The months passed. The decree nisi was pronounced, in due course made absolute. It was a period for Irene of entire calm and repose. The strong soul braces itself to stand the storm of great events; in the dull after-time it yields to the beseech-ings of the exhausted flesh. Day after day Irene read and thought and rested, scarcely desirous of other pursuits. Her outlook over men and things was narrowed within the horizon of an invalid or a prisoner. The waves of life beat unheeded against the fortress of her seclusion. Her servant Jane—who had begged to be taken into her service when the Sunnington establishment was broken up, on Gerard’s going abroad—the Cahusacs, and Hugh were the population of her universe. During these months of reaction and physical and moral apathy, she desired no more from life than immunity from its stress. An ample income, her own heritage, kept her assured against material cares, and the need of work for its own sake was stifled by the much greater need of self-reconstruction. And even after the healing of torn fibres, she loved the soothing calm of her lethargy.

Then, suddenly, a slight shock from the outer world gave a necessary stimulus. Hugh came to her one afternoon, in great excitement, brandishing an evening paper.

“The mystery is cleared at last! They have found the murderers. As I said all along—a common, sordid burglary!”

The discovery of some burglar’s tools buried in the wood behind The Lindens, coupled with the fact that, at the time of the murder, two well-known ticket-of-leave men had failed to report themselves, had put the police on the track. The miscreants were captured.

Irene revived, devoured greedily, during the succeeding weeks, the newspaper reports of the case. The wretches confessed during their trial; were eventually hanged. In spite of her own public disproof of Hugh’s guilt, she had never been able to free herself from the horrible feeling that he still walked before the eyes of the world under the black shadow of suspicion. This was eternally dispelled.

“Did you never think it possible,” said Hugh one day, “that I might have done it—in a fit of anger?”

“You would have given yourself up and faced the consequences like a man,” replied Irene.

When he mused, a while later, on the saying, a queer feeling of pity wove itself into his thoughts of her. If she only could see mortality in those upon whom she bestowed her affection or her friendship!

The awakened spirit of the woman rose with a hunger for fresh interests. To one with a keen mind, a fervent heart, and a full purse, London offers no lack of occupation. Gradually she gathered round her a little array of charitable duties, which she performed in quiet, unostentatious fashion. Again, the years of happy labour had borne ripe fruit of knowledge. She showed Hugh one day an article which she had written on “Some Unrecorded Facts of Infant Mortality.” In his enthusiastic way he bore it off to an editor of his acquaintance, who took it for his journal. It was the beginning of a series of articles signed “Delta” that attracted considerable attention. Thus Irene found a vocation. But being a very human woman, she sighed occasionally for that which she had surrendered and for the comfort that came not.

One afternoon Harroway stood in the street comically perturbed, watching the retreating figure of Hugh, who had marched away in great wrath. He shrugged his shoulders and returned to his office; but the perturbation remained and accompanied him home. It was his usual experience of Hugh Colman. The man was like a cigar that smokes mildly and comfortably until, piff! paff! with awful unexpectedness, some maliciously secreted gunpowder sends the thing to smithereens. Thus Harroway summed him up to his wife, during that evening’s dressing hour, while he tied his white tie. The imitations of the explosion, interrupting the operation and endangering the cambric, brought down conjugal rebuke.

“Your usual tact, I suppose, my dear,” said his wife suavely.

Harroway waited until the two little pats announced that he was well and duly cravatted and then burst out. Tact! If he had to humour Mr. Hugh Colman, whom on earth was he to speak straight to? A man who owed his first brief to him. A man whom he had set his heart on making the most brilliant advocate of the day—who had egregiously disappointed him. A man for whom he was even now trying to build up a chancery practice—Tact, indeed!

“You’ve said that so often, my dear,” said his wife. “If only you would tell me why he exploded to-day I might more readily sympathise with you.” Harroway explained. He had been lunching with Chevasse the artist. Talk had fallen upon Hugh and Mrs. Merriam. Chevasse, very broad-minded and kindly disposed to them both, had been talking the matter over with the Cahusacs. Mrs. Cahusac, of course, was unconventional enough to keep in with Mrs. Merriam, but Mrs. Chevasse was like Harroway’s own Selina, and drew certain lines.

“Very rightly,” interrupted Mrs. Harroway. “Hard and fast. Marriage lines.”

“Precisely,” said Harroway. “That’s Mrs. Chevasse’s attitude also. I uphold you. I’m fond of them both. I help Hugh all I can. Would help her if I could, but I’m not going to visit a woman my wife doesn’t visit. And my wife doesn’t countenance irregular liaisons. I’m old-fashioned enough to agree with you fully. Let them get married decently and we’d stretch a point. So would the Chevasses. One or two others doubtless would be ready to meet them. I dare say Gardiner and his wife. Everybody is sorry for them. As sorry as they are for Merriam. Somehow the luridness of the tragedy disposes people to forgive them.”

“The man’s pluck was heroic. Almost an atonement in itself,” said Mrs. Harroway. “Almost. So was the woman’s. But there is the eternal law, you know. Hundreds of women would be glad to meet Colman. You would, Selina.”

“Yes,” she replied frankly, “I should be willing to receive him, but he won’t come.”

“That’s where I admire the man. He mixes with men. Of course he’s obliged to. But he won’t cross the threshold of a woman who doesn’t receive Irene Merriam. He’s a strong-willed devil, and he’ll stick to that all his life. Selina, I wish to goodness I could believe the story she told Merriam! But it’s beyond possibility, and the other is only too miserably human.”

“If you want to get to Mr. Colman’s explosion, before the people come to dinner, Algernon, you had better make haste,” said his wife, fan and gloves in hand, advancing with the calm of buxom years to the ottoman where he was sitting.

“It will take you half an hour to put on your new gloves, my dear,” he retorted. He emphasised the fact of their newness, because he had brought them home with him that afternoon.

“So like a man,” murmured Mrs. Harroway.

“Well, sit down and I’ll tell you,” he said, making room for her on the ottoman.

She sat and busied herself with the gloves, and Harroway relapsed into narrative. In the middle of the discussion with Chevasse, in walked Hugh. The restaurant was one of his usual haunts. Sat down at their table, and talked about things in general in the charmingest of moods. One would have thought him the mildest mannered man—like Lambro.

“Like who?” said Mrs. Harroway.

“Don’t interrupt, we haven’t time,” replied Harroway with a chuckle.

He resumed. Chevasse went away, leaving him alone with Hugh. They had coffee, liqueurs, and cigars. Things very comfortable. Harroway enquired after Mrs. Merriam. She was well, though of course feeling the quietness of her life. She was writing on social subjects, under a pseudonym, and was making a little reputation. But it was bitter for her. Here was the chance. What need of tact?

Why didn’t he marry her? Hugh twirled his moustache. Selina knew the way. Began to look dangerous. He supposed that was what everybody was asking. There was no question of marriage between them. Never had been. Never would be. He drank off his coffee, threw away his cigar, and put his hands in his pockets. He worshipped the ground she trod on, said he; would give up his life for her any day. But no idea of marriage.

“Why not?” asked Mrs. Harroway, wide-eyed.

“I don’t know. How should I? I said it was his duty. Replies that he knows where his duty lies. I suggest that society demands it. He damns society. I get him to listen to me. Tell him about Chevasse. He looks at me with those blue sword-blade eyes of his, just as he looked at Hanna at the trial. ‘It’s for her sake,’ I said. ‘Pardon an old friend’s bluntness.’ ‘Of course I pardon anything you choose to say, you know that well enough,’ he replied. So I went on; told him that every woman in her position was not offered such a chance of social recognition. He calls the waiter, tosses him some silver, waves him away with a lordly gesture as he fumbles for change, and gets up. I accompany him to the street. ‘It’s very good of your wife and Chevasse—tell them so,’ says he, ‘but I’m not going to do it.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘it’s scarcely honourable, Hugh.’ Whereupon he grips me on the shoulder—the rheumatic one, my dear; I feel it now—and bawls out, ‘Damn it, man, if you think me an infernal blackguard say so at once.’ I was nettled—also in physical pain—so I did say it. And then he gave his shoulders a shrug and stalked away like a madman.”

Mrs. Harroway looked at him demurely. “I suppose you think you managed it all beautifully.” Then she laughed. But Harroway got up indignant.

“Hang it all, Selina!” he exclaimed, “I did expect a little sympathy from you.”

Whereupon she mollified him, so that he should eat his dinner with an unruffled mind, and thus avoid indigestion. A wife’s thoughtfulness is often very far-reaching.

Meanwhile Hugh had marched away in great wrath from his friend and benefactor. A man in a false position is apt to be unreasonable. Harroway should have taken it for granted he was acting honourably to Irene. Society generally ought to take it for granted. The irony of his friends’ kind suggestion was a red rag to his anger. Marry her! It was a palpitating vision of a paradise in this world for which he would cheerfully accept damnation in the next. Even were he not tied to Minna for life, and were free to ask Irene, sheer honour and loyalty forbade him to go to her with protestations of passion. She did not love him in the common way of women. Thus there was a double barrier to the fool wish of that composite fool society! And the maddening part of it was the impossibility of saying the words and bringing forward the proofs to convince it of its folly.

If he had loved her loyally through her married life, he loved her now with a new reverence. A new sacredness had arisen in his conception of his attitude toward her, such as had not hitherto invested his thoughts of women, and her influence had made itself felt in his work-a-day life. He had vowed he would never again plead in a criminal court, and had kept his vow. He was struggling to carve out a career in chancery practice. He had to supplement his income with irregular journalism. It was a hard battle; but he was not a beaten man. If he needed stimulus there were flashing goads in Irene’s eyes.

On this evening he had arranged to dine with her at seven. It had just struck the hour when he arrived at her flat in Kensington. Jane, who opened the door, greeted him with a smile, hung up his overcoat, and showed him into the drawing-room. Irene threw down her book beside her on the sofa, and rose in her quick, impulsive fashion.

“At last. You are two minutes late. They have been tedious.”

He looked at her, his eyes strangely blinded. The gradation from her customary laughing tenderness into something tenderer had been imperceptible. Perhaps to her as much as to him.

“A welcome like that is sweet after a day’s work,” he said. “And I haven’t seen you for forty-eight hours.”

“Very dull ones, I assure you. I have striven to improve them. A harder task than the busy insect’s.”

“Gathering honey out of blue-books?”

He indicated a couple of government publications lying open, face downwards, on an arm-chair.

“Horrid things!” cried Irene, pouncing on them and stowing them beneath a chiffonnier on the other side of the room. “I am tired of them. Let us be happy this evening, and forget their existence.”

A glance of surprised questioning met her. Usually she was eager to talk of her pursuits.

“I have a great need of happiness, you know, Hugh,” she continued, rather defiantly. “I could suck up an ocean of it, like an infinite sponge.”

Then she laughed, and turning away to her writing table swept the loose sheets of manuscript lying on it into a drawer.

“You see, I’m beginning to cultivate nerves.”

He watched her somewhat anxiously. She was looking pale this evening, and her grey eyes were more lustrous than usual. A faint pearl-coloured gown unrelieved by a spot of brighter colour accentuated the delicacy of her face.

“You are overworking yourself, Renie. Needlessly. You want a holiday—a change to sunshine and blue skies.”

“I want my dinner,” said Irene. “Here it is.”

Jane made formal announcement. They went into the little dining-room, where the table was daintily set with flowers, bright silver and glass.

“You are wrong,” she said quietly, as she helped the soup. “I am not overworking myself. I sleep like a top and haven’t an ache or pain in my body.”

“Still a change of air would do you no harm.”

She assented with idle interest. Where should she go? He suggested Spain. Zaraws, not far from St. Sebastian, on the Bay of Biscay; fairly secure from English; warm, picturesque, with the comforts of a civilised hotel. From personal acquaintance he launched forth into glowing description. The golden sands and the purple seas of the south. The olive gardens with their shivering silver and green. The dark-eyed Basques. The wealth of sun and colour. Irene leant her elbow on the table and her eyes dwelt softly on him.

“Does it please you?” he asked.

“The way you talk of it does. I would sooner have that. It does me more good. You always speak as if the subject of the moment were the one interest of your life. I wish you had a parliamentary career before you.”

He laughed. “That is dangerously near satire, Renie.”

“Women only use satire when they want to hurt, and to hurt deeply,” she said. “I want to—” She stopped, embarrassed.

“What?” he asked.

Her eyes fell before his. She made a pretence of eating. Jane entered with the next course. They discussed the weather, until she had retired.

“What could I do to make your life happier, Renie?” he asked. A futile question; yet men will continue to put it.

“What can I do to make yours happier? That is the all-important point to me.”

“Nothing,” he said in a low voice.

“This is the happiest time of my life.”

“There is nothing I could do—beyond asking you to dinner?”

“Nothing,” he repeated. “If there were, I should tell you.”

“You have only to ask,” said Irene.

Woman could say no more. There was a short silence. Hugh understood—yet did not divine. The inner man fell at her feet, blessing her for her sweet graciousness of surrender. He was fine enough to perceive that she was grateful to him for restraining expression of the love long known to her, and that her words were meant to relieve him of the obligation to which he had bound himself. But it was divine and tender charity. Nothing more. It was her way to reward royally out of proportion to services rendered.

“Life is a queer tangle,” he remarked after a while.

“The art of unravelling it is the art of living. But one must hold the master thread.”

“The master thread is work,” said Hugh, forcing his tone to lightness.

“No.”

“What is it, then?”

She did not answer. A little involuntary sigh fluttered her bosom.

“I wish I could put you back into your bright circle, Renie,” he said, putting his own interpretation upon her mood. With Harroway’s words fresh in his memory, his heart grew heavy.

“Yes, I miss my friends,” she replied absently.

The talk dropped a little. She stayed with him while he smoked his cigarette, and then they went into the drawing-room. Hugh drew her chair to the fire, set a footstool for her feet, and placed a cushion behind her head. She thanked him shyly, trying to keep back a rush of thoughts. Gerard had never done such a thing for her in his life. Suddenly tears came into her eyes. Hugh bent over her, in some concern.

“My poor Renie.”

She smiled as she wiped the tears away.

“The past sometimes hurts,” she said. “But the present is healing it.”

Again their talk languished, strangely lacking spontaneity. The breath of a new influence was hovering round them. At last Hugh rose to go.

“You look so tired that I won’t keep you up any longer. God bless you for what you have said this evening.”

She turned her head aside quickly and began to tremble a little. He could see the flush rising on the sweet contours of her temples, and losing itself in the shadow of her hair. “Then you did understand?” she murmured.

“Yes. But it was the angel and not the woman that spoke,” he said rather huskily. “Besides, I could never ask you for what I did not feel myself free to accept.”

She turned and faced him, looking him bravely in the eyes, while the flush flamed into scarlet.

“You will never think—as other men might think——?”

Her insinuation flashed for the first time through his mind—that she was urging him to marry her for social reasons.

“Good God, no!” he said. “Don’t speak of it.”

A moment afterwards they parted, and Hugh rushed down the stairs with his temples buzzing.