"Sister Alexandra, I have put a letter in your cell. And will you go to Mother Gertrude's room after Vespers?"

"Thank you, Sister. I wonder if Mother Gertrude remembers that I have to go down to the children at five o'clock, though?"

"Oh, I dare say not. Perhaps you could get some one to replace you there. Shall I see if Sister Agnes is free?"

"Thank you, I will speak to Mother Gertrude first."

The nuns separated, the lay-sister returning to her eternal task of polishing up the brasses and gilt candlesticks of the chapel perpetually dimmed by the rain and mists of the Belgian climate, and Alexandra Clare, professed religious, wearily mounted the steep, narrow stairs to the tiny cubicle in the large dormitory, designated a "cell." There would just be time to fetch the letter and put it into the deep pocket of her habit before the bell rang for Vespers, otherwise they would have to wait till next morning, for she knew there would be no spare instant for even a momentary return to the cell until she went to bed that night, far too tired for anything but such rest as her pallet-bed could afford. She felt little or no curiosity as to her correspondence.

Nobody wrote to her except Barbara, who had kept her posted in all the general family news with fair regularity for the past nine years.

She recognized without elation the narrow envelope with the thin black edge affected by Barbara ever since she had become the widow of Ralph McAllister, during the course of the war in South Africa. It all seemed to her very remote. The fact that Mother Gertrude had sent for her after Vespers was of far more importance than any news that Barbara might have to give of the outside world that seemed so far away and unreal.

Sister Alexandra had not been very greatly moved by any echoes from without, since the sudden shock of hearing of her mother's death, while she herself was still a novice preparing to take final vows.

Alex still remembered the bewilderment of seeing a black-clad, sobbing, schoolgirl Pamela in the parlour, and the frozen rigidity of grief which had masked her father's anguish.

Barbara and Ralph McAllister had been recalled from their honeymoon—he still rapturous at a marriage which had been deferred for nearly two years owing to Sir Francis' objection to his profession, and Barbara drowned in decorous tears, through which shone all the self-conscious glory of her wedding-ring, and her new position as a married woman. Alex had been thankful when those trying interviews had come to an end—she had been sent to LiÈge just before her religious profession. It had mitigated the wrench of a separation from her Superior, although the first months spent away from Mother Gertrude had seemed to her unutterably long and dreary. But less than a year later Mother Gertrude had come to the Mother-house as Assistant Superior, and the intercourse between them had been as unbroken as the rule permitted.

It was eight years since Alex had left England, but, except for the extreme cold of the winter, which told upon her health yearly, she had grown to be quite unaware of the surroundings outside. The wave of rather febrile patriotism that rolled over England at the time of the Boer War, left her quite untouched, and no description of Barbara's conveyed anything to her mind of the astoundingly wholesale demolition of old ideals that fell with the death of Victoria, and the succession of Edward VII to the English throne.

For Alex there was no change, except the unseen progress of time itself. She only realized how far apart she had grown from the old life when the news of her father's death reached her in the winter of 1902, and woke in her only a plaintive pity and self-reproachful wonder at her own absence of any acute emotion.

No one came to see her in the parlour after Sir Francis' death. For one thing, she was in Belgium and too far away to be easily visited, and the South African casualties, amongst whom had numbered Barbara's young husband, had familiarized them all with the ideas of death and parting, so that there was little of the consternation and shock that Lady Isabel's death had brought to her children. The house in Clevedon Square knew no more big receptions and elaborate At Home days, but Cedric, already of age, had taken over the headship of the household, and Alex had been conscious of a vague relief that she could still picture the surroundings she remembered as home for the boys and Pamela. Even that picture had become dim and strangely elusive, three years later, at the thought of Cedric's marriage.

Alex had accepted it, however, as she accepted most things now, with a passivity that carried no conviction to her mind. What her outer knowledge told her was true, failed to impress itself in any way upon her imagination, and consequently left her feelings quite untouched. To her inner vision, the life outside remained exactly as she had last seen it, in that summer that she still thought of as "Diamond Jubilee year."

Inside the convent, things had not changed. Looking back, she could remember a faint feeling of amusement when she had returned to the house at LiÈge at twenty-two years old, believing herself to be immeasurably advanced in years and experience since her schooldays, and had found that scarcely any alteration or modification in the rule-bound convent had taken place. She now sat among the other nuns at the monthly rÉclame and watched the girls rise one by one in their places, their hands concealed under the ugly black-stuff pÈlerine, their hair tightly and unbecomingly strained back, their young faces demurely made heavy and impassive, as they listened to the record read aloud just as unrelentingly as ever by old MÈre Alphonsine.

Sister Alexandra very rarely contributed any words of praise or blame to the judgment. At first she had been young, and therefore not expected to raise her voice amongst the many dignitaries present, but even now, when by convent standards she had attained to the maturity of middle age, her opinion would have been of little value.

She was seldom sent among the children, although she gave an English lesson to the moyennes on two evenings a week. In her first year at LiÈge, there had been an American girl of fourteen who had taken a sudden rapturous liking to her, which had never proceeded beyond the initial stages, since Alex, without explanation, had merely been told to hand over the charge of the child's English and French lessons hitherto in her hands, and had herself been transferred to other duties. Since then, she had been kept on the Community side of the house, and employed principally by Mother Gertrude to assist with the enormous task of correspondence that fell to the share of the Assistant Superior. She was taught to sew, and a large amount of mending passed through her hands and was badly accomplished, for Lady Isabel Clare's daughter had learned little that could be of use to her in the life she had selected. She was not even sufficiently musical to give lessons in piano or organ playing, nor had she any of the artistic talent that might be utilized for the perpetration of the various pious objects d'art that adorned the walls of the parlours or the class-room.

Nevertheless, Sister Alexandra was hard-worked. No one was ever anything else at the convent, where the chanting of the daily Office alone was a very considerable physical strain, both in the raw cold of the early morning and at the dose of the ceaselessly occupied day. Many of the nuns said the Office apart, owing to the numerous duties that called them from the chapel during the hours of praise and supplication, but Sister Alexandra had so few outside calls upon her time that she was one of the most regular in attendance.

At first her health had appeared to improve under the extreme regularity of the life, and later, when her final vows had been made, it was no longer a subject for speculation. She was not ill, and therefore need never reproach herself with being a burden to her Community. Anything else did not matter—one was tired, no doubt—but one had made the sacrifice of one's life.... Thus the conventual creed.

Time had sped by, with strange, monotonous, unperceived rapidity. It was all a matter of waiting for the next thing. At first, Alex Clare had waited eagerly and nervously to be taught some mysterious secret that would enable her to become miraculously happy and good at home in Clevedon Square. Then she had gradually come to see that there would be no return—that her home thenceforward would be with Mother Gertrude, and in the convent. Her novitiate days had come next—strange, trying apprenticeship, that had been lightened and comforted by the woman whose powerful and magnetic personality had never failed to assert itself and its strength.

Belgium, and the anguished waiting and hoping for orders to return to London, and the growing certainty that those orders would not come, had culminated in the rush of relief and joy that heralded Mother Gertrude's unexpected transfer to the Mother-house. After that, her first vows, taken for a term of two years, had inaugurated the long probationary period at the end of which a final and irrevocable pledge would bind her for ever to the way of the chosen few. Those perpetual vows were held out to her as the goal and crown of life itself, and her mind had speculated not at all on what should follow.

She was twenty-six before she was allowed to become a professed religious—according to conventual standards, no longer a very young woman. The delay had inflamed her ardour very much. It was characteristic of Alex to believe implicitly in an overwhelming transformation which should take place within her by virtue of one definite act, so long anticipated as to have acquired the proportions of a miracle.

It sometimes seemed to her that ever since the embracing of those perpetual vows, she had lived on, waiting for the transformation to operate. There was nothing else to wait for. The supreme act in the life of a religious, to the accomplishment of which her whole being had hitherto been tending, impelled at once by precept and by example, had taken place.

The next initiation could only be obtained through death itself, yet Alex was still waiting.

She would tell herself that she was waiting for the children's summer holidays for the beginning of the new term, then for the season of Advent and the Christmas festival, for the long stretch of Lenten weeks, with its additional fastings and fatigue, and still as each year slipped by the sense of unfulfilment remained with her, dormant but occasionally stirring.

In the last four years she had become additionally sensible of a growing exhaustion, that seemed to sap her spirit no less than the strength of her body. She had waited for her weariness to culminate in a breakdown of strength that should send her to the convent infirmary, when the rest that her body craved would be imposed upon her as an obligation, but no such relief came to her.

It sometimes struck her with a feeling of wonder that such utter lassitude of flesh and spirit alike could continue with no apparent and drastic effect upon her powers of following the daily rule. But she had no time in which to think, for the most part, and the example of Mother Gertrude's unflagging energy could always shame her into un-complaint. Her devotion to the elder nun had inevitably increased by the very restrictions that the convent rules placed upon their intercourse.

Even now, after so many years spent beneath the same roof, the thought that she was summoned to a private interview with Mother Gertrude could still make her heart beat faster. Since the days of her novitiate, there had been few such opportunities, and those for the most part hurried and interrupted.

Sister Alexandra went downstairs with a lightened heart.

The bell from the chapel rang out its daily summons, and she mechanically took off her black-stuff apron, folded and put it away, and turned her steps down the long passage.

Her hands were folded under her long sleeves and her head bent beneath her veil, in the attitude prescribed.

Barbara's letter lay in the depths of her pocket, already forgotten.

Her thoughts had flown ahead, and she was hoping that the Superior would allow her to send Sister Agnes in her stead to the children at five o'clock.

In the chapel, she raised her eyes furtively to the big, carved stall on a raised daÏs where the Assistant Superior had her place during the frequent absence of the Superior-General.

Mother Gertrude was very often claimed in the parlour or elsewhere, even during the hours of recital of the Office, and Alex was always aware of a faint but perceptible pang of jealousy when this was the case.

Tonight, however, the stately black-robed figure was present. She was always upright and immovable, and her eyes were always downcast to her book.

Alex went through the Psalms, chanted on the accustomed single high note, and was hardly conscious of a word she uttered. Long repetition had very soon dulled her appreciation of the words, and her understanding of even Church Latin had never been more than superficial.

She had come to regard it as part of that pervading and overwhelming fatigue, that she should bring nothing but a faint distaste to her compulsory religious exercises.

Towards the close of Vespers she saw a lay-sister come on tiptoe into the chapel, and kneeling down beside Mother Gertrude's daÏs, begin a whispered communication.

Immediately a feverish agony of impatience invaded her.

No doubt some imperative summons to an interview with the parents of a nun or a child, or consultation in the infirmary, where two or three little girls lay with some lingering childish ailment, had come to rob the Superior of her anticipated free time.

Alex, in nervous despair, saw her bend her head in acquiescence.

The lay-sister retired as noiselessly as she had come, and Mother Gertrude closed her book.

The concluding versicles and prayers were spoken kneeling, and Alex was compelled to turn towards the High Altar.

She was quivering from head to foot, and gripped the arms of her stall in order to restrain herself from turning her head. Every nerve was strained in her attempt to hear any movement at the back of the chapel, but she could distinguish nothing.

The few minutes that elapsed before the bell sounded for rising, seemed to her interminable.

She had grown accustomed lately to the grip of these nervous agonies, to which she became a prey for the most trivial of causes.

The modern exploitation of hysteria, however, was still in its embryo stage, half-way between the genteel hysterics of the 'sixties and the suppressed neuroticism of the new century. She did not diagnose her complaint. With the sensation, familiar to her, of blood pumping from her heart to her head, making her face burn, while her hands and feet remained dead and cold, she rose from her knees.

Although she had expected nothing else, a feeling of sick disappointment invaded her as she saw that the Superior's place had been noiselessly vacated.

With leaden feet, she moved out of the chapel and slowly resumed the black apron and the stuff sleeves that protected her habit.

In the absence of any direct order to the contrary, she knew that she must take her accustomed place in the class-room of the moyennes, and that the English lesson must proceed as usual.

"A vos places."

She had long ago learnt to speak French fluently, but never without an unmistakable British accent and intonation.

Subconsciously she was always rather relieved, on that account, when the preliminaries were done with, and the lesson could be given, according to the rules, in the English tongue.

"Simone! Begin, please."

Sister Alexandra, seated at the desk, held the book open in front of her, and her eyes rested upon the page, but her mind took in neither the meaning of the printed words nor the sense conveyed by Simone's droning, inexpressive voice.

She wondered whether some one would come to take her place at the desk and tell her that Mother Gertrude was waiting for her downstairs.

A sudden, stealthy opening of the class-room door made her look up with a flash of hope, but it was only a little girl late for her lesson and sidling in, hoping to escape notice.

Alex did not even trouble to give her the accustomed bad mark.

It would have meant opening her desk, and pulling out the mistress's note-book, and looking for a pencil, and she felt too tired. In her earlier days at the convent she would have felt ashamed at the thought of yielding to such slothful unconcern, and would have magnified the omission into a sin, to be confessed with shame to Mother Gertrude.

Now, she was too tired to care, and besides, she never saw Mother Gertrude. Even the poor little half-hour that had been held out to her was not to be hers, after all. She brooded in resentment over the thought.

A titter going round the room roused her.

"What are you saying, Simone?"

Simone stared back at her stupidly, but another keen-faced girl in the front row of desks spoke eagerly:

"She's said nearly all through the lesson, there's nothing left for any one else to say."

"You can repeat it afterwards," said Alex coldly.

She was vexed that her inattention should have been betrayed to the class, and presently she gave her full attention to the recital.

Just as it was over, the young novice, Sister Agnes, came into the room and, approaching the desk, spoke to Alex in a lowered voice:

"Mother Gertrude sent me, Sister. Will you go down to her and wait in her room? She will come in a moment. I am to take the children back to the study-room for you."

"Thank you," said Alex, trembling. The revulsion of feeling was so strong that she felt the chords tightening in her throat, which denoted approaching tears, such as she often shed for no adequate reason. She left the room.

The Assistant Superior's room on the ground floor was vacant.

Alex sat down on the low, rush-bottomed chair drawn close to the Superior's table, and closed her eyes. Now that her agony of suspense was ended, she became even more overwhelmingly conscious of fatigue, and began to wonder, almost against her will, whether Mother Gertrude would not notice it, and perhaps tell her that she was to go to bed after supper and not come to the recital of Office in the chapel.

She wondered whether she looked tired. There were no looking-glasses in the convent, but sometimes she had seen her own reflection in the big, full-length mirror of the sacristy, and she knew that she had lost her colour, and that her face had grown thin, with heavy, black circles underneath her eyes. She knew, too, that her step had lost any elasticity, and that she stooped far more than in the days when Lady Isabel had implored her to "hold up" so that her pretty frocks might be seen to advantage.

Waiting in the small room, with its carefully-closed window, and the big writing-table stacked with papers, and a great crucifix standing upright in the midst of them, she began for the first time to speculate as to the reason of her summons.

It occurred to her, with a slight sense of shock, that such a summons, in the case of nun or novice, had very often been the prelude to an announcement of bad news, such as the death of a relative at home.

Hastily she pulled out Barbara's letter and glanced through it.

There was no hint of approaching disaster in the rather set little phrases, and the four small sheets were mostly concerned with the fact that Barbara was finding it necessary to move into a still smaller house than the one that she and Ralph had taken at Hampstead after their improvident marriage.

Pamela was at Clevedon Square with Cedric and his wife. She was going to heaps of parties, and every one thought her very pretty and amusing.

There was no mention of Archie, and Alex hastily ransacked her memory as to his whereabouts.

Since the first year of her novitiate in London she had never seen her youngest brother, and although she felt a fleeting sorrow at the thought of harm having befallen him, her tenderness was for the little, curly-haired boy in a sailor suit with whom she had played and quarrelled in the Clevedon Square nursery, and not for the unknown youth of later years.

As she speculated, the well-known tread of the Assistant Superior sounded down the corridors—a hasty, decisive footstep. Alex sprang to her feet as the door opened.

"Oh, what is it?" she cried, at the first sight of the Superior's face.

The strong, lined countenance, suffused with agitation, bore every mark of violent disturbance.

Her deep voice, however, was as well under control as ever, although strong emotion underlay its vibrant quality.

"My little Sister, you have a big sacrifice before you. I cannot pretend to think that it will not cost you dear, as it will me. But we know Who asks it of us."

"What?" gasped Alex again, utterly at a loss, but feeling the blood ebb from her face.

"Our Mother-General has appointed me as Superior to the new house in South America. The boat sails at the end of this week."

---

XX

Aftermath

Alex could not believe the extent of the calamity that had befallen her, nor did she realize at first that the very mainspring of her life in the convent was attacked.

It astounded her to perceive that to the rest of the community the news brought no overwhelming shock.

Such sudden uprootings and transfers were not uncommon, and the notice given was generally a twenty-four hour one. Mother Gertrude had nearly a week in which to make her few preparations for an exile that almost certainly was for life, and to prepare herself as far as possible for new and heavy responsibilities.

The Superior-General was herself proceeding to South America with the little band of chosen pioneers, representative of almost every European house of the Order, and after inaugurating the establishment of the new venture, was to return to LiÈge, with one lay-sister only as companion.

In the general concern for her welfare and admiration of her courage in undertaking such a journey on the eve of her sixty-third birthday, it seemed to Alex that all other considerations were overlooked or ignored entirely.

She was aware that the convent spirit of detachment, so much advocated, and the consciousness of that vow of obedience made freely and fully, would alike preclude the possibility of any spoken protest or lamentation over the separation.

The severing of human ties was part and parcel of a nun's sacrifice, and her life was in the hands of her spiritual superiors.

There was no discussion possible.

Mother Gertrude, although the look of strain was deepening round her eyes and mouth, went steadily about her duties and spared herself in nothing.

Her place was to be taken temporarily by a French nun who had been for many years at LiÈge, and the charge was handed over with the least possible dislocation.

It was on a Tuesday night that Mother Gertrude had been told of the destiny in store for her, and on the following Saturday she was to proceed with her Superior to Paris, and thence to Marseilles to the boat.

Wednesday and Thursday Alex never saw her.

She had expected it, and was, moreover, far too much stunned to realize anything beyond the immediate necessity for taking her habitual place in the Community life without betraying the sense of utter despair that was hovering over her.

On Friday afternoon Mother Gertrude said to her:

"I have not had one spare moment to give you, my poor child. But I think you know everything that I would say to you? Be very, very faithful, Sister, and remember that these separations may be for life, but all Eternity is before us."

Alex could capture nothing of the rapt assurance that lay in the upraised eyes and vibrant voice.

"What shall I do without you?" she asked despairingly, feeling how inadequate the words were to voice her sense of utter deprivation.

The light, watchful eyes of the Superior seemed to pierce through her.

"Don't say that, dear child. You do not depend in any sense upon another creature. I have been nothing to you but a means to an end. It was given to me to help you a little, years ago, to find your holy vocation. You know that human friendships in themselves mean nothing."

Something in Alex seemed to be crying and protesting aloud in heart-broken repudiation of the formula to which her lips had so often subscribed, but her own tacit acquiescence of years rose to rebuke her, and the dread of vexing and alienating the Supervisor at this eleventh hour.

Dumbly she knelt down on the floor beside the Superior's chair.

Mother Gertrude looked at her compassionately enough, but with the strange remoteness induced by the long cultivation of an absolutely impersonal relation towards humanity.

"My poor little Sister, sometimes lately I have wondered whether I have been altogether wise in my treatment of you, and whether I have not allowed you to give way to natural affection too much. Perhaps this break has come in time. You must remember that you have renounced all earthly ties, even the holiest and most sacred ones, and therefore you must be ready to make any sacrifice for the sake of your one, supreme Love. There is so much I should like to say to you, but time is getting short now, and there is a great deal to be done. God bless you, my child."

The Superior laid her hand on Sister Alexandra's bent head.

Alex clasped it desperately.

"I shall still be your child always?" she almost wailed, with a weight of things unspoken on her heart, and in a last frantic attempt to carry away one definite assurance.

The slightest possible severity mingled in Mother Gertrude's clear gaze, bent downwards as she rose to her full height, her carriage as upright and as dignified as it had been ten years before.

"No, Sister," she said very distinctly. "You will be the child of whatever Superior God may send you in my place."

"You know that we in the convent have no human ties, only spiritual ones. You will see your Divine Master, and Him only, in the person of your Superior in religion. Remember that, little Sister. You must learn detachment if you are to be truly faithful. That is my last and most earnest counsel to you. I shall pray daily that you may be given strength to follow it."

"Don't go!" gasped Alex, hardly knowing what she said, as she saw the Superior's hand upon the door. "Don't go away like that. Oh, Mother, Mother, how shall I bear it? I've only got you and now you're going away for ever."

She broke into tearless sobs.

"Sister Alexandra! Has it come to this? I am indeed to blame if you are still so undisciplined and so weak as to cling to a mere creature—you that have been chosen by God to love Him, and Him only! I could not have believed it." Mother Gertrude's tone held bitter remorse and shame.

Alex' old, pitiful instinct of propitiating the being she loved best sprang to life within her.

"No, no, I didn't really mean it. I know I mustn't."

The nun gazed at her in compassionate perplexity.

"You are overstrung, and tired; you don't know what you are saying. When you come to yourself, my poor child, you will hardly believe that you could have proved so disloyal, even for a moment."

"Now calm yourself, and do not attempt to join the recreation tonight. You are not fit for it. I will tell our Mother-General that I have told you to go to your cell as soon as supper is over. Good-night, and again good-bye."

Sheer terror at the bare thought of being left there alone forced Alex to her feet, although she could scarcely stand, and was trembling violently. "You won't forget me?" she entreated almost inaudibly.

"I shall always remember you in my prayers, as I do all those who have been under my direction. Indeed, you will have a special place in them," said the Superior gravely, "since I can never forget that, by the grace of God, I was instrumental in bringing you into His holy house. But never forget that no human relation, however precious it may be, can have any completeness in itself. It all has to lead on to the one supreme thing, Sister, the 'one thing necessary.'

"Now you must detain me no longer." She freed herself from the convulsive grasp that Alex had unconsciously fastened on to the folds of her habit and moved unhesitatingly to the door.

Alex followed her with eyes that stared blankly from a blanched face. She felt as though she was under a spell and could neither move nor speak. She could not believe that Mother Gertrude would really leave her in that way. The Superior opened the door and passed out, closing it behind her without pausing or looking back.

Alex heard her steps receding, rapid and measured, along the uncarpeted corridor outside.

She stayed on and on in the little cold room, the winter dusk deepening rapidly outside, the silence only broken by the occasional clanging of a bell, to the sound of which she was so much inured that it hardly struck upon her senses. She thought that Mother Gertrude would come back to her.

There must be some other last words between them than those few impersonal counsels of perfection, that repudiated any more intimate link such as Alex' exclusive jealousy, stifled, but never stronger than after those ten years of repression, now claimed with such frantic yearning.

She waited, scarcely moving. She grew colder and colder, but she was unconscious of her icy feet and leaden hands. She was not even aware of consecutive thought.

Her whole body was absorbed in the supreme act of awaiting the Superior's return for the word, the look, that should at least break the dreadful darkness that encompassed her soul at the sudden deprivation of that one outlet which had, unaware, served as a safety-valve for the whole craving dependence of her spirit.

Mother Gertrude did not come back.

Dusk turned rapidly to night, and the distant cries and laughter of the children's evening recreation fell into a quiet that was only shattered by the single note of the deep-toned bell that proclaimed the hour of silence and the final gathering of the Community for the last recital of the Office in the chapel.

There was the flicker of a light along the passage outside, and the door opened at last.

Alex did not move.

She turned anguished eyes, that held scarcely any comprehension in the immensity of their fatigue, towards the entering figure.

It was that of the old Infirmarian, who put down the lighted candle and threw up her hands of dismay as her gaze met that of the younger nun. Mindful of the hour of silence, she asked no question, but she took Alex away to the convent infirmary, and placed her in a bed of which the mattress seemed strangely and wonderfully soft after the paillasse in her cell, and gave her a hot, sweet, strongly scented tisane and bade her sleep.

"Mais demain?" whispered Alex.

She was thinking of the early departure in the raw morning cold, when the convoy that was leaving for South America would be driven away from the convent. But the Infirmarian shook her head and shuffled slowly away, leaving the room in darkness.

She was old and very tired, and for her there was no demain, except the glorious dawn that should herald the day of Eternity.

Alex lay awake in the merciful darkness and envisaged the culmination of long years of stifled repression and self-deception.

She knew now, as she had never let herself know before, what had sustained her through the dragging years after the final objective of her vows had been left behind.

She knew that she had thought herself to be answering to a call of God, when she had been hearing only the voice of Mother Gertrude, and had been craving only for Mother Gertrude's tenderness and approbation.

Physical pangs of terror shot through her and shook her from head to foot as she realized to what she had bound herself, which now presented itself to her overstrung perceptions only in the crudest terms.

To live without earthly affection, to relinquish love as she understood it, in terms of human sympathy, for an ideal to which she knew, with tardy and unerring certainty, that nothing within her would ever conform.

She knew now, with that appalling clear-sightedness to which humanity is mercifully a stranger until or unless the last outposts of sanity are almost reached, that the vocation of which they all spoke so glibly had never been hers.

She had entered a life for which her every instinct declared her to be utterly unfitted, in search of that which her few short years in the outside world had denied her. The convent instinct, engrained in her at last, added to the anguish of startled horror at the wickedness of her own state of mind.

God is not mocked, she thought. Alex had tried to cheat God, and for ten years He had stayed His hand and had allowed her deception to go on.

And now it had all fallen on her—shame and punishment and despair, and nowhere any human help or consolation to turn to. She prayed frenziedly in the darkness, but no comfort came to her. She stifled in the pillow the imploring crying aloud of Mother Gertrude's name that sprang to her lips, but with a pang that sickened her, she recalled the Superior's parting from her that evening, her undeviating fidelity to an austere ideal which should also have been Alex'.

There was nothing anywhere.

And with that final certainty of negation came a rigidity of despair that no terms of time or space could measure.

Alex fell into exhaustion, then into a state of coma that became heavy, dreamless sleep enduring far into the next day. She woke to instant, stabbing recollection. It was a grey, leaden day, with rain lashing the window-panes, and at first Alex thought that it might be still early morning, but there was all the far-away, indescribable stir that tells of a household when the day's work is in full swing, and presently she realized that it must be the middle of the morning.

"They have gone," she thought, but the words conveyed no meaning to her. The Infirmarian came in to her and spoke, and asked whether she felt fit to get up, and although on the day before Alex had so craved for rest, she heard her own voice replying indifferently that she thought she was quite well, and that she was ready to rise at once.

"You are sure you have taken no chill? You must have been there in Mother Gertrude's room for a long time after you were taken faint.... Can you remember?" The nun looked at her, puzzled and anxious.

"Did I faint?"

"I think so, surely. You were almost unconscious when I came in, quite by chance, and found you there, almost frozen, poor little Sister! Now tell me—?" The old Infirmarian put a few stereotyped questions such as she addressed to all those of her patients whose ailments could not be immediately diagnosed at sight.

Alex' matter-of-fact replies, for the most part denials of the suggested ills, left her no wiser. Finally she decided on a refroidissement. "Put a piece of flannel over your chest," she said gravely, "and you had, perhaps, better spend recreation indoors until the spell of cold is over."

"Thank you," said Sister Alexandra lifelessly. "What time is it?"

"Nearly eleven. Have you any duties for which you should be replaced this morning?"

"There are a lot of things, I think," said Alex vaguely, "but I can get up."

"Very well," the Infirmarian acquiesced unemotionally. "There is much work to be done, as you say, and we nuns cannot afford to be ill for long."

Alex did not think that she was ill—she was quite able to get up and to dress herself, although her head was aching and her hands shook oddly.

She reflected with dull surprise that all the poignant misery of the days that had gone before seemed to have left her. Evidently this was what people meant by "getting over things." One suffered until one could bear no more, and then it was all numbness and inertia.

She felt a sort of surprised gratitude to God at the cessation of pain, as one who had undergone torture might feel towards the torturers for some brief respite.

Her thankfulness made tears come into her eyes, and she forced them back with a sort of wonder at herself, but that odd disposition to weep still remained with her.

As she went downstairs, rather slowly and cautiously, because her knees were shaking so strangely, she met a very little girl, the pet and baby of the whole establishment, climbing upwards. She was holding up the corners of her diminutive black apron with both hands, and after looking at the nun silently for a moment, she showed her that it contained two tiny, struggling kittens. "Les petits enfants de Minet," she announced gravely, and went on climbing, clasping her burden tenderly.

Alex could never have told what it was that struck her with so unbearable a sense of pathos in the sight of the little childish figure.

Quite suddenly the tears began to pour down her face, and she could neither have checked them nor have assigned any reason for them.

She went on downstairs, wiping the blinding tears from her sight, and amazed at the violence of the uncontrollable sobs that were noiselessly shaking her.

Something had suddenly given way within her and passed far beyond her own control.

It was as though she could never stop crying again.

---

XXI

Father Farrell

For what seemed a long while afterwards—a period which, indeed, covered three or four weeks—Alex learnt to be intensely and humbly grateful for the convent law that would not allow any form of personalities in intercourse.

She was utterly unable to cease from crying, and in spite of her shame and almost her terror, the tears continued to stream down her face in the chapel, in the refectory, even at the hour of recreation.

Nobody asked her any questions. One or two of the nuns looked at her compassionately, or made some kindly, little, friendly remark; a lay-sister now and then offered her an unexpected piece of help in her work, and the Infirmarian occasionally sent her a cup of bouillon for dinner, but it was nobody's business to offer inquiries, and had any one done so, the rule would have compelled Sister Alexandra to reply by a generality and to change the conversation without delay.

Only the Superior was entitled to probe deeper, and at first the Frenchwoman who was temporarily succeeding Mother Gertrude was too much occupied by her new cares to see much of her community individually.

Alex was relieved when the Christmas holidays began, and she had no longer to fear the notice of the sharp-eyed children, but in the reduction of work surrounding the festive season, it became impossible that her breakdown should continue to pass unnoticed. She did not herself know what was the matter, and could scarcely have given a cause for those incessant tears, except that she was unutterably weary and miserable, and that they had passed far beyond her own control.

The idea that that continuous weeping could have any connection with a physical nervous breakdown never occurred to her.

It was with surprise, and very little thought of cause and effect, that she one night noticed her own extraordinary loss of flesh. She had never been anything but thin and slightly built, but now she quite suddenly perceived that her arms and legs in the last two months had taken on an astounding and literal resemblance to long sticks of white wood. All the way up from wrist to armpit, her left hand, with thumb and middle finger joined, could span the circumference of her right arm.

It seemed incredible.

Her mind went back ten years, and she thought of Lady Isabel, and how much she had lamented her daughter's youthful angularity.

"If she could have seen this!" thought Alex. "But, of course, it only mattered for evening dress—she wouldn't have thought it mattered for a nun."

Instantly she began to cry again, although her head throbbed and her eyes burned and smarted. There was no need now to wonder if she looked tired. Accidentally one day, her hand to her face, she had felt the sort of deeply-hollowed pit that now lay underneath each eye, worn into a groove.

She had ceased to wonder whether life would ever offer anything but this mechanical round of blurred pain and misery, these incessant tears, when the Superior sent for her.

"What is the matter with you, Sister? They tell me you are always in tears. Are you ill?"

Alex shook her head dumbly.

"Sister, control yourself. You will be ill if you cry like that. Don't kneel, sit down."

The Superior's tone was very kind, and the note of sympathy shook Alex afresh.

"Tell me what it is. Don't be afraid."

"I want to leave the convent—I want to be released from my vows."

She had never meant to say it—she had never known that such a thought was in her mind, but the moment that the words were uttered, the first sense of relief that she had felt surged within her.

It was the remembrance of that rush of relief that enabled her, sobbing, to repeat the shameful recantation, in the face of the Superior's grave, pitiful urgings and assurance that she did not know what she was saying.

After that—an appalling crisis that left her utterly exhausted and with no vestige of belief left in her own ultimate salvation—everything was changed.

She was treated as an invalid, and sent to lie down instead of joining the community at the hour of recreation, the Superior herself devoted almost an hour to her every day, and nearly all her work was taken away, so that she could walk alone round the big verger and the enclosed garden, and read the carefully-selected Lives and Treatises that the Superior chose for her.

Gradually some sort of poise returned to her. She could control her tears, and drink the soups and tisanes that were specially prepared and put before her, and as the year advanced, she could feel the first hint of Spring stirring in her exhaustion. She was devoid alike of apprehension and of hope.

No solution appeared to her conceivable, save possibly that of her own death, and she knew that none would be attempted until the return of the Superior-General from South America.

As this delayed, she became more and more convinced, in despite of all reason, of the immutable eternity of the present state of affairs.

It shocked her when one day the Superior said to her:

"You are to go to the Superior of the Jesuits' College in the parlour this afternoon. Do you remember, he preached the sermon for your Profession, and I think he has been here once or twice in the last year or two? He is a very wise and clever and holy man, and ought to help you. Besides, he is of your own nationality."

Alex remembered the tall, good-looking Irishman very well. He had once or twice visited the convent, and had always told amusing stories at recreation, and preached vigorous, inspiring sermons in the chapel, with more than a spice of originality to colour them.

The children adored him.

Alex wondered.

Perhaps Father Farrell, the clever and educated priest, would really see in some new aspect the problem that left her baffled and sick of soul and body.

She went into the parlour that afternoon trembling with mingled dread, and the first faint stirrings of hope that understanding and release from herself and her wickedness might yet be in store for her.

Father Farrell, big and broad-shouldered, with iron-grey, wavy hair and a strong, handsome face, turned from the window as she entered the room.

"Come in, Sister, come in. Sit down, won't you? They tell me ye've not been well—ye don't look it, ye don't look it!"

His voice, too, was big and bluff and hearty, full of decision, the voice of a man accustomed to the command of men.

He pushed a chair forward and motioned her, with a quick, imperious gesture that yet held kindness, to sit down.

He himself stood, towering over her, by the window.

"Well, now, what's all the trouble, Sister?"

There was the suspicion of a brogue in his cultivated tones.

Alex made a tremendous effort. She told herself that he could not help her unless she told him the truth.

She said, as she had said to the French Superior:

"I am very unhappy—I want to be released from my vows as a nun."

The priest gave her one very quick, penetrating look, and his thick eyebrows went up into his hair for an instant, but he did not speak.

"I don't think I have ever had any—any real vocation," said Alex, whitening from the effort of an admission that she knew he must regard as degrading.

"And how long have ye thought ye had no real vocation?"

There was the slightest possible discernible tinge of kindly derision in the inquiry.

It gave the final touch to her disconcertment.

"I don't know."

She felt the folly of her reply even before the priest's laugh, tinged with a sort of vexed contempt, rang through the room.

"Now, me dear child, this is perfect nonsense, let me tell ye. Did ye ever hear the like of such folly? No real vocation, and here ye've been a professed religious for—how long is it?"

"Nearly four years since I was finally professed, but—"

"There's no but about it, Sister. A vow made to Our Blessed Lord, I'd have ye know, is not like an old glove, to be thrown away when ye think ye're tired of it. No, no, Sister, that'll not be the way of it. Ye'll get over this, me dear child, with a little faith and perseverance. It's just a temptation, that ye've perhaps been giving way to, owing to fatigue and ill health. Ye feel it's all too hard for ye, is that it?"

"No," said Alex frantically, "that's not it. It's nothing like that. It's that I can't bear this way of living any longer. I want a home, and to be allowed to care for people, and to have friends again—I can't live by myself."

She knew that she had voiced the truth as she knew it, and covered her face with her hands in dread lest it might fail to reach his perceptions.

She heard a change in Father Farrell's voice when next he spoke.

"Ye'd better tell me the whole tale, Sister. Who is it ye want to go back to in the world?"

She looked up, bewildered.

"Any one—home. Where I can just be myself again—"

"And how much home have ye got left, after being a nun ten years? Is your mother alive?"

"No."

"Your father?"

"No," faltered Alex.

"They died after ye left home, I daresay?"

"Yes."

"Then, in the name of goodness, who do ye expect is going to make a home for ye? Have ye sisters and brothers?"

"Yes." Alex hesitated, seeing at last whither his inquiries were tending.

"Yes, and I'm thinking they're married and with homes of their own by this time," said the priest shrewdly. "Let me tell ye, ten years sees a good many changes in the world, and it isn't much of a welcome ye'd get by breaking your holy vows and making a great scandal in the Church, and then planting yourself on relations who've lost touch with ye, more or less, and have homes of their own, and a husband or wife, as the case may be, and perhaps little children to care for. A maiden aunt isn't so very much thought of, in the best of circumstances, let me tell ye.

"Now isn't there reason in what I'm saying, Sister?"

Sick conviction shot through her.

"Yes, Father."

"Well, then, ye'll just give up that foolish notion, now."

He looked at her white, desperate face, and began to take long strides up and down the room.

"Have ye confidence in your Superior? Do ye get on with her?" he asked suddenly.

"Our present Superior has only been here a little while—the one before that—"

"I know, I know," he interrupted impatiently. "It's the Superior-General I mean, of course—everything must come to her in the long run, naturally. Have you full confidence in her, now?"

Alex felt as incapable of a negative reply as of an affirmative one. She knew that she did not understand the term "full confidence" as he did, and she temporized weakly.

"But our Mother-General is away in South America—she keeps delaying, and that's one reason why nothing has been settled about me. She hasn't even left America yet."

"I'm well aware of that. Don't waste time playing with me that way, Sister, ye'll get no further. Ye know very well what I mean. Now, tell me now, will it do for ye if I arrange for your transfer to another house—maybe to the one in London, or somewhere in your own country?"

The instinct of the imprisoned creature that sees another form of the same trap offered it under the guise of freedom, made her revolt.

"No," she cried. "No! I want to get right away—I want to stop being a nun."

The priest suddenly hit the table with his clenched fist, making it rock, and making his auditor start painfully.

"That's what you'll never do, not if ye got release from the holy vows ten times over. Once a nun always a nun, Sister, although ye may be false and faithless and go back into the very midst of the world ye've renounced. But ye'll find no comfort there, no blessing, and God'll remember it against ye, Sister. A soul that spurns His choicest graces need expect no mercy, either here or hereafter. I tell ye straight, Sister, that ye'll be deliberately jeopardizing your immortal soul, if ye give in to this wicked folly. Ye've to choose between God and the Devil—between a little while of suffering here, maybe, and then Eternity in which to enjoy the reward of the faithful, or a hideous mockery of freedom here, followed by Hell and its torments for ever and ever. Which is it to be?"

Alex was terrified, but it was the priest's anger that terrified her, not the threats that he uttered. At the back of her mind, lay the dim conviction that no Hell could surpass in intensity of bitterness that which her spirit was traversing on earth.

Father Farrell looked at her frightened, distorted face, and his voice sank into persuasiveness.

"This'll pass, me dear child. Many a poor soul before ye has known what it is to falter by the wayside. But courage, Sister, ye can conquer this weakness with God's help. You're in no trouble about your faith, now are ye?"

Had Alex been able to formulate her thoughts clearly, she might have told him that it had long since become a matter of supreme unimportance to her whether or no she still possessed that which he termed her faith. As a fact, the beliefs which could alone have made the convent life endurable to her, had never struck more than the most shallow of roots into her consciousness. Perhaps the only belief which had any real hold upon her was the one that she had gradually formed upon her experience of the living—that God was a Superior Being who must be propitiated by the sacrifice of all that one held dear, lest He strike it from one.

She looked dimly at Father Farrell, and shook her head, because she was afraid of his anger if she owned to the utter insecurity of her hold upon any religious convictions.

"That's right, that's right," he said hastily. "I felt sure ye were a good child at bottom. Now would ye like to make a good general Confession, and I'll give ye absolution, and ye can start again?"

Some hint of inflexibility in the last words roused Alex to a final, frantic bid for liberty.

"It's no use—it won't do for me to begin again. I can't stay on. If I can't get released from my vows I'll—I'll run away."

Then there was a long silence.

When the priest spoke again, however, his voice held more of meditative speculation than of the anger which she feared.

"Supposing I could arrange it for ye—I don't say I could, mind, but it might be done, if good reasons were shown—what would ye say to another religious order altogether? It may be that this life is unsuited to ye—there have been such cases. I know a holy Carmelite nun who was in quite another order for nearly fifteen years, before she found out where the Lord really wanted her. Are ye one of those, maybe?"

"No," spoke Alex, almost sullenly. The conflict was wearing her out, and she was conscious only of a blind, unreasoning instinct that if she once gave ground, she would find herself for ever bound to the life which had become unendurable to her.

"What d'ye mean, No?"

"I want to go away. I want to be released from my vows."

The formula had become almost mechanical now. The Jesuit for the first time dropped the brusqueness of manner habitual to him.

Pacing the length of the big parlour with measured, even strides, his hands clasped behind his shabby cassock, he let his deep, naturally rhetorical voice boom out in full, rolling periods through the room.

"Why did ye come to me at all, Sister? It wasn't for advice, and it wasn't for help. I've offered both, and ye'll take neither. Having put your hand to the plough, you've looked back. Ye say that sooner than remain faithful ye'll run away—ye'll make a scandal and a disgrace for the Community that's sheltered ye, and bring shame and sorrow to the good Mothers here. What did ye expect me to answer to that? If your whole will is turned to evil, it was a farce and a mockery to come to me—I can do nothing.

"But one thing I'll tell ye, Sister. If ye do this thing—if it goes up to Rome, and the vows ye took in full consciousness and free will on the day ye were professed, are dissolved—so far as they ever can be, that is, and let me tell ye that it's neither a quick nor an easy business—if it comes to that, Sister, there'll be no going back. No cringing round to the convent afterwards, when ye find there's no place and no welcome for ye in the world, asking to be taken back. They'll not have ye, Sister, and they'll be right. If ye go, it's for ever."

It seemed to Alex that he was purposely seeking to frighten her—that he wanted to add fresh miseries and apprehensions to those already piled upon her, and a faint resentment flicked at her in questioning acceptance of such an assumption.

The shadow of spirit thus restored to her, just enabled her to endure the seemingly endless exposition hurled at her in the priest's powerful voice.

When it was all over, she crawled out of the room like a creature that had been beaten.

Stunned, she only knew that yet another fellow-creature had entered the league of those who were angered against her.

---

XXII

Rome

The crisis passed, as all such must pass, and Alex found herself in the position openly recognized as that of waiting for the dissolution of her religious vows.

It was as Father Farrell had said, neither a short nor an easy business, nor was she allowed to pass the months of her waiting at the LiÈge Mother-house.

They sent her to a small house of the Order in Rome, thinking, with the curious convent instinct for misplaced economy, to save the petty cost of incessant passing to and fro of correspondence and documents, between the convent in Belgium and the Papal Secretariat at the Vatican.

Alex went to Italy in a dream. It struck her with a faint sense of irony that she and Barbara, long ago, had entertained an ambition to visit Italy, standing for all that was romantic and picturesque in the South. After all, she was to be the first to realize that girlish dream, the fulfilment of which brought no elation.

At first she lived amongst the nuns, and led their life, but when it became evident beyond question that she was eventually to obtain release from her vows, the Community held no place for her any longer.

Her religious habit was taken away, and a thick, voluminous, black-stuff dress substituted, which the nuns thought light and cool in comparison with their own weighty garments, but of which the hard, stiff cuffs and high collar, unrelieved by any softening of white, made Alex suffer greatly.

The house was too small to admit of a pensionnat, but the nuns took in an inconsiderable number of lady boarders, and an occasional pupil. Alex, however, was not suffered to hold any intercourse with these. After her six months spent in Community life a final appeal was made to her, and when it failed of its effect she passed into a kind of moral ostracism.

She had a small bedroom, where her meals were served by the lay-sister who waited on the lady-boarders, and a little prie-dieu was put in a remote corner of the chapel for her use, neither to be confounded with the choir-stalls, nor the benches for visitors, nor the seats reserved for the ladies living in the house. The librarian Sister, in charge of the well-filled book-case of the Community-rooms, had instructions to provide her with literature. Beyond that, her existence remained unrecognized.

She often spent hours doing nothing, gazing from the window at the Corso far below, so curiously instinct with life after the solitude of the LiÈge grounds, encompassed by high walls on every side.

She did not read very much.

The books they gave her were all designed to one end—that of making her realize that she was turning her back upon the way of salvation. When she thought about it, Alex believed that this was, in truth, what she was doing, but it hardly seemed to matter.

Her room was fireless, and the old-fashioned house, as most Roman ones, had no form of central heating. She shivered and shivered, and in the early days of February fell ill. One abscess after another formed inside her throat, an unspeakably painful manifestation of general weakness.

One evening she was so ill that there was talk of sending for the chaplain—the doctor had never been suggested—but that same night the worst abscess of all broke inside her throat, and Alex saw that there was no hope of her being about to die.

The bright winter cold seemed to change with incredible rapidity into glowing summer heat, and a modicum of well-being gradually returned to her.

She even crept slowly and listlessly about in the shade of the great Borghese gardens, in the comparative freshness of the Pincio height, and wondered piteously at this strange realization of her girlhood's dream of seeing Italy. She never dared to go into the streets alone, nor would the nuns have permitted it.

Her difficult letters to England had been written.

Cedric had replied with courteous brevity, a letter so much what Sir Francis might have written that Alex was almost startled, and her father's man of business had written her a short, kind little note, rejoicing that the world was again to have the benefit of Miss Clare's society after her temporary retirement.

The only long letter she received was from Barbara.

"Hampstead,
"March 30, 1908.

"DEAREST ALEX,

"Your letter from Rome was, of course, a great surprise. I had been wondering when I should hear from you again, but I did not at all guess what your news would be when it came, as we had all quite grown to think of you as completely settled in the convent.

"I am afraid that, as you say, there may be complications and difficulties about your vows, as I suppose they are binding to a certain extent, and they are sure not to let you off without a fuss.

"Your letters aren't very explicit, my dear, so I'm still somewhat in the dark as to what you are doing and when you mean to come to London, as I suppose you will eventually do. And why Italy? If you're going to get out of the whole thing altogether, it seems funny that the convent people should trouble to send you to Italy, when you might just as well have come straight to England. However, no doubt you know your own affairs best, Alex, dear, and perhaps you're wise to take advantage of an opportunity that may not come again!

"Travelling has always been my dream, as you know, but except for that time I had at Neuilly, when you came out—Heavens, what ages ago!—and then our honeymoon in Paris, which was so terribly broken into when dear mother died, I've never had any chance at all, and I suppose now I never shall have. Everything is so expensive, and I'm really not a very good traveller unless I can afford to do the thing comfortably, otherwise I should simply love to have run over to Rome for Easter and got you to show me all the sights.

"I suppose your time is quite your own now? Of course, when you really do leave the Sisters, I hope you'll come straight to my wee cottage here—at any rate while you look about you and think over future plans.

"Cedric has written to you, I know, and if you feel you'd rather go to Clevedon Square, needless to say, my dear, I shall more than understand. Please yourself absolutely.

"But, of course, one's always rather chary of unknown sisters-in-law, and Violet quite rules the roost now-a-days. She and Cedric are a most devoted couple, and all that sort of thing, but as she's got all the money, one rather feels as if it was her house. I daresay you know the kind of thing I mean.

"She's quite a dear, in many ways, but I don't go there tremendously.

"Pamela adores her, and lives in her pocket. Pam tells me she hasn't seen you since she was about fifteen—I could hardly believe it. My dear, I don't know what you'll think of her! She's quite appallingly modern, to my mind, and makes me feel about a hundred years old.

"When I think of the way we were chaperoned, and sent about everywhere with a maid, and only allowed the dullest of dinner-parties, and tea-parties, and then those stiff, solemn balls! Pamela is for ever being asked to boy-and-girl affairs, and dinner dances and theatre-parties—I must say she's a huge success. Every one raves about her, and she goes in for being tremendously natural and jolly and full of vitality and she's had simply heaps of chances, already, though I daresay some of it has to do with being seen about everywhere with Violet, who simply splashes money out like water. She paid all Archie's debts, poor boy—I will say that for her. The result is that he's quite good and steady now, and every one says he'll make a first-rate Guardsman.

"I'm writing a long screed, Alex, but I really feel you ought to be posted up in all the family news, if you're really going to come and join forces with us again, after all these years. It seems quite funny to think of, so many things have happened since you left home for good—as we thought it was going to be. Do write again and tell me what you think of doing and when you're coming over. My tiny spare-room will be quite ready for you, any time you like.

"Your loving sister,
"BARBARA MCALLISTER."

Barbara's letter was astounding.

Even Alex, too jaded for any great poignancy of emotion, felt amazement at her sister's matter-of-fact acceptance of a state of affairs that had been brought about by such moral and physical upheaval.

Had Barbara realized none of it, or was she merely utterly incurious? Alex could only feel thankful that no long, explanatory letter need be written. Perhaps when she got back to England it would be easier to make her explanation to Barbara.

She could hardly imagine that return.

The affair of the release from her vows dragged on with wearisome indefiniteness. Documents and papers were sent for her signature, and there were one or two interviews, painful and humiliating enough.

None of them, however, hurt her as that interview in the parlour at LiÈge with Father Farrell had done, for to none of them did she bring that faint shred of hope that had underlain her last attempt to make clear the truth as she knew it.

She knew that money had been paid, and Cedric had written a grave and short note, bidding her leave that side of the question to his care, and to that of her father's lawyers.

Then, with dramatic unexpectedness, came the end.

She was told that all the necessary formalities had been complied with, and that her vows were now annulled. It was carefully explained to her that this did not include freedom to marry. The Church would sanction no union of hers.

Alex could have laughed.

She felt as though marriage had been spoken of, for the first time, to an old, old woman, who had never known love, and to whom passion and desire alike had long been as strangers. Why should that, which had never come to her eager, questing youth, be spoken of in connection with the strange, remote self which was all that was left of her now?

She reflected how transitory had been the relations into which she had entered, how little any intimacy of spirit had ever bound her to another human being.

Her first love—Marie-AngÈle:

"I love you for your few caresses,
I love you for my many tears."

Where was Marie-AngÈle now? Alex knew nothing of her. No doubt she had married, had borne children, and somewhere in her native Soissons was gay and prosperous still.

Alex dimly hoped so.

Queenie Torrance.

Her thoughts even now dwelt tenderly for a moment on that fair, irresponsive object of so much devotion. On Queenie as a pale, demure schoolgirl, her fair curls rolled back from her white, open brow, in her black-stuff dress and apron. On Queenie, the blue ribbon for good conduct lying across her gently-curving breast, serenely telling fibs or surreptitiously carrying off the forbidden sweets and dainties procured for her by Alex, or gazing with cold vexation on some extravagant demonstration of affection that had failed to win her approval.

In retrospect Alex could see Queenie again, the white, voluminous ball dresses she had worn, the tiny wreath of blue forget-me-nots, once condemned as "bad form" by Lady Isabel.

On Queenie Goldstein her thoughts dwelt little. She had heard long ago from Barbara of Queenie's divorce, in an action brought by her husband, which had afforded the chief scandal of the year 1899, and then no one had heard or even seen anything of Queenie for a long while, and Barbara had said that she was reported to be abroad with her father.

Five years later Barbara had written excitedly:

"You remember that awful Queenie Goldstein? and how full the papers were of her pictures, when that dreadful divorce case of hers was on, and the five co-respondents and everything? You'll hardly believe it, but she's in London again, having succeeded in marrying an American whom every one says is the coming millionaire. I saw her at the theatre myself, in a box, absolutely slung with diamonds. She's taken to making up her face tremendously, but she hasn't altered much, and she's received everywhere. They say her husband simply adores her."

Alex still remembered the rebuke with which Mother Gertrude had handed her that letter, bidding her remind her sister that things of the world, worldly, had no place in the life of a nun.

Nevertheless, although she had put the thought from her, she knew that in her heart she had felt a certain gladness that her erstwhile playmate, given over though she might be to the world, the flesh and the Devil, had yet not found those things that she coveted to have failed her.

Queenie, at least, had known what she wanted, and Alex' thoughts of her held no condemnation.

From Queenie, her mind went to the memory of Noel Cardew, and she was faintly surprised at the unvivid presentment of him which was all that she could evoke.

Noel had held no real place in her life at all.

Nothing that would endure had ever passed between him and her. It was years since she had thought of their ill-starred engagement, and then it had always been in connection with Sir Francis and Lady Isabel—their brief pride and pleasure in it, and the sudden downfall of their hopes.

Of Noel himself she had scarcely a recollection. Perhaps her clearest one was that of the earnest young egoist, only made attractive by a certain simplicity, who had taken her to sit in a disused ice-house one hot summer day, and had talked about photography. Of the later Noel, Alex was astounded to find that she retained no impression at all.

She could not even remember whether it was he or his brother Eric who had married red-haired Marie Munroe in the same year that she herself had taken her first vows as a nun.

Perhaps it was Noel.

At all events, he had probably married long ago, and Alex could believe that some corner of land in Devonshire was the better for the earnest supervision that he would accord to it, both in his own person and in that of the generation that would doubtless succeed him.

Mother Gertrude.

At the last and most worshipped of the shrines before which Alex had offered the sad, futile, unmeasured burnt-offerings of her life, her thoughts lingered least.

It had all been a mistake.

She had given recklessly, foolishly, squandering her all because life had cheated her of any outlet for a force of the strength of which she had had no measure given her, and now she had to pay the bitter penalty for a folly which had not even been met by answering human affection.

She wrote no letter to Mother Gertrude, and received no word from her.

As the days crept on, Alex, without volition of her own, found that her journey to England had been arranged for—that money was to be advanced to her for her expenses, that she was expected to supplement with it her utter penury of worldly possessions. One day she went out, frightened and at a loss, and entered some of the first shops she saw, in a street that led down from the Pincio Gates.

They were not large shops, and she had difficulty in making herself understood, but she purchased a ready-made blue-serge skirt, with a coat that she called a jacket, and an ugly black toque, that most resembled in shape those that she remembered seeing in London ten years earlier. She wore these clothes, with a white cotton blouse that fastened at the back and came high up under her chin, for some days before she left Rome, so as to grow accustomed to them, and to lose the sense of awkwardness that they produced in her.

The heavy boots and a pair of black-cotton gloves that she had brought from Belgium, still served her. The day of her departure was fixed, and she wrote to Barbara, but she knew neither by what route she was going nor how long the journey would take.

Her companions, selected by the Superior of the convent, proved to be an old lady and her daughter who were going to Paris. Evidently they knew her story, for they looked at her with scared, curious faces and spoke to her very little. Both were experienced travellers, and on the long, hot journey in the train, when it seemed as though the seats of the railway carriage were made of molten iron, they extended themselves with cushions and little paper fans, and slept most of the way. At Genoa the daughter, timidly, but with kindness, pressed Alex to eat and drink, and after that she spoke to her once or twice, and gave her a friendly invitation to join them at the small pension in Paris to which they were bound, for a night's halt before she proceeded to Boulogne and thence to England. Alex accepted with bewildered thankfulness.

She was weak and exhausted, and the old lady and her daughter were pitiful enough, and saw her into the train next day, and gave her the provision of sandwiches which she had not thought to make for herself.

The train sped through flat, green country, with tall poplars shading the small, narrow French houses that dotted the line on either side. Her eye dilated as she gazed on the sea, when at last Boulogne was reached.

She remembered the same grey expanse of rolling waves tipped with foam on the morning, eight years ago, when the girl Alex Clare had crossed to Belgium, tearful, indeed, and frightened, but believing herself to be making that new beginning which should lead to the eventual goal which life must surely hold in store for her.

Only eight years, and the bitterness of a lifetime's failure encompassed her spirit.

---

XXIII

N.W.

Alex got off the boat at Folkestone, dazed and bewildered. She had been ill all through the crossing, and her head was still swimming. She grasped her heavy, clumsy suit-case and was thankful to have no luggage, when she saw the seething crowd of passengers, running after uniformed porters in search of heavy baggage that was being flung on to trucks to an accompaniment of noise and shouting that frightened her.

She made her way to the train and into a third-class carriage, too much afraid of its starting without her to dare to go in search of the hot tea which she saw the passengers drinking thankfully. It was a raw, grey day, and Alex, in her thin serge coat and skirt, that had been so much too hot in Italy, shivered violently. Her gloves were nearly thread-bare and her hands felt clammy and stiff. She took off her little black-straw toque and leant her head against the back of the seat, wishing that she could sleep.

It seemed to her that the other people in the carriage were looking at her suspiciously, and she closed her eyes so as not to see them.

After a long while the train started.

Alex tried to make plans. In the shabby purse which she had clasped in her hand all the way, for fear of its being stolen, was a piece of paper with Barbara's address. She would not go to Clevedon Square, for fear of Cedric's unknown wife. Cedric with a wife and child! Alex marvelled, and could not believe that she might soon make the acquaintance of these beings who seemed to her so nearly mythical.

The thought of Barbara as a widow living in a little house of her own in Hampstead, seemed far less unfamiliar. Barbara had always written regularly to Alex, and had twice been to see her when she was in the English house and once in her early days in Belgium.

Barbara had often said in her letters that she was very lonely, and that it was terrible having to live so far out of town because of expenses. Ralph, poor dear, had left her very, very badly off, and there had been very little more for her on the death of Sir Francis. Alex supposed that Downshire Hill must be a very unfashionable address, but she did not connect "N.W." with any particular locality.

She was always very stupid at finding her way about, and, anyhow, her bag was heavy. She decided that she would take a cab.

At Charing Cross it was raining, and the noise was deafening. Alex had meant to send Barbara a telegram from Folkestone, but had not known where to find the telegraph office, and she now realized with a pang of dismay that her sister would not be expecting her.

"How stupid I am, and how badly I manage things," she thought. "I hope she won't be out."

The number of taxis at the station bewildered Alex, who had only seen one or two crawling about the streets in Rome, and had heard of them, besides, as ruinously expensive. She found a four-wheeled cab and put her bag on the floor. The man did not get down from his box to open the door for her, as she expected. He leant down and asked hoarsely.

"Where d'you want to go, Miss?"

"Downshire Hill," said Alex. "No. 101."

"Downshire 'Ill? Where's that?"

"I don't know," said Alex, frightened. She wondered if the man was drunk, and prepared to pull her bag out of the cab again.

"'Alf a minute."

He called out something unintelligible to another driver, and received an answer.

"Downshire 'Ill's N.W.," he then informed her. "Out 'Ampstead w'y."

"Yes," said Alex. "Can't you take me there?"

He looked at her shabby clothes and white, frightened face.

"I'd like to see my fare, first, if you please," he said insolently.

Alex was too much afraid of his making a scene to refuse.

"How much will it be?"

"Seven and sixpence, Miss."

She pulled two half-crowns out of her purse. It was all she had left.

"This is all the change I have," she told him in a shaking voice. "They will pay the rest when I get there."

He muttered something dissatisfied, but put the coins into his pocket.

Alex climbed into the cab.

It jolted away very slowly.

The rain was falling fast, and dashing against the windows of the cab. Alex glanced out, but the streets through which they were driving were all unfamiliar to her. It seemed a very long way to Downshire Hill.

She began to wonder very much how Barbara would receive her, and how she could make clear to her the long, restless agony that had led her to obtain release from her vows. Would Barbara understand?

Letters had been very inadequate, and although Barbara had written that Alex had better come to her for a while if she meant to return to England, she had given no hint of any deeper comprehension.

"We must make plans when we meet," she had written at the end of the letter.

Alex wondered with a sense of apprehension what those plans would be. She had for so long become accustomed to being treated as a chattel, without volition of her own, that it did not occur to her that she would have any hand in forming her future life.

Presently she became conscious that the rain had stopped, and that the atmosphere was lighter. She let down the glass of the window nearest her, and saw, with surprise, that there was a rolling expanse of green, with a number of willow-trees, on one side of the road. It did not look like London.

Then the cab turned a corner, and Alex saw "Downshire Hill" on a small board against the wall.

This was where Barbara lived, then.

The little houses were small and compact, but of agreeably varying height and shape, with a tiny enclosure of green in front of each, protected by railings and a little gate. No. 101, before which the cab drew up, had a bush that Alex thought must be lilac, and was covered with ivy. There were red blinds to the windows.

She got out, pulling her heavy bag after her, and timidly pushed open the little gate, glancing up at the windows as she did so.

There was no one to be seen.

Still clutching at her suit-case, Alex pulled the bell faintly.

"There's half my fare owing yet," said the cabman gruffly.

Thus reminded, Alex rang again.

An elderly parlour-maid with iron-grey hair and a hard face opened the door.

"Is—is Mrs. MacAllister at home?" faltered Alex.

"I'll inquire," said the maid, with a lightning glance at the suit-case.

She left the door open, and Alex saw a little flight of stairs. A murmured colloquy took place at the top, and then Barbara, slight and severely black-clad, came down.

"Alex, that's not you?"

"Yes. Oh, Barbara!"

"My dear—I've been expecting to hear from you every day! I've been imagining all sorts of awful things. Why didn't you wire? Do come in—you must be dead, and have you been carrying that huge bag?"

"I came from the station in a cab."

"A cab!" echoed Barbara in rather a dismayed voice. "What a long way to come, when you could have done it so easily by the underground railway but I suppose you didn't know?"

"No," repeated Alex blankly. "I didn't know."

"What's he waiting for? Will he carry your trunk upstairs?"

"That is all the luggage I have, and I can carry it up quite well, and it isn't heavy. But I hadn't quite enough money for the fare—he ought to have another half-crown."

"Oh, dear," said Barbara. "Wait a minute, then, Alex."

She disappeared up the stairs, leaving Alex alone with the severe parlour-maid, who still held open the front door.

She leant against the wall in the tiny passage, wondering what she had expected of her actual arrival, that the reality should give her such a sense of misery.

If only she had telegraphed to Barbara from Folkestone!

"Here's two shillings. Ada, have you got a sixpence, by any chance?"

"There's sixpence in the kitchen, 'm," said Ada, and fetched it.

"There!" said Barbara. "Pay him then, please, Ada. Now, Alex, come upstairs and sit down. You look dreadfully ill and worn-out, my dear."

Alex lifted the suit-case again.

"Oh, Ada will see to that. Your room is all ready, Alex. It's very small, but then the house is a perfect doll's house, as you see. This is my tiny drawing-room."

"It's very pretty," said Alex, sinking into a chair.

"It's not bad—the things are nice enough. Ralph had some exquisite things—but, of course, the house is too hateful, and I hate living all the way out here. No one ever comes near me. Cedric's wife can't get her chauffeur to bring her—he pretends he doesn't know where it is. The only person who ever comes is Pamela."

"I thought she was to live with you?"

"Pam! Oh, she wouldn't bury herself out here, for long. Pam's very much in request, my dear. She's been paying visits all over the place, and can go on indefinitely, I believe. She makes her headquarters with Cedric and Violet in Clevedon Square, you know, but of course she'll marry. Pam's all right."

"Last time I saw Pam she was in short frocks and a pigtail."

"She's come out in the most extraordinary way. Every one says so. Not exactly pretty, but frightfully taking, and most awfully attractive to men. They say she's so full of life. I must say, when we came out, Alex, we didn't have nearly such a good time as she has. Men seem to go down like ninepins before her. She's always bringing them out here to tea, and to look at the view of London from the Heath. One always used to look on Hampstead Heath as a sort of joke—Phil May's drawings, and that kind of thing. I certainly never expected to live here—but lots of artists do, and Ralph had a big studio here. And it's very inexpensive. Besides, if you know you way about, it's quite easy to come in and out from town. Pamela always brings her young men on the top of a 'bus. Girls can do anything now-a-days, of course. Fancy father, if one of us had done such a thing!"

"Who looks after her?" asked Alex, rather awe-struck.

"She looks after herself, my dear, and does it uncommonly effectively. She could marry tomorrow if she liked—and marry well, too. Of course, Cedric is her guardian in a sort of way, I suppose, but he lets her do anything she like—only laughs."

"Cedric!" spoke Alex wistfully. "Do you know, I haven't seen Cedric since—I left Clevedon Square."

"My dear, that's ten years, isn't it? Cedric's grown exactly like father. He's got just his way of standing in front of the fire and shaking his spectacles up and down in his hand—you remember father's way? Of course, he's done extraordinarily well—every one says so—and his marriage was an excellent thing, too."

"Is—Violet—nice?"

Barbara laughed rather drily.

"She's got a lot of money, and—yes, I suppose she is nice. Between ourselves, Alex, she's the sort of person who rather aggravates me. She's always so prosperous and happy, as though nothing had ever gone wrong with her, or ever could. She's very generous, I will say that for her—and extraordinarily good-natured. Most people adore her—she's the sort of woman that other women rave about, but I must say most men like her, too. Her people were rather inclined to think she could have done better for herself than Cedric. Of course, he isn't well off, and she's two years older than he is. But it's answered all right, and they were tremendously in love with one another."

"Is she very pretty?"

"She's inclined to be fat, but, of course, she is pretty, in her own style—very. And the little girl is a perfect darling—little Rosemary.

"But, Alex, here am I talking you to death when you must be dying for tea. What sort of a crossing did you have?"

"Not very bad, but I was ill all the way."

"Oh, no wonder you look so washed out," said Barbara, as though relieved, but she went on eyeing her sister uneasily through the rapidly increasing dusk.

When Ada came in with the tea appointments, Barbara told her to bring the lamp.

"Yes'm. And your bag, 'm—may I have the key?"

Alex looked bewildered, then recollected that the maid was offering to unpack for her, and pulled out the key from her purse.

"Isn't there your trunk still to come?" asked Barbara.

"No. You see, I hadn't much to bring—only just one or two things that I got in Rome."

Alex wondered if Barbara understood that until a few months ago she had been a nun, living the life of a nun. She thought of the apprehension with which she had viewed making an explanation to Barbara, and almost smiled. It appeared that no explanation would be required of her.

But presently Barbara said uneasily:

"It seems extraordinary, your having no luggage like this, Alex. I don't know what Ada will think, I'm sure. I told her that you'd been living abroad for a good many years—I thought that was the best thing to say. But I never thought of your having no luggage."

"I hadn't got anything to bring, you see. I must get some things," repeated Alex forlornly.

"You see," said her sister half apologetically, "Ada's been with me ever since I married. She was Ralph's mother's maid, and perfectly devoted to him. I couldn't ever get that sort of servant to live out here, if it wasn't for that—she waits at meals, and maids me, and does everything, except the actual cooking. I know she's rather disagreeable in her manner, but she's a perfect treasure to me."

When Ada had brought in the lamps and filled the little room with cheerful light, drawing the blinds and curtains, Barbara looked again hard at her sister.

"Good heavens, Alex, how thin you are! and you look as though you hadn't slept for a month."

"Oh, but I have," said Alex eagerly, and then stopped.

She did not feel able to explain to Barbara the insatiable powers of sleep which seemed as though they could never be satisfied, after those ten years of unvarying obedience to a merciless five o'clock bell.

"I am glad to hear it," Barbara replied in a dissatisfied voice. "But I never saw any one so changed. Have you been ill?"

"Rather run down," Alex said hurriedly, with the convent instinct of denying physical ills. "I had two or three very troublesome abscesses in my throat, just before Easter, and that left me rather weak."

"My dear, how awful! You never told me. Did you have an operation? Are you scarred?"

"No. They broke of themselves inside my throat, luckily."

"Oh—don't!" cried Barbara, and shuddered.

The sisters were very silent during tea. Alex saw her sister looking hard at her hands, and became conscious of contrast. Barbara was thin, but her hands were slender and exceedingly white. She wore, besides her wedding-ring, a sapphire one, which Alex thought must have been her engagement-ring. On her wrist was a tiny gold watch, and a gold curb-chain bracelet. Her own hands, Alex now saw, were more than thin. They were almost emaciated, with knuckles that shone white, and a sharp prominence at each wrist-bone. They were not white, but rough and mottled, with broken skin round each finger-nail. She wondered if her whole person was in as striking a contrast to her sister's. When she had put on the serge skirt and white muslin shirt, the sensation had overwhelmed her, accustomed to the heavy religious habit, of being lightly, almost indecently clad. But Barbara's dress was of soft, silky material, with a low, turned-down collar, such as was just beginning to come into fashion. Her hair was piled into a shining knot of little, sausage-shaped curls, and parted in front. Though she was only twenty-eight, the grey in Barbara's hair was plentiful, but her small face looked youthful enough, and had none of the hard lines and shadows that Alex knew to lie round her own eyes and lips. Her little, slight figure was very erect, and she wore black suÈde shoes with sparkling buckles. Alex looked down at her own clumsy, ill-made boots, which had already begun to hurt her feet, and instinctively put up her hands to the cheap black toque, that felt heavy on her head.

"Why don't you take off your hat?" Barbara asked her kindly. "I am sure it would rest you."

She was too much used to obedience not to comply instantly, pushing back with both hands the weight of untidy hair that instantly fell over her eyes.

"Oh, Alex! Your hair!"

"It's growing very fast. I—I've not been cutting it lately. There's just enough to put it up, Barbara."

"It's much darker than it used to be, isn't it?"

"Yes, it's nearly black now. Do you remember how light the ends used to be? But I think it lost its colour from being always under the veil, you know. The worst of it is that it's not growing evenly, it's all short lengths."

"Yes. That's very awkward," said Barbara dispassionately. "Especially when it's so straight."

Alex reflected that her sister was just as self-contained as ever.

"Wouldn't you like to come to your room and rest till dinner, Alex?"

Alex got up at once.

"You ought to take Plasmon, or something of that sort, and try to get a little fatter. There's simply nothing of you, Alex—you're all eyes, with rings like saucers round them."

After Barbara had left her in the tiny, pretty bedroom, that Alex thought looked wonderfully luxurious, she went straight to her looking-glass.

"Good heavens, how ugly I am!" she said to herself involuntarily.

Her face was sallow, with sunken cheeks, and the Roman sun had powdered her skin all over with little, pale freckles. Her eyes, as Barbara had said, had rings like saucers round them, and looked oddly large and prominent, from the slight puffiness of the under-lids.

Her teeth had, perhaps, suffered most of all. She had had one or two taken out, and the gaps were visible and unsightly. They had never been very good teeth, and she remembered still all that she had suffered at the hands of an unskilled Brussels dentist in Belgium. For the last few years she had endured intermittent toothache, sooner than submit to further torture, and she saw now that a small black patch was spreading between the two front teeth. Barbara, with the grey mingled freely in her light hair, and her severe widow's weeds, might look more than twenty-eight but Alex, at thirty-one, bore the semblance of a woman of forty.

She hid her face in her disfigured hands.

Presently she saw that there was hot water in a little brass can on the washing-stand, and she thankfully made use of it.

Ada had unpacked everything, and Alex saw the brush and comb that she had hastily purchased, on the dressing-table. Beside them was the packet of hair-pins that she had remembered to get at the last moment, and that was all.

"There ought to be something else, but I've forgotten," thought Alex.

She wondered if Barbara would expect her to dress for dinner. The idea had not occurred to her. She had one other blouse, a much better one, made of black net, so transparent as to show glimpses of her coarse, white-cotton underwear, with its high yoke and long sleeves.

Her hair, of course, was impossible. Even if it had not been so short and of such an intractable, limp straightness. Alex had forgotten how to do it. She remembered with dim surprise that at Clevedon Square Lady Isabel's maid had always done her hair for her.

She brushed it away from her face, and made a small coil on the top of her head, after the fashion which she remembered best, and tried to fasten back the untidy lengths that fell over her ears and forehead.

The hair-pins that she had bought were very long and thick. She wished that they did not show so obviously.

"Alex?" said Barbara's cool voice at her door.

Alex came out, and they went downstairs together, Alex a few steps behind her sister, since the stairs were not broad enough for two to walk abreast. She tried awkwardly not to step on the tail of Barbara's black lace teagown. Ada waited upon them, and although the helpings of food seemed infinitesimal to Alex, everything tasted delicious, and she wondered if Barbara always had three courses as well as a dessert of fruit and coffee, even when she was by herself.

"You don't smoke, I suppose?" Barbara said. "No, of course not how stupid of me! Let's go up to the drawing-room again."

"Barbara, do you smoke?"

"No. Ralph hated women to smoke, and I don't like to see it myself, though pretty nearly every one does it now. Violet smokes far too much. I wonder Cedric lets her. But as a matter of fact, he lets her do anything she likes."

"I can't realize Cedric married."

"I know. Look here, Alex, he'll want to see you—and you'll be wanting to talk over plans, won't you?"

"Yes," said Alex nervously. "I—I don't want to have a lot of fuss, you know. Of course I know it's upsetting for everybody—my coming out of the convent after every one thought I was settled. But, oh, Barbara! I had to leave!"

"Personally, I can't think why you ever went in," said Barbara impersonally. "Or why you took ten years to find out you weren't suited to the life. That sounds unkind, and I don't mean to be—you know I don't. Of course, you were right to come away. Only I'm afraid they've ruined your health—you're so dreadfully thin, and you look much older than you've any right to, Alex. I believe you ought to go into the country somewhere and have a regular rest-cure. Every one is doing them now. However, we'll see what Cedric and Violet say."

"When shall I see them?" asked Alex nervously.

"Well," said her sister, hesitating, "what about tomorrow? It's better to get it over at once, isn't it? I thought I'd ring them up this evening—I know they're dining at home." She glanced at the clock.

"Look here, Alex, why don't you go to bed? I always go early myself—and you're simply dead tired. Do! Then tomorrow we might go into town and do some shopping. You'll want some things at once, won't you?"

Alex saw that Barbara meant her to assent, and said "Yes" in a dazed way.

She was very glad to go to her room, and the bed seemed extraordinarily comfortable.

Barbara had kissed her and said anxiously, "I do hope you'll feel more like yourself tomorrow, my dear. I hardly feel I know you."

Then she had rustled away, and Alex had heard her go downstairs, perhaps to telephone to Clevedon Square.

Lying in bed in the dark, she thought about her sister.

It seemed incredible to Alex that she could ever have bullied and domineered over Barbara. Yet in their common childhood, this had happened. She could remember stamping her foot at Barbara, and compelling her to follow her sister's lead again and again. And there was the time when she had forced a terrified, reluctant Barbara to play at tight-rope dancing on the stairs, and Barbara had obediently clambered on to the newel-post, and fallen backwards into the hall and hurt her back.

Alex remembered still the agonized days and nights of despairing remorse which had followed, and her own sense of being all but a murderess. She had thought then that she could never, never quarrel and be angry with Barbara again. But she had gone away to school, and Barbara had got well, and in the holidays Alex had been more overbearing than ever in the schoolroom.

And now Barbara seemed so infinitely competent—so remote from the failures and emotional disasters that had wrecked Alex. She made Alex feel like a child in the hands of a serious, rather ironical grown-up person, who did not quite know how to dispose of it.

Alex herself wondered what would happen to her, much as a child might have wondered. But she was tired enough to sleep.

And the next morning Barbara, more competent than ever, came in and suggested that she should have her breakfast in bed, so as to feel rested enough for a morning's shopping in town.

"Though I must say," said Barbara, in a dissatisfied voice, "that you don't look any better than you did last night. I hoped you might look more like yourself, after a night's rest. I really don't think the others will know you."

"Am I going to see them?"

"Oh, I talked to Violet last night on the telephone, and she said I was to give you her love, and she hoped we'd both lunch there tomorrow."

"At Clevedon Square?" asked Alex, beginning to tremble.

"Yes. You don't mind, do you?"

"No, I don't mind."

It was very strange to be in the remembered London streets again, stranger still to be taken to shops by Barbara and authoritatively guided in the choice of a coat and skirt, a hat that should conceal as much as possible of the disastrous coiffure underneath, and a pair of black suÈde walking-shoes, that felt oddly light and soft to her feet.

"There's no hurry about the other things, is there?" said Barbara, more as though stating a fact than asking a question. "Now we'd better take a taxi to Clevedon Square, or we shall be late."

A few minutes later, as the taxi turned into the square, she said, with what Alex recognized in surprise as a kind of nervousness in her voice:

"We thought you'd rather get it all over at once, you know, Alex. Seeing the family, I mean. Pam is staying there anyway, and Violet said Archie was coming to lunch. There'll be nobody else, except, perhaps, one of Violet's brothers. She's always got one or other of them there."

Alex felt sick with dismay. Then some remnant of courage came back to her, and she clenched her hands unseen, and vowed that she would go through with it.

The cab stopped before the familiar steps, and Barbara said, as to a stranger: "Here we are."

---

XXIV

All of Them

The well-remembered hall and broad staircase swam before Alex' eyes as she followed Barbara upstairs and heard them announced as:

"Mrs. McAllister—and Miss Clare!"

In a dream she entered the room, and was conscious of a dream-like feeling of relief at its totally unfamiliar aspect. All the furniture was different, and there was chintz instead of brocade, everywhere. She would not have known it.

Then she saw, with growing bewilderment, that the room was full of people.

"Alex?" said a soft, unknown voice.

Barbara hovered uneasily beside her, and Alex dimly heard her speaking half-reassuringly and half-apologetically. But Violet Clare had taken her hand, and was guiding her into the inner half of the room, which was empty.

"Don't bother about the others for a minute—Barbara, go and look after them, like a dear—let's make acquaintance in peace, Alex. Do you know who I am?"

"Cedric's wife?"

"Yes, that's it." Then, as Barbara left them, Violet noiselessly stamped her foot. "You poor dear! I don't believe she ever told you there was to be a whole crowd of family here. That's just like poor, dear Barbara! I'm sure she never had one atom of imagination in her life, now had she? The idea of dragging you here the very day after you got back from such a journey." The soft, fluent voice went on, giving her time to recover herself, Alex hardly hearing what was said to her, but with a sensation of adoring gratitude gradually invading her, for this warm, unhesitating welcome and unquestioning sympathy.

She looked dumbly at her sister-in-law.

In Violet she saw the soft, generous contours and opulent prettiness of which she had caught glimpses in the South. The numerous Marchesas who had come to the convent parlour in Rome had had just such brown, liquid eyes, with dark lashes throwing into relief an opaque ivory skin, just such dazzling teeth and such ready, dimpling smiles, and had worn the same wealth of falling laces at dÉcolletÉ throat and white, rounded wrists. Violet was in white, with a single string of wonderful pearls round her soft neck, and her brilliant brown hair was arranged in elaborate waves, with occasional little escaping rings and tendrils.

Alex thought her beautiful, and wondered why Barbara had spoken in deprecation of such sleepy, prosperous prettiness.

She noticed that Violet did not look at her with rather wondering dismay, as her sister had done, and only once said:

"You do look tired, you poor darling! It's that hateful journey. I'm a fearfully bad traveller myself. When we were married, Cedric wanted to go to the south of France for our honeymoon, but I told him nothing would induce me to risk being seasick, and he had to take me to Cornwall instead. Cedric will be here in a minute, and we'll make him come and talk to you quietly out here. You don't want to go in amongst all that rabble, do you?"

"Who is there?" asked Alex faintly.

"Pam and the boys—that's my two brothers, you know, whom you needn't bother about the very least bit in the world, and here's Archie," she added, as the door opened again.

Alex would have known Archie in a moment, anywhere, he was so like their mother. Even the first inflection of his voice, as he came towards Violet, reminded her of Lady Isabel.

She had not seen him since his schooldays, and wondered if he would have recognized her without Violet's ready explanation.

"Alex has come, Archie. That goose Barbara went and brought her here without explaining that she's only just got back to England, and is naturally tired to death. I'll leave you to talk, while I see what's happened to Cedric."

"I say!" exclaimed Archie, and stood looking desperately embarrassed. "How are you, Alex, old girl? We meet as strangers, what?"

"I should have known you anywhere, Archie. You're so like Barbara—so like mother."

"They say Pam's exactly like what mother was. Have you seen her?"

"No, not yet. She—Violet—brought me in here."

"I say, she's a ripper, isn't she? Cedric didn't do badly for himself—trust him. Wonder what the beggar'll be up to next? He's done jolly well, all along the line—retrieved the family fortunes, what? It only remains for me to wed an American, and Pamela to bring off her South African millionaire. She's got one after her, did you know?"

He spoke with a certain boyish eagerness that was rather attractive, but his rapid speech and restless manner made Alex wonder if he was nervous.

"Couldn't you ask Pamela to come to me here, so that I could see her without all those people?"

"What people? It's only old Jack Temple, and Carol. Harmless as kittens, what? But I'll get Pam for you in two twos. You watch."

He put his fingers into his mouth and emitted a peculiar low whistle on two prolonged notes. The signal was instantly answered from the other room, but quaveringly, as though the whistler were laughing.

Then in a minute she appeared, very slim and tall, in the opening between the two rooms.

"I like your cheek, Archie!"

"I say, Pam, Alex is here."

"Oh, Alex!"

Pamela, too, looked and sounded rather embarrassed as she came forward and laid a fresh, glowing cheek against her sister's.

"Barbara telephoned last night that you'd come, and seemed awfully seedy," she said in a quick, confused way. "She ought to have made you rest today."

"Oh, no, I'm all right," said Alex awkwardly. "How you've changed, Pamela! I haven't seen you since you were at school."

Looking at her sister, she secretly rather wondered at what Barbara had said of the girl's attractiveness.

Pamela's round face was glowing with health and colour, and she held herself very upright, but Alex thought that her hair looked ugly, plastered exaggeratedly low on her forehead, and she could not see the resemblance to their mother of which Archie had spoken, except in the fairness of colouring which Pamela shared with Barbara and with Archie himself.

"You've changed, too, Alex. You look so frightfully thin, and you've lost all your colour. Have you been ill?"

"No, I've not been ill. Only rather run down. I was ill before Easter—perhaps that's it."

Alex was embarrassed too, a horrible feeling of failure and inadequacy creeping over her, and seeming to hamper her in every word and movement. Pamela's cold, rather wondering scrutiny made her feel terribly unsure of herself. She had often known the sensation before—at school, in her early days at the novitiate, again in Rome, and ever since her arrival in England. It was the helpless insecurity of one utterly at variance with her surroundings.

She was glad when Violet came back and said: "Here's Cedric. Go down to lunch, children—we'll follow you."

Cedric's greeting to his sister was the most affectionate and the least awkward that she had yet received. He kissed her warmly and said, "Well, my dear I'm glad we've got you back in England again. You must come to us, if Barbara will spare you."

"Oh, Cedric!"

She looked at him for a moment, emotionally shaken. That Cedric should have grown into a man! She saw in a moment that he was very good-looking, the best-looking of them all, with Sir Francis' pleasantly serious expression and the merest shade of pomposity in his manner. Only the blinking, short-sighted grey eyes behind his spectacles remained of the solemn little brother she had known.

"Come down and have some lunch, dear. What possessed Barbara to bring you here, if you didn't feel up to coming? We could have gone to Hampstead. Violet says she's been most inconsiderate to you."

"Yes, most," said Violet herself placidly. "Dear Barbara is always so unimaginative. Of course, it's fearfully trying for Alex, after being away such ages, to have every one thrust upon her like this."

Alex felt a throb of gratitude.

"Barbara thought it had better all be got over at once," she said timidly.

"That's just like her! Barbara is being completely ruined by that parlour-maid of hers—Ada. I always think Ada is responsible for all Barbara's worst inspirations. She rules her with a rod of iron. Shall you hate coming down to lunch, Alex? Those riotous children will be off directly, they're wild about the skating-rink at Olympia. Then we can talk comfortably."

She put her hand caressingly through Alex' arm, as they went downstairs. Alex felt that she could have worshipped her sister-in-law for her easy, pitying tenderness.

The consciousness of it helped her all through the long meal, when the noise of laughter and conversation bewildered her, after so many years of convent refectories and silence, and her solitary dinners in Rome.

Violet had placed her between Cedric and Pamela, and the girl chattered to her intermittently, without appearing to require any answer.

"Are you boys ready?" she cried, just as coffee was brought in. "We can't wait for coffee—come on! My instructor will be engaged."

"How are you going, Pam?" asked Violet.

"Underground. It's the quickest."

"Oh, no, Pam. Take a taxi. Archie, you must!"

Between laughter and admonition, they were dispatched—Pamela, Archie and the two Temple boys, all laughing and talking, and exchanging allusions and references unintelligible to Alex.

The room seemed much quieter and darker when the hall-door had finally slammed behind them. Alex looked round her.

At the head of his own table, Cedric sat reflective. Violet lounged, smoking a cigarette and laughing, where Lady Isabel's place had always been. Opposite Alex, Barbara, in her prim black, was leaning forward and speaking:

"What's the attraction about this roller-skating? Pamela seems to do nothing else, when she isn't dancing."

"Every one's doing it, my dear. I want to take it up myself, so as to reduce my figure, but it's such an impossible place to get at. I've only been to Olympia for the Military Tournaments. But Pam has a perfect passion for getting about by the underground railway. Alex, isn't Pam a refreshing person?"

Alex felt uncertain as to her meaning, and was startled at being addressed. She knew that she coloured and looked confused.

"My dear," said Barbara impressively, "your nerves must simply have gone to pieces. Imagine jumping like that when you're spoken to! Don't you think she ought to do a rest-cure, Violet? There's a place in Belgrave Street."

"No, no," said Violet's kind, soft voice. "She's coming to us. You must let us have her, Barbara, for a good long visit. Mustn't she, Cedric?"

"Of course. You must have your old quarters upstairs, Alex."

The kindness nearly made her cry. She felt as might a child, expecting to be scolded and punished, and unexpectedly met with smiles and re-assurance.

"Come up and see Baby," said Violet. "She's such a little love, and I want her to know her new auntie."

"Violet, we really must talk business some time," said Barbara, hesitating. "There are plans to be settled, you know—what Alex is going to do next."

"She's going to play with Rosemary next. Don't worry, dear—we can talk plans any time. There's really no hurry."

Alex dimly surmised that the words, and the indolent, dÉgagÉe smile accompanying them, might be characteristic of her new sister-in-law.

Violet took her upstairs.

"The nursery is just the same—we haven't changed a thing," she told her.

Alex gave a cry of recognition at the top of the stairs. "Oh, the little gate that fenced off the landing! It was put up when Cedric was a baby, because he would run out and look through the balusters."

"Was it, really?" cried Violet delightedly. "Cedric didn't know that—he told me that it had always been there. I shall love having you, Alex, you'll be able to tell me such lots of things about Cedric, when he was a little boy, that no one else knows. You see, there's so little difference between him and Barbara, isn't there?"

"I am only three years older than Barbara."

"Then you're the same age—or a little older than I am. I am twenty-nine—two whole years older than Cedric. Isn't it dreadful?"

She laughed gaily as she turned the handle of the nursery door.

"Baby, precious, where are you?"

Alex followed her into the big, sunny room.

A young nurse, in stiff white piquÉ, sat sewing in the window, and a starched, blue-ribboned baby, with disordered, sunny curls, crawled about the floor at her feet.

When she saw her mother she began to run towards her, with outstretched hands and inarticulate coos of pleasure.

"Come along, then, and see your new Auntie." Violet caught her up and lifted her into her arms.

"Isn't she rather a love, Alex? Shall we look after her for a little while, while Nurse goes downstairs?"

Alex nodded. She felt as though she hardly dared speak, for fear of frightening the pretty little laughing child. Besides, the constriction was tightening in her throat.

Violet sank down into a low chair, with Rosemary still in her arms.

"I'll stay with her, Nurse, if you like to go downstairs for half-an-hour."

"Thank you, my lady."

"Sit down and let's be comfy, Alex. Isn't this much nicer than being downstairs?"

Alex looked round the nursery. As Violet had said, it had not been altered. On the mantelpiece she suddenly saw the big white clock, supported by stout Dresden-china cherubs, that had been there ever since she could remember. It was ticking in a sedate, unalterable way.

Something in the sight of the clock, utterly familiar, and yet forgotten altogether during all her years away from Clevedon Square, suddenly caught at Alex. She made an involuntary, choking sound, and to her own dismay, sobs suddenly overpowered her.

"My poor dear!" said Violet compassionately. "Do cry—it'll do you good, and Baby and I won't mind, or ever tell a soul, will we, my Rosemary? I knew you'd feel much better when you'd had it out, and nobody will disturb us here."

Alex had sunk on to the floor, and was leaning her head against Violet's chair.

The soft, murmuring voice went on above her:

"I never heard of such a thing in my life as Barbara's bringing you here today—she never explained when she telephoned that you hadn't been in England for goodness knows how many years, let alone to this house. And, of course, I thought she'd settled it all with you, till I saw your face when she brought you into the drawing-room, all full of tiresome people, and brothers and sisters you hadn't set eyes on for years. Then I knew, of course, and I could have smacked her. You poor child!"

"No, no," sobbed Alex incoherently. "It's only just at first, and coming back and finding them all so changed, and not knowing what I am going to do."

"Do! Why, you're coming here. Cedric and Rosemary and I want you, and Barbara doesn't deserve to keep you after the way she's begun. I'll settle it all with her."

"Oh, how kind you are to me!" cried Alex.

Violet bent down and kissed her.

"Kind! Why, aren't I your sister, and Rosemary your one and only niece? Look at her, Alex, and see if she's like any one. Cedric sometimes says she's like your father."

"A little, perhaps. But she's very like you, I think."

"Oh, I never had those great, round, grey eyes! Those are Cedric's. And perhaps yours—they're the same colour. Anyway, I believe she's really very like what you must have been as a baby, Alex!"

It was evident that Violet was paying the highest compliment within her power.

Alex put out her hand timidly to little Rosemary. She was not at all shy, and seemed accustomed to being played with and admired, as she sat on her mother's lap. Alex thought how pretty and happy she and Violet looked together. She was emotionally too much worn-out, and had for too many years felt herself to be completely and for ever outside the pale of warm, human happiness, to feel any pang of envy.

Presently Violet reluctantly gave up Rosemary to the nurse again, and said:

"I'm afraid we ought to go down. I don't like to leave Barbara any longer. She never comes up here—hardly ever. Poor Barbara! I sometimes think it's because she hasn't any babies of her own. Let's come down and find her, Alex."

They found Barbara in the library, earnestly talking to Cedric, who was leaning back, smoking and looking very much bored.

He sprang up when they entered, and from his relieved manner and from Barbara's abrupt silence, Alex conjectured that they had been discussing her own return.

She stood for a moment, forlorn and awkward, till Violet sank on to the big red-leather sofa, and held out her hand in invitation to her.

"Give me a cigarette, Cedric. What have you and Barbara been plotting—like two conspirators?"

Cedric laughed, looking at her with a sort of indulgent pride, but Barbara said with determined rapidity:

"It's all very well, Violet, to laugh, but we've got to talk business. After all, this unexpected step of Alex' has made a lot of difference. One thought of her as absolutely settled—as father did, when he made his will."

"You see, Alex," Cedric told his sister, "the share which should have been yours was divided by father's will between Barbara and Pamela, and there was no mention of you, except just for the fifty pounds a year which my father thought would pay your actual living expenses in the convent. He never thought of your coming away again."

"How could he, after all these years?" ejaculated Barbara.

"I know. But I couldn't have stayed on, Cedric, indeed I couldn't. I know I ought to have found out sooner that I wasn't fitted for the life—but if you knew what it's all been like—"

Her voice broke huskily, and despair overwhelmed her at the thought of trying to explain what they would never understand.

"Poor little thing!" said Violet's compassionate voice. "Of course, you couldn't stay on. They've nearly killed you, as it is—wretched people!"

"No—no. They were kind—"

"The point is, Alex," Barbara broke in, "that you've only got the wretched fifty pounds a year. Of course, I'd be more than glad to let you have what would naturally have been yours—but how on earth I'm to manage it, I don't know. Cedric can tell you what a state poor Ralph left his affairs in—you'd never believe how little I have to live on. Of course, the money from father was a godsend, I don't deny it. But if Cedric thinks it's justice to give it back to you—"

She looked terribly anxious, gazing at her brother.

"No, no, Barbara!" said Alex, horrified. "I don't want the money. Of course, you must keep it—you and Pamela."

"That's all very well, my dear Alex," said Cedric sensibly, "but how do you propose to live? You must look at it from a practical point of view."

"Then you think—" broke from Barbara irrepressibly.

"No, my dear, I don't. One knows very well, as things are—as poor Ralph left things—it would be almost out of the question to expect—"

He looked helplessly at his wife.

"Of course, dear," she said placidly. "But there's Pamela's share."

"Pamela will marry, of course. She's sure to marry, but until then—or at least until she comes of age—I don't think—as her guardian—"

Cedric broke off, looking much harassed.

"If Pam married a rich man—which she probably will," said Violet, with a low laugh.

"We can't take distant possibilities into consideration," Barbara interposed sharply. "We're dealing with actual facts."

Alex looked from one to the other with bewilderment. She hardly understood what they were all discussing. From the natural home of her childhood and girlhood, where she had lived as unthinking of ways and means as every other girl of her class and generation, she had passed into the convent world, where all was communal, and the rights of the individual a thing part shunned, part unknown. She could not, at first, grasp that Cedric and Barbara and Violet, perhaps Pam and Archie, too, were all wondering how she would be able to maintain herself on fifty pounds a year.

"Of course," Barbara was saying, "Alex could come to me for a bit—I'd love to have you, dear—but you saw for yourself what a tiny place mine is—and there's only Ada. I don't quite know what she'd say to having two people instead of one, I must say—"

"We want her, too," Violet exclaimed caressingly. "Let us have her for a little while, Barbara,—while you're preparing Ada's mind for the shock." She broke into her low, gurgling laugh again.

Barbara looked infinitely relieved.

"What do you think, Alex? It isn't that I wouldn't love to have you—but there's no denying that ways and means do count, and in a tiny household like mine, every item adds up."

"Oh," said Alex desperately, "I know what you must feel—the difficulty of—of knowing what to do with me. It's always been like that, ever since I was a little girl. I've made a failure of everything. Don't you remember—Barbara, you must—old Nurse saying, 'Alex will never stick to anything'? And I never have, I never shall. I can only make dreadful muddles and failures, and upset you all. If only one could wreck one's own life without interfering with other people's!"

There was a silence, which Alex, after her outburst, knew very well was not one of comprehension. Then Cedric said gently:

"You mustn't let yourself exaggerate, my dear. We're very glad to have you with us again, one only can't help wishing it had been rather sooner. But there's no use in crying over spilt milk, and after all, as Violet says, there's no hurry about anything. Come to us and have a good long rest—you look as though you needed it—and get a little flesh on your bones again. We can settle all the rest afterwards."

Alex saw Barbara looking at her with furtive eagerness. She turned to her, with the utter dependence on another's judgment that had become second nature to her.

"When shall I go?"

"My dear!" protested Barbara. "Of course, the longer you can stay with me the better I shall be pleased. It's only that Ada—" She broke off at the sound of Violet's irrepressible laugh.

"You must suit yourself absolutely, of course."

"Supposing you came to us at the end of the week?" Violet suggested. "Say Saturday. Pamela is going away then to pay one or two visits—and I shall have you all to myself."

Alex looked at her wonderingly.

It seemed to her incredible that Violet should actually want her, so engrained was her sense of her own isolation of spirit. That terrible isolation of those who have definitely, and for long past, lost all self-confidence, and which can never be realized or penetrated by those outside.

"That will be delightful," said Violet, seeming to take her acceptance for granted.

Barbara got up, smoothing her skirt gently.

"We really ought to be going, Alex. I said we'd be in to tea, and it takes such ages to get back."

Alex rose submissively. She marvelled at the assurance of Barbara, even at the ease of her conventionally affectionate farewells.

"Well, good-bye, my dear. When are you coming out to the wilds to look me up?"

Then, without giving her sister-in-law time to reply, she added gaily, "You must ring me up and let me know, when you've a spare moment. You know I'm always a fixture. What a blessing the telephone is!"

"Then we'll see you on Saturday, Alex," said her brother. "Good! Take care of yourself, my dear." He looked after her with an expression of concern, as the servant held open the door for her and Barbara and they went into the street. Alex could not believe that this kindly, rather pompous man was her younger brother.

"Cedric has grown very good-looking, but I didn't expect to see him so—so old, somehow," she said.

Barbara laughed.

"Time hasn't stood still with any of us, you know. I think Violet looks older than he does—she is, of course. She'll be a mountain in a few years' time, if she doesn't take care."

"Oh, Barbara! I think she's so pretty—and sweet."

Barbara shrugged her shoulders very slightly.

"She and I have never made particularly violent friends, though I like her, of course. Pamela adores her—and I must say she's been good to Pam. But her kindness doesn't cost her anything. She's always been rich, and had everything she wanted—she was the only girl, and her people adored her, and now Cedric lets her do everything she likes. She spends any amount of money—look at her clothes, and the way she has little Rosemary always dressed in white."

"Rosemary is lovely. It's so extraordinary to think of Cedric's child!"

Barbara tightened her lips.

"She ought to have been a boy, of course. Cedric pretended not to care, but it must have been a disappointment—and goodness only knows if Violet will ever—"

She stopped, throwing a quick glance out of the corners of her eyes at her sister.

Alex wondered why she did not finish her sentence, and what she had been about to say.

The constraint in her intercourse with Barbara was becoming more and more evident to her perceptions. It was clear that her sister did not intend to ask any questions as to the crisis through which Alex had passed, and when she had once ascertained that Alex had not "seen anybody" whilst in Rome, she did not refer to that either.

Alex wondered if Barbara would tell her anything of Ralph and their married life, but the reserve which had always been characteristic of Barbara since her nursery days, had hardened sensibly, and it was obvious that she wished neither to give nor to receive confidences.

She was quite ready, however, to discuss her brother Cedric and his wife, or the prospects of Pamela and Archie, and Alex listened all the evening to Barbara's incisive little clear tones delivering shrewd comments and judgments. She again suggested that Alex should go to bed early, saying as she kissed her good-night:

"It's quite delightful to have some one to talk to, for me. I generally read or sew all the evening."

"It must be lonely for you, Barbara."

"Oh, I don't mind quiet," she laughed, as though edging away from any hint of emotional topic. "But, of course, it's nice to have some one for a change. Good-night." She turned towards the door of the bedroom. "Oh, Alex! there's just one thing—I know you'd rather I said it. If you wouldn't mind, sometime—any time you think of it—just letting me have the money for those clothes we bought for you today. The bills have come in—I asked for them, as I don't have an account. I knew you'd rather be reminded, knowing what pauper I am. I only wish I hadn't got to worry you. Good-night, my dear. Sleep well."

---

XXV

Violet

For days and nights to come, the question of the money that Barbara had paid for her clothes weighed upon Alex.

She had no idea how she was to repay her.

The money that had been given her in Rome for her journey to England had only lasted her to Charing Cross, and even her cab fare to Hampstead had been supplemented by Barbara. Alex remembered it with fresh dismay. Even when she had left Downshire Hill and was in Clevedon Square again, the thought lashed her with a secret terror, until one day she said to Cedric:

"What ought I to do, Cedric, to get my fifty pounds a year? Who do I get it from?"

"Don't Pumphrey and Scott send it half yearly? I thought that was the arrangement. You gave them your change of address, I suppose."

"Oh, no," said Alex gently. "I've never written to them, except once, just after father died, to ask them to make the cheques payable to to the Superior."

"What on earth made you do that?"

"They thought it was best. You see, I had no banking account, so the money was paid into the Community's account."

"I see," Cedric remarked drily. "Well, the sooner you write and revoke that arrangement, the better. When did they last send you a cheque? In June?"

"I don't know," Alex was forced to say, feeling all the time that Cedric must be thinking her a helpless, unpractical fool.

"Write and find out. And meanwhile—I say, Alex, have you enough to go on with?"

"I—I haven't any money, Cedric. In Rome they gave me enough for my travelling expenses, but nothing is left of that."

"But what have you done all this time? I suppose you've wanted clothes and things."

"I got some with Barbara, but they aren't paid for. And there are some other things I need—you see, I haven't got anything at all—not even stamps," said Alex forlornly. "Violet said something about taking me to some shops with her, but I suppose all her places are very expensive."

"They are—dashed expensive," Cedric admitted, with a short laugh. "But look here, Alex, will you let me advance you what you want? It couldn't be helped, of course—but the whole arrangement comes rather hard on you, as things are now. You see, poor Barbara is really as badly off as she can be. Ralph was a most awful ass, between ourselves, and muddled away the little he had, and she gets pretty nearly nothing, except a widow's pension, which was very small, and the money father left. If you'll believe me, Ralph didn't even insure his life, before going to South Africa. Of course, he didn't go to fight, but on the staff of one of the big papers, and it was supposed to be a very good thing, and then what did he do but go and get dysentery before he'd been there a fortnight!"

Cedric's voice held all the pitying scorn of the successful.

"Poor Barbara," said Alex.

"That's just what she is. Of course, I think myself that Pamela will make your share over to you again when she marries. She's not likely to make a rotten bad match like Barbara—far from it. But until then she can't do anything, you know—at least, not until she's of age, if then."

Cedric stopped, and his right hand tapped with his spectacles on his left hand, in the little, characteristic trick that was so like Sir Francis.

Alex had already heard him make much the same observations, but she realized that Cedric had retained all his old knack of reiteration.

"I see," she said.

"Well, my dear, the long and the short of it is, that you must let me be your banker for the time being. And—and, Alex," said Cedric, with a most unwonted touch of embarrassment breaking into his kind, assured manner, "you needn't mind taking it. There's—there's plenty of money here—there is really—now-a-days."

Alex realized afterwards that it would hardly have occurred to her to mind taking the twenty pounds which Cedric offered her with such patent diffidence. She had never known the want of money, either in her Clevedon Square days or during her ten years of convent life. She did not realize its value in the eyes of other people.

The isolation of her point of view on this and other kindred subjects gradually became evident to her. Her scale of relative values had remained that which had been set before her in the early days of her novitiate. That held by her present surroundings differed from it in almost every particular, and more especially in degree of concentration. All Violet's warm, healthy affection for Rosemary did not prevent her intense preoccupation with her own clothes and her own jewels, or her innocently-assured conviction that no one was ever in London during the month of August, and that to be so would constitute a calamity.

All Cedric's pride in' his wife and love for her, in no way lessened his manifest satisfaction at his own success in life and at the renovated fortunes of the house of Clare.

Both he and Violet found their recreation in playing bridge, Cedric at his club and Violet in her own house, or at the houses of what seemed to Alex an infinite succession of elaborately-gowned friends, with all of whom she seemed to be on exactly the same terms of an unintimate affection.

Violet at night, when she dismissed her maid and begged Alex to stay and talk to her until Cedric came upstairs, which he never did until past twelve o'clock, was adorable.

She listened to Alex' incoherent, nervous outpourings, which Alex herself knew to be vain and futile from the very longing which possessed her to make herself clear, and said no word of condemnation or of questioning.

At first the gentle pressure of Violet's soft hand on her hair, and her low, sympathetic, murmuring voice, soothed Alex to a sort of worn-out, tearful gratitude in which she would nightly cry herself to sleep.

It was only as she grew slowly physically stronger that the craving for self-expression, which had tormented her all her life, woke again. Did Violet understand?

She would reiterate her explanations and dissections of her own past misery, with a growing consciousness of morbidity and a positive terror lest Violet should at last repulse, however gently, the endless demand for an understanding that Alex herself perpetually declared to be impossible.

It now seemed to her that nothing mattered so long as Violet understood, and by that understanding restored to Alex in some degree her utterly shattered self-respect and self-confidence. This dependence grew the more intense, as she became more aware how unstable was her foothold in the world of normal life.

With the consciousness of an enormous and grotesque mistake behind her, mingled all the convent tradition of sin and disgrace attached to broken vows and the return to an abjured world. One night she said to Violet:

"I didn't do anything wrong in entering the convent. It was a mistake, and I'm bearing the consequence of the mistake. But it seems to me that people find it much easier to overlook a sin than a mistake."

"Well, I'd rather ask a divorcÉe to lunch than a woman who ate peas off her knife," Violet admitted candidly.

"That's what I mean. There's really no place for people who've made bad mistakes—anywhere."

"If you mean yourself, Alex, dear, you know there's always a place for you here. Just as long as you're happy with us. Only I'm sometimes afraid that it's not quite the sort of life—after all you've been through, you poor dear. I know people do come in and out a good deal—and it will be worse than ever when Pam is at home."

"Violet, you're very good to me. You're the only person who has seemed at all to understand."

"My dear, I do understand. Really, I think I do. It's just as you say—you made a mistake when you were very young—much too young to be allowed to take such a step, in my opinion—and you're suffering the most bitter consequences. But no one in their senses could blame you, either for going into that wretched place, or—still less—for coming out of it."

"One is always blamed by some one, I think, for every mistake. People would rather forgive one for murder, than for making a fool of oneself."

"Forgiveness," said Violet thoughtfully. "It's rather an overrated virtue, in my opinion. I don't think it ought to be very hard to forgive any one one loved, anything."

"Would you forgive anything, Violet?"

"I think so," said Violet, looking rather surprised. "Unless I were deliberately deceived by some one whom I trusted. That's different. Of course, one might perhaps forgive even then in a way—but it wouldn't be the same thing again, ever."

"No," said Alex. "No, of course not. Every one feels the same about deceit."

In the depths of her own consciousness, Alex was groping dimly after some other standard—some elusive certainty, that continually evaded her. Were not those things which were hardest to forgive, the most in need of forgiveness?

Alex, with the self-distrust engrained in the unstable, wondered if that question were not born of the fundamental weakness in her own character, which had led her all her life to evade or pervert the truth in a passionate fear lest it should alienate from her the love and confidence that she craved for from others.

Sometimes she thought, "Violet will find me out, and then she will stop being fond of me."

And, knowing that her claim on Violet's compassion was the strongest link that she could forge between them, she would dilate upon the mental and physical misery of the last two years, telling herself all the time that she was trading on her sister's pity.

Her days in Clevedon Square were singularly empty, after Violet had tried the experiment of taking Alex about with her to the houses of one or two old friends, and Alex had come back trembling and nearly crying, and begging never to go again.

Her nerves were still utterly undependable, and her health had suffered no less than her appearance. Violet would have taken her to see a doctor, but Alex dreaded the questions that he would, of necessity, put to her, and Cedric, who distrusted inherently the practice of any science of which he himself knew nothing, declared that rest and good food would be her best physicians.

Sometimes she went to see Barbara at Hampstead, but seldom willingly. One of her visits there was the occasion for a stupid, childish lie, of which the remembrance made her miserable.

Alex, amongst other unpractical disabilities, was as entirely devoid as it is possible to be of any sense of direction. She had never known how to find her way about, and would turn as blindly and instinctively in the wrong direction as a Dartmoor pony turns tail to the wind.

For ten years she had never been outside the walls of the convent alone, and when she had lived in London as a girl, she could not remember ever having been out-of-doors by herself.

Violet, always driven everywhere in her own motor, and accustomed to Pamela's modern resourcefulness and independence, never took so childish an inability into serious consideration.

"Alex, dear, Barbara hoped you'd go down to her this afternoon. Will you do that, or come to Ranelagh? The only thing is, if you wouldn't mind going to Hampstead in a taxi? I shall have to use the MercÉdÈs, and the little car is being cleaned."

"Of course, I shouldn't mind. I'll go to Barbara, I think."

"Just whichever you like best. And you'll be back early, won't you? because we're dining at seven, and you know how ridiculous Cedric is about punctuality and the servants, and all that sort of thing."

After Violet had gone, in all her soft, elaborate laces and flower-wreathed hat, Alex, with every instinct of her convent training set against the extravagance of a taxi, started out on foot, rejoicing that a sunny July day should give her the opportunity of enjoying Pamela's boasted delight, the top of an omnibus.

She took the wrong one, discovered her mistake too late, and spent most of the afternoon in bewilderedly retracing her own footsteps. Finally she found a taxi, and arrived at Downshire Hill very tired, and after five o'clock.

Barbara was shocked, as Alex had known she would be, at the taxi.

"Violet is so inconsiderate. Because she can afford taxis as a matter of course herself, she never thinks that other people can't. I know myself how every shilling mounts up. I'll see you into an omnibus when you go, Alex. It takes just under an hour, and you need only change once."

But that change took place at the junction of four roads, all of them seething with traffic.

And again Alex was hopelessly at sea, and boarded at last an omnibus that conveyed her swiftly in the wrong direction.

She was late for dinner, and when Cedric inquired, with his assumption of the householder whose domestic routine has been flung out of gear, what had delayed her, she stammered and said that Barbara had kept her—she hadn't let her start early enough—had mistaken the time.

It was just such a lie as a child might have told in the fear of ridicule or blame, and she told it badly as a child might have told it, stammering, with a frightened widening of her eyes, so that even easy-going Violet looked momentarily puzzled.

Alex despised and hated herself.

She knew vaguely that her sense of proportion was disorganized. She was a woman of thirty-one, and her faults, her judgments and appreciations, even her mistakes, were those of an ill-regulated, unbalanced child of morbid tendencies.

When Pamela came back to Clevedon Square, Alex was first of all afraid of her, and then became jealous of her.

She was jealous of Pam's self-confidence, of her enormous security in her own popularity and success, jealous even of the innumerable common interests and the mutual love of enjoyment that bound her and Violet together.

She was miserably ashamed of her feelings, and sought to conceal them, none the less as she became aware of a certain shrewdness of judgment underlying all Pamela's breezy vitality and joie de vivre. She and her sister had nothing in common.

To Pamela, Alex evidently appeared far removed from herself as a being of another generation, less of a contemporary than pretty, sought-after Violet, or than little Rosemary in her joyous, healthy play. Pamela could accompany Violet everywhere, always radiantly enjoying herself, and receiving endless congratulations, thinly disguised as raillery, on her universal popularity and the charm that she seemed to radiate at will. She could play whole-heartedly with Rosemary, thoroughly enjoying a romp for its own sake, and making even Cedric laugh at her complete abandon.

"Don't you like children?" Pamela asked Alex, looking up from the nursery floor where she was playing with her niece.

"Yes, I like them," said Alex sombrely.

She had been reflecting bitterly that she would have known how to play with a baby of her own. But with Pamela and the nurse in the room, she was afraid of picking up Rosemary and making a fuss with her as Pam was doing, afraid with the terrible insecurity of the self-conscious.

And she never would have babies of her own now. The thought had tormented her often of late, watching Violet with her child, and Pamela with her own radiantly-secure future that would hold home and happiness as her rights.

But Alex concealed her thoughts, even, as far as possible, from herself.

The married woman who is denied children may lament her deprivation and receive compassion, but the spinster whose lot forbids her the hope, must either conceal her regrets or know herself to be accounted morbid and indelicate.

"I like babies while they're small," Pam remarked. "Don't I, you little horror of a niece? Other people's, you know. I don't know that I should want any of my own—they're all very well when they're tiny, but I can't bear them at the tell-me-a-story stage. I make it a rule never to tell the children stories at the houses where I stay. I always say, the very first evening, that I don't know any. Then they know what to expect. Some girls let themselves be regularly victimized, if they want to please the children's mother, and get asked again. I must say I do hate that sort of thing myself, and I don't believe it really does any good. Men are generally frightfully bored by the sort of girl who's 'perfectly wonderful with children.' They'd much rather have one who can play tennis, or who's good at bridge."

Pamela laughed comfortably at her own cynicism. "I must say I do think it pays one to be honest in the long run. I always say exactly what I feel myself, and don't care what any one thinks of me."

Alex felt a dull anger at her sister's self-complacent statement of what she knew to be the truth. Pamela could afford to be frank, and her boast seemed to Alex to cast an oblique reflection on herself. She gazed at her without speaking, wretchedly conscious of her own unreason.

"Look at Aunt Alex, Baby!" mischievously exclaimed Pam in a loud whisper. "We're rather afraid of her when she pulls a long face like that, aren't we? Have we been naughty, do you think?"

Alex tried to laugh, contorting her lips stiffly. Pamela jumped up from the floor.

"Really and truly, you know, Alex," she gravely told her sister, "you ought to try and make things less au grand sÉrieux. I think you'd be much happier, if you'd only cultivate a sense of humour—we all think so."

Then she ran out of the room.

Alex sat still.

So they all thought that she ought to cultivate a sense of humour. She felt herself to be ridiculous in their eyes, with her eternal air of tragedy, her sombre despair in the midst of their gay, good-humoured conventions, that admitted of everything except of weighty, unseasonable gloom.

Pamela's spontaneous and unwearied high spirits seemed to her to throw her own dejection into greater relief; her own utter social incompetence.

She began to long for the end of July, when the household in Clevedon Square would be dispersed for the remainder of the summer.

Pamela talked incessantly of a yachting invitation which she had received for August, and spoke of the difficulty of "sandwiching in" country-house visits for autumn shooting-parties, and Alex knew that Violet's people were taking a house in Scotland, and wanted her and Cedric and the baby to make it their headquarters. She wondered, with a sense of impending crisis, what would happen to her.

At last Cedric said to her:

"Have you any particular plans for August, Alex? I want to get Violet up north as soon as possible, she's done so much rushing about lately. I wish you could come with us, my dear, but we're going to the Temples'—that's the worst of not having a place of one's own in the country—"

"Oh," said Alex faintly, "don't bother about me, Cedric. I shall find somewhere."

He looked dissatisfied, but said only:

"Well, you'll talk it over with Violet. I know she's been vexed at seeing so little of you lately, but Pamela's an exacting young woman, and chaperoning her is no joke. I wish she'd hurry up and get settled—all this rushing about is too much for Violet."

"I thought she liked it."

"So she does. Anyhow," said Cedric, with an odd, shy laugh, "she'd like anything that pleased somebody else. She's made like that. I've never known her anything but happy—like sunshine." Then he flung a half-smoked cigarette into the fireplace, looked awkward at his own unusual expression of feeling, and abruptly asked Alex if she'd seen the newspaper.

Alex crept away, wondering why happiness should be accounted a virtue. She loved Violet with a jealous, exclusive affection and admiration, but she thought enviously that she, too, could have been like sunshine if she had received all that Violet received. She, too, would have liked to be always happy.

She had her talk with Violet.

There was the slightest shade of wistfulness in Violet's gentleness.

"I wish we'd made you happier, but I really believe quiet is what you want most, and things aren't ever very quiet here—especially with Pam. I simply love having her, but I'm not sure she is the best person for you, just now."

"I don't feel I know her very well. I mean, I'm not at all at home with her. She makes me realize what a stranger I am to the younger ones, after all these years."

"Poor Alex!"

"You're much more like my sister than she is, and yet a year ago I didn't know you."

"Alex, dear, I'm so glad if I'm a comfort to you—but I wish you wouldn't speak in that bitter way about poor little Pamela. It seems so unnatural."

Violet's whole healthy instinct was always, Alex had already discovered, to tend towards the normal—the outlook of well-balanced sanity. She was instinctively distressed by abnormality of any kind.

"I didn't really mean it," said Alex hurriedly, with the old fatal instinct of propitiation, and read dissent into the silence that received her announcement.

It was the subconscious hope of rectifying herself in Violet's eyes that made her add a moment later:

"Couldn't Barbara have me for a little while when you go up to Scotland? I think she would be quite glad."

"Of course she would. She's often lonely, isn't she? And you think you'd be happy with her?"

"Oh, yes," said Alex eagerly, bent on showing Violet that she had no unnatural aversion from being with her own sister.

But Violet still looked rather troubled.

"You remember that you found it rather difficult there, when you first got back. You said then that Barbara and you had never understood one another even as children."

"Oh, but that will all be different now," said Alex, confused, and knowing that her manner was giving an impression of shiftiness from her very consciousness that she was contradicting herself.

As Pamela's claims and her own ceaseless fear of inadequacy made her increasingly unsure of Violet, Alex became less and less at ease with her.

The old familiar fear of being disbelieved gave uncertainty to every word she uttered and she could not afford to laugh at Pam's merciless amusement in pointing out the number of times that she contradicted herself. Violet always hushed Pamela, but she looked puzzled and rather distressed, and her manner towards Alex was more compassionate than ever.

Alex, with the impetuous unwisdom of the weak, one day forced an issue.

"Violet, do you trust me?"

"My dear child, what do you mean? Why shouldn't I trust you? Are you thinking of stealing my pearls?"

But Alex could not smile.

"Do you believe everything that I say?"

Violet looked at her and asked very gently:

"What makes you ask, Alex? You're not unhappy about the nonsense that child Pamela sometimes talks, are you?"

"No, not exactly. It's—it's just everything...." Alex looked miserable, tongue-tied.

"Oh, Alex, do try and take things more lightly. You make yourself so unhappy, poor child, with all this self-torment. Can't you take things as they come, more?"

The counsel found unavailing echo in Alex' own mind. She knew that her mental outlook was wrenched out of all gear, and she knew also, in some dim, undefined way, that a worn-out physical frame was responsible for much of her self-inflicted torment of mind. Sometimes she wondered whether the impending solution to her whole destiny, still hanging over her, would find her on the far side of the abyss which separates the normal from the insane.

The days slipped by, and then, just before the general dispersal, Pamela suddenly announced her engagement to Lord Richard Gunvale, the youngest and by far the wealthiest of her many suitors.

"Oh, Pam, Pam!" cried Violet, laughing, "why couldn't you wait till after we'd left town?"

But every one was delighted, and congratulations and letters and presents and telegrams poured in.

Pamela declared that she would not be married until the winter, and refused to break her yachting engagement. She was more popular than ever now, and every one laughed at her delightful originality and gazed at the magnificence of the emerald and diamond ring on her left hand.

And Alex began to hope faintly that perhaps when Pamela was married, things might be different at Clevedon Square.

Then one night, just before she was to go to Hampstead, she overheard a conversation between Cedric and his wife.

She was on the stairs in the dark, and they were in the lighted hall below, and from the first instant that Cedric spoke, Alex lost all sense of what she was doing, and listened.

"...they're wearing you out, Pam and Alex between them. I won't have any more of it, I tell you."

"No, no, my dear old goose. Of course they're not." Violet's soft laughter came up to Alex' ears with a muffled sound, as though her head were resting against Cedric's shoulder. "Anyhow, it isn't Pam—I'm delighted about her, of course. Only Alex—I wish she was happier!"

"And why isn't she? You're a perfect angel to her," said Cedric resentfully.

"I'm so sorry for her—only it's difficult sometimes—a feeling like shifting sands. One doesn't know what to be at with her. If only she said what she wanted or didn't want, right out, but it's that awful anxiety to please—poor darling."

"She always was like that, from our nursery days. You never could get the rights of a matter out of her—plain black or white—she'd say one thing one day and another the next, always."

"That's what I find so difficult! It's impossible to do anything for a person like that—it's the one thing I can't understand."

"Pack her off to Hampstead tomorrow," Cedric observed gruffly. "I will not have you bothered."

"Oh, Cedric! I'm not bothered—how can you? She'll be going next week, anyway, poor dear, and it may be easier for her to be herself with Barbara, who's her own sister, after all. But I don't know what about afterwards—when we get back."

"You'll have quite enough to think about with Pam's wedding, without Alex on your hands as well. Violet," said Cedric, with a note in his voice that Alex had never heard there, "when I think of the way you've behaved to all my wretched family—"

Alex did not hear Violet's answer, which was very softly spoken.

She had turned and gone away upstairs in the dark.

---

XXVI

August

Was it, after all, only for Cedric's sake that Violet had kept her at Clevedon Square—had shown her such heavenly kindness and gentleness?

Alex asked herself the question all night long in utter misery of spirit. She had craved all her life for an exclusive, personal affection, and had been mocked with counterfeit again and again. She knew now that it was only in despair at such cheating of fate that she had flung herself rashly to the opposite end of the scale, and sought to embrace a life that purported detachment from all earthly ties.

"I will have all or none" had been the inward cry of her bruised spirit.

Fate had taken her at her word, this time, and she had not been strong enough to endure, and had fled, cowering, from the consequence of her own act.

Tortured, distraught, with self-confidence shattered to the earth, she had turned once again, with hands that trembled as they pleaded, to ask comfort of human love and companionship. Violet had not condemned her, had pitied her, and had shown her untiring sympathy and affection—for love of Cedric.

Alex rose haggard, in the morning. She wanted to be alone. The thought of going to Barbara in Hampstead had become unendurable to her.

It was with a curious sense of inevitability that she found a letter from Barbara asking her if she could put off her visit for the present. The admirable Ada had developed measles.

"Good Lord, can't they send her to a hospital?" exclaimed Cedric, with the irritability of a practical man who finds his well-ordered and practical plans thrown out of gear by some eminently unpractical intervention on the part of Providence.

"I'm sure Barbara never would," said Violet, laughing. "Poor dear, I hope she won't catch it herself. It'll mean having the house disinfected, too—what a nuisance for her. But, Alex, dear, you must come with us! I'll send a wire today—mother will be perfectly delighted."

"Couldn't I stay here?" asked Alex.

Cedric explained that the house would be partially shut up, with only two of the servants left.

"I shouldn't give any trouble—I'd so much rather," Alex urged, unusually persistent.

"My dear, it's out of the question. Not a soul in London—you forget it's August."

"But, Cedric," said Violet, "I don't see why she shouldn't do as she likes. It will be only till Barbara can have her, after all—I suppose Ada will be moved as soon as she's better, and the disinfecting can't take so very long. If she wants to stay here?"

"I do," said Alex, with sudden boldness.

"You don't think you'll be lonely?"

"No, no."

"After all," Violet considered, "it will be very good for Ellen and the tweeny to have somebody to wait upon. I never do like leaving them here on enormous board wages, to do nothing at all—though Cedric will think it's the proper thing to do, because his father did it."

She laughed, and Cedric said, with an air of concession:

"Well, just till Barbara can take you in, perhaps—if you think London won't be unbearable. But mind you, Alex, the minute you get tired of it, or feel the heat too much for you, you're to make other arrangements."

Alex wondered dully what other arrangements Cedric supposed that she could make. She had no money, and had never even roused herself to write the letter he had recommended, asking to have her half-yearly allowance sent to her own address and not to that of the Superior of the convent.

But on the day before Cedric and Violet, with Violet's maid, and Rosemary, and her nurse, and her pram, all took their departure, Cedric called Alex into the study.

She went to him feeling oddly as though she was the little girl again, who had, on rare occasions, been sent for by Sir Francis, and had found him standing just so, his back to the fireplace, spectacles in hand, speaking in just the same measured, rather regretful tones of kindliness.

"Alex, I've made out two cheques one to cover the servants' board wages, which I thought you would be good enough to give them at the end of the month, and one for your own living expenses. You'd better cash that at once, in case you want any ready money. Have you anywhere to keep it under lock and key?"

Cedric, no more than Sir Francis, trusted to a woman's discretion in matters of money.

"Yes, there's the drawer of the writing-table in my bedroom."

"That will be all right, then. The servants are perfectly trustworthy, no doubt, but loose cash should never be left about in any case—if you want more, write to me. And, Alex, I've seen old Pumphrey—father's man of business. He will see that you get your fifty pounds. Here is the first instalment."

Cedric gravely handed her a third cheque.

"Have you a banking account?"

"I don't think so."

"Then I'll arrange to open one for you at my bank today. You'd better deposit this at once, hadn't you—unless you want anything?"

"No," faltered Alex, not altogether understanding.

"You will have no expenses while you're here, of course," said Cedric, rather embarrassed. Alex looked bewildered. It had never occurred to her to suggest paying for her own keep while she remained alone at Clevedon Square. She gave back to her brother the cheque for twenty-five pounds, and received his assurance that it would be banked in her name that afternoon.

"They will send you a cheque-book, and you can draw out any small sum you may need later on."

"I don't think I shall need any," said Alex, looking at the other two cheques he had given her, made payable to herself, and thinking what a lot of money they represented.

"You will have a thorough rest and change with Barbara," Cedric said, still looking at her rather uneasily. "Then, when we meet again in October, it will be time enough—"

He did not say what for, and Alex remembered the conversation that she had overheard on the stair. With a feeling of cunning, she was conscious of her own determination to take the initiative out of his hands, without his knowledge.

They did not want her, and they would want her less than ever, with all the approaching business connected with Pamela's wedding in December. Barbara did not want her, self-absorbed, and unwearingly considering how to cut down more and yet more expenses.

Alex had made up her mind to go and live alone. She would prove to them that she could do it, though they thought fifty pounds a year was so little money. She thought vaguely that perhaps she could earn something.

But she gave no hint of her plans to any one, knowing that Violet would be remonstrant and Cedric derisive.

Obsessed by this new idea, she said good-bye to them with a sort of furtive eagerness, and found herself alone in the house in Clevedon Square.

At first the quiet and the solitude were pleasant to her. She crept round the big, empty house like a spirit, feeling as though it presented a more familiar aspect with its shrouded furniture and carefully shaded windows, and the absence of most of Violet's expensive silver and china ornaments. The library, which was always kept open for her, was one of the least changed rooms in the house, and she spent hours crouched upon the sofa there, only rousing herself to go to the solitary meals which were punctiliously laid out for her in the big dining-room.

Presently she began to wonder if the elderly upper-housemaid, Ellen, left in charge, resented her being there. She supposed that the presence of some one who never went out, for whom meals had to be provided, who must be called in the morning and supplied with hot water four times a day, would interfere with the liberty of Ellen and the unseen tweeny who, no doubt, cooked for them. They would be glad when she went away. Never mind, she would go very soon. Alex felt that she was only waiting for something to happen which should give her the necessary impetus to carry out her vague design of finding a new, independent foothold for herself.

A drowsy week of very hot weather slipped by, and then one morning Alex received three letters.

Cedric's, short but affectionate, told her that Violet had reached Scotland tired out, and had been ordered by the doctor to undergo something as nearly approaching a rest-cure as possible. She was to stay in bed all the morning, sit in the garden when it was fine, and do nothing. She was to write no letters, but she sent Alex her love and looked forward to hearing from her. Cedric added briefly that Alex was not to be at all anxious. Violet only needed quiet and country air, and no worries. She was looking better already.

Alex put the letter down reflectively. Evidently Cedric did not want his wife disturbed by depressing correspondence, and she did not mean to write to Violet of her new resolution. She even thought that perhaps she would continue to let Violet believe her at Clevedon Square or with Barbara.

Her second letter was from Barbara. It was quite a long letter, and said that Barbara had decided to leave Ada at a convalescent home and take her own much-needed summer holiday abroad. Would Alex join her in a week's time?

"What do you think of some little, cheap seaside hole in Brittany, which we could do for very little? I wish I could have you as my guest, dear, but you'll understand that all the disinfecting of the house has cost money, besides forcing me to go away, which I hadn't meant to do. However, I'm sure I need the change, and I dare say it won't do you any harm either. We ought to do the whole thing for about fifteen pounds each, I think, which, I suppose, will be all right for you? Do ring me up tonight, and let's exchange views. I shan't be free of a suspicion as to these wretched measles till next week, but I don't think really there's much danger, as I've had them already and am not in the least nervous. Ring up between seven and eight tonight. I suppose Violet, as usual, has kept on the telephone, even though they're away themselves?"

Alex knew that she did not want to go abroad with Barbara. She nervously picked up her third letter, which bore a foreign post-mark. When she had read the sheet of thin paper which was all the envelope contained, she sat for a long while staring at it.

The nuns in Rome, with whom she had spent the few weeks previous to her return to England, had sent in their account for her board and lodging, for the few clothes she had purchased, and for the advance made her for her travelling expenses. The sum total, in francs, looked enormous.

At last Alex, trembling, managed to arrive at the approximate amount in English money.

Twenty pounds.

It seemed to her exorbitant, and she realized, with fresh dismay, that she had never taken such a debt into consideration at all. How could she tell Cedric?

She thought how angry he would be at her strange omission in never mentioning it to him before, and how impossible it would be to explain to him that she had, as usual, left all practical issues out of account. Suddenly Alex remembered with enormous relief that twenty-five pounds lay to her credit at the bank. She had received her new cheque-book only two days ago. She would go to the bank today and make them show her how she could send the money to Italy.

Then Cedric and Violet need never know. They need never blame her.

Full of relief, Alex took the cheque-book that morning to the bank. She did not like having to display her ignorance, but she showed the bill to the clerk, who was civil and helpful, and showed her how very simple a matter it was to draw a cheque for twenty pounds odd. When it was done, and safely posted, Alex trembled with thankfulness. It seemed to her that it would have been a terrible thing for Cedric to know of the expenses she had so ignorantly incurred, and of her incredible simplicity in never having realized them before, and she was glad that he need never know how almost the whole of her half-year's allowance of money had vanished so soon after she had received it.

She telephoned to Barbara that night, and said that she could not go abroad with her.

"Oh, very well, my dear, if you think it wiser not. Of course, if you don't mind London at this time of year, it's a tremendous economy to stay where you are.... Are the servants looking after you properly?"

"Oh, yes."

"Well, do just as you like, of course. I think I shall get hold of some friend to join forces with me, if you're sure you won't come...."

"Quite sure, Barbara," said Alex tremulously. She felt less afraid of her sister at the other end of the telephone.

She went and saw Barbara off the following week, and Barbara said carelessly:

"Good-bye, Alex. You look a shade better, I think. On the whole you're wiser to stay where you are—I'm sure you need quiet, and when once the rush begins for Pam's wedding, you'll never get a minute's peace. Are you staying on when they get back?"

"I'm not sure," faltered Alex.

"You may be wise. Well, come down to my part of the world if you want economy—and to feel as though you were out of London. Good-bye, dear."

Alex was surprised, and rather consoled, to hear Barbara alluding so lightly to the possibility of her seeking fresh quarters for herself. Perhaps, after all, they all thought it would be the best thing for her to do. Perhaps there was no need to feel guilty and as though her intentions must be concealed.

But Alex, dreading blame or disapproval, or even assurances that the scheme was unpractical and foolish, continued to conceal it.

She wrote and told Violet that she had decided that it would be too expensive to go abroad with Barbara. Might she stay on in Clevedon Square for a little while?

But she had secretly made up her mind to go and look for rooms or a boarding-house in Hampstead, as Barbara had suggested. As usual, it was only by chance that Alex realized the practical difficulties blocking her way.

She had now only five pounds.

On the following Saturday afternoon she found her way out by omnibus to Hampstead. She alighted before the terminus was reached, from a nervous dread of being taken on too far, although the streets in which she found herself were not prepossessing.

For the first time Alex reflected that she had no definite idea as to where she wanted to go in her search for lodgings. She walked timidly along the road, which appeared to be interminably long and full of second-hand furniture shops. Bamboo tables, and armchairs with defective castors, were put out on the pavement in many instances, and there was often a small crowd in front of the window gazing at the cheaply-framed coloured supplements hung up within. The pavements and the road, even the tram-lines, swarmed with untidy, clamouring children.

Alex supposed that she must be in the region vaguely known to her as the slums.

Surely she could not live here?

Then the recollection of her solitary five pounds came to her with a pang of alarm.

Of course, she must live wherever she could do so most cheaply. She had no idea of what it would cost.

It was very hot, and the pavement began to burn her feet. She did not dare to leave the main road, fearing that she should never find her way to the 'bus route again, if once she left it, but she peeped down one or two side-streets. They seemed quieter than Malden Road, but the unpretentious little grey houses did not look as though lodgers were expected in any of them. Alex wondered desperately how she was to find out.

Presently she saw a policeman on the further side of the street.

She went up to him and asked:

"Can you tell me of anywhere near here where they let rooms—somewhere cheap?"

The man looked down at her white, exhausted face, and at the well-cut coat and skirt chosen by Barbara, which yet hung loosely and badly on her stooping, shrunken figure.

"Somebody's poor relation," was his unspoken comment.

"Is it for yourself, Miss? You'd hardly care to be in this neighbourhood, would you?"

"I want to be somewhere near Hampstead—and somewhere very, very cheap," Alex faltered, thinking of her five pounds, which lay at that moment in the purse she was clasping.

"Well, you'll find as cheap here as anywhere, if you don't mind the noise."

"Oh, no," said Alex—who had never slept within the sound of traffic—surprised.

"Then if I was you, Miss, I'd try No. 252 Malden Road—just beyond the Gipsy Queen, that is, or else two doors further up. I saw cards up in both windows with 'apartments' inside the last week."

"Thank you," said Alex.

She wished that Malden Road had looked more like Downshire Hill, which had trees and little tiny gardens in front of the houses, which almost all resembled country cottages. But no doubt houses in Downshire Hill did not let rooms, or if so they must be too expensive. Besides, Alex felt almost sure that Barbara would not want her as a very near neighbour.

She was very tired when she reached No. 252, and almost felt that she would take the rooms, whatever they were like, to save herself further search. After all, she could change later on, if she did not like them.

Like all weak people, Alex felt the urgent necessity of acting as quickly as possible on her own impulses.

She looked distastefully at the dingy house, with its paint cracking into hard flakes, and raised the knocker slowly. A jagged end of protruding wire at the side of the door proclaimed that the bell was broken.

Her timid knock was answered by a slatternly-looking young woman wearing an apron, whom Alex took to be the servant.

"Can I see the—the landlady?"

"Is it about a room? I'm Mrs. 'Oxton." She spoke in the harshest possible Cockney, but quite pleasantly.

"Oh," said Alex, still uncertain. "Yes, I want rooms, please."

The woman looked her swiftly up and down. "Only one bed-sittin'-room vacant, Miss, and that's at the top of the 'ouse. Would you care to see that?"

"Yes, please."

Mrs. Hoxton slammed the door and preceded Alex up a narrow staircase, carpeted with oil-cloth. On the third floor she threw open the door of a room considerably smaller than the bath-room at Clevedon Square, containing a low iron bed, and an iron tripod bearing an enamel basin, a chipped pitcher and a very small towel-rail. A looking-glass framed in mottled yellow plush was hung crookedly on the wall, and beneath it stood a wooden kitchen chair. There was a little table with two drawers in it behind the door.

Alex looked round her with bewilderment. A convent cell was no smaller than this, and presented a greater aspect of space from its bareness.

"Is there a sitting-room?" she inquired.

"Not separate to this—no, Miss. Bed-sitting-room, this is called. Small, but then I suppose you'd be out all day."

For a moment Alex wondered why.

"But meals?" she asked feebly.

"Would it be more than just the breakfast and supper, and three meals on Sunday?"

Alex did not know what to answer, and Mrs. Hoxton surveyed her.

"Where are you working, Miss? Anywhere near?"

"I'm not working anywhere—yet."

Mrs. Hoxton's manner changed a little.

"If you want two rooms, Miss, and full board, I could accommodate you downstairs. The price is according, of course—a week in advance, and pay by the week."

Alex followed the woman downstairs again. She was sure that this was not the kind of place where she wanted to live.

Mrs. Hoxton showed her into a larger bedroom on the first floor, just opening the door and giving Alex a glimpse of extreme untidiness and an unmade bed.

"My gentleman got up late today—he don't go to 'is job Saturdays, so I 'aven't put the room to rights yet. But it's a nice room, Miss, and will be vacant on Monday. It goes with the downstairs sitting-room in the front, as a rule, but that's 'ad to be turned into a bedroom just lately. I've been so crowded."

"Will that be empty on Monday, too?" asked Alex, for the sake of answering something.

"Tonight, Miss. I let a coloured gentleman 'ave it—a student, you know; a thing I've never done before, either. Other people don't like it, and it gives a name, like, for not being particular who one takes. So he's going, and I shan't be sorry. I don't 'old with making talk, and it isn't as though the room wouldn't let easy. It's a beautiful room, Miss."

The coloured gentleman's room was tidier than the one upstairs, but a haze of stale tobacco fumes hung round it and obscured Alex' view of a short leather sofa with horsehair breaking from it in patches, a small round table in the middle of the room, and a tightly-closed window looking on to the traffic of Malden Road.

"About terms, Miss," Mrs. Hoxton began suggestively in the passage.

"Oh, I couldn't afford much," Alex began, thinking that it was more difficult than she had supposed to walk out again saying that she did not, after all, want the rooms.

"I'd let you 'ave those two rooms, and full board, for two-ten a week!" cried the landlady.

"Oh, I don't think—"

Mrs. Hoxton shrugged her shoulders, looked at the ceiling and said resignedly:

"Then I suppose we must call it two guineas, though I ought to ask double. But you can come in right away on Monday, Miss, and I think you'll find it all comfortable."

"But—" said Alex faintly.

She felt very tired, and the thought of a further search for lodgings wearied her and almost frightened her. Besides, the policeman had told her that this was a cheap neighbourhood. Perhaps anywhere else they would charge much more. Finally she temporized feebly with the reflection that it need only be for a week—once the step of leaving Clevedon Square had been definitely taken, she could feel herself free to find a more congenial habitation at her leisure, and when she might feel less desperately tired. She sighed, as she followed the line of least resistance.

"Well, I'll come on Monday, then."

"Yes, Miss," the landlady answered promptly. "May I have your name, Miss?—and the first week in advance my rule, as I think I mentioned."

"My name is Miss Clare."

Alex took two sovereigns and two shillings, fumbling, out of her purse and handed them to the woman. It did not occur to her to ask for any form of receipt.

"Will you be wanting anything on Monday, Miss?"

Alex looked uncomprehending, and the woman eyed her with scarcely veiled contempt and added, "Supper, or anything?"

"Oh—yes. I'd better come in time for dinner—for supper, I mean."

"Yes, Miss. Seven o'clock will do you, I suppose?"

Alex thought it sounded very early, but she did not feel that she cared at all, and said that seven would do quite well.

She wondered if there were any questions which she ought to ask, but could think of none, and she was rather afraid of the strident-voiced, hard-faced woman.

But Mrs. Hoxton seemed to be quite satisfied, and pulled open the door as though it was obvious that the interview had come to an end.

"Good afternoon," said Alex.

"Afternoon," answered the landlady, as she slammed the door again, almost before Alex was on the pavement of Malden Road. She went away with a strangely sinking heart. To what had she committed herself?

All the arguments which Alex had been brooding over seemed to crumble away from her now that she had taken definite action.

She repeated to herself again that Violet and Cedric did not want her, that Barbara did not want her, that there was no place for her anywhere, and that it was best for her to make her own arrangements and spare them all the necessity of viewing her in the light of a problem.

But what would Cedric say to Malden Road? Inwardly Alex resolved that he must never come there. If she said "Hampstead" he would think that she was somewhere close to Barbara's pretty little house.

But Barbara?

Alex sank, utterly jaded, into the vacant space in a crowded omnibus. It was full outside, and the atmosphere of heat and humanity inside made her feel giddy. Arguments, self-justification and sick apprehensions, surged in chaotic bewilderment through her mind.

---

XXVII

The Embezzlement

Alex, full of unreasoning panic, made her move to Malden Road.

She was afraid of the servants in Clevedon Square, all of them new since she had left England, and only told Ellen, with ill-concealed confusion, that she was leaving London for the present. She was unaccountably relieved when Ellen only said, impassively, "Very good, Miss," and packed her slender belongings without comment or question.

Suddenly she remembered the cheque which Cedric had given her for the servants. She looked at it doubtfully. Her own money was already almost exhausted, thanks to that unexpected claim from the convent in Rome, and Alex supposed that the sum still in her purse, amounting to rather less than three pounds, would only last her for about a fortnight in Malden Road. She decided, with no sense of doubt, that she had better keep Cedric's cheque. It was only a little sum to him, and he would send money for the servants. He had said that he was ready to advance money to his sister. Characteristically, Alex dismissed the matter from her mind as unimportant. She had never learnt any accepted code in dealings with money, and her own instinct led her to believe it an unessential question. She judged only from her own feelings, which would have remained quite unstirred by any emotions but those the most matter-of-fact at any claim, direct or indirect, justifiable or not, upon her purse.

She had never learnt the rudiments of pride, or of straight-dealing in questions of finance. But in Malden Road Alex was, after all, to learn many things.

There were material considerations equally unknown to Clevedon Square and to the austere but systematic doling-out of convent necessities, which were brought home to her with a startled sense of dismay from her first evening at 252. She had never thought of bringing soap with her, or boxes of matches, yet these commodities did not appear as a matter of course, as they had always done elsewhere. There was gas in both the rooms, but there were no candles. There was no hot water.

"You can boil your own kettle on the gas-ring on the landing," Mrs. Hoxton said indifferently, and left her new lodger to the realization that the purchase of a kettle had never occurred to her at all.

Buying the kettle, and a supply of candles and matches and soap, left her with only just enough money in hand for her second week's rent, and when she wanted notepaper and ink and stamps to write to Barbara, Alex decided that she must appropriate Cedric's cheque for the servants' wages to her own uses. She felt hardly any qualms.

This wasn't like that bill from Rome, which she would have been afraid to let him see. He would have talked about the dishonesty of convents, and asked why she had not told him sooner of their charges against her, and have looked at her with that almost incredulous expression of amazed disgust had she admitted her entire oblivion of the whole consideration.

But this cheque for the servants.

It would enable her to pay her own expenses until she could get the work which she still vaguely anticipated, and the sum meant nothing to Cedric. She would write and tell him that she had cashed the money, sure that he would not mind, in fulfilment of his many requests to her to look upon him as her banker.

But she did not write, though she cashed the cheque. The days slipped by in a sort of monotonous discomfort, but it was very hot, and she learnt to find her way to Hampstead Heath, where she could sit for hours, not reading, for she had no books, but brooding in a sort of despairing resignation over the past and the nightmare-seeming present. The conviction remained with her ineradicably that the whole thing was a dream—that she would wake up again to the London of the middle 'nineties and find herself a young girl again, healthy and eager, and troubling Lady Isabel, and, more remotely, Sir Francis, with her modern exigencies and demands to live her own life, the war-cry of those clamorous 'eighties and 'nineties, of which the young new century had so easily reaped the harvest. She could not bring herself to believe that her own life had been lived, and that only this was left.

Alex sometimes felt that she was not alive at all—that she was only a shade moving amongst the living, unable to get into real communication with any of them.

She did not think of the future. There was no future for her. There was only an irrevocable past and a sordid, yet dream-like present, that clung round her spirit as a damp mist might have clung round her person, intangible and yet penetrating and all-pervading, hampering and stifling her.

The modicum of physical strength which she had regained in Clevedon Square was ebbing imperceptibly from her. It was difficult to sleep very well in Malden Road, where the trams and the omnibuses passed in incessant, jerking succession, and the children screamed in the road late at nights and incredibly early in the mornings. The food was neither good nor well prepared, but Alex ate little in the heat, and reflected that it was an economy not to be hungry.

The need for economy was being gradually borne in upon her, as her small stock of money diminished and there came nothing to replace it. Presently she exerted herself to find a registry office, where she gave her name and address, and was contemptuously and suspiciously eyed by an old lady with dyed red hair who sat at a writing-table, and asked her a fee of half-a-crown for entering her name in a ledger.

"No diplomas and no certificate won't take you far in teaching now-a-days," she said unpleasantly. "Languages?"

"French quite well and a little Italian. Enough to give conversation lessons," Alex faltered.

"No demand for 'em whatever. I'll let you know, but don't expect anything to turn up, especially at this time of year, with every one out of town."

But by a miraculous stroke of fortune something did turn up. The woman from the registry office sent Alex a laconic postcard, giving her the address of "a lady singer in Camden Town" who was willing to pay two shillings an hour in return for sufficient instruction in Italian to enable her to sing Italian songs.

Elated, Alex looked out the conversation manual of her convent days, and at three o'clock set out to find the address in Camden Town.

She discovered it with difficulty, and arrived late. The appointed hour had been half-past three.

Shown into a small sitting-room, crowded with furniture and plastered with signed photographs, she sank, breathless and heated, into a chair, and waited.

The lady singer, when she came, was irate at the delay. Her manner frightened Alex, who acquiesced in bewildered humiliation to a stipulation that only half-fees must be charged for the curtailed hour. She gave her lesson badly, imparting information with a hesitation that even to her own ears sounded as though she were uncertain of her facts. However, her pupil ungraciously drew out a shilling from a small chain-purse and gave it to Alex when she left, and she bade her come again in three days' time.

The lessons went on for three weeks. They tired Alex strangely, but she felt glad that she could earn money, however little; and although the shillings went almost at once in small necessities which she had somehow never foreseen, it was not until the middle of September that she began once more to reach the end of her resources.

Just as she had decided that it would be necessary for her to write to Cedric, she received a letter from him, forwarded from her bank.

Alex turned white as she read it.

"MY DEAR ALEX,

"I am altogether at a loss to understand why Ellen (the upper-housemaid at home) writes to Violet on Friday last, Sept. 12, that you have left Clevedon Square, and that she and the other servant have not yet received the money for their board and wages. This last I take to be an oversight on your part, but you will doubtless put it right at once, since you will remember that I handed you a cheque for that purpose just before leaving London. As to your own movements, I need hardly say, my dear Alex, that I do not claim to have any sort of authority over them of whatever kind, but both Violet and I cannot help feeling that it would have been more friendly, to say the least of it, had you given us some hint as to your intentions. Knowing that Barbara is already abroad, and Pamela with her friends yachting, I can only hope that you have received some unforeseen invitation which appealed to you more than the prospect of solitude in Clevedon Square. It would have been desirable had you left your address with the servants, but I presume the matter escaped your memory, as they appear to be completely in the dark as to your movements.

"Violet is looking quite herself again, and sends many affectionate messages. She will doubtless write to you on receipt of a few lines giving her your address. I am compelled to send this letter through the care of Messrs. Williams, which you will agree with me is an unnecessarily elaborate method of communication.

"Your affectionate brother,
"CEDRIC CLARE."

Alex was carried back through the years to the sense of remorse and bewilderment with which she had listened to the measured, irrefutable condemnations, expressed with the same unerring precision, of Sir Francis Clare. She realized herself again, sick with crying and cold with terror, standing shaking before his relentless justice, knowing herself to be again, for ever and hopelessly, in the wrong. She would never be anything else.

She knew it now.

Her sense of honour, of truth and justice, was perverted—in direct disaccord with that of the world. What would her brother say to her misuse of the money that he had entrusted to her? Alex knew now, with sudden, terrifying certainty how he would view the transaction which had seemed to her so simple an expedient. She knew that even were she able to make the almost incredible plea of a sudden temptation, a desperate need of money, that had led her voluntarily to commit an act of dishonesty, it would stand her in better stead than a mere statement of the terrible truth—that no voice within her had told her of dishonour, that she had—outrageous paradox!—committed an act of dishonesty in good faith.

To Cedric, the lack in her would seem so utterly perverted, so incomprehensible, that there would appear to be no possibility of that forgiveness which, as a Christian, he could consciously have extended to any wilful breaking of the law. But there would be no question of forgiveness for this. It was not the money, Alex knew that. It was her own extraordinary moral deficiency that put her outside the pale.

Perhaps, thought Alex drearily, this was how criminals always felt. They did the things for which they were punished because of some flaw in their mental outlook—they didn't see that the things mattered, until it was too late. They had to be saved from themselves by punishment or removal, or sometimes by death; and for the protection of the rest of the community, too, it was necessary to penalize those who could not or would not conform to the standard. Alex saw it all.

But dimly, involuntarily almost, an echo from her childhood's days came back to her, vaguely formulated into words:

"Always take the part of the people in the wrong—they need it most."

The only conviction to which she could lay claim was somehow embodied in that sentiment.

---

XXVIII

Cedric

She wrote to Cedric, the sense of having put herself irrevocably in the wrong by her own act making her explanation into an utterly bald, lifeless statement of fact. She felt entirely unable to enter into any analysis of her folly, and besides, it would have been of no use. Facts were facts. She had taken Cedric's money, which he had given her for one purpose, and used it for another. There had not even been any violent struggle with temptation to palliate the act.

Alex felt a sort of dazed stupefaction at herself.

She was bad, she told herself, bad all through, and this was how bad people felt. Sick with disappointment, and utterly unavailing remorse, knowing all the time that there was no strength in them ever to resist any temptation, however base.

She wondered if there was a hell, as the convent teaching had so definitely told her. If so, Alex shudderingly contemplated her doom. But she prayed desperately that there might be nothing after death but utter oblivion. It was then that the thought of death first came to her, not with the wild, impotent longing of her days of struggle, but with an insidious suggestion of rest and escape.

She played with the idea, but for the most part her faculties were absorbed in the increasing strain of waiting for Cedric's reply to her confession.

It came in the shape of a telegram.

"Shall be in London Wednesday 24th. Will you lunch Clevedon Square 1.30. Reply paid."

Alex felt an unreasonable relief, both at the postponement of an immediate crisis, and at the reflection that, at all events, Cedric did not mean to come to Malden Road. She did not want him to see those strange, sordid surroundings to which she had fled from the shelter of her old home.

Alex telegraphed an affirmative reply to her brother, and waited in growing apathy for the interview, which she could now only dread in theory. Her sense of feeling seemed numbed at last.

Something of the old terror, however, revived when she confronted Cedric again in the library. He greeted her with a sort of kindly seriousness, under which she wonderingly detected a certain nervousness. During lunch they spoke of Violet, of the shooting that Cedric had been enjoying in Scotland. The slight shade of pomposity which recalled Sir Francis was always discernible in all Cedric's kindly courtesy as host. After lunch he rather ceremoniously ushered his sister into the library again.

"Sit down, my dear you look tired. You don't smoke, I know. D'you mind if I—?"

He drew at his pipe once or twice, then carefully rammed the tobacco more tightly into the bowl with a nicotine-stained finger. Still gazing at the wedged black mass, he said in a voice of careful unconcern:

"About this move of yours, Alex. Violet and I couldn't altogether understand—That's really what brought me down, and the question of that cheque I gave you for the servants. I couldn't quite make out your letter—"

He paused, as though to give her an opportunity for speech, still looking away from her. But Alex remained silent, in a sort of paralysis.

"Suppose we take one question at a time," suggested Cedric pleasantly. "The cheque affair is, of course, a very small one, and quite easily cleared up. One only has to be scrupulous in money matters because they are money matters—you know father's way of thinking, and I must say I entirely share it."

There was no need to tell Alex so.

"Have you got the cheque with you, Alex?"

"No," said Alex at last. "Didn't you understand my letter, then?"

Cedric's spectacles began to tap slowly against the back of his left hand, held in the loose grasp of his right.

"You—er—cashed that cheque?"

"Yes."

Alex felt as though she were being put to the torture of the Inquisition, but was utterly unable to do more than reply in monosyllables to Cedric's level, judicial questions.

"May I ask to what purpose you applied the money?"

"Cedric, it's not fair!" broke from Alex. "I've written and told you what I did—I needed money, and I—I thought you wouldn't mind. I used it for myself—and I meant to write and tell you—"

"You thought I wouldn't mind!" repeated Cedric in tones of stupefaction.

"You said you would advance me money—I knew you could write another cheque for the servants' wages. I—I didn't think of your minding."

"Mind!" said Cedric again, with reiteration worthy of his nursery days. "My dear girl, you don't suppose it's the money I mind, do you?"

"No, no—I ought to have asked you first—but I didn't think—it seemed a natural thing to do—"

"Good Lord, Alex!" cried Cedric, more moved than she had ever seen him. "Do you understand what you're saying? A natural thing to do to embezzle money?"

Tears of terror and of utter bewilderment seized on Alex' enfeebled powers, and deprived her of utterance.

Cedric began to pace the library, speaking rapidly and without looking at her.

"If you'd only written and told me what you'd done at once—though Heaven knows that would have been bad enough but to do a thing like that and then let it rest! Didn't you know that it must be found out sooner or later?"

He cast a fleeting glance at Alex, who sat with the tears pouring down her quivering face, but she said nothing. It was of no use to explain to Cedric that she had never thought of not being found out. She had meant no concealment. She had thought her action so simple a one that it had hardly needed explanation or justification. It had merely been not worth while to write.

Cedric's voice went on, gradually gaining in power as the agitation that had shaken him subsided under his own fluency.

"You know that it's a prosecutable offence, Alex? Of course, there's no question of such a thing, but to trade on that certainty—"

Alex made an inarticulate sound.

"Violet says of course you didn't know what you were doing. That wretched place—that convent—has played havoc with you altogether. When I think of those people—!" Cedric's face darkened. "But hang it, Alex, you were brought up like the rest of us. And on a question of honour—think of father!"

Alex had stopped crying. She was about to make her last stand, with the last strength that in her lay.

"Cedric—listen to me. You must! You don't understand. I didn't look at it from your point of view—I didn't see it like that. There's something wrong with me—there must be—but it didn't seem to me to matter. I know you won't believe me—but I thought the money was quite a little, unimportant thing, and that you'd understand, and say I'd done right to take it for granted that I might have it."

"But it's not the money!" groaned Cedric. "Though what on earth you wanted it for, when you had no expenses and your allowance just paid in—But that's not the point. Can't you see, Alex? It's not this wretched cheque in itself; it's the principle of the thing."

Alex gazed at him quite hopelessly. The flickering spark of spirit died out and left her soul in darkness.

Cedric faced her.

"I couldn't believe that your letter really meant what it seemed to mean," he said slowly; "but if it does—as on your own showing it does—then I understand your leaving us, needless to say. Where are you living—what is this place, Malden Road?"

Characteristically, he drew out her letter, and referred to the address carefully.

"Where is Malden Road?"

"In Hampstead—near Barbara."

"Are you in rooms?"

"Yes."

"How did you find them? Who recommended them?"

She made no answer, and Cedric gazed at her with an expression of half-angry, half-compassionate perplexity.

"You are entitled to keep your own counsel, of course, and to make your own arrangements, but I must say, Alex, that the thought of you disturbs me very much. Your whole position is unusual—and your attitude makes it almost impossible to—" He broke off. "Violet begged me—quite unnecessarily, but you know what she is—not to let you feel as though there were any estrangement—to say that whatever arrangement you preferred should be made. Of course, Pamela's marriage will add to your resources—you understand that? She is marrying an extremely wealthy man, and I shall have not the slightest hesitation in allowing her to make over her share of father's money to you as soon as it can be arranged. She wishes it herself."

He paused, as though for some expression of gratitude from Alex, but she made none. Pam had everything, and now she was to have the credit and pleasure of a generosity which would cost her nothing as well. Alex maintained a bitter silence.

"The obvious course is for you to join Barbara, paying your half of expenses, as you will now be enabled to do."

"Barbara doesn't want me."

"It is the natural arrangement," repeated Cedric inflexibly. "And I must add, Alex, that you seem to me to be terribly unfitted to manage your own life in any way. If what you have told me is the case, I can only infer that your moral sense is completely perverted. I couldn't have believed it of one of us—of one of my father's children."

Alex knew that the bed-rock of Cedric's character was reached. She had come to the point where, for Cedric, right and wrong began and ended—honour.

They would never get any nearer to one another now. The fundamental principle which governed life for Cedric was deficient in Alex.

She got up slowly and began to pull on her shabby gloves.

"Will you forgive me, Cedric?" she half sobbed.

"It isn't a question of forgiveness. Of course I will. But if you'd only asked me for that wretched money, Alex! What you did was to embezzle—it neither more nor less. Oh, good Lord!"

He looked at her with fresh despair and then rang the bell.

"You're going to have a taxi," he told her authoritatively. "You're not fit to go any other way. Alex, my dear, I'd give my right hand for this not to have happened—for Heaven's sake come to me if you want anything. How much shall I give you now?"

He unlocked the writing-table drawer agitatedly. Alex thought to herself hysterically, "He thinks I may steal money, perhaps, from somebody else, if I want it, and perhaps I should." And with a sense of degradation that made her feel physically sick, she put into her purse the gold and the pile of silver that he pushed into her hand.

Cedric straightened himself, and taking off his glasses, wiped them carefully.

"Write to me, Alex, and let me know What you want to do. Barbara will be back soon—you must go to her—at any rate for a time—till after Pamela's wedding. You know that's fixed for December now? And, my dear, for Heaven's sake let's forget this ghastly business. No one on this earth but you and I and Violet need ever know of it."

"No," said Alex.

She looked at him with despair invading her whole being.

"Good-bye, Cedric. You've been very, very kind to me."

"The taxi is at the door, sir."

"Thank you."

Cedric took his sister into the hall, and she gave a curious, fleeting glance round her at the familiar surroundings, and at the broad staircase where the Clare children had run up and down and played and quarrelled together, in that other existence.

"Good-bye, dear. Write your plans, and come and see us as soon as we get back. It won't be more than a week or two now."

Cedric put her into the waiting taxi, and stood on the steps looking after her as the cab turned out of Clevedon Square. And Alex, crouched into a corner of the swiftly-moving taxi, knew herself capable of any treachery, any moral infamy to which she might be tempted, since Cedric had been right when he said that her sense of honour, of fundamental rectitude, was completely perverted.

---

XXIX

Forgiveness

The weather broke suddenly, and it became cold and rainy. For two or three days Alex sat in her sitting-room at Malden Road and heard the trams and the omnibuses clash past, and the children screaming to one another in the street. She could hardly have said when she had first realized that it was impossible for her to go on living. But the determination, now that it was there, full-grown, had brought with it a sense of utter finality.

For two or three days she felt stunned, and yet driven by a desperate feeling that it was necessary for her to think, to make a plan. But she could not think.

Then one evening Mrs. Hoxton, the landlady, said to her curiously:

"Wouldn't you like a fire, tonight?" She seldom said "Miss" in speaking to Alex. "It's so chilly, all of a sudden, and you look ill, really, now, you do."

Alex felt rather surprised. Perhaps she was ill, which would account for the impossibility of consecutive thought. A fire would be very nice. She shivered involuntarily, looking at her little empty grate crammed with cut paper. She remembered that there was no need to consider expense any more.

"Yes, I'd like a fire, please," she said gently. And that evening she sat close to the pleasant blaze, flickering on the wall, and dimly recalling to her the nursery at Clevedon Square in the old days, and the power of thought came back to her.

It was as though the warmth and companionship of the flames had suddenly unsealed something frozen up within her, and she became more herself than she had been for many months. With the horrible, pressing dread of an unbearable present and an unimaginable future lifted from her heart, Alex felt a pervading lucidity of thought, to which she had for years been a stranger, take possession of her. She knew suddenly that she was, for a little while, to regain faculties that had been atrophied within her since the far, free days of her girlhood. She began to reflect.

Why had life, to which she had looked forward so eagerly, with such confident anticipation of some wonderful happiness, which should be in proportion to the immense capacity for realizing it which she knew to exist within her, have proved to be only a succession of defeats, of receding hopes and of unfulfilled desires?

Alex did not question that the fault lay with herself. From her baby days, under the unvarnished plain speaking of old Nurse, she had known herself to be the black sheep of every flock. And she had not sinned splendidly, dramatically, either. Her sins had been those of petty meanness, of shirking and evading, of small self-indulgences and childish tyranny at the expense of others, of vulgar lies and half-truths.

Those sins which find little or no place in the decalogue, and which stand lowest in the scale by which the opinion of others is meted out to us.

Those are the things which are not forgiven. That was it, Alex told herself, with a feeling of having suddenly struck the keynote. Forgiveness.

Forgiveness was the key to everything. Alex, in the sudden surety of vision that had come to her, did not doubt that her own interpretation of the word was the right one. Forgiveness meant understanding—not condemnation and subsequent pardon. It did not mean the bewildered, scandalized, and yet regretful oblivion to which Cedric would consign her memory and that of her many failings, it did not mean Barbara's detached, indifferent kindness, carefully measured in terms of material resources, nor Pamela's and Archie's good-natured patronage, half-stifled in mirth, of which the very object was the gulf that separated them from their sister. It did not even mean Violet's soft pity and unresentful acceptance of facts that amazed her. Looking further back, Alex knew that it did not mean either the serious, perplexed pardon that Sir Francis had tendered to his troublesome daughter, or Lady Isabel's half-complaining, half-affectionate remonstrances.

It did not in any way occur to her to blame them for a lack of which she had all her life been subconsciously aware in all their forbearance. She told herself, with a fresh sense of enlightenment, that they had not understood because it was in none of them to have yielded to those temptations which had beset and mastered her so easily. Measuring her frailty by their own strength, they had only seen her utter failure in resistance, and been shamed and grieved by it. Alex knew that in herself was another standard of forgiveness; she could never condemn, for the simple reason that she herself had failed, in every sense of the word. Unresentfully, she was able to sum it all up, as it were, when she told herself, "People who would have resisted temptation themselves, can't understand those who fall—so they can't really forgive. But the bad ones, who know that they have given way all along the line, know that any temptation would have been too strong for them—it's only chance whether it comes their way or not—so they can understand."

She felt oddly contented, as at having reached a solution.

Later on, her thoughts turned to the past again, and to the childish days when she had been the leading spirit in the Clevedon Square nursery. But the memory of that past, incredible, security and assurance, made her begin to cry, and she wiped away blinding tears and told herself that she must not give way to them. She did not at first quite know why she must reserve the tiny modicum of strength still left her, but presently she realized that the end which had become inevitable could not be reached without decisive action of her own.

Alex' logic was elementary, and its directness left her no loophole for doubt.

She could endure the plane of existence on which she found herself no longer. If she fled in search of other conditions, it was with full certainty that these could not be less tolerable than those from which she was flying, and at the back of her mind was a strange, growing hope that perhaps that forgiveness of which her mind was full, might be found beyond the veil.

"After all," thought Alex, "it's even chances. If religion is all true, then I must go to hell, whether I kill myself or not, and if it isn't, then perhaps I shall just go out and know nothing more—ever—or perhaps it will be really a new beginning, and there will be somebody or something who will forgive me, and let me start over again."

She began to feel rather excited, as though she were about to try an experiment that might best be described as a gamble.

Mrs. Hoxton, coming in with the small supper-tray, looked at her sharply two or three times, and when she had gone away again, Alex, turning to the glass, saw that her eyes were shining and looking enormously large and wide-pupilled.

"I believe I am happy tonight," she thought wonderingly.

While she ate her supper she tried to make a plan, but the excitement within her was growing steadily, and she could only think out eager self-justification for her own decision.

"It won't hurt any one else—nobody will mind. In fact, when they've got over the first shock, it will be a relief to them all. They've been very kind—Violet and Cedric—Violet most of all—but they haven't understood. They'd have understood better if I'd been a bad woman—lived with wicked men, or things like that. I suppose I should have done that too, if it had come my way—but then I never had the temptation. I had only little, mean, horrible temptations—and I didn't resist any of them. The other sort of sin would have made me happier—it would have meant a sort of success in a way—but I have been a failure at everything—always."

Her heart hammering against her side, Alex resolved that in this, her last disgrace, she would not fail.

Making no preparations, no written farewells, she rose presently and went to her room, where she put on her thickest coat and tied a woollen scarf over her head.

Then she went out.

It had stopped raining, and the air was soft and moist. It was a starless night, and when Alex got to the Heath and away from the lighted streets, it was very dark. Underneath her sense of adventure she was conscious of terror—sheer physical terror—and also of the deeper dread that her resolution might fail her.

"I mustn't—I mustn't," she kept on muttering to herself.

Then, as though reassuring somebody else, "But it's only like going for a journey—to a quite new place where everything may be different and much, much better ... or else to sleep, and never any waking up to misery again.... Just one dreadful minute or two, perhaps, and then it will all be over ... only a question of a little physical courage ... not to struggle ... like taking gas ... much easier if one doesn't struggle...."

She was struck by a sudden thought and said aloud, triumphantly, as though she were defeating by her inspiration some one who was urging difficulties upon her:

"I won't give myself any chances. I'll put big stones in my pocket and tie my scarf over my mouth. That'll make it quicker, too."

When she came to the part of the Heath where the water lay, Alex began to stoop down and hunt for stones. She pounced on each one that seemed larger than its fellows with a sense of pride at her own success, and put them into the pockets of her coat. The moon appeared palely through clouds and then disappeared again, but not before she had taken her bearings.

She was on one of the many wide bridges that span the long pools dotted over the Heath—pools shelving at the sides with an effect of shallowness and deepening suddenly in the middle. Alex threw an indifferent glance at the dark water, and only felt annoyance that so few stones should be loose upon the pathway, and none of them very large ones. When her pockets were filled, she did not think the weight very noticeable.

Then came another evanescent gleam of moonlight, and Alex, still with that sharpening of all her perceptions, noticed that there was a man's figure at the far end of the bridge. He appeared to be stationary, leaning on the parapet and gazing down at the almost invisible pond.

She was conscious of vexation. His presence would surely interfere with her scheme.

For a moment she wondered, detachedly enough, whether she should go away and come back the following evening. But the next instant she recoiled from the thought, as though seeing in it the promptings of her own weakness.

"I am not frightened tonight—at least, hardly at all. If I wait I may never feel like this again. I shall make a failure of it all, and that would be worse than anything. I must do it tonight, while I'm not frightened."

She was not cold. Walking in her heavy coat had warmed her, and the evening was mild as well as damp. So she waited quietly in the shadow, hoping that the man would presently move away.

The thought crossed her mind, with a certain humour, that the situation held possibilities of romance.

"If it were in a book, he would save me at the last minute and fall in love with me and it would all end happily. Or he would see me now, and perhaps speak to me, and he would understand all I told him, and persuade me not to. Anyhow, it would all come right."

She smiled in the darkness.

"But that won't happen to me. There never was any one—and nobody would love me now, especially when they knew all about me." She remembered the haggard, distorted countenance that the looking-glass had shown her—the great, starting eyes with discoloured circles beneath them, and the blackened, prominent teeth, more salient than ever from the thinness of her face.

She could almost have laughed, without any conscious bitterness, at the idea of any romance in connection with her present self.

And yet the girl, Alex Clare, could have loved—had looked forward to love and to happiness as her rights, just as Pamela Clare did now.

But Pamela was different. Every one was—No!

It was Alex that was different—that had always been different.

She began to feel less warm, and shivered a little as she waited.

It occurred to her, not with any sense of fear, but with vexation, that her purpose would be far more difficult of achievement if she waited until she was physically chilled.

She looked up at the bridge again, and the figure was still there, at the furthest end. Alex measured the length of the bridge with her eyes.

It was doubtful if he would see her from the furthest end of it, but she reflected matter-of-factly:

"If I jump there will be the noise of a splash—and he might do something—he would try to save me, I suppose—or run for help. It wouldn't be safe. If he would only go."

She became irritated. With a sense of despair she determined to circumvent the motionless, watchful figure.

Moving very quietly and almost soundlessly over the soft muddy ground, Alex made her way from the path to the bank, and further and further down it till only a short declivity of shelving mud lay between her and the water.

She could feel the brambles catching in her thick coat as though pulling her back, but she went on, cautiously and steadily. Once or twice she pushed at the low, tangled bushes that impeded her progress, and paused aghast at the rustling that ensued. But from the bridge above her there came no sound.

Within a few steps of the dark water, her feet already sinking ankle-deep into the wet, spongy ground, she stopped.

She realized with wondering joy that, after all, she was not very much afraid. It was as though the self-confidence which had for so long deserted her had come back now to carry her through the last need.

She felt proud, because she knew that for this once she was not going to fail.

She talked to herself in a whisper:

"This one time—just a few minutes when it may be very bad—but remember that it can't last long, and then it'll all be over. And perhaps there'll never be anything more afterwards—like being always asleep, and no one need be vexed or disappointed any more. But perhaps—"

She paused on the thought, and her heart began to beat faster with a hopeful excitement such as she had not known for a very long while.

"Perhaps it will be much better than one imagines possible. Perhaps there'll be real forgiveness and understanding—and then my having done this won't matter. Anyway, I shall know very soon, if only I'm brave just for a few minutes."

She drew a long breath, then, instinctively stretching her arms straight out before her so as to balance herself, she began to move forward.

The first unmistakable touch of the water round her feet made her gasp and stifle a scream, but she waded on, encouraging herself in a low murmur, as though speaking to a child:

"It's only like going into the sea when one's bathing—pretend it's that, then you won't be frightened. Just straight on—it will be over quite soon—"

She was moving, slowly, but without pause, her hands held out in front of her, the ground still beneath her slipping feet, which felt oddly weighted. Once she began to pull the woollen scarf over her mouth, but with the sense of breathlessness came the beginning of panic, and she tore it away again.

"Go on—coward—coward," she urged herself. "Remember what it would mean to make another muddle of this, and to fail."

The cold invaded her body and her teeth began to chatter.

For an instant she stood, surrounded by the silent water, cold and terror and the weight of her now sodden clothing paralysing her, so that she could move neither backwards to the shore nor forward into the blackness in front of her.

"I must," muttered Alex, and wrenched one foot desperately out of the mud below. With the forward movement, she lost her balance, and her hands clutched instinctively at the water's level. Then the clogging bottom of the pond sheered away suddenly from beneath her, and there was only water, dark and icy and rushing, above and below and all round her.

---

XXX

Epitaph

They sat round, afterwards, in the Clevedon Square drawing-room—all the people who had helped misguided, erring Alex, according to their lights, or again, according to their limitations, and who had failed her so completely in the ultimate essential.

Pamela and her lover whispered together in the window.

"After all, you know," hesitated the girl, "she had nothing much to live for, poor Alex. She'd got out of touch with all of us—and she had no one of her very own."

"Not like us."

His hand closed for an instant over hers.

"There was no reason why she should not have come to us if—if she was in money difficulties," reiterated Cedric uneasily. He consciously refrained from adding "again."

Violet was crying softly, lying back in the depths of a great arm-chair.

"Poor Alex! I never guessed Malden Road was like that. Why did she go there? Oh, poor Alex!"

"You were nicer to her than any of us, Violet," said Archie gruffly. "She was awfully fond of you, wasn't she, and of the little kid?"

Barbara, hard and self-contained, gazed round the familiar room. For a moment it seemed to her that they were all children again, sent down from the nursery by old Nurse, on Lady Isabel's "At Home" afternoon.

Her eyes met those of Cedric, who had taken up his stand against the mantelpiece, in his hand his glasses, which he was shaking with little, judicial jerks.

"Oh, Cedric," said Barbara with a sudden catch in her voice.

"Don't you remember—Alex was such a pretty little girl!"

London, 1917.
Bristol, 1918.

THE END