When George had seen old Tom Craik enter his carriage and drive away from the house, he breathed more freely. He could not think very connectedly of what had happened, but it seemed to him that the old man had played a part quite as contemptible as that which Totty herself had sustained so long. He would assuredly not have believed that the terrific anger of which he had witnessed the explosion was chiefly due to the discovery of what was intended to be a good action. Craik had never liked to be found out, and it was especially galling to him to be exposed in the act of endeavouring to make amends for the past. But for this consideration, he would have been quite capable of returning the will to its place in the cabinet, and of leaving the house quietly. He would have merely sent for a lawyer and repeated the document with a new date, to deposit it in some place to which his sister could not possibly gain access. But his anger had been aroused in the first moment by the certainty that Totty had understood his motives and must secretly despise him for making such a restitution of ill-gotten gain. George could not have comprehended this, and he feared that the old man should do some irreparable harm if he were left any longer with the object of his wrath. The look in Craik’s eyes had not been reassuring, and it was by no means sure that the whole affair had not finally unsettled his intellect.

There was little ground for any such fear, however, as George would have realised if he could have followed Mr. Craik to his home, and seen how soon he repented of having endangered his health by giving way to his wrath. An hour later he was in bed and his favourite doctor was at his side, watching every pulsation of his heart and prepared to do battle at the first attack of any malady which should present itself.

George himself was far less moved by what had occurred than he would have believed possible. His first and chief sensation was a sickening disgust with Totty and with all that recent portion of his life in which she had played so great a part. He had been deceived and played with on all sides and his vanity revolted at the thought of what might have been if Craik’s discovery had not broken through the veil of Totty’s duplicity. It made him sick to feel that while he had fancied himself courted and honoured and chosen as a son-in-law for his own sake and for the sake of what he had done in the face of such odds, he had really been looked upon as an object of speculation, as a thing worth buying at a cheap price for the sake of its future value. Beyond this, he felt nothing but a sense of relief at having been released from his engagement. He had done his best to act honestly, but he had often feared that he was deceiving himself and others in the effort to do what seemed honourable. He did not deny, even now, that what he had felt for Mamie might in good time have developed into a real love, but he saw clearly at last that while his senses had been charmed and his intelligence soothed, his heart had never been touched. Doubts about Mamie herself would present themselves, though he drove them resolutely away. It was natural that he should find it hard to realise in her that which he had never felt during their long intercourse, and while his instinct told him that the young girl had been innocent of all her mother’s plotting and scheming, he said to himself that she would easily recover from her disappointment. If he was troubled by any regret it was rather that he should not have left her mother’s house as soon as he had seen that she was interested, than that he should have failed to love her as he had tried to do. On the other hand he admitted that his conduct had been excusable, considering the pressure which Totty had brought to bear upon him.

The most unpleasant point in the future was the explanation which must inevitably take place between himself and Sherrington Trimm. It would be hard to imagine a meeting more disagreeable to both parties as this one was sure to be. There could be no question about Trimm’s innocence in the whole affair, for his character was too well known to the world to admit the least suspicion. But it would be a painful matter to meet him and talk over what had happened. If possible, the interview must be avoided, and George determined to attempt this solution by writing a letter setting forth his position with the utmost clearness. He turned up the steps of a club to which he belonged and sat down to the task.

What he said may be summed up in a few words. He took it for granted that Trimm would be acquainted with what had occurred, by the time the letter reached him. It only remained for him to repeat what he had said to Mamie herself, to wit, that if she would marry him, he was ready to fulfil his engagement. He concluded by saying that he would wait a month for the definite answer, after which time he intended to go abroad. He sealed the note and took it with him, intending to send it to Trimm’s house in the evening. As luck would have it, however, he met Trimm himself in the hall of the club. He had stopped on his way up town to refresh himself with a certain mild drink of his own devising.

“Hilloa, George!” he cried in his cheery voice. “What is the matter?” he asked anxiously as he saw the expression on the other’s face.

“Have you been at home yet?” George asked.

“No.”

“Something very disagreeable has happened. I have just written you a note. Will you take it with you and read it after you have heard what they have to say?”

“Confound it all!” exclaimed Sherry Trimm. “I am not fond of mystery. Come into a quiet room and tell me all about it.”

“I would rather that you found it out for yourself,” said George, drawing back.

Sherry Trimm looked keenly at him, and then took him by the arm.

“Look here, George,” he said, “no nonsense! I do not know what the trouble is, but I see it is serious. Let us have it out, right here.”

“Very well,” George answered. “Your wife has made trouble,” he said, as soon as they were closeted in one of the small rooms. “You drew up Mr. Craik’s will, and you kept his secret. When you had gone abroad, your wife got the will out of the deed-box in your office and took it home with her. She kept it in that Indian cabinet and Mr. Craik found it there this afternoon, and made a fearful scene. Unfortunately your wife could not find any answer to what he said, and thereupon Mamie declared that she would not marry me.”

Sherrington Trimm’s pink face had grown slowly livid while George was speaking.

“What did Tom say?” he asked quietly.

“He hinted that his sister had not been wholly disinterested in her kindness to me,” said George. “Unfortunately Mamie and I were present. I did the best I could, but the mischief was done.”

Sherrington said nothing more, but began to walk up and down the small room nervously, pulling at his short grizzled moustache from time to time. Like every one else who had been concerned in the affair, he grasped the whole situation in a moment.

“This is a miserable business,” he said at last in a tone that expressed profound humiliation and utter disgust.

George did not answer, for he was quite of the same opinion. He stood leaning against a card-table, drumming with his fingers on the green cloth behind him. Sherry Trimm paused in his walk, and struck his clenched fist upon the palm of his other hand. Then he shook his head and began to pace the floor again.

“An abominable business,” he muttered. “I cannot see that there is anything to be done, but to beg your pardon for it all,” he said, suddenly turning to George.

“You need not do that,” George answered readily. “It is not your fault, Cousin Sherry. All I want to say, is what I had already written to you. If Mamie will change her mind and marry me, I am ready.”

Trimm looked at him sharply.

“You are a good fellow, George,” he said. “But I don’t think I could stand that. You never loved her as you ought to love to be happy. I saw that long ago and I guessed that there had been something wrong. You have been tricked into the whole thing—and—just go away and leave me here, will you? I cannot stand this.”

George took the outstretched hand and shook it warmly. Then he left the room and closed the door behind him. In that moment he pitied Sherrington Trimm far more than he pitied Mamie herself. He could understand the man’s humiliation better than the girl’s broken heart. He went out of the club and turned homewards. He had yet to communicate the intelligence to his father, and he was oddly curious to see what the old gentleman would say. An hour later he had told the whole story with every detail he could remember, from the day when Totty had told him to go and see Mamie to his recent interview with Sherry Trimm.

“I am sorry for you, George,” said Jonah Wood. “I am very sorry for you.”

“I think, on the whole, that is more than I can say for myself,” George answered. “I am far more sorry for Mamie and her father. It is a relief to me. I would not have believed it, this morning.”

“Do you mean that you were not in love?”

“Yes. I am just as fond of her as ever. There is nothing I would not do for her. But I do not want to marry her and I never did, till that old cat made me think it was my duty.”

“I should think you would have known what your duty was, without waiting to be told. I would have told her mother that I did not love the girl, and I would have gone the next morning.”

“You are so sensible, father!” George exclaimed. “I looked at it differently. It seemed to me that if I had gone so far as to make Mamie believe that I loved her, I ought to be able to love her in earnest.”

“When you are older, you will know better,” observed the old gentleman severely. “You have too much imagination. As for Mr. Craik, he will not leave you his money now. I doubt if he meant to.”

George went and shut himself up in the little room which had witnessed so many of his struggles and disappointments. He sat down in his shabby old easy-chair and lit a short pipe and fell into a profound reverie. The unexpected had played a great part in his life, and as he reviewed the story of the past three years, he was surprised to find how very different his own existence had been from that of the average man. With the exception of his accident on the river and the scene he had witnessed to-day, nothing really startling had happened to him in that time, and yet his position at the present moment was as different from his position three years earlier as it possibly could be. In that time he had risen from total obscurity into the publicity of reputation, if not of celebrity. He was not fond of disturbing the mass of papers that encumbered his table, and there, deep down under the rest were still to be found rough drafts of his last poor little reviews. Hanging from one corner there was visible the corrected “revise” of one of his earliest accepted articles. At the other end, beneath a piece of old iron which he used as a paper-weight, lay the manuscript of his first novel, well thumbed and soiled, and marked at intervals in pencil with the names of the compositors who had set up the pages in type. There, upon the table, lay the accumulated refuse of three years of hard work, of the three years which had raised him into the public notice. Much of that work had been done under the influence of one woman, of one fair young girl who had bent over his shoulder as he read her page after page, and whose keen, fresh sight had often detected flaws and errors where he himself saw no imperfection. She had encouraged him, had pushed him, and urged him on, in spite of himself, until he had succeeded, beyond his wildest expectations. Then he had lost her, because he had thought that she was bound to marry him. He did not think so now, for he felt that in that case, too, he had been mistaken, as in the more recent one he had deceived himself. He had never been in love. He had never felt what he described in his own books. His blood had never raced through his veins for love, as it had often done for anger and sometimes for mere passing passion. Love had never taken him and mastered him and carried him away in its arms beyond all consideration for consequences. It was not because he was strong. He knew that whatever people might think of him, he had often been weak, and had longed to be made strong by a love he could not feel. He had been ready to yield himself to a belief in affections which had proved unreal and which had disappointed himself by their instability and by the ease with which he had recovered from them. Even in the solitude of his own room he was ashamed to own to his inner consciousness how little he had been moved by all that had happened to him in those three years.

He thought of Johnson, the pale-faced hardworking man, whose heart was full of unsatisfied ambition and who had distanced his competitors by sheer energy and enthusiasm. He envied the man his belief in himself and his certainty of slow but sure success. Slow, indeed, it must be. Johnson had toiled for many years at his writing to attain the position he occupied, to be considered a good judge and a ready writer by the few who knew him, to gain a small but solid reputation in a small circle. He had worked much harder than George himself, and yet to-day, George Wood was known and read where William Johnson had never been heard of. Of the two Johnson was by far the better satisfied with his success, though of the two he possessed by very much the more ambition, in the ordinary acceptation of the word.

Then George thought of Thomas Craik, and of his sneer at ambitious men. He had said that there was no pleasure in possession, but only in getting, getting, getting, as long as a man had breath; that the wish to excel other men in anything was a drawback and a disadvantage, and that nothing in the world was worth having for its own sake, from money to fame, through all the catalogue of what is attainable by humanity. And yet, Thomas Craik was an instance of a very successful man, who had some right to speak on the subject. Whether he had got his money by fair means or foul had nothing to do with the argument. He had it, and he could speak from experience about the pleasures of possession. There must be some truth in what he said. George himself had attained before the age of thirty what many men labour in vain to reach throughout a lifetime. The case was similar. Whether he had deserved the reputation he had so suddenly acquired or not, mattered little. Many critics said that he had no claim to it. Many others said that he deserved more than he got. Whichever side was right, he had it, as Tom Craik had his money. Did it give him any satisfaction? None whatever, beyond the material advantages it brought him, and which only pleased him because they made him independent of his father’s help. When he thought of what he had done, he found no savour of pride in the reflection, nothing which really flattered his vanity, nothing to send a thrill of happiness through him. He was cold, indifferent to all he had done. It would not have entered his mind to take up one of his own books and glance over the pages. On the contrary, he felt a strong repulsion for what he had written, the moment it was finished. He admitted that he was foolish in this, as in many other things, and that he would in all likelihood improve his work by going over it and polishing it, even by entirely rewriting a great part of it. He was not deterred from doing so by indolence, for his rarely energetic temperament loved hard work and sought it. It was rather a profound dissatisfaction with all he did which prevented him from expending any further time upon each performance when he had once reached the last page. Nothing satisfied him, neither what he did himself, nor what he saw done by others.

Thinking the matter over in his solitude the inevitable conclusion seemed to be that he was one of those discontented beings who can never be pleased with anything, nor lose themselves in an enthusiasm without picking to pieces the object that has made him enthusiastic. But this was not true either. There were plenty of great works in the world for which he had no criticism, and which never failed to excite his boundless admiration. He smiled to himself as he thought that what would really please him would be to be forced into the same attitude of respect before one of his own books, into which he naturally fell before the great masterpieces of literature. He would have been hard to satisfy, he thought, if that would not have satisfied him. Was that, then, the vision which he was really pursuing? It was folly to suppose that he would be so mad, and yet, at that time, he felt that he desired nothing else and nothing less than that, and since that was absolutely unattainable, he was condemned to perpetual discontent, to be borne with the best patience he could find. Beyond this, he could find no explanation of his feelings about his own work.

The only other source of happiness of which he could conceive was love, and this brought him back to his kindly and grateful memories of Constance Fearing, and to the more disturbing recollection of his cousin. The latter, also, had played a part and had occupied a share in his life. He had watched her more closely than he had ever watched any one, and had studied her with an unconsciously unswerving attention which proved how little he had loved her and how much she had interested him. He was, indeed, never well aware that he was subjecting any one to a microscopic intellectual scrutiny, for he possessed in a high degree the faculty of unintentional memory. While it cost him a severe effort to commit to memory a dozen verses of any poet, old or modern, he could nevertheless recall with faultless accuracy both sights and conversations which he had seen and heard, even after an interval of many years, provided that his interest had been somewhat excited at the time. The half-active, half-indolent, wholly luxurious life at his cousin’s house had in the end produced a strong impression upon him. It had been like an interval of lotus-eating upon an almost uninhabited island, varied only by such work as he chose to do at his own leisure and in his own way. During more than four months the struggles of the world had been hidden from him, and had temporarily ceased to play any part in his thoughts. The dreamy existence spent between flowers and woods and water, where every want had been anticipated almost before it was felt, served now as a background for the picture of the young girl who had been so constantly with him, herself as natural as her surroundings, the incarnation of life and of life’s charm, the negation of intellectual activity and of the sufferings of thought, a lovely creature who could only think, reason, enjoy and suffer with her heart, and whose mind could acquire but little, and was incapable of giving out. She had been the central figure and had contributed much to the general effect, so much, indeed, that under pressure of circumstances he had been willing to believe that he could love her enough to marry her. The scene had changed, the hallucination had vanished and the delusion was destroyed, but the memory of it all remained, and now disturbed his recollection of more recent events. There was a sensuous attraction in the pictures that presented themselves, from which he could not escape, but which he for some reason despised and tried to put away from him, by thinking again of Constance, of the cold purity of her face, of her over-studied conscientiousness and of her complete subjection to her sincere but mistaken self-criticism.

He wondered whether he should ever marry, and what manner of woman his wife would turn out to be. Of one thing he was sure. He would not now marry any woman unless he loved her with all his heart, and he would not ask her to marry him unless he were already sure of her love. The third must be the decisive case, from which he should never desire to withdraw and in which there should be no disappointment. He thought of Grace Fearing, and of her marriage and short-lived happiness with its terribly sudden ending and the immensity of sorrow that had followed its extinction. It almost seemed to him as though it would be worth while to suffer as she suffered if one could have what she had found; for the love must have been great and deep and sincere indeed, which could leave such scars where it had rested. To love a woman so well able to love would be happiness. She never doubted herself nor what she felt; all her thoughts were clear, simple and strong; she did not analyse herself to know the measure of her own sincerity, nor was she a woman to be carried away by a thoughtless passion. She loved and she hated frankly, sincerely, without a side thought of doubt on the one hand nor of malice on the other. She was morally strong without putting on any affectation of strength, she was clear-sighted without making any pretence to exceptional intelligence, she was passionate without folly, and wise without annoyance, she was good, not sanctimonious, she was dignified without vanity. In short, as George thought of her, he saw that the woman who had openly disliked him and opposed him in former days, was of all the three the one for whom he felt the most sincere admiration. He remembered now that at his first meeting with the two sisters he had liked Grace better than Constance, and would then have chosen her as the object of his attentions had she been free and had he foreseen that friendship was to follow upon intimacy and love on friendship. Unfortunately for George Wood, and for all who find themselves in a like situation, that concatenation of events is the one most rarely foreseen by anybody, and George was fain to content himself with speculating upon the nature of the happiness he would have enjoyed had he been loved by a woman who seemed now to be dead to the whole world of the affections. It was sufficient to compare her with her sister to understand that she was, of the two, the nobler character; it was enough to think of Mamie to see that in that direction no comparison was even possible.

“It would be strange if it should be my fate to love her, after all,” George thought. “She would never love me.”

He roused himself from his reverie and sat down to his table, by sheer force of habit. Paper and ink were before him, and his pen lay ready to his hand, where he had last thrown it down. Almost unconsciously he began to write, putting down notes of a situation that had suddenly presented itself to his mind. The pen moved along, sometimes running rapidly, sometimes stopping with an impatient hesitation during which it continued to move uneasily in the air. Characters shaped themselves out of the chaos and names sounded in the willing ear of the writer. The situation which he had first thought of was all at once transformed into a detail in a second and larger action, another possibility started up out of darkness, in brilliant clearness, and absorbed the matters already thought of into itself, broadening and strengthening every moment. Whole chapters now stood out as if already written, and in their places. A detail here, another there, to be changed or adapted, one glance at the whole, one or two names spoken aloud to see how they sounded in the stillness, a pause of a moment, a fresh sheet of paper, and George Wood was launched upon the first chapter of a new novel, forgetful of Grace, of Constance Fearing and even of poor Mamie herself and of all that had happened only two or three hours earlier.

He was writing, working with passionate and all-absorbing interest at the expression of his fancies. What he did was good, well thought, clearly expressed, harmoniously composed. When it was given to the public it was spoken of as the work of a man of heart, full of human sympathy and understanding. At the time when he was inventing the plot and writing down the beginning of his story, a number of people intimately connected with his life were all in one way or another suffering acutely and he himself was the direct or indirect cause of all their sufferings. He was neither a cruel man, nor thoughtless nor unkind, but he was for the time utterly unconscious of the outer world, and if not happy at least profoundly interested in what he was doing.

During that hour, Sherrington Trimm, pale and nervous, was walking up and down his endless beat in the little room at the club where George had left him, trying to master his anger and disgust before going home to meet his wife and the inevitable explanation which must ensue. The servant came in and lit the gaslight and stirred the fire but Trimm never saw him nor varied the monotony of his walk.

At his own house, things were no better. Totty, completely broken down, by the failure of all her plans and the disclosure of her discreditable secret, had recovered enough from her hysterics to be put to bed by her faithful maid, who was surprised to find that, as all signs fail in fair weather, none of the usual remedies could extract a word of satisfaction or an expression of relief from her mistress. Down stairs, in the little boudoir where she had last seen the man she loved, Mamie was lying stretched upon the divan, dry eyed, with strained lips and blanched cheeks, knowing nothing save that her passion had dashed itself to pieces against a rock in the midst of its fairest voyage.

In another house, far distant, Grace Bond was leaning against a broad chimney-piece, a half-sorrowful, half-contemptuous smile upon her strong sad face, as she thought of all her sister’s changes and vacillations and of the aimlessness of the fair young life. Above, in her own room, Constance Fearing was kneeling and praying with all her might, though she hardly knew for what, while the bright tears flowed down her thin cheeks in an unceasing stream.

“And yet, when he came to life, he called me first!” she cried, stretching out her hands and looking upward as though protesting against the injustice of Heaven.

And in yet another place, in a magnificent chamber, where the softened light played upon rich carvings and soft carpets, an old man lay dying of his last fit of anger.

All for the sake of George Wood who, conscious that many if not all were in deep trouble, anxiety or suffering, was driving his pen unceasingly from one side of a piece of paper to the other, with an expression of keen interest on his dark face, and a look of eager delight in his eyes such as a man may show who is hunting an animal of value and who is on the point of overtaking his prey.

But for the accident of thought which had thrown a new idea into the circulation of his brain, he would still have been sitting in his shabby easy-chair, thoughtfully pulling at his short pipe and thinking of all those persons whom he had seen that day, kindly of some, unkindly of others, but not deaf to all memories and shut off from all sympathy by something which had suddenly arisen between himself and the waking, suffering world.