Loss of faith in all through the faithlessness of one is a common and a tragic phenomenon. It is vain for the robust-minded to prove the illogic of the conclusion, which is one arrived at more from the emotional than the logical faculties of the brain. The phenomenon occurs only in men of a certain temperament. They are endowed with powers of intense individual passion, but lack that universality of sympathy which makes for breadth of judgment. To narrow the proposition to a particular case, they take one woman, not after long and patient deliberation,—that is the supreme pity of it,—but haphazard, on the impulse of a great emotion, and glorify her as the queen of all women. She becomes inevitably the test of a sex. The poor human touchstone fails, and a whole sex is condemned. To the commoner sort this loss of faith matters little, for the nobility of a great faith was never in them; they cultivate an easy-going cynicism, and that is all. But the men whose lives are broken, who feel within them the horrible weight of a dead ideal, are of nobler mould, and therein lies the piteousness of the tragedy.

Sylvester walked slowly homewards from his partner's house in St. John's Wood, where he had been dining. For Dr. Frodsham, who had ample means and a large family, had taken the opportunity of moving from the house in Weymouth Street into the purer air of the N. W. district, on Sylvester's entrance into partnership, and only retained a consulting-room, where he attended at certain hours. The sense of his loss hung heavy upon Sylvester. He had left a home that glowed with a happiness for ever beyond his reach. He had seen love, trust, sympathy, reflected from face to face of husband and wife. The house was glad with the laughter of youth. The somewhat intellectual atmosphere was softened by an indescribable tenderness of human relation. Faith in themselves as men and women, in humanity in general, gave a largeness to their social intercourse. And he had sat there recognising, wondering; envying, until the door had closed behind him and he was left to his loneliness on the silent pavement.

A boy and girl of the lower class passed slowly by, she with her head on his shoulder, he with his arm round her waist. They were saying nothing, probably were maintaining a half-hour's silence, but they were undeniably happy, and, for the moment, Sylvester envied them. Vulgar as may have been their affection, they, like the Frodshams, possessed that which he had lost for ever,—faith. And faith meant love and love meant life. He had seldom felt so keenly the abomination of his desolation, and the craving for a woman's touch grew to a pang like hunger. And yet his whole nature rejected the idea of fulfilment. He shuddered as he walked, and strove to turn his thoughts into another channel. But the elemental dominates a man's will. Unconsciously he returned to the subject. Ella had been much in his mind since Roderick's announcement. Her yielding to such a lover had strengthened his conviction of the contemptibility of a woman's nature. Cynically he congratulated himself on his escape. He set down nothing in extenuation. He only saw, on the one side, a woman of apparent refinement whom he had once thought worthy of being his wife, on the other side a blatant, sensual, mercenary cad. The refined woman had thrown herself into the cad's arms. What was the need of looking further? Any woman would have done the same. The so-called virtuous were merely the untempted. The kindly matron at whose table he had been dining had only maintained her position by a series of lucky accidents. And what living soul could tell whether she had been true to Frodsham? But he envied Frodsham his unclouded faith and the happiness that love brought to his hearth.

Thus Sylvester walked homewards, his thoughts revolving in a vicious circle. At Baker Street Station he passed through a crowd that was gathering around two fringed and feathered coster-girls shrieking and biting and cursing in a policeman's grip. They were too much for one man, for your coster-girl in drink is a she-devil, and possessed of extraordinary activities. One escaped, and as her companion was struggling with the constable, she rushed at his face with a gigantic hat-pin held dagger-wise.

In an instant Sylvester had dropped his light coat and had seized the fury by the arms from behind. And there he held her pinioned. She kicked, she butted, she poured out torrents of filth, she struggled, she tried to lie down, to the great excitement of the crowd, who, out of respect for the hat-pin, kept at a reasonable distance off, and expected to see a battle royal in which the slight man in evening dress would get the worst of it. But they were not prepared for such an exhibition of sheer strength on the part of the slight man. He stood like a figure of bronze, holding the foul and frenzied Amazon almost at arm's length, lifting her like a child when she tried to fall, forcing her down when she tried to leap into the air. The tussle, as far as Sylvester was concerned, did not last long; for two policemen, forcing their way through the throng, speedily relieved him of his charge and the lady of the hat-pin. Whereupon Sylvester, cheered by the crowd, coolly took his overcoat from a man who was holding it, and walked away down Baker Street.

The incident, although not tending to raise the Eternal Feminine in his esteem, broke the train of his morbid imaginings. He glowed with the sense of victory and chuckled quietly to himself. The successful application of one's own brute force brings exultation to the primitive savage in a man.

“I'm not in such bad training, after all,” he said to himself pleasantly.

So he sprang up the steps of the house in Weymouth Street in a much healthier frame of mind than that in which he had descended them some hours before. The sudden stirring of the blood had done him good.

“Mr. Lanyon is here, sir,” said a servant, meeting him in the hall. “He said he would wait until you came home.”

Sylvester disregarded the letters lying on the hall table, and ran upstairs to the drawing-room, where somewhat breathlessly he expressed his delight and wonder at seeing his father. But he was struck almost immediately with dismay at the look of illness on the old man's face.

“You have no business to be here,” he exclaimed. “You ought to be in bed. For God's sake, father, what is wrong with you?” He looked at him keenly. “It is the heart, isn't it?”

“Yes, that and other things,” Matthew admitted; “I have been a bit seedy lately. But I'll look after myself; don't fret. And I didn't come here to talk about my inside. I had to come up to town on business, so I thought I'd look in instead of writing. I haven't been waiting long. You see, your man has made me quite comfortable.”

He pointed to a tray by his side with whisky, soda, and glasses, and a box of cigars. Sylvester poured himself out a drink and bit off the end of a cigar.

“What's gone wrong?” he asked, striking a match.

“This confounded marriage of Ella's.”

“I wouldn't worry about it, father, if I were you. They are just worth one another. She has proved she's on his level by accepting him.”

“Not at all, not at all,” said the old man. “That shows you know nothing of women. It is one of the most astounding facts about an astounding sex, that women of absolute refinement will throw themselves away upon the most obvious cad, be utterly blind to his coarseness, if once he gets a hold upon them. It's a kind of helpless infatuation. It doesn't at all argue the degeneration of the woman.”

“Well, you can withhold your consent, and in the mean time try to open her eyes.”

“I have already given my consent, and there are reasons why I can't open her eyes,” said Matthew, rather slowly, looking at his finger tips.

Sylvester swung a straight-backed chair from its place and sat down near his father.

“Then you are not going to interfere at all? Don't you think that the best thing you can do? Let them work out their own salvation or damnation, as the case may be.”

“I love Ella as my own daughter, Syl, and I would save her if I could.”

“Then I don't understand,” said Sylvester. “Forgive my being impertinent, Syl, but this is a serious matter. Weren't you fond of Ella yourself, some time ago?”

The eyes of father and son met, and the eyes of each were very keen.

“I would rather not answer the question,” said Sylvester.

“You needn't,” replied Matthew, taking a sip of his whisky and soda.

There was a short silence. Sylvester smoked on, his glance fixed on his father's face, his mind more concerned with the traces of illness and suffering that he read there than with the subject under discussion.

“Syl,” said the old man, at last, looking at his son, “we are neither of us sentimental people.”

“I suppose we're not,” assented Sylvester, with a short laugh.

“Good. So what I want to say to you is serious. You have been a good son to me. I've tried to do my duty by you. But I've never asked you to do a thing for my sake during the whole course of your life. Do you think I should be justified in starting now?”

“It stands to reason,” said Sylvester.

Matthew rose from his chair and put his hand on his son's shoulder. With all the tenderness of his heart, he was a man singularly little given to outward demonstrations of affection.

“Then do everything in your power,” said he, “to stop this marriage. For my sake.” He turned and walked away. “I can do nothing,” he added.

“Very well,” replied Sylvester, quietly; “I'll stop it.”

“Don't undertake too much. I only asked you to try.”

“I've said I'll stop it, and I will. Even if it comes to—”

“What?”

“To marrying her myself,” said Sylvester, grimly.

Matthew sat down again, and then passed one of the long silences, so common between these two, who seemed to understand each other better when no words were spoken. Each man kept his own life's secrets hidden in his heart, would have gone through torture rather than reveal them to the other, or indeed to any human being, and yet each was dearer to the other than any being on earth. Speech, then, on intimate matters was dragged reluctantly and painfully from their souls, which preferred to hold a silent and mysterious communion. Even what he had said to Sylvester this evening seemed to Matthew an indecency, an exposure of an integral part of himself that the proud man kept hidden under a usually inscrutable veil of reserve. It was characteristic of both that the subject received no further allusion.

“I must think about turning in,” said Matthew at last.

“I'll go and see if they've made things comfortable for you,” said Sylvester.

“But, bless you, man, I'm not billeting myself on you and turning your house upside down. I'm putting up at the Charing Cross Hotel.”

“You'd better stay here for two or three days and let me doctor you a bit,” said Sylvester.

But the old man pooh-pooh'd the idea. He did not want doctoring. He had had some worrying intricate business lately. These confounded landed proprietors,—they got their affairs into the most disastrous muddles, and when once they had put them into a lawyer's hands thought themselves relieved of all responsibilities and gaily went off to borrow more money. God may have made man in his own image, but he certainly forgot to supply the majority of the images with brains. However, he had set things straight by now and could take it easy for a bit. When he wanted Sylvester to doctor him, he would say so.

Against his will and better judgment, Sylvester had to let him go. He announced his intention of walking to Charing Cross, but Sylvester anticipated him by whistling up a hansom at the street door. Matthew protested. He had always walked home.

“Do something for my sake,—for a change,” said Sylvester, with a touch of humour.

The old man laughed, entered the cab, and drove off.

Sylvester went upstairs to finish his cigar. The world seemed a more ironical place than it had appeared some hours before. He felt certain aches in his fingers and sundry tinglings in his shins. He stooped and rubbed the latter with a meditative smile. There was another young woman between whom and her desires he was about to come. He speculated on the prospect of rubbing his shins after that encounter.

“I wonder how it is to be done,” he said, lying back in his chair.

His promise was given. He would have unquestioningly married his fair antagonist of Baker Street had his father so commanded. But all the same it was not without uneasiness that he contemplated his mission. And as for the girl he had undertaken to save, he assured himself that he took no interest whatever in her destiny.

To celebrate the engagement, Lady Milmo held a great reception to which came crowds of distinguished and undistinguished persons, but it was characteristic of her gatherings that the former far outnumbered the latter. The air hummed with congratulations and with laudations of Art. Sylvester, moving sardonically through the press, felt like a visitor dazed by the whirl of a great unfamiliar factory. He confessed the feeling to an acquaintance who fluttered between the two worlds of art and science.

“The manufactory of artificial ideals,” laughed the latter, having also to maintain a reputation for epigram.

The wit stayed to speak with a friend, and Sylvester tried to edge his way towards the further end of the room where Ella stood talking with a couple of men. From where he was he could see that she looked more than usually beautiful. Her face was flushed, her eyes held the light of enthusiasm, her young figure in a simple white silk dress stood out proud and defiant against the darkness of an open window. It recalled vividly to his mind her attitude when long, long ago she had passionately expressed her faith in the glory of the world. His lips twitched in a half-smile. All around him he heard snatches of conversation in which the engagement was alluded to. A man cast doubts on Roderick's solvency. A girl declared she would just as soon marry a steam-organ. A lean, anxious woman with a mechanical grin ecstaticised over the union. The Art Colony was discussed on all sides.

Presently Roderick, resplendent in a great white bow that fell half over his shirt-front and almost hid a topaz solitaire, caught sight of him and hailed him with a southern wave of his hand.

“My dear comrade,” he cried as soon as he was within hand-shaking range of Sylvester, “it does my heart good to see you here to share our joy. Have you spoken to her yet? There she is—

'Oh, she is fairer than the evening air

Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars!'

Isn't she? A throbbing moment, amigo.”

“I'm glad to see you so much in love,” said Sylvester. “It's refreshing.”

“Cynic!” said Roderick. “That's why your hair is turning grey. Look at mine,—fresh as a rose in June. And I'm older than you.”

“How's the Utopia?”

“Colossal. Come, I'll introduce you to Sir Decimus Bland. Lady Derring has fixed me with her glassy eye, and I must obey her call. Sir Decimus, let me present my oldest and most valued friend, Dr. Sylvester Lanyon, the terror of bacilli.”

Sir Decimus was a portly red-faced man who, from a habit of holding his hands in front of him, looked as if he were supporting a model of one of his Art galleries after the self-conscious manner of a “donor,” supporting his church in the company of various saints in an old Italian painting. He puffed as he spoke and glared amiably through a single eye-glass.

“Delighted to make your acquaintance, Dr. Lanyon,” said he. “Your name is a household word in the domain of science. In our domain we also have bacilli to fight against,—commercialism, insincerity, all the cankers that destroy the soul of art.”

“So you are going to choose an environment unsuitable for their development, I hear,” said Sylvester.

“Yes, the Walden Art Colony. I am, as you may know, guaranteeing the Director's salary. Our fortunate friend is just the man for the post.”

“When do you think it will take practical shape?” asked Sylvester.

“We hope to start next spring—and under very happy auspices. I look upon this as a fitting culmination to the poor services I have been able to render to Art in this country. Are you interested in the movement, Dr. Lanyon?”

“Not financially. I hardly know enough about it. One thing I don't quite understand. I thought an artist gave out the experience he had gathered in his contact with real life. How is he going to get that contact if he buries himself in what amounts to a desert island?”

“He goes direct to nature,” replied Sir Decimus, platitudinously.

“Does he?” argued Sylvester. “Rocks and trees are all very well for pretty pictures. But what about love and sorrow and other human emotions. He seems to get away entirely from the important side of nature.”

“Yes, yes, so I grant. But it's hardly that,” puffed Sir Decimus, mopping his forehead. “Ah, here is Urquhart; he will tell you all about it. Don't you know Urquhart?”

He performed the introduction, stated the case at great length with a confusion that irritated the scientist's trained mind, and then, with visible relief, moved away. Bevis Urquhart, a slight young man, with a tiny silky black moustache and a languid manner, began a patient explanation. Sylvester had heard of him as a lad of great wealth who had convulsed a whole county by refusing to ride to hounds and uttering blasphemy against partridge shooting. It was whispered that he had invented a new religion and had an oratory in his bedroom fitted with expensive idols made of chrysoprasus.

“It is the mistake of the crowd,” said he, “to regard Art as an interpretation of experience. Art has nothing to do with Life. Life claims all for itself and so kills Art, drains it of its blood. In other words, Life claims Art, Art does not claim Life. If not, Art would be unexpressed. The poem would remain a pure crystal in the soul of the poet, the picture a fair-hued mist in the fantasy of the painter. Art is the revelation of the Undetermined, and this can only reach its fulness in the quietude of the soul.”

“Thank you,” said Sylvester; “you have given me a lucid solution of my difficulty.”

The young man smiled deprecatingly.

“Pardon me. I try to be an artist in words, and lucidity is so brutal and commonplace. Do you read MallarmÉ?”

“No,” said Sylvester. “When I want wholesome unintelligibility I read Rabelais.”

Urquhart looked pained. There was a slight pause.

“Fond of bicycling?” asked Sylvester, cheerily.

Again came the pitying smile over the face of the young semi-millionaire.

“I know so little of the things one does with one's body,” he said.

“Better learn,” said Sylvester. “Capital exercise. Shakes up your liver, you know.”

Here he was carried off by Lady Milmo, who was dying to introduce him to somebody.

“Do you understand all the things they talk about here?” he asked.

Lady Milmo regarded him with a twinkling eye.

“God bless your soul, no,” she said.

“I suppose they're all exceedingly clever?”

Lady Milmo stood upon the points of her toes and looked around, as if to take in all her guests in one comprehensive glance. Then she half whispered into his ear,—“They've all got to talk like that to one another for the sake of their reputations. But I go round and talk to each in turn of their cooks or their stomachs, according to sex,—and they love it!”

“Well, I'd sooner talk to you, Lady Milmo,—though not of my stomach,—than to any of these people,” said Sylvester, with a laugh. “Can't you steal five minutes?”

Lady Milmo spied a couple of vacant chairs in a near corner, and sitting down on one motioned Sylvester to the other. Then she smiled. She was a kind-hearted woman, and in spite of her false air of youth possessed much charm of manner.

“I suppose you want to talk about the engagement!” she said.

“No, not particularly. What do you think of this Colony, where Ella proposes to exile herself?”

“Utter rubbish,” said Lady Milmo.

Sylvester expressed surprise. “I was under the impression that you were one of its fervent propagandists.”

“Oh, one must do something,” she replied inconsequently. “One bubble is just as good as another to blow during the season. Whether it's providing eau de cologne for released criminals, or founding a Garden of Eden for unsuccessful poets, it all comes to the same thing in the end. You look puzzled. Well, what is one person's amusement is another's bewilderment.”

“But all these promoters—Ella and Roderick—they believe in it?”

“Oh, yes, they believe in it. People will believe in anything,—Mr. Urquhart's new religion, for instance. But the Art Colony is rubbish. Don't put a penny in it. I haven't. It may be a romantic toy for Ella to play with for the first two years of her married life, but then she will come back and settle down to a reasonable existence. You won't give me away, will you?”

Sylvester promised, and a few moments later found himself standing alone, wrapped in gloomy wonder at the inanity of life. A voice roused him from his meditation.

“Good-evening, Sylvester.”

He started and found Ella by his side. She looked at him boldly, with a little triumphant gleam of defiance. He shook hands, explained that his object in accepting the invitation was to offer her his congratulations. Social convention required the formula. Ella's ear, however, detected an ironical note, and the blood came swiftly to her cheeks.

“For a man who scorns hypocrisy—” she began; then checked herself. His regard of grave inquiry made her swiftly conscious of a false position, and her cheeks flamed hotter.

“You know what I mean,” she said. “You don't really congratulate me.”

“Why do you say so?”

“I feel that you are inimical to me, and you have never liked Roderick.”

“One can wish one's enemies well,” he remarked with a half-smile.

“Why should we be your enemies? You should hear how differently Roderick speaks of you.”

“My dear Ella,” replied Sylvester, “I have not uttered a single word against Roderick. It would be in very bad taste for me to do so. I have known him for many years, and we still meet. But he is not an intimate friend of mine.”

“You dislike him,” said Ella. “I feel that you do.”

The feline that is in the nature of all women—just as its stronger, tigerish development is in the nature of all men—tingled to her finger ends. She felt the velvet sheaths stiffen back. The sight of him angered her. She itched to provoke him to battle, to fall on him tooth and claw if he took up her challenge. An unreasoning instinct clamoured also for violent defence of Roderick. It was a psychological moment full of many feminine complexities which she half understood; and that made her the more angry.

Sylvester, looking only on the surface, smiled somewhat contemptuously at her desire to scratch. Certainly he had undertaken a campaign against her; but he felt that so undignified a skirmish was not the wisest preliminary to hostilities. He had come here, besides, to reconnoitre.

“Why should I dislike Roderick?” he asked.

“Because you never try to understand anybody. Because Roderick has not locked himself up in your iron cage of convention; because he hasn't set himself up on a pillar of impeccability as you have done. You sit within your own prim parlour of moderation and think the man who goes to generous extremes is a lost soul. You need not have congratulated me. I should not have resented it. I should have understood and have given you credit for honesty.”

But Sylvester was not to be drawn into strife. He replied equably that he would withdraw his congratulations, if they offended her. Meanwhile they might talk of something pleasanter. She suggested Shakespeare and the musical glasses, with a fine air of disdain.

“Or the Walden Art Colony?” said Sylvester.

“What have you to say against the Colony?” she flashed.

“Nothing at all. Do you believe in it?”

“With all my heart. It is a great movement. It is an idea to live for. It is the first thing I have had to believe in since—since I threw off the girl and became a woman.”

“And I sincerely hope it won't be the last,” he replied with grave irony. And as a young man drew nigh to take his leave of Ella, he bowed and turned away with a saturnine sense of a victory after which there would be no rubbing of shins. But Ella, although she smiled sweetly on the young man, felt that she had been foolish in wantonly exposing herself to Sylvester's cold mockery, and the brightness of her evening suffered a miserable eclipse. It was only when Sir Decimus Bland came up and talked Colony with ponderous patronage, and elevated her to the dignity of high-priestess of the undefined cult of the Higher Art, that she regained her self-respect and looked more serenely on the universe.