The glorious frost lasted a glorious week, generous measure for an English frost, and long enough for Arthur to make considerable improvement in the art of skating; since Margaret maintained her attitude of not caring about it, he had the benefit of the professor's undivided attention. Long enough too it lasted for the new vision to stamp itself deep on his mind. For companion picture he recalled from memory another, which at the outset had made no such vivid impression—Judith crying over the failure of the farce. His mind had passed it by lightly when it was first presented to him; it had not availed to turn his amused thoughts from Miss Ayesha Layard and her medicine. It came back now, at first by what seemed only a chance or freak of memory, but presently establishing for itself a relation with its sister-vision of triumphant grace. Between them they gave to Judith in his eyes something that he had not discerned before—something which had always been there, though not in such full measure in the earlier days of their acquaintance, before disaster and grief, and love and sympathy, had wrought upon her spirit. He saw her now—he was idealising again, no doubt, to some degree, after that generous fashion of his which no cold steel of experience could quite eradicate—as capable of the depths and heights of emotion; no longer as tethered too tight by reason and good sense, somewhat too critical, a trifle too humdrum in her notions—that was the conception of her which he had in the days of Bernadette's reign. The solid merits of that type he left to her still; and in this he was indeed on the firm ground of experience; he had tried and tested them. But now he decked them with bright ornaments and blended their sober useful tints with richer colouring—with tenderness of heart, a high brave joy in life, the grace of form and charm of face in which the eye delights.

Subtly and delightfully sure of his changed vision of her, she dared now to be wholly herself with him, to maintain no shy reserves where prudence held pleasure in bondage, and affection took refuge from the fear of indifference. She borrowed of him too, though this unconsciously, in an instinct to adapt herself to him. As she had lent to him from her stores of fortitude and clear-sightedness, she levied toll for herself on his wealth of persistent and elastic cheerfulness, his gust for life and all that life brings with it.

Yet her old self was not eclipsed nor wholly transformed. Her caution remained, and her healthy distrust of sudden impulses. The satiric smile was still on her lips, to check transports and cool the glow of fascination. She had been so wont to think him Bernadette's man—whether in joy or in delusion, or in the cruel shock of sudden enlightenment—so wont to think Bernadette invincible, that even Bernadette's memory seemed a thing that could hardly be displaced. She craved a probation, a searching test both of her own feelings and of Arthur's. She feared while she enjoyed, and of set purpose nursed her doubts. There was not always skating—not always bright sun, keen air, and the rapture of motion, incentives to hot blood. If he deluded himself, she would have compassion ready and friendship for him unimpaired; but if she, with open eyes, walked into a trap, her judgment of herself would be bitter, and friendship would scarcely stand against the shame.

Arthur went back to town ten days before the Christmas vacation ended, to look after his work and, incidentally, to attend Marie Sarradet's wedding. He left Hilsey cheerfully, with no real sense of a parting or of separation. He was still keen and excited about his work, about the life that seemed now to lie before him in the law, and Hilsey—with all it meant to him—figured no longer as a distraction from that life, or even an enemy to it, but rather as its background and complement, so much a part of it as to seem with him while he worked. And so it was with Judith herself—the new Judith of the new vision. She was no enemy to work either. However bedecked and glorified, she was still Judith of the cool head and humorous eyes, the foe of extravagance and vain conceits.

"Back to my dog!" he said gaily. "Holding on to his tail, I'll climb the heights of fortune! And I hope one or two more will find their way to chambers—some little puppies, at all events."

"Ambition is awake! I seem to see a dawning likeness to Mr. Norton Ward."

"I seem to see, as in a golden dream, enough to pay his rent, confound him!"

"I discern, as it were from afar off, a silk gown gracefully hanging about your person!"

"I discern money in my pocket to pay a railway fare to Switzerland!"

"There rises before my eyes a portly man in a high seat! He administers Justice!"

"Before mine, a lady, gracious and ample, who——" But that final vision was promptly dispelled by a cushion which Judith hurled at him with unerring aim.

Marie Sarradet and Sidney Barslow were married at Marylebone Church, and after the ceremony there was a gathering of old friends at the house in Regent's Park—the family (including Mrs. Veltheim), Amabel Osling, Mildred Quain, Joe Halliday, and Mr. Claud Beverley, the last-named (and so named still in the Sarradet circle) blushing under congratulations; for the drama of real life had met with a critical success, though the London run had not as yet followed. Indeed, as befitted the occasion, a sense of congratulation pervaded the air. It seemed as though more than a wedding were celebrated. They toasted in their champagne the restored stability of the family and the business also. The bridegroom, Managing Director of Sarradet's Limited, showed signs of growing stout; there was a very solid settled look about him; order, respectability, and a comfortable balance at the bank were the suggestions his appearance carried. Far, far in the past the rowdy gaieties of Oxford Street! Old Sarradet basked in the sun of recovered safety and tranquillity. Even Raymond, still nominally "on appro," used, all unrebuked, such airs of possession towards Amabel that none could doubt his speedy acceptance. Marie herself was in a serene content which not even the presence of her aunt could cloud. She greeted Arthur with affectionate friendship.

"It is good of you to come. It wouldn't have seemed right without you," she told him, when they got a few words apart.

"I had to come. You don't know how glad I am of your happiness, Marie."

She looked at him frankly, smiling in a confidential meaning. "Yes, I think I do. We've been very great friends, haven't we? And we will be. Yes, I am happy. It's all worked in so well, and Sidney is so good to me." She blushed a little as she added, with frank simplicity, "I love him, Arthur."

He knew why she told him; it was that no shadow of self-reproach should remain with him. He pressed her hand gently. "God bless you, and send you every happiness!"

She lowered her voice. "And you? Because I've a right to wish you happiness too."

"Fretting about me! And on your wedding day!" he rebuked her gaily.

"Yes, just a little," she acknowledged, laughing.

"Well, you needn't. No, honestly you needn't." He laughed too. "I'm shamefully jolly!"

"Then it's all perfect," she said with a sigh of contentment.

Arthur had missed seeing Jephthah's Daughter owing to his mother's death, but since not having seen or read the work is not always a disadvantage when congratulations have to be offered to the author, he expressed his heartily to Mr. Beverley. "Next time it's put up, I shall be there," he added.

"I don't know that it ever will be—and I don't much care if it isn't. It's not bad in its way—you've seen some of the notices, I daresay?—but I'm not sure that it's my real line. I'm having a shot at something rather different. If it succeeds——"

Arthur knew what was coming. "You shan't chuck the office before we've found the dog, anyhow!" he interrupted, laughing. But none the less he admired the sanguine genius. "Only there won't be enough 'lines' to last him out at this rate," he reflected.

At the end—when bride and bridegroom had driven off—Arthur suddenly found his hand seized and violently shaken by old Mr. Sarradet, who was in a state of excited rapture. "The happiest day of my life!" he was saying. "What I've always hoped for! Always, Mr. Lisle, from the beginning!"

He seemed to have no recollection of a certain interview in Bloomsbury Street—an interview abruptly cut short by the arrival of a lady in a barouche. He was growing old, his memory played him tricks. He had found a strong arm to lean on and, rejoicing in it, forgot that it had not always been the thing which he desired.

"Yes, you know a good thing when you see it, Mr. Sarradet," Arthur smilingly told the proud old man. But he did it with an amused consciousness that Mrs. Veltheim, who stood by, eyeing him rather sourly, had a very clear remembrance of past events.

"We'll give 'em a dinner when they come back. You must come, Mr. Lisle. Everybody here must come," old Sarradet went on, and shuffled round the room, asking everyone to come to the dinner. "And now, one more glass of champagne! Oh yes, you must! Yes, you too, Amabel—and you, Mildred! Come, girls, a little drop! Here's a health to the Happy Pair and to Sarradet's Limited!"

"The Happy Pair and Sarradet's Limited!" repeated everybody before they drank.

"And Sarradet's Limited!" reiterated the old man, taking a second gulp.

"I don't know when he'll stop," whispered Joe Halliday.

"If we don't want to get screwed, we'd better make a bolt of it, Arthur."

So they did, and went for a stroll in the Park to cool their heads.

"Well, that's good-bye to them!" said Joe, when he had lit his cigar. "And it's good-bye to me for a bit too. I'm sailing the day after to-morrow. Going to Canada."

"Are you? Rather sudden, isn't it? Going to be gone long?"

"I don't know. Just as things turn out. I may be back in a couple of months; I may not turn up again till I'm a Colonial Premier or something of that sort. The fact is, I've got into no end of a good thing out there. A cert.—well, practically a cert. I wish I'd been able to put you in for a thou. or two, old fellow."

"No, thanks! No, thanks!" exclaimed Arthur, laughing.

"But it wasn't to be done. All I could do to get in myself! Especially as I'm pretty rocky. However they wanted my experience——"

"Of Canada? Have you ever been there?"

"I suppose Canada's much like other places," said Joe, evading the direct question. "It's my experience of business they wanted, of course, you old fool. I'm in for a good thing this time, and no mistake! If I hadn't had too much fizz already, I'd ask you to come and drink my health."

"Good luck anyhow, old fellow! I'm sorry you're going away, though. I shan't enjoy seeing Trixie Kayper half as much without you."

Joe suddenly put his arm in Arthur's. "You're a bit of a fool in some ways, in my humble judgment," he said. "But you're a good chap, Arthur. You stick to your pals, you don't squeal when you drop your money, and you don't put on side. As this rotten old world goes, you're not a bad chap."

"This sounds like a parting testimonial, Joe!"

"Well, what if it does? God knows when we shall eat a steak and drink a pot of beer together again! A good loser makes a good winner, and you'll be a winner yet. And damned glad I shall be to see it! Now I must toddle—get in the Tube and go to the City. Good-bye, Arthur."

"Good-bye, Joe. I say, I'm glad we did Did You Say Mrs.? Perhaps you'll run up against Ayesha Layard over there. Give her my love."

"Oh, hang the girl! I don't want to see her! So long then, old chap!" With a final grip he turned and walked away quickly.

Arthur saw him go with a keen pang of regret. They had tempted fortune together, and each had liked what he found in the other. Joe's equal mind—which smiled back when the world smiled, and, when it frowned, thought a cheerful word of abuse notice enough to take of its tantrums—made him a good comrade, a good stand-by; his humour, crude though it was and pre-eminently of the market-place, put an easier face on trying situations. He had a faithful, if critical, affection for his friends, and Arthur was not so rich in friends as to lose the society of one like this without sorrow. As it chanced, his intimates of school and university days had drifted into other places and other occupations which prevented them from being frequent companions, and he had as yet not replaced them from the ranks of his profession, from among the men he met in the courts and in the Temple; up to now courts and Temple had been too much places to get away from, too little the scene of his spare hours and his real interests, to breed intimacies, though, of course, they had produced acquaintances. As he walked down to the Temple now, after parting from Joe Halliday—and for how long Heaven alone could tell!—he felt lonely and told himself that he must get to know better the men among whom his life was cast. He found himself thinking of his life in the Temple as something definitely settled at last, not as a provisional sort of arrangement which might go on or, on the other hand, might be ended any day and on any impulse. The coils of his destiny had begun to wind about him.

It was vacation still, and chambers were deserted; Henry and the boy departed at four o'clock in vacation. He let himself in with his key, lit his fire, induced a blaze in it, and sat down for a smoke before it. Marie Sarradet came back into his mind now—Marie Barslow; the new name set him smiling, recalling, wondering. How if the new name had not been Barslow but another? Would that have meant being the prop of the family and the business, being engulfed in Sarradet's Limited? That was what it meant for Sidney Barslow—among other things, of course. But who could tell what things might mean? Suppose the great farce had succeeded, had really been a gold mine—of the sort with gold in it—really a second Help Me out Quickly! Where would he be now—he and his thousands of pounds—if that had happened? Would he have been producing more farces, and giving more engagements to infectious Ayesha Layard and indefatigable Willie Spring?

Dis aliter visum—Fate decreed otherwise. Detached from the fortunes of Sarradet's Limited, rudely—indeed very rudely—repulsed from the threshold of theatrical venture, he had come back to his Legitimate Mistress. He knew her ways—her rebuffs, her neglect, her intolerable procrastination; but he had enjoyed just a taste of her favour and attractions too—of the interest and excitement, of the many-sided view of life, that she could give. Because of these, and also because of her high dignity and great traditions—things in which Sarradet's Limited and theatrical ventures seemed to him not so rich—he made up his mind to follow the beckoning of fate's finger and to stick to her, even though she half-starved him, and tried him to the extreme limit of his patience—after her ancient wont.

But his renewed allegiance was to be on terms; so at least he tried to pledge the future. He did not want his whole life and thought swallowed up. Here his own temperament had much to say, but his talks with Sir Christopher a good deal also. He would not be a sleuth-hound on the track of success (a Norton Ward, as he defined it to himself privily), nose to the ground, awake to that scent only, with no eyes for the world about him—or again, as it might be put, he would not have his life just a ladder, a climb up the steep side of a cliff, in hope of an eminence dizzy and uncertain enough even if he got there, and with a handsome probability of tumbling into the tomb half-way up. Could terms be made with the exacting Mistress about this? Really he did not know. So often she either refused all favours or stifled a man under the sheer weight of them. That was her way. Still, Sir Christopher had dodged it.

Suddenly he fell to laughing over the ridiculousness of these meditations. Afraid of too much work, when but for that dog he was briefless still! Could there be greater absurdity or grosser vanity? Yet the idea stuck—thanks perhaps to Sir Christopher—and under its apparent inanity possessed a solid basis. There was not only a career which he wished to run; there was a sort of man that he wanted to be, a man with broad interests and far-reaching sympathies, in full touch with the varieties of life, and not starved of its pleasures. Thus hazily, with smiles to mock his dreams, in that quiet hour he outlined the future of his choice, the manner of man that he would be.

The ringing of the telephone bell recalled him sharply to the present. With a last smiling "Rot!" muttered under his breath at himself, with a quick flash of hope that it was Wills and Mayne again, he went to answer the call. A strange voice with a foreign accent enquired his number, then asked if Mr. Arthur Lisle were in, and, on being told that it was that gentleman who was speaking, begged him to hold the line. The next moment another voice, not strange at all though it seemed long since he had heard it, asked, "Is that you, Cousin Arthur?"

"Yes, it's me," he answered, with a sudden twinge of excitement.

"I'm at the Lancaster—over here on business with the lawyers, just for a day or two. Oliver's in Paris. I want to see you about something, but I hardly hoped to find you in town. I thought you'd be at Hilsey. How lucky! Can you come and see me some time?"

"Yes, any time. I can come now, if you like. I'm doing nothing here."

A slight pause—Then—"Are you alone there, or is Frank Norton Ward there too?"

"There's absolutely nobody here but me."

"Then I think I'll come and see you. It's only a step. Will you look out for me?"

"Yes, I'll be looking out for you."

"In about a quarter of an hour then. Good-bye."

Arthur hung up the receiver and returned to his room—the telephone was in Henry's nondescript apartment. A smile quivered about his lips; he did not sit down again, but paced to and fro in a restless way. Strange to hear her voice, strange that she should turn up to-day! Of all the things he had been thinking about, he had not been thinking of her. She recalled herself now with all the effectiveness of the unexpected. She came suddenly out of the past and plunged him back into it with her "Cousin Arthur." He felt bewildered, yet definitely glad of one thing—a small one to all seeming, but to him comforting. He was relieved that she was coming to chambers, that he would not have to go to the Lancaster, and ask for her with proper indifference; ask for her by an unfamiliar name—at least he supposed she used that name! He felt certain that he would have blushed ridiculously if he had had to ask for her by that name. He nodded his head in relief; he was well out of that anyhow! And—she would be here directly!