She turned on him a miserable, scared face and told him of her discovery. She had gone into her guardian's study that morning in order to tidy up, and had seen that he had left the key in the lock of his private drawer, with the rest of the bunch hanging from it. She had opened the drawer and found, lying on top of some documents one of which was a sealed envelope endorsed “My Will,” a loaded revolver and a case of cartridges. She knew that the revolver was loaded because she had examined it. Then, hearing his step, she had shut the drawer, and gone on with her dusting. He had entered, locked the drawer, put the bunch in his pocket, and gone out without a word.

Herold looked grave. More in order to gain time for reflection than to administer a moral lesson, he said:

“You should n't have searched his private drawer, Unity.”

“I'd search anything, if only I could find a way of helping him,” she replied impetuously. “When I see him suffer and can't do anything for him, I feel crazy. I can't sleep sometimes, and stand outside his door in the middle of the night. It does n't matter whether I ought n't to have done it or not,” she cried with an awkward and impatient gesture; “I did it, and I found what I found. What I want to know is, Why should my guardian make his will and keep a loaded revolver in his room unless he thought that—that he was going to die?”

Her eyes filled with tears. Herold, alarmed by her news and touched by her devotion, took her cheap-gloved hand and pressed it. Occupants of the dazzling equipages stared at the elegantly attired gentleman and the dowdy little girl love-making on the public seat. He tried to reassure her.

“Every man with folks depending on him makes a will, so we can dismiss that; and I know heaps of men who keep revolvers.”

“But why should the will be dated two days ago?” asked Unity.

“Was it?”

“The date was written on the envelope, with 'My Will' and his name.”

“In all probability,” said Herold, “the cloud that has come between him and Stellamaris has made him decide to make a fresh will. I know he made one some years ago.”

“But why the revolver?”

“He spoke to me, also some years ago, about getting one. There had been one or two burglaries and an ugly murder—don't you remember?—in the neighbourhood. He must have got it then.”

“It looks too new,” said Unity.

“Those things keep new for ever so long, if they 're not used,” he argued.

“Then you think there 's no danger?” she askeds with both her hands on his wrist.

“Not at present,” he said, with a smile. “Look after him as closely as you can and keep up your brave little heart, or we 'll have you too going about with hollow eyes and gaunt cheeks, and we can't afford it.”

“Me?” She sniffed derisively. “I'm as tough as a horse. And what do I matter?”

“Your guardian would have a pretty poor time of it if he had only Aunt Gladys to look after him.”

The shadow of a grin flickered over Unity's face.

“I suppose he would,” she said.

She went away half-comforted. She had shared her terrifying secret with Herold, which was a good and consoling thing; but she had not been quite convinced by his easy arguments. And Herold went away entirely unconvinced. He knew John as no one, not even Unity, who had made him the passionate study of her life, could know him. It was his peculiarity to pursue his right-headed ideas with far less obstinacy than his wrong-headed ones. In the former case he had a child's (and sometimes a naughty child's) hesitations, and was amenable to argument; but when bent on a course of folly, he charged blindly, and could be stopped only with great difficulty. Herold walked through the park in anxious thought, and, at a loose end for an hour or two, took a taxi to the club to which both he and John belonged. Avoiding the lounge and its cheery talk, he mounted to the deserted morning-room, and, having ordered tea, settled down to an evening newspaper, the pages of which he stared at, but did not read.

Presently, to his surprise, John, who had avoided the club for some little time, burly and gloomy, entered the room.

“I thought I'd come in for a quiet talk with somebody; but there's that ass Simmons down-stairs. He makes me sick.”

Simmons was the wit and brilliant raconteur of the club.

“You can have a quiet talk with me, if I'm good enough,” said Herold. “I 've been wanting to see you. What line are you going to take in the 'Review' on this latest freak of the censor?”

The prohibition of a famous Continental play had aroused the usual storm in the theatrical and journalistic world. Every one who wrote turned his back on the harmless and ridiculously situated man, and in cuttlefish fashion squirted ink at him. But John Risca took no interest in the question, and stated the fact with unnecessary violence. He, on his side, had wanted to see Herold. He had taken his advice and written to Stella and had received no reply. More than a week had passed. The whole thing was driving him mad.

Herold made a proposal which had been vaguely in his head for some days, and to which Unity's communication had given definiteness.

“Come away with me on a sea-voyage—a couple of months—South Africa, anywhere you like. I'm tired out. As for the piece, it's near the end of the run, and it 'll hurt no one if I go out and let Brooke play my part. I have n't had a holiday for two years. It would be an act of charity. You can get away; no man is indispensable, and you can afford it. If you stay here, you 'll lose your balance and very likely commit some act of idiotic folly. By our return, time will have done its soothing work, and the relations between Stella and yourself will have been readjusted.”

Such was the substance of that which for a solid hour he strove to nail into John's armour-clad mind. His efforts were vain. In the first place, John was not going to accept such a quixotic sacrifice of professional interests from any man, even from Herold; secondly, he could n't get away from London, and did n't want to; thirdly, if he were being driven mad within a journey of an hour or so from Stellamaris, he would become a raving maniac if he were separated from her by half the length of the earth; fourthly, he was in perfect health and perfect command of his faculties, and the only meaning he could attach to Herold's insinuation regarding idiotic folly was that he might forget himself so far as to go down to Southcliff and make a scene with Stellamaris, thereby acting with insensate cruelty toward her: all of which was ludicrous, and it was insulting on Herold's part to make such a suggestion.

Herold called him a fool and said that he did not mean that at all.

“Then what did you mean?”

“When a man loses control over himself and lets himself be obsessed by a fixed idea, his brain 's not right, and he's capable of anything. The only chance for him is change of scene and interests, and that's why I've been imploring you to come away with me.”

“And that's why I'm going to do nothing of the kind,” said John, rising and looking down upon his friend with blood-shot eyes. “I'm pretty miserable, I own. Lots of men are, and they have to keep their mouths shut, because they have n't any one before whom they 're not ashamed to let off steam. I've got you. I've had you all my man's life. I've told you everything. Somehow I've not been ashamed to tell you things I would n't dream of breathing to any other man living. There 's a kind of woman, I believe, whom I might have talked to as I do to you. I've not met her, so I've got into the habit of coming to you with whatever worries me; and you 've never failed me. And I've come to you now. But there are limits beyond which even a friend like you has no right to go. You've no right to tell me I'm going out of my mind and to warn me against behaving like the inmate of a lunatic asylum. You've no right. I resent it. I'm not going to stand it.”

Herold's reply was checked by the creaking of the door and the entrance of the bent figure of an old member, a county court judge who, on his way to a writing-table by the window, nodded courteously to the two younger men and remarked that it was a fine day.

“I suppose most people would call it so,” said John.

“Don't you?”

“I hate it,” cried John. “I wish it would rain. I wish it would rain like the devil. I would give my ears for a pea-soup fog. Sunshine is too blightingly ironical in this country.”

The old judge lifted his eyebrows. “The metaphysics of meteorology are beyond me,” he said, with a smile and a bow, and sat down to write.

John lingered for a second or two by the side of his friend, tracing the pattern of the Turkey carpet with the toe of his boot; then he swung round abruptly.

“Excuse me,” said he. “I 've got to look at Baxter's imbecile article in 'The Contemporary.' ”

He went to the table where the current magazines and reviews were tidily displayed, and Herold, sitting in an arm-chair some distance away, with his back to the table, pondered over the discussion that had just taken place. But for the rumble and clatter of London that came through the open windows, the ceaseless choric ode to all the drama of the vast city, there was silence in the spacious room, broken only by the scratching of the old judge's quill pen. Herold resumed his aimless skimming of the evening newspaper. What further appeal could he make to John in his contradictory and violent mood?

At last the old judge, having scribbled his note, got up and left the room. Herold turned and found himself alone. John had gone without drum or trumpet. In the lounge down-stairs there was no John, and in the hall the porter told him that Mr. Risca had left the club.

He went home to his actor's six o'clock dinner, and found a letter from Lady Blount imploring him to come to Southcliff at once. Stella was getting worse day by day. Sir Oliver and she were in despair, Dr. Ransome was at his wits' ends. In a woman's frantic helplessness she adjured him to come and work a miracle. Now, it so happened that on the early afternoon of the next day he had a very important appointment. It was a question of his going into nominal management in the autumn. Suitable pieces, a theatre, and financial backers, obscure but vital elements in theatrical business, had been found, and it was with these last that the morrow's all-important interview was to take place. He turned up the railway time-table, and saw that by leaving London by the first train in the morning, and probably skipping lunch, he could spend a couple of hours in Southcliff and get back in time for his engagement. He telegraphed to Lady Blount, dined, and went to the theatre. For perhaps the first time in his pleasant life he was overwhelmed that evening by the sense of the futility of his work, which every artist, actor, painter, and poet is doomed to feel at times. The painted faces of his colleagues, the vain canvas of the sets, the stereotyped words, gestures, inflections, repeated without variation for more than the two hundredth time, the whole elaborate make-believe of life that at once is, and is not, the theatre,—all this oppressed him, filled him with shame and disgust. It had no meaning. It was an idle show. He had given to inanity a life that might have been devoted to the pursuit of noble ideals.

Folks are apt to imagine that, when the pains of the actual world get round about an artist's soul, the supreme moment has arrived for him to deliver himself in immortal utterances. This is untrue. He does n't so deliver himself. On the contrary, he cuts up his canvas, smashes his piano, and kicks his manuscript about the room. What interpretation of life, however celestially inspired, can have the all-annihilating poignancy of life itself? Your poet may write an immortal lyric by the death-bed of his mistress; but it is a proof that he did not care a brass farthing for the lady: he is expressing the grief that he might have felt if he had loved her. For the suffering artist, at grips with the great realities, art is only a trumpery matter. It is only when he is getting, or has got, better, that he composes his masterpieces working

... the world to sympathy

With hopes and fears it heeded not.

So Herold, instinctively obeying the common law, as all poor humans in one way or another have to do, grew heartsick at the vanity of his calling, and, after a mechanically perfect performance, wondered how an honest man could live such a life of shameless fraud.

After a night and dawn of rain the sun shone from a blue sky when he reached the Channel House next morning. Sir Oliver and Lady Blount received him in the dining-room. They looked very old and careworn. Like Constable, they had nothing to live for save Stellamaris; and now Stellamaris, stricken by an obscure but mortal malady, was dying before their eyes. So, antiphonally, and at first with singularly little bickering, they told Herold their story of despair. It added little to his knowledge. The symptoms of which he was already aware had intensified; that was all. But the two guardians had altered their opinion as to the cause. Sir Oliver ruefully discarded the theory of the touch of the sun, and his wife now realized that the state of Stellamaris was not merely the morbid phase through which most maidens are supposed to pass. Dr. Ransome, with intuition none too miraculous, had emitted the theory that she had something on her mind. “But what could the poor darling innocent child have on her mind?” cried Sir Oliver.

“What, indeed,” echoed Lady Blount, “unless her mind is affected?”

“Don't be a fool, Julia,” said Sir Oliver.

“I'm not such a fool as you think, Oliver. Stella has n't lived a normal life, and who knows but what the change of the last year may have done harm? Dr. Ransome himself said that if we could cure the mind, we could cure the body, and advised us to take her abroad so that she could be distracted by fresh scenes.”

“He hinted nothing about insanity. You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” said Sir Oliver, with querulous asperity.

Then Herold saw that the truth must be told.

“Has it never struck you that John may be the cause of it all?”

Sir Oliver jerked himself round in his chair. “John? What do you mean?”

“Why, I wrote to John at the same time that I did to you,” said Lady Blount, “begging him to come down in almost the same words; for you know, dear Walter, I 'm not a clever woman and can't say the same thing in two different ways. She does n't know I did so, for she's so strange and won't talk to any one alone, if she can help it. I thought John and you might succeed in getting something out of her. But John has n't replied at all. I can't understand it.”

“Does n't that bear out what I say?” asked Herold.

“But John—what do you mean?” Sir Oliver repeated.

“Yes, dear, what do you mean? Of course John has behaved in an extraordinary way lately. He has n't been to see us for ever so long. But the dear fellow has explained. He is overwhelmed with work, especially at week-ends. He writes me charming letters, and he corresponds regularly with Stella. I don't see—“.

“Oh, for heaven's sake, Julia, let Walter put in a word!” cried Sir Oliver, rising and throwing his cigarette-end into the bank of flowering-plants that filled the summer fireplace, a domestic outrage that always irritated Lady Blount, and even now caused her to wince and dart an angry glance at the perpetrator. “Go on. Tell us what you mean.”

“Has it never occurred to you that Stella and John may have fallen in love with each other—with the ghastly barrier of the wife between them?”

The two old people looked at him wide-eyed and drooping-mouthed. That Stellamaris, their fragile, impalpable child of mystery, more precious to them than a child of their own bodies, over whom they might have quarrelled—that Stellamaris should be a grown woman, capable of a grown woman's passions, was a proposition bewilderingly preposterous. Sir Oliver found speech first.

“Stella in love with John? It 's absurd; it's ludicrous. Why, bless my soul! you might just as well say she was in love with me! It's nonsense—ridiculous nonsense.”

He walked up and down beside the dining-room table, with arms outstretched, shaking his thin hands in protest.

Lady Blount, her elbow resting on the table, looked at Walter.

“The barrier of the wife? Who could have told her?”

“John himself.”

“How much?”

“I don't know.”

Sir Oliver brought himself to an abrupt standstill by the side of his wife.

“He ought n't to have done anything of the kind. Such things are not fit for her to hear.”

“That's the dreadful mistake we've made all along, my dear Oliver,” said Herold, sadly; and he disclosed to them probabilities of which they had not dreamed.

Lady Blount began to cry silently, and her husband laid his hand on her shoulder. She put up her own and clasped it. They looked very forlorn, robbed of the darling they loved. The new Stellamaris was alien to their conservatism. They did not know her. They were lost. Like children they clasped hands, and their hearts were united at last in common dismay.

Herold turned and looked out of the window. Presently he said:

“She 's in the garden. I 'll go and talk to her, if she will let me.”

“Do, Walter dear. Try to make her speak. It's that awful silence that we can't bear.”

“She has always been devilish fond of you,” said Sir Oliver.

Herold went out and came upon her, escorted by Constable, in a path bordered on each side by Canterbury bells and fox-gloves and sweet-william. She drew herself up as he approached, and looked at him like some wraith or White Lady caught in the daylight, with no gleam of welcome in her glance. The old dog, however, pushed by her to greet Herold, whom he held in vast approbation. Then, aware of being relieved from duty, he wandered down the path, where he lay down and, like a kindly elder, suffered the frisky impudence of a stray kitten of the household.

“I suppose they 've sent for you because they think I am ill,” Stella began suspiciously.

“You are ill, dearest,” he replied in a quiet voice, “and it's causing us all very deep grief.”

“I'm not ill,” she retorted. “But every one's worrying me. I wish you would tell them to leave me alone.”

He took a nerveless, unresponsive hand and put it to his lips. “Stellamaris, Stella darling, don't you know how we all love you? How we would give everything, life itself, to make you happy?”

She withdrew her hand. “Don't talk of happiness. It's a delusion.”

“Every living thing can be happy after its kind,” said Herold. “Look at this great bumble-bee swinging in the campanula.”

“You were n't sent here to talk to me about bumble-bees,” she said with an air of defiance.

“No. I came to speak to you about John.”

It was a thrust of the scalpel. It hurt him cruelly to deal it, but it had to be dealt. He closely watched its effect. Her wan face grew even whiter, and her lips grew white, and she held herself rigid. Her eyes were hard.

“I forbid you to mention his name to me.”

“I must disobey you. No, my dearest,” said he, gently barring the path, “you must listen. John is as unhappy and as ill as you yourself. He is suffering greatly. I don't know what to do with him. He 's going on like a madman. You must not be unjust.”

“I 'm not unjust. I know the truth at last, and I judge accordingly.”

“You are hard, Stella. Perhaps that's the first unkind word anybody has ever spoken to you—and I've got to speak it, worse luck! John would have told you long ago of the unhappy things in his life if he had thought they could possibly concern you. As soon as he found that they might do so, he told you frankly.”

“He has told me nothing,” said Stella, icily.

“He wrote to you about his marriage over a week ago.”

“I did n't read the letter. I never read his letters. I don't take them out of the envelopes. I destroy them.”

Herold stared in amazement. “Then how,” he cried, “do you know what you call the truth? What do you know?”

“He married a woman who is still alive. I know a great deal more,” she added, ingenuous still in her cold disdain.

“More?” His brain worked against baffling conjecture. Who could have told her? Suddenly his eyes caught the shadow of tragedy. He made a step forward and closed his hands on her arms, and even then he felt the shock and pain of their fragility. In London, a short time ago, they were round and delicately full.

“Stellamaris darling, tell me. It is I, Walter, who have loved you all your life, and to whom you have always told everything. Something none of us know has happened. What is it?”

She swayed back from him, and half closed her eyes.

“Let me go,” she said faintly. “Such things are not to be spoken of. They are not to be thought of. They only come in horrible dreams one can't help.”

He put an arm round her instinctively to save her from falling.

“Who told you? You must speak.”

She wrenched herself free and stood rigid again.

“She told me, his wife herself.”

“His wife!” His head reeled.

“His deserted wife, a woman with green eyes and thin lips. I suppose you know her. She came down here to tell me.”

“My God!” cried Herold. “My God in heaven!”

And for the first time Stella saw a man in white, shaking anger, showing his teeth and shaking his fists.

“When was it?”

She told him. He controlled the riot within him and questioned her further, almost hectoringly, masterfully, and she replied like a woman compelled to obey, yet flinging her answers defiantly. And he went on unrelenting, fighting not her, but the devil that had got possession of her, until she told him all, even the final horror, as far as he could wring confession from her virgin fierceness; for, in the white-hot passion of his anger he had challenged her knowledge of evil almost as directly as the woman had done.

“And you believe her?” he cried. “You, Stellamaris, believe that murderous thing of infamy, when you 've known John Risca and his love and his tenderness all your life? You believe it possible—John and Unity? Good God! It 's monstrous! It 's hellish!”

He planted himself on the path before her, hands on hips, his sensitive face set, his blue eyes aflame, and looked at her as no man or woman had ever yet looked at Stellamaris. And she met his look, and her eyes, despite the battle her proud soul was fighting, lost their hardness, and new light flashed into them, as though they had changed from agate to diamond.

“She loves him, body and soul,” she said. “I ought to have recognized it in London. I did n't know the meaning of things then. I do now.”

“Yes, she does love him; she loves him as I love you,”—and, unrealized by him, there came into his voice the vibrating notes of passion that had stirred Stellamaris to the depths at the theatre,—“with every quivering fibre, heart and spirit, body and soul.” He flung both hands before his face,—these were words of madness,—and went on hurriedly: “She loves him as John loves you, as the great souls of the earth can love, without thought of hope, just because they love.”

She looked at him, and he looked at her, and they stood, as they had been standing all the time, in the pathway, between the gay borders of flowers; and the sky was blue overhead, and the noonday sun caressed the ivy and lichens on the Georgian front of the Channel House, which basked peacefully on the farther side of the lawn. The kitten had frisked away with feline inconsequence, and Constable sprawled stiffly asleep on the gravel, like a dead dog.

“You say you love me like that?” said Stellamaris.

“You command love. Unity herself loves you like that,” replied Herold, loyally.

“What reason should she have for loving me? She should be jealous of me, as I was of her. And who is she? Who is Unity?” she asked with an imperious little stamp. “I 've been lied to about her for many years. She too lied. Will you explain her? If she's not what that woman said, what is she?”

“I 'll tell you,” he said.

He spared her nothing. It was not the hour for glossing over unpleasant things. Let her judge out of the fullness of knowledge. At his tale of the torturing—he gave her the details—she shrank back, covering her eyes and uttered a sobbing cry.

“It 's too horrible! I can't bear it; I can't believe it.”

He waited a while to give her time for recovery.

“It's true,” said he.

“I don't believe it,” she cried, facing him again. “The woman warned me against lies that were being told about her—lies to screen Unity.”

“It 's true,” he repeated. “If you want proofs, I could get you the newspaper reports of the trial. She was put into prison for three years. Then John swore that Unity should never suffer again, and, by way of reparation, adopted her as his own daughter. He came like a god and lifted her from misery to happiness. That 's why she loves him, as you say, body and soul.”

“And he loves her.”

Her tone staggered him. “He loves her as a father loves a daughter.”

“And she as a woman loves a lover. I'm no longer a child. I know what I 'm talking about.”

Then he saw how deep the poison had gone. It was a ghastly travesty of Stellamaris that spoke.

“You are talking wickedness, Stellamaris,” he said sternly. “Go on your knees and pray to God for forgiveness.”

She threw back her head. “There is n't a God, or He would not allow such foulness and horror to be on His earth. I believe in nothing. I believe nobody. I would just as soon believe that woman as you. At least she did n't pretend to be good. She rejoiced in her vileness. She hid nothing, as every one else hides things. And now—” her voice dropped to a tone of great weariness—“don't you think you've tortured me enough?”

The word was a sword through his heart. He stretched out reproachful hands.

“Stella, dearest, dearest—”

“Forgive me,” she said. “Sometimes I hardly know what I'm saying.”

“If you would only trust me!”

She shook her head sadly.

“I can trust no one, not even you. Let me go now.”

He saw that she was at the end of her strength. Any concession that she might make now would be for him a Pyrrhic victory. And it was true that he had tortured her—tortured her, as his whole being asserted, for her soul's welfare. But he could probe her no further.

They walked in silence toward the house. Constable, as soon as they had passed, rose and followed them. It is for the greater happiness of big-hearted dogs that they do not understand all things human.

At the foot of the staircase leading to Stella's wing they parted.

“Stella, darling,” said he, taking her hand, “if you will believe nothing else, believe this: all our hearts are breaking for you.”

She looked at him for a long, odd moment, with the diamond glitter in her eyes.

“Mine is broken,” she said.

He stood and watched her wearily mounting the stairs until she disappeared at the turn of the landing, the old hound scrabbling up behind her.