Whenever Peter thought of the Misses Jacobite, the picture that formed was of four lean-breasted women, who spoke in whispers and sat forever in a room with the blinds down. They seemed to have no passions, no desires, no grip on reality, no sense of life’s supreme earnestness. They were waiting, always waiting for something to return—something which had once been theirs: youth, the hope of motherhood, love, the admiration of men. The day of their opportunity had gone by them; they could not forget. It was odd to remember that these gentlewomen, prematurely aged, had once been high-stepping and courted—the belles of Topbury. One of them sang, day in, day out, of the rest to be found on the other side of Jordan; it was all that she had to hope for now. Directly the front door opened you could hear her. The sound of her singing sent shivers down your back. It made you think of a mourner, sitting beside the dead; only the dead was not in the house. It had never come to birth. It was something once expected, that no one dared speak about.

When Peter called next morning he was aware of a changed atmosphere. The sense of folded hands had vanished. The singing was no longer heard; instead, there came to his ears a number of busy, orderly sounds—doors softly opening and shutting, feet making discreet haste upon the stairs, the clink of dishes in the basement and the sizzling of cooking.

As he had passed through the hall, with its varnished wall-paper, to the drawing-room in which he waited, the portrait of old Mr. Jacobite had gazed fiercely down. Quite evidently the old gentleman disapproved of the use being made of his night-shirt.

Peter didn’t seat himself; it would have been impossible to do so without causing havoc. Every chair had its antimacassar, spread at its correct old-maidish angle. He stood by the window, looking out into the cool little garden—a green, shy sanctuary for birds, across which the July sunlight fell. Overhead was the room in which Uncle Waffles had slept—he hoped he had behaved himself. The chandelier shook; several people were very industrious up there. And Peter wondered. Old Mr. Jacobite—had he always disapproved of men where his daughters were concerned? Had he kept them from marriage? Had the tall and reserved Miss Florence ever been kissed by a man? In the light of his own romantic experience he pitied all people who hadn’t been kissed and married. Life was wasted if that hadn’t happened; it was meant for that.

The handle turned. It was Miss Effie, the little and talkative Miss Jacobite, who entered. She was smiling and lifted to Peter a face all a-flutter, thanking him with her eyes, as though he had given her a present.

“How is he?” Peter asked. “I oughtn’t to have brought him here at all—let alone at such an hour. Only you see—you see there was nowhere else to bring him.”

She seated herself on the edge of a chair, patting out her dress. “He’s tired.” She spoke with an air of concern. “He wasn’t very well. We made him stay in bed. We’re going to keep him there; he needs feeding.”

She was flustered. Her hands kept clasping and unclasping. She seemed afraid of being accused of immodesty. She raised her eyes shyly. “It’s so nice to have a man in the house. Not since poor dear father——. I wonder what he’d have said.”

Peter didn’t wonder. He thought it was high time that he made matters clearer. “Of course, I’m not going to leave him on your hands. I only brought him for a night because——”

She interrupted anxiously. “Oh, please, until he’s better. He’s so run down. They made him work so hard in—in there.”

So he had brought his derelict uncle to the one spot on earth where he was regarded as a treasure! He was so amazed at Miss Effie’s attitude that he doubted whether she was in full possession of the facts.

“But—but,” he faltered, “didn’t Miss Florence tell you where he’s come from—where it was that he had to work?”

She answered in a low voice. “We’ve all done wrong.” It seemed she could get no further. She sank her head, gazing straight before her, tracing out the great red roses in the carpet. Peter thought of her sister, Leah, the shadow-woman; he knew what she meant. She raised her eyes to his with an effort. “We’ve all done wrong; I think to have done wrong makes one more gentle. It makes one willing—not to remember.”

Miss Florence opened the door and looked in on them. “He’s ready to see you now.” She hated scenes. Because she saw that one was in preparation, she made her voice and manner perfunctory. “You’d better go alone. You’d better go on tiptoe. I wouldn’t stop too long; he’s got a bad head.”

Peter couldn’t help smiling as he climbed the stairs, and yet it was a tender sort of smiling. Didn’t these innocent ladies know that too much whisky invariably left a bad head? Or, with their divine faculty for forgetting, were they willing to forget the whisky and only to remember to cure the bad head?

It was a white room—a woman’s room most emphatically. The pictures on the walls were triumphs of sentimentality. Gallants were kissing their ladies’ hands and clutching them to their breasts in an agony of parting, or looking meltingly at a flower which they had left. The seats of the chairs wore linen covers to prevent their upholstery from getting shabby. The window was wide; on the sill crumbs had been scattered. Sparrows chattered and, grown bold from habit, flew in on to the carpet and preened their feathers.

On the bed, the sheets drawn close up under his chin, lay Uncle Waffles. He had the look that invalids sometimes have, of being made to appear more ill by too much attention. He had not shaved—his cheeks were grizzled; that help to make him look worse. The atmosphere of a sickroom was completed by a table placed beside the counterpane, on which lay an open Bible and some freshly plucked wall-flowers. Peter had never seen his uncle in bed—for the moment he was embarrassed. He drew up a chair. “How are you? Getting rested?”

Uncle Waffles hitched himself higher on the pillow, reached out and took Peter’s hand. A glint of the old love of fun-making crept into his eyes. “I’ve not been treated like this since my mother—not since I was married. They’re pretending I’m ill because they want to nurse me. Carried off my trousers, they did, to prevent me from getting dressed. What’s the matter with them? Don’t they know who I am?”

“They know.”

“Then why are they doing it?”

“Because they’ve suffered themselves.”

Ocky tightened his grip on Peter’s hand. “One of them been to—to where I’ve been, you mean? Which one?” Peter shook his head. “They’ve all been to prison in a sense—not the kind you speak of. They had a big tragedy, when everything looked happy. Since then——. Well, since then people have pitied and cut them. They’ve been left. They’re glad you’ve come, partly because life’s been cruel to you, and partly——. Look here, I don’t want you to laugh!—partly because you’re a man.”

Ocky pulled the late Mr. Jacobite’s night-shirt tighter across his shoulders. It was much too large for him—as voluminous as a surplice. “Not much of a man,” he muttered; “not much of a man. Arrived here—you know how. Before that had been hanging about street corners, watched by the police and jostled into the gutter. My own wife won’t look at me; and yet you tell me these strangers——.”

His voice shook. “I don’t understand—can’t see why——.”

Peter spoke after an interval. “You—you haven’t often been surprised by too much kindness, have you? Comes almost like a blow at first?”

“Almost. It kind of hurts. But it’s the right kind of hurting. It makes me want to be good. Never thought I’d want to be that.”

“What did you think?”

For a moment a fierce look came into his eyes. “What does an animal think of when it’s trapped? It thinks of all the ways in which it can get back at the people who put it there. But now——.” He picked up the wall-flowers and smelt them. “She brought them this morning—the littlest one, with the gray hair and tiny hands. They were all wet with dew when she brought them. You need to go to prison, Peter, to know what flowers can mean to a chap.”

There was a tap at the door. Miss Madge entered, bringing some beef-tea. When she had gone Ocky said, “They take it in turns.”

Peter remembered how, going always into separate rooms with them, they’d taken turns in owning himself and Kay when they were children. How rarely life had allowed them to love anything!

Uncle Waffles’ thoughts seemed to have been following the same track. He paused, with the cup half-way to his mouth. “Those women ought to have married.—Been in prison most of their lives, you said? But I don’t know; marriage can be a worse hell.” He turned to Peter. “D’you remember at Sandport how she’d never let me kiss her? It was like that from the first. She kept me hungry. I stole to make her love me. She was always talking about her first husband and making me jealous. And yet——.”

He stopped and gazed vacantly across the room to where sparrows fluttered on the sill and sunlight fell. Peter supposed that he had forgotten what he was going to have said. Suddenly his face became all purpose and pleading. He flung back the bedclothes and leant out, gripping Peter’s shoulders till they hurt. “I’d steal again to-morrow to get one day of her bought affection. My God, how I’ve longed for her! Make her come to me. You must, Peter. You shall. Don’t tell her who I am. Oh, don’t refuse me.”

The sharp agony and desperate determination of a man so drifting and careless took Peter aback. He recalled those days when he had hidden him in the stable—it had been the same then. He had always been urging that Je-hane should be persuaded to walk in the garden that he might catch a glimpse of her. The one strong loyalty of his weak existence had been the love of this woman.

“Get her to come to you!” Peter said. “But how? She wouldn’t. She——” Ocky burried his face in the pillow. How thin he was and listless! How spent! How——. What was the word? How smashed! It was as though in the human quarry some chance stone of calamity had fallen on him, making him a moral cripple. He was what he was through the sort of accident that might happen to any man—to the Faun Man, if Eve refused to love him; even to Peter himself.

The boy pulled the clothes back over the man. “Somehow—I don’t know how—somehow I’ll do it. I promise.”

After that, whenever Peter entered the white room, he saw how his uncle watched for someone to follow.

The Misses Jacobite had found a doctor who supported their opinion that their guest must be kept in bed. The prison fare and long confinement had broken down his constitution. The doctor didn’t know what had done it; he advised food and rest.

From time to time Peter brought visitors to the room overlooking the garden. His father came and was shocked by the wasted look of the man who, in earlier years, had been his friend. It was of those earlier years that they chose to speak, by an instinctive courtesy; they, at least, had been happy territory. They recalled together their schoolday pranks—the canings they had earned, the football matches they had lost or won, the holidays when they had broken boundaries, going on some secret adventure. But, when Barrington rose to go, Ocky said, “Don’t come again, Billy. You used to hate to hear me call you Billy; you’ll dislike it just as much when I’m better. We’ve both been forgetting what I am, and what I’ve done. If you come again we may remember. For years I’ve worried you; well, that’s ended. But—you’re a man of the world, and you understand. I’m a jail-bird—and I don’t want to spoil the memory of this hour. Good-bye, old man.”

It turned out that Mr. Grace hadn’t slept on his box so soundly that evening of Peter’s return—at least, not so soundly as to keep his eyes shut.

“All swank on my part, Mr. Peter,” he said; “she’s been h’at me for years, my darter Grice ‘as, and I don’t mean to get conwerted. H’I’m not a-goin’ ter come ter ‘eaven, so long as ‘er voice is the only voice as calls me. ‘Eaven ‘ud be ‘ell, livin’ wiv ‘er in the same ‘ouse, if I wuz ter do that. We’d be for h’everlastin’ prayin’ and floppin’. Not but wot religion ‘as its uses; but not for me in ‘er sense. That’s why I shut me h’eyes when she was a-bellowin’ at the corner. But I saw yer. ‘Ow is the old bloke nar? Your uncle, I mean, meanin’ no disrespeck. I’ve h’often thought that if we ‘ad met under ‘appier h’auspices—h’auspices is one of my Grice’s words—we might ‘ave been pals.”

Peter brought about the ‘appier h’auspices. One afternoon Cat’s Meat halted before the house and Mr. Grace climbed down from his box, a bag of apples in one hand and his whip in the other. He was very red in the face and embarrassed; he had anything but a sick-room appearance, though he often drove in funeral processions. He was immensely careful about the wiping of his feet. Peter tried to coax him to leave his whip in the hall; he wouldn’t. He seemed to think that it lent him dignity, and explained his status in the world. So it was clutching a bag of apples and clasping his whip against his chest, that he entered the white room where the birds hopped in and out.

Ocky Waffles, shifting his position on the bed, caught sight of the weather-beaten, alcoholic figure. Before he could say a word, in a thick, husky voice Mr. Grace offered his apologies.

“‘Ere. ‘Ave ‘em. I ‘ear you ain’t well.” He swung the bag of apples on to the bed. “Bought ‘em from a gal off a barrer” He paused awkwardly.

“That was good of you,” said Ocky. “Come and sit down.”

Mr. Grace scratched his head. “I dunno as I want to sit down. I dunno as you and me is friends. Remember the last time we met and h’all the trouble we ‘ad? You wuz a nice old cough-drop in them days. I ‘ad to ‘it yer wiv this ‘ere whip—the wery same one—to make yer let go o’ the top o’ the gate and fall inter the stable. Well, I ‘it yer in kindness; but it’s because I ‘it yer that I dunno whether you and me is friends.”

“We’re friends,” said Ocky.

Mr. Grace sat down. It was most curious, all this. He hadn’t got his bearings. This chap, lying in a decent bed and waited on hand and foot by ladies, was Mr. Waffles, if you please. But he had been an old cock who climbed walls to avoid policemen, and rode about at night in philanthropic cabs. He turned to him gruffly. “Eat one o’ them there apples. Bought ‘em from a gal off a barrer.—Did h’I tell yer that h’already?” It was a sign that the truce was established.

Mr. Grace became a frequent caller. An odd friendship grew up between these two men, both broken on the wheel of feminine perversity. They exchanged notes on their experiences. Ocky spoke to the old cabby with greater freedom than to anyone, save Peter. Jehane had always said of him that he found it easy to be sociable with underlings and ostlers. In this case he found it easy because of the wide charity of the underling’s personal laxity. Sometimes Miss Effie would steal in and read to them of a man who chose his companions from among publicans and sinners. Mr. Grace would pay her the closest attention and ask her to repeat certain passages; he was picking up pointers, with which to challenge his daughter’s confident assertions concerning God’s unvarying severity.

And then Jehane! She came one afternoon to Topbury to visit Nan. She had heard nothing; nothing was told her. Peter waited for an opportunity to get her to himself. In the garden after dinner the others contrived to leave them together.

“Going up to Oxford, Peter? Oh, well, it’s good to have opportunities and a father with money. My poor Eustace, he’ll never have that. I might, while you’re there——.”

She paused; the thought had just occurred to her—a new plan for marrying off her girls “I might let Glory and Riska visit my father and mother while you’re there. It would be pleasant for all of you. Would you like that?”

“Splendid,” said Peter.

She eyed him, suspecting the sincerity of his enthusiasm.

“Of course, if you don’t want your cousins—-.”

“I do,” he assured her. “I’m going to Calvary College; that’s just opposite Professor Usk’s house. I’ll be able to see plenty of them.” Then, knowing how she liked to be appealed to as a person with superior knowledge, “I wish you’d tell me some of the things I mustn’t do; Oxford etiquette’s so full of mustn’ts.”

She laughed; the hard lines softened about her mouth. Talking about Oxford made her think of her girlhood, when to be the daughter of a don was to be something akin to an aristocrat. Those days were sufficiently far removed for her to have forgotten their dread of spinsterhood, and for her to remember only their glamour. “You must never use tongs to your sugar,” she said; “only freshers do that—you must help yourself with your fingers. And, let me see! You must never wear your cap and gown unless it’s positively necessary. You mustn’t speak to a second or third-year man unless he speaks to you first.—Oh, there are so many mustn’ts at Oxford; it would take all evening.”

And then, “Did your mother ever tell you the story of how we first met Billy? It had been raining, and we were waiting to go on the river. I put my head out of the window to see if the storm was over, and there was your father looking up at me. I used to tease your mother by pretending that I was in love with him. I shouldn’t wonder—I expect she still believes I wanted him. You see, Nan and I were inseparable as girls. We used to be horribly scared of not marrying—we didn’t know as much about marriage then. We used to think that girls were born on a raft and that only a man could come to their rescue. Funny idea, wasn’t it?”

“And if the man didn’t come?”

“Why, if the man didn’t come, we believed girls missed everything—believed they got blown out to sea, out of sight of land and starved with thirst. That was what made your mother so jealous, when I pretended to be in love with Billy. She was afraid she’d lose her one and only chance of getting safe ashore to the land of matrimony.” That was Jehane’s public version of how love had miscarried between herself and Barrington.

So she ran on, remembering and remembering, as they walked the garden path from the mulberry to the pear trees, forth and back, back and forth, while the sunset reddened the creepers on the walls and the loft-window, from which Ocky had watched in vain for her coming, looked down on them emptily.

When it was time for her to be getting on her way, Peter volunteered to accompany her to the station. They chose the Lowbury Station instead of the Topbury, because it would take longer and they could continue their conversation about Oxford, her Promised Land of the past. “You must have had good times as a girl.”

Good times! Hadn’t she? She painted for him the joys of Eights’ Week, the excitement of the Toggers, the tremendous elations of a young and vivid ‘Varsity world. She painted them for him as romantic realities which she had lived to the full and lost. And the odd thing was that she believed that she had been happy then. All her life it had been then that she had been happy. Her Eldorados had always been behind her—never in the To-days or the To-morrows. When she pitied herself, her otherwise barren nature blossomed into a tragic luxuriance that was almost noble, and entirely picturesque.

She hadn’t noticed where Peter was leading her. She found herself in a broad and quiet street, through which little traffic passed. The pavements, on either side of it, were lined with plane-trees. Houses stood far back from the road in gardens, with stone steps climbing up to them.

She slipped her hand into Peter’s arm. Now that Nan wasn’t there to be pleased by it, she was willing to let him know that she was proud of him. In the silver twilight, when one sees with the imagination rather than with the eyes, she found his face like to one which had looked up at her suddenly and held her spell-bound in the gray blur of an Oxford street.

“Is this the right way, Peter? Is it a short-cut? Are you taking me out of my way to lengthen our talk?”

He laughed, rather excitedly she thought. “I like to hear you telling of the old days—— Hulloa! Why here’s the Misses Jacobite’s house! You remember what you said about women being on a raft—I think that explains them. No one came out from the land to take them off. Let’s step inside and cheer them up.”

“But Peter, my train——.”

“Oh, there are plenty of trains—we needn’t stop more than a second.”

“You rascal!” She gave his arm a little hug. “I believe you had this in mind from the start.”

“Perhaps I had.”

When they were safe inside the hall and the door had closed behind them, his manner altered. She was conscious of it in a second. He no longer laughed, and he was more excited.

“There’s someone here who wants to meet you,” he informed her.

“But who? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I wanted to give you a surprise.”

She looked annoyed and yet curious. “You must tell me. Is it a man or a woman?”

He didn’t dare to let her know that it was her husband.

“You’ll see presently.”

She was beginning to protest; Miss Florence entered. Under her attempt at cordiality her face betrayed dismay, and something still less comfortable—judgment. Peter employed her entrance as an excuse for his own rapid exit. He soon returned. “They want to see you now.”

Making the best of an awkward situation, Jehane exclaimed, “They! So there are several of them! It was only ‘someone’ at first.”

She followed him up the stairs, trying to catch up with and question him; he was careful to keep sufficiently far ahead to prevent conversation. He opened a door on the landing—the door which led into the white room. He made as if he were going to accompany her, but, as she crossed the threshold, stepped back and closed the door.

“You!”

The man held out his arms. When she stood rigid and did not stir, he dragged himself across the bed, as if to come to her.

“Don’t.”

Her voice was sudden like a whip cracked.

His arms fell to his side. After all these years of absence, her stronger will lashed down his desire. He began ramblingly, shame-facedly, hinting at what he meant, not having the audacity to finish his sentences. “I had to——. I made Peter promise. When they let me out, I was thinking of you. All the time in there, for four years, I was thinking of——. Jehane, I’ve been punished enough. Isn’t it possible that——? Jehane, I love you. I always have. I always shall.”

He was aching to touch her. Through the mist of twilight that drifted through the room, he fed his eyes on every detail of this woman who had once been familiar to him. She hadn’t changed much; it was he who was altered. She also made her sternly pitiful estimate—the shrunken body, the loose-lipped, purposeless mouth, the hair growing thin and gray about the temples.

He stretched out his arms. “I love you.”

She shuddered; it was as though a man from the grave had called to her.

“Love me!” Her voice was so low that his ears were strained to catch what she said. “No. You never loved me; you weren’t strong enough for that. It was all a mistake; we never belonged to each other. If you had loved me, you wouldn’t have—— But we won’t talk about it. I’m not bitter; but we must go our own ways now.”

He was lying across the edge of the bed, threatening to reach across the gulf that spread between them. The nearer he came, the more she saw what had happened. He was old—a senile, night-robed caricature of the man she had married. In the half-light her fear of his claim on her made him ghastly.

He was moving—he was getting out of bed. She opened the door, running as she would have run from a skeleton. He was following her down the stairs. She fancied that he touched her. It seemed that he leapt through the air. Something fell. In the hall people tried to stay her. She was in the street where the plane-trees rustled; how she managed to get there she could not tell. She ran on, fearing that he still followed.

She halted for want of breath. Where was she? Lighted trams were passing. She jumped on the first, giving no thought to its direction. Not until she was safe aboard and moving, did she dare to look back.

Nothing was there, nothing gaunt and hungry—only saunterers and girls with their lovers, drifting dreamlike through the shadows under lamps against whose glare moths hurled their fragile bodies, beating their lives out flutteringly.