could,” she said wistfully, “but dear, I am restless, I cannot stay still.

“After Gwen went away,” she continued softly, with bent head, as they paced slowly up the drive, “my heart seemed to fill with restless growth, new thoughts and feelings were for ever astir in me, I could not rest; old feelings that should have had their budding and birth long ago only then awoke, and beset me with sweet pain.”

She stopped and leaned up against him. “I have never been able to tell you all this before, except indirectly. Ah, Henry, such strange new thoughts torture and soothe me, they war with one another continually and there is not one drop of sweetness that has not two drops of bitterness to temper it withal.

“Let’s walk on, dearest, you are cold.—I have such strange yearnings, Henry, for baby touches and baby kisses, I, who have never felt them for my own, have to seek them among babies not of my flesh and blood. I have to find the pale ghosts of them amongst my lost children’s little clothes.”

“My love, not lost.”

“Yes, Henry, lost, more than if the grave had closed over them; those forfeited things do not return. I have a mother’s heart now when I no longer need it,” she said, with a wan smile, “and I know—ah, I know so many things, such pitiful things. The other day a tiny baby grasped at my breast and tried to nestle his head there—to suck my breast, Henry—it was worse than death, for I knew I had lost the best sweetness of life.”

“My love, my love, those things are not lost,” cried her husband, and then with sudden and surprising astuteness, he added, “there will be Gwen’s children.”

She clutched his hand in a sudden tremor of excitement.

“Ah, and then—then, too, Gwen might understand—now—” she coughed softly and broke off.

“But, Henry, I have you, we will go together as we used to do; perhaps work, regular work, may make me feel better.”

“My love,” he cried eagerly, “I am certain it is just the thing you want, the very thing.”

“Perhaps,” she said sadly, “perhaps it is.”