Egidia got out of the train at Barnard Castle, as Mrs. Elles had done, months before. She took a fly, and drove four miles to Greta Bridge.

She knew every inch of the ground from the description which Rivers and Phoebe had at different times given her of it.

She was full of purpose. Jane Anne Cawthorne was the worst enemy of the two that she had taken under her protection—Jane Anne Cawthorne was prepared to swear falsely—Jane Anne Cawthorne’s mouth must be stopped.

Egidia thought she could do it, fairly and squarely, and without this girl’s evidence, so she gathered from the lawyers, the case against Rivers and Phoebe would fall to the ground.

It was Jane Anne Cawthorne herself who came forward civilly when she alighted at the door of “Heather Bell,” and asked for rooms. Egidia was as urbane in manner as she could be towards the woman who cared for Rivers, and was yet prepared to testify falsely concerning him.

“A low type!” she thought to herself, “a potential villain, but still susceptible to moral influences. They have bribed her, but all the same, she is doing this thing par dÉpit amoureux. Therefore an apt subject for diplomacy. How low I feel! But if I can only get him out of this, I don’t care what I do.”

She secured the very sitting-room that Rivers and Mrs. Elles had shared together, and derived a melancholy pleasure from the idea that it was so. There was the very rose-strewn table-cover, stained and splashed with the dabbling of the artist’s brush; there was the piano on which Mrs. Elles had played to him. But outside, in the wintry garden, the dark dank earth lay heavy upon all the flowers and verdure that had gladdened the eyes of the lovers. For in spite of Phoebe’s frivolity and Edmund’s asceticism, she could read through Phoebe’s admissions and falsifications, that for a brief space they had been lovers—the woman in her had been genuinely stirred, the man in him. It had not lasted, but it had been. But now it was winter, “the days dividing lover and lover, the light that loses, the night that wins,” the season when no man can paint, and loves that are ephemeral die down and are buried under the wrack of autumn. There was no frost as yet, the December air was mild and subdued, with only a prescience as it were of the snows and disasters of January.

Egidia made a sad little pilgrimage to the scenes of this romance that grieved her so. Brignal Banks under their winter aspect reminded her somehow of a young and pretty woman after a long and devastating illness. It was the same, and not the same, the warm tones had gone out of the green, the ragged boughs seemed blotted in upon the sky; the moist sides of the cliff, that no glow of sunset irradiated now, showed hard and chill behind the streaky lines of the leafless creepers that still hung on them. The water still bubbled and splashed over the stones, but with an empty merriment. So it seemed to the sad woman who stood by the river bank and looked at the bridge of stones made by human labour, that was no longer continuous. There had been a storm or two, and the rains had flushed the river bed, and the added flood had washed the stones away. She would never dare to confess it to Rivers and Phoebe, but she was at immense pains to gather up a heavy stone and try to drop it into a place between two remaining ones, and thus make the bridge passable. She would add her mite to Rivers’ bridge too. Phoebe Elles should not be the only woman who had helped him.

She came away from there a prey to terrible depression, and resolved to visit no more “mouldering lodges” of a past in which she had no share.

A fate seemed to be hanging over the whole world; to the sad Egidia, all the inanimate things that he had seen and touched seemed instinct with the foreboding of the particular disaster that threatened one man. And Jane Anne, too, who waited on her entirely now, at this dull season, when the personnel in the inn was necessarily diminished—was Jane Anne sad, or was it only the accustomed heaviness of the lonely, empty-lived, country girl?

Egidia had written her name, Miss Alice Giles, very clearly in the hotel book, and, in brackets, her nom de guerre, which had a world-wide reputation. She committed this solecism with a distinct purpose. Had her name as a novelist reached Jane Anne’s ears? That was the point she meant to work from.

Jane Anne certainly was full of the little civilities and attentions which that name generally evoked among the celebrity hunters of superior rank among whom Egidia’s ways were cast. Of taciturn habit though the landlady’s niece unmistakably was, she yet beamed on the authoress on every possible occasion, and lost no opportunity of insinuating herself into her good graces as far as was consistent with perfect deference and civility.

At the close of the second day she spoke and asked a question.

“If you please, ma’am,” she said, “might I venture to inquire if you are going to make a book about this place? So many do.”

“But tell me why you think I am likely to?” asked Egidia, with the elaborate indulgence of the conspirator.

“Because, ma’am, I happen to know that you are a writer. A gentleman that comes here sometimes, he gave me one of your books once, and oh, I do like it so! I got him to write my name in it, and who it was from! So I got his too. May I bring it out and show you?”

With the gracious permission of the authoress Jane Anne fetched the book. It was Egidia’s last novel but one, and on the flyleaf was Edmund Rivers’ signature. The book had the peculiar sodden appearance of a volume much and carefully read.

“The gentleman gave me lots of books,” Jane Anne went on. “And I have read them all over—hundreds of times. But I like none so much as this. I am so fond of novels! And if it was one written about here, why then I should like it all the better.”

“But this is such a very quiet place. I should not think that anything ever could happen here?”

“Oh, ma’am, don’t be too sure! Last summer now, something happened here, that if you was to put it into a book, no one would believe it! And I am in it too—leastways I shall be!”

“Tell me about it, if you have time,” said Egidia, “and then perhaps I could work it into something.”

“It is something very serious,” said Jane Anne, her heavy brows coming together. “It is a divorce case. I don’t know as I ought to tell it.”

“A divorce case is known eventually to all the world!” said Egidia sententiously. “Besides, you need not tell me the names!”

“Oh, no, I needn’t then,” said the girl, relieved, “but they are sure to slip out in the course of conversation. But then that won’t be my fault, will it?”

“No,” said the other, concealing her amusement at Jane Anne’s morality. “It will be mine—I hope. Come and sit down here, if you are not too busy, and tell me about it!”

Jane Anne was a little thrown off her majestic balance by the distinguished authoress’s condescension. She sat down, awkward, handsome, interesting even, as a study, but——

“This creature presumes to love Edmund too!” Egidia thought, and hated the mission she had set herself to accomplish, which involved converse, and an assumption of intimacy with her.

“You see, ma’am, it is like this,” began Jane Anne, too humble and modestly conscious of the capacity in which this interview had been granted her, not to begin on it at once. “There is a gentleman, the gentleman who gave me that book, he comes here every year and paints—he always has done—he is not married, leastways we think not!—he is what they call the co-respondent.”

She said correspondent, but it was not her mispronunciation that made Egidia wince.

“Well, then,” Jane Anne went on, “last summer there comes a lady—leastwise a very funny lady, to be a lady—to call herself one, I mean—she was a foreigner, with painted cheeks, and something she did to her hair, and she nivver let our Mr. Rivers alone! He didn’t run after her, he really didn’t, but she had made up her mind to have him, and she did. She was married!”

“This is very interesting, and extraordinary!” ejaculated Egidia.

“But she nivver telled him so, nor none of us. She called herself Miss Frick, and first of all she wore a pair of blue spectacles, but trust her, she couldn’t stick to that long, because, you see, he couldn’t rightly see her face while she wore them, and so one fine day, she went and left them off! That’s why Mrs. Popham will have it that she was a spy! A spy! What for? She didn’t want to spy anything. She just wanted Mr. Rivers, and she got him! They used to go jaunting into the Park at all sorts of hours of the night, and loverish things like that!”

“Oh, then it is your opinion they were lovers?”

“Yes, ma’am, I do, and I am going for to say so. It is me that knows best, the lawyer says so.”

“Whose lawyer?”

“Mr. Mortimer Elles’s lawyer! He’s been down to see me times out of number. Aunt was dreadfully fashed; she said it put me out with my work!”

“And this man—the lover—is he a nice man?”

“Oh—ma’am!”

“Very nice?”

“The nicest gentleman I ever saw, or ever shall see. I would have done anything for him!”

“And she—is she nice?”

“Oh—ma’am!”

“You don’t like her so well, I see!”

“Ma’am, I should like to take and run this darning-needle into her. Brazened painted-up creature, so rude spoken, too—and great staring eyes, with black saucers round them——”

“Whatever she is, he will have to marry her now!” Egidia remarked carelessly.

“Ma’am!”

“Oh, yes, as a man of honour, he is bound to, if she is to be divorced on his account. Did not the lawyer tell you that? How very clever! Perhaps he did not realise how a man of honour would feel under the circumstances. The lover is a man of honour, is he not?”

“He’s a real gentleman, ma’am,” replied Jane Anne, translating Egidia’s description into her own language.

“Well, then, I am sorry for him!”

“But, ma’am, I don’t see why? She is a married woman; she carries on with him, her husband doesn’t like it—he can’t separate them, so he calls in the law to help him.”

“Very nicely reasoned, Jane Anne! But the law only helps the husband to get rid of the woman who has betrayed him, he has nothing to do with the other man, who is of course bound to the woman who has lost her position through him. If the man you speak of is a gentleman, he will do what is usual, you may be sure of that!”

The girl was quite speechless with emotion for a moment, then said, solemnly and sadly:

“Shall I be the one to force him to that, ma’am?”

“What do you mean? What have you to do with it?”

“Because the lawyer young gentleman says it is on my evidence they chiefly rely, to prove the case against him!”

“Oh, then, you may consider that you have married her to him, when the divorce is over! But what is your evidence?”

“I saw them,” stammered Jane Anne, “the lawyer says I must tell what I know, and not swear falsely.”

“Certainly you must tell what you know to be true.”

She looked insistently at the girl, but not too insistently, lest she roused her suspicions.

“But I should make as light of it as I could, if I were you, and wished the man well, as you say you do!”

“Then if nothing is proved against him, he won’t have to marry her?” inquired the girl eagerly.

“Obviously not. Her husband will have to take her back!”

“Oh,” said Jane Anne, “and Mr. Rivers be just where he was before?”

“Oh, is it Mr. Rivers? I know him slightly.”

“Do you? Do you? Ma’am, then if you know him, will you tell him that Jane Anne Cawthorne is his friend, and wishes him well. Why, I would like to die for him, I would indeed!”

“Then you had better lie for him a little!”

She looked keenly at the girl as she spoke, and with ever so slight an accent on the word whose first letter she had altered, and she had the satisfaction of seeing Jane Anne redden.

“Understate rather than overstate, you know!”

She now ventured to say this, seeing by the girl’s confusion that the latter course was the one she had intended to take, or had perhaps even been suborned by a lawyer over-zealous in Mortimer Elles’s behalf to do.

“Nothing extenuate—but naught set down in malice!” she went on. “Don’t deny anything, or hold back anything, but make as light of what you did see as possible!”

“I think I hear my aunt calling me!” Jane Anne exclaimed suddenly. “I will just run and see what she wants, and be back in a moment.”

Miss Giles admired Jane Anne’s method of gaining time. Did she really go to attend on her aunt, or did she simply stand outside the door for a while? In five minutes she came back, looking somehow quite a different woman, and said simply:

“I want you to tell me how I can help him, ma’am?”

“Say simply what you know, and no more!”

“Then,” said Jane Anne, her eyes downcast, “I had better write to Mr. Perkins!”

“Who is he?”

“The lawyer gentleman who came here and saw me. He took down what I said on a piece of paper.”

“Perhaps in what you said then you—exaggerated a little—did not you?”

“Yes, ma’am, I did,” replied the girl, hiding her eyes in the apron she wore, and bursting into tears. “I was so angry with her and with him, because he would not even speak to me that last day, but shook my hand off his sleeve, that I said the worst I could. And truly I never saw no worse than him and her walking up the Broad Walk yonder hand in hand. It was the old lady saw him kissing her through the window, and standing by his bedroom door in the middle of the night. I didn’t see that, but I was there in the garden before,—it was I who took her to the window of his room, but I didn’t look, I couldn’t bear to. But I invented worse, and all I said, I told the lawyer I would swear to in Court.”

“How very awful!” said Egidia. “But if you write and say that you are not prepared to swear this then the chances are that the case will fall to the ground, and you will not have to appear in Court at all.”

“But then I shan’t even see him!” exclaimed Jane Anne.

“See him—no, not then, but if there isn’t any trial, you will have him back here painting as usual next spring, I should think.”

Jane Anne seized Egidia’s hand and kissed it.

“Oh, ma’am, ma’am, you know I never wanted nothing but that. I knew well enough he could never be anything to such as me, but I didn’t want him to marry anyone else.”

. . . . . . . .

“I did not expect him to marry me, but oh, I could not bear him to marry any one else!”

That phrase of the country girl’s was in Egidia’s ears all day as the train bore her southwards, her mission accomplished, and Phoebe Elles and Rivers for ever divided, by her means.

She had done it, and for what motive? Now that it was done, the spirit of self-analysis tormented the woman of letters skilled in the art of heart-searching. The happiness of Rivers was her object, and that she had been convinced lay in his continued celibacy. She herself had nothing to gain by it, wished to gain nothing by it. “I do not, I do not, if I have to go into a convent to prove it!” she said out aloud, in the solitude of the railway carriage. “I am glad we are cousins!” she added, mentally. “All women are dogs in the manger, when the man they love is concerned!” was her reflection with reference to Jane Anne’s pathetic speech. The devotion of the servant for the artist revolted while it touched her. “I wonder how many more there are of us?” she wondered bitterly. “And his method—indifference, and innate incapacity to make any woman really happy. Those are the men who are beloved.... Phoebe Elles is saved—but she won’t think so. So is Edmund—but he won’t admit it, perhaps. At any rate, I do not profit. If I did, I would kill myself!”