Morosine had been called emancipated by Lady Maria, who after a week or so found it proper to explain that he was by no means so free from chains as he appeared. Sanchia, she thought, was seeing a good deal of him. “He's the victim, like the rest of us, of his constitution. His, as you may see, is deplorable. Weak heart, they say—but it may be lungs. I never heard of a Pole who could live in any climate, least of any his own. As for his mind, that follows his wasted body; it's hectic. He affects a detachment which he will never have. It's a pose. He is exceedingly sentimental, has an imagination which—if you could follow it—might alarm you. I have no doubt at all but that, in imagination, he has you safe in some island of Cythera or another, and has slain every other male inhabitant of it lest some one of them should happen to look at your footprints in the sand. Jealous! He would sicken at the word—not because he would be ashamed, but because it would conjure up the vision of some satyr-shape, and haunt him day and night. He has no need to study Persian poetry, I assure you. He has rose-gardens enough and to spare; for, if you are inclined to be flattered at my suggestion of Cythera, I hasten to assure you that yours is not the only island of his dominion. Bless you, he'll have an archipelago. But I have no fear for you; you can afford a sentimental education.”

Sanchia did not tell her old friend how far that education was proceeding—not because she was afraid, still less because she was ashamed, but in obedience to her nature, which was extremely reserved. She spoke of herself and her affairs with difficulty—never unless she was forced. But it had become a custom just now—in the dull days on either side of Christmas—to look for Morosine in the reading-room about noon, to stroll the galleries for half-an-hour, to receive and to agree to a lightly-offered proposition that they should lunch together, and (it might well be) to accept his escort homewards. This, I say, had become the rule of three days in the week, more or less. And it's not to be supposed that so clear-sighted a young lady could see so much of so keen-sighted a man without a good deal of self-communing.

Her capacity for silent meditation, during which she would sit before her fire, gazing far, smiling at her thoughts, into the glowing coals, had never left her. But there was a slight difference to be noted. She could not think of Ingram—the past, the present, or any future Ingram—without contraction of the brows. Smooth-browed she thought of Morosine.

He interested her greatly; she was conscious of anxiety to learn his opinion, of a wave of warm feeling when she awaited it. She credited him with insight, had a notion, for instance, that she could discuss her own affairs without any preliminary apology. He took so much for granted—surely he would take her youth into full account. She had never said to him a word of herself as yet; but there had been times when she had felt near it—had seen herself rowing a boat, as it were, within range of a weir, been conscious of effort to keep a straight course, and of the fruitlessness of effort. There had been moments when she had been tempted to throw down her oars with a sigh—by no means of despair. Morosine seemed to her so extraordinarily reasonable, so ready, with well-known laws, to account for unheard of vagaries, that it would have been real luxury to her to find herself and her escapade the mere creatures of some such law. To be discovered normal: what a relief from strain!

Lady Maria, it seems, charged him with Oriental aptitudes. Sanchia gave that judgment careful attention, studied her friend in the light of it, weighed every word of his to her, watched him closely in company when he could not be aware of it. She decided against the opinion. His manners with women were his manners with men, those of urbane indifference to sex. To sex! To much more than that. He was, in fact, outwardly polite to the point of formality; but his attitude of mind towards the person he happened to be with seemed to her—when she examined it closely—to be sublimely insulting. No created thing, with the passions and affections common to his kind, ought to take up such a position with his fellow-creature—that which says, “I infer your existence from my sensations: apart from them, I cannot bring myself to believe in it.” She was aware that he must needs regard her from this stand-point, and the knowledge piqued her. If she did not exist for him, why did he seek her out? If she did, why did he pretend she did not? Or was Lady Maria right? Were his sensations awake, and had they fired his imagination, to carry her to Cythera, and keep her hidden there? These questions amused her, and she made no attempt to answer them. Amusement might cease that way: she indulged herself and left her questions open. One thing may be added. Morosine no longer reminded her of Senhouse. Quite otherwise—for of Senhouse just now she dared not think.

Her friend Bill Chevenix gave her no warnings. Even when she sounded for them, he gave none. “I like Alexis,” he said once. “He's not so original as he makes out, but there's enough to give him a relish. A handy chap, too, in a dozen ways—he'll model you in wax, or draw you in pastels, or sing about you on the guitar, or whistle you off on the piano; but he's not strong, isn't Alexis. The one thing he can do—no, there are two. He can ride anything, and he can use a revolver. I saw him empty the ten of hearts once: very pretty. I dare say, if he was put to it, he could use an iron to some purpose; but we don't stick each other here, so he'd be out of practice. I rather wish we did, you know. It's far more gentlemanly than laying for a chap outside his club with a hunting-crop, and getting summoned for assault at Vine Street. Not a bit more vicious, barring the Ten Commandments.”

“Prince Morosine doesn't believe in them,” Sanchia said. “He's vowed to abolish them.”

“So he may tell you, my dear. Don't you believe it. So long as they are good form they will be Alexis' form. He'd sooner die than covet his neighbour's wife.” She reserved this for consideration. Meantime, she saw more of Morosine than of any other man, and got through January very well by his help.

She particularly liked his company in galleries, because, though he never allowed himself raptures—of which she, too, was incapable—he was always seeking the roots of rapture. Sanchia had a fund of enthusiasm for art all the richer, perhaps, for being denied expression. It was comfortable to have that securely based.

“Do you ever consider,” he asked her once, when they stood before the great group of the Pediment, “why it is that these things are so beautiful; why, although they are bare of colour and all that stands for life to us in art, they are more than life? It's because they point to a state of being exquisitely conform to the laws of being. Such a perfect conformity soothes us into believing that while we witness it we are of it—ourselves conforming. These splendid creatures here, so superbly static—idle, you might say (only they wouldn't understand you), indulging their strength—are strong and able precisely because they have submitted themselves—-”

“Unlike the Poles?” She reminded him of their first conversation, and saw that he remembered it. He bowed to her.

“Let me finish. These existences, emanations, essences, what you will, are submiss, not to man, but to Nature. They are as passive as Earth herself, and as immune. They derive their strength from her. That's our only reasonable service.” Whether he intended it or not, the effect of this kind of talk was to make her view submission to the world's voice as a reasonable service.

It was not so odd as it may seem that her intimates had always been men. That reticence of hers which repelled her own sex was precisely that in her which attracted, by provoking, the other. After her dumb childhood, to which she never looked back, came her opening girlhood, and on the threshold of that stood Jack Senhouse, the loyal servitor, the one man who had loved her without an ounce of self-seeking. Then came Nevile Ingram, and swallowed her up for a while, and when he had tired of her she was once more without a friend. To Chevenix afterwards, rather than to Mrs. Devereux, she had struggled to utter herself. That cry of distress, “he wants me, to ravage me,” would never have been made by her to a woman. She would have died of it sooner. And now came the Pole, Morosine, and by taking for granted (as even Lady Maria could not have done) much that could not have been explained, put her at her ease. She found him a Jack without the spirit—without the divine spark. She could never have loved him, though she liked him well, and she had no idea that he thought of nothing but the greatness of his reward when, after patient toiling, she might fall into his arms. Every nerve in her body was now strung up to obedience to Jack's idea of her. She saw, as clearly as if it was printed, her fate before her. She was to put herself under the law. Jack should not have loved in vain her “dear obsequious head.” Nevile would come back and require her. For Jack's sake, who had seen her too noble to be touched by sin, she would dip herself deep in sin.

Morosine, who frankly desired her to be the wife of a man she did not love in order that she might the more easily find consolation in himself afterwards, had the wit to see that she needed some of his sophistry, though not enough to know exactly why. It was perfectly true. Her churchgoing was an ointment. It could soothe but not heal her. Sanchia had a mind. To do wrong by the world because it had seemed right to her was not to be remedied by doing a right by it now, which to her reasoning would glare before her as a monstrous sin. She forgot that Senhouse had also taught her that the great sin of all was insincerity. She could not have afforded to remember that. All her present desire was to be, as nearly as she might, what she had been when Jack had seen her first, what he had found excellent in her and love-worthy—pious, bowing her head in a fair place, obsequious, obedient to the law. He had loved her, of course, whatever she did—outraging the law as well as keeping it, loving Nevile, letting himself go away. She could not remember that. He had loved her meek; she would be meek. That was what her heart told her; and Morosine, to serve his own ends, lulled her head with his sophisticated anodynes, and sent her brain to sleep.

That he should know her story, as he obviously did, was not so disconcerting to her as it would have been to most young women. Taciturn as she was, it was not by reason of timidity, but rather that her own motives seemed too clear to her to be worth stating. She was, perhaps, rather given to assume her prerogative right to be different. Her first thought, therefore, was that she was saved the trouble of explaining herself, and her second that it was satisfactory to have a friend who understood her without explanations.

As for Morosine, he may or may not have felt that he had broken the ice; he pushed forward, at any rate, as if he had clear water in front of him. Sanchia felt, when she next met him, that their acquaintance had entered on a new phase.

Then suddenly, before she knew where she was, her fate was upon her.

It was in the Park on a fine Sunday forenoon in February. She was with Lady Maria, and had met with Melusine and Gerald Scales. Morosine also, seeing her and meeting her eyes, instantly left his companion and came to greet her, hat in hand. He addressed himself to her exclusively, having saluted Lady Maria; but she named her sister, and he saluted her too. Gerald Scales, bronzed, plump, and very full in the eye, having looked the newcomer over, decided against him, and gave him a shoulder. “Foreign beggar,” was the conclusion he came to, which does credit to his perspicacity, because the Pole had a very English appearance, and Scales himself the look of a Jew.

When they turned to walk, Morosine took the side next Sanchia, and though he talked to both ladies, so contrived that she should read more in what he said than her sister. He did it deftly, but continuously. Sanchia was entertained, slightly excited, and ended by taking part in the game of skill. It is impossible to say by how much this sort of thing increased the intimacy already established between the pair. It was by so much, at least, that when Melusine joined her husband, by dropping behind and waiting for him to come up with, the old lady, it came as no sort of shock to Sanchia that he took up the talk where he had ended it in the gallery.

“You have been to church, I see. But you are not a Christian?” He did not look at her.

Nor did she turn her head to reply. “I don't know. Nominally, at least; fitfully, at the most.”

“That must be the outside of it,” he continued. “The thing is the antithesis of the Hellenic ideal—which is yours. Your seemingly passive martyr is really in an ecstasy. He aims at outraging Nature; begins by despising and ends by dreading it. Nature, however, has ways of revenging herself.”

“Yes, indeed,” said Sanchia soberly.

They walked on together, she by this time very much absorbed. She was not conscious of the shifting crowd, the lifting of hats, the chatter, the yapping dogs that ran in and out of women's skirts.

Presently he spoke again. “You believe that you failed?”

Her voice came low. “I know that I failed.”

Then he looked at her, and spoke with vehemence. “And what is that to you? What is, failure in such a cause, to such as you?” But she could not meet his face, kept hers rigidly to the front.

“The cause,” Morosine told her, “is everything, the aim, the loyalty, the great surrender. Beside this failure is nothing at all. Do you say that the sapling fails that springs out of a cleft rock and towers—seeking, as we all seek, the sun, the light in heaven? A gale gathers it up and tears it out: over it goes, and lies shattered. Is that failure? How can it be when nothing dies?”

Sanchia, very pale, turned her face to his at last. Her mouth was drawn down at the corners, to the tragic droop. She almost whispered the words, “Something did die.”

His intuition worked like a woman's, in flashes. He knew immediately what she meant.

“I know, I know,” he said. “You were mistaken. But you never faltered. You followed a call.”

“You tell me,” she said, “that there was none.”

“I do.”

“But,” she argued, “that with which I began failed me. I was entirely certain, at the time; I could not possibly have hesitated. And then—it died.” Her eyes loomed large. “It is quite dead now, and I feel that I have betrayed myself—broken faith with myself.”

He shook his head. “You could not break faith; you are the soul of truth.”

This praise she accepted. “I don't tell lies, I hope—and I don't shirk things. But you see that I can stultify my own acts. I believed, and acted on my belief; and then I ceased to believe, and acted on that. I cannot trust myself—I ought to be ashamed to say so, and I hope I am.”

Morosine met her eyes again, and held them. “I can never believe that you would fail. I tell you that you have not failed. It is that you have been failed. You cannot give if what you give is not taken. Failed—you! Ah, no, you have succeeded, I think.”

She bent her brows as she faced resolutely forward. “I must take the consequences of what I have done. I see that.”

“Ah,” said Morosine, “that is a question of courage. Courage you have.”

“I need it,” she said in a hush, and stopped dead. Ingram stood before her, and took off his hat.

“Well, Sanchia,” he said, “here I am.”

{Illustration: “Well, Sanchia,” he said. “Here I am."}