JOHN RISCA, at thirty-four, with a ward of twenty, and with the normal hope of a man's life withered at the root, regarded himself as an elderly man. He looked older than his years. Ragged streaks of gray appeared in his black hair, and the lines deepened on his heavy brow. There are some men who, no matter what their circumstances may be, never take themselves happily. To do so is a gift; and it was denied to John Risca.

Two years had passed since his wife's release. During the years of their separation before her imprisonment, she had counted for little in his thoughts save as a gate barring the way to happiness. She had never molested him, never stood in the way of his ordinary life. In her prison she had begun by being a horror haunting his dreams; gradually she had dwindled into a kind of paralyzed force, had faded into a shadow incapable of action. But since her return to the living world he had felt her hatred as an influence, vague, but active, let loose upon the earth. He dreaded contact with her, however indirect, and through whatever agency; but contact was inevitable. Whereas formerly she had been content to live according to the terms of their agreement on separation, now she made demands. One of them, however, he considered reasonable. In Smith Street, the scene of her misdeeds, she led the life of a pariah dog. She was friendless. Her own relatives had cast her off.

The tradespeople round about supplied her reluctantly with necessaries and refused to exchange words with her when she entered their shops. Children hooted her in the streets. John, foreseeing unpleasantness, had offered to find her a home in the country. But this, being town-bred, she had declined. Let her change her name, she urged, and seek other London quarters. He agreed. She adopted the name of Rawlings and moved to a flat off the Fulham Road. To the suggestion of a different part of London altogether she turned a deaf ear. She had lived in that neighbourhood all her days and would feel lost elsewhere. The common Londoner has almost the local instinct of a villager. She would also, she said, be near her mother, who still let lodgings in Brompton.

“If your mother refuses to see you,” said John, when they were discussing the matter, “I see no reason for your being near her.”

She counselled him, in her vernacular, to mind his own business.

“So long as I don't come and live next to you, what have you got to do with it?”

“I certainly am not called upon to protect your mother,” said he. He smiled grimly, remembering the hard-bitten veteran of a thousand fights with impecunious and recalcitrant lodgers. She could very well look after herself.

The Bences, much against her will, though she dared not openly rebel, accompanied her to the flat. Her installation was expensive. He paid readily enough. But then came demands for money, insidious enough at first for his compliance, then monstrous, vindictive. She incurred reckless debts; not those of a woman who desires to make a show in the world by covering herself with costly dresses and furs and jewels or by dashing about in expensive equipages.

That side of life was unfamiliar to her, and class instinct quenched the imagination to crave it. She had been bred to regard cabs as luxuries of the idle rich, and it never occurred to her to travel in London otherwise than by omnibus or rail. Her wilful extravagance was of a different nature. She ran up bills with the petty tradesmen of the neighbourhood for articles for which she had no use; for flowers which she deliberately threw into the dust-bin; for ready-made raiment which she never wore,—jackets at three pounds, ten and six, and hats at ten shillings,—cheap jewelry, watches, and trinkets which she stored away in boxes. There was a gaudy set of furniture with which she bought a kind of reconciliation with her mother. When county-court summonses came in, she demanded money from John. When he refused, she posted him the summonses.

Meanwhile he found that she had struck up acquaintance with some helter-skelter, though respectable, folks in the flat below. The discovery pleased him. It is good for no human being, virtuous or depraved, to sit from month's end to month's end in stark loneliness. She forced him to the threat of revealing her identity to her new friends if she did not mend her ways. She mended them; but he felt his hands soiled by the ignoble weapons with which he had to fight.

After that she was quiet for months. Then one rainy afternoon, as he was walking downward with bent head, he ran into her in Maida Vale, the broad thoroughfare that merges into Kilburn. She started back with a quick gasp of fear.

“What are you doing in this part of London?” he asked angrily.

She plucked up courage. “I'm free to walk where I like, and just you jolly well don't try to stop me.”'

“You were going to my house.”

“I was n't. But supposing I was. What have you got to hide from me? My successor? Some little tuppenny-ha'penny piece of damaged goods you 've picked up cheap? Think I want to see her? What do you suppose I care? Just let me pass.”

He thrust aside the wet umbrella which she pushed rudely into his face.

“First tell me what you are doing here. Fulham people don't come to Maida Vale just to take a walk in the rain.”

“I was going to see some friends,” she replied sulkily.

A motor-omnibus came surging down toward them. At his hail it stopped.

“Get into that at once, or it will be the worse for you.”

He took her arm in his powerful grip and dragged her to the curb.

“You bullying brute!” she hissed through her thin lips.

But she entered the 'bus. John watched it until it whizzed into space, and then retracing his steps, he went home and mounted guard by the window of his aunt's gimcrack drawing-room, to the huge delight of its unsuspecting mistress. But his wife did not double back, as he anticipated; nor did he see her again in the neighbourhood.

Thenceforward, save for irritating pin-pricks reminding him of her existence, such as futile revolts against the supervision of the Bences and occasional demands for money, she ceased to worry him. But since the day when he caught her about to spy on his home-life, her shadow, like that of some obscene bird, hovered over him perpetually. What she had tried to do then she might have already done, she might do in the future. The horrible sense of insecurity oppressed him: it is that which ages a man who cannot take himself happily.

Otherwise the two years had passed with no great stir. The recurrence of seasons alone surprised him now and then into a realization of the flight of time. He had succeeded to the editorship of the weekly review of which he had been assistant editor; he had published a little book on the “Casual Ward of Workhouses,” a despised hash of journalistic articles which had brought him considerable recognition; leader writers had quoted him flatteringly, and his publishers clamoured for another book on a cognate subject; the President of the Local Government Board had invited him to a discussion of the matter, with a view to possible legislation; honours fell thick upon him; but, if it had been a shower of frogs, his disgust could not have been greater. For about the same time he had published a chunky, doughy novel destined to set the world aflame, which sold about a couple of hundred copies. He had cursed all things cursable and uncursable without in any way affecting the heartless rhythm of life. The world went on serenely, and in his glum fashion he found himself going on with the world.

Unity mended his socks and poured out his tea day after day, unchanging in her dull and common scragginess. Neither fine clothes, nor jewels, nor Aunt Gladys's maxims could turn her into a young lady. Miss Lindon sighed, Unity's inability to purr genteelly at tea-parties, the breath of female autumn's being, was the main sorrow in the mild lady's heart. She used to dream of the swelling pride with which she might have listened to Unity playing the “Liederohne Worte” or Stephen Heller or “The Brook” (such a pretty piece!), before the ladies purring on the gim-crack chairs. But the dream was poignantly vain. She had striven with vast goodness to teach Unity to play the piano, and the girl had honestly tried to learn; but as her brain could not master the mystery of the various keys, and as her ear was not acute enough to enable her to sing “Sun of my soul, thou Saviour dear,” in tune, the study of music had to be struck out of her curriculum. And she could not talk to the faded gentlewomen who came to the house, and to whose houses Miss Lindon took her. The ordeal always made her perspire, and little beads settled on her snub nose, and she knew it was not ladylike. Such a thing, said Miss Lindon, ought never to happen. But it did, in defiance of all the laws of gentility. So Miss Lindon sighed. But none of these things wrecked the peace of the home. Uneventful serenity reigned in the little house at Kilburn.

Walter Herold went on playing his exquisite miniatures of parts, and, in theatrical terminology, he became very expensive, and prospered exceedingly in his profession; his relations with John remained unaltered; Miss Lindon loved him, first because he was John's intimate, secondly (and here was a reason which she did not avow) because he had the gift of making her feel that, despite seven and fifty years of spinsterhood, she was still the most fascinating of her sex, and thirdly because he reminded her of poor Captain Featherstone, killed in the Zulu War, who was such a very clever amateur conjurer, and could act charades in a way that would make you die of laughing. And Unity came to him with her problems; and, as they both loved John Risca and Stellamaris, of whom (a thing undreamed of by John, for he rarely mentioned the fairy princess's name to Unity) they talked inordinately, the bond between them was strengthened by links ever freshly forged. And finally, in the sea-chamber at Southcliff, Herold maintained his rank of Great High Favourite, and companioned his august mistress on her fairy vagabondage along the roads that led no whither in the Land That Never Was.

And Stellamaris herself? She was twenty. John, still Great High Belovedest, still finding his perfect rest from care, his enchanted haven, in the great, wide-windowed room looking out to sea, wondered at the commonplace fact. Not long ago, it seemed to him, she had been but the fragile wraith of a child, with arms that you might pass through a signet-ring, and hands no bigger than an acacia-leaf. He had sat but yesterday full on the bed, without danger to the tiny feet which were far away from him. And now the little child had passed into the woman. Thanks to devotion, the world's learning, the resources of the civilized earth, the life-giving air of the sea, her malady had scarcely interfered with bodily growth. And the child's beauty had not been fleeting. It had remained, and matured into that of the woman. Unconsciously John had drifted away from childish things in his long and precious talks with her.

One day she rebuked him.

“Great High Belovedest,” she said, “you have n't told me of the palace and Lilias and Niphetos for months and months. Or is it years?”

He laughed. “It must be years. You don't realize that you 're grown up.”

“So every one says. I often wonder what it really means.”

“You 've developed,” said he.

“How?” she persisted.

“You've got longer and broader and—”

She laughed to hide a swift, pink confusion. “I know that, you silly dear. The doctor's always taking measurements of me and making funny calculations—cubing out the contents, as Mr. Wratislaw used to say. I know I'm enormous. That's an external matter of yards and feet,”—she spoke as if her proportions were Brobdingnagian,—“but I 'm referring to inner things. How am I different, in myself, from what I was four years ago?”

John scratched a somewhat puzzled head. How could he explain to her that of which he himself was not quite certain? In the normal case the phenomenon of manhood or womanhood, apart from the physical side,—allowing for the moment that the physical side can be set apart,—is a matter of a wider experience of life, of a million observations unconsciously correlated by a fully developed brain. It implies a differentiation between the facts and fancies of existence. The adult of twenty-one who takes seriously the make-believe of the dolls' house, and, sticking a paper crown on her head, asks you to recognize her as a queen, is merely an imbecile. The sane adult plays at mock tea-parties and crowns itself monarch in obedience to a different set of impulses altogether, either through sheer gaiety of heart, frankly making unto itself no illusions, or using make-believe as a symbol of the highest expression of life—videlicet, art—of which the human mind is capable. And, although we know very well that there are adults, many of advanced years, whom circumstances have so perverted that the Alpha and Omega of their lives is the pursuit either of a little ball or of a verminous animal over the surface of God's arresting earth, or else, it may be, a series of conjectures as to the comparative velocities of unimportant quadrupeds, yet none of them (at loose on society) would have the lunacy or the depravity to maintain that such pursuit or conjecture is a vital element in the scheme of existence. Even these who appear still to dwell in the play-world of the child have the essential faculty of discrimination. They have, in dull intervals between round or ride, encountered sorrow and pain and passion and wickedness and fierce struggle and despair. To them the sordid tragedies of criminal courts, the bestial poverty of slums, are commonplaces of knowledge. Any one of them can reel off a dozen instances of the treachery of false friends, the faithlessness of women, the corruption of commercial or political life. To them are also revealed splendours of heroism and self-sacrifice. They have a million data whence to deduce a serviceable philosophy. They are beyond all question grown up. But what wider experience of life had Stellamaris gained in the four years between the ages of sixteen and twenty? What fresh facts of existence had been presented to her for observation and correlation? What data had she for that deduction of a philosophy which marks the adult? Neither harm nor spell nor charm had come the lovely lady any nearer during the last four years than during those of her childhood. The Unwritten Law had prevailed as strong as ever. The routine of the sea-chamber had remained unchanged. Her reading, jealously selected, had brought her no closer to the sad core of many human things. The gulls and the waves and the golden sunset clouds were still her high companions. What did people mean when they said she had grown up? John continued for some time to scratch a puzzled head.

“Are you not aware of any change in yourself?” he asked.

She reflected for a moment. “No,” she replied seriously. “Of course I know more. I can speak French and Italian—” Professors of these tongues, duly hedged about with ceremonial, had for a long time past attended in the sea-chamber—“and I know lots more of history and geography and geology and astronomy and zoology—oh, Belovedest dear, I 'm dying to see a giraffe! Do you think if he stood on the beach he could stick his head through the window and look at me? And a hippopotamus—can't you bring one in on a string? Or do you think Constable would bite him?”

John expounded the cases of the giraffe and the hippopotamus with great gravity. Her eyebrows contracted ever so little, and a spark danced in her eyes as she waited for the end of the lecture.

“Oh, dear, can't you see a joke?”

“Joke?”

“Why, yes. Don't you think I know all about hippopotamuses?”

“Four years ago,” said John, “if I had told you that a wyvern and a unicorn were coming to tea, you would have believed me. Now you would n't. You 've grown up. That's what I meant.”

“I see,” said Stellamaris.

But she did n't; for she turned the conversation back to the palace.

“I'm afraid, dear,” said he, “that the cats are dead and Arachne has married a stock-broker, and I 've been so busy that the palace has run to seed.”

“I thought she was going to marry a duke,” said Stella, whose memory for unimportant detail was femininely tenacious.

“The duke was caught by Miss Cassandra P. Wurgles,” said John, once more launched on the sea of romance.

“What a funny name,” said Stella.

“It's the kind of name,” he replied, “always given in English fiction to the heiresses of the Middle West of America.”

“Was she an heiress?”

“Worth billions. After they were married they do say she would n't let the duke wipe his razor on anything less valuable than a thousand-dollar bill.”

“I don't think that's quite true,” laughed Stella.

“I don't know,” said John. “Anyhow, Arachne fell back on a stock-broker named Maclsaac, and now there's no one to look after the palace.”

“No one at all?” Her voice was full of pity.

“Not a soul,” said he.

A tragic pause followed this forlorn declaration. “Dear Belovedest,” said Stella, very seriously, “I do wish I could come and set it right for you.”

Their eyes met. John sighed.

“I wish you could,” said he. “There 's a fairy wand standing in the corner which no one but you can touch. It gives every one else an electric shock that sends them head over heels. But if you could get it and wave it about the place, you would make all sorts of dead things come to glorious life, and fill all the garden walks with flowers, and make the waters live again in the fountains.”

It was the John Risca whom she had always known that spoke, the John Risca of whom Herold had occasional flashes, so that he could discount his usual gloomy petulance and love the essential man, the John Risca whose hand poor dumb, little Unity Blake had laid against her cheek—the best and purest John Risca, a will-o'-the-wisp gleam to all his nearest save Stellamaris; but to Stellamaris just the ordinary, commonplace, unaltering, and unalterable John Risca, the Great High Belovedest of her earliest memories. He had said things like this a hundred thousand times before. Yet now the colour rose once more into her cheeks, and a mist such as might surround a dewdrop veiled her eyes.

“What makes you think I could do all that for you?” she asked.

“I don't know, my dear,” said John. “You seem to belong to another world.” He stumbled. “You 're just a fairy sort of creature.”

The answer did not satisfy the instinctive innermost whence sprang the question; but it served. Woman since the beginning of things has had to content herself with half-answers from man, seeing that she vouchsafes him scarcely any answers at all. She smiled and stretched out her hand. John took it in his clumsy fingers. It was whiter than any hand in the world, veined with the faintest of faint blue.

“Anyhow,” she said, “you ought n't to have neglected the palace.”

“What was I to do?” he asked whimsically. “You 've been so busy growing up that you've had no time to help me to run it.”

“Oh!” she said. She withdrew her hand. “Oh, Belovedest, how can you say such a thing!”

“You yourself,” laughed John, “asked whether it was months or years since we talked of it.”

“I 've never stopped thinking about it,” she protested, and she went on protesting. But, like the Shakspearian lady, she protested too much.

“You've grown up, Stellamaris,” said John.

But how much of the old fairy-tale she still believed in he could not gauge. He went away, man with the muck-rake that he was, with the uncomfortable conviction that the roots of her child's faith survived.

And yet she had grown up, and John, for the life of him, could not understand it. He was puzzled, because the sweet reverence of the man for the thing of sea-foam and cloud mystery that she had been to him all his man's life could not dream of physiological development. She was longer and broader; that met the eye. Living in her extraordinary seclusion from the multitudinous winds of earth, she could feel no breath of the storms that shake humanity into the myriad moulds of character. The physical side (other than mere linear and cubical expansion) apart, there was no possibility of change from childhood to womanhood. But John counted without his host—Nature, the host who claims reckoning from us all, kick though we may against her tyrannies; Nature, with her frank indecencies, her uncompromising, but loving, realism. The physical side in the development of any human being cannot be set apart. That passage of every maiden across the ford where brook and river meet is accomplished without a good, careless man's knowledge or conjecture. He kisses her to-day, as he has kissed her since she toddled with bare legs, and she responds, and it means little more to her than an acidulated drop. He shall kiss her to-morrow, and she shall grow as red as any turkey-cock, and cast down her eyes, and go through all the pretty antics characteristic, since the beginning of time, of a self-conscious sex. And the man shall go away scratching his head in a deuce of a puzzle.

Another year passed. Stella was twenty-one. The routine of the Channel House, of the house at Kilburn, of the Fulham flat, went on unchanged and unchanging. Time seems unimportant as a positive agent in human affairs. It is the solvent of sorrow, but it cannot create joy. From its benumbing influence no drama seems to spring. It is events—and events, too, no matter how trivial—that have their roots mysteriously deep in time that shake the world and make the drama which we call history. And it was an event, apparently trivial, but sudden, unlooked for, amazing, that shook the lives whose history is here recorded.

One morning, in obedience to a peremptory telegram from Sir Oliver Blount, John Risca met him at the Imperial Club. The old man rose from his seat near the entrance of the smoking-room into which John was shown, and excitedly wrung both his hands. “My dear boy, you must come to Southcliff at once.” Two or three times before he had been brought down post-haste by Sir Oliver, only to find himself needed as a mediator between husband and wife. He shook himself free.

“Out of the question, Oliver. I 'm overwhelmed with work. I 've got my syndicate article to do, and the review goes to press to-night.”

“You don't understand. It 's our darling Stella. This morning she lifted her head from the pillow.”

“But that's her death-warrant,” cried John, quickly. “It's her life-warrant. The fatal thing we've been warned against all these years is no longer fatal. She can move her head easily, painlessly. Don't you see?” The weak old eyes were wet.

“My God!” said John. His breath came fast, and he clapped his great hand on the other's lean shoulders. “But that means—great God in heaven!”.—his voice shook—“what may it not mean?”

“It may mean everything,” said Sir Oliver.

From time to time throughout Stella's life the great magicians of science had entered the sea-chamber and departed thence, shaking sad and certain heads. With proper care, they said, Stellamaris might live—might live, indeed, until her hair turned white and her young cheeks shrivelled with age; but of leaving that bed by the window and going forth into the outer world there was no hope or question. Still, Nature, the inscrutable, the whimsical, might be cozened by treatment into working a miracle. At any rate, no harm would be done by trying, and her guardians would have the consoling assurance that nothing had been left undone. They prescribed after their high knowledge, and pocketed their high fees, and went their way. Dr. Ransome, Stella's lifelong doctor and worshipper, carried out each great magician's orders, and, as prophesied, nothing ever happened either for good or harm.

But, six months ago, a greater magician than all, one Wilhelm von Pfeiler of Vienna, who by working miracles on his own account with newly discovered and stupendous forces had begun to startle scientific Europe, happened to be in England, and was summoned to the sea-chamber. He was a dark, silky-bearded man in whose eyes brooded perpetual melancholy. He, too, shook his head and said “Perhaps.” Ransome, who had seized with high hopes on the wandering magician, found him vastly depressing. His “Perhaps” was more mournfully hopeless than the others' “No.” He spoke little, for he knew no English, and Ransome's German, like that of Stella's household, was scanty; but Ransome understood him to croak platitudes about time and youth and growth and nature being factors in the case. As to his newly discovered treatment, well, it might have some effect; he was certain of nothing; as yet no sure deductions could be drawn from his experiments; everything concerning the application of these new forces was at the empirical stage. So profound a melancholy rang in his utterances that he left Lady Blount weeping bitterly, and convinced that he had passed death-sentence on their beloved being. Then a near-sighted, taciturn young man, a budding magician who had sat at Von Pfeiler's feet in Vienna, came down from London with apparatus worth a hundred times its weight in gold. And nothing happened or seemed about to happen. Stella called him the gnome.

All this John knew. Like the rest of Stella's satellites, accustomed for years to the unhesitating pronouncements of the great specialists and to their unhealing remedies, he had little faith in Von Pfeiler. The taciturn young surgeon who had been administering the treatment kept his own counsel and gave no encouragement to questioners. John had agreed with Sir Oliver that it was a waste of time and money—a fabulous amount of money; but the treatment amused Stella, and she liked the gnome, whom every one else detested, because he loved dogs, and cured Constable, now growing old and rheumatic, of a stiff leg. So every one suffered the gnome patiently.

And now the miracle had been worked. Stella had lifted her head from the pillow. The two men sat tremulous with hope.

“I 've been so upset,” said Sir Oliver, “and so has Julia. We had words. Why, I don't know. I love our darling quite as much as she does; but Julia is trying. Waiter! Get me a brandy and soda. What will you have? Nothing? I don't usually drink spirits in the morning, John; but I feel I need it. I'm getting old and can't stand shocks.”

“What does Ransome say?”

“He 's off his head. Every one 's off his head. The very dog is rushing about like a lunatic. Nearly knocked me down in the garden.”

“And Cassilis?”

Cassilis was the gnome.

“Ransome has telegraphed him to come down at once. But I thought I'd run up and tell you. We might go together to see him and fetch him back with us. You 'll come, won't you?”

“Come? Why, of course I'll come. What do you think I 'll do? Stay in London at such a time and send her a post-card to say I'm glad?”

“You said something about seeing your review through the press.”

“Oh, confound the review! It can go to the devil!” cried John.

London ablaze with revolution would have been a small matter compared with this world-shaking event, the lifting of a girl's head.

“It will be such a comfort to me,” said the old man. “I don't know what to do. I can't rest. My mind's in a maze. It's like the raising of Jairus's daughter.”

“Let us do some telephoning,” said John.

They went out together. John rang up Cassilis. He had been out all the morning and would not be returning for another hour. John rang up Herold at a theatre where he knew him to be rehearsing, and gave him the glad news. They returned to the smoking-room. Sir Oliver drank off his brandy and soda at one gulp.

“And Stella herself? What does she make of it?”

“The only one not upset in the house. That little girl 's an angel, John.” He blew his nose violently. “It appears she was stretching out her arm to pat the old dog's chaps, overreached herself a bit, and mechanically her head came away from the pillow. She called out to nurse, 'Nurse, I 've lifted my head.' Nurse flew up to her. 'What do you mean, darling?' She showed her. She showed her, by God! Nurse forbade her to do it any more, and flew down-stairs like a wildcat to tell us. Then we telephoned to Ransome. He saw her; she did it for him; then he came to us white and shaking all over. Naturally I wanted to see the darling child do it, too. Julia interfered. Stella must n't do it again till Cassilis came. Then we had the words. She said I was eaten through with egotism—I! Now, am I, John?”

Presently Herold dashed, in, aflame with excitement. The story, such as it was, had to be told anew.

“I 'll come with you to Cassilis, and then on to Southcliff.”

“But your rehearsal?” said John.

Herold confounded the rehearsal, even as John had confounded his review. In the presence of this thrilling wonder, trivialities had no place.

Cassilis received this agitated and unusual deputation without a flicker of surprise. He was a baldheaded, prematurely old young man, with great, round spectacles. He gave one the air of an inhuman custodian of awful secrets.

“I presume you have called with reference to this,” said he, indicating a telegram which he held in his hand. “I've just opened it.”

“Yes,” said Sir Oliver. “Is n't it wonderful? You must come down with us at once.”

“It's very inconvenient for me to leave London.”

“My dear sir, you must throw over every engagement.”

The shadow of a smile passed over the young man's features.

“If you press the point, I'll come.”

“But are n't you astounded at what has occurred? Don't you understand Ransome's message?”

“Perfectly,” said Cassilis. “I 've already written to Dr. von Pfeiler—a week: ago—detailing the progress and full success of the case.”

“Then you know all about it?” asked John. “Naturally. I've been practising her at it for the last fortnight, though she did n't realize what I was doing.”

“Then why on earth did n't you tell us?”

“I had arranged to tell you to-morrow,” said Cassilis.

“I don't think you've acted rightly, sir,” cried Sir Oliver.

“Never mind that,” said Herold. “Mr. Cassilis doubtless has his excellent reasons. The main thing is, Will her cure go beyond this? Will she get well and strong? Will she be able to walk about God's earth like anybody else?”

The little gnome-like man straightened with his toe a rucked corner of the hearth-rug. He paused deliberately before replying, apparently unmoved by the anxious eyes bent on him. There was a span of agonized silence. Then he spoke:

“This time next year she will be leading a woman's normal life.”