THAT autumn pressed heavily upon Mrs. Hardacre. Norma's engagement, without being broken off, was indefinitely suspended, and Norma, by going abroad with Mrs. Deering immediately on her return from Cornwall, had placed herself beyond reach of maternal influence. It is true that Mrs. Hardacre wrote many letters; but as Norma's replies mainly consisted of a line or two on a picture post-card, it is to be doubted whether she ever read them. Mrs. Hardacre began to feel helpless. Morland could give her little assistance. He shrugged his shoulders at her appeals. He was perfectly determined to marry Norma, but trusted to time to restore her common-sense and lead her into the path of reason. Nothing that he could do would be of any avail. Mrs. Hardacre urged him to join the ladies on the Continent and bring matters to a crisis. He replied that an election was crisis enough for one man in a year, and furthermore the autumn session necessitated his attendance in the House. He was quite satisfied, he told her stolidly, with things as they were, and in the meantime was actually finding an interest in his new political life. But Mrs. Hardacre shared neither his satisfaction nor his interest, a mother's point of view being so different from that of a lover.

As if the loss of ducal favour and filial obedience were not enough for the distraught lady, her husband one morning threw a business letter upon the table, and with petulant curses on the heads of outside brokers, incoherently explained that he was ruined. They were liars and knaves and thieves, he sputtered. He would drag them all into the police court, he would write to the “Times,” he would go and horsewhip the blackguards. Damme if he would n't!

“I wish the blackguards could horsewhip you,” remarked his wife, grimly. “Have you sufficient brains to realise what an unutterable fool you have been?”

If he did not realise it by the end of the week, it was not Mrs. Hardacre's fault. She reduced the unhappy man to craven submission and surreptitious nipping of old brandy in order to keep up the feeble spirit that remained in him, and took the direction of affairs into her own hands. They were not ruined, but a considerable sum of money had been lost through semi-idiotic speculation, and for a time strict economy was necessary. By Christmas the establishment in the country was broken up, a tenant luckily found for Heddon Court, and a small furnished house taken in Devonshire Place. These arrangements gave Mrs. Hardacre much occupation, but they did not tend to soften her character. When Norma came home, sympathetically inclined and honestly desirous to smooth down asperities—for she appreciated the aggravating folly of her father—she found her advances coldly repulsed.

“What is the good of saying you are sorry for me,” Mrs. Hardacre asked snappishly, “when you refuse to do the one thing that can mend matters?”

Then followed the old, old story which Norma had heard so often in days past, but now barbed with a new moral and adorned with new realism. Norma listened wearily, surprised at her own lack of retort. When the familiar homily came to an end, her reply was almost meek:

“Give me a little longer time to think over it.”

“You had better cut it as short as possible,” said Mrs. Hardacre, “or you may find yourself too late. As it is, you are going off. What have you been doing to yourself? You look thirty.”

“I feel fifty,” said Norma.

“You had better go and have your face massaged, or you'll soon not be fit to be seen.”

“I think I want a course of soul massage,” answered Norma, with a hard little laugh.

But when she was alone in her own room, she looked anxiously at her face in the glass. Her mother had confirmed certain dismal imaginings. She had grown thinner, older looking; tiny lines were just perceptible at the corners of eyes and lips and across the forehead. The fresh bloom of youth was fading from her skin. She was certainly going off. She had not been a happy woman since her precipitate flight to Cornwall. The present discovery added anxiety to depression.

A day or two afterwards Mrs. Hardacre returned to the unedifying attack. Had Norma written to Morland to inform him of her arrival? Norma replied that she had no inordinate longing to see Morland. Mrs. Hardacre used language that only hardened and soured women of fashion who are beginning to feel the pinch of poverty dare use nowadays. It is far more virulent than a fishwife's, for every phrase touches a jangling nerve and every gibe tears a delicate fibre, whereas Billingsgate merely shocks and belabours. Norma bore it in silence for some time, and then went away quivering from head to foot. A new and what seemed a horrible gift had been bestowed upon her—the power to feel. Once a sarcastic smile, a scornful glance, a withering retort would have carried her in triumph from her mother's presence. Secure in her own callous serenity, she would have given scarcely a further thought to the quarrel. Now things had inexplicably changed. Her mother's stabs hurt. Some curious living growth within her was wrung with pain. She could only grope humbled and broken to her room and stare at nothing, wishing she could cry like other women.

No wonder she looked old, when the spirit had left her and taken with it the cold, proud setting of the features that had given her beauty its peculiar stamp. Dimly she realised the disintegration. When a nature which has taken a colossal vanity for strength and has relied thereon unquestioningly for protection against a perilous world, once loses grip of that sublime mainstay, it is impossible for it to take firm hold again. It must content itself with lesser planks or flounder helplessly, fearful of imminent shipwreck. Norma, during those autumn months, had found her strength vanity. The fact in rude, symbolic form was brought home to her a short time after her return.

It was a bright Sunday afternoon, when, on her way to pay a call in Kensington, she had dismissed her cab at Lancaster Gate and was walking through Kensington Gardens. Half-way a familiar figure met her eye. It was her own maid sitting on a bench with a man by her side. The girl was wearing a cheap long jacket over an elaborate dress, absurdly light for the time of year. It caught Norma's attention, and then suddenly it flashed upon her that it was the dress she had given to be burned months ago. She walked on, aching with a sense of the futility of grandiose determinations. She had consigned the garment stained with Jimmie's blood contemptuously to the flames. It was incongruously whole in Kensington Gardens. She had cast her love for Jimmie out of her heart in the same spirit of comedic tragedy. Forlorn and bedraggled it was still there, mockingly refusing to be reduced to its proper dust and ashes. Her strength had not availed her to cast it out. Her strength was a vain thing. Yet being forlorn and bedraggled the love was as hateful as the unconsumed garment. It haunted her like an unpurged offence. The newspaper details had made it reek disgustfully. At times Connie Deering's half faith filled her with an extravagant hope that these sordid horrors which had sullied the one pure and beautiful thing that had come into her life were nothing but a ghastly mistake; that it was, as Connie suggested, a dark mystery from which if Jimmie chose he could emerge clean. But then her judgment, trained from childhood to look below the surface of even smiling things and find them foul, rebelled. The man had proclaimed himself, written himself down a villain. It was in black and white. And not only a villain—that might be excusable—but a hypocritical canting villain, which was the unforgivable sin. Every woman has a Holy Ghost of sorts within her.

Norma did not write to Morland. She dreaded renewal of relations, and yet she had not the courage to cut him finally adrift. The thought of withered spinsterhood beneath her father's roof was a dismaying vision. Marriage was as essential as ever to the scheme of her future. Why not with Morland? Her mother's words, though spoken as with the tongues of asps, were those of wisdom.

All that she could bring to a husband was her beauty, her superb presence, her air of royalty. These gone, her chances were as illusory as those of the pinched and faded gentlewomen who tittle-tattled at Cosford tea-parties. Another year, and at the present rate of decay her beauty would have vanished into the limbo of last year's snows. She exaggerated; but what young woman of six-and-twenty placed as she has not looked tremulously in her mirror and seen feet of crows and heaven knows what imaginary fowls that prey upon female charms? At six-and-thirty she smiles with wistful, longing regret at the remembered image. Yet youth, happily, is not cognisant of youth's absurdities. It takes itself tragically. Thus did Norma. Her dowry of beauty was dwindling. She must marry within the year. Sometimes she wished that Theodore Weever, who had not yet discovered his decorative wife and had managed to find himself at various places which she had visited abroad, would come like a Paladin and deliver her from her distress and carry her off to his castle in Fifth Avenue. He would at least interest her as a human being, which Morland, with all his solid British qualities, had never succeeded in doing. But Theodore Weever had not spoken. He retained the imperturbability of the bald marble bust of himself that he had taken her to see in a Parisian sculptor's studio. There only remained Morland. But for some reason, for which she could not account, he seemed the last man on earth she desired to marry. When she had written to him, soon after her flight to Cornwall, to beg for a postponement of the wedding, giving him the very vaguest reasons for her request, he had assented with a cheerfulness ill befitting an impatient lover. It would be impertinence, he wrote, for him to enquire further into her reasons. She was too much a woman of the world to act without due consideration, and provided that he could look forward to the very great happiness of one day calling her his wife, he was perfectly satisfied with whatever she chose to arrange. The absence of becoming fervour, in spite of her desire to postpone the dreaded day, produced a feeling of irritated disappointment. None of us, least of all women, invariably like to be taken at our word. If Morland lay so little value upon her as that, he might just as well give her up altogether. She replied impulsively, suggesting a rupture of the engagement. Morland, longing for time to raise him from the abasement in which he grovelled, had welcomed the proposal to defer the marriage; but as he smarted at the same time under a sense of wrong—had he not been betrayed by his own familiar friend and the woman he loved?—he now unequivocally refused to accept her suggestion. He had made up his mind to marry her. He had made all his arrangements for marrying her. The check he had experienced had stimulated a desire which only through unhappy circumstances had languished for a brief season. He persuaded himself that he was more in love with her than ever. At all costs, in his stupid, dogged way, he determined to marry her. He told her so bluntly. He merely awaited her good pleasure. Norma accepted the situation and thought, by going abroad, to leave it at home to take care of itself. It might die of inanition. Something miraculous might happen to transform it entirely. She returned and found it alive and quite undeveloped. It grinned at her with a leer which she loathed from the depths of her soul; and the more Mrs. Hardacre pointed at it the more it leered, and the greater became the loathing.

At last Mrs. Hardacre took matters into her own hands and summoned Morland to London. “Norma is in a green, depressed state,” she wrote, “and I think your proper place is by her side. I imagine she regrets her foolishness in postponing the marriage and is ashamed to confess it. A few words with you face to face would bring her back to her old self. Women have these idiotic ways, my dear Morland, and men being so much stronger and saner must make generous allowances. I confidently expect you.”

Morland's vanity, spurred by this letter, brought him in a couple of days to London.

“My dear Morland, this is a surprise,” cried Mrs. Hardacre dissemblingly, as he entered the drawing-room, “we were only just talking of you. I'll ring for another cup.”

She moved to the bell by the side of the fireplace, and Norma and Morland shook hands with the conventional words of greeting.

“I hope you've had a good time abroad?”

“Oh, yes. The usual thing, the usual places, the usual people, the usual food. In fact, a highly successful pursuit of the usual. I've invented a verb—'to usualise.' I suppose you've been usualising too?”

The sudden sight of him had braced her, and instinctively she had adopted her old, cool manner as defensive armour. Her reply pleased him. There was something pungent in her speech, irreconcilable in her attitude, which other women did not possess. He was not physiognomist or even perceptive enough to notice the subtle change in her expression. He noted, as he remarked to her later, that she was “a bit off colour,” but he attributed it to the muggy weather, and never dreamed of regarding her otherwise than as radically the same woman who had engaged herself to many him in the summer. To him she was still the beautiful shrew whose taming appealed to masculine instincts. The brown hair sweeping up in a wave from the forehead, the finely chiselled sensitive features, the clear brown eyes, the mocking lips, the superb poise of the head, the stately figure perfectly set off in the dark blue tailor-made dress, all combined to impress him with a realisation of the queenliness of the presence that had grown somewhat shadowy of late to his unimaginative mental vision.

“And how do you like Parliament?” she asked casually, when the teacup had been brought and handed to him filled.

“I find it remarkably interesting,” he replied sententiously. “It is dull at times, of course, but no man can sit on those green benches and not feel he is helping to shape the destinies of a colossal Empire.”

“Is that what you really feel—or is it what you say when you are responding for the House of Commons at a public dinner?” asked Norma.

Morland hesitated for a moment between huffiness and indulgence. In spite of his former gibes at the stale unprofitableness of parliamentary life, he had always had the stolid Briton's reverence for our Institutions, and now that he was actually a legislator, his traditions led him to take himself seriously.

“I have become a very keen politician, I assure you,” he answered. “If you saw the amount of work that falls on me, you would be astonished. If it were n't for Manisty—that's my secretary, you know—I don't see how I could get through it.”

“I always wonder,” said Mrs. Hardacre, “how members manage to find time for anything. They work like galley-slaves for nothing at all. I regard them as simply sacrificing themselves for the public good.”

“A member of Parliament is the noblest work of God. Don't, mother. Please leave us our illusions.”

“What are they?” asked Morland.

“One is that there are a few decently selfish people left in an age of altruists,” said Norma.

She talked for the sake of talking, careless of the stupid poverty of her epigram. Morland, as the healthy country gentleman alternating with the commonplace man about town, was a passable type enough, though failing to excite exuberant admiration. But Morland, with his narrow range of sympathies and pathetic ignorance of the thought of the day, posing solemnly as a trustee of the British Empire, aroused a scorn which she dare not express in words.

“I don't know that we are all altruists,” replied Morland, good-temperedly. “If we are good little members of Parliament, we may be rewarded with baronetcies and things. But one has to play the game thoroughly. It's worth it, is n't it, even from your point of view, Norma?”

“You're just the class of man the government does best in rewarding,” remarked Mrs. Hardacre, with her wintry smile that was meant to be conciliatory. “A man of birth and position upholds the dignity of a title and is a credit to his party.”

Morland laughingly observed that it was early in the day to be thinking of parliamentary honours. He had not even made his maiden speech. As Norma remained silent, the conversation languished. Presently Mrs. Hardacre rose.

“I have no doubt you two want to have a talk together. Won't you stay and dine with us, Morland?”

He glanced at Norma, but failing to read an endorsement of the invitation in her face, made an excuse for declining.

“Then I will say good-bye and leave you. I would n't stand any nonsense if I were you,” she added in a whisper through the door which he held open for her.

He sauntered up to the fireplace and stood on the hearth-rug, his hands in his pockets. Norma, looking at him from her easy-chair, wondered at a certain ignobility that she detected for the first time beneath his bluff, prosperous air. In spite of birth and breeding he looked common.

“Well?” he said. “We had better have it out at once. What is it to be? I must have an answer sooner or later.”

“Can't it be later?”

“If you insist upon it. I'm not going to hold a pistol to your head, my dear girl. Only you must admit that I've treated you with every consideration. I have n't worried you. You took it into your head to put off our marriage. I felt you had your reasons and I raised no objection. But we can't go on like this forever, you know.”

“Why not?” asked Norma.

“Human nature. I am in love with you, and want to marry you.”

“But supposing I am not in love with you, Morland. I've never pretended to be, have I?”

“We need n't go over old ground. I accepted all that at the beginning. The present state of affairs is that we are engaged; when are we going to be married?”

“Oh, I don't know,” said Norma, desperately. “I have n't thought of it seriously. I know I have behaved like a beast to you—you must forgive me. At times it has seemed as though I was not the right sort to marry and bring children into the world. I should loathe it!”

“Oh, I don't think so,” said Morland, in a tone he meant to be soothing. “Besides—”

“I know what you are going to say—or at any rate what you would like to say. It's scarcely decent to talk of such things. But I have n't been brought up in a nunnery. I wish to God I had been. At all events, I am frank. I would loathe it—all that side of it. Could n't we suppress that side? Oh, yes, I am going to speak of it—it has been on my mind for months,” she burst out, as Morland made a quick step towards her.

He did not allow her to continue. With his hand on the arm of her chair, he bent down over her.

“You are talking wild nonsense,” he said; and she flushed red and did not meet his eyes. “When a man marries, he marries in the proper sense of the term, unless he is an outrageous imbecile. There is to be no question of that sort of thing. I thought you knew your world better. I want you—you yourself. Don't you understand that?”

Norma put out her hand to push him away. He seized it in his. She snatched it from him.

“Let me get up,” she said, waving him off. She brushed past him, as she rose.

“We can't go on talking. What I've said has made it impossible. Let us change the subject. How long are you going to stay in town?”

“I'm not going to change the subject,” said Morland, rather brutally. “I'm far too much interested in it. Hang it all, Norma, you do owe me something.”

“What do I owe you? What?” she asked with a sudden flash in her eyes.

“You are a woman of common-sense. I leave you to guess. You admit you have n't treated me properly. You have nothing to complain of as far as I am concerned. Now, have you?”

“How do I know? No. I suppose not, as things go. Once I did try to—to feel more like other women—and to make some amends. I told you that perhaps we were making a mistake in excluding sentiment. If you had chosen, you could have—I don't know—made me care for you, perhaps. But you didn't choose. You treated me as if I were a fool. Very likely I was.”

“When was that?” asked Morland, with a touch of sarcasm. “I certainly don't remember.”

“It was the last night we had any talk together—in the billiard-room. The night before—before the garden-party.” He turned away with an involuntary exclamation of anger. He remembered now, tragic events having put the incident out of his mind. He was caught in a trap.

“I did n't think you meant it,” he said, hurrying to the base excuse. “Women sometimes consider it their duty to say such things—to act a little comedy, out of kindness. Some fellows expect it. I thought it would be more decent to let you see that I did n't.”

There was a short silence. Norma stood in the centre of the room, biting her lip, her head moving slightly from side to side; she was seeking to formulate her thoughts in conventional terms. Her cheek grew a shade paler.

“Listen,” she said at length. “I am anything bad you like to call me. But I'm not a woman who cajoles men. And I'm not a liar. I'm far too cynical to lie. Truth is much more deadly. I hate lying. That's the main reason why I broke with a man I cared for more than for any other man I have ever met—because he lied. You know whom I mean.”

He faced her with a conscious effort. Even at this moment of strain and anger, Norma was struck again with the lurking air of ignobility on his face; but she only remembered it afterwards. He brazened it out.

“Jimmie Padgate, I suppose.”

“I can't forgive him for lying.”

“I don't see how he lied. He faced the music, at any rate, like a man,” said Morland, compelled by a remnant of common decency to defend Jimmie.

“All his pose beforehand was a lie—unless the disclosures afterwards were lies—”

“What do you mean?” asked Morland, sharply.

“Oh, never mind. We have not met to discuss the matter. I don't know why I referred to it.”

She paused for a moment. She had begun her tirade at a white heat. Suddenly she had cooled down, and felt lassitude in mind and limbs. An effort brought her to a lame conclusion.

“You accused me of acting a comedy. I was n't acting. I was perfectly sincere. I have been absolutely frank with you from the hour you proposed to me.”

“Well, I'm sorry for having misunderstood you. I beg your pardon,” said Morland. They took up the conversation from the starting-point, but listlessly, dispiritedly. The reference to Jimmie had awakened the ever-living remorse in Morland's not entirely callous soul. The man did suffer, at times acutely. And now to act the conscious comedy in the face of Norma's expressed abhorrence was a difficult and tiring task. Unwittingly he grew gentler; and Norma, her anger spent, weakly yielded to the change of tone.

“We have settled nothing, after all our talk,” he said at last, looking at his watch. “Don't you think we had better fix it up now? Society expects us to get married. What will people say? Come—what about Easter?”

Norma passed her hand wearily over her eyes.

“I oughtn't to marry you at all. I should loathe it, as I said. I should never get to care for you in that way. You see I am honest. Let us break off the engagement.”

“Well, look here,” said Morland, not unkindly, “let us compromise. I'll come back in three days' time. You'll either say it's off altogether or we'll be married at Easter. Will that do?”

“Very well,” said Norma.

When Mrs. Hardacre came for news of the interview, Norma told her of the arrangement.

“Which is it going to be?” she asked.

Norma set her teeth. “I can't marry him,” she said.

But the proud spirit of Norma Hardacre was broken. The three days' Inferno that Mrs. Hardacre created in the house drove the girl to desperation. Her father came to her one day with the tears running down his puffy cheeks. Unknown to her mother he had borrowed money from Morland, which he had lost on the Stock Exchange. Norma looked in her mirror, and found herself old, ugly, hag-ridden. Anything was preferable to the torture and degradation of her home. The next time that Morland called he stayed to dinner, and the wedding was definitely fixed for Easter.