Julian, meanwhile, hailed a passing hansom, sprang into it, and told the man to drive, not to Bond Street but to the AthenÆum, Camden Town. There was an air about him as of one who plumes himself on having done a clever thing, and as he settled himself for his long drive there was a curious excitement and radiance in his face. When the cab reached its destination at last he jumped out and walked rapidly and eagerly away.

It was not a neighbourhood likely to be familiar to a young man about town, but Julian pursued his way with the certainty of a man who had followed it several times before. In about ten minutes he turned into a neat and respectable little street, consisting of two short rows of small houses with diminutive bow windows to the first-floor rooms. About half-way down he stopped at a house on the right-hand side and knocked with a quick, decided touch. He was an object of the deepest interest as he stood upon the little doorstep to a brisk, curious-looking woman who was standing in the ground-floor window of the house opposite, but her opportunity for observation was brief. The door was opened almost immediately, and with a pleasant greeting to the woman, who stood aside, he passed her and ran upstairs—a course of action evidently expected of him. He opened the door of the front room on the first floor and went eagerly in.

“Here I am!” he cried. “Did you expect me so soon?”

Standing in the middle of the room, as though she had suddenly started from her chair, with her hands outstretched towards him, was Clemence; and on the third finger of that thin, left hand there shone a bright gold ring.

Her face was a delicate rosy red, as though with sudden joy just touched with shyness, and all the beauty which had been latent in her tired, work-worn face seemed to have been touched into vivid, almost startling life, by the hand of a great magician. By contrast with the face she turned to Julian now, the large eyes deep and glowing, the mouth trembling a little with tenderness, the face of a month ago, pure and sweet as it had been, would have looked like the inanimate mask of a dormant soul. The soul was awake now, quivering with consciousness; womanhood had come with a purity and beauty beyond any possibility of girlhood. Looking at her face now, it was easy to see by what means alone the latent strength of her character might be developed.

He drew her into his arms with an eager, confident touch, and she yielded to him completely, clinging to him with the colour deepening in her face as he kissed it boyishly again and again. It was a fortnight only since he had kissed her first.

“I was watching for you,” she said softly. “I heard your step.”

He laughed exultantly and kissed her again.

“I thought you’d be watching!” he said. “Though I’m earlier than I told you, do you know? Much earlier! I say, Clemence, how jolly the room looks!”

It was a small room, furnished and decorated in the simplest and cheapest style; as great a contrast as could well be imagined to the rooms to which he was accustomed. But it was very clean and very comfortable-looking; and there was a homelike, restful atmosphere about it which might well have radiated from the slender figure in the plain dress, with that shining wedding-ring and lovely, flushing face. She smiled, a very sweet, pleased little smile.

“Do you think so really?” she said. “I am so glad. It is that beautiful basket-chair you sent, and the flowers.” She glanced as she spoke at a pot of chrysanthemums standing on a little table in the window. Then she turned to him again, her eyes a little deprecating. “Do you think you ought to spend so much money?” she said shyly.

Julian laughed, and flung his arm round her, as he surveyed the little room with a vivid air of proprietorship. Here he was master. Here his word was law. Here he was in a world of his own making, and his only fellow-creature was his subject.

“It looks jolly!” he pronounced again as a final dictum. “Now, come and sit down, Clemence, and tell me what you’ve been doing since yesterday!” He settled himself into the arm-chair by the fire with a lordly air as he spoke, adding: “Come and sit on this stool by me, like the sweetest girl in the world.”

Clemence hesitated, hardly perceptibly. Hers was a nature to which trivial endearments came strangely, almost painfully. She had not yet learned to caress in play; and there was an innate, unconscious, personal dignity about her to which trivial self-abasement was unnatural. But almost before she was conscious of her reluctance there swept over her, like a great wave of hot sweetness, the remembrance that she was his wife! It was her duty to do as he wished. She came softly across the room, sat down on the stool he had drawn out, and laid her cheek against his arm.

It was a trivial action, very quietly performed, but it was instinct with the beauty of absolute self-abnegation; and as if, as her physical presence touched him, something of her spirit touched him too, a sudden quiet fell upon the exultant, self-satisfied boy at whose feet she sat. Not for the first time, by any means, there stole over Julian a vague uneasiness; a vague realisation of something beyond his ken; something in the light of which he shrank, unaccountably, from himself. His hand closed round the woman’s hand lying in his with a touch very different from the boyish passion of his previous caresses, and for a moment he did not speak. Then he said slowly and in a low, dreamy voice:

“Clemence, I can’t think why you should ever have loved me!”

The hand in his thrilled slightly, and the head on his shoulder was just shaken. Clemence could not tell him why she loved him. The bald outline she could trace as most women can trace it. She could look back upon her first sense of reliance, her pity, her admiration, her sense of strange, delightful companionship; but the why and wherefore of it, the mystery which had given to this young man and no other the key of her soul, this was to her as a miracle; as, indeed, there is always something miraculous in it, even when it seems most natural. To account for love; to say that in this case it is natural, in this case it is unnatural; is to confess ignorance of the first great attribute of love—that it is supernatural and divine.

There was another silence, a longer one this time, and the strange spell sank deeper into Julian’s spirit. He said nothing. It would have been a relief to him to speak; to reduce to words, or, indeed, to definite consciousness, the vague trouble that oppressed him; but its outlines were too large and too vague for him. It was in truth a sense of total moral insolvency, but he could not understand it as such, having no moral standpoint. Clemence neither moved nor spoke; her hand lay motionless in his; her cheek rested against him; her beautiful eyes looked straight before them with a dreamy, almost awestruck gaze.

At last, with a desperate determination to thrust away so unusual an oppression, Julian moved slightly and began to talk. He wanted to get back his sense of superiority, and his voice accordingly took its most boyish and masterful tone.

“You haven’t told me what you’ve been doing, Clemence?” he said. “Have you given notice at your bonnet shop as I told you?”

Clemence lifted her head and sat up, clasping her hands lightly on the arm of his chair.

“No!” she said gently. “I thought I would ask you to think about it again. I would so much rather go on if you didn’t mind. For one thing, what could I do all day?” She looked up into his face as she spoke with deprecating, pleading eyes, which were full of submission, too; and the submission was very pleasant to Julian.

“I do mind,” he said authoritatively. “I can’t have it, Clemence. I can’t always see you home, don’t you see, and I won’t have you about at night alone. Besides, I don’t choose that you should work.”

“But I do so want to!” she said, laying her hand timidly and beseechingly on his. “It will be so difficult for you to keep us both; you will overwork yourself, I’m so afraid. Oh, won’t you let me help? I’ve always worked, you know; it doesn’t hurt me. You don’t want to forget that you’ve married a work-girl, do you?”

She smiled at him as she spoke, one of her sweet, rare smiles, and he kissed her impetuously.

“Don’t talk nonsense!” he said imperiously. “I can’t allow it, and that’s all about it. How do you suppose I could attend to my work when I’m kept at the hospital in the evening, if I were thinking all the time of you alone in the streets! No, you must give notice on Monday!”

She looked at him wistfully for a moment. He was condemning her to long days of idleness, to constant uneasiness and self-reproach on his behalf, to a certain loss of self-respect. But self-sacrifice was instinctive with her.

“Very well!” she said simply.

The little victory, the assertion of authority restored Julian’s spirits completely, and he plunged into discursive talk; more or less egotistical. It was all, necessarily, founded on falsehood, and it would have been a delicate question to decide when his talk ceased to be consciously untruthful, and became the expression of a fictitious Julian in whom the real Julian absolutely believed.

The afternoon wore on; the winter twilight fell, bringing with it a slight return of the fog of the morning; two hours had passed before Julian moved reluctantly, and said that he must go.

“I shall come to-morrow!” he said, taking her face between his hands and kissing it. “We’ll go out into the country if it’s fine. I wish it were summer-time! Have you ever seen the river, Clemence?”

“Not in the country,” she said. “It must be nice! How much you’ve seen! Do you know I often think that you must wish sometimes I was a lady! I don’t know anything and I haven’t seen anything, and——” she faltered, and he rose, laughing and drawing her up into his arms.

“Any one can know things,” he said lightly, “and any one can see things. But no one but you can be Clemence! Do you see? Oh, what a bore it is to have to go!”

He was lingering, undecidedly, as though a little pressure would have scattered his resolution to the winds, and seated him once more in the chair he had just quitted. But, since he had said that he must go, it never occurred to Clemence to ask him to stay. If it were not his duty he would never leave her. If it was his duty now, how could she hold him back!

“To-morrow will come!” she said, looking into his face with a brave smile.

“I don’t believe you want me to stay!” he returned, half laughing, half vexed.

“Don’t I?” she said simply, and he caught her in his arms again.

“What a shame!” he said. “There, good-bye! Are you coming to the door?”

She shook her head.

“I’ll stay here,” she said, “and watch you from the window. I see you farther so. Ah, it’s rather foggy! I’m so sorry! You’ll look up? Good-bye!”

She lifted her face to his and kissed him tenderly and shyly, and he left her standing by the window.

Julian ran downstairs, let himself out, and stood for a moment on the doorstep as he realised the disagreeable nature of the atmosphere. At the same instant the door of the house opposite opened, and a man came out, attended to the threshold by a woman. She caught sight of Julian instantly, and said something to the man, as he stood in the shadow, in a deferential whisper. Julian shook himself, confounded the fog, and then glanced up at the window from which the light streamed on his face. He waved his hand, turned away, and walked rapidly down the street, pulling up his coat collar as he went.

As he went, Dennis Falconer slowly descended the two steps of that opposite house, and slowly—very slowly—followed him.