Matthew and Miss Lanyon were standing under the front porch talking over poor Frank Leroux when Ella came up with a very happy face.

“What a colour you 've got, child!” cried Agatha Lanyon.

“It is the fresh country air. I was being choked in town.”

“And the country people,” suggested the elder lady, archly.

“And the fresh country people,” assented Ella.

“My dear,” said Matthew to his sister, “this is the first time we've been complimented on our adorable rusticity.”

“We don't count,” said Miss Lanyon.

“I never knew you could be so wicked,” cried Ella, taking her by her shoulders and kissing her. Whereupon she disappeared into the house.

“I do hope it is settled,” said Miss Lanyon, with a little sentimental sigh.

“What?”

“Sylvester and Ella. Do you mean to say you haven't noticed? I have been following it all for months.”

Miss Lanyon had reached the age when one lives in the romances of others.

“I believe you amuse yourself, Agatha, by mixing up your young friends and sorting them out in pairs, like gloves,” remarked Matthew.

Miss Lanyon denied the charge indignantly. This was quite a different matter. Anybody with eyes could see how things were tending. It was a match. She was sure it was a marriage made in heaven.

“I like heaven-made marriages as little as machine-made boots,” said Matthew. “Both are apt to come undone in unexpected places. But if these two are thinking of a wholesome earth-made union—well, I shall be delighted.”

“But hasn't Syl told you anything?”

“Not a word.”

“Couldn't you ask him, Matthew?”

“My dear Agatha,” said he, drawing himself up, “how can you suggest my committing such an impertinence?”

Miss Lanyon worshipped her brother, but she felt there were many odd corners of his mind which needed the housewifely besom; just as there were cobwebs in his office which, on the rare occasions when she entered it, made her fingers twitch. But being organically acquiescent she sighed again sentimentally, and brought Matthew his hat and stick.

For Ella, the hours of that day were winged with sunshine. She loved Sylvester as deeply as one of our untried, pure-minded Northern girls can love; and with larger wisdom, too, than most. For she had lived a free life in her aunt's eccentric house in London, and had sifted the vanities of many men. Passion would only be evoked by the clasp of encircling arms and would rise to meet claiming lips. As yet in Ella it lay a pure fire hidden in the depths of a fervent nature. But all the sweet thrills of a woman's early love were hers,—the pride in a strong man's wooing, the fluttering fears as to her sufficiency for his happiness, the resolves, scarce formulated, to raise herself to his level, the dim dreams of a noble life together, striving for the great things of the world that are worth the winning. Added thereto was the delicate charm, essentially feminine, of triumph over the shadows that had fought with her for possession of his heart.

When she entered her room to dress for dinner that evening, she took down her frocks and laid them on the bed, and stood a while in deep thought. She must look her best tonight. She chose a simple cream dress with chiffon round the bodice and sleeves. Halfway through her toilette she clasped her white arms over her neck, and looking in the glass held long converse with her image. It seemed so strange that she, with all her imperfections of soul and body, should be chosen to guide a man's destiny. Then lighter fancies prevailed, and she spent anxious moments in arranging her thick auburn hair. When she came down at last, with a diamond-hilted dagger thrust through the coils, and a bunch of violets peeping shyly from the chiffon in her corsage, Matthew paid her an old man's compliment.

“Do I look nice?” she asked, gratified. “I'm glad; for you once told me that you liked me in this frock.”

There are times when the sincerest of women can be most blandly deceitful.

A general practitioner may propose to himself many pleasant occupations for his spare hours, but his patients dispose of them effectually. On this particular day, when Sylvester craved leisure to watch over Leroux and to open his heart finally to Ella, impossible people fell sick at interminable distances, tiny human beings came with preposterous haste into this world of trouble, and larger ones gave sudden and alarming symptoms of leaving it. It was one of those well-known days of sudden stress when a country doctor eats his meals standing and wearing his overcoat. Finally, an evening visit from which he reckoned on being free by nine kept him by an anxious bedside till nearly eleven. But he had found time to despatch to Ella a few lines scribbled on a leaf of his pocket-book:—

This was almost the first letter he had ever written to her; certainly the first love-letter. The new sweetness of it soothed Ella's disappointment.

At half-past eleven he reached his house, a very weary man. He put on his slippers, stretched himself, yawned, and thought wistfully of bed. But first he must go to Leroux, whom he had only seen at odd intervals during the day. He was pouring himself out some whisky when the housekeeper entered the dining-room, smoothing her apron.

“I'm glad you 've come, Mr. Sylvester. He's took worse, nurse says. His temperature has gone up to 104.”

He nodded, swallowed the drink, and went upstairs. The nurse was bending over the bed in the dimly lit room, adjusting the ice-bag. The sick man's portmanteau had been unpacked, and the contents were piled upon a chest of drawers. The clothes he had been wearing were hanging from a row of pegs against the door. The flap of the jacket turned outward, revealed in the breast-pocket a letter-case stuffed with papers. With the air of a man accustomed to prompt action, Sylvester withdrew the letter-case and locked it up. The nurse confirmed the housekeeper's statements.

“He has been delirious at times,” she added.

Sylvester bent down and placed the thermometer in position, then waited, looking gravely down upon his friend. Leroux's face was congested. His hands moved feebly.

Now and then he moaned. Sylvester examined him closely, inspected the temperature chart of the last few hours, questioned the nurse as to their history. A surmise that had been troubling him most of the day now converted itself into a certainty. Leroux must have been drinking heavily of late. Thus it was that meningitis had set in from the concussion. But why should Leroux, once the sanest and cleanest of men, have taken to drink? The pity of it smote Sylvester. The gay spirit brutalised, the noble mind o'erthrown. His heart yearned over the unconscious man. His father had spoken of Leroux being in trouble. He conjectured pitiful histories of downfall. With a sigh he turned away, gave final directions, and went to bed.

Three hours later he was waked. The nurse outside the door was calling him. Accustomed to sudden rising, he leaped up, and thrusting on dressing-gown and slippers, went back to the sick room. Leroux was in full tide of violent delirium, his words, wonderfully articulate, striking almost spectrally upon the utter silence of the house,—“It is better to die than to live in hell on earth. If you give me up, God Almighty will give me up.... What is his love to mine?”

The nurse, who had been on duty since ten, was young and nervous.

“He has been like this for an hour. I couldn't stand it any longer.”

“We will go away to the south,” continued Leroux. “No one minds what a painter does—For God's sake don't give me up—”

“You can go to bed, nurse,” said Sylvester. “I'll sit with him.”

The tired girl, glad to gain some extra and unexpected hours of slumber, retired gratefully. Sylvester sat by the bedside. It was as well, he thought, that the man's poor secrets should be blabbed into a friend's ears instead of a stranger's. He tried not to listen, but to think of other things,—Ella and his meeting with her on the morrow. But the clear voice, now rising in ghastly emphasis, now sinking to a murmur losing itself in guttural incoherence, continued its tale of love and despair, so that Sylvester could not choose but piece it together in his mind. It was a common tale of unlawful love: a passionate man, a yielding woman, a deceived and adoring husband. Sylvester, whose reserved, chaste nature had caused him to train himself in a narrow groove of orthodox morality, felt strangely repelled by the confession. He had always regarded Leroux as the soul of honour. The thief of a man's wife was lowered in his esteem.

There was a silence. He rested his head on his hand and wearily dozed. Suddenly came a cry from the bed, a cry of great pain and longing,—

“Constance—Constance!”

The name, fitting in with a waking dream, brought Sylvester with a leap to his feet, and he looked in foolish bewilderment at Leroux. The latter murmured incoherently. Had he dreamed the voice crying out the name so distinctly? He held his breath, trying to seize the half-formed syllables. “Constance—my love—” had come again. He had not been dreaming. The voice rose once more, and each word came sharply cut from the sick man's lips.

“Sylvester will never know.”

Then the tremendous horror of the revelation crashed down upon the man, stunning his brain, paralysing his limbs. The great drops of sweat stood on his forehead, and his eyes were staring. And Leroux, who had struck upon a quieter vein of reminiscence, babbled on of the happy days of his love.

The first thunder-clap had passed. Thought began to return. Sylvester sank into a chair and stared at the ground. The once clear vision of the past was distorted into a phantasmagoria of leering shapes. He shivered as with an ague, rubbed his eyes, and looked sharply at the man on the bed. Which of the two was delirious? Leroux raved of death and despair. The involuntary confession was too complete; mistake was impossible. Yet the other was impossible. Constance guilty of this hideousness? Her life a lie? The firm anchorage of his soul but shifting sand? He had worshipped her as more than woman,—as the purest, chastest thing that God had ever given to man for his guidance. It was a ghastly figment of Leroux's drink-besotted brain.

He rose, went to the drawer in which he had locked Leroux's letter-case, and taking it out with shaking hands, deliberately turned the contents on to the corner of the chest. In spite of the revulsion of faith he had a sickening certainty of finding there what he hoped he would not find.

There it was, staring him in the face amid a heap of stamps, visiting cards, pencilled memoranda slips, letters, and law papers: a soiled, crumpled letter in his dead wife's hand. He took it up, and from it dropped a lock of fair hair,—her hair. He read it through steadily. It was a letter of passionate love, leaving no doubt as to guilt; of despair, almost madness; such a letter of abandonment as a woman writes but to one man in a lifetime. It bore no date save the day of the week,—Wednesday. Even in his agony he contrasted the difference between this woman and the serene, methodical wife who would as soon have left a letter undated as the household dinner unordered. He threw the letter and the lock of hair into the fire, and watched the two little flames in the glowing coals. The paper curled, the hair writhed; then a little light ash remained.

Methodically he replaced the cards and papers in the letter-case and locked it up again in the drawer. Then he stood at the foot of the bed and watched the man who had done him this great wrong, his brain on fire with bewildering fury. The name of his wife came again from the man's lips. A red cloud passed before Sylvester's eyes. For a moment he seemed to lose consciousness of manhood, to become a wild beast. When he recovered, he found himself glaring into Leroux's eyes with his fingers at his throat. How near he had been to murder he did not know.

He drew himself up and wiped the sweat from his forehead, shaken to the depths by the beast impulse. The reaction brought self-control. He resumed his vigil by the bedside, listening grimly to the words of Leroux, now less frequent and distinct. Yet though he could master his actions, he did not combat with the increasing hatred that took the place of the old affection. At times he considered calmly whether such a man should be allowed to live. In his weak state one quick blow over the heart would stop its beating for ever. The man had done more than wrong him. He had killed his soul, made it an awful thing to live. Yet, as if in contempt of such imaginings, he rose once or twice and changed the bandages with a surgeon's delicate handling, and moistened the swollen lips with ice.

Gradually all the phases of realisation developed themselves in his mind. Far off memories recurred, touched the flesh. It was their marriage bed whereon Leroux was lying.

He shuddered from the manifold horror of it, and for the first time broke into a hoarse cry.

Toward morning the fever lowered and Leroux lay still. Streaks of a ghostly daylight crept in through the Venetian blinds and barred the floor. The nurse came to take over her watch. Sylvester gave brief instructions, and, going to his room, threw himself on his bed and slept heavily. At the moment of waking he had a sense of nightmare, was all but congratulating himself on his release; but another instant brought the full flood of memory. He rose, shaved, dressed himself as usual, and went down to breakfast. At the bottom of the stairs was a quick patter of feet and two little arms were thrown around his limbs. It was Dorothy. He started back, looked at her stupidly. Then roughly disengaging her, he thrust her aside and hurried into the breakfast room. A new and sickening doubt convulsed him. Was she his child?

She came in a while later, shyly holding by the maid-servant's skirts, regarding him with scared reproach. Never had her father been cross or rough. Ungentleness from him was incomprehensible to her child's mind.

“Run away upstairs,” he said, controlling his voice, then added to the servant, “Take Miss Dorothy into the nursery.”

The child burst into tears, as the maid led her out. Tender-hearted a man as he was, for all the world he could not have called her back.