The next day Enid Raleigh came home.

Almost the first thing she said to her mother, who had met her at the station with the carriage, was:

"Well, and where is Master Vane, please? He is in town, isn't he? Why didn't he come to meet me? I shall have to make him do penance for this."

The words were lightly spoken, spoken in utter unconsciousness of the deep meaning which Fate had put into them. So far as Enid herself was concerned, and as, in fact, she was just thinking at the moment, all they meant was that at their next meeting she would refuse Vane his long-accustomed lover's kiss, and then, after an explanation occupying some three or four minutes at most, surrender at discretion, after which would come the luxury of playing at being offended and standing on her dignity for a few minutes more, and then enjoying the further luxury of making it up.

"Yes, dear," said her mother, "Vane is in town still. I think he doesn't go back to Oxford until the end of the week, but he hasn't been very well lately——"

"Not well!" exclaimed Enid, sitting up out of the corner of the carriage into which she had leaned back with that easy abandon which comes so naturally to people accustomed to comfort all their lives. "Ill! Why, Vane's never been ill in his life. What's the matter? It isn't anything serious, is it? You don't mean that he's really ill, mother, do you?"

There was no mistaking the reality of the anxiety in her tone. Her mother recognised it instantly, but she also saw that a brougham rattling over the streets of London was not exactly the place to enter upon such explanations as it was her destiny and her duty to make to this brilliant, beautiful, spoilt darling of a daughter who was sitting beside her.

So far as she knew, every hope, every prospect of Enid's life, that bright young life which, in the fuller acceptation of the term, was only just going to begin, was connected more or less intimately with Vane Maxwell.

Ever since they had come home together from Bombay on that memorable voyage, she and Vane had been sweethearts. They were very much in love with each other, and so far their love had been a striking exception to that old proverb which comes true only too often. Saving only those lovers' quarrels which don't count because they end so much more pleasantly than they begin, there had never been a cloud in that morning-sky of life towards which they had so far walked hand in hand. It seemed as though the Fates themselves had conspired to make everything pleasant and easy for them; and of course it had never struck either of them that when the Fates do this kind of thing, they always have a more or less heavy account on the other side—to be presented in due course.

Lady Raleigh knew this, and her daughter did not. She knew that the terrible explanation had to come, but she very naturally shrank from the inevitable—and so, woman-like, she temporised.

"Really, dear," she said, "I can't talk with all this jolting and rattle. When we get home I will tell you all about it. Vane himself is not ill at all. He is just as well as ever he was. It isn't that."

"Then I suppose," said Miss Enid, looking round sharply, "my lord has been getting himself into some scrape or other—something that has to be explained or talked away before he likes to meet me. Is that it?"

"No, Enid, that is not it," replied her mother gravely, "but really, dear, I must ask you to say nothing more about it just now. When we get home we'll have a cup of tea, and then I'll tell you all about it."

"Oh, very well," said Enid, a trifle petulantly. "I suppose there's some mystery about it. Of course there must be, or else he'd have come here himself, so we may as well change the subject. How do you like the new flat, and what's it like?"

As she said this she threw herself back again into the corner and stared out of the opposite window of the brougham with a look in her eyes which seemed to say that for the time being she had no further interest in any earthly affairs.

Lady Raleigh, glad of the relief even for the moment, at once began a voluble and minute description of the new flat in Addison Gardens into which they had moved during her daughter's last sojourn in Paris, and this, with certain interjections and questions from Enid, lasted until the brougham turned into the courtyard and drew up in front of the arched doorway out of which the tall, uniformed porter came with the fingers of his left hand raised to the peak of his cap, to open the carriage door.

Sir Godfrey was out, and would not be back until dinner time; so, as soon as they had taken their things off, Lady Raleigh ordered tea in her own room, and there, as briefly as was consistent with the gravity of the news she had to tell, she told Enid everything that her husband had heard from Sir Arthur.

Enid, although she flushed slightly at certain portions of the narrative, listened to the story with a calmness which somewhat surprised her mother.

The little damsel for whose kisses those two boys had fought ten or eleven years ago, had now grown into a fair and stately maiden of eighteen, very dainty and desirable to look upon, and withal possessing a dignity which only comes by birth and breeding and that larger training and closer contact with the world which modern girls of her class enjoy. Young as she was, hers was not the innocence of ignorance. She had lived too late in the century, and had already been too far afield in the world for that.

"It comes to this, then," she said quietly, almost hardly, "instead of being dead, as we have believed all along, Vane's mother is alive; an imbecile who has become so through drink, and who seems to have misbehaved herself very badly when Vane was a baby. She is in an asylum, and will probably remain there till she dies. No one but ourselves and this interesting young person, Miss Carol Vane, appears to know anything about it, and I really don't see why Vane is to be held responsible for his mother's insanity—for I suppose that's what it comes to.

"And then there is Miss Carol herself. Of course she's not a particularly desirable family connection; but I don't suppose Vane would expect me to meet her, much less fall upon her neck and greet her as his long-lost sister. I suppose, too, that between us we could manage to do something for her, and put her in a more respectable way of living and induce her to hold her tongue.

"As for Vane getting drunk that night, of course it's very improper and all that sort of thing from the Sunday School point of view; but I don't suppose he was the only undergraduate who took too much to drink that night. Probably several hundreds of them did, and I daresay a good many of them were either engaged or going to be. Would they consider that a reason why they should go and break off their engagements? I'm afraid there wouldn't be many marriages nowadays if engagements were broken off on that account.

"Of course, mam, dear, what you've told me is not exactly pleasant to hear, but still, after all, I really can't see anything so very dreadful in it. Most families have a skeleton of some sort, I suppose, and this is ours, or will be when Vane and I are married. We must simply keep the cupboard door shut as closely as possible. It's only what lots of other people have to do."

"Well, my dear," said her mother, "I must say I'm very glad to see you take it so reasonably. I'm afraid I could not have done so at your age, but then girls are so different now, and, besides, you always had more of your father's way of looking at things than mine. Then, I suppose, Vane may come and see you. I think it was very nice of him not to come until you had been told everything."

"May come!" said Enid. "I should think so. If he doesn't I shall be distinctly offended. I shall expect him to come round and make his explanations in person before long, and when he does we will have a few minutes chat À deux—and I don't think I shall have very much difficulty in convincing him of the error of his ways, or, at any rate, of his opinions."

"What an extremely conceited speech to make, dear!" said her ladyship mildly, and yet with a glance of motherly pride at the beauty which went so far towards justifying it. "Well, perhaps you are right. Certainly, if anyone can, you can, and I sincerely hope you will. It would be dreadful if anything were to happen to break it off after all these years."

The colour went out of Enid's cheeks in an instant, and she said in quite an altered voice:

"Oh, for goodness sake, mamma, don't say anything about that! You know how fond I am of Vane. I simply couldn't give him up, whatever sort of a mother he had, and if he had a dozen half-sisters as disreputable as this Miss Carol Vane—the very idea of her having the impudence to use his name! No, I shan't think of that—I couldn't. If Vane did that it would just break my heart—it really would. It would be like taking half my life away, and it would simply kill me. I couldn't bear it."

She honestly meant what she said, not knowing that she said it in utter ignorance of the self that said it.

It was in Enid's mind, as it also was in her mother's, to send a note round to Warwick Gardens to ask both Vane and his father to come round to an informal dinner, and to discuss the matter there and then; but neither of them gave utterance to the thought. Lady Raleigh, knowing her daughter's proud and somewhat impetuous temperament, instinctively shrank from making a suggestion which she would have had very good grounds for rejecting, more especially as she had already given such a very decided opinion as to Vane's scruples.

As for Enid herself, she honestly thought so little of these same scruples that she felt inclined to accuse Vane of a Quixotism which, from her point of view at least, was entirely unwarrantable. It was, therefore, quite impossible for her to first suggest that they should meet after a parting during which they might have unconsciously reached what was to be the crisis of both their lives.

The result was that the thought remained unspoken, and Enid, after spending the evening in vexed and anxious uncertainty, went to bed; and then, as soon as she felt that she was absolutely safe in her solitude, discussed the whole matter over again with herself, and wound the discussion up with a good hearty cry, after which she fell into the dreamless slumber of the healthy and innocent.

When she woke very early the next morning, or, rather, while she was on that borderland between sleeping and waking where the mind works with such strange rapidity, she reviewed the whole of the circumstances, and came to the conclusion that she was being very badly treated. Vane knew perfectly well that she was coming back yesterday afternoon, and therefore he had no right to let these absurd scruples of his prevent him from performing the duties of a lover and meeting her at the station. But, even granted that something else had made it impossible for him to do so, there was absolutely no excuse for his remaining away the whole afternoon and evening when he must have known how welcome a visit would have been.

Meanwhile Vane had been doing the very last thing that she would have imagined him doing.

After his fateful conversation with his father he had left the house in Warwick Gardens to wander he knew and cared not whither. His thoughts were more than sufficient companionship for him, and, heeding neither time nor distance, he walked as he might have walked in a dream, along the main road through Hammersmith and Turnham Green and Kew, and so through Richmond Hill till he had climbed the hill and stopped for a brief moment of desperate debate before the door of the saloon bar of the "Star and Garter." The better impulse conquered the worse, and he entered the park, and, seating himself on one of the chairs under the trees, he made an effort to calmly survey the question in all its bearings.

It was the most momentous of all human tasks—the choosing of his own future life-path at the parting of the ways. One of them, flower-bordered and green with the new-grown grass of life's spring-time, and the other dry, rugged and rock-strewn—the paths of inclination and duty: the one leading up to the golden gates of the Paradise of wedded love, and the other slanting down to the wide wilderness which he must cross alone, until he passed alone into the shadows which lay beyond it.

A few days before he had seen himself well on the way to everything that can make a man's life full and bright and worthy to be lived. He was, thanks to his father's industry, relieved from all care on the score of money, and, better still, he had that within him which made him independent of fortune, perfect health and great abilities, already well-proved, although he had yet to wait nearly a year for his twenty-first birthday.

He had great ambitions and the high hopes which go with them. The path to honour and distinction, even to fame itself, had lain plainly open before him—and now everything was so different. The sun which he had thought was only rising was already setting. He knew now that the fruit which looked so sweet and luscious had the canker-worm feeding on the core; that the flesh which seemed so healthy was really tainted and leprous; and that, worse than all, the brightest and sweetest promise of his life, a promise infinitely sweeter and dearer than even the fulfilment of his highest material ambition, was now no longer a promise but a denial, a life-sacrifice demanded, not only by his honour as a man, but by his love as a lover.

He sat thus thinking until the buzzing of a motor-car woke him from his day-dream. He looked at his watch, and found that he had about time to get across the park to Sheen Gate; but he fell to dreaming again on the way, and when he reached the gate it was closed.

He turned back with the idea of asking a keeper to unlock the gate and let him out, but after a few strides he halted and sat down again on a seat. After all, were he to go home, he could not sleep, and it better suited his mood to keep vigil in the open air than within the four walls of his room.

And so he passed the night, walking half awake, and then sitting, half asleep, dimly reviewing this sudden crisis of his fate again and again from all possible aspects. And again and again the determination to adhere to the decision which duty had marked out so clearly seemed to beat itself deeper and deeper into his brain.

The taint of alcoholism was in his blood, and matrimony and parentage were not for him. In the morning he would go straight to Enid's father and admit that, although ties reaching back into her childhood and his had to be broken, yet it was impossible for the engagement between him and Enid to be continued.

The night passed, and the park gates were again opened, but still Vane sat on, until, noticing the suspicious glances of some of the early pedestrians, he decided to get home, have a tub, and pay his fateful visit to Sir Godfrey Raleigh.

As it happened, however, that visit was never to be paid. Enid had found her waking thoughts unpleasant, if not almost intolerable, and, being too perfectly healthy to indulge in anything of the nature of moping or sulks, she came to the conclusion that a good sharp spin on her bicycle would be the best mental tonic she could have; so she got a cup of coffee and a biscuit, took out her machine, and started away to work off, as she hoped, the presentiment of coming trouble which seemed to have fastened itself upon her.

Thus it happened that she entered Richmond Park by Sheen Gate just as Vane, physically weary yet still mentally sleepless, was coming out of it.

During his night's vigil he had nerved himself, as he thought, to meet every imaginable trial but this one—this vision of his well-beloved, not waiting for him, but coming to him fresh and radiant in her young beauty, delightful and desirable, tempting almost beyond the powers of human resistance, and his, too, his own sweetheart, pledged to him ever since that memorable afternoon when he had fought for her and won her behind the wheelhouse in the midst of the Indian Ocean.

When her wonder had given way to complete recognition Enid dismounted and waited, naturally expecting that he would greet her; but he stood silent, looking at her as though he were trying to find some words of salutation.

"Well, Vane," she said at last, "I suppose we may shake hands. I did not expect to see you here. Cannot you look a little more cheerful? What is the matter? You look as if you hadn't been home all night."

He took her hand mechanically, and, as he held it and looked down into the sweet upturned face with a bright flush on the cheeks and the dawning of an angry light in the gentle eyes, he felt an almost irresistible desire to take her in his arms just as he had done at their last meeting and kiss into silence the tempting lips which had just shaped those almost scornfully spoken words.

It dawned upon her in the same moment that he was looking as she had never seen him look before. His face was perfectly bloodless. The features were hard-set and deep-lined. There were furrows in his forehead and shadows under his eyes. When she had last seen his face it was that of a boy of twenty, full of health and strength, and without a care on his mind. Now it was the face of a man of thirty, a man who had lived and sinned and sorrowed.

In that instant her mood and her voice changed, and she said:

"Vane, dear, what is it? Why don't you speak to me? Are you ill?"

He took her bicycle from her, and, turning, walked with her back into the park. After a few moments' silence he replied in a voice which seemed horribly strange to her:

"Yes, Enid, I am. I am ill, and I am afraid there is no cure for the disease. I have not been home. In fact, I have been in the park all night. I was shut in by accident, and I remained from choice, trying to think out my duty to you."

"Oh, nonsense!" she replied. "I know what you mean. It's about you getting drunk the other night—and—and your unfortunate mother and this newly-found half-sister of yours. Well, of course, I suppose it was exceedingly wrong of you to get so very drunk. And the rest—I mean about your mother—that is very sad and terrible. But, bad as it is, I think you are taking it a great deal too seriously. I've talked it all over with mamma, and she thinks just as I do about it."

When she had said this Enid felt that she had gone quite as far as her self-respect and maidenly pride would permit her to go. As she looked up at him she saw the pallor of his face change almost to grey. His hand was resting lightly on her arm, and she felt it tremble. Then he drew it gently away and said:

"I know what you mean, Enid, and it is altogether too good and generous of you; but I don't think you quite understand—I mean, you don't seem to realise how serious it all is."

"Really, Vane, I must say that you are acting very strangely. What is the good of going all over it again? You can't tell me anything more, I suppose, than I have heard already from mamma. Surely you don't mean that you intend that everything is to be over between us—that we are only to be friends, as they say, in future?"

"I quite see what you mean," he said, his lips perceptibly tightening; "and that, too, in a certain sense, is what I mean also."

"What!" she exclaimed. "Do you really mean that I am not to be any more what I have been to you, and that if we meet again it must only be as ordinary acquaintances, just friends who have known each other a certain number of years? Surely, Vane, you don't mean that—dear?"

The last word escaped her lips almost involuntarily. She tried to keep it back, but it got out in spite of herself. It was only the fact that they were walking on the public highway that prevented her from giving way altogether to the sense of despair that had come over her. As his face had changed a few moments before so did hers now, and as she looked at him he stopped momentarily in his walk.

But the lessons which he had learnt during the last few days, and most of all during this last night of lonely wandering and desperate questioning with himself, had ground the moral into his soul so deeply that not even the sight of her so anxiously longing for just one word from him to bring them together again, and make them once more as they had always been—almost since either of them could remember anything—was strong enough to force him to speak it.

He involuntarily wheeled the bicycle towards the middle of the road, as though he was afraid to trust himself too near her, and said, speaking as a man might speak when pronouncing his own death sentence:

"Yes, Enid, that is what I do mean. I mean that there is a great deal more, something infinitely more serious in what has happened during the last few days, in what I have learnt and you have been told, than you seem to have any idea of."

Enid made a gesture as though she would interrupt him, but he went on almost hotly:

"Listen to me, Enid, and then judge me as you please—only listen to me. Four days ago, after I had seen the Boat Race, I did as a good many other fellows from the 'Varsity do—I went West. By sheer accident I met a girl so like myself that—well, I didn't know then that I had a sister. Yesterday I learnt, then, that I have one—not my father's daughter, only my mother's—and you know what that means. We had supper together at the Trocadero——"

"Really, Vane, I do think you might spare me these little details," said Enid, with a sort of weary impatience. "I have heard of this half-sister of yours already. Suppose we leave her out for the present?"

"Yes," he said, again stopping momentarily in his walk. "We will leave her out for the present. In fact, as far as you are concerned, Enid, she may be left out for ever."

"Why—what do you mean, Vane?" she exclaimed, stopping short.

"I mean," he said, beginning quickly and then halting for a moment. "I mean that, considering everything that has happened during the last few days, I have no intention of asking you to become her half-sister—even in law."

The real meaning of his utterance forced itself swiftly enough upon her now, and for a minute rendered her incapable of speech. She, however, like others of her blood and breed, had learned how to seem most careless when she cared most, and so she managed to reply not only steadily but even stiffly:

"Of course, after that there is very little to be said, Mr. Maxwell. I'm afraid I have not properly understood what has happened. Perhaps, though, it would have been better for you to have seen my father and talked this over with him first."

The "Mr. Maxwell" cut him to the quick. It was the first time he had ever heard it from her lips. Yet it did not affect the decision which was, as he had for the time being, at least, convinced himself, inevitable, and so miserable was he that even her scornful indignation was something like a help to him.

He was even grateful that this interview, which he had looked forward to with dread, had taken place in the open air rather than in the drawing-room of Sir Godfrey Raleigh's house, for if she had simply sat down and cried, as, perhaps, nine out of ten girls in her position would have done, his task would have been infinitely more difficult, perhaps even impossible of accomplishment. Her present attitude, however, seemed to appeal to his masculine pride and stimulate it. He turned slightly towards her, and said, with a sudden change in his voice which she felt almost like a blow:

"Yes, Miss Raleigh, you are quite right. I will spare you the details; at least, those which are not essential. But there are some which are. For instance," he went on, with a note of vehemence in his tone which made it impossible for her to interrupt him, "four nights ago I was lying on the floor of the Den at home, blind, dead drunk—drunk, mind you, after this sister of mine had seen in my eyes the sign of drunkenness which she had seen in her mother's—that was my mother, too, an imbecile dipsomaniac, remember—who had sunk to unspeakable degradation before she became what she is. I was as sober as I am now when I told my father this—I mean what Carol had told me. I noticed that there was something strange about him while I was telling him, but I thought that was just a matter of circumstances, you know——"

"Yes, I think I know, or at any rate I can guess," said Miss Enid, with angry eyes and tightened lips.

"Very well, then," he went on, "and after that—after my father had asked me to have a glass of whiskey with him—after I had refused and he had gone to bed and I was putting the spirit-case away without any idea of drinking again, one smell of the whiskey seemed to paralyse my whole mental force. It turned me from a sane man who had had a solemn warning into a madman who had only one feeling—the craving for alcohol in some shape. I smelt again, and the smell of it went like fire through my veins. I tasted it, and then I drank. I drank again and again, until, as I suppose your mother has told you, I fell on the rug, no longer a man, but simply a helpless, intoxicated beast. I was utterly insensible to everything about me, I didn't care whether I lived or died. When I woke and thought about it I would a thousand times rather have been dead.

"It wasn't that I wanted the liquor. I didn't get drunk because I wanted to. I got drunk, Enid, because I had to; because there was a lurking devil in my blood which forced me to drink that whiskey just because it was alcohol, because it was drink, because it was the element ready to respond to that craving which I have inherited from this unhappy mother of mine.

"Do you know what that means, Enid? I don't think you do. It means that my blood has been poisoned from my very birth. Of course, you don't know this. Your parents don't know it, any more than they know that it is too late to redeem the ruin which has fallen upon me. That, at least, I can say with a clear conscience is no fault or sin of mine. Since then I have thrashed this miserable thing out in every way that I can think of. I have talked it over with my father, and he has talked it over with yours. I have been wandering about the park all night trying to find out what I ought to do—and I think I have found it."

"From which I suppose I am to understand," she replied, in a voice which was nothing like as firm as she intended it to be, "you mean, Vane—or perhaps I ought to say Mr. Maxwell now—that henceforth—I mean that we are not going to be married after all."

"What I mean is this, Enid," he replied, "that dearly as I love you, and just because I love you so dearly, because I would give all the world if I had it to have you for my wife, I would not make you the wife of a man who could become the thing that was lying on the hearthrug of the Den four nights ago—a man drunk against his own will, a slave to one of the vilest of habits—no, something much worse than a habit, a disease inherited with tainted, poisoned blood!

"What would you think of your parents and my father if they allowed you to marry a lunatic? Well, with that taint in my blood I am worse, a thousand times worse, than a lunatic, and I should be a criminal as well if I asked you or any other girl for whom I had the slightest feeling of love or respect to marry me.

"Think what the punishment of such a crime might be!" he went on even more vehemently. "Every hour of our married life I should be haunted by this horrible fear. Tempted by a devil lurking in every glass of wine or spirits that I drank, or even looked at—the same devil which had me in its grip the other night. Enid, if you could have seen me then, I think you would have understood better; but if, which God forbid, you could have gone through what I went through after I swallowed that first drink of whiskey, you would as soon think of marrying a criminal out of jail or a madman out of a lunatic asylum as you would of marrying me. I daresay all this may seem unreasonable, perhaps even heartless, to you; but, dear, if you only knew what it costs to say it——"

He broke off abruptly, for as he said this a note of tenderness stole for the first time into his voice, and found an instant echo in Enid's heart. So far she had borne herself bravely through a bitterly trying ordeal, but as she noticed a change in his tone a swift conviction came to her that if she remained many more minutes in his company she would certainly break down and there would be "a scene," which, under the circumstances, was not to be thought of. So she stopped him by holding out her hand and saying in a voice which cost her a terrible effort to keep steady:

"No, Vane, we have talked quite enough. I see your mind is made up, and so there is, of course, nothing more to be said except 'good-bye.' I think we had better not meet again until we both have had more time to think about it all."

This was as far as she could get. They had by this time reached Sheen Gate again, and Enid took her bicycle from him. She did not look at him, and, indeed, could not even trust herself to say "thank you." She mounted and rode through the comparatively lonely roads in a sort of dream until the traffic at Hammersmith Bridge and Broadway mercifully compelled her to give her whole attention to the steering of her machine.

When she got home she gave her bicycle to the porter, went straight to her own room, took off her hat and gloves and jacket, and then dropped quietly on the bed and laid there, staring with tearless eyes up at the ceiling, wondering vaguely what it all meant, and if it was really true.

Vane stood and watched her until she swept round a bend in the road, and then walked on with the one thought echoing and re-echoing in the emptiness of his soul—the thought of the course which he was bound to follow by the dictates of both love and duty. He had reached the Surrey end of Hammersmith Bridge when the strong smell of alcoholic liquor coming through the open door of a public-house caused him to stop for a moment. Would a drink do him any harm after what had happened? He had passed a sleepless night in the open air, and felt almost fainting—surely a drop of brandy would do him no harm under the circumstances? Then he remembered the hearthrug in the Den, and turned towards the bridge with something between a sneer and a curse on his lips.

Was he always to be beset by temptation in this way—and would he always have strength to successfully combat the evil influence? If Fate had really marked him out for a dipsomaniac, was it any use his fighting against what must inevitably be his destiny? His thoughts were interrupted by the rumbling of a 'bus which was coming towards him, and, seeing that it was one which went through Kensington, he jumped on it and went home.

He alighted at Warwick Gardens, and on reaching the house found that his father had just come in for lunch.

"It's all right, dad," he said, anticipating his inevitable question. "I got shut in Richmond Park by accident, and did a night in the open. But I'll tell you all about it at lunch. I'm going to have a tub now."

Lunch was ready by the time Vane came downstairs, re-clothed and refreshed, and when they were alone he repeated to his father almost verbatim the conversation he had had with Enid.

"Well, my boy," he said when he had concluded. "I cannot but think that as far as you can see now you have acted rightly. It is terribly hard on you, but I will help you all I can. And perhaps, after all, the future may prove brighter than it looks now for all of us."