A morning or two afterwards we set out on our homeward journey—the sea curdling softly into foam on its stones, a solitary ship in the distance on its dim, blue horizon. We were a dejected pair of travellers, keeping each a solemn face turned aside at the window, thinking our thoughts, and avoiding, as far as we could, any interchange of looks that might betray them one to the other. For the first time in our friendship Mrs Bowater was a little short and impatient with me over difficulties and inconveniences which I could not avoid, owing to my size.

Her key in the lock of the door, she looked down on me in the porch, a thin smile between nose and cheek. "No place like home there mayn't be, miss," she began, "but——" The dark passage was certainly uninviting; the clock had stopped. "I think I'll be calling round for Henry," she added abruptly.

I entered the stagnant room, ran up my stairs, my heart with me—and paused. Not merely my own ghost was there to meet me; but a past that seemed to mutter, Never again, never again, from every object on shelf and wall. Yet a faint, sweet, unfamiliar odour lay on the chilly air. I drew aside the curtain and looked in. Fading on the coverlet of my bed lay a few limp violets, ivory white and faintly rosy.

I was alone in the house, concealed now even from Mr Bowater's frigid stare. Yet at sight of these flowers a slight vertigo came over me, and I had to sit on my bed for a moment to recover myself.

Then I knelt down, my heart knocking against my side, and dragged from out its hiding-place the box in which I kept my money. Gritty with the undisturbed dust of our absence, it was locked. I drew back, my hand on my mouth. What could be the meaning of this? My stranger had come and gone. Had he been so stupidly punctilious that, having taken out the twenty pounds, he had relocked an almost empty box?

Or had he, at the last moment...? This riddle distressed me so much that instantly I was seized with a violent headache. But nothing could be done for the present. I laid by the violets in a drawer, pushed back the box, and, making as good a pretence at eating my supper as I could, prepared for the night.

One by one the clocks in hall and kitchen struck out the hours, and, the wind being in the East, borne on it came the chimes of St Peter's. Automatically I counted the strokes, turning this way and that, as if my life depended on this foolish arithmetic, yet ready, like Job, to curse the day I was born. What had my existence been but a blind futility, my thought for others but a mask of egotism and selfishness? Yet, in all this turmoil of mind, I must have slept, for suddenly I found myself stiff, drawn-up, and wideawake—listening to a cautious, reiterated tapping against my window-pane. A tallow night-light burned beside me in a saucer of water. For the first time in my life—at least since childhood—I had been afraid to face the dark. Why, I know not; but I at once leapt out of bed and blew out that light. The night was moonless, but high and starry. I peered through the curtains, and a shrouded figure became visible in the garden—Fanny's.

Curtain withdrawn, we looked each at each through the cold, dividing glass in the gloom—her eyes, in the night-spread pallor of her skin, as if congealed. The dark lips, with an exaggerated attempt at articulation, murmured words, but I could catch no meaning. The face looked almost idiotic in these contortions. I shuddered, shook my head violently. She drew back.

Terrified that she would be gone—in my dressing-gown and slippers I groped my way across the room and was soon, with my door open, in the night air. She had heard me, and with a beckon of her finger, turned as if to lead me on.

"No, no," I signalled, "I have no key." With a gesture, she drew close, stooped, and we talked there together, muttering in the porch.

"Midgetina," she whispered, smiling bleakly, "it's this wretched money. I must explain. I'm at my wit's end—in awful trouble—without it."

Huddled close, I wasted no time in asking questions. She must come in. But this she flatly refused to do. Yet money, money was her one cry: and that she must have before she saw her mother again. Not daring to tell her that I was in doubt whether or not my savings were still in my possession, I pushed her hand away as she knelt before me on the uppermost step. "I must fetch it," I said.

By good fortune my money-box was not the weightiest of my grandfather's French trunks—not the brass-bound friend-in-need of my younger days, and it contained little but paper. I hoisted it on to my bed, and, as I had lately seen the porters do at the railway station, contrived to push under it and raise it on to my shoulder. Its edge drove in on my collar-bone till I thought it must snap. Thus laden, I staggered cautiously down the staircase, pushed slowly across the room, and, so, out into the passage and towards the rounded and dusky oblong of the open door.

On the threshold Fanny met me, gasping under this burden, and at sight of me some blessed spirit within her seemed to give her pause. "No, no," she muttered, and drew back as if suddenly ashamed of her errand. On I came, however, and prudence prevailed. With a sound that might have been sigh or sob she snatched the load from me and gathered it in, as best she could, under her cloak.

"Oh, Midgetina!" she whispered meaninglessly. "Now we must talk." And having wedged back the catch of my door, we moved quickly and cautiously in the direction of Wanderslore.

We climbed on up the quiet hill. The cool, fragrant, night seemed to be luring us on and on, to swallow us up. Yet, there shone the customary stars; there, indeed, to my amazement, as if the heavenly clock of the universe had set back its hands on my behalf, straddled the constellation of Orion.

Come to our beech-tree, now a vast indistinguishable tent of whispering, silky leaves, Fanny seated herself upon a jutting root, and I stood panting before her.

"Well?" she said, with a light, desolate laugh.

"Oh, Fanny, 'well'!" I cried.

"Can't you trust me?"

"Trust you?"

"Oh, oh, mocking-bird!—with all these riches?"

I cast a glance up into the leafy branches, and seated myself opposite to her.

"Fanny, Fanny. Have you heard?"

"'Heard,' she says!" It was her turn to play the parrot. "What am I here for, but to hear more? But never mind; that's all over. Has mother——"

"'All over,' Fanny!" I interrupted her. "All over? But, the letters?"

"What letters?" She stared at me, and added, looking away, "Oh, mine?" She gave out the word with a long, inexhaustible sigh. "That was all right. He did not hide, he burned.... Neither to nor from; not even to his mother. Every paper destroyed. I envy her feelings! He just gave up, went out, Exit. I envy that, too."

"Not even to you, Fanny? Not a word even to you?"

The figure before me crouched a little closer together. "They said," was her evasive reply, "that there is melancholia in the family."

I think the word frightened me even more than its meaning. "Melancholia," I repeated the melodious syllables. "Oh, Fanny!"

"Listen, Midgetina," her voice broke out coldly. "I can guess easily enough what's saving up for me when I come home—which won't be yet a while, I can assure you. I can guess, too, what your friends, Lady Pollacke and Co., are saying about me. Let them rave. That can't be helped. I shall bear it, and try to grin. Maybe there would be worse still, if worse were known. But your worse I won't have, not even from you. I was not his keeper. I did not play him false. I deny it. Could I prevent him—caring for me? Was he man enough to come openly? Did he say to his mother, 'Take her or leave her, I mean to have her'—as I would have done? No, he blew hot and cold. He temporized; he—he was a coward. Oh, this everlasting dog-fight between body and mind! Ages before you ever crept upon the scene he pestered and pestered me—until I have almost retched at the sound of church bells. What was it, I ask you, but sheer dread of what the man might go and do that kept me shilly-shallying? And what's more, Miss Wren, who told me to throw the stone? Pff, it sickens me, this paltering world. I can't and won't see things but with my reason. My reason, I tell you. What else is a schoolma'am for? Did he want me for my sake? Who begged and begged that his beautiful love should be kept secret? There was once a philosopher called Plato, my dear. He poisoned Man's soul."

Flesh and spirit, Fanny must have been very tired. Her voice fluttered on like a ragged flag.

"But listen, listen!" I entreated her. "I haven't blamed you for that, Fanny. I swear it. I mean, you can't help not loving. I know that. But perhaps if only we had—— It's a dreadful thing to think of him sitting there alone—the vestry—and then looking up 'with a smile.' Oh, Fanny, with a smile! I dare hardly go into his mind—and the verger looking in. I think of him all day."

"And I all night," came the reply, barked out in the gloom. "Wasn't the man a Christian, then?"

"Fanny," I covered my eyes. "Don't say that. We shall both of us just suffocate in the bog if you won't even let yourself listen to what you are saying."

"Well," she said doggedly, "be sure you shall suffocate last, Miss Midge. There's ample perch-room for you on Fanny's shoulder." I felt, rather than saw, the glance almost of hatred that she cast at me from under her brows.

"Mock as you like at me," was my miserable answer, "I have kept my word to you—all but: and it was I who helped—Oh yes, I know that."

"Ah! 'all but,'" her agile tongue caught up the words. "And what else, may I ask?"

I took a deep breath, with almost sightless eyes fixed on the beautiful, mysterious glades stretching beneath us. "He came again. Why, it was not very many days ago. And we talked and talked, and I grew tired, yes, and angry at last. I told him you were only making use of me. You were. I said that all we could do was just to go on loving you—and keep away. I know, Fanny, I cannot be of any account; I don't understand very much. But that is true."

She leaned nearer, as if incredulous, her face as tranquil in its absorption as the planet that hung in the russet-black sky in a rift of the leaves.

"Candid, and candid," she scoffed brokenly, and all in a gasp.

The voice trailed off. Her mouth relaxed. And suddenly my old love for her seemed to gush back into my heart. A burning, inarticulate pity rose up in me.

"Listen, Midgetina," she went on. "That was honest. And I can be honest, too. I don't care what you said. If you had called me the vilest word they can set their tongue to, I'd still have forgiven you. But would you have me give in? Go under? Have you ever seen Mother Grundy? I tell you, he haunts me—the blackness, the deadness. That outhouse! Do you suppose I can't see inside that? He sits by my bed. I eat his shadow with my food. At every corner in the street his black felt hat bobs and disappears. If even he hadn't been so solemn, so insignificant!..." Her low, torturing laugh shook under the beechen hollow.

"And I say this"—she went on slowly, as if I sat at a distance, "if he's not very careful I shall go the same way. I can't bear that—that kind of spying on me. Don't you suppose you can sin after death? If only he had given me away—betrayed me! We should at least have been square. But that," she jerked back her head. "That's only one thing. I had not meant to humble myself like this. You seem not to care what humiliations I have to endure. You sit there, oh, how absurd for me, watching and watching me, null and void and meaningless. Yet you are human: you feel. You said you loved me—oh, yes. But touch me, come here"—she laid her hand almost fondly on her breast—"and be humanly generous, no. That's no more your nature than—than a changeling's. Contamination, perhaps!"

Her eyes fretted round her, as if she had lost her sense of direction.

"And now there's this tongueless, staring ghost." She shuddered, hiding her face in her hands. "The misery of it all."

"Fanny, Fanny," I besought her. "You know I love you." But the words sounded cold and distant, and some deadly disinclination held me where I was, though I longed to comfort her. "And at times, I confess it, I have hated you too. You haven't always been very kind to me. I was trying to cure myself. You were curing me. But still I go on—a little."

"It's useless, useless," she replied, dropping her hands into her lap and gazing vacantly on the ground. "I can't care; I can't even cry. And all you say is only pity. I don't want that. Would you still pity me, I wonder, if you knew that even though I had come to take this wretched money from you, I meant to taunt you, to accuse you of lying to me?"

"Taunt," "lying." My cheek grew hot. I drew back my head with a jerk and stared at her. "I don't understand you."

"There. What did I say! She doesn't understand me," she cried with a sob, as if calling on the angels to bear witness to her amazement. "Well, then, let Fanny tell you, Miss M., whoever and whatever you may be, that she, yes, even she, can understand that unearthliness, too. Oh, these last days! I have had my fill of them. Take all: give nothing. There's no other means of grace in a world like this."

"But you said 'taunt' me," I insisted, with eyes fixed on the box that lay between the blunt-headed fronds of the springing bracken. "What did you mean by that? I did my best. Your mother was ill. She fainted, Fanny, when the newspaper came. I couldn't come back a single hour earlier. So I wrote to—to a friend, sending him my keys, and asking him to find the money for you. I know my letter reached him. Perhaps," I hesitated, in dread of what might be hanging over our heads, "perhaps the box is empty."

But I need not have wasted myself. The puzzle was not quite inexplicable. For the moment Fanny's miseries seemed to have vanished. Animation came into her face and voice and movements as she told me how, the night before, thinking that her mother and I might have returned from Lyme Regis, she had come tapping. And suddenly as she stood in the garden, her face close to the glass, an utterly strange one had thrust itself into view, and the figure of "a ghastly gloating little dwarfish creature" had appeared in the porch.

At first she had supposed—but only for an instant—that it was myself. "Of course, mother had mentioned him in her letters, but"—and Fanny opened her eyes at me—"I never guessed he was, well, like that."

Then in her folly, and without giving him the least opportunity to explain his presence there, she had begun railing at him, and had accused him of forcing his way in to rob the house: "And he stood there, hunched up, looking at me—out of my own house." The very picture of Fanny helplessly standing there at her own door, and of these two facing each other like that in the porch—this ridiculous end to my fine stratagem, filled me with a miserable amusement. I leaned back my head where I sat, shrilly and dismally laughing and laughing, until tears sprang pricklingly into my eyes. If any listener had been abroad in the woods that night, he would, I think, have hastened his departure.

But Fanny seemed to be shocked at my levity. She peered anxiously into the clear night-glooms around us.

"And what!" I said, still striving to regain command over myself. "What happened then? Oh, Fanny, not a policeman?"

But her memory of what had followed was confused, or perhaps she had no wish to be too exact. All that I could win from her for certain was that after an angry and bitter talk between herself and Mr Anon, he had simply slammed my door behind him and dared her to do her worst.

"That was pretty brave of him," I remarked.

"Oh," said Fanny amiably, "I am not blaming your friend, Midgetina. He seemed to be perfectly competent."

Yet even now I remained unsatisfied. If Fanny had come secretly to Beechwood, as she had suggested, and had spent the night with a friend, solely to hear the last tidings of Mr Crimble, what was this other trouble, so desperate that she had lost both her wits and her temper at finding Mr Anon there? Supposing the house had been empty? My curiosity overcame me, and the none too ingenuous question slipped from my tongue: "Did you want some of the money for mourning, then, Fanny?"

Her dark, pale face, above the black, enveloping cloak, met my look with astonishment.

"Mourning!" she cried, "why, that would be the very—— No, not mourning, Midgetina. I owe a little to a friend—and not money only," she added with peculiar intensity. "Of course, if you have any doubts about lending it——"

"Give, not lend," said I.

"Yes, but how are we to get at it? I can't lug that thing about, and you say he has the key. Shall we smash it open?"

The question came so hurriedly that I had no time to consider what, besides money—and of course friendship—could be owed to a friend, and especially to a friend that made her clench her teeth on the word.

"Yes, smash it open," I nodded. "It's only a box."

"But such a pretty little box!"

With knees drawn up, and shivering now after my outburst of merriment, I watched her labours. My beloved chest might keep out moth and rust, it was no match for Fanny. She wound up a large stone in her silk scarf. A few heavy and muffled blows, the lock surrendered, and the starlight dripped in like milk from heaven upon my hoard.

"Why, Midgetina," whispered Fanny, delicately counting the notes over between her long, white fingers, "you are richer than I supposed—a female Croesus. Wasn't it a great risk? I mean," she continued, receiving no answer, "no wonder he was so cautious. And how much may I take?"

It seemed as if an empty space, not of yards but of miles, had suddenly separated us. "All you want," said I.

"But I didn't—I didn't taunt you, now, did I?" she smiled at me, with head inclined to her slim shoulder, as if in mimicry of my ivory Hypnos.

"There was nothing to taunt me about. Mayn't I have a friend?"

"Why," she retorted lightly, mechanically re-counting the bits of paper, "friend indeed! What about all those Pollackes and Monneries mother's so full of? You will soon be flitting to quite another sphere. It's the old friends that then will be left mourning. You won't sit moon-gazing then, my dear."

"No, Fanny," I said stubbornly, "I've had enough of that, just for the present."

"Sst!" she whispered swiftly, raising her head and clasping the notes to her breast beneath her cloak, "what was that?"

We listened. I heard nothing—nothing but sigh of new-born leaf, or falling of dead twig cast off from the parent tree. It was early yet for the nightingale.

"Only the wind," said she.

"Only the wind," I echoed scornfully, "or perhaps a weasel."

She hurriedly divided my savings and thrust my share into my lap. I pushed it in under my arm.

"Good heavens, Midgetina!" she cried, aghast. "You are almost naked. How on earth was I to know?"

I clutched close my dressing-gown and stumbled to my feet, trying in vain to restrain my silly teeth from chattering. "Never mind about me, Fanny," I muttered. "They don't waste inquests on changelings."

"My God!" was her vindictive comment, "how she harps on the word. As if I had nothing else to worry about." With a contemptuous foot she pushed my empty box under cover of a low-growing yew. Seemingly Wanderslore was fated to entomb one by one all my discarded possessions.

Turning, she stifled a yawn with a sound very like a groan. "Then it's au revoir, Midgetina. Give me five minutes' start.... You know I am grateful?"

"Yes, Fanny," I said obediently, smiling up into her face.

"Won't you kiss me?" she said. "Tout comprendre, you know, c'est tout pardonner."

"Why, Fanny," I replied; "no, thank you. I prefer plain English."

But scarcely a minute had separated us when I sprang up and pursued her a few paces into the shadows, into which she had disappeared. To forgive all—how piteously easy now that she was gone. She had tried to conceal it, brazen it out, but unutterable wretchedness had lurked in every fold of her cloak, in the accents of her voice, in every fatigued gesture. Her very eyes had shone the more lustrously in the starlight for the dark shadows around them. But understand her—I could not even guess what horrible secret trouble she had been concealing from me. And beyond that, too—a hideous, selfish dread—my guilty mind was haunted by the fear of what she might do in her extremity.

"Fanny, Fanny," I called falsely into the silence. "Oh, come back! I love you; indeed I love you."

How little blessed it is at times even to give. No answer came. I threw myself on the ground. And I strove with myself in the darkness, crushing out every thought as it floated into my mind, and sinking on and on into the depths of unconsciousness.

"Oh, my dear, my dear," came the whisper of a tender, guttural voice in my ear. "You are deathly cold. Why do you grieve so? She is gone. Listen, listen. They have neither love nor pity. And I—I cannot live without you."

I sat up, black with rage. My stranger's face glimmered obscurely in the gloom.

"Oh, if you spy on me again!" I rasped at him, "'live without me,' what do I care?—you can go and——"

But, thank God, the die without me was never uttered. I haven't that to haunt me. Some hidden strength that had been mine these few days melted away like water. "Not now; not now!" I entreated him. I hastened away.