“T ELL me, Harroway,” said Gerard, “you who are the friend of us all, and would like to defend both my wife and Colman, does her story hold water?”

“I should let things alone for the present,” replied the lawyer, cautiously; “make investigations, give her for the while the benefit of the doubt.”

“But there can’t be any doubt. The whole thing hangs together. Colman was over head and ears in love with her before our marriage. He has been openly in love with her ever since. They have been associated in all her confounded schemes and philanthropies. He was always on her tongue and in her thoughts—always in the house when I wasn’t there. I remember he wanted to jump down my throat once because I suggested Irene had her faults like others. Look at those poems of his addressed to her. All the same story. This charge of murder is brought against him. His mouth is closed. For a time I didn’t believe the woman plea. However, we all agreed there was one. Who could it be? All of us floored. My wife half dead with anxiety—yet going through it day by day. We know what women can bear when it’s a question of concealment—a woman the other day was delivered of a child during a ball, and returned smiling to the ball-room—you saw the case. I don’t call Irene’s attitude any criterion of innocence. She keeps it up to the end. But when the rope is round his neck, her nerve gives way, and the whole thing comes out. Put upon oath, she gives it cut and dried—as cynically as you please—a woman all over. There’s no getting out of it. And I—I am the common mock of England.”

He spoke quietly, with an air of outraged dignity that won Harroway’s sympathy.

“It’s a miserable business altogether,” said the latter, biting the end of his quill-pen, as he sat in his leathern office-chair, pushed back slightly from the table.

“Then you agree with me that her explanation is preposterous?”

“The other thing bears the greater stamp of probability,” replied Harroway. And thus was Irene judged. Gerard felt relieved. Harroway’s opinion was of a certain value. It was sure to be the keynote of that of the Merriams’ social circle in which the old solicitor was an influential member, and Gerard was anxious to learn how society would take his divorce. For that purpose he had sought out Harroway in his office and plunged into the midst of things, with a frankness that was not altogether characteristic. He had gained his first point—a definite verdict against Irene. He himself believed her guilty. But a lurking, uncomfortable suspicion that proof of her innocence might not sing with his heart’s secret wishes made him distrustful of his own judgment. The contemplation of divorce was accompanied by sundry pricks of conscience. A vague fear assailed him that society might take Irene’s side. He sought the support of public opinion to bolster up a not too stout courage. He had a dim feeling that, in spite of his willingly jealous belief in her guilt, he was about to do Irene a great wrong by divorcing her.

“I am not a revengeful man, Harroway,” he said after a few moments’ silence. “I am only anxious to put an end to a tie the continuance of which would be a farce. It is not even as though I were putting her to public shame. She has done that herself already.”

“Then I would not be precipitate,” said Harroway. “You might feel disposed to forgive her. Such things have happened to men without loss of dignity.”

“I’m not going to forgive her. I don’t think she would desire it. The fact is our marriage has been a sham from the beginning. If I divorce her, she can marry Colman. I’m not likely—God forbid—to tie myself to a woman again. So it’s not for my sake. If I were seeking vengeance I should keep her legally tied. And I shan’t sue for damages.”

“The action would have to be undefended.”

“Precisely,” said Gerard, with a slight flush. Harroway rose and took two or three turns about the room, his hands behind his back.

“I see no other way out of it, Merriam,” he said. “I was hoping you could forgive her—take her back, sometime. I am fond of her. In fact, fond of the three of you, confound it! The whole business has upset me. First the murder affair—and now this. Yes. It’s best. Let somebody be happy, at any rate. You are acting generously—but I’d like you to give her a little grace—unless time is important.”

“It is important,” said Gerard. “I want to get away. I don’t see why I should go on slaving at the bar any longer. If it hadn’t been for my wife I should have chucked it long ago. I have about six hundred a year of my own. Why the deuce should I worry myself?”

“What are you thinking of doing?”

“South Africa. Big game shooting. One of the dreams of my life. I’m sick of this atmosphere. I want to breathe freely. I know Freewintle—the big man at that sort of thing, you know. He’s going out in two or three months. I don’t see why I should lose the chance of going with him. So I should like to set everything straight by then.”

Harroway nodded his head with mournful assent.

“I can quite understand.”

He walked across the room, then back again and halted before Gerard.

“But you know, Merriam, I would willingly give a thousand pounds to have your wife proved innocent.”

“I would give all I have to be able to believe her,” returned Gerard. But his tone sounded disingenuous in his own ears.

“I am not going to ask you to act for me, professionally,” he added.

“I suppose not,” replied Harroway, drily.

They shook hands and parted. Gerard took a long breath as soon as he reached the open air, and the look of dignified sorrow vanished from his face. He walked through Lincoln’s Inn Fields with a step that was almost jaunty—greatly pleased by his visit.

If there had been anything mean or cruel in his proposed action, Harroway would have protested bluntly, for flabbiness of expression was not one of his characteristics. Obviously it was the only thing to be done. The sooner the better. As he turned into Chancery Lane a child held up to him a basket of violets. He bought a bunch, stuck it in his buttonhole, a thing which he had not done for years, being a man neglectful of spruceness in attire. He felt exhilarated, in holiday mood, experiencing a sensation of freedom from chafing constraints.

Two weeks had passed since his furious interview with Irene. He had spent them at his friend Weston’s place, alone, for the owner was absent, where he fished, and, between the rises, meditated on his wrongs. He had spoken to Irene in violent indignation and hatred, brutally, as the coarse-grained man does when he feels himself to be injured. Instinct, that explosion of a long-laid train of a thousand tiny sensations, had directed his blow against her most vital spot—her idealisation of himself. He had left her in passionate anger. It was well that he did not encounter Hugh that day. In the calm of the country life his anger cooled down, but it had engendered a crop of sentiments which, when he examined them, turned out to be not altogether disagreeable. As he was not the man to have his senses long led captive by the same woman, the honeymoon fervour of his attachment to Irene had grown cold for some years. The glowing passion of love, therefore, had not been outraged. As a matter of fact, he was tired of her, like thousands of men at the present moment, whom habit and sloth and kind integrity keep dully affectionate to their wives. He was tired of her effusiveness, of her strenuousness, of the high plane of feeling on which she seemed to live, and of her unremitting efforts to drag him thither. He had never felt at ease with her, had been forced to practise a thousand deceptions; to live, in short, a life alien to his nature. In the daily unconscious struggle between two individualities, the stronger and more finely tempered wins. Gerard had yielded simply because he had been afraid to resist. The subconsciousness of this moral flabbiness had always been present. It acted now as a forcing-bed for the above-mentioned crop of sentiments.

The violets in his buttonhole typified their bursting into riotous bloom. He walked across the Strand and down westward along the embankment, his veins tingling. The fresh breeze blowing against the tide raised a myriad ripples that sparkled in the sunshine. A gull that had strayed up river was hovering snow-white against the blue sky. The steamers, with their illusory air of crowded merriment, shot swiftly by, and gave a queer sense of the rushing life of liberty. Every man has certain moments of sensitiveness to external surroundings. With Gerard they were rare; but this was one. Life was holding out her promise, the world was before him. He felt magnanimous towards Hugh; almost grateful to him for having given him this opportunity of re-starting his existence. He was young still, only five-and-thirty. A recent legacy had put him beyond the necessity of working at an irksome and unremunerative profession. He leaned over the parapet by Somerset House, and in the factories across the water saw the wide stretching veldt and the lumbering bullock-carts and all the joys of the longed-for hunter’s life. A lingering respectability no longer sought to disguise the fact; he was heartily glad to be freed from Irene.

And so it happened that, some days afterwards, while Cahusac was sitting with Hugh before their hotel at Avignon, and opening the letters which the swarthy waiter had just brought, he was astonished to see Hugh start to his feet, and, white and trembling with passion, stare at a communication which he dashed presently upon the table.

“The villain—the damned villain!”

Cahusac queried mutely through his gold spectacles. “He is bringing an action for divorce—for divorce against her—do you understand?”

“Don’t shout so, man, and sit down,” said Cahusac, quietly. Hugh obeyed mechanically, tore at his great moustache, and went on in a voice rendered hoarse by his effort to keep it within conversational tones:

“He believes that story. Is proceeding on the strength of it. A woman who idolised him, made him her god—-the veriest cur would have understood. My God! Cahusac, I’ll go back at once and shoot him on sight. He doesn’t deserve to live. To cast off a woman like that. By heaven, I’ll kill him.”

“Don’t talk like a madman,” said Cahusac.

“I can’t sit here. Come for a turn with me. I shall be better walking.”

Cahusac stuffed his correspondence into his pocket and accompanied him out of doors. They passed beneath the frowning mass of the old Palace of the Popes, with its innumerable towers and machicolated battlements, and reached the outer boulevards. The mid-day sun beat fiercely down. Below them lay the blue Rhone, winding through this garden of Southern France. The sun, the scene, and Cahusac’s quiet yet sympathetic common sense gradually calmed Hugh’s blazing anger.

“Had you no suspicion that it might come to this?” asked Cahusac, as they walked along under the trees.

“None whatever. Do you think if I had, I should have loitered about here? I knew he had quarrelled with her. She told me. I could see nothing unnatural in it. There are some sacrifices beyond the power of the average man. She thought he was equal to herself. I didn’t. At least for a day or two I did—just after the trial. Then came disillusion. You were right in what you said about knowledge of men. One can only test them by tempest. This one has been tested. He’s no better, no worse, than that fellow over there with the white umbrella and the rolls of fat at the back of his neck. In fact, I was obliged, after a time, to sympathise with him. What right had I to expect that a man would make such a sacrifice for me? I was powerless to reconcile them. It was her urgent wish that I should disappear for a few weeks—until things got settled. But I never, for one second, thought he doubted. We have been friends from childhood, he and I—intimates. He knows every syllable that has ever passed between his wife and myself. A thunderbolt out of this blue sky could not appall me more than this ghastly news.”

“To tell you a secret,” said Cahusac, “I saw the clay feet of the idol long ago. A good fellow in his way—the average sensual man.”

“The discovery must be killing her,” said Hugh. “I wonder why she did not tell you before you started.”

“I don’t pretend to know. She had her reasons. I am quite satisfied. I could never put her into the dull category of common women. And to think that that man—Cahusac, he can’t believe it of her. Some infernal villainy is at work.”

He broke forth again. Cahusac quietly listened out the torrent of indignation. It held elements of the rhapsodic that interested him.

They returned through the town. Hugh rushed into the telegraph office and despatched a message:—

“Are you mad? I am coming.”

“I hope you have done nothing rash,” said Cahusac, who had waited for him outside.

“I’ve told him that I am coming. I must go back straight, Cahusac. It is treating you miserably. But you see I can’t go on. I must see him—put a stop to this infamous business—drag him to his knees before his wife.”

“Take a sober man’s advice, Colman,” said the other, “and have it out with Mrs. Merriam first.”

Hugh’s eyes flashed and his lips curled in a smile beneath his moustache. Superfluous counsel! His heart hungered for her. There was a spice of irony in his thanks.

A few hours later Cahusac accompanied him to the railway station. The final adieux came.

“I owe you a great debt of gratitude, Cahusac,” said Hugh.

“I have enjoyed every minute of the holiday,” replied the other heartily.

“So have I. It has made a fresh man of me. I can face this now, thanks to you. If it had come on top of all the rest, I believe it would have floored me. A man is only capable of a certain amount of convulsion at a time.”

They parted, and the great P. L. M. train carried Hugh swiftly northwards. He had spoken truly. He was under a deep obligation to the quiet, kind-hearted man whose calm judgment and equable nature formed a complete sedative to the fever of his mind, whose companionship was a cool hand on a hot brow. A great need of expansion had been the reaction from the intense restraint of the month preceding his trial. His thoughts paid Cahusac grateful tribute.

A study of time-tables suddenly brought him to realisation of the date. It was the anniversary of his wedding day. The first. It was scarcely credible. The disastrous twelvemonth, viewed in retrospect, seemed a space of many years. The memory of the first wedded kiss of Minna’s young ripe lips came faintly as if from a far past, yet not without a spasm of revulsion; the memory of a succubus. Elemental sex feelings, determining hatred, bend a man’s judgment of a woman to elemental fierceness. For this reason often are women beaten. He tried to shake off the haunting sense of her caresses—to bury her existence in oblivion. But she was too essential a factor in this ruin of lives amongst which he was walking. What had become of her? He clenched his hands together, and wished that she was dead.

Yet what was she doing? The petty and incongruous question teased him.

A train whirred past. Was it a strange fatality, or an equally strange telepathic sub-consciousness? In that train was Minna, convalescent after a long illness, being carried on to Marseilles, where she was to catch the steamer to Smyrna. So husband and wife passed each other in the darkness, on the first anniversary of their wedding-day, and the soul of each was filled with passionate repudiation of the other. And in either case the starry woman, whom one worshipped and the other dreaded and envied, was the determining cause.