Lady Ingleton looked swiftly at the woman coming in at the doorway clad in the severe, voluminous, black gown and cloak, and black and white headgear, which marked out the members of the Sisterhood of St. Mary’s. Her first thought was “What a cold face!” It was succeeded immediately by the thought, “But beautiful even in its coldness.” She met Rosamund near the door, took her hand, and said:

“I am glad you were able to come. I wanted very much to meet you. I came here really with the faint hope of seeing you. Let me take your umbrella. What a day it is! Did you walk?”

“I came most of the way by tram. Thank you,” said Rosamund, in a contralto voice which sounded inflexible.

Lady Ingleton went to “stand” the umbrella in a corner. In doing this she turned away from her visitor for a moment. She felt more embarrassed, more “at a loss” than she had ever felt before; she even felt guilty, though she had done no wrong and was anxious only to do right. Her sense of guilt, she believed, was caused by the fact that in her heart she condemned her visitor, and by the additional, more unpleasant fact that she knew Rosamund was aware of her condemnation.

“It’s hateful—so much knowledge between two women who are strangers to each other!” she thought, as she turned round.

“Do sit down by the fire,” she said to Rosamund, who was standing near the writing-table immediately under a large engraving of “Wedded.”

She wished ardently that Rosamund wore the ordinary clothes of a well-dressed woman of the world. The religious panoply of the “sister’s” attire, with its suggestion of a community apart, got on her nerves, and seemed to make things more difficult.

Rosamund went to a chair and sat down. She still looked very cold, but she succeeded in looking serene, and her eyes, unworldly and pure, did not fall before Lady Ingleton’s.

Lady Ingleton sat down near her and immediately realized that she had placed herself exactly opposite to “Wedded.” She turned her eyes away from the large nude arms of the bending man and met Rosamund’s gaze fixed steadily upon her. That gaze told her not to delay, but to go straight to the tragic business which had brought her to Liverpool.

“You know of course that my husband is Ambassador at Constantinople,” she began.

“Yes,” said Rosamund.

“You and I met—at least we were in the same room once—at Tippie Chetwinde’s,” said Lady Ingleton, almost pleading with her visitor. “I heard you sing.”

“Yes, I remember. I told Father Robertson so.”

“I dare say you think it very strange my coming here in this way.”

In spite of the strong effort of her will Lady Ingleton was feeling with every moment more painfully embarrassed. All her code was absolutely against mixing in the private concerns of others uninvited. She had a sort of delicate hatred of curiosity. She longed to prove to the woman by the fire that she was wholly incurious now, wholly free from the taint of sordid vulgarity that clings to the social busybody.

“I’ve done it solely because I’m very sorry for some one,” she continued; “because I’m very sorry for your husband.”

She looked away from Rosamund, and again her eyes rested on the engraving of “Wedded.” The large bare arms of the man, his bending, amorous head, almost hypnotized her. She disliked the picture of which this was a reproduction. Far too many people had liked it; their affection seemed to her to have been destructive, to have destroyed any value it had formerly had. Yet now, as she looked almost in despite of herself, suddenly she saw through the engraving, through the symbol, to something beyond; to the prompting conception in the painter’s mind which had led to the picture, to the great mystery of the pathetic attempt of human beings who love, or who think they love, to unite themselves to each other, to mingle body with body and soul with soul. She saw a woman in the dress of a “sister,” the woman who was with her; she saw a man in an Eastern city; and abruptly courage came to her on the wings of a genuine emotion.

“I don’t know how to tell you what I feel about him, Mrs. Leith,” she said. “But I want to try to. Will you let me?”

“Yes. Please tell me,” said Rosamund, in a level, expressionless voice.

“Remember this; I never saw him till I saw him in Turkey, nor did my husband. We were not able to draw any comparison between the unhappy man and the happy man. We were unprejudiced.”

“I quite understand that; thank you.”

“It was in the summer. We were living at Therapia on the Bosporus. He came to stay in a hotel not far off. My husband met him in a valley which the Turks call Kesstane Dereh. He—your husband—was sitting there alone by a stream. They talked. My husband asked him to call at our summer villa. He came the next day. Of course I—I knew something of his story”—she hurried on—“and I was prepared to meet a man who was unhappy. (Forgive me for saying all this.)”

“But, please, I have come to hear,” said Rosamund, coldly and steadily.

“Your husband—I was alone with him during his first visit—made an extraordinary impression upon me. I scarcely know how to describe it.” She paused for a moment. “There was something intensely bitter in his personality. Bitterness is an active principle. And yet somehow he conveyed to me an impression of emptiness too. I remember he said to me, ‘I don’t quite know what I am going to do. I’m a free agent. I have no ties.’ I shall never forget his look when he said those words. I never knew anything about loneliness—anything really—till that moment. And after that moment I knew everything. I asked him to come on the yacht to Brusa, or rather to Mudania; from there one goes to Brusa. He came. You may think, perhaps, that he was eager for society, for pleasure, distraction. It wasn’t that. He was making a tremendous, a terrible effort to lay hold on life again, to interest himself in things. He was pushed to it.”

“Pushed to it!” said Rosamund, still in the hard level voice. “Who pushed him?”

“I can only tell you it was as I say,” said Lady Ingleton, quickly and with embarrassment. “We were very few on the yacht. Of course I saw a good deal of your husband. He was absolutely reserved with me. He always has been. You mustn’t think he has ever given me the least bit of confidence. He never has. I am quite sure he never would. We are only acquaintances. But I want to be a friend to him now. He hasn’t a friend, not one, out there. My husband, I think, feels rather as I do about him, in so far as a man can feel in our sort of way. He would gladly be more intimate with your husband. But your husband doesn’t make friends. He’s beyond anything of that kind. He tried, on the yacht and at Brusa. He did his utmost. But he was held back by his misery. I must tell you (it’s very uninteresting)”—her voice softened here, and her face slightly changed, became gentler, more intensely feminine—“that my husband and I are very happy together. We always have been; we always shall be; we can’t help it. Being with us your husband had to—to contemplate our happiness. It—I suppose it reminded him——”

She stopped; she could not bring herself to say it. Again her eyes rested upon “Wedded,” and, in spite of her long conviction of its essential banality—she classed it with “The Soul’s Awakening,” “Harmony,” and all the things she was farthest away from—she felt what it stood for painfully, almost mysteriously.

“One day,” she resumed, speaking more slowly, and trying to banish emotion from her voice, “I went out from the hotel where we stayed at Brusa, quite alone. There’s a mosque at Brusa called Jeshil Jami, the Green Mosque. It stands above the valley. It is one of the most beautiful things I know, and quite the most beautiful Osmanli building. I like to go there alone. Very often there is no one in the mosque. Well, I went there that day. When I went in—the guardian was on the terrace; he knows me and that I’m the British Ambassadress, and never bothers me—I thought at first the mosque was quite empty. I sat down close to the door. After I had been there two or three minutes I felt there was some one else in the mosque. I looked round. Before the Mihrab there was a man. It was your husband. He was kneeling on the matting, but—but he wasn’t praying. When I knew, when I heard what he was doing, I went away at once. I couldn’t—I felt that——”

Again she paused. In the pause she heard the gale tearing at the windows. She looked at the woman in the sister’s dress. Rosamund was sitting motionless, and was now looking down. Lady Ingleton positively hated the sister’s dress at that moment. She thought of it as a sort of armor in which her visitor was encased, an armor which rendered her invulnerable. What shaft could penetrate that smooth black and white, that flowing panoply, and reach the heart Lady Ingleton desired to pierce? Suddenly Lady Ingleton felt cruel. She longed to tear away from Rosamund all the religion which seemed to be protecting her; she longed to see her naked as Dion Leith was naked.

“I didn’t care to look upon a man in hell,” she said, in a voice which had become almost brutal, a voice which Sir Carey would scarcely have recognized if he had heard it.

Rosamund said nothing, and, after a moment, Lady Ingleton continued:

“With us on the yacht was one of my husband’s secretaries of Embassy, Cyril Vane, who had just become engaged to be married. He is married now. In his cabin on the yacht he had a photograph of the girl. One night he was walking up and down on deck with your husband, and your husband—I’d just told him about Vane’s engagement—congratulated him. Vane invited Mr. Leith into the cabin and showed him the photograph. Vane told me afterwards that he should never forget the look on your husband’s face as he took the photograph and gazed at it. When he put it down he said to Vane, ‘I hope you may be happy. She looks very kind, and very good, too; but there’s no cruelty on earth like the cruelty of a good woman.’” (Did the sister’s dress rustle faintly?) “Vane—he’s only a boy—was very angry for a moment, though he’s usually imperturbable. I don’t know exactly what he said, but I believe he made a rather strong protest about knowing his fiancee’s character au fond. Anyhow, your husband took hold of his arm and said to him, ‘Don’t love very much and you may be happy. That’s the only chance for a man—not to love the woman very much.’ Vane came to me and told me. I remember it was late at night and my husband was there. When Vane was leaving us Carey said to him, ‘Forget the advice that poor fellow gave you. Love her as much as you can, my boy. Dion Leith speaks out of the bitterness that is destroying him. But very few men can love as he can, and very few men have been punished by their love as he has been punished by his. His sorrow is altogether exceptional, and has made him lose the power of moral vision. His soul has been poisoned at the source.’ My husband was right.”

“You came here to tell me that?” said Rosamund, lifting her head and speaking coldly and very clearly.

“I didn’t know what I was going to tell you. At the time I am speaking of I had no thought of ever trying to see you. That thought came to me long afterwards.”

“Why?”

“I’m a happy woman. In my happiness I’ve learnt to respect love very much, and I’ve learnt to recognize it at a glance. Your husband is the victim of a great love, Mrs. Leith. I feel as if I couldn’t stand by and see him utterly destroyed by it.”

“Father Robertson tells me——” said Rosamund.

And then she was silent. All this time she was struggling almost furiously against pride and an intense reserve which seemed trying to suffocate every good impulse within her. She held on to the thought of Father Robertson (she was unable to hold on to the thought of God); she strove not to hate the woman who was treading in her sanctuary, and whose steps echoed harshly and discordantly to its farthest, its holiest recesses; but she felt herself to be hardening against her will, to be congealing, turning to ice. Nevertheless she was resolute not to leave the room in which she was without learning all that this woman had to tell her.

“Yes?” said Lady Ingleton.

And the thought went through her mind:

“Oh, how she is hating me!”

“Father Robertson told me there was someone else.”

“Yes, there is. Otherwise I might never have come here. I’m partly to blame. But I—but I can’t possibly go into details. You mustn’t ask me for any details, please. Try to accept the little I can say as truth, though I’m not able to give you any proof. You must know that women who are intelligent, and have lived long in the—well, in the sort of world I’ve lived in, are never mistaken about certain things. They don’t need what are called proofs. They know certain things are happening, or not happening, without holding any proofs for or against. Your husband has got into the wrong hands.”

“What do you mean by that?” said Rosamund steadily, even obstinately.

“In his misery and absolute loneliness he has allowed himself to be taken possession of by a woman. She is doing him a great deal of harm. In fact she is ruining him.”

She stopped. Perhaps she suspected that Rosamund, in defiance of her own denial of proofs, would begin asking for them; but Rosamund said nothing.

“He is going down,” Lady Ingleton resumed. “He has already deteriorated terribly. I saw him recently by chance in Stamboul (he never comes to us now), and I was shocked at his appearance. When I first met him, in spite of his bitterness and intense misery I knew at once that I was with a man of fine nature. There was something unmistakable, the rare imprint; that’s fading from him now. You know Father Robertson very well. I don’t. But the very first time I was with him I knew he was a man who was seeking the heights. Your husband now is seeking the depths, as if he wanted to hide himself and his misery in them. Perhaps he hasn’t found the lowest yet. I believe there is only one human being who can prevent him from finding it. I’m quite sure there is only one human being. That’s why I came here.”

She was silent. Then she added:

“I’ve told you now what I wished to tell you, all I can tell you.”

In thinking beforehand of what this interview would probably be like Lady Ingleton had expected it to be more intense, charged with greater surface emotion than was the case. Now she felt a strange coldness in the room. The dry rattling of the window under the assault of the gale was an interpolated sound that was in place.

“Your husband has never mentioned your name to me,” she said, influenced by an afterthought. “And yet I’ve come here, because I know that the only hope of salvation for him is here.”

Again her eyes went to “Wedded,” and then to the sister’s dress and close-fitting headgear which disguised Rosamund. And suddenly the impulsiveness which was her inheritance from her Celtic and Latin ancestors took complete possession of her. She got up swiftly and went to Rosamund.

“You hate me for having come here, for having told you all this. You will always hate me, I think. I’ve intruded upon your peaceful life in religion—your peaceful, comfortable, sheltered life.”

Her great dark eyes fixed themselves upon the cross which lay on Rosamund’s breast. She lifted her hand and pointed to it.

“You’ve nailed him on a cross,” she said, with almost fierce intensity. “How can you be happy in that dress, worshiping God with a lot of holy women?”

“Did I tell you I was happy?” said Rosamund.

She got up and stood facing Lady Ingleton. Her face still preserved something of the coldness, but the color had deepened in the cheeks, and the expression in the eyes had changed. They looked now much less like the eyes of a “sister” than they had looked when she came into the room.

“Take off that dress and go to Constantinople!” said Lady Ingleton.

Rosamund flushed deeply, painfully; her mouth trembled, and tears came into her eyes, but she spoke resolutely.

“Thank you for telling me,” she said. “You were right to come here and to tell me. If I hate you, as you say, that’s my fault, not yours.”

She paused. It was evident that she was making a tremendous effort to conquer something; she even shut her eyes for a brief instant. Then she added in a very low voice;

“Thank you!”

And she put out her hand.

Tears started into Lady Ingleton’s eyes as she took the hand. Rosamund turned and went quickly out of the room.

Some minutes after she had gone Lady Ingleton heard rain beating upon the window. The sound reminded her of the umbrella she had “stood” in the corner of the room when Rosamund came in. It was still there. Impulsively she went to the corner and took it up; then, realizing that Rosamund must already be on her way, she laid it down on the table. She stood for a moment looking from “Wedded” to the damp umbrella.

Then she sat down on the sofa and cried impetuously.