IN the end the Syndicate left to Joe Halliday the responsibility of deciding on the future of the unfortunate farce, so far as it had a future on which to decide. On mature reflection Joe was for acting on the sound business principle of 'cutting a loss,' and the turn of events reinforced his opinion. They had taken the Burlington for four weeks certain, and the liability for rent was a serious fact and a heavy item to reckon with. Another dramatic venture wanted a home, and Joe had the opportunity of sub-letting the theatre for the last two weeks of the term. By and with the advice of Mr. Etheringham he closed with the offer. Did You Say Mrs? dragged on for its fortnight, never showing vitality enough to inspire any hope of its recovering from the rude blow of the first night. In the day-time new figures filled the stage of the Burlington, new hopes and fears centred there. Only Mr. Etheringham remained, producing the new venture with the same fiery and inexhaustible energy, lifting dead weights with his hands, toiling, moiling, in perpetual strife. Gone soon were all the others who had become so familiar, from the great Mr. Spring, the Indefatigable, downwards, some to other engagements, some left "out"—dÉbris from the wreck of the unhappy Did You Say Mrs?

Gone too, soon, was Miss Ayesha Layard with her infectious laugh. For her sake Arthur had sat through the farce once again—not even for her sake twice, so inconceivably flat had it now become to him. He had gone round and seen her, but she had other guests and no real conversation was possible. Then he saw in the papers that she was to go to America; a manager from that country had come to see the piece, and, though he did not take that, he did take Miss Layard, with whose talents he was much struck. He offered a handsome salary, and she jumped at it. Joe let her go three days before the end of the hopeless little run. One of the last items of the Syndicate's expenditure was a bouquet of flowers, presented to her at Euston on the morning of her departure. Arthur went to see her off, found her surrounded by folk strange to him, had just a hand-clasp, a hearty greeting, a merry flash from her eyes, and, as he walked off, the echo of her laugh for a moment in his ears. The changes and chances of theatrical life carried her out of his orbit as suddenly as she had come into it; she left behind her, as chief legacy, just that vivid memory which linked her so fantastically with Bernadette.

So the whole thing seemed to him to end—the Syndicate, the speculation, his voyage into the unknown seas of the theatre. It was all over, shattered by a blow almost as sudden, almost as tragical, as that which had smitten his adoration itself. Both of these things, always connected together for him by subtle bonds of thought and emotion, making together the chief preoccupation of the last six months of his life, now passed out of it, and could occupy his days no longer. They had come like visions—Bernadette in her barouche, the glittering thousands dangled in Fortune's hand—and seemed now to depart in like fashion, transitory and unsubstantial.

Yet to Arthur Lisle they stood as the two greatest things that had up to now happened in his life, the most significant and the most vivid. Set together—as they insisted on being set together from the beginning to the end, from the first impulse of ambition roused by Bernadette to the coming of her telegram on that momentous evening—they made his first great venture, his most notable experience. They had revealed and developed his nature, plumbed feeling and tested courage. He was different now from Marie Sarradet's placid, contented, half-condescending wooer, different from him who had worshipped Bernadette with virgin eyes—different now even from the forsaken and remorseful lover of that black hour at Hilsey. He had received an initiation—a beginning of wisdom, an opening of the eyes, a glimpse of what a man's life may be and hold and do for him. He had seen lights glimmering on the surface of other lives, and now and then, however dimly and fitfully, revealing their deeper waters.

Sitting among the ruins—if tangible results were regarded, scarcely any other word could be considered appropriate—and acutely awake to what had happened to his fortunes, he was vaguely conscious of what had happened to himself. The feeling forbade remorse or despair; it engendered courage. It enabled him to infuse even a dash of humour into his retrospect of the past and his survey of the present. If he still called himself a fool, he did it more good-naturedly, and perhaps really more in deference to the Wisdom of the Wise and the Prudence of the Elders than out of any genuine or deep-seated conviction. And anyhow, if he had been a fool, he reckoned that he had learnt something from it. Everybody must be a fool sometimes. In prudent eyes he had been a tolerably complete one, and had paid and must pay for the indulgence. But it had not been all loss—so his spirit insisted, and refused sack-cloth and ashes for its wear.

Meanwhile, however, the bill! Not the rather nebulous balance-sheet of his soul's gains and losses, but the debit account in hard cash. A few sovereigns from the five hundred still jingled forlornly in his pocket; a few might possibly, thanks to the sub-let, stray back from the Burlington Theatre, but not many. In round figures he was fifteen hundred pounds out, and was left with an income barely exceeding a hundred pounds a year. Now that would not support the life and meet the necessary expenses of counsel learned in the law. Other prospects he had none; what his mother had Anna was to take. He did not want to give up the Bar; he still remembered Mr. Tiddes with a thrill; Wills and Mayne were alive—at any rate Mayne was; a third defeat from fortune was not to his liking. Moreover to abandon his chosen career would nearly break his mother's heart. He came to a swift determination to "stick it out" until he had only a thousand pounds left. If that moment came, a plunge into something new! For the present, all useful expenditure, but strict economy! He instructed his broker to sell out two hundred pounds' worth of stock and felt that he had achieved a satisfactory solution of his financial troubles.

For a mind bent on industry—and Arthur flattered himself that his really was now—his chambers offered new opportunities. Norton Ward had got his silk gown. His pupils had disappeared; Arthur could have the run of his work, could annotate and summarise briefs, and try his hand on draft "opinions." This was much more alluring work than reading at large. He could sit in court too, and watch the progress of the cases with a paternal, a keener, and a more instructed interest. This was how he planned to spend the winter sittings, rejecting the idea of going circuit—the chances of gain were so small, the expenses involved so great. But in the immediate future things fell out differently from what he had planned.

The morning after the Courts opened, he received a summons to go and see Mr. Justice Lance in his private room. The old Judge gave him a very friendly greeting and, being due to take his seat in five minutes, opened his business promptly.

"My old friend Horace Derwent, who generally comes with me as Marshal, is down with influenza and won't be available for three or four weeks. Esther Norton Ward was at my house yesterday and, when she heard it, she suggested that perhaps you'd like to take his place. I shall be very glad to take you, if you care to come. If anything crops up for you here, you can run up—because Marshals aren't absolutely indispensable to the administration of justice. Your function is to add to my comfort and dignity—and I shan't let that stand in your way."

"It's most awfully kind of you. I shall be delighted," said Arthur.

"Very well. We start on Monday, and open the Commission at Raylesbury. My clerk will let you know all the details. If you sit in court regularly, I don't think your time will be wasted, and a grateful country pays you two guineas a day—not unacceptable, possibly, at this moment!" His eyes twinkled. Arthur felt that his theatrical speculation had become known.

"It's uncommonly acceptable, I assure you, Sir Christopher," said he.

"Then let's hope poor Horace Derwent will make a leisurely convalescence," smiled the Judge.

In high spirits at the windfall, Arthur started off in the afternoon to thank Esther for her good offices. He had not seen her since they parted, with forced cheerfulness, at the doors of the Burlington Theatre; neither had he carried out his idea of going to one of her husband's meetings; the urgency of his own affairs would have dwarfed those of the nation in his eyes, even had his taste for politics been greater than it was.

"I thought you'd like it. You'll find Sir Christopher a pleasant chief, and perhaps it'll keep you out of mischief for a few weeks—and in pocket-money," said Esther, in reply to his thanks.

"I've got no more mischief in view," Arthur remarked, almost wistfully. "My wild course is run."

"I hope so. Did you ever believe in that terrible farce?"

"Oh yes, rather! That is, I believed in it generally—Moments of qualm! That's what made it so interesting."

"That evening, Arthur! I declare I still shudder! What did you do after you got rid of us? Knock your head against the wall, or go to bed to hide your tears?"

Arthur smiled. "Not exactly, Mrs. Norton Ward. I took part in a sort of Privy Council, about ways and means, though there weren't any of either, to speak of—and Claud Beverley swore eternal friendship to me, heavens knows why! And I had a talk with Miss Layard."

Esther was looking at his smiling face in some amazement; he seemed to find the memory of the evening pleasant and amusing. Her own impressions were so different that she was stirred to resentment. "I believe I wasted some good emotion on you," she observed severely.

"Oh, I forgot! I had a telegram from Bernadette—from Genoa. Good wishes, you know—but I never got it till it was all over." He was smiling still, in a ruminative way now.

"Very attentive of her! It seems to amuse you, though."

"Well, it was rather funny. It came when I was in Ayesha Layard's dressing-room, talking to her, and she—well, rather made fun of it."

Esther eyed him with curiosity. "Did you like that?" she asked.

"I didn't seem to mind it at the time." His tone was amused still, but just a little puzzled. "No, I didn't mind it."

"I believe—yes, I do—I believe you were flirting with the impudent little creature! Oh, you men! This is what we get! We cry our eyes out for you, and all the time you're——!"

"Men must work and women must weep!" said Arthur.

"That's just what Judith was doing—literally—all the way home in the car; and in bed afterwards, very likely." Esther rapped out the disclosure tartly. "And all the while you were——!" Words failed the indignant woman.

"Cried? What, not really? Poor old Judith! What a shame! I must write to her and tell her I'm as jolly as possible."

"Oh, I daresay she's got over it by now," said Esther, with a dig at his vanity. But he accepted the suggestion with a cheerful alacrity which disappointed her malice.

"Of course she has! She's a sensible girl. What's the good of crying?"

"Would you have liked to be asked that at all moments of your life, Arthur?"

He laughed. "Rather a searching question sometimes, isn't it? But poor Judith! I had no idea——" His remorse, though genuine enough, was still tinged with amusement. The smile lurked about his mouth.

Esther's resentment, never very serious, melted away. In the end there was something attractive in his disposition to refuse even a sympathy which was too soft. She thought that she saw change there. Hard knocks had been chipping off a youthful veneer of sentimentality. But she would not have him impute a silly softness to Judith. "And Judith's not a crying woman. I know her," she said.

"I know. She's got no end of courage. That's why it's so queer."

"She thought your heart was broken, you see."

"Yes, but—well, I think she ought to know me better than that."

"Perhaps she doesn't always keep up with you," Esther suggested.

Rather to her surprise he let the suggestion go by, and did not seize the opportunity it offered of considering or discussing himself—his character and its development. Instead, he began to talk about the Marshalship once more, full of interest and pleasure in it, looking forward to the companionship of Sir Christopher, to seeing and learning, to the touches of old pomp and ceremony in which he was to assist, unimportantly indeed, but as a favourably placed spectator.

"I'm more grateful to you than I can say," he declared. "And not for the two guineas a day only!"

His gratitude gave her pleasure, but she could not understand his mood fully. Her nature moved steadily and equably on its own lines; so far as she could remember, it always had, aided thereto by the favouring circumstances of assured position, easy means, and a satisfactory marriage. She did not appreciate the young man's reaction after a long period of emotion and excitement, of engrossment in his personal feelings and fortunes. With these he was, for the moment, surfeited, and disposed, consequently, to turn on them a critical, almost a satiric, eye. The need of his mind now was for calmer interests, more impersonal subjects of observation and thought. He was looking forward to being a spectator, a student of other people's lives, acts, and conditions—he was welcoming the prospect of a period during which his mind would be turned outward towards the world. He had had enough of himself for the time being.

It was not, then, a moment in which he was likely to ask himself very curiously the meaning of Judith's tears, or to find in them much stuff to feed either remorse or vanity. He was touched, he was a little ashamed, though with twitching lips, as he contrasted them with his farewell to Ayesha Layard at approximately the same moment. But on the whole he felt relieved of a matter with which he had little inclination to occupy himself when Esther said, at parting, "I think on the whole you'd better not say anything to Judith about what I told you; she might be angry with me for giving her away."

Judith might well have thought herself betrayed by the disclosure which Esther had made in her irritated curiosity, in her resentful desire to confront the smiling young man with the pathetic picture of a girl in tears. When a woman says to a man, of another woman, "See how fond she is of you!" there is generally implied the reproach, "And you under-rate, you slight, you don't return, her affection." Such a reproach had certainly underlain the contrast Esther drew between Judith's tears and the smiles in which Arthur had presumably indulged during his talk with Ayesha Layard. But Arthur took the contrast lightly; it did not really come home to him; he did not seek to explore its possible meaning, the suggestion contained in it. Lightly too he seemed to have taken Bernadette's telegram—her recollection of him at a crisis of his fortunes, coming out of the silence and darkness in which her flight had wrapped her. Here was a thing which might surely have moved him to emotion, rousing poignant memories? But when Miss Ayesha Layard rather made fun of it, he had not minded! Even this account of what had happened—this faint adumbration of the truth—agreed ill with Esther's previous conception of him.

But it was of a piece with his new mood, with the present turn of his feelings under the stress of fortune. To this mood matters appertaining to women—to use the old phrase, the female interest—did not belong. He was liberated for the time from the attack of that, from his obsession with it, and in his freedom was turning a detached, a critical, eye on his days of bondage. Rather oddly it had been a woman's work, not indeed to bring about his release, but still to mark the moment when he began to be conscious of it; for the turn of the tide of his mind was marked by the moment when, in kissing Ayesha Layard, he forgot his telegram. That little episode satirically mocked the erstwhile devotee and the inconsolable lover, and all the more because it hovered itself pleasantly near the confines of sentiment. It pointedly and recurringly reminded him that there were more women than one in the world, that there were, in fact, a great many. And when a young man's heart is open to the consideration that there are a great many women in the world, it is, for all serious purposes, much the same with him as though there were none.

Esther Norton Ward was not in possession of the full facts, or she might better have understood why Arthur's smile had resisted even the appeal of Judith's tears.

On the last evening before he left London, he dined with Joe Halliday and, with a heart opened by good wine, Joe gave his personal view of the Burlington Theatre disaster.

"I'm sorry I let the Sarradets and Amabel in," he said, "and of course I'm awfully sorry I stuck you for such a lot—though that was a good deal your own doing——"

"It was all my own doing," Arthur protested.

"And I'm sorry for everybody involved, but for myself I don't care much. As long as a fellow's got a dinner inside him and five quid in his pocket, what's there to worry about? I've got lots of other jobs maturing. In fact, as far as I'm personally concerned, perhaps it's rather a good thing we did take such a toss. The fact is, old chap, I was getting most infernally gone on Ayesha."

"I thought you were touched! Well, she's very attractive."

"You're right! If we'd run a hundred nights, I should have been a fair goner! And on the straight too, mind you! Even as it is, I don't mind telling you—as a pal—that I'm hardly my usual bright self since she went to Yankeeland. Keep thinking what's she up to—like a silly ass! Beastly! And what did I get out of it? Nothing!" His voice grew plaintively indignant. "On my word, not so much as that, Arthur!" With the words he put two fingers to his lips and flung a kiss to the empty air.

"That was rather hard lines," Arthur remarked, smiling, pleased to hear that, so far as Joe was concerned at least, Miss Ayesha's promise about her medicine had been handsomely kept.

"Well, I suppose you wouldn't notice it much"—(A veiled allusion to the Romantic and Forsaken Lover!)—"but she's enough to make any man make a fool of himself over her." He heaved a ponderous sigh. "I expect I'm well out of it! She'd never have given me more than a string of beads to play with. And if by a miracle she had succumbed to my charms, I should have been as jealous as a dog every time she went to the theatre! No sound way out of it! All just silly!" He looked up and caught Arthur smiling at him. He burst into a laugh, "Lord, what an ass I am! Come along, old chap! If we get moving, we shall be just in time to see Trixie Kayper at the Amphitheatre. I hear she knocks stars out of High Heaven with her twinkling feet!"

Arthur agreed that the performance was one not to be missed.