Each lay awake that night, thinking. To Clytie the revelation of Kent's love was dazing. The sense of her own dulness in never having pierced the heart of his mystery was even more confounding. Why should she have divined suddenly the meaning of the light in his eyes, on this first meeting after their eighteen months of separation, when she had been blind to it before? She only half guessed as yet why he had not told her, but she saw that it must have arisen from a rare, strange delicacy in his nature differentiating him from all other men that she had known. Her heart went out in pity for him.

“How he must have suffered!” she repeated over and over to herself. And then scenes between them came before her mind and became clear in the light of this revelation: the strange suppressed interview after her arrival from Durdleham; the last evening he had spent in London before going abroad, when he had lit her fire, and she had gone up to bid him farewell. How had her ears been so dull as not to detect the tremor in his voice when, after kissing her hand, he had said: “You are my very dear lady whom I will serve to the hour of my death”?

And then a little hissing snake of a thought formed itself into a reply; and she shrank up together with a slight convulsive shiver as if something foul had touched her.

After that she could not sleep. She got up, lit her candle, and took a book at random from her shelves. It was her well-worn, girlish Globe Shakespeare, one of the books she had surreptitiously procured when the family Bowdler was included in the category of formulas against which she revolted. She took it back to bed with her and commenced reading where it had chanced to open. The first words that met her eye seemed like a voice from the other world:

Such harmony is in immortal souls;

But while this muddy vesture of decay

Doth grossly clothe it in, we cannot hear it.

They followed so closely on the track of her own shuddering thought that she could read no more. She blew out her candle, and remained awake, staring into the darkness, until the gray dawn filtered through the blinds, and she fell asleep.

Nor was Kent more restful. He had battled with his love, and with a strong man's will had brought it under subjection, making it minister to his happiness in spite of torturing longings instead of allowing it to darken his life. It had awakened him to a sense of a world of beautiful things, given him a deeper understanding and a wider sympathy than he had before. For him truly might it be said that to love her was a liberal education. It gave him the key to the knowledge and appreciation of women, drew him from his seclusion into the general society he had formerly avoided. A feminine conclusion which he would once have pooh-poohed as weak and illogical struck him now with its intuitive subtlety and delicacy of point. He learned that what the essentially feminine mind lacks in breadth it gains in fineness, and he was amazed to discover what a sensitive touch upon life is possessed by a cultivated woman. And mingled with this new charm was another of an esoteric kind. No woman he met had all the fascinations of Clytie, but every woman seemed to possess one of them. He confided this once in a roundabout way to Wither, who laughed, and told him he was growing too susceptible and would find himself married one of these days. But Kent shook his head. “I could only find a Clytie among them by marrying the whole sex and making an extract of it,” he said with conviction. For not only did the higher qualities of woman's nature manifest themselves to him, but the minor graces of manner and appearance appealed to that side of his aesthetic temperament that had hitherto been under a cloud. It occurred to him then that he had been living with half his faculties. Accordingly he felt a peculiar satisfaction in his new powers of perception.

It had cost him a pang to forego the pleasure of the bright society that Mrs. Farquharson gathered round her. At first he had given up going to Harley Street through fear of meeting Clytie, for he shrank from meeting her under the new conditions. Then as time passed on, and he accustomed himself to the idea of Clytie as a married woman of fashion, he wished to go, but shyness held him back. It would look strange to resume visiting suddenly after his apparent rudeness and neglect. Probably the Farquharsons would never have seen him again had not George met him at a learned society's meeting, and given him a hearty and pressing invitation.

But there was a large though somewhat scattered society in which, although the rarest of visitors, he had always been welcome. And now he not only mixed assiduously in this, thereby causing many laughing conjectures as to the reason of his social reformation, but he volunteered occasionally to go out with Wither, whose circle of acquaintance, like Sam Weller's knowledge of London, was extensive and peculiar. A revolution was thus effected in Kent's habits, and to a certain extent in his mode of thought. A new zest was given to life in this enlargement of his horizon. And all through his love of Clytie. The awakening of the dormant sex principle had strengthened his nature, extended his humanity in depth and breadth. In spite of a hopeless, passionate love Kent was still a happy man.

And now this spell of her influence was broken, or at least modified. He had seen her, felt the softness of her voice, the kindliness of her eyes. And he had unwittingly betrayed his secret. She knew that he loved her. She pitied him, promised that he should see her frequently on the basis of the old friendship. It was kind and generous, he thought, to step down from the height of her wedded felicity to comfort him with her friendship and sympathy. An unexpected happiness was in store for him. Perhaps, after all, his loyalty and devotion might be of some use to her.

But strong, loyal man as he was, this sudden meeting troubled him. If only he had spoken at once, before the other had come upon the scene, she might have been won to love him. The old torturing regrets came upon him, and he tossed sleeplessly on his bed. The love which, through its very hopelessness, had all these months given him peace and a measure of happiness now burst forth again tumultuously. It became a miserable farce to lie awake in the darkness. He rose, went into his sitting-room and lit the gas. Then he sat down at his writing space, and, burying his face in his hands, remained for some time in great pain of thought. At last his eye fell upon some notepaper lying invitingly on his blotting-pad. An idea struck him. He would write to her. He covered four sides with a passionate outburst of his love, writing wildly, unthinkingly, as men must write in moments of overpowering emotion. Then he tore up the sheet and began afresh. The summer morning light was streaming into the room through the curtainless window, mingling oddly with the yellow gas, when Kent enclosed and addressed the first letter to Clytie in which he told her of his love. He got up, stiff from his long sitting and somewhat exhausted, and going to bed, slept the sleep of the just until it was his usual hour for rising.

The next afternoon when Clytie returned from a drive she found the letter awaiting her. She took it up to her room, and there, sitting on the edge of the bed, read it with conflicting feelings. It ran as follows:

My Dear Clytie:

You know my secret. I think so. I saw it in your face. But if I was mistaken, let me tell it to you in so many words; and as I bring to you what is best and truest in me, it will neither dishonour me to tell it nor you to hear it. And as you in your goodness offer me a resumption of the old friendship, I must say it once and for all. I love you, Clytie, with all the strength of a man who has allowed women to take up very little part in his life. I loved you long before I knew it. It grew up gradually during our intercourse, and only one day when you were at Durdleham a little, little chance circumstance revealed to me that you were not only the grand, sweet friend, but the woman that I passionately loved. And I could not tell you for fear of paining you and destroying our friendship—for what was I to love you? And I dreaded lest you should think me disloyal to the trust between us. And at last I came, resolved to speak, and it was too late. Winifred can tell you.

From that time I have carried my love with me as the vivifying principle of my life. I thought you would never know, but now I have betrayed myself.

Will it not pain you too much in your present happiness to see me under this new guise? Ah, Clytie! tell me frankly as you always used to do.

I shall never, never willingly trouble the serenity of your life. I love you too sincerely, too devotedly; and my love makes me myself too happy. If you will meet me now and again after this, freely, at the houses of our common friends, you shall only see the old Kent who now and then scolded you, sometimes helped you, and who always held you dearer and higher and grander than all other women; and yet you must let yourself be loved—that I cannot help. It is fused into my being, and it gives me happiness in my own way. I am an oddity, you know, Clytie, as you yourself have called me, and oddities have their little privileges, and if you know that it makes my happiness, and does not grudge you yours, you will not find it hard to be loved.

If you were a woman of ordinary conventional ideas, I could not tell you this. You would misunderstand it.

There seems but little I could do for you—and I would do so much. But life is full of strange chances, and perhaps my chance of serving you may come, and would then I could die for you to save you an hour's pain.

Yours in all devotion,

Kent.

Clytie read the letter over several times. At first the tears came into her eyes and a lump rose in her throat. This simple, unrequiring love soothed her and smote her at once. The largeness and tenderness of the man's nature came to her almost as a revelation. What was there in her worthy of this sacrifice? How could she tell him, she thought in her broken pride, that she had failed miserably, wretchedly, that she had forsaken the higher for the lower, that this selfless love of his was as far above the sudden intoxication that had degraded her as the spirit is above the flesh? She had thrown away the best, like the shepherd in the German legend, who, in the sensuous heart-leap at the sight of the glittering treasure, disregarded the voice, “Forget not the best,” and dropped and trampled underfoot the little blue flower that opened the enchanted hillside. How could she tell him that?

Then, too, the note of unconscious irony in his letter jarred through her painfully. “Her present happiness!”

“Oh, my God!” she cried at last. “If he only knew how much need I have of happiness!”

And then the strength that had kept the tears back for all these latter months of weariness and disillusion suddenly forsook her, and turning as she sat, she threw herself on the bed in a great agony of sobbing.

A little later she wrote Kent the following reply:

My Dear Friend Kent:

I am not worthy of such devotion. I can only wonder at it and accept it humbly and gratefully. Words like these of yours I never could misunderstand, Kent. If it is a pleasure to you to see me, you need not shun me any more. Clytie.

Kent went into the studio on Monday to tell Winifred of the meeting; on Tuesday, with a vague hope of seeing Clytie; on Wednesday, when Winifred herself expected her, but she did not come. On Thursday, however, he heard her voice from outside the studio door, and his heart gave a great throb. He entered and found himself once more in her presence. Neither spoke of the letters that had passed between them, but the faintest pressure of the hand and a glance from her eyes told him that she understood.

After that they met frequently—on Sunday evenings at the Farquharsons', during the week in the studio, where for some months Clytie had taken to coming very frequently for the comfort of seeing Winifred. Clytie maintained her usual habits; Kent, as far as was possible, resumed his old ones. Sometimes it was strangely like the old days. With a little longing, perhaps, to add to the illusion, and also to give herself some employment while Winifred worked, Clytie began a picture, choosing in a humorous tenderness to take Winnie as her model. The picture never was completed, for Clytie had not the temperament to do justice to the slender figure in its quiet summer dress, and to the soft, dark face bent so earnestly over the palette and sheaf of brushes. But while the painting of it lasted it gave a comfortable air of reality to the revival. It was new life to Kent to come in on his return and once more receive Clytie's friendly nod as she stood by the easel, a painting-apron over her dainty dress, and her hands smudged with charcoal or daubs of paint. He did not think much of the portrait, and he told her so with laughing frankness. But he divined why she was doing it, and while criticising, encouraged her to proceed. His arrival, however, as it always had been, was a signal for the cessation of work. Then Winifred cleaned the brushes and put them in the trays, and gathered up the tubes and rags which Clytie, with less sense of tidiness, had strewed around her, and Clytie drew out the basket-table and rang the bell for Mrs. Gurkins to bring up the tea. Clytie had left behind her all her small domestic articles for Winnie's use in the studio. So there was the familiar tea-service, the Crown-Derby cups and apostle spoons,—a piece of wicked extravagance on Clytie's part in times gone by,—the gray Japanese teapot whose wicker handle had still to be delicately fingered, and the little glass sugar-bowl that looked so plebeian beside the aristocratic porcelain. Scarcely anything in the studio had been changed. The charcoal caricatures on the walls were as sacred in Winifred's eyes as if they had been frescoes by old Italian masters, and she had issued strict injunctions to spring-cleaners to leave them intact. Even Clytie's easel was there now. Kent lived for these afternoons.

One day Kent was going to dine with Wither and Fairfax. As his road to a certain point was the same as Clytie's, they walked along together. This was almost the first occasion on which they were quite alone together. He reminded her casually of the fact.

“Yes,” she replied. “And I have been wanting to see you by yourself. I have not thanked you for your letter. But you do see that I appreciate it, don't you?”

“There is nothing to thank me for, since I pleased myself in writing it. The thanks are from me to you for treating it as you have done.”

“Oh, no,” said Clytie, shaking her head and looking before her. “You can't understand,—and perhaps it is better you shouldn't,—what a letter like that means to a woman. Well, it meant a great deal to me. To tell you so is the only return I can make you.”

“Don't let us talk of it,” said Kent. “I could not bear to have you as a friend under false pretences.”

After they had walked a few steps in silence she continued the subject.

“Don't you think it would be better for you to forget all about me, and look around for someone who can make you happy—really happy?”

“I'd have to live till the day of judgment to find her,” said Kent bluntly.

“That's ridiculous, Kent. But can't you feel that it sometimes pains me to see you sacrificing your life for me?”

“I am not sacrificing my life,” he answered cheerfully. “Besides, I don't quite see what it has got to do with you—in one sense. I love you, and I couldn't love anybody else for all the joys in creation. Thank God, you are broad-minded enough to let me tell you this without any chance of misconstruction.”

“Ah! That's all very well,” she said, with a little sigh. “If I were a saint, I might placidly accept it as my due. Being only a woman, and that none of the best, it seems such a waste of good love, Kent, and love is a rare, rare thing in the world.”

“But it would go a-begging if you did not have it,” he replied, laughing. “Come, don't let us say anything more about it. You are happy with your own home and interests, and I am happy in seeing you and having your friendship. Of course I have suffered a bit, but it's all over now.”

“Ah!” she said. “Life seems to be made up of that.”

“Of what?”

“Suffering.”

He waved an energetic protest with his ash stick.

“Since when have you grown a pessimist? I don't believe in it. Life is made up of responsibilities and interests. There's suffering in it of course; but there are alleviations. It's like cold and frost. If you stood up without a rag on in the snow you'd think the world was made of nothing else but frost. But you put on warm clothing and defy it.”

“But the poor, ill-clad, shivering wretches—what about them?”

“I'm talking of people with average material wealth,” he replied. “That's just it. So can the people of ordinary moral wealth clothe themselves against suffering. I don't like the morbid view of things. It doesn't do any good. Do you remember a passage in Longfellow's 'Hyperion'—a criticism of two German poets—'melancholy gentlemen to whom life was only a dismal swamp, upon whose margin they walked with cambric handkerchiefs in their hands, sobbing and sighing, and making signals to Death to come and ferry them over the lake'? It's a bit fierce on your pessimists; but it's a wholesome little passage to remember.”

A little while after this they parted. Kent walked on, swinging his stick, convinced of Clytie's happiness, yet wondering at her unusual note of pessimism, and Clytie called a cab, as she was late, and drove home with a world of strange and troubling thoughts.

On the 1st of August Clytie received a visit from the boy Jack, who had just come to London for his summer holiday. He had grown greatly during the past year, had filled out. The taint of the street had gone from him and he was becoming civilised. Clytie leaned back in her chair and looked at him curiously as he sat, in all the self-consciousness of a newly awakened sense of propriety, upon the edge of his seat, twirling his glengarry cap. As an artistic object he had deteriorated. The motive of his worth in that respect had gone with the picturesqueness of his old garments and dirt and wild elf locks; but he was handsome in spite of his cropped brown hair and the severity of his attire. Indeed there was something incongruous in the corduroy uniform and the refinement of his face, with its bright dark eyes and finely cut lips that disclosed a perfect row of white, even teeth. And yet there was cruelty around the mouth, the sublimated essence of the fierce savagery that Clytie had impressed upon her famous picture. He had been transformed from the animal into the human being, it is true; but that does not necessarily imply that the human being does not retain many of the passions of the animal. With the old Jack the untamable was degradingly confused with lowness, but it shone out all the clearer now by reason of the humanising of his face. Clytie noted all this as they talked together.

“You are getting quite a man,” she said. “When are you leaving school?”

“Mr. Kent says I'm to stay there another year,” replied Jack. “Then I'm to be 'prenticed.”

“To a joiner?”

“I suppose so,” said Jack. And after he had scraped a little with his toe on the ground he looked up and added: “Do you think I needn't be a joiner if I didn't want to?”

“I don't see why you shouldn't be what you like, Jack.”

“Really!” and his face brightened. “I have been thinking I should like to be something else.”

“What is that?”

“A carver and gilder,” said Jack bashfully.

“Where do the especial charms of that trade come in?” asked Clytie, laughing.

“I dunno,” said Jack; “I only thought it.”

There was a touch of pique in his voice. Clytie noticed it, saw that she had wounded susceptibilities.

“Tell me, Jack, why you want to be a carver and gilder.”

“I could make all the picture-frames for you and Miss Marchpane,” he replied.

“Thank you, Jack,” said Clytie, touched at the boyish idea. “But perhaps we'll make you something better than a carver or gilder. I don't know what you could be. What could we make of you?”

A vague idea of raising Jack above the artisan level had occurred to her during her scrutiny of his face. He was not an ordinary creature. That he should spend his life in the dull, commonplace atmosphere of the British workman seemed a waste of possibilities. There are millions who possess just the qualifications for hewers of wood and drawers of water. Why should a finer organisation not be cultivated, trained, put into an environment where there are conditions for free development? But whether the boy was a potential admiral, Lord Chancellor, or novelist she could not determine. That was why she asked the question, “What could we make of you?” somewhat pathetically. Jack shook his head in reply. He had learned at school that life was a serious thing terminating in apprenticeship.

“I've got to learn a trade,” he replied after a little, “and I'd sooner be a carver and gilder than anything else.”

“But suppose a good fairy were to come, Jack,” persisted Clytie, “and say that you were not to learn a trade, or that, if you did begin, you would work your way out of it, and become a great man, and do glorious things in the world—suppose you were able to choose to be anything you liked—what do you think you would be? Tell me—something great and bright and noble!”

She had grown animated with her enthusiasm, and leaned forward, with her chin raised and lips parted—her attitude in moments of exaltation. The boy looked at her for a few seconds, catching her spirit. Something was at work within him too, for his eyes glowed, and his breath came quickly.

“There is something, Jack. Tell me what it is!”

“I'd like to be a soldier like my father,” he said in a low voice, the extravagant, glowing fancies that had haunted him for six months thus finding half-choked expression.

“Your father?” asked Clytie, taken aback, and diverging into the side track of her astonishment. “I never knew you had—I mean, I thought you did not know anything at all about him. You used not to tell me the truth, then, Jack.”

“Oh! but I did not know then!” he cried eagerly. “It was only when I come here at Christmas, and you was ill, so I couldn't tell you. He was a soldier, my father, an orficer. And I would like to be an orficer too.”

“Really, Jack, this is very interesting,” said Clytie. “Aren't you pleased to have a father you can be proud of? Was he a very brave man?”

“He had a sword,” said Jack proudly, as if that was proof positive of valour.

“Come and sit down in your old place on the hearthrug and tell me all about him.”

The boy did as he was bidden, sinking somewhat shyly at first on to the great bearskin at Clytie's feet. But after a while he huddled himself up in his old posture.

“Mother didn't tell me much,” he said in answer to a question of Clytie's. “I was looking in a chest of drawers of mother's, and I see a photograph—an orficer—all over strings and buttons and a sword and great big moustaches. And I come to mother and says: 'Who's this?' and she says: 'That's your father.' And then she snatched it out of my hand and hit me a clout on the head for going to her drawer. She wouldn't tell me no mere; but I know he was an orficer because he's got a star on his collar. I think I knows orficers when I sees them,” he added, with the ci-devant street urchin's knowledge of life. “And I go and look at him now when mother isn't by.”

“But you shouldn't go to your mother's private drawers,” said Clytie by way of moral precept.

“I've got as much right to look at my father as she has,” replied Jack in an injured tone, whereat Clytie laughed a little.

“You are an odd youth. I wish I could make you an officer right away. But I am afraid I can't.”

“I believe you could,” said Jack.

There was a world of childish faith in the remark and the manner in which it was delivered. Clytie was both touched and saddened. She regretted that she had raised hopes in the boy that from the nature of things were doomed to disappointment. The overpowering difficulties in the way of her sudden visionary aspirations for Jack's future ranged themselves before her mind. So it was with a sigh she answered his outburst of faith.

“I am afraid I can't, Jack,” she repeated. “But you yourself can do a great deal. If you like, one of these days when you are much older, you can enlist in the army, and then throw your soul into your duties, and keep before you at every minute of the day the words, 'I am going to be an officer,' and if you do this intensely, and never lose sight of it, you will succeed. That's the only way. They call it getting a commission through the ranks. But between now and then there are a great many years, and I'll do all I can for you, Jack. Yet, perhaps, after all, you'd be a happier and more useful man as a carver and gilder. Who knows!”

Jack did not heed the pessimism of the peroration. His mind was aflame with the possibilities of becoming an officer and he took his leave in high spirits.

Clytie sat for a little musing over the solution of the problem that had troubled her in the first days of her acquaintance with Jack. She was gratified at her intuitions having proved correct. But there was still much that was dark to her. The physiological side of the question, however, was shadowed at present by more practical considerations. Why could she not find a means of giving Jack a chance in life? She looked ahead at the years to come, as she often had done since that dark December morning, and a pain came at her heart as she beheld their blankness. And now fate had thrown across her path this drifting spar of humanity. Jack was hers if she chose to claim him. No one would dispute with her the privilege.

After luncheon she walked to the King's Road and sat with Winifred, in the hope that Kent would look in on his way upstairs. She wanted to take counsel with him. His sturdy common sense would help her. She did not confide her vague scheme to Winifred, because Winifred would have called her a darling, and put her arms round her neck, and made her feel as if she were meditating something peculiarly noble. So she waited for Kent's sobering presence.

He came in at his customary hour, bearing a paper bag of peaches which he had brought for Winifred. He had carried them from some distance through the streets, and there were little wet stains on the paper. But when the fruit was put on a plate beside the bread and butter on a flap of the wickerwork afternoon tea table it looked fresh and inviting. This sudden return of their old intimacy was delightful to all three of them, and they chatted during tea as if nothing had happened to break it.

Then Clytie propounded her case, and they formed themselves into a committee to consider it.

“I don't like social experiments,” said Kent. “It's constituting one's self a Providence without Providence's resources. If one bit of the machinery fails, the whole thing is apt to go wrong.”

“But I don't want to experiment!” cried Clytie. “It's quite wicked of you to say so.”

“How can it be otherwise?” asked Kent. “You want to put an industrial school boy of the most unconventional type and upbringing into the most caste-bound, conventional profession under the sun. It's like putting a bit of metallic sodium into water. A pretty experiment, though rather common; but the result is an explosion.”

“But he must be trained and made a gentleman first,” cried Winifred, coming to Clytie's assistance.

“Of course,” said Clytie. “Should he ever be able to get into the army, he will be by that time quite a different being to what he is now.”

“Then you'll have to give him a rigid, conventional training, and so spoil him,” said Kent.

“It wouldn't spoil him to learn to speak the Queen's English and the use of his knife and, fork,” said Clytie a little defiantly.

“He'd have to learn more than that. Besides, how is he to be taught?”

“That's what I've come to you for advice about.”

Kent mused for a moment and stroked his beard.

“Are you very much bent upon this?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Then I can only see one way.”

“Well—and that?”

“Adopt him,” said Kent. “An industrial school boy can be run by a committee—the experiment is not very dangerous, but a conventional gentleman must have conventional references.”

His first words struck the chord she had shrunk from striking herself. It was the formulated suggestion of a vague desire. She was silent for a little. Then Winifred in response to a business summons went out on to the landing, and Kent and Clytie were left alone.

“I am afraid I have been too downright and have hurt you,” he said concernedly.

She shook her head and glanced at him smilingly.

“I came to you for common sense. You have given it me. And your conclusion is one that I dared not come to myself.”

“That you should adopt him? A reductio ad absurdum!”

“Yes, I feel it. I am not my own mistress now There are difficulties. Oh, Kent, don't let me talk of them! You see, I came to you for help—to no one else.”

“I don't quite understand you, Clytie,” said Kent, anxious at her sudden agitation.

She recovered herself, womanlike, and forced a laugh.

“If I were a rich, lonely old woman, I might be able,” she said, “but, you see, I'm not. No, no, I can't adopt Jack; and we'll have to run him by a committee, whatever happens to him.”

“Well, what have you decided?” asked Winifred, coming into the room.

“That it will be fairer to Jack to let him work out his own salvation,” said Kent. “Let him work his way through the ranks. If there is anything in him it will come out. You don't think me unkind, do you, Clytie?”

Whereat Clytie laughed honestly and Kent received much consolation.

They talked a little longer, on indifferent subjects, and then at Winifred's hour of departure they all rose together. Winifred went to the back of the studio and put on her hat; Clytie and Kent moved slowly in the direction of the door. Kent sighed a little.

“I only seem to have seen you for five minutes,” he said, “and I have told you nothing, but given you commonplace advice.”

“Had you so much to tell me?” she asked, smiling, as his unformulated wish echoed within herself. “There is no reason for us to go away because Winifred does. Would you really like to stay a little and talk to me?”

Before Kent spoke Clytie had not the faintest thought of doing this. But in a flash came before her the long evening she was to spend in the great lonely house. Thornton rarely came home for dinner. He even dressed at his club. Often he slept there. On such occasions the first notice Clytie received of his absence was from the inscrutable butler, who would come into the studio in the morning with: “The commissionnaire for master's letters, ma'am.” Occasionally three days passed without their meeting. When they did pass an hour in each other's company sometimes there was calm and sometimes storm. It depended upon his mood. As a general rule he was polite, even bright and entertaining, and life with him under these conditions was just bearable. But now the thought came with some bitterness: What did it matter whether she was at home by seven or eight—or twelve, for that matter? Why should she not have a cheery hour with Kent?

His face brightened as she made her smiling offer to stay.

“It is too good of you. Of course I should like to have a talk with you. But you—can you——”

“Oh, yes,” she interrupted lightly. “I am not due home at any hour. I want to chat with you myself. Winnie dear, we are going to remain a little. Give me the key and I'll hand it to Mrs. Gurkins as I go down. I haven't asked you, but I suppose we can?”

“Why, of course, darling,” said Winnie, coming up and giving her a farewell kiss. “I hate to think the studio isn't yours.”

So Winifred went away and they remained as in the old days. The sudden association gave Clytie a pang. A reaction from her enthusiasm about Jack to weariness of spirit made her sink back listlessly in her chair.

“What is the matter?” asked Kent, filling his pipe. “You are not looking yourself. It is this steaming London. Why don't you go and get some country air?”

“Oh, one place is just the same as another. It isn't London and it isn't the weather. It is the world that is out of joint, somehow. I am afraid I have been moping. I think I shall invest in a cat. Then I can pour out my grievances to it. That's the best of a cat: it never mopes. It goes on purring cheerfully so long as it's warm and well fed, and when you feel paradoxical it never worries you to explain yourself. Do you like cats? I forget.”

“What are you moping about?” he asked between the first few puffs of his kindling pipe.

“Oh, don't talk in that aggressively cheerful tone, Kent. I have come on all over moods, and I want comforting.”

“You should work,” replied Kent with some self-restraint. “You have hardly touched a brush in earnest this year. It is the claims of that part of your nature that cry out if they are not satisfied. Why don't you go on painting? What has the fact of your not having to make your living got to do with your art?”

“Everything, in a way,” she murmured.

“I can't believe it,” said Kent earnestly. “You are not the woman to neglect your art out of pure idleness. Come, Clytie, rouse yourself and paint a great picture. The 'Faustina'—what has become of that?”

“Oh, don't, don't!” she cried, putting her hands up before her face. “I can't do that now—can't think of it. Years hence, perhaps, when I am a middle-aged woman, if I find it good enough to live till then, I may try—but not now.”

Kent laid down his pipe and drew his chair near to her. He was pained and troubled. He saw that her nerves were a little unstrung; but the Clytie he knew was the last woman in the world to give way to attacks of this kind. And then a dreary conjecture dawned upon him, and his heart sank.

“My poor Clytie!” he said in his kind way. “You seem unhappy. I wish I could do something to help you.”

“Ah! it's too late now,” she said impulsively, scarcely heeding the purport of her words. “You might have done it eighteen months ago—if you had not been quixotic.”

“What do you mean?” he asked, more and more troubled and at fault. “Eighteen months ago? How could I have helped you? I loved you and hid it from you. I could only have caused you pain. I love you now. I don't hide it. Why should I? I am ready to help you if I can. I am stronger, wiser now than I was then. How could I have helped you then?”

The simplicity of his short, reiterative sentences and the sincerity of his tone went to her heart, “You could have helped me then by not hiding it.”

“I don't understand,” he said. “How could the knowledge that I loved you have helped you, unless you cared for me?”

“Perhaps I might have cared for you,” she said wearily.

“Oh, God, Clytie! don't say that. It is cruel!” he cried, starting to his feet in great agitation. “I know I acted like a fool, but it was with true motives. Don't twit me with them. It is more than I can bear.”

Only then did Clytie clearly realise what she had been saying. The fit of supreme dejection passed off as suddenly as it had come, and she felt keenly the justice of his words.

“Oh, Kent, Kent, forgive me!” she cried, with starting tears. “I hardly knew what I was saying. You are so noble and true-hearted that you must forgive me. Sometimes when a woman is wretched she has not control over herself, and I am sometimes very, very wretched, Kent. I was thinking of myself more than of you when I said the thing that pained you. Tell me that you forgive me.”

The appeal was too human, too unreserved, to be rejected by Kent's tender nature. He sat down again by her and took her hand and kissed it gently.

“I have never seen you like this before,” he said. “I wish I could comfort you.”

He knew that it was no passing irritation or weariness that forced the confession from Clytie's proud nature. It was something deep and final—something impossible in her married life. Her wretchedness made him forget his own longing in the desire to be of use to her and lighten her lot. He let go her hand, which she allowed to lie on her lap as it fell, with the palms lightly upwards.

“I don't know why I have told you this to-day,” she said, not meeting his eyes. “I have never breathed it or hinted it to a living being, and it came upon me unawares. Don't despise me, Kent.”

“Clytie!”

“Oh, yes. I know what any outsider would say. I was posing as the femme incomprise. I was casting away my womanly pride. Of all persons in the world you ought not to have been my confidant. Judged by conventional canons I am to be despised, for what can the world say of a woman who tells a man that still loves her that she regrets she did not marry him? Oh, don't interrupt me. I may as well speak out my true self once and for all to you. You yourself once remarked that if we were superior to conventionalities of habit, we ought to extend our unconventionalities to sentiment. You are loyal and staunch. You can help me by being my friend, for I have no one else to turn to. My life is a dreary mistake. My art does not satisfy me, because I have no hopes. One must have enthusiasms to be an artist, and all mine are dead. Now you know.”

There was a certain fierce pleasure in this self-abasement. It was like the vengeance of her higher nature upon her lower, the whip of scorn applied by the spirit to the flesh.

He did not answer, but looked at her with inexpressible sadness in his eyes. She added a few more words.

“If you despise me for telling you, let me know at once. It would be better.”

“God forbid!” he said in a low voice. “I shall never apply to you the conventional canons of misjudgment. I take what you have said to me as a sacred trust, and thank you from my heart for thinking well enough of me to give me your confidence. You must never ask me such a question again, Clytie, for it would wound me.”

“I believe you, Kent,” she said, raising her eyes to his in her frank manner. “And I was wrong to say you might have helped me, for you can now. And you will?”

“With my last breath,” said Kent simply. “It has been the torturing regret of the last eighteen months that, much as I wished, I could never do a hand's turn for you.”

“But what can I do for you in repayment, my poor Kent?”

“Be your own bright, eager self again. Throw yourself into your painting, and the result I will take as my reward. It will be my influence gleaming through your genius, and it will be sweet to me. Oh, Clytie! you are wrong. A life is seldom so wrecked that it cannot be reconstructed, for that implies the utter loss of faith. A grain of faith in anything can move mountains; if one hasn't it, then it is time to put an end to life altogether, it becomes one's duty not to live.”

“I came within an ace of that at the beginning of the year,” said Clytie, with a sad retrospective smile. “Some time I may tell you why. I thought of dying, but then it seemed cowardly. Perhaps it was I had more curiosity to go on seeing how the world went on than I was aware of. And now, Kent, you have put things in a new light before me, and how can I thank you for all your goodness?”

“I have told you,” he replied, with a smile.