Lord Henry could have flown amid the foliage of the trees, he could have leaped from branch to branch,—aye, he could have pranced from the tip of each leaf of bracken on his way,—so elated did he feel that now, at least, the worst was over, the worst was known, and what remained to be done was within the compass of his own powers, and free from any treacherous element of luck or accident.

But his joy at the comparatively harmless outcome of Cleopatra's action was nothing compared to his delight at that action itself, and even the knowledge that he had read her character aright did not gratify him as completely as the positive realisation that such characters as hers still existed. It was chiefly this fact that dazzled him, and almost choked him with a sensation of all too abundant ecstasy.

"One touch of Nature!" Yes, indeed; and in England of the twentieth century it was terrifying in its intensity. Those tame people who talked glibly of "Nature" and of "a return to Nature," as if this were something they could contemplate with blissful equanimity, imagined belike that Nature was all humming bees, smiling meadows, nodding blooms and sporting butterflies, the Nature of the most successful Victorian poets. It was their back-parlour misinterpretation and belittlement of Nature that made these modern Philistines worship her. Even the most sanguine could hardly suspect them of having the courage, the good blood and the taste, to worship Nature as she really was,—Nature with all her intoxicating joys, staggering immorality and tragic passions.

Thus did Lord Henry meditate as he picked his way eagerly back to the spot where Cleopatra lay, and for the first moment that day he began to feel proud of his work at Brineweald.

When he reached the girl again she was just recovering consciousness, and, as her frightened eyes began to take in the scene about her, and recognised him, he noticed that she shuddered.

He knelt down and took her hand, but she shrank from him with a look of such concentrated terror that he allowed her fingers to slip slowly away.

"My poor dear girl!" he murmured, wiping the beads of perspiration from her brow. "My poor brave Cleo!"

Her teeth chattered a little, and again the frightened look entered her tired eyes, and she appeared to swoon once more.

He threw off his rain-coat and laid it on her, supported her head on his knee, and waited thus for some time.

After a little while, however, it occurred to him that someone might come across them if they remained so close to the house, and picking up his charge, he penetrated further into the wood in the direction of the morning's walk.

The movement seemed to restore Cleopatra a little, and laying her down on a gentle slope, he succeeded in making her sip a little brandy from his flask.

"You are breathing too quickly," he said. "You have just had a most terrific shaking and your head is agitated. Try breathing more slowly and deeply, as if nothing had happened; and soon your body will be persuaded that nothing has happened."

He spoke sternly, but with just that modicum of tenderness which made his words at once a command and an entreaty.

"Try it," he said again. "Breathe as if nothing had happened." He held her hand, and gazed sympathetically into her face. "As a matter of fact," he added, "so little has happened that it's not worth while being agitated about it."

She looked about as if in search of someone.

"It's all right," he said, "no one can find us here. We are a long way from where I first came across you."

She closed her eyes, and seemed to be trying to do as he directed, for her nostrils dilated as if in an effort to breathe deeply. He wished she would speak. He dreaded that her mind might be unhinged.

"When you are well enough to walk," he said, "we shall go to Sandlewood. We'll have some tea or dinner there, and then you can get back to 'The Fastness' after dark and go straight to bed. That will be excellent, and nobody will be any the wiser."

Patiently he waited while her breathing became by degrees more normal, and faint traces of returning colour began to fleck her cheeks. He still held her hand, and now and again he would press it gently as an earnest of his sympathy. It seemed a long and anxious wait, and as his will and desire for her return to strength grew more intense, he hoped that she was profiting from his silent co-operation with her struggle for recovery.

Suddenly her eyes opened, and she looked anxiously round.

"It's all right," he repeated, "you are not where you were when I first found you. We have moved since then."

"Where are the others?" she gasped, the terrified look returning to her eyes.

"They went back to the house over an hour ago," he replied.

"Is he dead? Did I kill him?" she demanded defiantly.

"Dead? No! He's not even badly wounded," he answered.

"Where was he wounded?"

"In the shoulder,—a slight flesh wound."

Her face became slightly flushed, and he rose and faced her.

"Don't move unless you want to," he muttered. "But I should prefer to go a little further away. I think it would be a good thing."

"Move away?—is any one after us?" she cried frantically.

"No, no. No one is after us. But I think you would be better alone with me for a while anyway, and if we can walk a little further on, we shall be off everybody's track."

She made an effort to rise. He assisted her, and leaning heavily on his arm she walked with him slowly towards Sandlewood. It was after six. Neither spoke until the village was in sight, and then he asked if she knew of any place in it where they could dine. "Not that it really matters," he added, "because we don't want anything very substantial."

She said that she supposed the inn would be the best place.

To the inn they therefore went, and while the innkeeper's wife prepared tea for them and boiled a few eggs, they walked over to the village church.

"Stephen has a flesh wound, no more, in the shoulder. Nobody else is hurt," he said as they sauntered along. "I have dressed the wound, and a doctor has been fetched. He was actually able to walk to the house. I told them it was an accident, that I was not skilled in the use of rook-rifles. Of course they believed me. Why shouldn't they? I want you to promise not to show me up. It was all my fault, and I may surely be allowed to come out of it with only an accident against my name?"

"I don't care who knows. I don't care what happens!" Cleopatra exclaimed hoarsely. "You needn't imagine I want you to shield me. I did it on purpose, and they must know I did it on purpose."

Lord Henry frowned. "Yes, quite so," he continued. "You have suffered so much of late that you disbelieve in anything but unhappiness. You feel it must be interminable. It was all my fault. You fancy that you are alone, with a bitter hostile world arrayed against you. And since the world is your enemy, what do you care what the enemy thinks of you? Very natural too! That is what you feel. If only, if only, Leonetta had not been so slow in walking home this morning! It was hard luck on me that you should have been driven to this, because I was aiming at something so very different. However, it seems even harder luck that you should imagine that you were driven to it by me. But fancy! only a flesh wound in the shoulder, and it's all over! God! how thankful I am. And they must believe it was my accident. For did I not come to do you good, and had I not succeeded?"

"Better have left me alone," exclaimed the girl with a bitter smile. "I wish I could go away. I want to leave this hateful place!"

"Wherever you go, whatever you do, understand," said Lord Henry, "I am going to stick close to you. So don't imagine you can drive me away."

She stopped a moment. They had reached the churchyard, and she extended an arm to the nearest tree to steady herself.

"Why don't you leave me?" she demanded. "Can't you see that I have been tormented enough? I hate everything and everybody! I want to forget; I want to be alone."

Lord Henry was silent and led the way back to the inn.

"You are doing what hundreds have done before you," he observed after a while, "and always with disastrous results. You are condemning a man unheard. Until this morning I was your friend, your most useful ally here. You knew it, you felt it. I did everything in my power to bring about a change in the balance of advantages, which was all in your favour. You saw the proof of this. You drew strength from the very change I created. You know you did; you cannot deny it. I worked with zeal and with effect. God! if I worked with the same zeal for all my patients I should be dead in a fortnight."

"Well?" she cried.

"Then you were told something by third parties,—something that seemed to destroy in an instant all the careful work of my three days here. You believed that there was only one interpretation of this thing, and that was that my purpose all along had been so hazy and my nature so capricious and irresponsible that I had suddenly resolved to reverse the whole of the elaborate machinery which I had set in motion to re-establish your health and spirits;—and what for?—in order, if you please, to win the flattering smile of a mere child! Do you imagine that even my love for your wonderful mother would ever have allowed me to right-about-wheel all of a sudden in that ridiculous fashion? Come, Cleopatra, be reasonable."

She averted her gaze, and her eyes began to well with tears.

"No, you have known the thing to happen before, and therefore you were the more readily convinced that it had happened again. You had no faith because your faith had been cruelly broken. But, believe me, although I did this action this morning chiefly on your account and Leonetta's, and partly also on account of a great friend of mine whom you do not yet know, I swear I should never have undertaken it if I had dreamt for an instant that it was going to cost you as much as a single tear."

The girl put her handkerchief to her eyes. "I'm afraid I don't understand," she said. "It all seems so mysterious. I only know that, one after another, you all seem to go the same way."

Lord Henry sighed. "Come," he said, offering her his arm again; "let me make myself clear to you."

But she was too convulsed with sobs to move. The situation was certainly difficult.

He waited, and looked for a while away from her.

"Besides," she cried at last, "you don't really know what I wanted to do, otherwise—otherwise—Oh! it's too dreadful!"

He swung round. "I know everything," he rejoined.

"You can't really want to keep me beside you then."

He smiled sadly. "And why not, in all conscience!"

She wiped her eyes quickly and frowned darkly at him.

"Lord Henry, are you fooling me?" she ejaculated. "Don't you know that a moment ago I was intent only on one thing, and that was——"

She choked and could go no further.

He walked up to her and laid a hand on her arm. "I tell you I know everything," he repeated.

"You pretend that you know," she sneered.

He smiled and bowed his head. "If you mean," he suggested, "that two hours ago you were firing from that ambush with the definite intention of doing Leonetta some mortal injury, I need hardly say——"

"Yes," she said fiercely, "I do mean that."

"Of course I knew that," he observed. "Don't imagine I had any doubt about that. When I first came up to you I was convinced of it. What else could you have been doing?"

She scrutinised him intently. "Well, then?" she stammered.

"If only you will be good enough to walk back to the inn with me," he said, again offering her his arm, "I'll explain everything to you."

"All right, walk on!" she said, declining his proffered assistance.

And then, as they walked, he began to unfold to her his reasons for his behaviour with Leonetta in the woods that morning. He explained how he had reckoned that he would be back in time to tell her first, and that had it not been for the fury of Denis's indignation, he would certainly have succeeded.

They reached the inn and repaired to the bar parlour, and over the frugal meal he continued his explanation. She listened intently, raised an objection from time to time, which he deftly parried, and thus gradually the whole story was made plain to her. She revived visibly under the effects of the refreshment, and the precise and convincing manner of his narrative; and when at last the complete chain of consequence had been revealed to her, he left her very much recovered while he went in search of some vehicle to convey them back to "The Fastness."

In about twenty minutes he returned with a broken-down old brougham—the only vehicle the village possessed,—and in a moment they were rattling away slowly in the direction of Brineweald.

"Then what made you look for me with such anxiety?" she enquired, once they were well on their way. "Why did you guess so positively that something tragic would happen? Why didn't you simply assume that my fainting fits had returned?"

He caught her hand in his.

"My dear Cleo," he replied, "perhaps I am disgustingly arrogant, perhaps I am quite unfit for decent society, but it occurred to me that your fainting fits had been, not the outcome of thwarted passion, but the result of mortified vanity. You never loved Denis. I felt somehow that in this instance, not your vanity alone, but your deepest passions were involved, and that when you would act from thwarted passion, either against yourself, against me, or against Leonetta, you would proceed to violence. Was I wrong? Was I hopelessly vain and foolish to imagine that in this instance, because I was concerned and not Denis, therefore something more tragic was to be expected?"

She looked away and a smile began to dawn on her tortured features.

"What about Baby?" she demanded after a while. "Did you consider her feelings?"

"Did I consider her feelings? How can you ask me that, seeing that I was leaving no stone unturned to save her from the toils of an arch-flappist?"

She almost laughed.

"But didn't you go unnecessarily far with the poor kid?"

"Only as far as I was obliged to go to effect my purpose. But do you suppose I am only the second man with whom she has flirted heavily? Do you suppose I am even the sixth? I took care that she should realise that it was only a rag. She is deep and she is passionate. She knows what a good rag is. And she will behave very differently, I can assure you, when she meets the man with whom she feels she cannot play without burning her pretty fingers. She won't accept his first overtures so readily, believe me. She will be too terrified, as all decent women are when they are truly and deeply moved. She won't even yield so very quickly to his repeated overtures. She will realise that the affair is too deep, too committing, too final for that."

"But didn't you kiss her?" Cleopatra enquired.

"Of course I did," replied Lord Henry, chuckling quite heartily now. "But is not a man entitled to kiss his future sister-in-law?"

Two tears rolled slowly down her face, and she fumbled hurriedly for her handkerchief.

"Come, come, my beloved Cleo," he exclaimed, taking her into his arms, "allow me to say that. Allow me to regard that kiss in that light. It makes it so perfectly innocent. Didn't you feel that that is what I was driving at? Oh, how easily I could have prevented all this if only Leonetta hadn't dragged so on the way home!"

And then, as they approached the outskirts of Brineweald, they quickly decided on their plan of action. It was settled that only Mrs. Delarayne, Leonetta, and Stephen should ever know the truth about the accident, and that, even so, Leonetta should not be told until she was sensible enough to see how inevitable and how "natural" it was. Meanwhile, everyone was to believe that Lord Henry had made a fool of himself,—a fact which, as both he and Cleopatra knew, would afford infinite satisfaction to Miss Mallowcoid, Denis, and the baronet.

Two months later, at about half-past eleven on a drizzly October morning, there was a small and fashionable-looking crowd assembled near the edge of one of the quays at the East India docks, and as the huge Oriental liner moved slowly out into the Thames, five people on its upper deck waved frantically towards this group. They were Cleopatra, Lord Henry, the Tribes, and young Stephen Fearwell.

Again and again Lord Henry waved his hat, and again and again, in the interval of putting it to her eyes, Mrs. Delarayne waved her tiny lace handkerchief back at him.

He noticed that the brave woman was surviving wonderfully the strain of losing for a while the beloved son that she had at last found; but as he turned to call Cleopatra's attention to this, he found that he was obliged to suppress the intended remark for fear of making an ass of himself.

The gigantic steamer grew smaller and smaller, the group on the quay still waved and waved, and then, at last, nothing more could be seen of the travellers.

"Is it a trying journey to China?" Leonetta asked of Aubrey St. Maur, jerking her arm which was enlocked in his, as they turned away from the sight of the oily harbour water.

"Hush!" said St. Maur, glancing ominously at Mrs. Delarayne, who was staggering along between Sir Joseph and Agatha Fearwell's father. "Poor Peachy seems very much upset, doesn't she?"

"Yes, you see," Leonetta replied, "Henry always was her star turn."