Mary continued to live in the town of Lindow for several weeks. The night of exposure had brought upon Kingcote a complication of ills; his life was in the balance. It was something for Mary to have her children with her, yet as often as not the sight of them was an added misery. What would become of her and of them if Bernard died? Kingcote was a frail reed to represent the support in life of any mortal. It was anything but clear how, if he lived, the responsibilities which had come upon him would be discharged. But his sister had all the shrinking from the world’s demands which marked Kingcote himself, heightened by the sensibilities and incapacity of a gently-nurtured woman. He was her only stay. Her gratitude to him was very deep, and it had grown of late to a sisterly love which she had not known in earlier days.

Gabriel came from London once a week, after bringing the children. That morning he also brought a letter which had arrived for Kingcote. Mary saw that it was from Mrs. Clarendon; she put it away. At first she was much troubled with doubt whether it was her duty to send Mrs. Clarendon news of what had happened; she determined ultimately to wait and see if other letters came for her brother. But that which she kept had no successor. The fact strengthened a suspicion she had conceived, and she sent no news to Knightswell....

The return to London was scarcely a cheerful home-coming. Kingcote, still feeble, very seldom spoke; after the first natural questions, when he entered upon convalescence, he was possessed by muteness; no interests reawoke in him; he watched his fraction of the world without curiosity, and, beyond a pressure given to Mary’s hand from time to time, gave no sign that others’ presence had significance for him. His catastrophe he briefly explained exactly as Gabriel had done. Already they had reached home, and he had not as much as asked if letters awaited him.

Mary determined to wait a few days before she gave him the letter which, was in her possession; she feared for the result it might have upon him. Yet, on the other hand, it might be that to withhold it was an unwise thing. The contents of this letter she felt that she knew; what she could not know was how far her brother was prepared for them. But his very silence was significant; he expected nothing from Knightswell.

His health established itself day by day; of that there was, happily, every assurance. Yet he could not interest himself in anything. His mind was much like that of a child when it is weary. He would sit in his chair and watch what went on about him; even to read demanded too much exertion. She read to him for several hours daily, and he listened, or seemed to. At length Mary persuaded herself that to speak with him freely might perchance be the best course. She began to do so one day when she had been reading aloud.

“Bernard, can you remember all that happened on the day when you went to Winstoke?”

“Remember? Certainly; everything, till I lost my senses in walking along the roads.”

“Did you go to Knightswell?”

He replied in the affirmative, without constraint.

“And did you see Isabel?”

“I saw Mrs. Clarendon.”

It was a correction, but with no remarkable emphasis.

“Have you not expected to hear from her?”

He looked at her with more interest, but replied without emotion:

“No, I have not.”

Then he asked calmly: “Is there any letter?”

“Yes, there is one. It came the second day after you left London.”

“I will have it, please.”

Mary had the letter by her in readiness, and, having given it him, left the room.

Kingcote examined the envelope deliberately, and opened it with equal deliberation. He read this:

“Bernard,

“You have often wronged me so that it seemed to me that you did it wilfully. Surely there can be no real love without trust, and you have never trusted me. As you wish to free yourself, it shall be as if all was at an end between us. But I am not free, for I still love you, and I shall hold myself yours till you have rejected me a second time. Till then I will keep silence; I cannot help it if you misinterpret that, as you have misinterpreted my words.

“Isabel.”

He sat for a while musing, then went up to his own room. He walked up and down with the letter in his hands; at length, as if unwillingly, he destroyed it. When he had done so, he unlocked a drawer, and took out a collection of letters, all from Isabel. One of them he held to the paper still burning in the fireplace, then threw the others, one by one, upon the flame. As he watched the last sparks flicker, he was overcome with a rush of tears. He covered his face with his hands, and stood weeping.

There was a change in him after that day. He walked for several hours each morning, and the rest of his time gave to new books, which he got from a library. His own volumes did not attract him; he read simply with the pleasure in novelty, which is as far as most people ever get to in the matter of reading. His mind appeared to be quite calm, and in the evenings he spoke freely with his sister. By degrees the question of what he should do for a living actively occupied him. He answered advertisements persistently, and received no replies; that, circumstances considered, was in the order of things. The world has no place for a man who is possessed merely of general intelligence and a fair amount of reading. No one will take him on trust or on trial.

There must be specific capacity, estimable in terms of the ledger. Lacking this, and lacking the aid of influential friends, a man may starve—or there is the workhouse. What would you have? We are civilised, and enjoy the blessings of a social order.

Kingcote believed that Mr. Meres might have helped him, but in that quarter he could not apply. Gabriel was his only friend; Mr. Vissian, though correspondence with him continued, could scarcely be counted. But neither had Gabriel any practical suggestions to offer. He always talked of literary work, and literary work Kingcote could not undertake; it was perhaps his one note of actual wisdom, that he recognised his unfitness for earning money by the pen, and did not waste time in efforts that way. He was prepared, he said, to do anything that promised an income whereon he and his sister could live. Were it manual labour, well and good; were it the basest of clerkships, equally well.

“I have a need of work,” he said to Gabriel, one day about Christmas time. “It is getting to be a physical need. I must do something which calls for exertion. Do you know that I am at present exactly in the state which leads men to any kind of dissipation, which tests their character. If I had not my home and my sister, I should fall into the gulf by the edge of which walk such men as I am. And, if I fell, there would be no ascent to the light.”

“In other words, you are nursing your weakness,” said Gabriel unsympathetically. He was seldom sympathetic. It may have been as a tonic that Kingcote relished his society. “I perfectly believe what you say; you are capable of going to the devil. But remember that other people cannot devote themselves to hanging on at your coat-tails; you must put the drag on yourself.”

Gabriel always worked during their sittings together; idleness was abhorrent to him.

“I,” he went on, throwing himself back in his chair, “should have had as natural an alacrity in going to the devil as any man. I was made for it. I am by nature the most indolent fellow alive. I fight it, and I shall go on fighting.”

It was stimulating, but without practical direction; nor was the artist to blame for this. Kingcote was not adapted for any one of the plain categories of money-earning labour. Only the benevolence of fate could come to his aid.

He was a sad man to regard in these days. Seldom or never came a smile to his face; the springs of his natural vivacity seemed broken. He was not consciously melancholy, but then he did not give himself opportunities of brooding. The character of his countenance was a complete hopelessness; there was no forward-looking, no gleam of the joy of living. Anxiety gained upon him as the months succeeded each other, and when he was actively anxious his face had a look of age, which was more painful to observe than the passionate misery of youth. He often said that he felt he had lived his life, and that was indeed the impression his habitual look conveyed. When he turned back to the past, he saw hills and valleys; henceforth his path was on a dull plain, with the latter darkness upon the horizon. Formerly, when he said in conversation that he had come to know himself, and that he acquiesced in his inefficiency, it was always with the pleasurable expectation of being contradicted; there was a youthful insincerity in his confession. At present he made no such statements, as a general thing, and for the melancholy reason that they would no longer have been insincere; he believed in truth that his character was an inefficient one. He had not an ambition left. He had no passion left, which was worse.

He did at times think of Isabel, and with strange coldness. He had lost the power of realising her to his mind’s eye; she was more of an abstraction than a living woman. In certain moods there came to him the temptation to dwell upon those tenderest memories, to try and hear the voice which had once haunted him only too persistently, to see her face as a living thing. He could not; her very features escaped him, when he closed his eyes to fix them on the darkness. It was all so remote, that happiness and suffering; it affected him only as would the poet’s telling of a sweet and sad story. Anger he felt himself still capable of, had he allowed himself to indulge in it. What he had seen in the arbour at Knightswell could still be a source of indignation. That last letter she wrote in ignorance of his having seen her then; and it was a false letter. He accused her of paltry insincerity. That was why he had at once burnt all her other letters; and the tears he had shed were not so much on his own account as of regret for the vanished image of her nobleness and truth. Noble he had tried to think her, in the face of all he knew about her past; but it was all illusion, wrought in him by her beauty. Her love was her vanity. She liked to make slaves of men, and her coldness would preserve her independence to the end. That letter, she thought, would bring him back to her feet; so noble it seems to forgive. It was her better self that dictated the attempt to send him abroad; having won her rich cousin, who freed her from fear of the future. She meant for a moment to act honourably, and dismiss the lover who had nothing to give her. When he took her at her word, the woman’s instinct overcame her; she could not wholly lose her plaything. Nay, she was piqued that he broke so easily; she would have had a passionate scene, reproaches, entreaties—such as he, poor wretch, excelled in. There should be punishment for his literalness....

It was in this way that he reasoned of Isabel. He entertained no doubt of his interpretations. This view of her character became fixed; and it made his heart as cold and heavy as a stone within his breast.

There was more truth in the words he spoke to his sister as they sat together late on New Year’s Eve. Mary had not mentioned Isabel or Knightswell since she gave him the last letter, and he himself only now broke silence. He had closed his book, and was thoughtful for some minutes, then said:

“Mary, we will never speak of the things that have happened in this past year. I dare say you feel as if I were your debtor for a story, but the story is too simple to tell; you must have gathered it for yourself from what you have seen and heard.”

“I would not ask you to speak of what pains you, Bernard,” she replied.

“I scarcely think it does any longer pain me. There are some things,” he added, after a pause, “which, however possible in themselves, the world agrees to make impossible in practice. My story is one of these cases. We forgot the world, or thought we were strong enough to overcome it. But”—he laughed—“it is the latter end of the nineteenth century.” Mary was not satisfied, naturally; but she only sighed, saying: “You have suffered so much, dear!”

“Yes, but what else are we born for?”

This evening they were to have had Gabriel with them, but the day before he had been called away to Norwich. A telegram came to him, saying that his father was dead; the old man had been killed in a couple of days by bronchitis. For the past half-year there had been communication between father and son. The bookseller was alone in his old age; a sister who had kept his house for many years was dead, and he had no near relatives to take her place. He wished to see his son, and the artist had promised to go to Norwich early in the new year. The journey had to be taken sooner.

Within a week Kingcote received a note, asking him to go to his friend’s studio. Gabriel was at work as usual. There was no need for hypocritical words on one side or the other; Gabriel pointed in silence to a chair, and talked for five minutes of an artist whose works were then on exhibition at Burlington House.

Then: “My father seems to have left no will. But his affairs are in order, and I shall be a good deal better off than I was. In fact, the business has been profitable. No doubt his successor will continue to find it so.”

“Who succeeds him?”

“I don’t know.”

He mixed colours on his pallet.

“The shop, and the house above it, were his freehold property; they belong, of course, to me. There is a good deal of stock, and there is an assistant who has been in the shop nine years. The immediate capital required to carry on the business will be next to nothing.”

Kingcote was silent, and moved uneasily on his chair. The artist worked for a few minutes, then, turning suddenly round: “Well, what do you say?”

“You surely don’t mean——?”

“Certainly not, if it disagrees with you. Let us talk of something else.”

Kingcote’s face was gloomy, but at length he broke into a laugh.

“The idea is amazing!” he exclaimed. “And it really occurred to you that I should be capable of conducting a business?”

“Yes, it occurred to me,” admitted Gabriel, in his unsmiling way. “There are many more disagreeable ways of getting a living. I went so far as to think that the chance savoured of the providential.”

“But, my good friend, supposing for a moment that I were at all fitted for such things”—the touch of depreciation was involuntary—“how would it be possible for me to take over your father’s business? What securities can I give you? What——”

Gabriel checked him with a peculiar look, very nearly a smile.

“You are giving yourself a testimonial. I scarcely credited you with such business faculty.”

“Any man is aware that he cannot take a flourishing concern as a gift,” said Kingcote, with a little annoyance.

“Please to remember,” Gabriel remarked, “that I am an artist, and that you have certain pretensions to culture. I did not imagine that we ever talked on any other basis.”

He painted on.

“Is that man in the shop to be depended on?” was Kingcote’s next question. He had thrust his hands into his trouser-pockets, and was swaying one foot up and down, looking at the ground.

“Entirely. A first-rate man of business, and on the whole a gentleman; I have been at much trouble to get to know him.”

Kingcote rose, and walked about the studio. He smiled frequently, though there was a twitching in his lips to show that his thoughts had their prickly points.

“If I am to be a man of business,” he said at length, “I must accept the responsibilities of one from the first. Let me be bound by conditions you would lay upon a stranger, whom for some reason you were trusting rather liberally, and—I will go to Norwich.”

The artist smiled, but did not look from his canvas.

“Your sister would have no objection?”

“I can foresee none. Rather the contrary, I should say.”

“In that case, will you go down with me to-morrow?”

“I will.”

“Good.”

Kingcote walked home in a singular mood. He was glad, but without rejoicing; he was mortified, but without pain. It was done. His life had fallen from insubstantial cloud-heights to the lower level, to which fate had foredoomed it. To this end he had been travelling by how indirect a way! He began with thoughts of glory; he would finish his career as a shop-keeper. The sting was in the fact that he acknowledged the justice of Gabriel’s estimate of him. Of himself he could never have taken this step, however ready for it he might declare himself to be; a push by a friendly hand, and he yielded with a sense of relief. Behind the counter at Norwich, he would not be out of his place. He could not make books, but he might very well sell them; he could foresee a pleasure in the pursuit. The life would be restful. To dwell once more in his native town would make a continuity between his boyhood and his maturity; all between was air-building and moonshine. A few of those people whom he used to know would still be living; perhaps it would cost him a twinge or two to put up his name over the shop, and invite the attention of all who remembered it; but a week of custom—in both senses of the word—would put an end to sentimental difficulties. And at length he would rest. His business would probably continue to flourish; in a few years he might achieve independence. He might marry, children would sit upon his knee....

Mary listened with wonder, in the end with extreme happiness. He told her in the quietest way; it was not a future to excite enthusiasm, even had he been capable of it in any cause. To her, poor woman, it was admission to Elysian fields. This terrible London would be left behind, and with it her unceasing fears. Her children would be brought up in comfort, and enter naturally upon decent walks of life. The thought that it was the end of all her brother’s hopes could not long dwell with her; he and she were safe. What more can one ask, when the world is over-full, and every day the internecine war grows deadlier?