CHAPTER I
IN A FIELD

I

Sandwiches, supplied in liberal manner by Mr. Master and not touched on the railway journey, sufficed Mr. Wriford's needs through the following day. He tramped aimlessly the greater part of the time. Evening again provided him with a bed by the roadside. It was the next morning, to which he awoke feeling cold and feeling ill, that aroused him to his first thoughts of his present situation. He clearly must do something; but he had only negative ideas as to what it should be. Negative, as that, in passing a farm, it crossed his mind to apply for work as had been the practice with Mr. Puddlebox. But he recalled the nature of that work and was at once informed that he was now completely unfitted for it. He had been very strong then. He felt very weak now. He had then been extraordinarily vigorous and violent in spirit, and his spirit's violence had led him to delight in exercising his body at manual labour. Now he felt very weary and submissive in mind; and that feeling of submission was reflected in extreme lassitude of his limbs. It came back to this—and at once he was returned again to his mental searching—that then there seemed object and relief in taxing himself arduously: now he had proved that trial and knew that no object lay beyond it, that no relief would ever now be contained in it. And in any event he was not capable of it: he was weak, weak; he felt very ill.

But something must be done. Let him determine how he stood; and with this thought he began for the thousandth time to rehearse his life as he had lived it. One of the lucky ones: he had been that: it had driven him into the river. One of the free: that also he now had been. Those months with Puddlebox he had cared for nothing and for nobody: recked nothing whether he lived or died. He had worked with his hands as in the London days he had imagined happiness lay in working. He had attained in brimming fulness all that in the London days he had madly desired. It had brought him where now he was—to knowledge that there was something in life he had missed, and to baffled, to bewildered ignorance what it might be or in what manner of living it might be found. Well, let him drag on. Just to drag on was now the best that he could do. Let life take him and do with him just whatsoever it pleased. Let him be lost, be lost, to all who knew him and to all and everything he knew. Let him a second time start life afresh, and this time not attack it as in the wild Puddlebox days he had attacked it, but be washed by it any whither it pleased, stranded somewhere and permitted to die perhaps, perhaps have disclosed to him, and be allowed to seize, whatever it might be that somehow, somehow, somewhere, somewhere, he had missed.

Thus, as aimlessly he wandered, his thoughts took the form of plans or resolutions, yet were not resolutions in any binding sense. They drifted formlessly through his mind as snatches of conversation, carried on in a crowded apartment, will drift through a mind pre-occupied with some idea; or they drifted through him as snow at its first fall will for long drift over and seem to leave untouched any stone that rises above the surface of the ground. He was preoccupied with his own ceaseless questioning. He was preoccupied with helpless and hopeless sense of helplessness and hopelessness. There was something that others found that gave them peace and gave them happiness, that he had missed, that he knew not where he had missed or where to begin to find.

All of plan or resolution that in any way settled upon this deeper brooding was that somehow he must find something to do. In the midst of his brooding he would jolt against realisation of that necessity, think aimlessly upon it for a little, then lose it again. Slowly it permeated his mind. Evening brought him to the outskirts of a small town; and at a house in a by-street where "Beds for Single Men" were offered, and where he listlessly turned in, the matter of being called upon for the price of a lodging shook him to greater concentration upon his resources. He found that, by Mr. Master's carelessness or kindness, he had been left with a trifle of change over the money given him to make his way across town when he broke his journey in London—elevenpence. He paid ninepence for his bed. In the morning there remained to him two coppers for food, and he knew himself faint with protracted fasting. In a street of dingy shops he turned into a coffee-house. "Shave?" said a man in soiled white overalls, and he realised that he had mistaken the door and stepped into a barber's adjoining the refreshment shop. He was unshaven, and any work that he could do would demand a reasonably decent appearance. "Attend to you in a moment," said the soiled overalls, and Mr. Wriford dropped into a chair to await his pleasure. The ragged fragment of a local newspaper lay on a table beside him, and he took it up with some vague idea of discovering employment among the advertisements. That portion of the paper was missing. His eye was attracted by an odd surname, "Pennyquick," and when the barber called him and was operating on him he found himself listlessly reflecting upon what he had read of an inquest following the sudden death of the assistant-master at Tower House School, chief evidence given by Mr. Pennyquick, headmaster.

A penny was the price of his shave. He took his penny that remained into the adjoining coffee-shop and obtained with it a large mug of cocoa. "Three ha'pence with a slice of bread and butter," said the woman at the counter, pushing the cocoa towards him. "Don't you want nothing to eat?"

Her tone and the look she gave him were kindly. "I want it," said Mr. Wriford significantly.

"You look like it," said the woman. "There!" and slid him a hunk of dry bread.

He tried to thank her. He felt strangely overcome by her kindness. Tears of weakness sprang to his eyes; but no words to his mouth. "That's all right," she said. "You're fair starved by the look of you."

He puzzled as he finished his meal, and as he wandered out and up the street again, to know why he had been so touched by the woman's action. He found himself feeling towards her that same swelling in his heart as when the oldest sea-captain living with stained lips had whispered: "Matey! Matey!"

Was there something in life that he had missed? What in the name of God had that to do with being given a piece of bread?

II

He found himself late in the afternoon reaching the end of a deserted road of widely detached villas. The last house carried on its gate a very dingy brass plate.

TOWER HOUSE SCHOOL
JAMES PENNYQUICK, B.A.

Pennyquick? Pennyquick? It was the name that had caught his attention in the paper at the barber's. What had he read about it? He trailed on a few steps and remembered the inquest on the assistant-master, and stopped, and stared.

A rough field lay beyond the house. It was separated from the road by barbed-wire fencing which trailed between dejected-looking poles that at one time had supported it but now bowed towards the ground in various angles of collapse. Within the field were pitched at intervals decayed cricket stumps set in a wide circle, and there stood about dejectedly in this circle dejected-looking boys to the number of eighteen or twenty. At intervals, as Mr. Wriford stood and watched, the boys stirred into a dejected activity which gave them the appearance of being engaged in a game of rounders. A gentleman, wearing on his head a dejected-looking mortar-board without a tassel, and beneath it untidy black garments of semi-clerical appearance, imparted these intervals of activity to the boys. He paced the field in a series of short turns near the house, hands behind his back, head bent, and, as Mr. Wriford could see, sucking in the cheeks of a coarse-looking face surrounded by scrubby whiskers of red hair. Every now and then he would throw up his head towards the dejected-looking boys and bawl "PLAY UP!" whereupon the dejected-looking boys would give momentary attention to their game.

Mr. Wriford stepped over the trailing wire and approached the maker of this invigorating call. "Excuse me," said Mr. Wriford, come within speaking distance. "Are you Mr. Pennyquick?"

Halted in his pacing at sight of Mr. Wriford, the gentleman thus addressed awaited him with lowered head and lowering gaze much as a bull might regard the first movements of an intruder. He sucked more rapidly at his cheeks as Mr. Wriford came near, and for a space sucked and fiercely stared after receiving the question.

"Well, what if I am?" he then returned. His voice was extraordinarily harsh, and he came forward a step that brought his face close to Mr. Wriford's and stared more threateningly than before. His eyes were dull and heavily bloodshot, and there went with the sucking at his cheeks a nervous agitation that seemed to possess his neck and all his joints. "What if I am?" he demanded again, and his words discharged a reek communicative of the fact that, whoever he was, abstinence from alcohol was not among his moral principles.

"By any chance," said Mr. Wriford, "do you happen to want an assistant-master?"

"I don't want you."

"I thought you might want temporary assistance."

He was stared at a moment from the clouded eyes. Then, in another volume of the fierce breath, "Well, you thought wrong!" he was told. "Now!"

"Very well," said Mr. Wriford and turned away.

He went a dozen paces towards the road. There seized him as he turned and as he walked away a sudden realisation of his case, a sudden panic at his plight, a sudden desperation to cling on to what he believed offered here. He must find something to do. There could be no concealment, no peace for him while he wandered outcast and penniless. That way lay what most he feared. He would be found wandering or found collapsed, and questions would be asked him and explanations demanded of him. That terrified him. He could not face that. Whatever else happened he must be left alone. He must find something to do that would hide him—give him occupation enough to earn him food and shelter and leave him to himself to think.

He turned and went back desperately. The man he believed to be Mr. Pennyquick was standing staring after him and waited staring as he came on.

"Look here," said Mr. Wriford desperately. "Look here, Mr. Pennyquick. I know you think it strange my coming to you like this. But I heard, I heard in the town, that you wanted an assistant-master. If you don't—"

"I've told you," said Mr. Pennyquick, admitting the personality by not denying it, "I've told you I don't want you. Now!"

"If you don't," said Mr. Wriford, unheeding the rebuff, more desperate by reason of it, "if you don't, there's an end of it. But if you want temporary help—temporary, a day, or a week—I can do it for you."

"Do what?" demanded Mr. Penny quick.

"I can teach," said Mr. Wriford. There was sign of relenting in Mr. Pennyquick's question, and Mr. Wriford took it up eagerly. "I can teach," he repeated.

"What can you teach?"

"I can teach all the ordinary subjects."

"I'm getting a University man," said Mr. Pennyquick.

"Temporarily," Mr. Wriford urged. As every passage of their conversation brought him nearer this sudden chance or threw him further from it, his panic at its failure, and what must happen, then increased desperately. "Temporarily," he urged. "I've had a public-school education."

"Yes, you look it!" said Mr. Pennyquick, and laughed.

"English subjects," cried Mr. Wriford. "Latin, mathematics. I can do it if you want it."

Mr. Pennyquick glanced over his shoulder at his dejected-looking boys, then stared back again at Mr. Wriford and began to speak with more consideration and less fierceness. "I'm not saying," said Mr. Pennyquick, "that I don't want temmo—temmer—PLAY UP! Tem-po-rary assistance. I do. I'm very ill. I'm shaken all to bits. I ought to be in bed. What I'm saying is I don't want you. I don't know anything about you. I've got the reputation of my school to consider. That's what I'm saying to you."

Dizziness began to overtake Mr. Wriford—the field to rock in long swells, Mr. Pennyquick by turns to recede and advance, swell and diminish. He felt himself upon the verge of breaking down, wringing his hands in his extremity and staggering away. But where? Where? "Temporarily," he pleaded. "Temporarily."

"You might drink for all I know," said Mr. Pennyquick, pronouncing this possibility as if consumed with an unnatural horror of it.

"I don't drink."

"How do I know that?"

Mr. Wriford cried frantically: "It's only temporarily! If I drink, if I'm not suitable, you can stop it in a moment."

"No notice?" said Mr. Pennyquick.

"No—no notice. Temporarily—it's only temporarily. That'll be understood."

"Well, if no notice is understood I'll take the risk—for a week, while I'm getting a man. I'll give you fifteen shillings. No, I won't. I'll give you twelve. I'll give you twelve shillings, and if I have to sack you before the week's out—well, you just go. That's understood?"

"Thank you," Mr. Wriford said. The field was spinning now. He could think of nothing else to say. "Thank you."

"Be here at nine to-morrow," said Mr. Pennyquick. "Just before nine," and he turned away and shouted to his boys: "Stop now! Come in now!"

"But—" said Mr. Wriford. "But—but—" He was trying for words to frame his difficulty. "But—do I live in?"

"Live in!" cried Mr. Pennyquick. "I'm taking risks enough having you at all! Live in! Stop now. Come in now!" and he walked away towards the house.

CHAPTER II
IN A PARLOUR

I

Lights in all the windows and in the street lamps as Mr. Wriford regained the town. Night approaching—and he terrified of its approach. Little chill was in the air, yet as he walked he trembled and his teeth chattered. He was shaken and acutely distressed by revulsion of the effort to cling on and achieve his purpose against Mr. Pennyquick's domineering savagery. He was worse shaken and worse distressed by mounting continuance of the panic at his plight that had driven him to the interview. That plight and to what it might lead had suddenly been revealed to him as he walked away after the first rebuff. Now it utterly consumed him. He shrunk from the gaze of passers-by. He avoided with more than the fear of an evil-doer the police constables who here and there were to be seen. His urgent desire was concealment, to be left alone, to be quiet. His fear was to be apprehended, found destitute, questioned, interfered with. Questioning: that was his terror; solitude: that was his want. He wanted to hide. He wanted to hide from every sort of connection with what in two different phases he had lived through, and in each come only to misery. He told himself that if, in obedience to his bodily desires—his hunger, his extreme physical wretchedness—he were somehow to get in communication with London and enjoy the money and the place that waited him there—that would be the very quick of intolerable meeting with his old self again. Unthinkable that! If his bodily desires—his faintness, his extreme exhaustion—overcame him, there would be meeting the old life in guise of explanations, of dependence again in infirmary or workhouse. No, he must somehow be alone; he must somehow live where none should interfere with him and where he might on the one hand be occupied and on the other be able to sit aside from all who knew him or might bother him, and thus pursue his quest: was there some secret of happiness in life that he had missed? These bodily miseries would somehow, somewhere, be accommodated or would kill him: this mental searching—ever?

There was upon him accumulation of wretchedness such as in all his wretchedness of his accursed life he never had endured. At its worst in the old days, the days of being one of the lucky ones, there had shone like a lamp to one lost in darkness the belief that if he could get out of it all he would end it all. Ah, God, God, he had escaped it and was in worse condition for his escape! The belief had been tested—the belief was gone. In the wild Puddlebox days he had beaten off wretchedness with violence of his hands and of his body, believing that it ever could thus be beaten. God, it had beaten him, never again in that deluded spirit could be faced. In the infirmary he had begun his wondering after something in life that he had missed. Lo, here was he come out to find it, and Christ! it was not, and Christ! he might not now so much as sit and rest and ponder it.

He felt himself hunted. He felt every eye turned upon him within whose range he came; every hand tingling suddenly to clutch him and stop him; every voice about to cry: "Here, you! You, I say! What are you doing? Where do you live? Who are you?"

He felt himself staggering from his dreadful faintness and thereby conspicuous. Thrice as he stumbled round any corners that he met he found himself passing a constable who each time more closely stared. He took another turning. It showed him again that same policeman at the end of the street. He dared not turn back. That would be flight, his disordered mind told him, and he be followed. He dared not go on. There was a little shop against where he stood. Its lighted window displayed an array of gas-brackets, a variety of glass chimneys and globes for lamps and gas, some coils of lead piping, and in either corner a wash-basin fitted with taps. There was inscribed over this shop

HY. BICKERS, CERT. PLUMBER

and attached to a pendent gas bracket within the window was a card with the announcement:

LODGER TAKEN

Mr. Wriford made a great effort to steady himself; steadied his shaking hand to press down the latch; and to the very loud jangle of an overhead bell entered the tiny shop that the door disclosed.

II

There was sound of conversation and the clatter of plates from a brightly-lit inner parlour. Mr. Wriford heard a voice say: "I'll go, Essie, dear," and there came out to him a nice-looking little old woman, white-haired and silvery-hued, rather lined and worn, yet radiating from her face a noticeable happiness, as though there was some secret joy she had, who smiled at him in pleasant inquiry.

"I'm looking for a lodging," said Mr. Wriford.

At her entry she had left the parlour door open behind her, and at Mr. Wriford's words there came to him through it a bright girlish voice which said: "There, now! Jus' what I was saying! Isn't that funny, though! Let's have a laugh!" and with it, as though Mr. Wriford's statement had conveyed the jolliest joke in the world, the merriest possible ring of laughter.

The woman smiled at Mr. Wriford; and there was in the laugh something so infectious as to make him, despite his wretchedness, smile in response. She went back to the door and closed it. "That's our Essie," she said, speaking as though Mr. Wriford in common with everybody else must know who Essie was. "She's such a bright one, our Essie!" The secret happiness that seemed to lie behind her years and behind the lines of her face shone strongly as she spoke. One might guess that "Our Essie" was it. Then she answered Mr. Wriford's statement. "Well, we've got a very nice bedroom," she told him. "Would you like to see it?"

"I'm sure it's nice," said Mr. Wriford. His voice, that he had tried to strengthen for this interview, for some ridiculous reason trembled as he spoke. The reason lay somewhere in the woman's motherly face and in her happy gleaming. He felt himself stupidly affected just as he had been affected—recurrence of the sensation brought the scenes before his eyes—by the last appeal to him of the oldest sea-captain living, and by the kindly action of the woman in the coffee-shop who had given him a piece of bread early that morning. "I'm sure it's nice," he said again, repeating the words to correct the stupid break in his voice. "Would you tell me the price?"

"Won't you sit down?" said the woman. "You do look that tired!"

He murmured some kind of thanks and dropped into a chair that stood by the counter.

She looked at him very compassionately before she answered his question. "Tiring work looking for lodgings," she said.

He nodded—very faint, very wretched, very vexed with himself at that stupid swelling from his heart to his throat that forbade him speech.

"Would you be living in?" he was asked.

"I think I should be out all day."

"Jus' breakfast and supper? That's the usual, of course, isn't it? And full Sundays. That would be twelve shillings."

Twelve shillings was to be his wage from Mr. Pennyquick. He could not spend it all.

"I couldn't pay it," said Mr. Wriford and caught at the counter to assist himself to rise.

"Well, I am sorry, I'm sure," said the woman, and she added: "Hadn't you better rest a little?"

His difficulty in rising warned him that if he did get up he might be unable to stand. "I will, just a moment," he told her, "if you don't mind. It's very kind of you. I've had rather a long day."

She had said she was sorry, and she stood looking at him as though she were genuinely grieved and more than a little disturbed in mind. "How much could you pay?" she asked.

"I could pay ten."

"And when might you want to begin?"

"Now."

"Would it be for long?"

"I can't say. I don't think it would."

She said briskly, as though her obvious disturbance of mind had dictated a sudden course, "Look here, jus' wait a minute, will you?" and went into the parlour, closing the door behind her.

Murmur of voices.

"You know," she said, coming back to him, "if it was likely to be regular perhaps we could arrange ten shillings. But not knowing, you see, that's awkward. We like our lodger more to be one of us like. We don't want the jus' come and go sort. That's how it stands, you see. You couldn't say, I suppose?"

"It's very kind of you," said Mr. Wriford. "I'm afraid I can't. I'll tell you. I'm engaged with Mr. Pennyquick at Tower House School—"

"Oh, Mr. Pennyquick!"

"You know him, I expect?"

"Oh, I know Mr. Pennyquick," said the woman, and seemed to have some meaning in her tone.

"Well, it's only for a week, or by the week. I can't say how long."

He was given no reply to this. It was as if mention of Mr. Pennyquick's name placed him as very likely to be among the "come and go sort." "I had better be going, I think," he said, and this time got to his feet.

"Well, I am sorry," the woman said again. "I'm sure I'm very sorry, and you know I can't say straight off where you'll get what you want for ten shillings. There's places, of course. But you know you don't look fit to go trudging round after them this time of night. Hadn't you better go just for the night somewhere? There's Mrs. Winter I think would take you for the night. She's at—"

Mr. Wriford went to the door. "You needn't trouble," he said weakly. "It can't be by the night. I can only pay at the end of the week."

The woman gave a little sound of dismay. "But—do you mean no money till then?"

He nodded. That was what he meant—and must face.

"But, dearie me, you won't find any will take you without deposit. They're very suspicious here, you know."

"Well," said Mr. Wriford. "Well—" and with fingers as helpless as his voice began to fumble at the latch.

"But where are you going?"

"This handle," he said. "It's rather stiff." He took his hand from it as she came round the counter to him, then immediately caught at it again and supported himself against it.

She saw the action and cried out in consternation. "Oh," she cried. "Why, you can't hardly stand, and going off nowhere! Why, you jus' can't. You'll have to stop."

He asked wearily: "Stop! How can I stop?"

"Why, ten shillings. That'll be all right. Our Essie, you know—"

He could say no more than "Thank you. Thank you."

"You'll come right along. We're just sitting down to supper. No, I'll just tell them first."

He effected speech again as, with her last words, she went to the parlour door. "But deposit," he said, and recalled the phrase she had used. "Aren't you suspicious?"

"Why, that can't be helped," she smiled back at him. "Our Essie, you know, she'd never forgive me if I sent you off like you are. Jus' sit down."

He had scarcely taken a seat when she was back again and calling him from the threshold of the open parlour door. "That's all right. Come right along. You didn't give your name, did you?"

"Wriford," and he reached her where she stood smiling.

She turned within and announced him: "Well, here's our lodger. That's Mr. Bickers."

A man of stature and of strength, once, this Hy. Bickers, Cert. Plumber. Bent now and stooping, but with something very strong, very confident in his face: lined and worn as his wife's, silvery as hers. Slightly whiskered, of white, otherwise clean shaven. A smoking-cap on his head. Little enough hair beneath it. In his face that same suggestion of a very happy secret happiness. "Expect you're tired," said Mr. Bickers and gave a warm hand-clasp.

"And that's our Essie."

A very cool, vigorous young hand, this time, that grasped Mr. Wriford's and shook it strongly. A slim, brown little thing, our Essie, eighteen perhaps, very pretty, with extraordinarily bright eyes; wearing a blue cotton dress with white spots.

"Pleased to meet you," said Essie.

III

Such a cheerful, jolly room, the parlour. Here was a round table set out for supper, and Essie bustling in and out of what appeared to be the kitchen, giving final touches and laying a fourth place. A great number of framed texts all round the walls, with two or three religious pictures, a highly coloured portrait of Queen Victoria and another of General Booth. A bright little fire burning, with an armchair of shining American cloth on each side of it, and a sofa and chairs, similarly covered, all with antimacassars, set around the room. A bookcase near the window, and near one armchair a little table carrying an immense Bible with other Bibles and prayer-books placed upon it. Some shells on the mantelpiece in front of an immense, gilt-framed mirror, and with them a great number of cups and saucers and vases all inscribed as "A present from" the place whence they were purchased.

Mr. Wriford sat on the sofa, silent, better already from the warmth and the fragrant savour from the kitchen; not less wretched though: somehow more wretched, somehow overcome and utterly consumed with that swelling feeling from his heart to his throat. Mr. Bickers sat in one of the armchairs, silent. Mrs. Bickers in the kitchen.

Mrs. Bickers appears. "Now Essie, dear, I'll dish up. You jus' look after the lodger, dear. I expect the lodger will like to wash his hands. Hot water, dear, and there's his bundle."

Essie comes out of the kitchen with a steaming jug in one hand and a candle in the other, puts down the candle to tuck Mr. Wriford's parcel under her arm, and then takes it up again. "This way," says Essie and leads the way through another door and up a flight of very steep and very narrow stairs. "Aren't they steep, though?" says Essie over her shoulder. "We don't half want a lift!"

The stairs give onto a passage with doors leading off from the right, and the passage terminates in a door which Essie butts open with her knee, and here is a bedroom. "This is the lodger's room," says Essie, setting down the candle and then removing the jug from the basin and pouring out the water. "Course it don't look much jus' at present, not expecting you, you see. But I'll pop up after supper an' put it to rights. Find your way down, can't you? I'll get you a bit of soap out of my room to go on with." There is a second door to the bedroom, and Essie goes through it and returns with soap. "That's my room," says Essie. "I call this my dressing-room when we haven't got a lodger, jus' like as if I was a duchess," and she gives the bright laugh that Mr. Wriford had heard in the shop. "That's all right then. Bring the candle. That mark on the wall there's where a lodger left his candle burning all night. Oh, they're cautions, some of our lodgers! Don't be long."

IV

Most savoury and most welcome soup opens the supper. After it a shoulder of mutton, Essie doing all the helping and the carving and the running about. She sits opposite Mr. Wriford. Her eyes—there is something quite extraordinarily bright about her eyes as he watches them. They are never still. They are for ever sparkling from this object to that; and wherever momentarily they rest he sees them sparkle anew and sees her soft lips twitch as though from where her eyes alight a hundred merry fancies run sparkling to her mind. Her eyes flicker over the dish of potatoes and rest there a moment, and there they are sparkling, and her mouth twitching, as though she is recalling comic passages in buying them or in cooking them, or perhaps it is their very appearance, grotesquely fat and helpless, heaped one upon the other, in which she sees something odd that tickles her. Most extraordinarily bright eyes, and with them always most funny little compressions of her lips, as if she is for ever tickled onto the very brink of breaking into laughter.

This at last, indeed, she does. Presence of the new lodger seems to throw a constraint about the table, and the meal is eaten almost to the end of the mutton course in complete silence. Very startling, therefore, when Essie suddenly drops her knife and fork with a clatter and leans back in her chair, eyes all agleam. "Oh, dear me!" cries Essie, as Mr. and Mrs. Bickers stare at her. "Oh, dear me! I'm very sorry, but just munching like this, you know, all of us, without speaking a word! Oh, dear!" and she uses the expression that Mr. Wriford had heard when he first spoke to Mrs. Bickers. "Oh, dear, let's have a laugh!"

Mrs. Bickers glances at Mr. Wriford and says reprovingly: "Oh, Essie!" But there is no help for it and no avoiding its infection. Essie puts back her head and goes into a ring of the brightest possible laughter, and Mrs. Bickers laughs at her, and Mr. Bickers laughs at her, and even Mr. Wriford smiles; and thereafter Essie chatters without ceasing to her parents on an extraordinary variety of topics connected with what she has done or seen during the day, in every one of which she finds subject for amusement and many times declares of whatever it may be: "Oh, aren't they funny, though! Let's have a laugh!"

Mr. Wriford smiles when she laughs—impossible to avoid it. Otherwise he contributes nothing to the chatter. This strange, this kind and happy and generous ending to his day, acts upon him only in increasing sensation of that upward swelling from his heart to his throat that forbids him speech. He has the feeling that if he talks his voice will break in tears—of weakness, of wretchedness: nay, of worse than these—of their very apotheosis. There is happiness here. There is here, among these three, that which he is seeking, seeking and cannot find. They have found it: what is it then? It is all about them—shining in their faces, singing in their words. He is not of it. He is outside it. They are on the heights; he in the depths, the depths! Let him not speak, let him not speak! If he speaks he must sob and cry, get to his feet, while wondering they look at him, and stare at them, and break from them and go. If he so betrays himself he must cry at them: "What have you found? Why are you happy? This kills me, kills me, to sit here and watch you. Don't touch me. None of you touch me. Let me go. Just let me go."

They seem to see his plight. They smile encouragingly at him to draw him into their talk; Mr. Bickers, when the women are clearing away, offers him a new clay pipe and the tobacco jar. But they seem to understand. They accept without comment or offence the negation of these advances which he gives only by shaking his head as they are made.

"Well, that's done!" says Essie, coming down from the lodger's room after the supper has been cleared away. "Bed made and everything nice and ready. One of the castors of the bed is shaky, Dad. You'll have to see to it in the morning. I can't think how I never noticed it till now. Oh, those lodgers! They're fair cautions!"

Mrs. Bickers smiles at Mr. Wriford. "Well, I expect you'd like to go straight to bed, wouldn't you now?"

Painful this distrust of his voice. He rises and manages: "Yes, I would."

"You'll be ever so much better in the morning after a good sleep. What about—" and Mrs. Bickers looks at her husband.

"It's our custom," says Mr. Bickers in his deep voice, "all to read a piece from the Bible before we go to bed—all that sleep under this roof. We'll do it now so you can get along. Essie, dear."

Essie puts chairs to the table, and then Bibles. The immense Bible for Mr. Bickers, one but a little smaller for Mrs. Bickers, and one for herself. "There's my Church-service for you," says Essie to Mr. Wriford. All the Bibles have a ribbon depending from them whereat they are opened, and Essie finds the place for Mr. Wriford. "Twenty-fourth Psalm," says Essie. "My fav'rit. Isn't it a short one, though!"

"We read in turn," says Mr. Bickers. He has one hand on the great Bible and stretches the other to Mrs. Bickers, who takes it and holds it. Mr. Wriford sits opposite them, then Essie, next her father on his other side and snuggling against him, and they begin.

Mr. Bickers, very deep and slow and reverent:

"The earth is the Lord's and all that therein is: the compass of the world and they that dwell therein."

Mrs. Bickers, very gently:

"For he hath founded it upon the seas, and prepared it upon the floods."

Mr. Wriford. He is trembling, trembling, trembling. They are waiting for him. They are looking at him. Round swings the room, around and around. Who is waiting? Who is looking? Others are here. He hears the oldest sea-captain living, plainly as if he stood before him in the room: "Matey! Matey!" He sees Mr. Puddlebox, plainly as if he were here beside him. "Wedge in, boy; wedge in!" They are surely here. They are surely calling him. He is on the rock with the sea about him. He is in the little room with the figure on the bed. Darkness, darkness. Is this Puddlebox? Is this Captain? Is he by the sea? Is he by the bed? Round swings the darkness, around and around. He is not! He is here! He is here where happiness is. They are waiting for him. They are watching him. Wriford! Wriford! He tries to read the words that swim before his eyes. He must. They are very few. They are a question. He must! Trembling he gives voice:

"Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord: or who shall rise up in his holy place?"

Essie, strong and clear and eager, emphasising the first word as though strongly and directly she answered him:

"Even he that hath clean hands, and a pure heart: and that hath not lift up his mind unto vanity, nor sworn to deceive his neighbour."

Mr. Bickers, as one that feels the words he reads, and is sure of them:

"He shall receive the blessing from the Lord: and righteousness from the God of his salvation."

Mrs. Bickers in gentle confirmation:

"This is the generation of them that seek him: even of them that seek thy face, O Jacob."

His turn again. He cannot! Let him get out of this! Let him away! This is not to be borne. Unendurable this. What are they reading? Why have they chosen these words. "Who shall ascend?" They know his misery, then! They know the depths that he is in! Hateful that they should know it, hateful, insufferable, horrible. They see his state and have chosen words that mean his state. He is exposed before them. Let him away! Let him get out of this! They shall not know! His turn. He cannot, cannot. They are watching. They are waiting. Do they see how his face is working? Do they see how he twists and twists his hands? His turn. Ah, ah, he is in the depths, the depths! He is physically, actually down, down—struggling, gasping, suffocating. All this room and these about him stand as it were above him—watching him, waiting for him, knowing his misery. He is sinking, sinking. He is in black and whirling darkness. There is shouting in his ears. Let him away! Let him go!

Some one says: "Essie, dear."

Essie—strong and loud and clear, with tremendous emphasis upon the first word as though her strong young voice performed its meaning:

"Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors: and the King of glory shall come in."

He gets to his feet, overturning his chair. He stumbles away, with blind eyes, with groping hands.

"Not that door!" cries Essie and runs to him. "Here's the door. Here's the stairs. Look, here's your candle."

He blunders up. He blunders to his room. He extinguishes the candle. Let him have the dark, the dark! He throws off his clothes, tearing them from him as though they were his agonies. God, if he could but tear these tortures so! He flings himself upon the bed and trembles there and clutches there and thrusts the sheet between his teeth to stay him crying aloud. Inchoate thoughts that rend him, rend him! Unmeaning cries that with the sheet he stifles. What, what consumes him now? He cannot name it. What tortures him? He does not know. Writhe, writhe in the bed; and now it is the sea, and now the Infirmary ward, and now the coffee-shop, and now the parlour. Ah, beat down, beat down these torments! Ah, sit up and stare into the darkness and rid the spirit, rid the mind, of all these shapes and scenes that press about the pillow. Has he slept? Is he sleeping? Why suffers he? What racks him? In God's name what? In pity, in pity what?

"Lift up your heads, O ye gates; and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors: and the King of glory shall come in."

Ah, ah!

CHAPTER III
TRIAL OF MR. WRIFORD

I

He had determined, writhing in those tortures of that night, at daybreak to get out of it. He had promised himself, striving to subdue his mental torments, that early morning, the house not yet astir, should see him up and begone. Sleep betrayed him his promises and his resolves. While he writhed and while he cried aloud to sleep to come and rest his fevered writhings, she would not be won. Towards morning she came to him. He awoke to find daylight, sounds about the house, escape impossible.

His reception at breakfast in the little parlour changed his intention. His reception made the desertion that now he intended immediately he could leave the house as impossible as, now he saw, escape at daybreak had been most base. He found in Mr. and Mrs. Bickers and in Essie not the smallest trace of recognition that his conduct upon the previous evening had been in the smallest degree remiss. He found them proving in innumerable little ways that, as Mrs. Bickers had told him, they liked their lodgers to be "one of us like." Mr. Bickers proposes to walk with him towards Tower House School in order to show him short cuts that will lessen the way by five minutes. Mrs. Bickers inquires if she may go through his bundle to see if any buttons or any darnings are required. Overnight he had been made to put on a pair of Mr. Bickers' slippers. Essie has put a new lace in one of his boots because one, when she was polishing the boots, was "worn out a fair treat." How can he run away from them without paying them in face of such kindness and confidence as all this? "Glad you like bacon," says Essie, helping him generously from the steaming dish she brings from the kitchen; and says to her mother: "Haven't some of our lodgers bin fanciful, though? Oh, we haven't half had some cautions!" and her eyes sparkle and her lips twitch as though her merry mind is running over the entertainment that some of the cautions have given.

No, there can be no desertion of his duties here after this. They trust him. They accept him as "one of us like." Already he is indebted to them. Until the week is out he is penniless and unable to repay them. When his week is up he can thank them and pay them and go. Till then, at whatever cost—and he will stiffen himself for the future; he was ill and overwrought last night—he must stay and earn and settle for the week for which he is committed.

"Ready?" says Mr. Bickers. "Time we was moving now."

Yes, he is quite ready. Essie runs to the shop door to open it for them. Mrs. Bickers comes with them to see them off. Some cows are being driven down the street. Essie stops with hand on the door to watch them. "Now, Essie," says Mr. Bickers. Two cows lumber onto the pavement. Mr. Wriford sees Essie's eyes sparkling and her lips twitching as she watches.

Mr. Bickers again: "Now, Essie dear—Essie!"

But Essie still watches. "Oh, jus' look at them!" says Essie with a little squirm of her shoulders and then turns round: "Aren't cows funny, though? Let's have a laugh!"

There is nothing at all to laugh at that any of the waiting three can see—except at Essie. Essie laughs as though cows were indeed the very funniest things in the world, and her laugh is impossible of resistance. Mr. Bickers is smiling as they start down the street, and Mr. Wriford is smiling also.

"She's such a bright one, our Essie," says Mr. Bickers.

"You must be very fond of her," says Mr. Wriford—"You and Mrs. Bickers;" and Mr. Bickers replies simply: "Why, I reckon our Essie is all the world to us."

II

Mr. Wriford suits Mr. Pennyquick. Mr. Pennyquick, indeed, as Mr. Wriford finds, is suited by anybody and anything that permits him leisure in which to nurse his ailment. His ailment requires rest which he takes all day long on the sofa in his study; and his ailment requires divers cordials which he keeps handily within reach in long bottles under the sofa. He is an outdoor man, as he tells Mr. Wriford when Mr. Wriford comes into the study on some inquiry. He is all for the open air and for sports; he only missed a double Blue at Cambridge—Rugby football and cross-country running—through rank favouritism, and he can't bear to be seen taking physic. To look around his room, says he, you'd never think he was a regular drug-shop inside owing to these rotten doctors, would you? Not a bottle of the muck to be seen anywhere. That's because, says he, his breath exuding the muck in pungent volumes, he hides the bottles through sheer sensitiveness. He's feeling a wee bit brighter this afternoon, thank goodness, and if Wriford, like a good chap, would just start the First Form in their Caesar he'll be in in about two ticks and take them over.

Poor fellow, he never does manage to get in in two ticks or in any more considerable circumference of the clock. Mr. Wriford, as he closes the study door, hears the chink of bottle and glass and knows that the open-air man will breathe no other air than that of his room until he is able to grip his malady sufficiently to stagger up to bed.

The trial week, indeed, is not many days old before Mr. Wriford obtains a pretty clear comprehension of the state of affairs at the Tower House and the reputation of its Headmaster. "Pennyquick! Whiskyquick, I call him," says Essie; and though her mother reproves this levity, and though ill-natured gossip has no exercise in the Bickers' establishment, even the cert. plumber and his wife admit that the school is not what it was, and speak of a time when there were forty or fifty boys and several resident masters. There are only twenty-four boys now—all boarders. There are no day-boarders. The town knows its Mr. Pennyquick; and the time cannot be far distant when the tradesmen in different parts of the county, now attracted by the past reputation of this "School for the Sons of Gentlemen," also will know him for what he is. Six boys left the Tower House at the end of the previous term; five are leaving at the end of this. They are sorry to go, Mr. Wriford finds, and at first rather wonders at the fact. But the reason is clear before even the trial week is out. The reason is that these twenty-four young Sons of Gentlemen, dejected-looking as he had seen them at play when he accosted Mr. Pennyquick, are dejected also in spirit—morally abased, that is to say, partly as coming from homes too snobbish to commit them to the rough and tumble of local elementary or grammar schools, and partly as being received into the atmosphere emanated by their Headmaster at the Tower House. They like the school. It suits them, and therefore, wiser than they should be, they carry no tales to their parents. They like the school. They like the utter slackness and slovenliness of the place. There is no discipline. There is scarcely a pretence of education. They wash in the mornings not till after they are dressed, Mr. Wriford finds, and they do not appear to wash again all day. They are thoroughly afraid of Mr. Pennyquick, but he scarcely ever visits them, leaving them now entirely to Mr. Wriford as formerly he left them to Mr. Wriford's predecessors who seemed to have been much of a habit of mind and character with themselves. Domestic arrangements are looked after by Mr. Pennyquick's mother who is a little, frightened grey wisp of a woman with hands that shake like her son's, but shake for him and because of him, Mr. Wriford discovers, not as a result of similar ailment and remedy. She adores her son. She is terrified of him. She is terrified for him. She sees his livelihood and his manhood crumbling away, simultaneously and disastrously swift, and what she can do, by befoolment of parents in correspondence relative to her son's ill-health and their own son's happiness and success, by pathetic would-be befoolment of Mr. Wriford on the same counts, and by lenient treatment of the pupils, that does she daily and hourly to avert the doom she sees.

III

Within the first days of the trial week Mr. Wriford's duties fall into a regular routine. This is his trial week, his temporary week, a week in which he comes to his duties overwrought, shaken, uncertain and, thus conditioned, is wretched in his performance of them. Shortly before nine he presents himself at Tower House. The boys are wandering dejectedly about the playground. He passes nervously through them—they do not raise their caps—and hides from them in the schoolroom till the hour strikes on a neighbouring church clock. Then Mr. Wriford rings a large hand-bell, and the boys drift in at their leisure and take their places on the benches. Sometimes, before Mr. Wriford has finished ringing, Mr. Pennyquick, in gown and untasselled mortar-board, comes charging across the playground from the house, and there is then an alarmed stampede on the part of the boys to get in before him or to crowd in immediately upon his heels. Sometimes there is a very long wait before the appearance of the Headmaster; and Mr. Wriford, nervously irresolute as to whether to ring again or to begin school without him, stands wretched and self-conscious at his raised desk while the boys titter and whisper, or throw paper pellets, or look at him and—he knows—titter and whisper at his expense. This is his trial week, his temporary week. He is much overwrought in body and in mind. He does not know what authority he should show or how to show it. He hesitates till too late to interfere with one outburst of horse-play or of giggling. At the next he hesitates in doubt as to whether, having overlooked the former, he can attempt to subdue this. While he hesitates, and while the noise increases, and while the humiliation and wretchedness it causes him increase—in the midst of all this Mr. Pennyquick charges in. Mr. Pennyquick is either unshaved and looking the worse for it; or he has shaved and has cut himself and dabs angrily at little tufts of cotton wool that decorate his chin.

"Anderson!" barks Mr. Pennyquick, seizing the roll-call book and a pencil but not looking at the one or using the other. "Adsum," responds Anderson; and Mr. Pennyquick barks through the roll, which he knows by heart, much as if he were a sheep-dog with each boy a sheep and each name a bark or a bite in pursuit of it. He does not wait for responses. He barks along in a jumble of explosions, interspersed with a jumble of squeaked replies; punctuated at intervals, as if it were part of the roll, by a very much louder bark in the form of a fierce "SPEAK UP!" and concluded by a rush without pause into prayers—Mr. Pennyquick plumping suddenly upon his knees, much as if the sheepdog had suddenly hurled itself upon the flock, and the first portion of the devotions being lost in the din of his pupils extricating themselves from their desks in order to follow his example, much as if the flock had responded by a panic stampede in every direction.

"Samuel Major," barks Mr. Pennyquick, as if he were biting that young gentleman. "'Sum!" squeaks Samuel Major, as if he were bitten. "Minorsum - Smithsum - Stoopersum - Taylorsum—SPEAK UP!—Tooveysum - Westsum - Whitesum—SPEAK UP!—Williamssum - Wintersum - Woodsum - Ourfatherchartinheavenhallo'edbeth'name ... Amen—SPEAK UP!—mightyanmosmercifulfatherwethynunworthyservants ... Amen—SPEAK UP!"

The schoolroom is divided by a red baize curtain into two parts. The scholars are divided into three forms of which Form One is the highest. Mr. Pennyquick, who knows the time-table of lessons by heart just as he knows the roll-call, follows the last Amen with a last "SPEAK UP!" and is himself followed in haste and trepidation by the members of Form One as he jumps from his knees and charges through the curtain barking "Form One. Thursday. Euclid. Blackboard. Come round the blackboard. Last night's prep?"

"Twelfth proposition, sir," squeaks the boy whose eye he has caught.

This—or the same point in whatever else the subject may be—invariably marks the end of Mr. Pennyquick's early morning energy. He begins to draw on the blackboard or to find the place in a text-book. The energy goes, or the recollection of his medicine begins, and he changes his mind and barks: "Revise last night's prep!" There is a stampede to the desks and a burying in books. The Headmaster paces the room between the wall and the curtain, barking a "WORK UP!" at intervals and hesitating a little longer each time he turns at the curtain. "WORK UP!" and he comes charging through towards Mr. Wriford and the door. "Keep an eye on Form One, Wriford. Draw the curtain. I'm not quite the thing this morning. Take them on for me if I'm not back in ten minutes, will you? I ought to be in bed, you know. I shan't be long. WORK UP!"

He is gone. He rarely appears again. If he appears it is when clearly he is not quite the thing and is only to skirmish a few times up and down the schoolroom to the tune of "WORK UP! WORK UP!" or to show himself on the playing-field, bellow "PLAY UP!" and betake himself again to the treatment of his complaint.

He is gone. Mr. Wriford is left with all the three forms in his charge. It is his trial week. He does not know what authority he should show or how to show it. He does not know what has been learnt or what is being learnt, and he is cunningly or cheekily frustrated at every attempt to discover it. In whatever way he attempts to set work afoot an excuse is found to stop him. By one boy he is told that "please, sir," they do not do this, and by another that "please, sir," they have never done the other. He has neither sufficient strength of himself nor sufficient certainty of his position to insist. Without advice, without support, he is left very much at the mercy of the three forms, and they show him none. While he tries to settle one form it is under the distractions and the interruptions of the other two. When he turns to one of these the first joins the third in idleness and disorder. At eleven o'clock he is informed "Please, sir, we have our break now," and there is a stampede for the door without awaiting his assent. Similarly at half-past twelve, when morning school ends, and similarly again at four and at half-past seven, which are the terminations of afternoon school and of evening preparation. There is no asking his permission. His position is exactly summarised by this—that the boys know the rules and customs, he does not; and further by this—that while he remains miserably uncertain of the extent of his authority and of how he should assert it, they, by that very uncertainty, well estimate its limits and hourly, with each advantage gained, more narrowly confine it, more openly defy him.

IV

At one o'clock there is lunch. Sometimes Mr. Pennyquick is present as the boys assemble, and then they assemble in timid silence and eat with due regard to manners. Sometimes he does not appear till midway through the meal, till when there is greedy and noisy and slovenly behaviour, which frightened-looking Mrs. Pennyquick attempts occasionally to check with a timid: "Hush, boys," or upon which she looks with nervously indulgent smiles. There is painfully evident in all her dealings with the boys a dread amounting to a lively terror that anything shall be done to displease them. Mr. Wriford soon realises that her hourly fear is of a boy writing home anything that may lead to parental inquiry and thence to the disclosure of her son's affliction. In out-of-school hours she frequently visits the schoolroom and looks anxiously at any boy who may be engaged in writing. Mr. Wriford at first wonders why. He understands when one day, passing behind a boy thus occupied, she stops and says: "Writing home, Charlie? That's a good boy. Do tell your father that Mr. Pennyquick only this morning was telling me what a good boy you are at your lessons and how well you are getting on. Write a nice letter, dear. Would you like to come with me a minute and see if I can find some sweeties in my cupboard? Come along, then."

With like purpose it is in fearful apprehension that she watches her son's face and his every movement when he is at the luncheon table. Mr. Wriford sees her look up with face in agony of misgiving when the Headmaster comes in late, sees her eyes ever upon him in constant dread as he sits opposite her at the head of the table. There does not appear great cause for nervousness. As a rule the Headmaster sits glowering and glum and fires off no more than, his own plate being empty, an occasional "EAT UP!" Sometimes he is boisterously cheerful. Whatever his mood he never omits one very satisfactory tribute to his own principles in which his mother joins very happily and impressively. It takes this form. Immediately Mr. Pennyquick sits down he calls in a very loud voice for the water to be passed to him. He then fills his glass from such a great height as to make all the boys laugh, then drinks, then sets down the tumbler with a sharp rap, and then says to Mr. Wriford: "I don't know if you're a beer-drinker, Wriford, but I'm afraid we can't indulge you here. I never touch anything but water myself. I attribute every misery, every failure in life, to drink, and I will allow it in no shape or form beneath my roof. I can give no man a better motto than my own motto: Stick to Water!"

Mr. Pennyquick then drinks again with great impressiveness, and Mrs. Pennyquick at once cries: "Boys, listen to that! Always remember what Mr. Pennyquick says and always say it was Mr. Pennyquick who told you. Stick to Water is Mr. Pennyquick's motto, and he never, never allows drink in any shape or form beneath his roof. Why, do you know—I must tell them this, dear—a doctor once ordered Mr. Pennyquick just a small glass of wine once a day, and Mr. Pennyquick said to him: 'Doctor, I know I'm very ill; but if wine is the only thing to save me, then, doctor, I must die, for wine I do not and will not touch.'"

All eyes in great admiration on this unflinching champion of hydropathy, who modestly concludes the scene with a loud: "EAT UP!"

V

Afternoon school, in its idleness, inattention, and indiscipline, is a repetition of the morning. Preparation from six to half-past seven again discovers irresolution, uncertainty and wretchedness set in the midst of those who by every device increase it and advantage themselves from it. At four o'clock it is Mr. Wriford's duty to keep an eye on the boys while they disport themselves in the field where he had first seen them; at half-past five is tea; at shortly before eight Mr. Wriford is making his way to where supper awaits in the cheerful parlour behind the little shop of the cert. plumber.

Thither he goes through the darkness; and, as one in darkness that gropes for light, can see no light, and dreads the sudden leap of some assault, so trembles he among the dark oppressions of his mind.

These are evenings of early summer, and they have early summer's dusky veils draped down from starry skies. Her pleasant scents they have, her gentle airs, her after-hush of all her daylight choirs. They but enfever Mr. Wriford. Her young nights, these, that not arrest her days but softly steal about her, finger on lip attend her while she sleeps, then snatch their filmy coverlets while eastward she rubs her smiling eyes, springs from her slumber, breaks into music all her morning hymns, and up and all about in sudden radiance rides, rides in maiden loveliness. Ah, not for him!

These are young nights that greet him as he leaves the school. In much affliction he cries out upon their stilly peace. Look, here that new year in summer is, her peace, her happiness attained, that from the windows of the ward at Pendra he had watched blown here and there, mocked, trampled on, caught by the throat and thrust beneath the iron ground in variance with winter's jealousy. In her he had envisaged his own stress. Look, here she reigns in happy peace, in ordered quiet: he?

He moans a little as he walks. There is something in life that he has missed, and to its discovery he can bring no more than this—that it rests not in violent disregard of what happens to him or what he does, for that he has proved empty; nor rests in the ease that, by communication with London, might be his, for that inflicts return to the old self, hatred and fear of whom had driven him away. Where then? And then it is he moans. His mind presents him none but these alternatives; his mind, when miserably he rejects them, threateningly turns them upon him in forms of fear. "Well, you have got to live," his mind threatens him. "To-morrow you shall perhaps be turned out from this post at the school. You will have to face anew some means of life; you will have to suffer what has to be suffered in that part; face men and submit to their treatment of such as you, or face them and find fierceness sufficient to defy them."

"No, no!" he cries. "No, no!" He fears his powers of endurance, fears that beneath those trials he will be driven back to where is turned upon him the other threat. "Well, you must go back," his thoughts threaten him. "Money and comfort await you in London for your asking. You must go back to what you were. Live at ease in seclusion, if you will; ah, with your old way of life to tell you hourly that now it has you chained—that now you have tried escape, proved it impossible, and never again can escape it!"

He cries aloud: "No, no!" He moans for his abject hopelessness. He trembles for his fears at these his threats. Under his misery he wanders away from the direction of the little plumber's shop, hating to enter it and to its brightness expose his suffering; under his fears he hastens to it, clinging to this present occupation lest, losing it, one of the threats that threaten him unsheaths its sword upon him.

VI

When, by these vacillations, he is late for the supper hour, Essie will be at the shop door watching for him.

"Well, aren't you half late, though!" cries Essie. "I was jus' goin' to dish up. Oh, you lodgers, you know, you're fair cautions!"

"I was kept late," he says.

"Well, you weren't half walking slow when you come round the corner, though." She sees his face more clearly in the light of the shop and she says: "Oh, dear, you don't look half tired! My steak-and-kidney pudding, that's what you want! Here he is, Dad! Get his slippers, Mother? That old Whiskyquick's been fair tiring him out!"

She runs to the kitchen and in a minute calls out: "All ready? Oh, it's cooked a fair treat!" She bears in the steaming steak-and-kidney pudding, sets it on the table, but stops while above the bubbling crust she poises her knife and watches it with her little twitches of her lips and with her sparkling eyes.

"Come, Essie," says Mrs. Bickers.

"Oh, isn't it funny, though," says Essie, "all bubbling and squeaking! Let's have a laugh!"

It is by a very surprising and extraordinary event that, from the abyss of wretchedness, irresolution and humiliation of the trial week at Tower House School, Mr. Wriford finds himself lifted to the plane of its extension by week and week of ever increasing stability and assurance; finds himself suiting Mr. Pennyquick; finds himself in a new phase in which there develop new emotions.

This event is no less remarkable, no less apparently cataclysmal to his position in the school and to the school itself, than a tremendous box upon the ear which, early in his second week, Mr. Wriford administers to a First Form pupil whose name is Cupper and whose face is fat and dark and cunning.

Morning school, very shortly after the Headmaster with a loud "WORK UP!" has left his class "for ten minutes," is the hour of this amazement. A week's experience of the new assistant-master has opened to the pupils unbounded lengths of impertinence and indiscipline to which they can go; and the door has no sooner banged behind Mr. Pennyquick than they proceed to explore them..

A favourite form of this sport is to badger Mr. Wriford with requests, and it is done the more noisily and impertinently by strict observation of the rule established in all schools on the point. At once, that is to say, Mr. Pennyquick having left the room, there uprises a forest of arms, a universal snapping of fingers and thumbs, and a chorus that grows to a babel of: "Please, sir! Please, sir! Please, sir!"

One "Please, sir" is that there is no ink, another to borrow a knife to sharpen a pencil, another to find a book, another to open a window, another to shut it. Mr. Wriford tries to pick out a particular request and to answer it; he calls for silence and is responded to with louder "Please, sirs!" He thinks to stop the din by ignoring it, turns his back upon the noise and cleans the blackboard, and this is the signal for changing the note to a general wail of: "Oh, please, sir!—Oh, please, sir!—Oh, please, sir!"

Master Cupper carries the sport to a length hitherto unattempted. Master Cupper rises to his feet and with snapping finger and thumb calls very loudly: "Please, sir! Please, sir!"

"Sit down, Cupper!"

"But, please, sir; please, sir!"

"Sit down!" and Mr. Wriford turns again to the blackboard. He is quite aware, though he cannot see, what is happening. He knows that Cupper has left his place and is approaching him with uplifted hand and persistent "Please, sir!" He knows that Cupper is close behind him and, from the laughter, that doubtless he is misbehaving immediately behind his back. He turns and catches Cupper with fingers extended from his nose. He does not know whether to pretend he has not seen it, or how, if he should not overlook it, to deal with it. His face works while he tries to decide. Cupper should have been warned. Cupper is not. Cupper's fat face grins impudently, and Cupper says: "Please, sir."

"Go and sit down," says Mr. Wriford, trying not to speak miserably, trying to speak sternly.

"But, please, sir!"

And thereupon, as hard as he can hit, stinging his own hand with the force of the blow, putting into it all he has suffered in this room during the week, Mr. Wriford hits Master Cupper so that there is a tolerable interval in which Master Cupper reels somewhere into the middle of next month before Master Cupper can so much as howl.

Then Master Cupper howls. Master Cupper, hand to face, opens his mouth to an enormous cavern and discharges therefrom four separate emotions in one immense, shattering, wordless blare of terror and of fury, of anguish and of surprise. Scarcely all the boys shouting together could have surpassed this roar of the stricken Cupper, and they sit aghast, and Mr. Wriford stands aghast, while tremendously it comes bellowing out of the Cupper throat. Then bawls Cupper: "I'll tell Mr. Pennyquick!" and out and away he charges, roaring through playground and into house as he goes as roars a rocket into the night. Fainter and more distant comes the roar, then, true to its rocket character, and to the consternation of those who listen, culminates in a muffled explosion of sound and in a moment comes roaring back again pursued by Mr. Pennyquick who also roars and drives it before him with blows from a cane.

Woe is Cupper! Cupper, for appreciation of this astounding sequel, must be followed as, hand to face, from assistant-master to Headmaster bellowing he goes. Blindly the stricken Cupper charges through the study door, slips on the mat, and blindly charges headlong into Mr. Pennyquick.

Then is the explosion that comes muffled to the listening schoolroom. First Cupper, shot head first into Mr. Pennyquick's waistcoat, knows that his head is lavishly anointed with strongly smelling medicine which Mr. Pennyquick is pouring into a tumbler from a very large medicine bottle labelled "Three Star (old);" next that his unwounded cheek and ear have suffered an earthquake compared with which that received by their fellows from Mr. Wriford was in the nature of a caress; next that with a bottle and a broken glass he is rolling on the floor; then, most horrible of all, that Mr. Pennyquick is springing round the room bellowing: "WHERE CANE? WHERE CANE? WHERE CANE?"

There is then a pandemonic struggle between Mr. Pennyquick, a cupboard, a cataract of heterogeneous articles which pour out of it upon him, and a bashful cane which refuses to emerge; and there is finally on the part of Master Cupper a ghastly realisation of his personal concern in this terrifying struggle and the part for which he is cast on its termination. Invigorated thereby, up springs Master Cupper, bawling, and plunges for the door, and simultaneously out comes the cane, and on comes Mr. Pennyquick, bawling, and plunges after him. Master Cupper takes three appalling cuts of the cane in the embarrassment of getting through the doorway, two at each turn of the passages, a shower in the death-trap offered by the open playground, and comes galloping, a hand to each side of his face, into the shuddering schoolroom, bawling: "Save me! Save me!" and leading by the length of the cane Mr. Pennyquick, with flaming face and streaming gown, who cuts at him with bellows of: "FLOG you! FLOG you!"

The circuit of the schoolroom is thrice described with incredible activity on the part of Cupper, and with enormous havoc of boys, books, forms, and blackboards on the part of Mr. Pennyquick. The air is filled with dust, impregnated with Three Star (old). Finally, and with an exceeding bitter cry, Master Cupper hurls himself beneath a desk where Mr. Pennyquick first ineffectually slashes at him, then thrusts at him as with a bayonet, and then, to the great horror of all, turns his attention to the room in general. Up and down the rows of desks charges Mr. Pennyquick, hacking at crouching boys with immense dexterity, right and left, forehand and backhand, as a trooper among infantry; bellows "WORK UP! WORK UP!" with each slash, and with a final cut and thrust at a boy endeavouring to conceal himself behind a large wall map, and a final roar of "WORK UP!" disappears in a whirlwind of streaming gown and flashing cane.

II

The schoolroom clock has not altered five minutes between the first roar of unhappy Cupper, tingling beneath Mr. Wriford's hand, and the sobbing groans that now he emits crouching beneath his sheltering desk. Yet in that period the whole atmosphere of Tower House School is drastically and permanently changed.

There stands in his place the assistant-master, momentarily expecting summary dismissal, yet, while to anticipate it he debates immediate departure, conscious that the whole room whose butt he has been now cowers beneath his eye and shudders at his slightest movement. There tremble on their benches the pupils who in this appalling manner have seen first the iron discipline of their assistant-master and next, most surprisingly and most horribly, his terrific support by Mr. Pennyquick. In the study there rocks upon his feet the Headmaster endeavouring to drown in Three Star (old) the memory of the exhibition he has given, and thinking of Mr. Wriford, in so far as he is capable of coherent thought, only in the aspect of one who must be implored to keep the school together while the outbreak of fury is explained and lived down by its perpetrator taking to his bed and his mother reporting a sudden breakdown.

Unhappy Cupper, it is to be remarked, martyred in his poor throbbing flesh for the production of this new atmosphere, is directly responsible for the several delusions on which it is in large measure based, in that he is firmly convinced that he told the Headmaster why he was come howling to his study and is assured therefore that it was the reason, not the manner, of his entry that earned him his subsequent flight for life paid for so horribly as he ran. The boys believe he made his appeal and, in the result of it, are tremblingly resolved to take any punishment from Mr. Wriford rather than follow Cupper's example of inviting Mr. Pennyquick's interference. Mr. Wriford believes his blow was reported and awaits dismissal for his loss of temper. And finally it is the belief of Mr. Pennyquick that Cupper made a wilful and groundless entry to his study and that he was surprised thereby into a violence in which (said he to Three Star [old]): "God alone knows what I did."

It is while the first onset of these thoughts pursue their several victims that Master Cupper, under terror of his own portion in them, creeps snuffling from his hiding-place to his seat; and to his own seat also, on tiptoe, very timidly, the young gentleman who had taken shelter behind the wall map. Mr. Wriford makes a sudden movement with the intention of leaving the Tower House before he is dismissed from it. A convulsion passes through the pupils. They glue their heads above their books. Immediately they are in a paroxysm of study, each separate minute of which surpasses in intensity the combined labours of any week the Tower House has known since its Headmaster was forced to take to medicine.

Mr. Wriford remains in his seat to watch this extraordinary scene. The hour of the recreation interval comes and goes. Not a boy so much as lifts his head. The close of morning school shows itself upon the clock. Not a boy moves. This is the serenest period Mr. Wriford has known since ever the train from London brought him here a fortnight ago. It is a grim eye he sets upon the devoted heads of his toiling pupils. He hates them. For what they have made him endure in these days he hates them one and all, wholly and severally. He has a relish of their desperate industry beneath his observation. He has a relish that is an actual physical pleasure in this utter silence, in this feeling that here—for the first time since God alone knows when—he is where he rules and is not hunted. He leans back in his chair in sheer enjoyment of it. He closes his eyes and delights that he is utterly still.

The luncheon bell rings. Mr. Wriford goes to the door and opens it and stands by it. Very quietly, file by file from the rows of desks, with bent heads and with the gentle movements of well trained lambs, the boys pass out before him.

He follows them, and, neither Mr. nor Mrs. Pennyquick appearing, presides at a meal over which there broods, as it were, a solemn and religious hush.

CHAPTER V
ESSIE'S IDEA OF IT

I

It is Essie who helps Mr. Wriford carry forward the advantage that Master Cupper has gained him. Mr. Pennyquick did not show himself throughout the remainder of the day. The expected dismissal for having struck Master Cupper—awaited in the grim satisfaction of grovellingly docile pupils throughout afternoon school and evening preparation—is deferred, therefore, as Mr. Wriford supposes, until the morrow; and in the morning he finds himself mentioning it to Essie.

He is the reverse of talkative with the Bickers household. The oppression that nightly he brings home from Tower House sits heavily upon him in the bright little parlour, intensified, as on his first evening there, rather than relieved by it. He always dreads the ordeal of the Bible reading. He always escapes to bed immediately it is over. At breakfast he has excuse to hurry over his meal and hurry from the house. On this morning, however, Essie comes to breakfast dressed in hat and jacket. She is going to spend the day with friends in a neighbouring town. She has to start for her train as Mr. Wriford starts for his work and, as his way lies past the railway station, "Why, we'll jus' skedaddle together," says Essie.

He cannot refuse. Facing the dismissal he anticipates, he more than ever desires to be alone; but Essie takes their companionship on the way for granted, and presently is chattering by his side of whom she is going to see, and what a long time it is since she has seen them, and appearing not at all to notice that he gives her no response. She is wonderfully gay and excited, her cheeks flushed, and her eyes even more radiant than commonly they sparkle. She has new gloves, which she shows him, turning the hand next him this way and that for their better display and announcing them "not half a bargain at one-an'-eleven-three, considering I never had this dress then to match 'em by;" and she has a linen coat and skirt of lilac shade and a hat of blue flowers in which she looks quite noticeably pretty; and she looks at herself in all the shop windows as she chatters and appears to be more delighted than ever at what she sees reflected there.

"Don't think I shall miss the train, do you?" says Essie. "Takes me a long time to say good-bye to Mother and Dad through not liking leavin' them alone all day. Don't think it's very unkind, do you, jus' once in a way, you know? You'd never think how I hate doin' it, though."

These are questions, in place of chattering information, and Mr. Wriford feels he must come out of his own thoughts to answer them. He chooses the first and tells her—his first words since they left the shop: "You've plenty of time. It takes exactly nine minutes to the station. I notice it by the big clock every day."

"Well, that's safe as the Bank of England then," declares Essie. "Plenty of time," and she takes advantage of it to stop deliberately for a moment and twitch her veil in front of a tobacconist's shining window. Mr. Wriford pauses for her, and she turns dancing eyes to him when she has settled her veil to her liking. "Isn't it funny, though, seeing yourself with pipes and all in your face? Let's have a laugh!"

He does not join her in the merry laugh she enjoys; and suddenly he is aware that she is regarding him curiously, and then that she is making the first personal remark she has ever addressed to him. "You aren't half one of the solemn ones," says Essie.

It is then that he tells her: "Well, I'm on my way to be dismissed. There's not much joke in that."

Essie gives a little exclamation and stops abruptly, her face all concern. "Oh, you don't say!"

"Yes, I do. Come on."

"The proper sack?"

"Come along. You'll miss your train."

"Oh, bother the old train!" cries Essie. "That's fair done it. I shan't be half miserable thinking of you."

"Why should you?" says Mr. Wriford indifferently.

She replies: "Well, did you ever! Me going off to enjoy myself and thinking of you getting the sack! Oh, that old Whiskyquick, he's a caution!"

"But there's no earthly need for you to mind."

"Why, of course there is," says Essie. "Especially with me going off on a beano like this. Of course there is. My goodness, I know what it is for a lodger when he gets the sack! Whyever didn't you tell us before—all of us? Then we might have talked it over, and ten to one Dad could have advised you. I've seen Dad get a lodger out of a mess before now. Just tell me. Whatever is it for?"

"I hit one of the boys."

Essie's eyes wince as though herself she felt the blow. "Not hard?"

"As hard as ever I could."

"Oh, dear!" says Essie reproachfully. "You never ought to do that, you know. Just a slap—that's nothing. I've fetched one of my Sunday-school boys a slap before now. But losing your temper, you know!"

"He wanted it," said Mr. Wriford.

"That's what you think," says Essie. "Well, never mind about that now. Just tell me."

He tells her. He finds himself less indifferent to her sympathy as he proceeds. He finds it rather a relief to be telling her of it—rather pleasantly novel to be telling anybody anything. He tells her from the moment of his blow at Cupper, and why the blow was struck, to the furious onset of Mr. Pennyquick, slashing among the boys with his cane—the humourous aspect of which he for the first time perceives and laughs at—and he finds himself, as he concludes, rather leaning towards the sympathy he expects.

But the sympathy is not for him; nor does Essie, who usually can see a joke in nothing at all, laugh at Mr. Pennyquick's wild gallop among his pupils.

"Oh, those poor boys!" says Essie. "Don't I just feel sorry for them!"

"You wouldn't if you knew them."

"Wouldn't I, though! I wish I had half your chance!"

He asks her impatiently, irritated at the unexpected attitude she has taken: "My chance at what?"

"Why, your chance to make them happy. Why, they're not boys at all. I think it every time I see them."

"No, they're little fiends."

"That's silly talk," says Essie rather sharply. "I daresay you'd be a fiend, for that matter, with that old toad of a Whiskyquick not to care what happens to you except to frighten you to death."

Mr. Wriford says coldly: "I didn't know we were talking about the boys. You asked me to tell you—"

"Oh," cries Essie, "don't you get a crosspatch now! I know it was about your sack we were talking, and I am sorry, truly and reely sorry. But, look here, I don't believe you'll get it, you know. I believe old Whiskyquick's that ashamed of himself he won't show his face for a week. An' I don't believe he even knows you hit that poor what's-his-name—Cupper?—so there! I believe he hit him for disturbing him, and I daresay catching him drinking, before the poor little fellow could speak. I do reely. Look here—"

They have reached the station and Essie stops outside the booking-office. "Look here, I tell you what there is to it. Don't you worry about the sack. Ten to one you won't get it till he's got some one instead of you, anyway. Just you don't worry. It only makes it worse, like when you're going to have a tooth out. You see if you can't make those poor boys happy. Why, you know, when I first had my Sunday-school class, oh, they were cautions! They'd never had any one to be kind to them, jus' like your boys. I told 'em stories, and told 'em games, and took 'em a walk every time, and showed 'em things, and you'd never believe how good they are now. You just try. I mean to say, whatever's the good of anybody if you don't try to make other folk happy, is there? Oh, there's my train signalled. Goo'-by. I shan't half think how you're getting on. I say, though—" and Essie, who has been extraordinarily grave in this long speech, begins to sparkle in her eyes again.

"Yes," says Mr. Wriford.

"You haven't got a minute to buy my ticket?"

"I'll get your ticket, of course."

"That's fine." She counts him some money from her purse. "Third return Wilton, excursion. Mind you say excursion. One and tuppence. Here comes the puffer."

Mr. Wriford says "excursion;" and then Essie, by hanging back as the train comes in, indicates clearly enough that she would like him also to find her a carriage. When she is in and leaning from the window she explains the reason of these manoeuvres.

"Thanks awfully," says Essie and whispers: "You know, I like people to see me with a young man to fuss me about."

Mr. Wriford's smile is the first expression of real amusement he has known in many long months. As the train begins to move he raises his hat. "Oh, thanks awfully," cries Essie, immensely pleased. "Remember what I said. I shan't half think how you're getting on. Mind you remember! Goo'-bye! Goo'-bye!"

II

He remembers. Mr. Pennyquick's manner at roll-call and prayers distinctly bears out all three of Essie's conjectures, and that helps him to remember. The Headmaster charges through the names and through the devotions even more rapidly than usual. At their termination he does not even indulge the pretence of taking Form One in a lesson. "Amen—WORK UP!" concludes Mr. Pennyquick and turns at once to Mr. Wriford. "Can you possibly take them all this morning, Wriford? Just for once. I absolutely ought to be in bed. I'm on the very verge of a breakdown. You saw what happened to me yesterday. I really don't know what I'm doing. The doctor insists on a little wine, but I'm fighting against it. Perhaps I'm wrong. But you know my principles. If you could just look after them till lunch." He strides to the door, opens it, closes it again, strides back and glares upon his pupils, strained over their books. "WORK UP!" and then more threateningly, more hoarsely than ever: "WORK UP! WORK UP!" and then to the door and a last "WORK UP!" and then discharges himself from view as abruptly as if Three Star (old) had stretched a hand across the playground and grabbed him out.

Thus are proved, as Mr. Wriford reflects, seated in the shivering silence that remains after the Headmaster's disappearance, two of Essie's beliefs. Mr. Pennyquick is obviously ashamed of himself—apprehensive of the results upon his boys and upon his assistant-master of his yesterday's exhibition and seeking by greater fierceness to coerce the one and by pitiable excuses to cajole the other; obviously also he projects no summary measures against Mr. Wriford—likely enough, indeed, is ignorant of cause of offence. There remains Essie's third premise: that the boys are wretched and to be pitied; and with it her advice that it is for Mr. Wriford to make them happy. He remembers. He looks on them, cowed before him, with the new eyes of these instructions, and for the first time since he has assumed his position here sees them, not as little fiends who have made his life a burden, but as luckless unfortunates whose lives have themselves been burdensome under one tyrant, and who now believe themselves delivered over to another.

He remembers. He remembers Essie's Sunday-school boys who were "little cautions" until she told 'em stories and showed 'em games and took 'em for walks and showed 'em things; and suddenly Mr. Wriford sits upright and says briskly: "Look here!"

There is a sharp catching at breaths all about the room, a nervous jump—a panic apprehension, clearly enough, that this is the prelude to repetition of yesterday's violence. It makes Mr. Wriford feel very sorry. He remembers Essie's "Poor little fellows. I don't feel half sorry for them." He contrasts their dejected and aimless and slipshod and now frightened ways with his own bright school-days. He gets up and steps down from the platform on which his desk is raised and stands amongst them, his hands in his pockets, feeling curiously confident and easy. "Look here," says Mr. Wriford, "let's chuck work this morning and have a talk. We ought to be jolly good pals, you know, instead of messing about like we've been doing ever since I came. When I was at school we used to be frightful pals with our masters. Of course we couldn't stick 'em in Form sometimes, but out of school they were just like one of us. They played footer and all that with us, and the great thing was to barge them like blazes, especially if one had had a sock over the ear like poor old Cupper there."

First surprise; then a nervous giggle here and there; then more general giggling; now all turning towards Master Cupper (very red and sheepish), and very cheerful giggling everywhere.

Rather jolly, thinks Mr. Wriford, and proceeds: "How is old Cupper, this morning, by the way? Cupper, you and I ought to shake hands, you know," and Mr. Wriford strolls down to Master Cupper, and they shake, Master Cupper grinning enormously. "That's all right. You and I are pals, anyway. You and I versus the rest in future, Cupper, if they get up to any of their larks. You were a silly young ass, you know, yesterday, cocking a snook at me behind my back. That's absolutely what you'd expect a Board School kid to do. What's your father, Cupper?"

"Please, sir, he's an auctioneer," says Cupper.

"Auctioneer, is he? Well, you look out he doesn't sell you one of these days, my boy, if you go cocking snooks all over the place."

Immensely delighted laughter at this brilliant flash of wit, and Mr. Wriford sits easily on Cupper's desk with his feet on the form before him and goes on. "You know, you're all rather young asses, you are, really. You don't work in school, and you don't play out of it. Why, hang it, you don't even play cricket. You're keen on cricket, aren't you?"

Enthusiastic exclamations of "Rather!"

"Well, you go fiddling about with rounders—a girl's game; and you don't even play that as if you meant it. Why on earth don't you play cricket?"

"Please, sir," says some one, "we haven't got any proper bats and wickets."

"Man alive," says Mr. Wriford, "you've got some stumps and a ball, and I've seen an old bat kicking about. What more do you want? Tell you what, we'll start right away and get up Cricket Sixes—single wicket, six a side. They're a frightful rag. We can get three—four teams of six boys each. Each team plays all the rest twice to see which is the champion. We'll keep all the scores in an exercise book and call it the Tower House Cricket League. I'll be scorer and umpire. Come on, we'll pick the Sixes right away."

Up to his desk Mr. Wriford goes amidst a buzzing of delight and gets a clean exercise book and then says: "Half a moment, though. We ought to have a Captain of the School, you know, and some Prefects—Monitors. The Captain will be my right-hand man, and the Prefects will be his. We'll vote for him. That's the best way. Each of you chaps write down the man you think ought to be the Captain, and then old Cupper will collect the papers and bring them to me, and we'll count them together."

It is done amid much excitement, and presently Mr. Wriford hails Abbot as Captain of the School, and up comes Abbot, loudly applauded, a red-headed young gentleman of pleasant countenance, to shake hands with Mr. Wriford and with him to select the Prefects. Three Prefects, Mr. Wriford thinks, and says: "I vote we have old Cupper for one."

"And Toovey," says Abbot.

"Right, Toovey. And what about Samuel Major? He looks a bit of a beefer. Well now," continues Mr. Wriford, thoroughly interested, "you four chaps had better each be captain of one of the Cricket Sixes. We'll pick them next. They must all be as equal as possible."

This takes quite a long time, but is satisfactorily settled at last and the names written down in the exercise-book and the first two matches arranged for that afternoon: Abbot's versus Toovey's, and Samuel Major's v. Cupper's. Then "Good Lord," says Mr. Wriford, looking at the clock, "it's nearly lunch time. I vote we chuck it now and go and look out these stumps and things and find a decent pitch. Half a minute, though. You, Abbot, you know, and you three Prefect chaps must remember what you are and must help me to keep order and to see that no one plays the fool in school or out, and all that kind of thing; and you other chaps must jolly well obey them. This afternoon, for instance, we'll have a talk about work and see just where we all stand and make up our minds to work like blazes. Well, while I'm fixing up Form Three, you must see that Form One doesn't play the goat, Abbot, and you, Samuel, must look after Form Two. See the idea of the thing? Work is jolly interesting, you know, if you go at it properly, like I'll show you. Some subjects—like geography for instance—we'll take all together, and that'll be quite a rag. We're simply going to pull up our socks and work like blazes and play like blazes, too. See? Come on, let's get those cricket things fixed up."

Out they go. Mr. Wriford holding Abbot's arm, and other boys clinging about him—out to the field where first from the roadside he had seen them dejected and listless, and where now they run before him, keen, excited, eager, taken right out of their old sorry habits.

He, also, the first time in many months, out of himself removed.

III

Mr. Wriford goes back to the plumber's shop that night occupied with plans for developing on the morrow the interests of the Cricket Sixes, the Captaincy, the Prefects, and the new schedule of lessons drawn up during the afternoon. Essie is home before him, chattering more volubly and more brightly than ever by reason of her doings with her friends and her day-long desertion of Mother and Dad. She runs to the shop door when she hears Mr. Wriford and greets him eagerly.

"You never got the sack, did you?"

"No, he never said a word. I believe you were right about him being rather ashamed."

Essie does a little dance of joy and claps her hands. "Oh, if I'm not lucky, though!" cries Essie. "That was the one thing would have spoilt the fair jolly old time I've had, and there it's turned out A1 just like all the rest!"

Mr. Wriford tells her: "It's very nice of you to be glad about it."

"Why, of course I'm glad," cries Essie. "That's just finished up my day a treat! Now you won't half enjoy the things I've brought home for supper from my young lady friends. I was afraid—oh, you don't know what it is to have a lodger about the house when he's lost his job! They're fair cautions, lodgers are, when they've got the sack!"

And later in the evening, when he sees Essie sitting and looking before her with her eyes smiling and her lips twitching, she suddenly looks up, and catching his gaze, reveals that it is of him she is thinking. "You weren't half in the dumps, though, were you?" she says. "Isn't it funny, though, when a thing's turned out A1, to look back and see what a state you were in? Isn't it, though? Let's have a laugh!"

CHAPTER VI
THE VACANT CORNER

I

The morrow finds eager pupils awaiting Mr. Wriford, and eager work and eager play, and again in the evening he is returning to the plumber's shop occupied with the plans for the next day thrown up by these new developments.

So it is also on the following day, and so the next, and so by day and day and week and week. Interestedly and swiftly the time in these preoccupations passes. He is quite surprised to find one evening that weeks to the number of half the term have gone. Captain of the School Abbot brings it to his notice; and on arrival at Tower House next morning Mr. Wriford brings it, together with Abbot's reason for mentioning it, to the notice of Mr. Pennyquick.

Mr. Wriford knocks on the study door, waits for the "One moment! One moment!" which is called to him and which gives a chinking of glass in suggestion of the fact that the Headmaster is putting away the medicine bottles, exhibition of which, as an Open-air Man, is so distasteful to him, and then enters to find the Open-air Man lying, as usual, on the sofa, amidst an air that appears to have escaped from beneath a cork rather than have come from the window.

Mr. Wriford expresses the hope that he is better, Mr. Pennyquick the fear that he is not, and there is then brought forward the suggestion advanced by Abbot.

"Thursday is half-term," says Mr. Wriford. "Do you think the boys might have a holiday? They've been working very well."

"A whole holiday?" says Mr. Pennyquick doubtfully.

Mr. Wriford knows perfectly well the reason for the dubiety in the Headmaster's voice. In these days he has taken the work of the school entirely out of Mr. Pennyquick's hands. Mr. Pennyquick no longer so much as reads roll-call and prayers. Abbot calls the roll and is mighty proud of the duty; Mr. Wriford takes prayers. Mr. Pennyquick perhaps twice in a week will tear himself from his sofa and his medicines and suddenly burst upon the schoolroom, patrol a few turns with loud and quite unnecessary "WORK UP'S!" and as suddenly discharge himself again to his study.

The less frequently he appears, the more he shirks any scholastic duties with the neglect they entail of nursing his distressing ailments in the seclusion of his study. Thus it is the idea of having the boys on his hands for a complete day that gives this doubt to his tone when a whole holiday is projected, and Mr. Wriford, well aware of it, quickly reassures him on the point.

"Well, I think they deserve a whole holiday," says Mr. Wriford. "Of course I'd come up just the same and look after—"

"My dear fellow, a whole holiday by all means," Mr. Pennyquick breaks in. "By all means. Splendid! They deserve it. You're doing wonderfully with them, my dear fellow. My mother reports she has never known them so happy or so well-behaved. No ragging in the dormitories at night. Cold baths every morning at their own request. Good God, do you know I'm so much a cold bath man myself that I take one twice a day—twice a day winter and summer—when I'm fit. Clean and smart and quiet at meals. Perfect silence in the schoolroom. Keen, manly play in the field. Devoted to you. My dear fellow, you're wonderful. Whole holiday? Whole holiday by all means. I was going to suggest it myself."

"Thursday, then," says Mr. Wriford. "They'll be delighted. I thought of playing cricket in the morning and then, if you agree, asking Mrs. Pennyquick if she could fix us up some lunch and tea things in hampers, and we'd go and picnic all the rest of the day at Penrington woods and bathe in the river and that kind of thing."

The Headmaster thinks it splendid. "Splendid, my dear fellow. Splendid. Certainly. I'll see to it myself. Cricket! Bathing! Good God, you'll think it very weak of me, but I feel devilish near crying when I think of a jolly day like that and me tied up here and unable to share it. Cricket! Good God, why, when I was at Oxford I made nine consecutive centuries for my college one year. It's a fact. Nine absolutely—or was it ten? I must look it up. I believe it was ten. Bathing! My dear fellow, a few years ago I thought nothing of a couple of miles swim before breakfast—side-stroke, breast-stroke, back-stroke; good God, I was an eel in the water, a living eel. I'm an outdoor man, absolutely. Always have been. That's the cruelty of it. Hullo, there's the bell. I shall take prayers this morning, Wriford. I'm coming in all day for a real good day's work with the dear fellows. I don't know what the doctor will say, but I'm going to do it."

Mr. Wriford is at the door, and the Outdoor Man already stretching down an arm to feel beneath the sofa. "Perhaps not prayers," says the Outdoor Man. "You'd better not wait for me for prayers. I've just my loathsome medicine to take. Take prayers for me for once, like a good fellow, and I'll be with you in two minutes. Splendid. You're wonderful. Two minutes. Damn."

There is the sound of a bottle upset beneath the sofa, and Mr. Wriford hurries off to find Abbot already halfway through the roll, then to take prayers, and then, amidst tremendous applause, to announce a whole holiday for Thursday's half-term.

"Well, come on, let's make certain we deserve it," says Mr. Wriford, when the manifestations of joy have been sufficiently expressed. "Come along, Form Two, arithmetic. Let's see if we can't understand these frightful decimals. Clean the blackboard, Toovey. Abbot, you take Form Three behind the curtain and give them their dictation. Here's the book. Find an interesting bit and read it out loud first. Form One, you're algebra. You'd better take the next six examples. Cupper, you're in charge. Now then, Two, crowd around. Where's the chalk?"

II

This was the spirit of the lessons nowadays. Everybody worked. Nobody shirked. Interest, even excitement, was found under Mr. Wriford's guidance to lie in the hated lesson-books, and it was excitedly wrestled out of them. Some of the subjects, as Mr. Wriford taught them, were made exciting in themselves; the rest were somehow inspired with the feeling that the next chapter—the next chapter really is exciting once we can get to it. All the Tower House schoolbooks were horribly thumbed and inked and dog-eared in their first few pages—long indifferently laboured over, never understood, cordially loathed. Beyond lay virgin pages, clean, untouched, many sticking together as when fresh from the binder's press. "Look here," Mr. Wriford used to say, "these French grammars, they're all the same—all in a filthy state up to page thirty and rippingly clean beyond, just like a new story-book. Look here, let's pretend all that new part is a country we're going to emigrate into and explore, and that first of all we've got to toil over the Rocky Mountains of all this first muck. You half know it, you know. If we get through a good few pages every time we'll get there like lightning. Come on!"

They always "came on" responsive to this kind of call. The work in all the subjects belonged to the distant period of Mr. Wriford's own school-days. He had to get it up as it came. He brought to the boys the quite novel effect of a master learning with them as they learnt, and that produced the stimulus of following him in place of the grind of being driven. "My word, this is a teaser!" Mr. Wriford would say, frankly stumped by an arithmetical problem; and the delighted laugh that always greeted this was the impetus to an eager and intelligent following him when he would get it aright and demonstrate its processes. Wits were sharpened, perceptions stirred. Boyish high spirits, mental alertness, and vigorous young qualities were rescued from the dejection and apathy and slovenliness and ugliness that had threatened to submerge them: and Mr. Wriford finds himself infected and carried along by the moral quickening he has himself aroused.

III

He knows it. He feels it. He both knows and feels it because, whereas formerly he groped ever in darkness of spirit and beneath intolerable oppression of mind, now, when engaged in these occupations or when thinking upon them, he is lifted out of himself, and in the zest of their activities forgets the burden of his own tribulations. Thus what had been all darkness, all shrinking, all fears, becomes divided, as street lamps break the night, into periods of light while he is within the arc of these pursuits and into passages of the old gloom only between one day's leaving of the school and the next morning's return to it. Slowly from this he advances to stronger influence of the light, less frequent onset of the shadows. First by these lamps the measureless blackness of his way is broken. Gradually he is handed more quickly and more surely from lamp to lamp. Not often now, with their immense and crushing weight, their suffocating sense of numbing fear, those old and intolerable clouds of misery descend upon him; not often now those black abysses that yawned on every side about his feet; not often those entombing walls that towered every way about his soul. Sometimes they come. He, in the days of that nightmare hunted life in London, sometimes had known snatched intervals of relief—in companionship, in reading—in the midst of which there would strike down upon him the thought that this was but transitory, that presently it would end, that presently he would be returned to the strain, to the fears, to the darkness, to the panic bursting to get out of it. So now, sometimes, when his mind moved ever so little from its occupation with these new interests, he would be clutched as though immediately outside them clutching hands waited to drag him out and drag him down—clutched and engulfed and bound again in bonds of terror, as one whose pleasant slumber suddenly gives place to dreadful sense of falling. In the midst of his thoughts upon some aspect of work or play with his pupils, "This cannot go on always," he would think; "This will somehow come to an end sooner or later;" and immediately the waiting hands would up and snatch him down; immediately the fears oppress him; immediately the walls, the blackness come; and he would cry: "What then? Where then?" and grope again; and bruise once more himself on his despair; and plan to go away and abandon it all, so that at least he might of his own will leave these interests, not wait till suddenly they to their own end should come and he be driven from them.

So sometimes these old tumults came upon him; yet came less frequently, and the less frequently they came were with less suffering escaped. Now, in their onsets, was for the first time a way of refuge from them. Where formerly he had been utterly abandoned to them, sinking more and more deeply within them at every cry of his despair, now was a knowledge that they could be lost; and quicker and more strongly a conscious grasp at what should lose them and draw him out from their oppression. At first with dreadful effort and often with defeat, gradually with less affliction and with more certain hold, he would attempt to turn his mind from these broodings and fasten it upon his enterprises in the school. There was to be thought out a way of helping Form Two to get the hang of parsing in their English grammar to-morrow; there was the idea of starting the young beggars in a daily class of drill and physical exercises; there was the plan of rummaging among Pennyquick's books to pick out a little library of light reading for the boys and to read to them himself for half an hour each day; there was the thought of how jolly nicely they had responded to his proposal to go through their play-boxes and pick out all the cheap trash he found they had been reading, and of the jokes they had had over the bonfire made from the collection; there was the thinking of other ways in which this complete confidence they gave him could be used for their own benefit; there was—there were a hundred of such preoccupations for his mind, any one of which, could he but fix tenaciously enough upon it, would draw him from the quicksands of his depression and set his feet where strongly they bore him.

IV

Thus came he gradually into a state in which the old depths of oppression troubled him no more; in which the apprehensive, hunted look went from his eyes; in which sometimes a smile was to be seen upon his face; and in which—to the observer—his outstanding attribute was just that he was very quiet, very reserved: gently responsive to advances from others but never of himself offering conversation. So may one newly convalescent after great illness be observed; and to this Mr. Wriford's case in these days may best be likened. As the convalescent, after long pains, deliriums, fevers, nights void of sleep, is carried to sit in the sunshine from the bed where these have been endured, so in this haven rested Mr. Wriford from his mind's distresses. There sits the patient, wan and weak, desirous only to enjoy the pleasant air, wanting no more than just to feed upon the smiling prospect his eyes that all the devils of his fevered brain have burned; silently acquiescent to ministrations of those who tend him. Here lived Mr. Wriford, quiet and reserved, no longer preyed upon by those fierce storms of hopeless misery such as, on the first night at the Bickers' table, had sent him torn and broken from the room; wearing a gentle aspect now in place of those contracted eyes, that knotted brow, born of the fever in his brain; hands no longer trembling; voice eased of its strained and rasping note that came of fear it should break out of his control and go in tears of his distress. There rests the convalescent's body, thin and enfeebled from its rackings on the bed. Here stayed Mr. Wriford, wanting only here to stay where refuge was from all the devils that had devoured him. There rests the patient, slowly replanning life that death had challenged, sickness shattered. Here lived he, quietly revolving what had brought him here and what should follow now.

Was there something in life that he had missed? Calmly now he could ask and search the question. Till now, since its first coming, it had been as a gnawing tumour, as an empoisoned wound within him—an inward fire, a pulsing abscess to relieve whose tortures he, as a wild beast thus maddened that turns its jaws upon its vitals, had bruised himself to madness in frantic goadings of his mind. Now he could review it calmly, almost dispassionately. The thing was out of him, no longer burning in his brain. Till now, he had thought upon it in frenzy of despair, now he could stand as it were away from it—turn it this way and that in examination with his hands, smile and shake his head in puzzlement, and put it aside to go to his duties with his boys, return and take it up and puzzle it again. Was there something in life that he had missed? Yes, there was something. He could unriddle it as far as that. He was at peace now, but there was nothing in that peace. Some attribute was missing. This was peace: but it was emptiness. This was quietness: but a thousand leagues remote from happiness. Happiness was an active thing, a stirring thing, a living thing, a warm thing, a pulsing thing. Barren here, cold here. Let the mind run, let the mind run about a thousand pleasures such as money could buy. They might be his for the asking. He had but to return to London, and they were his. Well, let the mind run. Back it would come disconsolate, empty-handed, with no treasures in its pack. Nothing attracted him. Ah, but somewhere, somewhere, somewhere, that thing was—the live thing, the stirring thing, the active thing, the warm thing. Something that he had missed in life: that was certain. Happiness its name: that was assured. Where? In what? How to be found? Only negative answers to these. Well, shake the head over it and put it away; smile and confess its bafflement. Here are things to be done. Do them and return to puzzle again in a little while.

So and in this wise quietly through the days—standing aside in this retreat and looking at life as one that, furnishing a room, stands to stare at a bare corner, and only knows something is wanted there, and only knows that nothing of all he has will suit, and only turns away but to return again and stare.

CHAPTER VII
ESSIE

I

That simile of Mr. Wriford's condition in these days to one who, rearranging the furniture of his room, stares in constant bafflement at a bare corner and can by no means determine with what to fill it, may be advanced a further step. The decorator's eye, narrowly judging all the objects that are at his disposal, will in time, in a "better than nothing" spirit, turn more frequently to one, and presently he will try it: there came a time when it occurred to Mr. Wriford, dispassionately revolving the vacancy in his life, that there was one might fill it—Essie.

One day, and this was the beginning of the idea—not then conceived—Mr. Wriford asked Essie if he might take her for a walk. A Saturday evening was the day: a July evening, cool and still—very grateful and inviting after oppressive heat through morning and afternoon; a breeze come up with nightfall. There was no preparation class at Tower House on Saturdays. Mr. Wriford left his boys reading the books he had rummaged for them out of Mr. Pennyquick's library and came home to early supper. By eight o'clock Essie had washed up, and Mr. Wriford came to her where she was standing by the shop door enjoying the pleasant air.

"Isn't it jolly, though?" said Essie, moving to give him place beside her in the entrance.

"Yes, it's beautifully cool now," Mr. Wriford agreed.

Several young couples—man and maid—were passing in one direction up the street. Mr. Wriford watched Essie's face as she watched them. He could see her eyes shining and those little twitches of her lips as she observed each separate swain and maid. With the slow passing of one pair, their hands clasped, walking very close together, she gave a little squirm and a little sound of merriment and turned to him.

"Aren't they funny, though," said Essie, "courting!"

Mr. Wriford asked her: "Where are they all going?"

"Why, they're going to the Gardens, of course. There isn't half a jolly band plays there Saturday evenings."

She was the prettiest little thing, as Mr. Wriford looked at her, standing there beside him. He liked her merry ways, so different from his own habitual quietude. It occurred to him that, apart from that walk to the station together some weeks before, he hardly ever had spoken to her out of her parents' company. Why not?—so pretty and jolly as she was.

A sudden impulse came to him. He hesitated to speak it. She might resent the suggestion. He looked at her again—those funny little twitchings of her lips! "May I take you for a stroll, Essie?" he said.

There was not the least reason to have hesitated. Essie's face showed her pleasure. She quite jumped from her leaning pose against the doorway. "Oh, that's fine!" cried Essie. "I'll just pop on my chapeau. I won't be half a tick."

She was gone with the words, and he heard her running briskly up the stairs to her room and then very briskly down again and then in the parlour, crying: "Dad, me an' the lodger are going for a stroll in the Gardens. Sure you've got everything you want, Mother? Look, there's the new silk when you've finished that ball. Isn't it pretty, though!" and then the sound of a kiss for Mother and a kiss for Dad; and then coming to him, gaily swinging her gloves in a brown little hand, her eyes quite extraordinarily sparkling.

"There you are!" cried Essie, and they started. "That wasn't long, was it? Why, some girls, you know, keep their young fellows waiting a treat."

"Do they?" said Mr. Wriford, a trifle coldly.

"Don't they just!" cried Essie, noticing nothing that his tone might have been intended to convey, and beginning, as they went on in silence, to walk every now and then with a gay little skip as though by that means to exercise her delighted spirits.

Mr. Wriford, now that he was embarked upon his sudden impulse, found himself somehow dissatisfied with it. He would have been embarrassed, perhaps a little disappointed, he told himself, had she refused his invitation. He found himself embarrassed, perhaps a little piqued, that she had accepted it so readily, taken it so much as a matter of course. And then there was that "young fellow" expression with its obvious implication. His idea had been that she would have shown herself conscious of being—well, flattered, by his invitation. Not, he assured himself, that there was anything flattering in it; but still—. Perhaps, though, she was more conscious of it than she had seemed to show; and coming to that thought he asked her suddenly, giving her the opportunity to say so: "I hope you didn't mind my proposing to take you for a walk?"

Essie skipped. "Good gracious!" cried Essie. "Whyever?"

"I thought you might think it rather—sudden."

Essie laughed and skipped again. "Sudden! Why, you've bin long enough, goodness knows! Why, I've bin expecting you to ask me for weeks, you know!"

"Have you?" said Mr. Wriford.

"Think I have!" cried Essie. "Why, the lodger always does!"

"Oh!" said Mr. Wriford.

This time Essie seemed to detect something amiss in his tone. In a few paces she was bending forward as she walked and trying to read his face. "I say," said Essie, "you aren't in a crosspatch, are you?"

"Of course I'm not. Why should I be?"

"Sure I don't know. You wanted me to come, didn't you?"

"Of course I did. I shouldn't have asked you otherwise."

"Well, I don't know," said Essie. "Young fellows are that funny sometimes!"

Silence between them after that, but as they came to the Gardens Essie showed that the funny ways of young fellows had been occupying her in the interval. "Of course, you're always very quiet, aren't you?" she said.

"I don't talk much," Mr. Wriford agreed.

"Of course you don't!" cried Essie and seemed so reassured by the recollection that Mr. Wriford suddenly felt he had been behaving a little unkindly—stupidly; and with some idea of making amends smiled at her.

Essie flashed back with eyes and lips. "Of course you don't!" she cried again. "Well, I vote we enjoy ourselves now if ever. Just look at all the lights! See the funny little blue ones? Aren't they funny though, all twinkling! Let's have a laugh!"

With a laugh, therefore, into the Gardens; and with a laugh Mr. Wriford's unreasoning distemper put off. Jolly little Essie!

No need, moreover, to do more than listen to her, and to think how jolly she was, and how pretty she looked, as she turned chattering to him while she led the way among the groups clustered about the bandstand. "We'll go right through," said Essie. "There's seats up there where you can sit an' hear the band an' see the lights a treat. Jus' watch a minute to see that great big fat man with the trombone where he keeps coming in pom! pom! There! See him? Oh, isn't he a caution!"

Close to Mr. Wriford she stands, and Mr. Wriford watches her watch the fat gentleman with the trombone, her lips twitching while she waits for his turn and then her little squirm of glee when he raises his instrument to his mouth and solemnly administers his deliberate pom! pom! to the melody. "Oh, dear!" cries Essie, "isn't this just too jolly for anything! Come along. Up this path. I know a not half quiet little seat up here. I say, though! When you've been looking at the lights! If this isn't dark! Oo-oo!"

This "Oo-oo!" is expressive of the fact that really it is rather ticklish work suddenly being launched on a pitch dark path, falling away steeply at the sides, after the glare of the bandstand; and with the "Oo-oo!" comes Essie's arm pressing very close against Mr. Wriford's and her hand against his hand.

"Let's hold hands," says Essie, and her fingers come wriggling into his—-cool and firm, her fingers, and there is the faint chink of the bracelets that she wears. "I like holding hands, don't you?"

Cool and firm her fingers. His hand is unresponsive, but rather jolly to feel them come wriggling into it and then twine about it. She settles them to her liking, and this is enlocked about his own, her palm to his. Yes, rather jolly to feel them thus: they give him a curious thrill, a desire.

II

Essie's seat was found to be quite the not half quiet little place that she had promised. It stood at the termination of the winding path, backed by a high rockery of ferns and looking down upon the lights and the bandstand whence came the music very pleasantly through the distance.

Here were influences that touched anew the curious thrill her fingers had given Mr. Wriford. The warm, still night, the feeling of remoteness here, the music floating up, Essie very close beside him, her face clear to his eyes in this soft glow of summer darkness. A very long time since to Mr. Wriford there had been such playfulness of spirit as stirred within him now. Soft she was where she touched him, sensibly warm against his arm, enticingly fragrant.

"Told you this would be jolly, didn't I?" said Essie.

"Yes, it is," agreed Mr. Wriford, and put his arm along the seat behind her shoulders.

Essie didn't seem to mind.

And then his hand upon the shoulder further from him.

Nor to mind that.

"All right, I call it," said Essie. "You know, if you came out more to the band and places like this, you soon wouldn't be so quiet."

"I shouldn't care much about it by myself," said Mr. Wriford.

"Oh, I'd come with you," Essie assured him. "Nothing's much fun not when you do it by yourself. I say, whatever are you doing with that arm of yours on my shoulder?"

"I'm not doing anything with it," said Mr. Wriford, and gave a little laugh, and said: "I'm going to, though."

"What?"

"This."

"Oo-oo!" cried Essie.

Mr. Wriford's "This" was bending his face to hers, and his arm slipped a little lower down her shoulders, and drawing her towards him. "Oo-oo-oo!" cried Essie and pressed away and turned away her head. "Oo-oo!" and then he kissed her cheek, then brought his other arm around and turned her face to his. "Oo-oo-oo! I say, you know!"—and there, close beneath his own, were those soft, expressive lips of hers, and twice he kissed them: and of a sudden she was relaxed in his arms, no longer struggling, and there were depths in those eyes of hers, and this time a long kiss.

"There!" said Mr. Wriford and released her; and immediately two curious emotions followed in his mind. First, that, now the thing was over, it was over—completed, done, not attracting any more.

"I say, you know!" said Essie, settling her hat and pouting at him: and all rosy she was, all radiant, enticingly pouting, pretending aggrievement—just the very blushes, pouts, and smiles to have it done again. But for Mr. Wriford not enticing at all: over, done; conceiving in him almost a distaste of it; and, moved a trifle away from her, he said hardly: "I suppose the lodger always does that, too?"

"Well, most of 'em," said Essie cheerfully; and at that his new emotion quickened, and he made a petulant, angry movement with his shoulders.

She detected his meaning just as she had detected the coldness in his voice as they came down towards the Gardens together a short while before. She detected his meaning, and answered him sharply, and the words of her defence and the manner of it broke out in him the second of the two emotions that followed his caprice.

"Well, what's the odds to it if they have?" said Essie, sitting up very straight and speaking very tensely. "Where's the harm? It's only fun. Not as if I had a proper young fellow of my own. Take jolly good care if I had! Where's the harm? I like being kissed. I like to think some one's fond of me."

Now, for all the sharpness of her tone, she looked appealing: a trifle of a flutter in those expressive lips of hers: a hint of a catch in her voice. Swiftly to Mr. Wriford came his second emotion. Poor little Essie that liked to think some one was fond of her! Jolly little Essie with her "Let's have a laugh!" Here was the kindest, cheeriest little creature in the world! Let him enjoy it!

"That's all right, Essie," said Mr. Wriford and moved to her again and took her brown little hand.

"Glad you think so, I'm sure!" said Essie. "That's my hand, if you've no objection," and she withdrew it.

Mr. Wriford took it again and held it while it wriggled. "Come, who's the crosspatch now?"

"Well, that's nice!" cried Essie. "I'm sure I'm not."

"Put your fingers like you had them when we walked up. That's the way of it. This little one there and that little one there."

"Oh, go on!" said Essie, but settled her fingers as she was told.

"Rather nice just now, don't you think?" said Mr. Wriford.

"Not bad," said Essie.

"Perhaps we'll do it again?"

"Perhaps the moon'll drop plump out of the sky."

"Well, we'll watch it," said Mr. Wriford, "and if it doesn't we will. Let's be friends, Essie."

"Oh, we're friends, all right."

"Well, I'll pretend I'm your—young fellow. How about that?"

Essie gave a little laugh. "Likely!" she said. "You know, I believe you're a caution after all, for all you're so quiet. My young fellow! Why, I don't even know your name—your Christian name, I mean."

"What do you think?"

"However do I know? Shouldn't be a bit surprised if it was Solomon."

"Well, it isn't. What would you like it to be?"

Essie looked across the bandstand lights beneath them for a moment, then made a little snuggling movement with the hand in Mr. Wriford's, and then looked at him and said softly: "Well, I've never had an Arthur."

"Call me Arthur, then—so long as you don't make it Art or Artie."

"What, don't you like Art, then?" said Essie, and then suddenly, her eyes asparkle again, her lips twitching, "Aren't names funny, though? Let's have a laugh!"

And Mr. Wriford laughed and said the name Edith always made him think of seed cake; and Essie laughed immensely and said Alice always reminded her of a piece of silk; and Mr. Wriford said Ethel was a bit of brown velvet; and Essie said Robert was a bouncing foot-ball; and in this laughter and this childish folly Mr. Wriford found himself immoderately tickled and amused, and Essie quite forgot the disturbance that had followed the kissing; and home when the band stopped they went in quick exchange of lightsome subjects.

Mr. Wriford, for the first time that he might have remembered, went to bed and fell asleep without lying long awake to think and think.

The significant thing was that he did not try to remember it, nor reflect upon it. He was smiling at an absurdity of jolly little Essie's as he put out his light: he was soon asleep.

CHAPTER VIII
OUR ESSIE

I

Walks with Essie are frequent now; and in the house talk with Essie at all odd moments that bring them together. Jolly little Essie! Mr. Wriford finds himself often thinking of her as that, and for that quality always seeking her when moodiness oppresses him. Days pass and there is a step in advance of this: good little Essie! Careless, he realises himself, of what mood he takes to her. He can be silent with her, depressed, oppressed, thinking, puzzling: Essie never minds. He can be irritable with her and speak sharply to her: Essie never minds. Essie is content just to rattle along and not be answered, or, if that seems to vex him further, then just to occupy herself with those bright, roving eyes of hers, and with those merry thoughts which they pick up and reflect again in the movements of those expressive lips. Days pass and his thoughts of her take yet a further step: pretty little Essie!—Essie who likes to be kissed, who sees "no odds to it," who likes to think somebody is fond of her! She is jolly little Essie—always cheers him: "Oh, Arthur!" when for an hour he has not spoken a word, or speaking, has snubbed her, "Oh, Arthur! Just look at those dogs chasing! Oh, did you ever! Aren't they funny, though! Let's have a laugh!" She is good little Essie—never minds: "Well, whatever's the odds to that?" when sometimes he apologises for having been ungracious. "I daresay I'm not half a nuisance, chattering, when you want to be quiet. Why, you're always quiet though, aren't you? I don't mind." She is pretty little Essie: "Oo-oo!" cries Essie. "I say, though!" and then, as on that first occasion, relaxes and gives him those pretty, expressive lips of hers, and is warm and soft and clinging in his arms; and then one day, when in his kiss she detects some ardour, born, while he kisses her, of a sudden gathering realisation of his frequent, his advancing thoughts of her, says to him softly, snuggling to him: "What, are you fond of me, Arthur?"

More swiftly than the space of the inspiration of a single breath an idea springs, fixes, spreads within him. It is determination of all his thought of her in their advancing stages: it is swiftest look from that vacant corner in the room of his life to Essie, always so jolly, always so good, ah, so pretty, yielding in his arms. Swift as a single breath it is. Why should not Essie fill that vacant place?

"What, are you fond of me, Arthur?"

Deep in his sudden thought he does not answer her. What sees she responsive to her question in his eyes? She sees that which makes her leave his grasp.

In her eyes he sees sudden moisture shining.

Deep in the sudden thought that has him—bemused as one that, in earnest conversation with a friend, turns bemusedly to address a remark to another, he says: "Hulloa, you're not crying, Essie?"

"Likely!" says Essie, blinking.

"You are, though. What's up?"

"That's the sun in my eyes."

"There's precious little sun."

Essie dabs her eyes with her handkerchief and gives a little sniff. "Well, there's precious little tears."

"Essie, you asked me if I was fond of you."

She turns upon him with sudden sharpness. "More fool me then."

"What do you mean? Essie, I am. I'm very, very fond of you."

"Come on," says Essie briskly. "We'll be late. I was only having a game—so are you."

II

Here is a new idea for Mr. Wriford—come to him suddenly, but, as now he sees, in process of coming these many days. Here is a new idea, completely developed in that swift moment while Essie asked him: "What, are you fond of me, Arthur?" but over whose development now constantly he ponders—welding it, shaping it, assuring himself of it in its every detail. It is solution—no less—of what has hounded him these many years. It is discovery of what shall fill that vacant place over which, in the quietude of these more recent days, dispassionately he has puzzled. Essie the solution: Essie the thing that shall fill up the vacancy. He wonders he has not thought of it before. Who, out of the turmoil, the hopelessness, the abject misery in which he came here, who found him the quietude? Essie. Who for the old grinding torments, the abysmal fears, has exchanged him the dispassionate wondering? Essie. Look, look upon the present state that now is his, contrast it with the old, and seek who is responsible. Essie. His early constraint in the Bickers' household is vanished as completely as his early miseries at the Tower House School. He is confident and at ease and actively interested when among his boys. Who showed him the way of it? Essie. In the life behind the plumber's shop he is become very intimately the "one of us like" that Mrs. Bickers, at their first meeting, had told him they liked their lodgers to be. By whose agency? Essie's. Essie has told Mother and Dad his name is Arthur and to call him Arthur: and Arthur he is become, alike to the cert. plumber, who delights to instruct him in the mysteries of plumbing and often from his workshop in the yard hails him "Arthur! Arthur, come an' look at this here! I'm fixin' a new weight to a ball-tap;" and to Mrs. Bickers who as often as not adds a "dear" to it and says: "Arthur, dear, give over talking to Essie a minute an' jus' see if you can't put that shop bell to rights like Mr. Bickers showed you how. It's out of order again." Who to this pleasant homeliness introduced him? Essie. Who supports him in its enjoyment? Essie. Who is the centre, the mainspring of this happy household? Essie. Essie, Essie, Essie, jolly and good and pretty little Essie! He meets her at every thought. She, she, supplies his moods at every turn!

Very well, then. The school term at Tower House is drawing to a close. Scarcely a fortnight remains before the holidays begin. What then?

Ah, then the new thought that suddenly has come to him. In the quietude of mind, in the dispassionate puzzlement upon what it is that he has missed in life—in this convalescent attitude towards life that now is his he has no desire to return, when the school term is ended and he is unemployed, to the wandering, to the hopeless quest that brought him here. Why not advance by Essie the quietude that by Essie he has found? Why not by Essie fill the dispassionate puzzlement that by Essie has become dispassionate where for so long it had so cruelly been frenzied? What if he went away with Essie? What if he took her away? What if he so far resumed touch with the prosperity that waited him in London as to get money from his agent, due to him for his successful novels, and go away with Essie—live somewhere in retreat with Essie, have Essie for his own? Why not? No reason why. It was fixed and determined in his mind in that very instant when, as she asked him "What, are you fond of me, Arthur?" it came to him.

The more he thinks upon it the more completely it attracts him....

He thinks upon it, and it attracts him, with no delusion of what, if he acts upon it, it will give him. It will not give him positive happiness. He would take Essie away with no such delusion as that. But strongly, seductively, it offers him a negative peace. With Essie no need longer to brood on what it was in life that he had missed: Essie who never minded, who always brightened him, who then would be his own—Essie would stifle that old hopeless yearning. There would be pleasure in money with Essie—pleasure in pleasing her, in watching her delight in little things that it could buy. He first would travel on the Continent with Essie, delighting in her delight at worlds of which she had scarcely so much as heard. How she would laugh at funny foreigners and at funny foreign ways! Then he would settle down, take a house somewhere, live quietly, take up his novel-writing again, have Essie always to turn to when he wanted her, to minister to him and entertain him, and have her—being Essie—at his command to keep out of his way when he wished to work, or perhaps to think—ah, for thoughts sometimes still would come!—and not be worried. Yes—jolly little Essie, good little Essie—there was refuge, refuge to be found with her! Yes—pretty little Essie—she was desirable, desirable, desirable to him! Yes, let it be done! Yes, let him immediately set about the accomplishment of it!

III

His purpose was no sooner definitely fixed, than in the way of its fulfilment practical difficulties began to arise. They arose in form of scruples. He intended no harm to Essie. She never should suffer in smallest degree, by word or act, in giving herself to him. But to marry her never—at the first making of his purpose—so much as crossed his mind. A little later this aspect of his moral intentions towards her came up in his thoughts—and marriage he at once dismissed as altogether subversive of that very peace of mind he anticipated in having her for his own. To marry her, as he saw it, were an irrevocable and dreadful step that immediately would return him to new torments, new despair. Bound for life to such as Essie was, not loving her, only very fond of her, very grateful to her—why, the bond would terrify him and goad him as much as ever he was terrified and goaded by the bonds and responsibilities of the London days from which in frenzy he had fled. Misery for him and, knowing himself, he knew that he would visit it in misery upon her. Panic at what he had done would fill him, consume him in all the dreadful forms in which he knew his panics, directly he had done it. He would hate her. Despite himself, despite his fondness for her, despite all she had given him and could give him, despite all these, if he were bound to her he would be unkind to her, cruel to her. Merely and without bond to have her for his own presented his Essie—his jolly little Essie, good little Essie, pretty little Essie—on a footing immeasurably different. That very fact of being responsible for her without being bound to her would alone—and without his happiness in her—assure her of his constant care, his unfailing protection always and always. Natured as he was—or as he had become in the days of his stress—he thought of bondage as utterly intolerable to him. No; marriage was worse than unthinkable, marriage was to lose—and worse than lose—the very happiness upon which now he was determined.

Yet scruples came.

He had not the smallest doubt of winning Essie to his intentions—Essie who liked to think somebody was fond of her, who liked to be kissed, who had confessed of the lodgers that "most of 'em had"—who, in fact, was Essie Bickers. He knew, thinking upon it, what had been in pretty little Essie's heart when she said softly: "What, are you fond of me, Arthur?" He knew it was that she loved him. He knew what had been in her heart when, having said it, she drew away from him, and he knew why as she drew away he had seen tears in her eyes. He knew it was because, having made her confession of love, she had seen no response of love in his eyes that only were bemused with sudden thought upon his sudden plan. He knew he had only to tell her that she was wrong, that indeed he loved her. Yet scruples came.

IV

He set about his plans. On the morning when but a week remained to the end of the term—the date he had fixed in his mind—he wrote before he came down to breakfast a letter to his agent in London.

"DEAR LESSINGHAM,

"I'm still alive! I've been wandering—getting back my health. I was rather run down. Now, very soon, I hope to get to work again. Keep it to yourself that you've heard of me again. I'll be seeing you soon. Meanwhile, you've got a pile of money for me, haven't you? I want you, please, to send me at once £200 in £10 notes to this address. I'm going abroad for a bit.

"Yours ever,
"PHILIP WRIFORD."

Funny to be in touch with that world again! He put the letter in his pocket. He would post it on his way to school. Imagine Essie's eyes when she saw all that wealth! He could hear her cry—he imagined himself showing it to her in a first-class carriage bound for London—"Oh, Arthur! Did you ever, though!"

Smiling upon that thought, he went down-stairs to the parlour; and it was thus, at the very moment as it were of first putting out his hand to take Essie, that scruples came.

He found Mrs. Bickers seated alone. There were sounds of Essie gaily humming as she prepared breakfast in the kitchen. Mrs. Bickers, busily sewing, looked up and smiled at him. "Good morning, Arthur. I declare I do like to see you come down of a morning smiling like that. Busy, aren't I? So early, too!" and she held up what looked to be a blouse that she was making, and told him: "That's for our Essie!"

The smile went from his face and from his thoughts. "Our Essie!" Only now that phrase, and what it meant, entered his calculations on his purpose; and with it the thought of his smiles which Mrs. Bickers had been so glad to see—and what they meant.

He desired to turn the conversation; yet even as he made answer he knew his words were leading him deeper into it. "Why, you're not surprised to see me smiling, are you, Mrs. Bickers?" he said. "This is what I call a very smiling house, you know."

Mrs. Bickers set down her work on her lap and smiled anew. "Well, that's good news," she said. "Ah, and it's not always been either, Arthur."

"Hasn't it, Mrs. Bickers?"

"Oh, dear, it hasn't! Why, Mr. Bickers and me we had a heap of trouble one time."

"But you're very happy now?"

"I've been happy," said Mrs. Bickers, smiling again, "eighteen years and three—four—eighteen years and four months."

"That means ever since something?"

"Ever since our Essie came," said Mrs. Bickers softly.

Our Essie! Ah! He said dully: "Yes, you must be fond of Essie?"

"Fond!" Mrs. Bickers echoed him. "Why, Arthur, she's all the world to Mr. Bickers an' me, our Essie. She's such a bright one! Our Essie came to us very late in life, and you know I reckon we've never had a minute's trouble since. Looking back on what we'd had before, that's why we say, Mr. Bickers an' me, that we reckon she was a gift sent straight out of heaven. We're sure of it. Brought up with old folk like us, she'd grow up quiet and odd like some children are, wouldn't you think? Or likely enough discontented, finding it dull? But you've only got to look at our Essie to feel happy. There's not many can say that of a daughter, not for every bit of eighteen years, Arthur. We reckon we're uncommon blessed, Mr. Bickers an' me."

In comes Essie with a steaming dish: "Oh, these sausages, Mother! Jus' look at them sizzling! Oh, aren't they funny, though!"

He does not post his letter on the way to school. He does not post it on the way back from school. He carries it up-stairs again in his pocket when he goes to bed. Scruples!

Scruples—he lies awake and reasons the scruples; he tosses restlessly and damns the scruples. Scruples! In the morning he has settled them. He rises very early before the house is astir. He comes down to post his letter and goes at once through the back yard which offers nearer way to the letter-box.

"Hulloa, Arthur! Why, you're up early!"

This time it is Mr. Bickers, hailing him through the open door of his workshop where he is busily occupied with blow-flame and soldering-irons.

"Well, not so early as you, Mr. Bickers. I thought I was first for once."

The cert. plumber laughs, evidently well-pleased. "Come along in an' give a hand. Soldering, this is. Me! I'm never abed after five o'clock summer-times."

"I often think you're wonderfully young for your years, Mr. Bickers."

Another laugh of satisfaction. "I'm younger than I was a score years back; and that's a fact, Arthur."

"What's the secret of it?"

"Why," says Mr. Bickers, "there is a secret to it, sure enough. It's this way, Arthur. Now you put the solder-pot on the lamp again. There's matches. This way—I was fifty-two years growing old, and I've been close on nineteen years growing young. Ever since— Hullo! careful with it!"

"Ever since—?" says Mr. Wriford, his head averted, fumbling with the lamp, fumbling with his thoughts.

"Ever since our Essie came to us."

"Yes," says Mr. Wriford, and adds "Yes, that's much what Mrs. Bickers was telling me only yesterday."

"Why, it's the same with both of us," says Mr. Bickers; and then changes his voice to the voice that Mr. Wriford recognises for that in which he reads the scriptural portions at night. "You mark this from me, Arthur," Mr. Bickers continues. "You're a young man. You mark what I tell you—"

Necessary to face Mr. Bickers while he tells—to face that serene old countenance, those steady eyes, that earnest voice. "Prayers aren't always answered the way you expect, Arthur. You'll find that. There's man's way of reckoning how a thing ought to be done, and there's God's way. We'd had uncommon trouble, Mrs. Bickers an' me, a score years back, and we prayed our ways for to ease it. Essie came. God's way. Our Essie come to us a blessing straight out of heaven."

Necessary to face him, necessary to hear in his voice, to see in his eyes, to watch in the radiation that fills up the careworn lines about his mouth and on his brow—necessary to hear and to see there what "Our Essie" means to him.

Necessary to say something.... To say what? Mr. Wriford can only find the words he said yesterday to Mrs. Bickers. He says: "Yes, you must be fond of Essie."

"Fond!" says Mr. Bickers. "I'll tell you this to it, Arthur. I'll tell you just what our Essie is to us. There's a verse we say night and morning, Mrs. Bickers an' me, when we're returning thanks for our blessing: 'Through the tender mercy of our God, whereby the dayspring from on high hath visited us.' That's our Essie."

The dayspring from on high! Irreverent, in Mr. Wriford's dim recollection of the text, in its application to Essie. He tries to laugh at it. How laugh at it? Dayspring—ah, that is she! She is that in her perpetual vitality, in her bubbling, ceaseless, bottomless well of spirits. She is that to him, and therefore he requires her, requires her. Ah, she is that to them! Scruples—scruples—infernal scruples—ridiculous scruples. He means no harm to her. God knows he means nothing but happiness to her. Yet the day passes. He defers his intention to post his letter till after breakfast. He goes to school and defers it till the luncheon hour. He goes then for a walk and defers it till he is coming home. He comes home and brings his letter with him.

Scruples—damn them! Scruples—damn himself for entertaining them!

CHAPTER IX
NOT TO DECEIVE HER

I

Let Essie decide! That is the decision to which he comes, with which he stills his scruples. He desires her. The more he reflects upon possession of her—his to amuse him, to run his house that he will take for her, to make him laugh, not to interfere with him, requiring nothing from him but what he shall choose to give her—the more he visions this prospect, the more ardently it attracts him. There he sees that vacant place in his life filled up; there he sees sufficiently attained the secret of happiness that he has missed; there, belonging to him, he sees her—jolly little Essie—filling, hiding, forgetting him his endless quest, his hopeless hopelessness, his old-time miserable misery. He cannot marry her. He does not love her. He could not be mated—for life!—to such as she in all her funny little phrases reveals herself to be. He only wants her. Then come the scruples. Well, let Essie decide! She shall know his every intention, his every feeling. He will not even so far delude her as to tell her he loves her. If she who loves him is willing to go with him, what need matter Mr. and Mrs. Bickers with their devotion to our Essie? What are they to him? Why should they interfere with his life? What are they to Essie if he—as he will be—is everything to her? And then, with "Let Essie decide," he finally crushes under foot all of scruples, all of conscience, that remain after this review of his resolve: finally, for this is his last and comforting and confident resolve—that if Essie is shocked and frightened and will not, he will immediately accept it: whatever the temptation will nothing deceive or trick her, not by so much as a look pretend he loves her, immediately leave her and immediately return to the old hopelessness, the old quest, the old emptiness of all his former years.

Decided! His scruples stilled! Himself assured, absolved! Let Essie decide it. Now to act.

II

This is Thursday. He has carried that letter nearly a week unposted in his pocket. To-morrow the Tower House School breaks up. On Saturday Mrs. Bickers and Essie are going for a three weeks' summer holiday to Whitecliffe Sands, which is an hour away on the Norfolk coast, and it has been decided a month before that he is to accompany them for their first week as Mrs. Bickers' guest. The kindly invitation had been made, and he had gratefully accepted it, in the period before this sudden thought of filling with Essie that vacant corner in the room of his life: in the period when he had been content dispassionately to drift along until the holidays should terminate his engagement—dispassionately to leave till then conjecture upon what he next should do.

This summer visit to Whitecliffe Sands was, as he then learned, an annual excursion. Mr. Bickers stays with the shop, but closes it and comes down to mother and Essie every Saturday until Monday. When only that month remained before the holiday came, discussion of the subject became Essie's chief topic of conversation at supper every evening; all aglitter it made her with reminiscences of Whitecliffe's past delights and with anticipations of its fond excitements now to be renewed: the pier that has been opened since last summer, the concert party that will reopen its season there just before they arrive, the progress she has made and means to make in swimming, the white shoes she is going to buy, the new coat and skirt that she and mother are making because "My goodness, you don't have to look half smart on the parade, evenings!"

In the midst of this had come one evening Mrs. Bickers' "What about Arthur?" and then, to his rather rueful smile and announcement that he had no plans as yet beyond the end of the term, her kindly proposal, evidently arranged beforehand with Mr. Bickers: "Well, I tell you what would be very nice, Arthur dear, that is, if you haven't got another job of work immediately by then. Me and Mr. Bickers have had a talk about it. We'd like you to come with Essie an' me jus' till Mr. Bickers comes down after our first week. There's his nice room you could have in our lodgings, and you'd be just our guest like. A nice blow by the sea would do you a world of good, an' nice for our Essie to have a companion."

Essie had clapped her hands in immense delight: he had accepted with marks in his eyes and voice of a return of that sense of being overwhelmed by this household's kindness that in the early days here often overwhelmed him. Now he set his teeth against consideration of that aspect. Let Essie decide! He might take her away to-morrow or on Saturday morning: it might be easier to wait and slip off one day from Whitecliffe. Let Essie decide!

That evening he asked her.

III

The night was fine for a stroll after supper. They passed together up the main street of the town towards the Gardens—Essie desperately excited with the immediate nearness of Whitecliffe and attracted by all the shops in case there was something she had not yet bought for the holiday: himself revolving in his mind how best to open his proposal. He wished to do it at once. He found it very difficult to begin.

"Oh, those parasols!" cried Essie, stopping before a brightly-illuminated window. "Do stop, Arthur. That sort of blue one with lace! Did you ever! Wouldn't I like that for Whitecliffe though! Can you see the ticket? Nine-an'-eleven-three! Oh, talk about dear!"

"That's not really expensive, Essie."

"My goodness, it is for me, though. Ten shillings, Arthur!"

"Essie, would you like to be rich?"

"Oo, wouldn't I just!"

"What would you say if I was rich, Essie?"

Essie turned away from the coveted sunshade and laughed delightedly at him. "Goodness, wouldn't it be funny! I'd say what ho! What ho!"

"Essie, I want to tell you something. I am rich. I'm what you'd call very rich."

"Picked up a shilling, have you?" cried Essie, gleefully entering into the game. "Let's go into the bank and invest it!"

"No, we'll go in here," said Mr. Wriford, the contents of a bookseller's window they had reached giving him a sudden idea. "We'll go in here. I'll show you something."

She caught his arm as he stepped towards the door. "Whatever do you mean?"

He answered her very intensely, "Essie, be serious. I've a lot to tell you to-night. First of all, I'm rich, I've only been pretending all the time I've been down here. My name's not Arthur at all. It's Philip—"

Essie made a laughing grimace. "Ur! Philip's like skim milk."

Unheeding her, he went on. "Philip Wriford. I'm an author—

"Oh, if you aren't a caution!" cried Essie.

"You don't believe it?"

Essie assumed a very ingenuous air. "Your mistake, pardon me. I wasn't born jus' before supper, you know."

"Will you believe it if I go in here and ask to see some of my books?"

"Oh, wouldn't I like to see you dare!"

"Come along," and he stepped inside the porch of the shop and opened the door.

Essie, half-laughing, half-frightened at this boldness, clutched at his arm. He caught her hand and led her within. "Oh, if you aren't a caution to-night!" Essie whispered. "Don't, Arthur! Arthur, don't be so bold!"

"You've got to believe."

A counter at the end of the shop displayed above it the words "Lending Library." Essie, most terribly red in the face, followed him while he stalked to it, and then stood confounded with his boldness and striving immensely to restrain her laughter while Mr. Wriford addressed the young woman who came towards them.

"Have you got any of Philip Wriford's books in the library?" Mr. Wriford asked her.

"We've got several copies," he was told. "But they're all out. There's a great demand for them."

His eye caught the top volume of a pile of books on the counter, from each of which a ticket was displayed, and he motioned towards it.

"Yes, that's his last," the young woman said, "but it's ordered. It's going out to-morrow."

"I can look at it?"

"Oh, you can look at it. If you like to take out a subscription by the week or longer, you can put your name down for it. There's other copies out," and she moved away.

Mr. Wriford took up the book with something of a thrill—the first actively stirring thought of his work since he had fled from it. It was the book he had delivered to his agent shortly before that night of his escape, and had seen ecstatically reviewed in the paper at Pendra. He had never seen it in print. He opened it at the title page. "Twelfth Edition," he read aloud to Essie. "You know what that means. It was only published in the autumn."

"How do you know?" said Essie.

"I tell you I wrote it. I tell you I'm Philip Wriford."

The young woman's departure permitted Essie to relieve her laughter. "Oh, Arthur, do not!" she cried.

"I tell you it's true." He turned to the opening chapter and began with very strange sensations to read what he had written in days separated from the present by illimitable gulfs of new identity. The cunning of his own hand, thus separated from the identity that now read the words, was abundantly apparent to him. There was a nervous and arresting force in the first paragraph, a play of wit above a searching philosophy, that called up and strongly attracted his literary appreciation, dormant beneath the stresses of his past months.

Occupied, for the moment he forgot Essie standing by his side. Her voice recalled her to him. She was reading over his shoulder, and reaching the end of the paragraph, spoke her opinion.

"Isn't it silly, though!" said Essie.

He closed the book and put it down and turned to her and looked at her. "Do you think so?" he said.

"Well, don't you?" cried Essie. "I never read such ridiculous nonsense. I'm sure if you were an author, Arthur, you couldn't write such silly stuff as that."

He laughed a trifle vexedly. "Come along," he said, and laughed again, this time to himself and with better humour, as they came into the street and turned towards the Gardens. He could appreciate the blow at his conceit: further, this little scene was illuminating demonstration of the gulf social and intellectual between himself and Essie, and somehow that approved him in his intentions towards her: what vexed him now was only the failure of this sudden plan to inform Essie of his position in life and so to give him opening for the proposal he intended.

The bookseller's was the last shop in the High Street. They had entered the Gardens before Essie, consumed with laughter, could find words for comment. Then she said: "Oh, Arthur, if you weren't a fair caution! I'd never have thought it of you!"

"You don't believe it?"

"Why, of course I don't!"

"Well, you've got to believe somehow that I've got a lot of money."

"Daresay I can believe the moon is made of green cheese if I try hard enough. I say, though, serious, whatever for have I got to believe you're rich?"

It was the desired opening. He slipped his hand beneath her arm. "Because I want to spend it on you, Essie. I want to make you happy with me."

He felt and heard her sharply catch her breath. He looked down at her and saw her eyes dim and her face suffuse in sudden rush of colour.

"Oh, Arthur!" Essie said and caught her breath again.

"Let's go up to our seat, Essie."

IV

In silence up to their seat, and on their seat a little space in silence. She first to speak. She, while he sat determining how best to tell her, turned to him eyes starry as the stars that lit them, in which still and deeper yet he saw the moisture that had dimmed them a moment before, and still, and cloudier yet, her face all cloudy red.

She said very softly: "What, have you proposed to me, Arthur, dear?"

He was prepared for anything but that. He was reassuring himself, while they waited in that silence, upon his resolution not to deceive her, not even to pretend he loved her as she understood love, upon his determination, for his honour and for hers (so he convinced himself), straitly, without deception, without temptation, to throw all the burden of decision upon her love for him. This "What, have you proposed to me?" took him unawares. It caught him so unexpectedly that, of its very unexpectedness, it threw out of him its own response where, had he first imagined such a question, to fashion answers to it had filled him with confusion, nay, with dismay.

Its own response! It came to him as a question so ludicrously odd, so blundering, so inept, ah, so characteristic of jolly little Essie's funny little ways, that he gave a little laugh, and put his arm about her shoulders, and playfully squeezed her to him and laughed again and exclaimed "Essie!"

The softness left her voice, the dimness her eyes. "Oh, aren't I glad!" cried Essie and snuggled against him and said: "Oh, hasn't it come all of a sudden, though!"

Her funny little ways! Close she was against him—jolly to hold her thus: his arm about her, her face close beneath his own, his other hand that held her hand caressing her soft warm cheek—his dear, his jolly little Essie. But not to deceive her! Let him hold to that. Let her be told in her own opportunity that which he has to tell. Let him lead her towards it.

He asked her—avoiding her question, not confirming her exclamation—"Do you love me, Essie?"

She wriggled herself closer up to him, and laughed at him with those soft expressive lips and with those eyes of hers, and said "Oh, love you!" as though love were too ridiculously poor a word.

"Put up with me, Essie—always? You know what I am sometimes."

"Put up with you!" cried Essie, and again the wriggle and again the laugh, and then said "What a way to talk!" and by a movement of her face towards his own made as if to kiss such talk away.

He kept himself from that. Not to deceive her! "Suppose I made you miserable, Essie?"

"However could you?"

"Suppose I did? You know how I get sometimes."

"Mean when you're quiet?" said Essie, snuggling. "Of course you're quiet sometimes, aren't you? My goodness, I don't mind. I'd just have a jolly laugh by myself."

Her funny little ways! He was fighting against them. They urged him that they were in themselves just what attracted him—always to have them to turn to in his moodiness. Ah, not to deceive her! He said heavily: "I don't mean that, Essie. Suppose—suppose I made you more miserable than that? Suppose I told you something that made you think I couldn't be fond of you?"

She asked him quickly: "What, been engaged before, have you?"

"I've been lots of things. I'm going to tell you."

He felt her stiffen. "I only want to hear this one. Why didn't you marry her?"

"I think because she wouldn't marry me."

"Oh, dear!" cried Essie, and wriggled. "Isn't this awful! Oh, don't I hate her, though! Whyever wouldn't she?"

Here was a way to tell her. What if it meant to lose her? Here was the opportunity. Let him hold to his vow! He said deeply: "Essie, because she knew me too well. She knew some of what you've got to know, Essie. She'd tell you."

"Like her to try!" said Essie and sat up with a jerk.

He could face her now. There she was, his jolly little Essie, looking so fierce, breathing so quickly. Tell her and lose her? Clasp her and kiss away that angry little frown? Not to deceive her! Hold, hold to that! He began: "She'd tell you—what I've got to tell you. She'd tell you—listen to me, Essie. What would you do if she told you I'd make you—or anybody—unhappy? That I'm all—all wrong, all moods, all utterly impossible? Essie, that I can't love anybody really—not even you? That I'm not to be trusted? That I can't trust myself? That I'd marry and then—then pretty well go mad to think I was married and do anything to get out of it? That all I want, that what I want, Essie, is—is not exactly to marry? Essie, do you understand? That so long as I felt free, perhaps—perhaps—I'd be all right—perhaps be kind?"

He stopped. She was sitting bolt upright, staring straight before her into the night, her pretty lips compressed, and he could hear her breathing—short and quick and sharp.

He said: "Essie, what would you do—what would you do if she told you that?"

She turned sharply towards him. "Do?" cried Essie. He could see how she quivered. "I tell you what I'd do! I'd take my hand and I'd give her such a slap in the face as she wouldn't forget in a hurry, I know!"

He laughed despite himself. But he cried: "If it was true, Essie? If it was true?"

"Give her another!" said Essie. "Such a one!"

Her funny little ways! He gave an exclamation and caught her to him. She was rigid in her indignant heat. He clasped her and turned her face to his. "Oo-oo!" cried Essie, "Oo-oo!" and relaxed, and snuggled, and put her mouth to his. He laughed freely—bitterly—recklessly. How treat her as others than her class should be treated? Why treat her so? He cried: "Essie, you're impossible!" and squeezed her in reproof of her and in helpless desire of her, and cried: "Essie! Essie! Essie!"

She laughed and clung to him; laughed and kissed him kiss for kiss. She said presently, only murmuring, so close their lips: "Wouldn't I just though! Hard as I could I'd fetch her such a couple of slaps! Oo-oo! Oh, I say, Arthur! Why, I never heard such things! I never heard such a caution as she must have been! Jus' because you're quiet, dear—that's what it was. One of that fast lot. That's what she was. Don't I know them, though!"

He was just holding her, kissing her, laughing at her. Why not? He'd not wrong her till she understood—that was his new assurance. At Whitecliffe he'd take her, and tell her there so that not possibly she'd misunderstand him. Not to deceive her—he'd not deceived her yet.

Swiftly deception came.

"Won't we be happy though!"

"Won't we!" he answered her.

"Won't I take care of you just!"

"That's what I want, Essie! That's what I want!"

"Quiet as you like, dear. I shan't mind.".

"Essie, I'll make you happy—happy."

"Just think of Mother and Dad when we tell them! They aren't half fond of you, Mother and Dad."

The beginning of it. "We won't tell them—yet," he said.

"What, have a secret?"

"Just for a day or two—just till Whitecliffe."

"Oh, isn't that fine, though, to have it a secret by ourselves!"

"Fine, Essie."

"Not long though. I couldn't keep it above a week!"

"Just a week, Essie."

She was silent a moment, her lips on his. And very silent he.

She said: "You're not really rich, dear?"

"Yes, I am."

"Perhaps you only said it—just because. I know how things pop out. That doesn't matter. Look, I shouldn't be half surprised if Dad'll give you a job of work in his shop when he knows we're engaged."

"It's true, Essie. Rich as rich."

"You've never got as much as fifty pounds?"

"Heaps more than that."

"Oh, if ever! We'll never have a jolly little house of our own?"

"We will, though. A jolly one."

Silent again. She was smiling, dreaming. And silent he. He was thinking, thinking. A striking clock disturbed her. "Eleven! Oh, would you believe it! If we don't hurry, we'll have to tell them—to explain."

"We'll hurry," he said; and he added: "We must keep our secret, Essie."

She was out of his arms in her surprise at the hour. Something in his voice made her look at him quickly. "There, you're quiet now—like you are sometimes," she said.

He told her "I'm thinking—of you."

At that she suddenly was in his arms again, her hands about his neck. "There's one thing," she whispered and drew down his face. "Oh, there's one thing!"

He asked her "What?"

"Jus' tell me how you love me. You've not said it."

Not to deceive her! "As if I need, Essie?"

"But I want you to. Jus' say it so I can remember it."

Not to deceive her! He stroked her face. "As if I need, Essie! Why should you want me to?"

She told him: "Well, but of course you need. Of course I want you to. Oh, isn't that jus' what a girl wants to hear, Arthur? Why, haven't I laid awake at night, loving you over and over, and thought how it would be to hear you say it! Do jus' say it to me, dear."

Not to deceive her!—not even to pretend he loved her as she understood love! Ah, here at the stake was his vow—caught, brought at last to the burning. Evasions had saved it, hidden it, preserved it to him unbroken: here it was dragged to the open. As he had nerved himself to try to tell her, so now he strengthened himself to hold to his resolution. Ah, as at enticement of her funny little ways he could not resist her, so now, by sudden yearning in her cry, fear to lose her overcame him. She suddenly had change of her fresh young voice; she suddenly, as he waited, and she felt his arms relax, most passionately was pressed against him, and suddenly, with a break, in a cry, entreatingly besought him: "Ah, do jus' put your arms around me, dear, and hold me close and say you love me. Do!"

Why not? How not? Thrice fool, thrice fool to hesitate! These that she asked were only words, and all his plans and all his happiness at stake upon them. This not the deeper step—nothing irrevocable here. Who, with such as Essie, would scruple as he scrupled? Who such a fool? Who had suffered of life as he had suffered? Who, in his case, would hold away relief as he was holding it? She should decide. He'd hold to that. By God, by God, he'd seal her to him first!

He said: "I love you, Essie."

Holding her, he could feel the sigh she gave run through her as though all her spirit trembled in her ecstasy. She whispered: "Put your face down on mine."

He put his cheek to hers. Her cheek was wet.

"Are you crying, Essie?"

She pressed closer to him.

"Why are you crying?"

She murmured: "Well, haven't I wanted this! Isn't it what I've always wanted! Say it again, dear. With your face on mine and with your arms around me say it."

"I love you, Essie."

Only words—no harm in that. Only words! At Whitecliffe he'd tell her, and she, as he'd sworn, should decide. Only words—only words, but he'd not lose her now!

As they walked home, he posted his letter.

CHAPTER X
THE DREAM

I

"Registered letter for you," cried Essie. "My goodness if there isn't!"

This was in the little sitting-room of the Whitecliffe Sands lodgings—the fifth morning there; Mr. Bickers expected on the morrow; Mr. Wriford, as had been arranged when he was invited for the blow by the sea that would do him a world of good, supposed to be leaving on the same day; and Essie, as they walked the parade together before breakfast, in highest state of excitement and mystification at Arthur's insistence that their secret should be kept till then and then should be revealed—if Essie wished it.

"Well, but aren't you a tease, though!" said Essie delightedly, as this was repeated while they came in to where the registered letter awaited them on the breakfast-table. "Aren't you a fair tease! 'If I want to!' Why, aren't I simply dying to just! I'm simply bursting to tell Mother every single minute. Isn't a secret a caution though—just like when you've got a hole in your dress and think everybody's looking at it. Oh, isn't it funny how you do when you have, though? Let's have a laugh!"

The laughter brought them to the registered letter and to Essie's exclamation at it; and then, as she handled the packet, readdressed in Mr. Bickers' clerkly script, and gave it to Mr. Wriford: "Feels to me as if some one's sent you a pocket-handkerchief," said Essie.

"That shows you don't know what a honeymoon ticket feels like," said Mr. Wriford and fingered the bundle of banknotes within their parchment cover. "Listen to the crinkling. That's the confetti they always pack it in."

Essie was highly amused. "Hasn't being engaged made you different, though! You're jolly as anything down here. Aren't I glad!"

"It's you that's made me different," Mr. Wriford declared; and "Oo-oo!" cried Essie at what went with this assurance. "Oo-oo! Look out, here's Mother coming."

Mrs. Bickers' appearance, and then all the jolly chatter at breakfast, and afterwards the morning bathe and the rest of the usual programme of Whitecliffe's delights, caused the mysterious registered letter to go—as she would have said—clean out of Essie's head. Mr. Wriford, when he had a moment alone, opened it and read it, and found within it, thrice repeated, a phrase that intensely he chorused as he put letter and the twenty ten-pound notes in his pockets and looked upon the immediate plans that now were all ripe for execution.

II

"Your return to life" was this phrase that the literary agent three times repeated in the course of his enthusiastic delight and surprise at news at last of missing Mr. Wriford. He gave some astonishing figures of the sales of Mr. Wriford's books. He put forward what appeared to him the most engaging of the contracts which publishers were longing to make. He ended with How soon would Mr. Wriford run up to town for a talk? or should Mr. Lessingham come down? "Don't let your return to life—now that at last you have made it—give me a moment's longer silence than you can help."

"Return to life"—that was the phrase. Essie's words—"Hasn't being engaged made you different, though?"—that was the illustration of it. Return to life! Ay, that was it, ay, that was his, far, far more truly, with wonder of rebirth immeasurably more, than ever Lessingham or any one in all the world could know. There was thrill in that very thought that none but himself knew its heights, its volume, its singing, its radiant intensity. That knowledge was his own as in the immediate future his life was to be his own—life without a care, life without a tie, life of complete abandonment to pleasure of work, to pleasure of sheer pleasure, to pleasure of jolly little Essie always to turn to, to look after, to make happy, and yet always to know of her that if he wished—he never would so wish—he could be rid of her: no tie, no bond—happiness, freedom; freedom, happiness!

This was the state to which, with a sudden, ecstatic soaring as it were, he had swung away from the evening of saying "I love you, Essie," and of posting his letter, through these laughing days at Whitecliffe Sands, to now when arrival of the honeymoon ticket made him all ready for the final step. Once that declaration of the love he did not feel—as Essie understood love—had been made, his scrupulous withholding from it lay strewn about his feet as matter of no more regard than the torn wrappings of a casket from which there has been taken a very precious prize. That declaration sealed her to him; and through those intervening days while the letter was awaited, constantly he repeated it, constantly embellished it. He mocked, he almost upbraided himself for his old scruples at it. Why, it was her due, her right, he told himself. She should be happy with him—that was his resolve: never should regret, never suffer. Why, how possibly could she be happy, how avoid pains of regret, if she were not assured that he loved her?

So he gave her this bond—that was her due—of his love; so with each day, each hour, each moment of Whitecliffe in her company he became more and more assured of her. Assured! He was convinced. There was not a glance from her eyes, not a sound from her lips, not a touch of her hand but informed him that she was his to do with as he would, come any test that he might put her to. Return to life! Why, this freedom, this happiness, was but the threshold of it. Return to life! He imaged all the darkness he had come through and damned it in exultant triumph at all its terrors trampled under foot: night, darker than deepest summer darkness here, he had known; day, of which these burning cloudless days of holiday were sign and symbol, now was his, and brighter still awaited him....

Whitecliffe Sands, anxious to present to its visitors every attraction and convenience that may place it among rising seaside resorts, numbers among the latter a Tourist Bureau in the High Street where, so an inscription informs you, you may book in advance to any railway station in the British Isles. On the morning of the arrival of the registered letter, Mr. Wriford stepped in here and took for to-morrow two first-class tickets to London: a fast train at five o'clock in the afternoon, he was told.

III

The morrow brought Mr. Bickers at midday, Mrs. Bickers and Mr. Wriford and Essie at the station to meet him, Essie in his arms and hugging him with delighted cries of joy before he is well out of the train. It is a thing to make all who stand about on the platform desist from their own greetings to see her slim young figure in its pretty white dress flash forward as the train comes in, and to smile at her cry of "There he is! Oh, jus' look at his summer waistcoat he's got!" and then to see her in his arms with "Oh, Dad! Oh, if you don't look a darling in that waistcoat! Whereever did you get it, though?"

Most wonderfully animated she is, most radiantly pretty. Mr. Bickers, after affectionate greeting of his wife, and to Mr. Wriford most genial "Hullo, Arthur! All right? That's the way! Glad to see you again, Arthur," watches her adoringly where she has returned to his carriage with "I'll get your bag, Dad!" and says: "Doesn't she look a picture, our Essie! Doesn't Whitecliffe suit our Essie!"

Most wonderfully animated she is, most radiantly pretty—chattering; walking with gay little skips as she holds Dad's hand while they proceed to the lodgings; carrying them all with her a dozen times on her irresistible appeal of: "Oh, isn't that funny, though! Let's have a laugh," before the lodgings are reached.

It is much more than Whitecliffe's breezes that make her thus, much more than joy at Dad's arrival: it is that this is To-day, the promised day—the secret come to bursting-point, and to burst out in all its wonder at any moment that Mr. Wriford may choose to relieve the almost unbearable excitement and mystery and tell her it may be told. "Feels to me like all the birthdays I ever had all rolled into one," Essie had declared to Mr. Wriford early that morning. "If you'd seen me jump out of bed when I woke up! Oh, jus' think when we tell them! Will it be when Dad arrives at the station? Well, at lunch, then?" And when Mr. Wriford smiles and shakes his head at each of these, "Well, but they think you're going to-day! Oh, if ever I knew any one love a mystery like you do!"

"I'll tell you when," says Mr. Wriford. "I'll tell you all of a sudden." For him also it is the day—the promised day—awaited thus with deliberate purpose, and he a little nervous, a little restless, something ill at ease now that its hour swiftly comes.

"You're never going to keep it till the very last minute just before they think you're going? My goodness, I couldn't bear it. I'll simply scream. I know I shall."

"Look here, Essie, I'll tell you. I'm going by the five o'clock train to London—"

Essie corrects him. "You mean that's what you'll say you are. Oh, how ever I won't scream I can't think!"

"Well, just before that we'll say we're going for a last walk together—for me to say good-bye to everything; and then we'll arrange how to—tell them."

She clapped her hands and laughed with glee. "If you're not a caution, Arthur! Oh, how ever I won't scream before five o'clock! Oh, when we tell them!"

At five o'clock she was to be lying still, with silent lips: he on his knees: death waiting.

CHAPTER XI
THE BUSINESS

I

"You're never going to keep it till the very last minute?" Essie had said. Mr. Wriford's plan rested for its actual execution upon this very fact of keeping it till the very last minute—from her. Essie had thrilled with the delicious mystification of "They think you're going to-day." It was his carefully deliberated project suddenly to spring upon her that indeed he was going to-day—and then to ask her: "I'm going, Essie—by this train—I'm not going back to say good-bye—I'm going now—for ever. Essie, are you coming with me?"

Thus was she suddenly to be presented with it. Thus was she to decide—flatly, immediately. She was to know what sort of union he intended. She was either to fear it and let him go from her—as he would go—at once and for ever; or of her love for him he was to carry her with him—immediately, to have always for his own!

Let Essie decide! He was holding to that. With Essie let the decision be! All he was doing was to present the decision to her sharp and clear and sudden: all he had done was to tell her that he loved her. But there resulted to him this: that between the sharpness of the decision she was to make and the love he had pressed upon her in these intervening Whitecliffe days, between the effects of these on such as Essie was, he was certain of her, convinced of her: so utterly assured of her that as, after lunch, they left the house for that last walk in which he was "to say good-bye to everything," he told Mr. and Mrs. Bickers: "Don't be anxious if we're not back by half-past four. There's another train at seven. I can just as well go by that if we find we want to stop out a bit;" so certain of her that, as they left the house, "Bring a warm wrap of some kind," he said to Essie. "Bring that long cloak of yours."

"Why, it's as hot as anything!" Essie protested. But the agonies of "nearly screaming" in which she had sat through lunch while Mother and Dad said how sorry they were Arthur was going, and that if the job of work he was after fell through he was to be sure and let them know at once—the agonies of enduring this without screaming, made it, as she told him when they were started, impossible "to stand there arguing on the steps with them watching us, so I've got to lug this along, and don't I look half a silly carrying it either, all along the parade too!"

"I'll carry it," said Mr. Wriford and took the cloak; "and we won't keep along the parade. We'll go that walk of ours in towards Yexley Green and round by that white house with the jolly garden and come out on to the cliff. That'll give us plenty of time to get back."

Essie laughed and skipped. "Plenty of time! How you can keep it up like that I can't think. My goodness, if you oughtn't to be on the stage! Hope you like carrying that cloak!"

"Well, there'll be a shower or two, I shouldn't be surprised," said Mr. Wriford. "Anyway, it'll do to sit down on when we get over to the cliff and sit down—to arrange."

II

This white house with the jolly garden that was to be the turning-point of their walk had come to be quite a place of pilgrimage since its chance discovery on the first morning of the holiday. "Whitehouse" was its name. It was tenantless. An auctioneer's placard announced that it was for sale. They had walked far along the cliffs from Whitecliffe Sands on that first morning, had taken a winding lane that led to Yexley Green, and in the lane suddenly had come upon Whitehouse, with which immediately Essie, and Mr. Wriford scarcely less, had fallen most encaptivatingly in love. A high wall surrounded it. They had explored its garden: kitchen garden with fruit trees; and a bit of lawn with a shady old elm; and enticing odd little bits of garden tucked here and there behind shrubberies and in corners; and a little stable—at the stable Mr. Wriford had said: "That's where you'd keep a fat little pony, Essie, and have one of those jolly little governess cars and drive into Whitecliffe every day to do the shopping." And "Oh, if ever!" Essie had cried delightedly; and immediately and thenceforward the thing had been to come here every day and imagine Whitehouse was theirs and plan the garden—sadly neglected—as they would have it if it were. One storey high, the house, and white, and "sort of bulging, the darling," as Essie had said, with the effect that the three ground-floor rooms and even the kitchen at the back were spaciously circular in shape. High French windows—"My goodness, though, if there aren't more windows than walls almost!" Encircled all about by a wide, paved verandah.

"It's the very house for an author," Mr. Wriford had declared. "Shut away from everything by that jolly old wall, Essie; and this room—come and look at this room, Essie—this would be mine where I'd write. It must get the sun pretty well all day, and it's sort of away from the others—quite quiet. Couldn't I write in there!"

Essie with her nose flat against the window: "Oh, wouldn't it be glorious! Can't I just see you sitting in there writing a book! Perhaps I'd be out on the verandah here with a little dog that I'd have and just have a peep at you sometimes!"

To-day as they came by Whitehouse and turned towards the cliffs there was a sudden development of these imaginative ecstasies. The showers that Mr. Wriford had foreboded, heralded by watery clouds trailing up from the west, approached in quickening drops of heavy rain as they came through Yexley Green. They were at Whitehouse when sudden midsummer downpour broke and descended.

"My goodness!" cried Essie.

"We'll shelter in the porch—in the verandah," said Mr. Wriford and opened the gate. "Run, Essie!"

In the porch, Essie breathless and laughing from their helter-skelter rush, and shaking the raindrops from her skirts, Mr. Wriford read again a duplicate of the auctioneer's notice posted at the gate. He came to the last words and read them aloud with exclamation.

"'Open to view!' Essie, if we haven't been donkeys all this time! I believe it's—" He turned the handle of the door. "It is. It's open!"

"Oo-oo!" cried Essie, clasping her hands in delight, flashing her sparkling eyes all about the wide hall—its white panelling, its inglenook fireplace, its room-doors standing ajar with captivating peeps of interiors even more entrancing than when seen from outside, its low, spacious stairway bending up to the first floor—"Oh, if ever! Oh, Arthur, if it isn't a darling!"

At the cliffs—and they had been within five minutes of them when the rain came—he had planned they should sit down and he would tell her: "I'm going by the five o'clock train. Here's my ticket. Essie, are you coming with me? Look, here's yours." The diversion of being within enchanting Whitehouse, his laughter at Essie's ecstasies as from room to room they went, momentarily forgot him his purpose—and yet, and partly of envisaging within these perfect surroundings the very joy, settled with Essie in dwelling-place so conducive to work and happiness as this, that soon should be his, brought him (and her) directly to it.

With light and trifling steps they suddenly were plunged amidst it. The exploration, twice repeated, was done. Essie was in ecstasies anew over the sitting-room, of which Mr. Wriford told her again: "Yes, this would be yours. That's the dining-room behind, you see, with a door to the kitchen where your servants would be."

"Not really two servants?" said Essie.

"Oh, rather—three perhaps; and then the gardener chap who'd look after your pony-trap."

"Oh, my goodness!" said Essie, sparkling. "Do just go on, dear!"

"Yes, well, this would be yours. We wouldn't call it the drawing-room or any rot like that. Just your room with jolly furniture and a little bureau where you'd keep your accounts. We'd have tea in here when we didn't have it outside. The servants would call it the sitting-room. We'd call it jolly little Essie's room. I'd get fed up with working sometimes, you know, and come and sprawl about in here. You'd be sewing or something, I expect."

Essie had no expression for all this but an enormous sigh of ecstasy. Then she said: "Now we'll go back to yours," and hand in hand they came to it—and to their reckoning.

III

"Simply built for a chap to write in," Mr. Wriford said. "Just look how it gets the sun. It's stopped raining. I'd come here directly after breakfast. That's the time I can write. There's where I'd have my table. You'd see I was kept quiet."

"Oh, wouldn't I just," said Essie. "You see, there's a passage comes right down to this door, and my goodness if I saw any of the servants come past that corner there, or even go into the room overhead! My goodness, they'd know it if they did!"

He put his arm about her shoulders and laughed and pressed her to him; and Essie said: "Oh, just fancy if it really could be ours!"

He kept her there. She in his arm, they in surroundings such as these: he working, she ministering to him—ah, return to life! return to life!

"Well, we'll have a place as like it as we can find," he said.

She shook her head. With just a little sigh, "We never could," she said. "We'll be happier than anything wherever we are; but one thing, there couldn't be another darling place like this, and another, it would cost a fair fortune. Why, it's not even to let. It's only for sale."

He told her easily: "That's all right. That's just what we're going to do—buy a little place somewhere. I bet a thousand would buy this Whitehouse, buried away down here."

Essie made a tremendous mouthful of the word: "Well, a thousand!"

He laughed and squeezed her in reproof again. "Or two," he said. "Won't you ever understand what they pay for what you call the silly books?"

She had protested before, when in these Whitecliffe days he had assured her of his identity with Philip Wriford, that she never would have said silly in the library that evening if she had known the book was his "really." She protested now again with a wriggle and a laugh; but quickly upon her protest looked up at him with: "Oh, you can't ever mean that you really could buy this? You simply can't?"

He nodded, smiling.

"Oh," she cried, "why not then? Why not? Oh, Arthur, just think if you would! Oh, jus' think!"

The smile went from his lips and from his eyes. Whitehouse, so near to Mother and Dad, was impossible. Flight must take them, and keep them, very far from here. Before he could speak it was this very fact of proximity to home that she adduced in further persuasion.

"And think," she cried, "how near we'd be to Mother and Dad! Jus' an hour in the train. I could see them every week. I expect you've thought they'd live with us, you being so rich. But they never would, you know. Dad would never leave his shop, one thing; and another, Mother's often said when we've talked about me getting married one day, that a girl ought to have a home of her own and not have her mother tied round her neck. Why, this would be perfect, this darling Whitehouse, and so close to them! Oh, if you really can, Arthur!"

Here was the telling of it.

"I can't," he said. "We can't live here, Essie."

She detected something amiss in his tone. There went out of her face the fond and smiling entreaty expressive of her plea. She said: "Arthur, why?"

To one of the windows there was a broad window-seat, and he took her to it. "Let's sit down here, Essie."

She said: "Oh, whatever is it, dear?"

He took her hand. "It's this. What I told your father and mother about going by the five o'clock train is true. I am going. It's nearly four now. It's time to be starting back. I am going. Look, here's my ticket."

Wonderingly she looked at it, and at him. "Oh, you can't be?"

"I am. There's the ticket. Essie, look. Here's yours."

She almost laughed. She looked at his face and the impulse was checked. But she said half-laughingly, her brows prettily puckered: "Oh, whatever? Is it a game, dear, you're having?"

"No, it's no game. It's very serious. I'm going—for good. Not coming back—ever."

She made a little distressful motion with her hands. "Oh, Arthur, don't go on so, dear. Whatever can you mean?"

"I mean just what I say. I'm going—at five o'clock." He stopped and looked intently into her wondering, her something shadowed, eyes. He said: "Essie, are you coming with me?"

This time she laughed. It obviously was a game! A little ring of her clear and merry laughter, and her eyes that always sparkled, that had been shadowed, sparkling anew. "Oh, if you oughtn't to be an actor on the stage! If you didn't half frighten me, though!" and she laughed again. "Why, how could I come? Why, we're not married yet!"

Now!

He put an arm about her and drew her to him. "Don't let me frighten you, Essie. Trust me. Trust me. Come with me, Essie. I'll take care of you. I'll love you always. You'll never regret it—not a moment. You know what I can do for you—everything you want. You know how happy we'll be—happy, happy."

He had imagined—he had prepared for—everything that she might say: fears, tears, doubts, protests—he had rehearsed his part, his fond endearments, his dear cajoleries, against them all. He was utterly unprepared for her answer, for the gentle puzzlement in her eyes that went with it, for the Sunday-school awe in her voice with which she spoke it.

"What, live in sin?" said Essie.

He was prepared for, he had rehearsed, every way this telling of her might go. Across any difficulties of it he had stepped to the utter conviction of her that, howsoever it went, would radiantly end it, he knew. He was utterly unprepared for this her first contribution to it, for each and all with which she followed it, for the sudden fear, and then the quickly mounting fear, and then the knowledge, that she was lost to him—that the game was up, the thing done, the plans shattered, the future irrevocably destroyed: he was most unprepared of all, as the knowledge came and grew and burned within him, for the fury that began to fill him at his loss, the fury and the hate that finally he broke upon her. And God, God, how vilely quickly the thing was projected, was fought, was done! In one minute, as it seemed to him, they were lovingly trifling their plans of Whitehouse; in the next, those very plans had swept him to the telling; in the next, return to life was crushed like ashes in his mouth, and his fury and hate were out and raging; in the next, they were back returning on the cliffs, a blustering wind got up, rain again streaming.

Look how it went. Consider the quickness of it.

"What, live in sin?"

He caught her to him. "Live together, live together, Essie—always. Don't talk about sin."

"How could I? Oh, how ever could I?"

"Together, together, Essie! Think of us together in a little house of our own just like this. Think of you looking after me, and of me looking after my sweet, my dear, my darling!"

"How could I, dear? How could I?"

"Trust me—trust me! Ah, those tears in my darling's darling eyes! Look how I kiss them away and hold her in my arms and always hold her."

"I couldn't, dear. I couldn't."

"You know I'm different. You know how different I am from other men. That's why I ask you, why I take you, without marrying you. Does it frighten you at first? Only at first. You know I'm different. You know you trust me."

"Oh, you don't love me! You don't love me, after all!"

Chill at his heart.

"I can't live without you, Essie."

"Oh, you couldn't ask me to live in sin, not if you loved me."

Swift fear that he has lost her.

"It is because I love you. Because I love you."

"Oh, didn't I love to think you loved me, Arthur! You don't. You don't."

Losing her! The knowledge loses him the ardour of his words, halts him and stumbles him among them. "You're silly, you're silly to talk like that!"

"Oh, didn't I think you loved me truly!"

Lost her! He knows it. He feels it. There is something in her simple, plaintive exclamations, in her "I couldn't, couldn't, dear," in her abandonment to belief that he cannot love her—there is some damned, numbing essence in it that emanates as it were from her spirit and thus informs him; and thus informing him, numbs and dumbs his own. Lost her! And cannot combat it. Lost her! And has no words, no help. Fury beginning in him. Fury at his impotence mounting within him. Return to life! By God, by God, to lose it!

"Essie, will you let me go, then? Now? For ever? You can't. All our love? All our happiness we're going to have?"

"Oh, didn't I think you loved me truly!"

Fury within him. That maddening iteration of her maddening cry! He can scarcely retain his fury. He chokes it back. He is hoarse as he grinds out words. "Think of us in a little house like we've planned."

"I couldn't, dear, I couldn't!"

"Think how we'll have everything we want!"

"Oh, I can't bear to hear you tempting me!"

Fury in a storm breaks out of him. "Oh!" he cries and makes a savage action with his arms that thrusts her from him. "Oh, for God Almighty's sake, don't drag the Bible into it!"

She says: "Arthur!"

He gets violently to his feet, his hands clenched, and makes again that savage, breaking action of his arms, and cries at her: "Temptation and sin and rubbish, rubbish, like that! Let it alone! If you don't love me, say so! If you're going to let me go, say so! Don't drag the Bible into it! If you don't love me, say so, say so, say so!"

"Arthur, you know I love you. You don't love me, dear!"

A last effort. A last control of his fury. He turns to her. "Essie, I can't live without you. Essie! Essie!"

"Oh, you couldn't love me to ask me to live in sin!"

That ends it. That expression—its beastly and vulgar piety, its common, vulgar phraseology—sweeps across his fury as in a rasping shudder of abhorrence. He breaks his fury out upon it. He bursts out: "By God, you're common, common! Do you think I'd marry you—you? What do you think you are? Who do you think I am? Marry you! Marry you! Let's get out of this! Let's go home, and you can tell your father and your mother!"

Return to life! Gone, gone! Lost, lost! He was shaking with hate and shaking with utter fury. He walked to the door and staggered as he walked and must stop and correct his direction as though he were drunken. At the door he turned to her and saw that she remained seated, leaning back against the window, her hands clasped. He cried: "Are you coming? Are you coming?"

She got up and came to him and went through the doorway before him and through the outer door. He slammed it behind him, and they passed out from Whitehouse and up the lane, and out upon the cliffs and turned along them homeward. Raining. He carried her cloak but did not offer it her. A wind blew gustily from off the land that frequently buffetted him, and her, and at whose buffettings and at the slippery foothold of the rain-swept grass he angrily exclaimed.

IV

She walked to seaward of him close along the cliff's edge. Here the cliff fell sharply a few feet, then overhung an outward lap of gorse and bracken, sheer then to the sands. Once as they pressed and slipped their way along, he caught her eyes. She was crying. He sneered: "You can tell your father and mother!"

She caught her breath to answer him: "As if—I should!"

"What are you crying about, then?"

"Didn't I think you loved me—truly!"

They were approaching the little coastguard station of Yexley Gap. Damn this rain. Damn this slippery grass. Damn this infernal wind. A fiercer gust came blustering seaward. He caught with both hands at his hat—nearly gone. Essie's cloak upon his arm blew across his eyes—blinded him, and he had to stop.

She didn't scream. It was not a cry. She just, in perplexity, in puzzlement, in trouble as it were, said "Arthur!"

She was balancing. She was struck by the wind and balancing—balancing with her body and with her arms, and looking at him as if she did not quite know what was happening to her; and in the like perplexity said to him "Arthur!"—balancing, over-balancing.

There were not ten feet between them. He rushed, and slipped as he rushed. It was like running with those leaden feet of nightmare. It seemed to him an immense time before he reached her. A horrible, blundering, unspeakable business, then. The cloak, the accursed cloak, got between them—between them. A jumbling, ghastly, blundering business, their hands fumbling on either side of it. Was this going on for ever and ever? The accursed cloak fumbled itself away. Ah, God, now it was their naked hands that were fumbling—all wet and slippery with rain, seeming to be all fists and no fingers and only knocking against one another instead of catching hold. And not a word said, and only very quick breathing, and jumbling and fumbling and jumbling. Look here, this fumbling, she's falling, toppling; is this going on for ever and ever and ever?

It was her hands that in the last wild, hideous fumbling clutched his. She toppled right back. He fell. He was face downwards upon the slippery grass, to his waist almost over the cliff, and slipping, slipping, and she had his hands—the backs of his hands over the knuckles so that his fingers were imprisoned and useless, and there she hung and dragged him, and he was slipping.

He said: "O God, Essie! O God! Can't you get your hands higher up, so I can hold you, instead of you holding me?"

She said: "I shall fall if I do."

He said: "My darling! My darling! Hold on, then, Essie. Dig your nails in."

"Am I hurting you?"

"Oh, for God's sake, Essie, hold, hold!"

Next she said: "Are you slipping?"

He said: "Some one will come. Some one will come. I heard a shout. Hold! Hold!"

She persisted: "Are you slipping?"

He said: "Yes. I'm slipping. Hold! Hold!"

There isn't any need to describe anything—of his gradual slipping by her drag upon him, of his useless hands enviced in hers, of her very terrible clutch upon them.

She presently said: "Tell me that what you said on the seat that night, dear."

He knew. He cried most passionately: "I love you, Essie."

"Truly?"

From the uttermost depths of his heart: "Truly! Truly!"

"More than any one?"

From his soul, from all his deepest depths, from all he ever had suffered, from all he ever had been, "Essie," he cried, "before God I love you more than all the world!"

She said: "You can't raise me to kiss me, can you, dear?"

He said: "I can't, Essie."

"Are you slipping?"

He did not answer her. He was slipped almost beyond recovery.

She then said: "Say that again—'before God.' I like that, dear."

"Essie, Essie, before God I love you above all the world!"

She gave a little sigh. She said: "Well, both of us—what's the sense to it, dear?" and she opened her fingers, and he saw her whizz, strike the face of the cliff where it jutted out, and pitch, and crash among the gorse and bracken, and roll over and over to the very edge of the outward lap above the sands, and caught there and lying there ... her jolly little dress for Whitecliffe lying there.

A hand grabbed him, or he, beyond recovery of his balance, had followed her. A coastguard grabbed him and dragged him back. He said in a thick, odd voice: "What the devil's the use of that now? You fool, what the devil's the use of that?"

He lay there, the rain stopped, in the sunshine. He just lay there—a minute, an hour, a year, a lifetime, eternity? They went down—a circuitous path to where she lay. They brought her up. They carried her, on a shutter, past him. He gave some wordless sound from his lips and scrambled on his knees towards their burden and threw his arms about it and clung there, with wordless sounds.

One man said: "She's alive, sir."

Another man said: "We'd best try to get her home before—"

A third man said: "Can you walk to show us the way?"

He got up and went stumbling along.

They carry her to her room. There is only one doctor in Whitecliffe. He is found and fetched; and leaving Mr. and Mrs. Bickers by the bedside, comes down to the sitting-room where is a man stunned to apparent speechlessness by grief, whom he takes to be the patient's brother. The doctor says he will stay till the end, and for "the end" then substitutes "for the night." There is nothing he can do immediately and by himself. He speaks of the possibility of an operation in the morning, but seemingly has no thought of telegraphing to a surgeon he names who could perform it. She will pass away without recovery of consciousness, he fears. There is not only the injury to her head but of her spine. More than that there is the question of— If the case had been taken to the hospital at Market Redding.... The man whom he takes to be her brother drags with blundering fingers from his pocket a packet of banknotes and thrusts them towards him with a curious action—an action suggestive (were not the idea ridiculous) of their being some horrible thing.

Well, are they not the price of her that was to buy her?

Taking the packet, the doctor flushes. He had judged these people by the rooms they occupy—a clumsy thing to do at the seaside where frequently people must take what accommodation they can find. This man's educated bearing, perceptible despite the grief that scarcely enables him to speak, should have informed him of his mistake. Very well, he will telegraph. He cannot hold out much hope. But convey hope to those poor old folk up-stairs. Indeed, of course one knows of cases.... In these days of aeroplanes one hears of cases where terrible falls, long periods of unconsciousness, have been survived. Eh? Still—and though he is alone in the sitting-room with this the poor girl's brother he drops his voice and tells him....

She lies in her room, Mother and Dad with her. She lies there unconscious and only, under God, to wake to die. He that had stumbled before her bier, directing those who bore her, stumbles now from the house. "Kill me! Kill me!" Ah, cry that pulses as a wound within him; that he desires to cry aloud, and would cry aloud, and does wordlessly groan with his breathing. But there is agony that he endures that of speech bereaves him, of power of movement wherewith to carry out what now alone remains, numbs and denies him. There is a seat without the house upon the parade. He drops upon it, and there endures ... and there endures....

Endures! It is as if there had been discovered to him within him some vital core, some spot, some nucleus of life, some living soul and centre of him, capable of receiving the very quick and apotheosis of torture, such as all his normal body and all his normal mind delivered over to rack and irons could not have felt. There is a point in human pain where pain, numbing the centres of the mind, mercifully defeats itself and can no more. There is discovered to him within him a core, a quick, an essence of him, capable of agony to infinity, down into which, as a blunted knife, drives every thought in writhing agony. In physical agony he writhes beneath them, twisting his legs, driving his nails within his palms, bleeding with his teeth his lips.

In that flash while she fell, and falling saved him: "She has given her life for mine!" In that hour, that age, that all eternity of time while, prone and powerless, rescued upon the cliff he lay: "Twice, twice, I look upon a body lifeless to let mine live!" In that stumbling progression before her bier: "Kill me! Kill me! O vile, O worst, O foulest, unnameable thing, betake thyself to hell, if any hell be vile enough to hold thee!"

Revelation! Revelation! As she fell, as he lay, as he stumbled, as here he writhes in agony—revelation—and all his life in terrible review beneath it. "Kill me! Kill me!" he groans. "O vile, O worst, O foulest, unnameable thing, betake thyself to hell, if any hell be vile enough to hold thee!"

"Not so. Not yet," there answers him. It is as though there speak to him his thoughts with voice that peals imperatively through all his being, reverberating through him in tremendous majesty of doom, as through the aisles reverberates and makes to tremble all the air an organ's swelling thunder.

"Not so! Not yet! Thou hast not strength to move to find thy hell. Rise if thou canst. Stay, for thou must. Revelation is here. Behold thy life beneath it!"

He crouches there. Enormously it thunders all about him. "Revelation! O blind, O purblind miserable! Have not a thousand lights been thrust before thee to proclaim thee this that only now thou seest? Thou seeker after happiness! Thou greatly-to-be-pitied! Thou sufferer! Thou victim of affliction! Thou innocent! Thou greatly wronged! Is it thus thou hast seen thyself? Ah, whining wretch that thou hast been! Ah, blind, ah, purblind fool, that could not see! That first must have a life to show thee! That first must send to death he that in daily sacrifices of thy companionship had shown thee happiness was sacrifice! Blind, blind! Thou must demand death of him to try to rend thy blindness, and still wast blind, still cried to heaven of thy misery, still wast of all men most to be pitied, most oppressed! Ah, whining wretch! To her for more revelation thou must come. By her, daily, hourly revelation is thrust before thee—she, that gay, that sweet, that joyous life, whose every single, smallest thought was thought for others, and still, O soul enmired, enmeshed in blindness, thou couldst not see!—still thou must have the deeper sacrifice! One life doth not suffice thee. Another thou must have. And now thou criest: 'Revelation! Revelation!' What cost? Look, look, thou vilest, now that thine eyes are clear, now that thy soul is stirred at last from all the slime of self, self, self, where thou hast kept it—look now, and count the cost of this thy revelation. Look now! Hold up thy shuddering soul, new from its slime, to look how all thy life is strewed with sacrifices made for thee, how at each step, blind, thou hast demanded more; how two whose every slightest breath was more of beauty than all thy years have made, how two were given thee; how in thy blindness thou rebukedst them both in each devotion, in every act of love, of care, and must press on to have their lives, their broken bodies—he by the sea, she by the cliff—for this thy revelation."

Day comes to evening, evening reaches into night. "Kill me! Kill me!" he moans. "O vile, O worst, O foulest thing, O blind, let me betake myself to hell, if any hell be vile enough to hold me!"

There answers him in dreadful summons, in final roll and crash of sound: "Look back. Look back. Thou hast purchased this thy revelation. Thou hast recovered from its slime thy soul. Two lives and boundless love thou hast demanded for it. Thy price is paid. Look back, look back. Hold up that soul of thine and see the way that thou hast come. Then seek thy hell, if hell will have thee. Hold up thy soul!"

The sound is snatched away. Only its resonance remains, and sharp and piercing streams the air it leaves to silence. In that intensity with new eyes he looks back; and now into this quick, this nucleus of life within him that is made capable of pain transcending human pain, receives each vision that his new eyes reveal. In agony receives them, writhing at their torture. Who had been happy? They that had sacrificed! Happy till when? Till he came! Happy in what? In selflessness, in selflessness.... Who had been happy? That uncouth vagabond that in their every moment together had tended him, cared for him, protected him. O blind, that, mired in self, never till now had realised his strong devotion! In shame, in horror, in grief's abandonment, he cries aloud his uncouth name: "Puddlebox! Puddlebox! For me! O God, for me!" Writhing, he hears his jolly voice: "O ye tired strangers of the Lord: bless ye the Lord." Hears his jolly voice: "Down, loony, down!" ... That was on the wagon, receiving blows that he might escape! ... Hears his jolly voice: "You think too much about yourself, boy, and therefore I name you spooked." ... O blind, O blind that all his life had thought too much about himself, and only of himself—thought only of how to win his own happiness, realised never till now that happiness was in making others happy, and nowhere else, and nowhere else! ... Hears his jolly voice: "Wherefore whatsoever comes against me, boy—heat, cold; storm, shine; hunger, fullness; pain, joy—cause for praise I find in them all and therefore sing: 'O ye world of the Lord; bless ye the Lord.'" ... O blind, blind, that many weeks lived with that creed and never till now realised its meaning.... Hears his jolly voice: "I like you, boy." ... Hears his jolly voice: "Why, what to the devil is the sense of it, boy?"—but doing it, following it, for him! ... O blind, O blind! ... Hears his jolly voice: "I'm to you now, boy! I'm to you, boy. Why, that's my loony!" ... Hears his jolly voice: "Wedge in, boy! Wedge in! Swim! Why, I'd swim that rotten far with my hands tied, and I challenge you or any man—" ... Sees him swing off his hands, and drop, and go, and drown, and die.... O blind, blind, blind!

Deep swings the night about him; deep sounds the murmuring sea. "Kill me! Kill me!" he groans. "O vile, O worst, O foulest thing, let me betake myself to hell, if any hell be vile enough to hold me!"

There answers him: "Not so. Not yet. Look back. Look back. Hold up thy soul, new from its slime of self, self, self, and look along the way that thou hast come. Hold up thy soul and look!"

He is searching, he is searching in the days at Pendra. He is wondering, he is wondering. Is there some secret of happiness in life that he has missed? O blind, O purblind in the face of God! Day and night, by countless love, by endless devotion, the secret had been thrust before him. Blind! Of self alone he had thought. The last, the uttermost sacrifice had been presented him. Blind! Enmired, enmeshed in self, it had shown him nothing, left him still whimpering, still wondering, still seeking, still pitying his fate. Who had been happy? Essie! Essie! Happy till when? Till he came! Happy in what? In selflessness! Blind! O blindness black beyond belief, now that with new eyes he sees it. Puddlebox had shown him. Essie not alone had shown him but had told him. On that day of the depth of his misery at the Tower House School, when she had helped and advised him by telling of her way with her own Sunday-school boys: "You jus' try it," she had said. "I mean to say, whatever's the good of anybody if they don't try to make everybody else happy, is there? You jus' try." He had tried. He had made the boys happy. Himself he had touched happiness in theirs. O blind, O blind! She had given the very secret of happiness into his hands, and he had used it and proved it and yet, so chained in self, had never recognised it, but had pressed on for further proof. On past her "Aren't you quiet, though, sometimes? I don't mind, dear." On past her "Oh, won't I keep you quiet just when you're working!" On to her piteous cry: "Oh, didn't I think you loved me truly!" On, on, voracious in his blindness as vampire in its lust, on, on, demanding yet another life until she says: "Well, both of us, dear, what's the sense to it?" Until she lies there, broken, that he might live. Until she lies here unconscious and only, under God, to wake to die.

"Kill me! Kill me!" he groans. "Let me find hell, if any hell is vile enough to hold me. Let me not live but to create hell here on earth for all who come about me. O ye world of the Lord: bless ye the Lord." He had crushed out that praise. "Let's have a laugh!" He had crushed out that laughter.

Kill himself. That was left. That was all. Ah, if he had but killed himself when, on that night countless ages of changed identity ago, he had thrown himself into the river! Who had been saved had he not lived? What of delight had he not robbed the world had he not trailed across it? Who had been saved? Old Puddlebox—old Puddlebox had been alive, jovial, genial, praising. Essie—Essie had been alive, laughing, loving, streaming her sunshine. Who would have missed him? None, none, for there was none in all his life he had brought happiness.

Was there none, indeed? What is this sudden apprehension as of some new dismay that checks and holds him? What new revelation of his depths has that question unlocked, unloosed upon him? What change, what agony is here? What bursts within his heart? What seems to struggle in the air to reach him? What sweeps across that quick, that nucleus of life, that core, that essence, that as deep waters takes his breath and holds him trembling where till now in torture he has writhed?

"Matey! Matey!"

"Captain! Captain!"

Ah, tumult inexpressible as of bursting floods rushing in mist and spray from bondage; ah, surging of immensity of thoughts, of visions. Missed him had he died? There was one, there was one had lost a little happiness had he died when he had tried to die. "Captain! Captain!"

He hears his voice as he had heard it in the ward: "Matey! Matey! Gor' bless yer, Matey!"

He turns about on the seat. He throws his arms upon its rail. He buries his face upon them.

There is a step across the road. A hand touches him. "Arthur? Is that you, Arthur?"

Mr. Bickers, bending above him.

"Is she dead?"

"She's still unconscious. I'm anxious for Mrs. Bickers, Arthur. I want to take her to lie down a little. Would you just come and watch in case our Essie wakes?"

He gets up and goes with Mr. Bickers to the house.

CHAPTER XIII
PRAYER OF MR. WRIFORD

I

Look where she lies. Never to wake? Unconscious, and only, under God, to wake to die? Surely she but reposes, smiling, smiling there? Look where her face, surrounded by her hair, rests there untouched by scratch or mark or bruise. Surely she only sleeps; and sleeping, surely still pursues those gay young fancies of her joyous life: look how they seem to smile upon those soft, expressive lips of hers. Look where she lies. Look how her tender form, hid of its suffering, lies there so slim and shapely beneath the wrappings drawn about her. Look at her hands, each slightly closed, that lie upon her breast: surely to touch them is to feel responsive their firm, cool clasp? surely to touch them is to wake her? Look where she lies. Never to wake? Unconscious, and only, under God, to wake to die? Surely she but reposes, smiling, smiling there?

Look where she lies. This is her room. Look where here, and here, and here, and here, are all her little trinkets, treasures, trifles, she has brought with her from home for this her jolly holiday. These are her portraits here, in those plush frames, of Mother and of Dad. That is her text she has illumined, taken from her "fav'rit:" "Lift up your heads, O ye gates: and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors." An odd, long text for framing. Those are her copper wire "native" bracelets there. "Oh, you don't have to look half smart on the parade, evenings!" That is her Church-service by her bed. He remembers that first night when he used it. Those are her best gloves, smoothed out there. That old stump of lead pencil lying upon them was his. He remembers it.

Look where she lies. On the threshold he pauses. That is old Mr. Bickers gone again on his knees against the bed, his white head bowed within his hands. That is Mrs. Bickers kneeling there, her lips moving. Brokenly now, such an odd, deep, trembling sound, comes Mr. Bickers' voice. Brokenly—jumbling his own words with words familiar. It is the prayer he had said was their daily prayer, and he jumbles it with other prayers and into it jumbles his own.

"Lord, now lettest—" Mr. Bickers stops; and there is long silence; and he begins again: "Lord, if it be thy will, if it be thy will, if it be thy will, if our Essie's suffering, if it be thy will, Lord, now lettest this thy servant, thy servant, depart in peace, in peace, in peace, according to ... mine eyes have seen thy ... through the tender mercies of our God whereby the dayspring ... from on high ... hath visited us. Amen. Amen."

Mrs. Bickers says "Amen." Mrs. Bickers collapses where she kneels. Mr. Bickers goes to her and raises her and says: "There, Mother! There, Mother, dear! Come and rest, Mother. Rest just a little while, Mother. Arthur's here. Arthur will stay by her. Arthur will tell us. Just a little while, Mother, dear."

She has no resistance. She is collapsed in his arms.

He supports her from the room. He says to Mr. Wriford: "I'll just lay her on her bed, Arthur. Just across the passage. Doors open. I'll hear you. The doctor's down-stairs. There, Mother! There, there, Mother."

Look where she lies. He is alone with her.

II

Come to this Mr. Wriford on his knees with her, his hands upon her hand, his head between his outstretched arms. Come to his revelation she has revealed to him; to that which came to him with sudden thought of Captain; come to his prayer.

"This is my dear, my darling, lying here.... I have looked back. I have looked back upon such pitiless review of all my blindness, that to look forward, to live and not destroy myself, is almost heavier than I can bear.... I will bear it.... I see. I understand. I accept. Self has been the cause of all my wreckage—thought of myself, always of myself and of no other. I see that now—clearly, bitterly, I see it. And yet—and yet, O God—in the very moment of seeing it, I still thought to kill myself. That was self again. I am so rooted in self that, in the very hour of my revelation, still only of myself I thought—only of saving myself by death from these my torments, only of ending them because I could not bear to let myself endure them. All my life I have lived in self. Ah, with my eyes open—deeper shame! deeper shame!—I almost had died in self. Ah, even realising that, still I cannot tear self out of me, still I kneel here dreading to live, fearing to live, crying that it is heavier than I can bear, heavier than I can bear! Oh, what a thing is self that with such cunning can prevail, how deeply hidden, in what myriad forms disguised! Help me to see it. Keep my eyes open. Keep my eyes open....

"Well, I accept then. I will not kill myself.... Lord, since I have accepted, use this my dear, my darling, no longer for me.... This is my dear, my darling, lying here beneath thy hand. She has offered her life for mine. Let it suffice, O God. Judge me apart from her. Judge me apart from her. Judge me apart from my darling. One life came to me to open my eyes. I remained blind. He gave the deeper sacrifice—blind in my blindness I remained. Then Essie. Thy servant. My jolly little Essie. If I had killed myself, if by destroying myself I had mocked her sacrifice, mocked Thee, O God, then mightest Thou by closing Thy hand upon her have pursued me even into hell. But I accept—but I accept, O God. Therefore relieve her—therefore relieve her—therefore let suffice that which she has done....

"Am I daring to bargain? Am I stipulating, making terms, advancing a price? Remember, remember that I am new before Thee, long out of prayer, long unaccustomed to Thy ways. It is no bargain, O God. It is only confusion of these my thoughts. All that I ask is this—judge me apart from her, use her no longer for me, judge me no more through her, let that which she has done suffice. Look, I will go away from her and leave her. Whether, beneath Thy wisdom, she lives or dies shall nothing prevail with me. If she may live it shall not strengthen me—no bargain there, O God. If she must die it shall not shake me—O God, no bargain there. Judge me apart from her. I will go out of her life. I will go out from every knowledge of Thy will towards her. I will not even pray for her. I will not even pray for her lest in my heart, beneath my words, beneath my thoughts, it is in cunning that actually I am here—agreeable to forego destruction of myself if I may know that she is spared; resolved to kill myself if I be guilty of her death. Enough—enough. Let me end with that while I have clearness of vision to see it. This is my dear, my darling, lying here. I will go out from all knowledge of her. Judge me apart from her. Let that which she has done suffice."

He withdrew his hands from her hand as though in evidence of detaching himself from her. He thrust them out again to touch her and cried "Essie! Essie!" He then took them to his face.

He said: "Let me speak as a man. I will go out from her. I will live. Let me speak as a man. Let me not make vain promises, offer false protests. This is not religion. Religion, as it is lived, is nothing to me. Let me not delude myself nor seek in cunning to delude Thee. Let me not try to pretend that this that I have suffered converts me suddenly from that which I was to that which Essie is. Let me speak as a man. That is not of a moment. I am not one man in one moment, a new man in the next. I am the same. All my infirmities the same—rooted in me as my bones: bones of my spirit and no more changed than bones of my body that are rooted in my flesh. I am the same. Ay, even as I say it, I am tempted to say that I am not the same but am changed. Rescue me from that cunning. Keep me from that. Let me not even in cunning pretend, in self-delusion believe, that this hour, these thoughts, these torments I have endured will all my life remain with me. I have known penitence before. I have knelt in presence of death before. I have wept. I have vowed. Where are my tears? Where my promises? Let me speak as a man. Time swings on. That which is all the world to-day is less than dust to-morrow, That which is laid, beneath death's shadow, in penitence before Thy feet, is there in ashes, when death has winged away, to mock Thy mercy. Time swings on. Vows made in penitence—they are no more than to the drunkard his drink: delusion, forgetfulness, anodyne, courage until the spirit that has tricked the brain has gone, until the travail that has worn the soul has ebbed. Back then to fear, to baseness, as surely as night succeeds to day....

"What then? What do I purpose? What have I to offer? Lord, there is only this in me that is different: that my eyes are opened to that to which all my life they have been sealed. I have nothing to promise, nothing to vow. I have only to ask: Keep my eyes open; help me to remember this that my eyes have seen; help me to know what is self; help me to rid me of it. All my life—all my life from the beginning it has been self. Back in the London days when I was working day and night, when I was longing to be free, when I thought I was giving up my life to others, it was all self, self that was destroying me. It was not ceaseless work that wrought upon my peace of mind, robbed me of my youth; it was pitying myself, thinking of myself, contrasting my lot with that of others. It is not work nor trouble that kills a man, robs him of sleep, loses him his happiness—it is turning the stress of it inwards upon himself, never forgetting himself when occupied with it, always keeping himself before his eyes, watching himself, pitying himself. Brida knew it. 'You think too much about yourself, Phil,' she used to tell me. That old Puddlebox had the secret of it and told it me plainly. 'You think too much about yourself, boy, and that is what's the matter with you and with most of us.' He told it to me plainly. 'I don't believe a word of it,' he told me when he had heard my story. 'Your story is the same as my story and the same as everybody else's story in this way: that you've never done any thing wrong in all your life, and that all that's happened to you is what other folk have put upon you.' Ay, that was it! I thought I was sacrificing my life; I was grudging every thought of it, every moment of it given away from my own pursuits. How could I be sacrificing when in doing so I was unhappy? That is negation in terms. To sacrifice is happiness. Old Puddlebox showed it me. This my Essie showed it me. To give—to give time, money, life itself, and have compassion for oneself in giving them, that is the very pit of self, worse than self open and wilful. That is the selfishness that all my life has been my curse, my wreckage. All that ever has happened to me I have seen in terms of myself and of no other. Every trouble, every irritation that in those London days those poor things about me brought to me, I at once turned upon myself—looked at with my eyes, not with theirs; thought instantly and always, even while I helped them, how it affected me, not how it affected them. Ah, that is the heart of misery and that is the secret of happiness! To see only with one's own eyes, to judge only from one's own point, to estimate life in terms of self and of no other: that is to goad oneself on from trial to trial, from misery to misery. To see with others' eyes, to judge from their outlook upon life, to estimate life in terms of those upon whom life presses and not in terms of self: that is the secret of happiness, that is the thing in life that I have missed....

"Try me not, O God, in great things. Help me in small. In the small things, in the small, the everyday things, O God, that is where self comes—that is where I shall not see it, that is where, disguised, it will deceive me. To quarrel, to complain, to be impatient—what is it but self? Help me to put myself where each one stands that comes about me. Help me to look with their eyes—how have vexation then? There is no vexation, there is no unhappiness in all this world but what through self a man brings into it. All happiness, this world—in every hour happiness, in every remotest corner happiness. But man lives not in it but in his own world—the world that he himself creates; of which he is the centre; that, however little he be, revolves about him. That is whence is his unhappiness. Others come into his world. Ah, if he can but watch them in it with their own eyes, not with his! God! what a world this world would be if under Thy hand it were governed as man governs the world which he himself creates—as I have governed mine! Tolerance for none but self, pity for none but self, all within it judged, measured, watched in terms of self! Rid me of that! Rid me of self. Help me to see self. Help me to see with others' eyes, not with my own...."

So ends his prayer—so ends his vigil. Mr. Bickers returns, and it is towards daybreak. He looks once more at her, smiling, smiling there. He will not even pray for her. Let that which she has done suffice. Let him be judged apart from her—not strengthened if she may live, not shaken if she must die. He goes down the stairs; out into young morning spreading across the sea.

CHAPTER XIV
PILGRIMAGE

I

Not to know—in no way to be prevailed upon in this his return to life by knowledge of whether she lives or has died. In no way to be strengthened—but of himself to live—if life has been permitted her; in no way to be shaken if her life has been required. To be judged apart from her....

Come with this Mr. Wriford while for a year he thus places in proof his acceptance. He takes up his life where on his flight from London he had left it. To do that—not to admit his every impulse which calls upon him to hide, to live in seclusion, and there dwell with his memories, cherish his affliction—is part of his bond pledged by her bedside. The secret of happiness has been purchased for him; let him not mock that which has been paid. He has the secret; let him exercise it. Abandonment to grief—what is that but pity of self? Life in retreat, unable to face the world—what is that but admission that his fate, that which affects himself, is harder than he can bear?

Bound up in this, he takes train immediately from Whitecliffe to London, presently is involved in all the tortures that his welcoming inflicts upon him. His return is made a sensation of the hour by his friends and soon, as he finds, by that larger circle to whom his books have made him known. "Where have you been?" It is a question to which he seems to have to spend every hour of all his days in formulating some kind of answer. It is a question—and all the congratulation and felicitation that goes with it—that often he tells himself he can no longer stand and must escape. "Where have you been?" and all the while it is at Whitecliffe—in that room, among those scenes—that his heart is, and that he desires only to be left alone to keep there. But he does not escape. But he does not keep himself alone. It is self that bids him. It is self he has come out to know and face. He forces himself to see with the eyes of those that do them the kindnesses that are done him. He makes himself respond. He permits himself no shrinking.

He revisits Mr. and Mrs. Filmer. They have "got along very well without him," they tell him.

"I am bound to say," says Mrs. Filmer, "that at the time we thought your conduct showed very little consideration for us. I am bound to say that."

"A mere postcard," says Mr. Filmer, "can relieve much suspense; but one does not of course always think of duties to others, h'm, ha."

"Well, that's just what I am here to think of," Mr. Wriford responds. "Is there anything I can do? Anything you want?"

There is nothing, as it appears, except a manifestation of fear that he proposes to upset the establishment by quartering himself upon them, relief from which expands them somewhat, and they proceed with the news that two of the boys, his nephews, are on their way home on leave.

The boys come, and in their affairs and in their interests he finds better response to the "Anything I can do?" than was received from the Filmers. Till their arrival he has had, in seclusion of his rooms, intervals when he can retreat within his thoughts. There is a holiday home to be made for them, and he takes a flat and occupies himself with them, and these intervals are denied him. The young men are here to have a good time. There are their eyes for him to see with—not his own. He has a trick, they both notice it, of saying: "Well, tell me just how you look at the business." It is a trick that is expressed also in his manner, in a certain inviting, sympathetic way that he has, and it comes to be noticed in the much wider circle of his friends. "Used to be a fearfully reserved chap, Wriford," they say. "Never quite knew whether he was shy or thought himself too good for you. Do you notice how different he is now?"

"Do you ever notice him when he's alone, though—sitting in the club here and not knowing you're looking at him?" another would reply. "There's a look on his face then—he's been through it, Wriford, I'll bet money."

II

Ah, he has been through it and daily feels the mark of it. Time swings on. He settles down. The sensation of his return evaporates. His nephews go back to their duties. He settles down. This is his post—here in the hurly-burly. He will not desert it. He takes up his work again. Long days he sits staring at the blank sheets of paper before him. His thoughts are ready. There obtrudes between them and the marshalling of them memories of how it had been planned he again was to resume them: "Won't I keep you quiet just, dear!" ... That is self, pity for himself, grieving for himself. Let him put it away. Let him get to work. Let it return—ah, let her face, her voice, her jolly laughter return to him just for an hour when work is done, just while he lies awake....

Come to this Mr. Wriford when a year is gone. Summer again—June again—the holidays again—again that day. He has lived through a year of it. Through a long year he has proved himself. If he might know certainly that she is dead, he could not fall back again. That is what he has feared at the outset. He does not fear it now. He has lived through a year of it. He is assured of himself now. If he might but make a pilgrimage to Whitecliffe, see where he had walked with her, see where perhaps she lies, permit his spirit to walk those roads, those paths, those fields with her again, suffer it to stand beside her...!

He goes. He goes first, on a sudden fancy, to far Port Rannock and stands beside the mound that marks the grave he knows there.

"Well, you old Puddlebox," says Mr. Wriford, standing there. "Well, you old Puddlebox. How goes it? How goes it now? Well enough with you, old Puddlebox! You knew the secret. I know it now. Too late for me, old Puddlebox. But, if you know, you'll be shouting your praises on it, eh, old Puddlebox? What was it you said as the sea came on to us? 'Well, we've had some rare times together, boy, since first you came down the road.'"

He suddenly cried: "I would to God—I would to God you might shake off this earth, these stones, and come to me face to face for one moment while I clasped your hand!"

III

So on to Whitecliffe. So to his pilgrimage there. Just such another day awaits him as on that day a year ago. Sunshine and clouded sun, as he walks the parade. Presage of rain, as on through Yexley Green to Whitehouse he goes. Whitehouse still stands empty; he walks the garden, looks through the windows, tries the door, treads again the rooms where last he had walked with her. "Jolly little Essie's room" this was to have been.... This was where he would write.... This was where wouldn't she keep him quiet just! ... She sat there while he told her...

Up the path to the cliff, along the cliff and past that place, paused long upon it, and on to Whitecliffe Church. Here is the churchyard. He knows all these old graves—he had peered here and here and here with Essie, puzzling their quaint inscriptions. It is for a new stone he looks. Yes, there is one. Three sides of the church he walks and only the old stones sees. Come to the porch, a new white cross confronts him. He goes to it. It is not hers! Sense tells him they would not have brought her here, would not have left her here. They would have taken her home. Yes, but that moment while he crossed the turf towards the cross, that moment while its letters came in view—and were not "Essie,"—has shaken him so that his limbs tremble, so that he must somewhere rest ... there is the porch.

A troop of noisy boys come through the gate, and then more boys by ones and twos. An old man who comes from within the church and looks out upon the churchyard for a moment remarks to him first that there is going to be a shower, then, calling out in reproof at a pair of the laughing boys, that it is choir-practice just going to begin. The old man returns to his duties; the last of the boys seem to have arrived: there are sounds within the church and premonitory notes of the organ; some heavy drops of the rain that has been threatening; then in a sudden stream the shower.

From where he sits he can see far up the road beyond the gate. He sees a group that had been approaching shelter beneath a distant tree. The downpour falls in a deluge that is fierce and short, passes and leaves the path in puddles, and with unnoting eyes he sees the group beneath the tree desert its shelter and come hurrying towards the church. The organ is playing now, voices swing in sudden volume of sound; unheeding, as with his eyes he is watching without seeing, he yet is subconsciously aware of the regular rise and fall of psalms.

With his eyes unseeing! They suddenly, as he watches, declare to him that which sets a drumming in his head, a snatching at his breath. The group has reached the gate. It is an old man drawing a wicker bath-chair, an old lady walking behind it. Drumming in his head; it passes; there succeeds to it a rocking of all the ground about his feet, a swimming, a receding, a swift approaching of all the land beyond the porch. That old man is opening the gate, turning his back to draw the bath-chair carefully through, revealing one that sits within it, coming on now ... coming on now ... closer and closer and closer...

This Mr. Wriford simply stands there. He doesn't do anything, and he doesn't say anything. He can't. You see, he has been through a good deal for a good long time. This is the end of a long passage for him. You know how weak he is. You probably despise him. Well, then, despise him now. He has no parts, no qualities, for this. He makes a bungling business of it. He has come to the doorway of the porch and simply stands there. They have seen him. They are staring at him. They are saying things. They are exclaiming. He doesn't hear. He just stands there....

Then he begins. He jolts down off the step of the porch. He stumbles along the few paces to the bath-chair. She that is seated there gives a kind of laugh and a kind of cry. He falls on his knees, kneeling in puddles, and puts his arms out, and takes her in them, and catches her to him, and buries his face against her, and holds her, holds her—and has nothing at all that he can say, not even her name.

Well, nor has she. She just has her arms about him.... When at last she speaks, Mr. and Mrs. Bickers have gone—into the church, or into the air, or into the ground—gone somewhere for some reason. And even then it is not at first speech but some odd little sound that she makes, and at that he looks up and she stoops to him—and there they are, her cheek against his cheek.

"My back's a fair old caution," says Essie then. "They don't think I'll ever walk again."

He stammers something about "I'll carry you, dear. I'll carry you."

Each in the other's arms, her cheek against his cheek.

"Just going to Whitehouse, we were," says Essie. "My goodness, if it hadn't rained and made us come for shelter!"

He says something about: "It's empty—it's still empty for us—Whitehouse."

Some one opens the church door. Young voices and music that have been muffled come streaming through towards them—

Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord: or who shall rise up in his holy place?

Even he that hath clean hands and a pure heart: and that hath not lift up his mind unto vanity, nor sworn to deceive his neighbour.

A sound escapes him. He feels a sudden moisture from her face to his. The singing goes deeper; then with triumphant surge and sweep breaks out again:

"Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors...."

"What, are you crying too?" says Essie. "Aren't we a pair of us, though?"

THE END

By the author of "The Clean Heart"

THE HAPPY WARRIOR

By A. S. M. HUTCHINSON

Author of "The Clean Heart" and "Once aboard
the Lugger——"

Frontispiece $1.35 net.

The plot of "The Happy Warrior" is unusual, its love interest is sweet and pure, and there is a fight of which it is truthfully said that there is nothing more virile and tense in literature.

Shows the touch of the master hand ... Mr. Hutchinson is nothing if not original. His own strong individuality is apparent in his method and in his style.—New York Times.

Mr. Hutchinson has a newer and a better grasp of style, which manifests itself in clear, forcible English, and a really fine intermixture of humor and pathos. We have here a sweet and pure love story.—St. Louis Globe-Democrat.

"The Happy Warrior" is a remarkable publication ... Mr. Hutchinson establishes himself as a master of characterization, keen observer with a fine sense of the dramatic, and as fine a prose poet as we have had since Meredith.—Chicago Post.

A brilliant piece of work.... Its author takes his place at once among living novelists whose work is something more than a successful commercial product. "The Happy Warrior" establishes Mr. Hutchinson among the artists.—London Daily Telegraph.

... His romance and his humor are all his own, and the story is shot through and through with a fleeting romance and humor that is all the more effective because it is so evanescent. Few novels exist in which the characters are as viable as Mr. Hutchinson's.—Boston Transcript.

By the author of "The Clean Heart."

ONCE ABOARD THE LUGGER——

By A. S. M. HUTCHINSON

Author of "The Clean Heart" and "The Happy Warrior."

327 pages. $1.30 net.

This is the novel that gave Mr. Hutchinson a conspicuous place among the younger English authors who have so recently achieved literary distinction. It is not a sea story, as its title would appear to indicate, but a delightful comedy of English life, containing the most romantic of love stories, written with such rare humor that it stands apart from the great mass of present-day fiction. It is a novel to read and reread, for through all the laughter and quaintness shines the reality of life.

At once serious in its mockery of seriousness and touched with genuine sentiment in its sympathy with the emotions of youth ... Altogether it is refreshing.—Everybody's Magazine.

A light, humorous and clever romance.... Mr. Hutchinson's name is new to American readers but he is a writer of parts. To the right readers it will be warmly welcomed.—Springfield Republican.

As real and dainty as anything which has been written for years. It is a book to please every sort of reader, for it is full of wit and wisdom. The best praise that one can write of it, however, is that after reading it you will want to own it, for a desire to reread parts of it is sure to come.—San Francisco Call.

It is written in the highest of high spirits, in a vein of persistent humor, and it moves along with an alertness and vivacity that is a perpetual joy to the reader. A new humorist as well as a new novelist has arisen in Mr. Hutchinson. He never fails to be entertaining. It is vitally and significantly human.—Boston Transcript.

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