Meanwhile a problem of some complexity remained to be solved. Hugh devoted the morning’s clear-headedness to vain attempts at solution. From the position in which he found himself there was no issue without a loss of honour. The prospect chafed him like a hair-shirt. If he had erred, in times past, far from the paths of the homely virtuous, he had at least despised the crooked ways of the smugly vicious. He had been the thief of no woman’s virtue. Such remnants of it as had come into his possession he had paid for right royally. There is a difference between sinning en prince and sinning en voyou, in spite of the moralist. Hugh was an honourable man. At least, he desperately clung to such a conception of himself. Three courses lay open. To abandon Minna altogether, to make her his mistress, to make her his wife. By adopting any one of these, he would find himself forsworn.

He journeyed up to his chambers in a denunciatory attitude of mind. Subjects for anathema were plentiful. His own folly in borrowing the £5,000 from Israel Hart; his greater folly in incurring the debts towards the payment of which that sum had been mainly devoted; his uncle for having played this April fool’s trick upon him, and, lastly, the fate that had robbed him of Irene—a clause that invariably terminated his commination. Three solid, middle-aged city men were travelling in his compartment. They appealed to his fancy as potential Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar. If he had lifted up his voice like Job, they would obviously have told him that it served him right. The parallel put him into a good humour.

Shortly after his arrival, a telegram came from Minna. Could she see him for a minute to-day? And if so, where? She could meet him at any place and at any hour. It was only to see that he was not vexed with her. She had passed a wretched night and was depressed. It was a long, impulsive message, regardless of the principles of condensation, and couched in German, so as not to become the common property of the young ladies at the Sunnington telegraph office. Hugh despatched an answer, making an appointment at three o’clock, in his chambers. At a quarter past, Minna appeared, blushing, introduced by the clerk. Her pretty apologetic air compelled reassuring endearments. Of course she was dearly welcome. The whole of the dingy room was lit up with her charms. The very wig-block was beaming at her. She laughed happily, turned towards the object indicated, and seized the wig. Would he put it on for her to see? She would fix it herself. No, she didn’t like him in it. He looked too wise.

They had a lover’s hour, vowed they would conjure light out of darkness and be each other’s before long. A formal demand in marriage was out of the question. Israel Hart would not give his daughter to a penniless barrister and starveling poet, who owed him money. And Hugh’s soul sickened at the thought of asking him. Besides he had expressed his desire that Minna should marry a friend of his, appropriately named Goldberg, who kept an extensive bucket-shop in Gracechurch Street. To inform her father would put an end to everything. He would carry her off and shut her up like DanaË in a brazen tower, into which Goldberg would Zeus-wise insinuate himself—this time at Aczisius’s invitation. Hugh proposed a two years’ private engagement, during which period he would bestir himself strenuously to make his fortune. Minna acquiesced, but only with the outside of her lips. She was not accustomed to wait for what she desired. And, for the matter of that, neither was Hugh. At any rate, things were moved a stage further during the visit. Before she departed, she desired of him perfect secrecy. He was to keep it from everybody—and Mrs. Merriam. He agreed.

“I shall certainly not tell Mrs. Merriam,” he replied, dryly.

She cast him a quick, suspicious glance out of otherwise glowing eyes. Then she bade him farewell, and tripped through the door that he held open for her.

The following day was Sunday. Although the season was the end of March, there had been a sudden cold snap. In the night the temperature had fallen and the wind risen. The morning gave the spectacle of a blizzard, driving sleet and snow. Hugh laid down the rough pencilled scraps of the verses he had been polishing, and went to look disconsolately out of the window. The prospect was uninviting; scarcely anything visible through the vibrating screen of swift, horizontal grey lines. He had agreed to meet Minna at noon, weather permitting, in the little patch of wood that stretched behind The Lindens, her father’s house, to more or less open country. The weather was hardly in a permissive mood. He felt that he could annul the engagement with a free conscience. It would be madness of Minna to expect its fulfilment. But knowing that a woman in love is capable of many madnesses, he resolved to keep his tryst on the chance of being able to despatch her summarily home again. He started out, with ulster collar drawn up to his ears, and thick gloves, and strode fast through the gale along the deserted pavements. At the appointed spot in the wood he waited for a quarter of an hour. Minna did not come. He congratulated her on her common sense, greater than his own, and retraced his steps. As he emerged from the branch lane leading from the wood on to the heath road, and meeting the latter at a point somewhat nearer the Merriams’ house than The Lindens, he was passed by a hansom cab, the window of which was down. After a few yards, the trap door in the roof was pushed open and the cabman drew up. Hugh approached, and perceived through the side glass Irene’s expectant face. On the window being pulled up, he saw her sitting in the chilliness of an indoor silk blouse, while by her side, huddled up in her sealskin jacket, was a dirty, emaciated, shivering little girl.

“What a lucky chance to have passed you!” cried Irene; “will you do something real kind for me?”

“Anything in the world. I suppose I’m to fetch a doctor,” he replied, with an eye on her new protÉgÉe.

“No. I’ll send Jane, if necessary. Go round to this little creature’s home and tell them she is ill and that I’ll take care of her for to-day, and if they like I’ll find a decent place for her. She lives with an uncle and aunt, who beat her. Fancy sending out a child, with nothing on, to sell violets on a day like this!”

“Where do they live?”

“At 24 George Street—in the slums at the back of the station. Their name is Jackson. Come back and tell me. I’ll give you some lunch.”

Hugh nodded, stepped back, gave the word to the driver and the cab started off. He trudged along in its wake, amused and touched by the little scene. He could imagine Irene first catching sight of the child, her indignant whipping off of her sealskin, putting the child into the cab, arranging everything off-hand, in her undoubting, imperial fashion. He smiled, too, at her unhesitating anticipation of his immediate acceptance of his mission. It was well that there was a woman like Irene in the world. As he passed by the house, he saw her figure flit quickly across an upper window. He pictured her stirring up the maids, getting a hot bath ready, and kneeling before the fire with a roll of flannel in her hands—the light playing in her fair hair and illuminating her face. He dwelt upon the picture until he had reached his destination.

He found Mrs. Jackson. Her husband was not in. If one judged from his home, he was certainly at that moment hugging the lee-side of a public-house doorway, waiting for opening time. The room was filthy. Mrs. Jackson, if possible, filthier. Her habitual speech, as Hugh shortly discovered, was filthy in the superlative degree. She was also perceptibly drunk. There was an apology for a bed in the room; but in a corner lay some sacking and a bundle of rags, evidently the child’s sleeping place. Hugh explained his mission; to his surprise, met with instant success. Mrs. Jackson did not see why she should support a child that was nothing to her. She was expecting a sanguinary one of her own shortly. If anyone else cared to support her, they were welcome.

For all she cared, they could take her to a much warmer place than Irene’s fireside.

“It’s all right,” he said to Irene, when she came down to the hall to meet him.

“Good,” she said. “Come upstairs for a moment.”

She turned abruptly and he followed. He knew the signs of Irene’s indignation.

Snugly in bed, in the room that former tenants had fitted as a nursery—but unused now for that purpose, to Irene’s wistful regret—her one sadness—lay the little girl. Irene went up to her, drew back the bedclothes and tenderly exposed her shoulders and bosom.

“Look,” she said.

He bent over; the flesh was livid with bruises.

“I should like to go among them with a flaming sword,” she cried, “and sweep them off the face of the earth.”

“I wish you could, before the child they are expecting is born to them,” he said, grimly.

He sketched his visit. Irene gave but half heed. His first remark had struck a strongly vibrating chord.

“Let us pray to God that it is never born alive,” she said. “To think that such brute-beasts can have a child and—oh, why are they allowed to bring them into the world, and given the most glorious privilege of humanity?”

“The next best privilege is to be able to do what you’re doing now,” said Hugh, consolingly.

“But what is it, after all? It is like trying to stop an avalanche and just getting hold of a handful of snow.”

“Well, you’ve got your handful.”

“Poor little thing,” said Irene.

She tucked the clothes around her, and, after a few nurse-like touches to the arrangements of the room, took Hugh downstairs. Lunch was ready. They sat down together. Gerard was absent on his fishing visit. They imagined him glowering at the weather through Weston’s dining-room windows.

“What will he say to our little friend upstairs?” asked Hugh, helping himself to claret.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you can’t settle her comfortably for life at a moment’s notice.”

Irene opened her eyes wide.

“Do you mean that he won’t be pleased to have her here? My dear Hugh!”

He smiled inwardly, but prudently changed the topic; enquired as to her discovery of the child. “Why was she herself out in such awful weather?”

“I was taking some trifles to a girl who is ill,” she answered. The rest of her explanation agreed with Hugh’s conjecture. Driving back, she had seen a woman trying to get the child on its feet. She had stopped the cab and swooped off with her prize.

“But you needn’t have risked your own life by taking off your sealskin and coming home in that flimsy thing,” he said, with a smile. “Even St. Martin didn’t do that.”

“Do you know,” she replied, with a charming viciousness, and leaning over the table, “I consider St. Martin one of the meanest characters in history!”

Some time after lunch, the servant came into the smoking-room and announced that Mr. Jackson had called.

“He’s a very horrid-looking man, ma’am,” she remarked.

“I’ll go and settle him,” said Hugh, rising.

“No. Let me. I shall enjoy it,” replied Irene.

And she departed, with the light of battle in her eyes. She met the man in the hall. He began to bluster. Hugh, by a turn of the passage, stood an unobserved spectator.

“You’re not going to have the child back,” said Irene.

“Then I’ll have compensation,” said the man.

“I’m not going to give up my wife’s flesh and blood for nothing. ’Tain’t likely—we’re poor folks and the kid earns a little.”

“More shame for you—a great hulking brute like you.”

“I don’t mind taking five pounds.”

“You won’t get a half-penny.”

“Then out I goes to fetch a policeman.”

He moved towards the door. Irene took a step forward.

“You dare threaten me!” she cried. “You! Get out of my house and never let me hear of you again, or, as there’s a Lord in heaven, I’ll put the Children’s Protection Society on your tracks and you’ll see the inside of a gaol.”

Whether it was the threat or Irene’s shining eyes that cowed the man, Hugh could not tell. He slunk away with muffled maledictions and banged the street door after him. Hugh ran to meet her, his heart aglow with her. It was the eternal combat of Mithra and Ahriman. He broke into boyish eulogies. She laughed a little excitedly and wiped her lips with her handkerchief.

“Let us go back to the smoking-room. The foul beast! The whole air tastes of him.”

“You have a delicious way of setting the law of England at defiance,” he said, laughing.

“Bad laws ought to be defied,” she retorted, full of the flush of victory. Which exquisitely feminine conviction he had not the heart to disturb.

A little later she claimed his assistance in another matter.

“It’s the extension of premises for the Institution,” she said. “The plans came in yesterday and I can’t make head or tail of them.”

She produced the roll of plans from a corner, and spread the sheets on the desk. They bent over them together, and for a long time were deep in architectural discussion.

“It will take such a long time,” she said at last. “I wish I could have it all built to-morrow.”

“I have no doubt you could, if you really tried,” said Hugh. “You can bring most things to pass.”

The Institution was Irene’s pet philanthropic interest—a charitable organisation of which she was the founder and guiding principle. At first Gerard had scouted the scheme as entirely impracticable; but Irene had succeeded, and, devoting to it her impetuous energy, had lifted those around her to equal enthusiasm. Both Gerard and Hugh were members of the committee, and attended meetings with praiseworthy regularity.

Irene rolled up the plans and replaced them in their corner.

“How little we can do to alleviate the misery in the world!” she said, with a sigh.

Hugh smiled. “If you could only get a lever long enough and a fulcrum you would move the universe, like Archimedes. But you will have to get to heaven first.”

“That’s just the appalling part of the idea of heaven,” she answered. “As soon as you get there you are useless, utterly and besottedly useless. It’s the only terrible aspect of death, that whether there is an hereafter or not, you are cut off forever from doing a hand’s turn for your fellow creatures. Everything has to be done in the little sphere of your life—when lever and fulcrum are unattainable. I wonder sometimes that I can be happy. And yet I am—blessedly happy. Can you explain it?”

He replied vaguely, so as to hide betrayal of a little pang; for he knew her thoughts were with Gerard. Association brought his own to Minna for the first time almost since he had caught sight of Irene in the cab. Dismaying comparisons forced themselves on his mind.

“Why are you frowning like that?” she asked, lightly.

“I was thinking of all the happiness you deserve.”

She laughed, with a little air of mockery.

“Does it distress you so much?”

“I suppose it does,” he said. “Now it is your turn to explain.”

But Irene, like a wise woman, dropped the subject.