RATHER less than a week after this Dyke came to Prince’s Gate by appointment. All the preliminaries for the interview had been completed by letters and in the most courteous manner on both sides. Greatly as the Verinders hated him, they felt that there was no other way of doing things. Mr. Verinder, then, politely expressing a wish to see Mr. Dyke for the purpose of discussing “certain matters,” Mr. Dyke had replied that he was entirely at Mr. Verinder’s service and begged that place and time should be named. Mr. Verinder named his own house and nine o’clock in the evening; choosing an evening on which Emmeline could be conveniently banished from the premises.

Mrs. Verinder had taken her to dine quietly with Mrs. Bell in Queen’s Gate, and afterwards they and their hostess were going to a concert given by an elderly widower. The widower had hired the Grosvenor Gallery for his concert; it would be a grand and a late affair; thus Mr. Verinder need not apprehend the return of his ladies until long after midnight. The docility with which Emmeline agreed to these arrangements had made him wonder suspiciously if she had received confirmative instructions from the enemy. He trusted, however, that this was not so.

It was now a quarter to nine, and he and Eustace and Mrs. Verinder’s brother, Colonel Gussie Pollard, were seated at the dinner table finishing their dessert. The presence of their brother-in-law and uncle bothered Mr. Verinder, but there had seemed to be no way of avoiding it; for his own convenience he was staying in the house, he now had learned all about their trouble, and his sister said she thought he would add weight to their side of the discussion.

“I should not scruple myself to tell him it isn’t cricket,” said Colonel Gussie, beginning to peel a second nectarine.

He was one of those very large, radiantly smooth elderly men who take inordinate pains in cleaning, polishing, and decorating their persons. The dress-suit of Colonel Gussie, his white waistcoat, his jewelled buttons, studs, and little chains, suggested that he felt he could never do quite enough for himself; and, as if for this reason, his face was garnished with every small blob of white hair that can be grown on a face—moustache, whisker, imperial, even something under the plump chin, but each sample small and nicely trimmed, and all of it neatly divided. Through the white hair his complexion showed with the silvery pinkness of an uncooked salmon. For the rest, he had a genial yet grand manner, was not disposed to think evil of anybody, and when compelled to censure knew no worse verdict than to say that a thing was not cricket.

If pushed beyond that mark and as it were forced to put on the black cap and pass a final sentence of condemnation, he said the thing was un-English.

Mr. Verinder secretly objected to his insistence on calling himself colonel, since he was not a regular soldier but merely in command of a militia or volunteer battalion attached to one of the city regiments; and he thought it childish of him to like to be addressed as Gussie instead of Augustus.

“Wouldn’t be playing the game,” said Colonel Gussie, as he finished his nectarine with relish.

Then, after saying he knew that Emmeline was not contaminated with anything of this kind, he spoke in disapproval of these modern notions that were tending to upset the feminine half of humanity—“emancipation,” “the new woman,” “equal rights,” and so on. It was one thing to like advanced education and keep yourself “up-to-date”; but this impressionist art, this Yellow Book, and all these “problem plays”—well, they did no good, did they? There was too much of the spirit of revolt in the air.

Eustace smoked his cigarette and stared at the ceiling. Mr. Verinder allowed his brother-in-law to talk, only saying once, as if to himself, “Freedom, yes, so long as it does not degenerate into license.”

Then the butler came in, and informed them that Mr. Dyke was upstairs.

The colonel rose at once, drawing himself to his full height, which was at least six feet three inches, and looking magnificent.

“Come on,” he said; and they all three went upstairs to that room behind the music-room—the room that contained the smiling landscapes by Leader. Mr. Verinder had ordered that Dyke should be shown into this room, because he felt it was large enough and yet not too large for their purposes.

In spite of the hatred, the interview opened with extreme propriety and politeness, but Mr. Verinder was at once oppressed by its incredible fantastic nature. It was as though he had not been really Mr. Verinder, here, among these smiling landscapes, in Prince’s Gate, but a person wrenched out of a land of probabilities and launched on an ocean of the impossible.

Dyke was in evening clothes, and perhaps recently his hair had been cut and his beard pointed; at any rate, that aspect of Tolstoy or the pilgrim had entirely vanished. He was standing on the hearth-rug when they came in, and he did not move; he stood there, a tall commanding figure; handsome too—with his strong nose and high cheek-bones—in a careless, dare-devil, but not swash-bucklering style; not really taller than the others, certainly less tall and very much less round than the colonel, and yet somehow dominating them and the whole room.

Eustace understood that they had made a mistake in procedure. It was a trifle—no consequence, of course—but it vexed him to think how very obviously they should have had him brought into a room where they were sitting, so that he would have seemed like a person summoned before a tribunal, instead of establishing him here by himself and then coming to him, to be received by him as though they were a deputation.

“Will you smoke?” said Eustace curtly, and he opened the silver cigarette box that he had brought up from the dinner table.

With a gravely courteous gesture and smile—the gesture indeed almost Spanish and antiquated in its courtesy—Dyke indicated that he preferred not to smoke.

“My son—Eustace,” said Mr. Verinder. “And my brother-in-law—Colonel Pollard.”

“Miss Verinder’s godfather too,” said the colonel, seating himself.

Dyke ignored the second introduction; not rudely, but as if all that pinkness and whiteness had made no impression on him. He appeared to be quite unaware of them, and throughout this first interview spoke not a single word to their possessor.

“I was admiring that picture,” he said with another gesture, and he smiled again. “Mr. Verinder, I don’t pretend to be a judge of art, but I must say, that picture took my fancy enormously. So cleverly painted—all the autumn tints of the foliage, and the effect of the sunshine on the lake.” He said this as if wishing to put them at their ease and allow them time. “A very charming picture—in my uneducated opinion.”

“It is by Leader, R. A.,” said Mr. Verinder simply. “I have several of them.”

He had sat down at a table on which were blotting pads with tortoise-shell covers, boxes of porcelain, a gold photograph frame, and a massive ivory paper-knife; picking up the knife and toying with it, he conveyed the intimation that he wished Mr. Dyke to sit upon the amber satin sofa which faced the table at about two yards distance.

Dyke, immediately obeying, went to the sofa and sat down.

Eustace had gone to the double doors and he opened one of them, disclosing the music-room as a sombre and empty vault. He closed the door again and turning from it said that, since they were here for a delicate confidential talk, it was just as well to make sure they would not be overheard. This, as he had intended, set the thing going.

Mr. Verinder, balancing the paper-knife, drove at the heart of the matter and spoke of “these attentions and meetings.” He said he felt sure that Dyke would himself see that they must cease.

“Mr. Verinder,” said Dyke, gravely and very gently, “I hope you will allow me to say that I would sooner die than injure your daughter.”

“Just so,” said Mr. Verinder. “I was quite prepared to believe so, but—”

Dyke interrupted him. “No, I would rather kill myself many times than harm a hair of her head.” As he said this, not only his voice but his face softened in the most extraordinary manner; and Mr. Verinder was pleased with the man for saying it. But Dyke went on, with his blue eyes fixed on Mr. Verinder and his voice becoming a mere whisper. “Not one pretty dark hair of her sweet little head.”

The outrageous use of such adjectives made Mr. Verinder tremble from wrath; but, with difficulty controlling himself, he spoke in a firm quiet tone.

“If there is any meaning in what you are saying, Mr. Dyke, you will give me an assurance that no further molestation will occur.”

Dyke remained silent for a little while, and during the pause Gussie was heard to mention the national pastime—“Not cricket, what!” Dyke did not seem to hear him; he was now looking at the parquetry. “Mr. Verinder,” he said, looking up, “this is not plain-sailing, it is complicated. I suppose you know that Emmie—”

Mr. Verinder flapped with the paper-knife and grew hot and red. The use of his daughter’s christian name, the use of a grossly familiar abbreviation of that name! Not a member of the family ever called her anything shorter than Emmeline. But Dyke went on, as if oblivious of his offence.

“Emmie has done me the honour—the very great honour—to become attached to me. Mr. Verinder, you do know that, don’t you? Emmie—God bless her—has become very fond of me.”

“Nothing of the sort,” said Mr. Verinder wrathfully; and both the colonel and Eustace made movements.

Dyke’s manner changed, and he spoke with a sudden biting hardness. “Unless,” he said, “you admit that, it is useless for us to attempt to discuss the situation.”

Mr. Verinder said he would not admit it; certainly not. But, on consideration, he said he would go as far as possible to meet Dyke’s argument; he would admit as much as this—that, to some extent, Dyke had unfortunately fascinated the imagination of her; against a young inexperienced girl Dyke had employed the advantage given by age, the glamour of romance, and so forth; and he wound up to the effect that two hundred years ago it would have been said that Dyke had thrown a spell over her.

Dyke answered, sadly, that he had thrown no spell. The first evening he had certainly told her a few of his adventures.

“Oh, yes,” said Eustace, sneering. “Othello and Desdemona”; and he quoted a few words of the famous speech. “‘Hair-breadth escapes—antres vast and deserts idle.’ But then Othello wasn’t a married man. Unfortunately you are.”

Dyke had now risen from the sofa. He walked about the room and began to make a noise. To Mr. Verinder, in the midst of his anger and distress, the striding up and down of Dyke was a fresh discomfort, a new surface-sting. If anybody walked about rooms in that house, it should be he, the master of the house; it was a habit of his. No one else had the right to take the floor on him.

“Of course I’m married,” said Dyke, loudly, almost shouting. “How can I help that? It’s my misfortune, not my fault. Besides, I told her so. I told her so at once.”

“She doesn’t weigh the consequences,” said the father.

“She has weighed them,” Dyke shouted. Then he went on more quietly, but with the incisive hardness that was almost worse than noise. “Besides, she’s over twenty-one; she has independent means—why shouldn’t she do what she likes? She’s her own mistress.”

“Exactly. But we don’t want her to be your mistress,” said the sneering brother. “That’s just what it amounts to.”

From this point onwards the thing was devoid of hope; and they knew it really. Dyke made more and more noise; he rumpled his hair, brandished his arms, broke his shirt front; and the other three felt their helplessness. How could they tackle this hulking ruffian, this savage in dress clothes who disregarded all rules, who cared nothing for civilization? They were three tame men, and utterly impotent against a wild man. He overwhelmed their minds by his unchecked fierceness; but it should be noted that they had not any unworthy physical fear of him, although Eustace, more particularly, felt that at any moment Dyke might strike him. That odd, hideously vulgar expression, A word and a blow, echoed in the troubled thoughts of Eustace. A blow, a struggle, a disgraceful episode, at any moment now.

They appealed to his better feeling, and he seemed to have none. They spoke of law and decency, and he inveighed against the cursed law. A wife that wasn’t a wife, but tied to her irrevocably—a millstone round his neck—“Poor unhappy lady, God forgive me for speaking of her like that. She’s not to blame. No, no, it’s the law’s to blame.”

As he said all this he was banging on the table in front of Mr. Verinder, so forcibly that the porcelain boxes danced and the gold frame fell over.

“It’s fellows like you who make these infernal laws. Why don’t you alter them? Why do you allow people to be tormented and bedevilled because that sort of thing pleased a pack of dirty verminous monks hundreds of years ago? Poor little innocent Emmie too! I feel the cruelty of her situation just as much as you do—and a dashed sight more. It’s monstrous and iniquitous”; and he strode away from the table waving his arms.

In every lull Mr. Verinder said the same sort of thing—that facts were facts, laws laws, proprieties proprieties. “You must see it, Mr. Dyke. On reflection, you must see it. I decline to believe that you yourself will wish to continue—”

Dyke swore that he had no choice; he would continue, he could not stop.

“What do you propose to do then?” asked Mr. Verinder.

“What do you want me to do?” asked Dyke.

Mr. Verinder said he wanted Dyke to give her up altogether.

“Never!” Dyke roared at them now.

So the thing went on. Eustace was livid with rage, trembling. The colonel, unnoticed, chattered and fumed. Mr. Verinder felt possessed by that sensation of the dreamlike nature, the sheer fantasticness of it all—this quiet room, with the loud voices in it, servants probably listening on the stairs; yet also the awareness of the framework of society all round them still unbroken; his friends next door enjoying a little music after dinner in one of their drawing-rooms, or playing a rubber of whist for moderate points; a small evening-party at Number Ten; above everything, the Albert Hall such a little distance away, with a ballad concert as usual;—only in here this raging lunatic trying to turn the whole world upside down. But perhaps the colonel’s agitation and horror were even more painful than what his brother-in-law underwent. To him the thing was so appallingly obnoxious, so immeasurably far from the spirit of the game he worshipped. He continued to say it; and close to his lips, contained but certain to be released if the strain lasted, there hovered the crushing black-cap epithet—un-English.

“I shan’t give her up.”

Dyke was blustering fiercely as he moved here and there. Once he threatened Eustace, saying that if there was any attempt to bully Emmie, he would break every bone in his body. Finally he left them, mentally shattered.

He was gone, right out of the house.

Then, quite late, after eleven-thirty, there was a tremendous sustained ringing of the front-door bell. What could it be? The house on fire? Mr. Verinder, half unrobed, hurried down from his dressing-room to the first floor, and looked over the gilt balustrade into the hall. It was the man come back again—but altered, strange, in a totally different mood. He forced his way past the butler, past Eustace, past Gussie, and shouted upward.

“Verinder, I must talk to you. Verinder—my dear fellow—I can’t sleep to-night, until you and I have settled it.”

And he came up the stairs; with Eustace and the colonel following, both of them really scared now.

“Go in there,” said Eustace, and, while Dyke entered the darkened room, he whispered to his father: “If he is violent I shall send for the police.”

Mr. Verinder ran up for a dressing-jacket, came down and sat at the same table, looking queer without his collar. As Eustace switched on the lamps the Leaders sprang into life, smiling at them all again. Dyke threw his slouch hat and an Inverness cape to the floor, stood with his hair absurdly ruffled; then sank upon the amber satin sofa.

“I have been walking about, feeling half mad,” he began in a humble tone, then paused. His face was strangely pale, as though all the blood had gone from it; and they noticed, during the pause, that he seemed suddenly to shiver or gasp for breath. “Look here. I want to apologise to you—Out there, trying to think, I felt that I deserved to be kicked. Anybody would say you’re quite right—from your point of view.” And he looked at them most piteously. “I’m sorry I made a noise. But please make allowances. This—this entanglement—or whatever you like to call it—is so tragically serious for both of us. I mean for her as well as for me. That’s why I beg you to bear with me—to reach an understanding, a solution—to do anything rather than just quarrel about it. If, to begin with, you can only put yourself in my place”; and he seemed to be wringing his hands. “Verinder, I want that girl. I simply can’t live without her.”

He said these last words in a hoarse whisper that was more disturbing to hear than if it had been a loud cry of pain. It jarred upon the ear, it set one’s teeth on edge; and the expression of his haggard face added to the physical commotion he produced, even if one did not think of what he had said. The colonel felt the commotion all through his stout body; Eustace held up an arm, as if calling for invisible cabs.

“Verinder!” He was perceptibly shivering—a tremor that made his limbs jerk. “Verinder—don’t you see? This is tearing me to pieces. Surely you can comprehend? You were young once—under forty, full of life. Perhaps you were unhappy too—as I have been—lonely—Didn’t you ever feel the longing to make a girl your own?”

Mr. Verinder, once more white with anger, shouted in his turn. “Will you remember that I am her father.”

“I know. Forgive me. I express myself badly.” And he sat staring at the carpet, and shivering as though some fever of the jungle again had him in its clutch. They watched him; and when he raised his head they saw it for moment convulsed and twitching. He put his hand to his forehead, and then continued to speak. “You and I must have it out, mustn’t we? We can’t leave it all in doubt. I must settle it before I sail for South America”; and he gave a groan. “I want that girl. I can’t live without her. She has become the whole world to me. She wants me, too. And, remember, other people mayn’t want her like that—I mean, as I do.” As he went on it seemed to them that delirium had set in. He was raving at them now. “We can’t do without each other. Well, that’s love. Love! What is it? I can’t say. But no one’s to blame for it. A chance? A fatality? Some day these things will be scientifically ascertained, and then the accident of love will be avoidable—to be guarded against. But it isn’t now.”

He paused as if for breath, and cast glances round the room before he went on again.

“Verinder, I know you want to do what’s right and proper. You’re a man of high principle—no one could doubt that. Only don’t be hide-bound—or tied down by prejudice. Look the thing in the face. I see the obstacles, plainly, from your point of view—but somehow we must get over them. You and your friends are people of the world—you have all sorts of social riddles at your fingers’ ends. Can’t you find an answer? Can’t you cut the knot? If we could only tide over—get round the obstacle—then we should come to daylight one day. No,” he cried forcibly. “I mustn’t say that—I mustn’t hint that my unhappy wife may die and cut the knot herself. Besides, it isn’t true. Her physical health is excellent. She’ll probably live to a hundred”; and once more he groaned. “But one thing is certain, Verinder. You can’t say we must be left quite without hope—and remain divided for ever. Oh, no, that would be inhuman. Neither of us could submit. Verinder, my dear fellow, it’s in your power to make it hard for us or easy. Don’t make it hard for us.”

All this last part of his appeal had seemed to them worse than delirium, grotesque and terrible in its nearness to a kind of perverted impossible logic. Now he seemed suddenly to collapse on the sofa in a fit of profound dejection. His back stooped, his hands dangled down between his knees, his head subsided almost upon his chest, and he sighed at brief intervals. They watched him, as if spellbound.

He changed his attitude, and sat now with an elbow on the back of the sofa and his head leaning on his hand; and he sighed, as if sick with emotion.

Then there occurred what was perhaps the most astounding incident of the night. The colonel had launched his last word; now he darted round behind the sofa, bent over Dyke, seized his shoulder, and shook him. What was it? Some deep invincible instinct of remote antiquity—the instinct that compels the tame animal to take all risks and fly at and worry the wild beast when it lies prostrate and in pain? Or was it just frenzy and disgust aroused in the colonel by the sight and the sound of something so devastatingly un-English. But Dyke, plainly supposing that the action was prompted by compassionate sympathy, spoke to the colonel for the first time, and in tones of grateful affection.

“Thanks, old boy,” said Dyke; and then, as the colonel continued to shake his shoulder, “Don’t trouble, dear old chap. I shall be all right directly.”

The colonel dropped his hands and tottered away from the sofa. To him the thing had become like the fourth dimension, or the fifth; beyond the range of intellect, brain-destroying. He thought vaguely that if it went on he should faint.

Mr. Verinder was running his fingers round the open neck of his shirt. He felt that his universe had crumbled. He felt that the only sane thing for him to do would be to speak as if to a child, and say, “Mr. Dyke, stop making these afflicted noises; get up, go home to bed, and don’t be so ridiculous.” He would have said it perhaps, if he could. But strangely, inexplicably, Mr. Dyke was not ridiculous; he was still awe-inspiring—dreadful. Yes, that was the word. In the language of the locality, the man had made a dreadful exhibition.

He got up presently, without being told to do so.

“It’s not a bit of good my making promises that I can’t keep. I’ve made one promise about it already—to my father—and I’ll keep that. My father’s a clergyman—in Devonshire.”

He shook hands with Mr. Verinder, gave the colonel a wan smile, and went. Eustace let him out, watched by Gussie; the butler standing by, looking very anxious.

When they came upstairs again Mr. Verinder was still sitting at the table.

“Do you think Dyke had been drinking?” he asked, tapping with the paper knife.

“No, I don’t think so,” said Eustace.

“He didn’t smell of alcohol,” said Gussie, “when I stooped over him on the sofa.”

“That makes it all the worse,” said Mr. Verinder, stonily.

“Thank goodness,” said Eustace, “that mother and Emmeline didn’t come back before we had got rid of him.” And he lit a cigarette with fingers that trembled.

After this they had a plain perception of the force they were up against. As Mr. Verinder looked at the imposing faÇade of the house, he felt that, solid as he had always considered it to be, it afforded a frail protection. He sighed as he drove away from it—his menaced stronghold, his undermined fortress.

He went once again to see Mr. Williams in Spring Gardens, but without any hope that Mr. Williams would be able to help him.

“What can one do?”

Mr. Williams seemed to think that one could do nothing.

“You mean to say,” said Mr. Verinder, frowning, “that if I know this man intends to abduct my daughter—”

“Oh, you can hardly call it that, I think,” said Mr. Williams; and he moved towards his book-shelves, as if with the intention of taking out the letter A and looking up the article entitled Abduction. But then he was mechanically checked by something already in his mind. “By the way, Miss Verinder herself has been here.”

“She has, has she? What for?”

“To ask about her securities. She wants all papers sent to her bank. She said she would discontinue our arrangements, you know, and henceforth manage her affairs herself. She brought her maid with her, and they took some papers I gave her then and there straight on to the bank, I believe.”

Mr. Verinder thought that this was very significant. He said it suggested premeditated defiance and rebellion.

The solicitor said, smiling mildly, that she had not the air of “a rebel.” No, she had seemed “very quiet and sensible,” and he somehow implied that he would like to venture to add “very good-looking, too.”

In conclusion, Mr. Verinder asked, “Would you advise me to have her watched by detectives?”

“Oh, surely not? What could be gained by that?”

“It is her mother’s suggestion. At least we should then know her movements—and perhaps some of his. He alleges that he means soon to sail for South America. Of course, if one knew for certain that he was out of the country! If we did do it, could you arrange it for us?”

Mr. Williams said yes, if really necessary; but he must own that this class of thing was not in his line, or in the line of the firm.

“Then I will not trouble you further,” said Mr. Verinder stiffly.

“Emmeline,” he said that afternoon, or on an afternoon very near to it, “come in here, please, I want to speak to you.”

Mrs. Verinder had given him a warning; he was flushed, angry, uncomfortable, as he stood at the dining-room door and waited for his daughter. He spoke sternly now, as she appeared at the bottom of the staircase.

“Father, I am going out.”

“Going out as late as this? Why, it’s nearly seven o’clock. And where’s your maid? Where’s that girl—where’s Louisa?”

“I don’t require her. I’m not going far.”

“No, so I think.” He made her come into the dining-room, and he closed the door behind her.

She was wearing a queer little fashionable hat made of chip straw, with rosebud ornaments, and a white spotted veil neatly drawn under her chin; her dark simple dress was of the kind then known as “tailor-made,” fitting close to the waist, but enormously wide at the shoulders; as she stood looking at her father and quivering in anxiety, she had that gentle inoffensive charm of feminine prettiness which du Maurier was at the moment drawing so cleverly.

“Father, I beg you not to detain me. I have an appointment.”

“You won’t keep it. Do you understand? Sit down. I won’t allow you to leave this room.”

“Do you mean you’ll use force to prevent me?”

“If necessary. Sit down—over there.”

She sat down then, meekly, despairingly; but almost immediately she got up again.

“Father, let me go, please. To-morrow he is leaving London for a day or two. I want to see him before that.”

Although she had not moved from her chair, he stepped between it and the door; and he angrily told her to be seated. Once or twice more she rose and implored him to let her go. Then she sat still, in agony. She thought of this lost hour, this hour of mellow sunlight beyond the trees, by the water of Kensington Gardens; and of her lover waiting for her.

It was a cruel little scene, and Mr. Verinder felt the cruelty of it. He knew that he was inflicting anguish; worse, much worse than if he had really employed force. Throughout the dragging hour he might have beaten her, thrown her down upon the floor, knelt on her chest, and he would have hurt her less. He walked about the room torturing and tortured; his thoughts on fire, and yet his heart coldly aching.

Once she said words that sounded like an echo of another voice, but in her pathetically pleading tones they stabbed Mr. Verinder with a stiletto thrust.

“I’m not very happy, as it is, father. Please don’t make things harder.”

“My dear girl,” Mr. Verinder groaned, “do you think I’m happy either? Have I been unkind till now? Have I reproached you, even now? How else can I act? I see you drifting”—and he clung to this word—“drifting quite unconsciously to perils that you cannot measure.”

She said no more, and she never changed her attitude in her chair until Mr. Verinder, ostentatiously consulting his watch, said it was time to dress for dinner. As he glanced at her it seemed to him that her nose had grown sharp and thin beneath the veil; her eyes were dry and hard, so that the face, instead of being like a young girl’s, made him think of a haggard woman who has “knocked about” and “been through a lot.”

She herself had thought all the while of the man who was waiting for her, thinking, “He will give me another five minutes; now he won’t wait any longer; now he has really abandoned hope.”

She had lost the hour with him. It was gone for ever; nothing could bring it back. Out of her life they had taken it; this hour of love they had stolen from her—the hour that should have had love in it; and life is so pitifully short, holding, if you count them, so few hours of any sort.

That morning, quite early, Miss Verinder walked out of the house by herself; and she did not return for three days.

During her absence Mr. and Mrs. Verinder took what seemed perhaps an odd course, and yet it would have been difficult in the circumstances to propose a better one. They wished to maintain “appearances” as far as might be possible, to avoid premature scandal, to keep the talk within the four walls of home; and also they were in this predicament, that they did not really know if Miss Verinder would come back next minute or never. They therefore entered into a conspiracy with their servants, giving orders rather than explanations, and instructing them to tell inquirers that Miss Verinder was ill in bed upstairs—nothing serious, merely indisposition, but bed advisable.

Mrs. Bell, of Queen’s Gate, worried them badly by her good-natured solicitude. She was fond of Emmeline; and learning of the indisposition, she came often, brought hot-house grapes, and begged that if reading aloud was out of the question, she might at least be permitted to sit by the bedside and hold the invalid’s hand. Except by Mrs. Bell few inquiries were made.

It was just before dinner when Emmeline reappeared. Her mother and father received her alone in the boudoir; directly she came in, her father seized her by the wrist, and Mrs. Verinder sat down on a “pouf” in the middle of the room. Mr. Verinder released his daughter, almost casting her from him, and began walking to and fro; while Mrs. Verinder, sitting in a huddled fashion, following him with her eyes, so that her head moved from side to side exactly as heads move when people are watching the flight of the ball at a lawn-tennis match. Her hands were shaking, her watchful face expressed great distress as well as fear and wonder. Emmeline seemed calm and fearless.

“What’s the meaning of this?” said Mr. Verinder tragically, in spite of the commonplace character of the question.

“I am sorry, father, for any trouble and anxiety I have caused—but I couldn’t help it.”

“Couldn’t help it?”

“I mean, you were keeping me a prisoner. Well, I had to break my prison.”

“Where have you been?”

Emmeline remained silent.

“Emmeline, why don’t you answer?” said her mother. “Can’t you see what I’m suffering?”

“Leave her to me,” said Mr. Verinder. “You have been with that man?”

“Yes—if by that man you mean Mr. Dyke”; and Emmeline squared her shoulders and looked her father full in the face.

“For—for these three days you have been living with him as if you were his wife?”

“Yes.”

Mrs. Verinder uttered a suffocated cry, and it seemed for an instant as if Mr. Verinder was about to hurl himself upon Emmeline and fling her down at his feet; but then he turned his back on her, walked to a window and opened the curtains as if in need of more air.

“And you haven’t yet told us where,” said Mrs. Verinder, making strange throat sounds as well as speaking.

“Liverpool,” said Emmeline quietly.

“Liverpool!” Mrs. Verinder repeated the word, and moaned. “You went that distance—to Liverpool—without even a dressing-bag! No things—not even a brush and comb!”

“I got things there.”

“Then where are they? You have come back without anything.”

“I left them.”

Mrs. Verinder uttered another cry. “So that you could return to him!”

Then there came a tapping on the outer panels of the door.

“Come in,” shouted Mr. Verinder furiously.

It was the butler; and Mr. Verinder swore at him roundly. For the first time in his life he swore at a servant, and with ladies present.

“Damn you, you fool, what do you mean by knocking at the door. Why did you do it?”

The butler said he thought they were talking business, and was loth to disturb them. But he wished to know about the dinner.

To Mr. Verinder that tap had been symbolic; it seemed to imply the end of keeping up pretences. It was this thought that made him swear.

“Dinner! Yes, at once”; and he looked at his watch. “Eight-fifteen!”

They sat down to dinner and Emmeline joined them. Sherry was poured out for Mr. Verinder to drink with his soup; he could smell, before it came in, the shrimp sauce that was to go with the turbot; there was general conversation—about the weather and politics, just as usual.

What had happened had happened; yet there they were. In appearance at least, the world was going round at the same pace. The Albert Hall still stood on the old site.

During the course of the evening Emmeline told them that it would be wiser for them to let her go away altogether; and she was unshaken by the storm that both parents launched. She said she was very sorry; she knew they must hate her now; it would be better for everybody if they parted. What amazed them most was her courage. It was as though she drew all this new strength and character from the man. In their distress and confusion they told her so.

“I don’t recognize you”; “You are changed”; “I simply do not recognize you”; and so on.