OTHER people having breakfast in the room glanced from time to time at the lady with the short hair who was sitting all alone at a table near the window. Gently stirred by the vapid curiosity that would seem to be the atmosphere itself in private hotels, they had already put themselves to the trouble of ascertaining that she was a Miss Verinder who had arrived last night from foreign parts, and they wondered if the oddly shortened hair meant that she had suffered from a fever while abroad. One or two of the old ladies determined, since she was obviously quite proper and genteel, to make her acquaintance before luncheon—by rolling a ball of crochet silk across the floor at her, by inquiring if they had inadvertently taken her chair, or by some other polite method usual in such places.

A large proportion of the visitors were old ladies, some of them very old indeed, and each had a comparatively young lady as attendant or companion—a granddaughter or great-niece, or merely a nice girl glad to see London under any conditions—who readjusted the white woollen shawl, cut bread into convenient slices, and made herself generally serviceable. There was talk about the inclemency of the weather, the unusualness of it so late in the year; and these juvenile aids were sympathetic and thoughtful, saying “Auntie, you won’t venture out, of course.” At a table larger than the others there was a family group, father, mother, governess, and well-grown children, visitors from the northern provinces. The father stood in the window to eat his porridge, and without searching for pretexts, spoke genially to the solitary breakfaster; telling her that his way of eating porridge was the only correct one, and advising her to adopt the method. “At hoam ’tis always served to us on the sideboard, never on the table.” Then he jerked his head towards the windowpanes. “Give it an hour, an’ all that snow will have turned to fair sloosh. I’ve ben watching those la’ads shoovel away wi’ it off the steps and the footway.”

It was Sunday morning; and Miss Verinder, automatically resuming one of her old customs, set forth an hour later to attend divine services at Brompton parish church. The hotel manageress insisted upon lending her a pair of indiarubber goloshes, and praised her for her temerity while the page-boy knelt and put them on her feet. “Yes, I do call you brave,” said the manageress, “to face the elements on such a morning as this. I wouldn’t have the courage”; and she shivered. “No, I wouldn’t. And walking too! Why don’t you let me send Charles to fetch you a cab?... Oh, shut that door, Charles. I declare the cold comes in enough to cut you in half.”

Miss Verinder did not feel the cold—she was inured to cold. In fact, the air out of doors seemed to her only remarkable for its flatness and heaviness. She observed the snow—if one must honour with the name of snow that niggardly smoke-stained deposit which men with tools had scraped from the pavement into mean little banks and defiled with a crust of mud as they swept it here and there. Changing already to “sloosh” in the roadway, with wet tracks made by cart wheels, and pools of primrose-coloured water where the faint wintry sunlight touched it, any approximate whiteness that it still retained served only to make the house fronts seem darker, more offensively drab, more overwhelmingly dismal. Out of the porches and down the steps came people who seemed to be in some queer manner parasitic to the houses, rather than their owners or leaseholders; as if the architect’s incessantly repeated design, the builder’s profuse stucco, and the plumber’s leaden pipes, had mysteriously engendered human tenants. Born of the Cromwell Road, they closely resembled it; they were uniform, drab of complexion, with a dingy respectability that took the last fading lustre out of the trodden snow and obliterated every spiritless effort of the sunlight. All similar, but of both sexes, well wrapped in coats and furs, with prayer-books in their hands, they moved slowly and cautiously, begging one another to beware of slipping, to avoid puddles, and to step back and stand still when a passing carriage splashed the mud dangerously. They seemed to Miss Verinder strange, small, pitiful. Moreover the roadway that she used to think so wide had constricted, the lofty line of the house cornices came crushing down upon her, a narrowing vista of plate glass and window curtains seemed to close any chance of escape into freedom and open spaces. Even the terra-cotta mass of the Natural History Museum shrank to nothing as she approached it, and offered to her, instead of the dignity of soaring towers and vaulted vastness, a fantastic little toy, or that picture of a toy that is pasted on the lid of a child’s box of bricks.

Why had she returned to this particular neighbourhood—like the wounded animal creeping back to the place it used to haunt before, largely straying, it received its wounds? As though exhausted by rebellious originality she seemed meekly to have surrendered to the force of habit. Or perhaps when the cab-driver asked where he should take her she had said Kensington as the only name of a locality belonging to this hemisphere that she could remember in her great weariness. Because the effort required for thinking hard was just now impossible, because nothing that concerned herself personally was any longer of the least consequence; because one place was the same to her as another, since more than half of the world had become quite empty and she was condemned to live alone in it?

She mingled with the small stream of worshippers passing beneath the drip of the trees by the blank wall of the Oratory, threaded her way past two or three broughams regretfully brought there by devout masters or mistresses who could not walk but hated troubling their stable on the day of rest, and then just outside the church door she came almost face to face with her parents.

Sweeping into the sacred edifice, they both cut her—Mr. Verinder in the manner known as dead; Mrs. Verinder with a vacillation of gait, a fluttering of furs and feathers, the first rough sketch of a gesture, and a look. It was in its essence a look that Emmie had often seen at home; the look that came when servants had committed an accident with valuable glass or rare porcelain, angry but not really inexorable, seeming to say: “I cannot ignore it. You have broken our hearts, and we are very much annoyed.”

In spite of the disastrous turn of events that occurred last August, Mr. and Mrs. Verinder throughout the month and during half of September were still sustained by a modified form of hope, and still making strenuous efforts to conceal the disgrace that had befallen them. They felt that they were engaged in a contest with time. If they could “hush things up” until their enemy went back to the wilds no one need know of this truly fin-de-siÈcle escapade, and Emmeline need not be given that horrible up-to-date label of “The woman who did.” Dyke was leaving England about the middle of September—really going—no doubt of it. Not only the newspapers said so, but Mr. Verinder—without the aid of detectives—had assured himself of the truth. When once Dyke was gone all would be over; Emmeline would come to her senses, rub her eyes as one awakening from an ugly delirium, and be very grateful to find her reputation still intact. They could then do anything they liked with her—for instance, marry her to that old widower who hired the Grosvenor Gallery for his concert, and thus, as Mr. Verinder put it, “save her from her temperament.”

Straining therefore towards these ends, they for the moment gave their daughter what she had already taken, absolute freedom; they frustrated the desire of Eustace to get Dyke out on the sands of Boulogne; and they officially intimated to their servants, through the housekeeper and butler, that a very slight tiff recently existing between Mr. Verinder and Miss Verinder had now been completely smoothed away, leaving father and daughter the very best of friends as in the past. The faithful servants were glad to hear this; they knew they had a good master, and never meaning to quarrel with him themselves, they could not understand why anybody else should fall foul of him. They thought that the girl Louisa Hodson had acted like a rare fool in forfeiting her situation—for it should be mentioned that Louisa had been despatched with a month’s board wages as well as salary, in lieu of notice. She was dismissed not because her complicity had been established, but because Mrs. Verinder could no longer bear the sight of her.

Then came the middle, the end of September, and the total vanishment of Louisa’s late charge. The enemy had gone and his victim with him. Nothing more could now be done by her tormented father. In the whole circle of the family acquaintance the dreadful affair became more or less known. Within those limits it was a very solid scandal—a scandal that could only have been allayed by the production of Emmeline herself, and Mr. Verinder was unable to produce her. He abandoned fictional enterprise, clothed himself in a garment of silence, and suffered. Conscious that the local society was talking about him, he had the illusion that it was talking of nothing else; when old friends like Sir Timothy shook hands with him he seemed to feel an added pressure on his fingers and winced beneath this contact with sorrowful sympathy; if people spoke of such matters as public morality or licentious domestic habits and then broke off the conversation, he believed they had all at once remembered his misfortune. Doubtless, he thought, they condemned him for failing to bring up a family in the way it should go, for being unable to govern his own household, for letting things drift until they came to a pretty pass indeed. If now it had been necessary to issue debentures of those paper mills, he felt that the terms would be less favourable than in the past and the response not so large, because confidence was withdrawn from one of the principal directors of the company. If a man can’t look after his own daughter, you don’t trust him to look after anything.

In this winter of 1895-96, he suffered, feeling as he walked to the house and away from it that invisible eyes were looking at him from all the neighbours’ windows and that he was not holding up his head as he used to do. Only in the spacious tranquillity, the well-warmed atmosphere of egoism, the nicely arranged comfortable total indifference to all things except oneself, that permeates and makes up the charm of a really good London club—only there could he shake off his depression and feel sure that nobody was sympathising with him, pitying him, or blaming him; that if members laughed at the story of his fugitive child, they immediately forgot what had set them laughing; that if, going into the coffee-room, they connected the names of Anthony Dyke and Emmeline, they disconnected them again, and probably for ever, in the moment of asking for red currant jelly with the hot mutton or mixed pickles with the cold beef.

At Kensington these names had been fatally connected. Kensington knew that Dyke, the famous Anthony Dyke, was at the bottom of everything, at the side of it too, and all round it. The most faithful servants will chatter, even at the risk of losing the best of places. If people are quick at putting two and two together to make four, they are quicker still at putting one and one together to make two. Perhaps Miss Marchant, emissary to Mrs. Pryce-Jones, not really hoodwinked by Mrs. Verinder’s explanation, had continued to keep a watchful eye. Perhaps as well as Miss Marchant, the mournful angels on top of the Albert Memorial had seen the infatuated couple walking side by side, and had told the summer wind while begging it not to carry the news any further. Such things always leaked out somehow—more or less. Thus rumour, busy with both names, had enlivened drawing-rooms, by swift amplification; and in the protracted absence of Miss Verinder there had been reports that somebody or other had met her and Mr. Dyke at Monte Carlo, had lodged next door to them at Folkestone, had bumped into them at Tunbridge Wells.

During the church service she meditated, without emotion, upon her new social status. Glancing at one or two familiar faces she thought she could observe a rigidity of feature, a marble restraint of expression, that was something more than should be produced by absorbed interest in a religious exercise. They could not of course, at such a time and in such a place, even faintly nod or smile at an old friend; but their devotion was not surely quite so profound in past days; this statuesque aspect of the praying saint was surely new and significant. She felt a numb grief at having caused pain to her parents; but she cared nothing for the mental perturbation of these other people.

Except perhaps Mrs. Bell! She felt a sting of regret, a sudden realisation of forlornness, as she noticed that, far from assuming that air of sculptured oblivion, Mrs. Bell from time to time looked at her in a most distressful manner. Mrs. Bell had always shown strong regard for her. Emmie was fond of Mrs. Bell.

As has been mentioned, Mrs. Bell owned one of the largest houses in Queen’s Gate, and it may now be added that her heart was as large as her house. She was a childless widow of forty-two who had earned a widowhood in which she frankly delighted by assiduous care of an elderly invalid husband; loquacious but devoid of malice, indeed exuberantly good-natured, she loved to clothe her pleasant expansive figure with grand garments; fair of complexion, gracious, smiling, when dressed at her grandest she looked blondly opulent like the queen of diamonds in the very best and most expensive packs of cards. She was waiting on the porch steps, when Emmie, after allowing the congregation to depart, herself left the church.

“Now, my dear girl—my dearest Emmeline—you are coming home to lunch with me. That goes without saying.”

She would take no refusal. Her brougham, the last of the carriages remaining on the wet gravel, stood with its door open; she pushed Miss Verinder into it and the footman smothered them with a fur rug. As they drove away Miss Verinder’s eyes for a moment filled with not easily repressible tears. She was touched by the warmth of her friend’s greeting.

“Now I want to tell you,” said Mrs. Bell, with affectionate impressiveness, when she and Emmie had crossed the hospitable threshold and were alone together, “I want to tell you at once that nothing that has happened makes the least difference to me.”

“Thank you, dear Mrs. Bell,” said Emmie gratefully.

“I am not even going to ask you what has happened.”

Miss Verinder thanked her again.

“I shall not ask a single question; and I want you to know that you will be welcomed in this house precisely as before—at all times and seasons, do you understand? If any of my friends object, then,” said Mrs. Bell firmly and grandly, “they can stay outside. Yes, they shall soon find I will not stand anything of that sort. You see, I am perfectly frank with you, Emmeline. I should be less than a friend if I attempted to conceal the truth from you. You have the whole world against you. So far as worldly opinion is concerned, your only chance is to live it down—just to live it down. And, as I say, by me you will be asked no questions of any kind. But, oh, my dear child, what on earth have you done with your hair?”

“I had it cut,” said Miss Verinder meekly.

“But why?”

“I mean to let it grow again,” said Miss Verinder, evading an answer.

“I hope so indeed. Now we will go into the other room and have lunch.” But before opening the door good Mrs. Bell put her hands on the visitor’s shoulders and administered a warmly affectionate kiss. Then she looked at Miss Verinder doubtfully, distressfully, and with a slight piteousness of appeal. “As I have promised you, I shall not ask questions—unless, my dearest Emmeline, you yourself would like to tell me every single little thing. If you feel it would be a relief to you for me to know exactly where you have been and exactly what you have been doing since you left England—but, no, I see you would rather not. Then come along.”

And with that tremendous adventure for ever locked in her heart, Miss Verinder sat down to luncheon.

She remained in the neighbourhood. Cut by her friends and cast off by her family, she calmly settled in the flat at the corner of Oratory Gardens and went about just as if she had been anybody else instead of the disgraced Miss Verinder. The arrangement of the flat pleased her; she liked the narrow steep staircase with its private street-door beside the auctioneer’s office; when she closed that door behind her she felt safe, and when she passed through the door at the top of the stairs she felt that she was in an impenetrable stronghold. She furnished the flat charmingly, with antique things that as yet were not valued by everyone. Mrs. Bell said she had made it “too pretty and comfy for words.” Louisa Hodson, discovered without much trouble, came to the flat as factotum, and added to Miss Verinder’s sensation of being finally established in a shelter and retreat that was quite unassailable. No one on earth could interfere with her here. Even when the street door stood wide and an invader mounted the stairs, there was Louisa at the top of them to bar further progress and send him down again. In these days visitors were of the kind that wish to sell tea or dispose of tickets for a benevolent concert; but neither then nor at a later period could anyone get past Louisa when her mistress desired brief or lengthy seclusion; no one—not even Mrs. Bell of Queen’s Gate.

At once Miss Verinder began to occupy herself in the pursuit of knowledge, as though attempting a sort of higher or secondary education. She read scientific treatises and learned to draw maps. She studied such impossible things as logic, rhetoric, and English composition. She joined a literary society, attended lectures and classes; wrote essays on subjects chosen by a severe young professor, and humbly carried them back to him for sharp censure or faint praise. She was in many ways busy.

Almost at once too there fell upon her that air of self-reliance which, whether proudly deprecating or gently defiant, is observable in all women who are for any length of time compelled to manage without assistance both their outward and their inward lives. All people knowing her story must see in her appearance as well as her manner a confirmation of their own way of interpreting it. Even her cheerful resignation was suspicious; they looked for the sadness in her face when she thought herself unnoticed. To such critics she was in every detail precisely what might be expected in one who has forfeited all chances of respectful attention, who is left to herself because she deserves to be left to herself. To those who knew nothing about her she was merely old-maidish. Her hair grew again, long and thick, but the brightness of youth had irrevocably gone from her. Her complexion slowly faded, the tints of the frail blush rose giving place to the waxen permanence of the lily. At twenty-eight she looked at least thirty-five.

And the long years began to glide away. Colourless, without salient features, swift in their cold monotony, the years were like ghosts of years flitting across a half-lit room into the endless dark passages that leads to the eternal. Mrs. Bell had said that she must live down the past, but it seemed that her real task was to live down the future.

At least thus it all appeared to external observers. Events of one sort or another were truly happening in the flat all the while. For instance—as observed by Mrs. Bell—after a time a parrot arrived, to be petted and fed and cared for. Then Louisa, the maid-housekeeper, asked permission to keep a cat. Louisa did not intend to marry; she had established herself in the flat as firmly as her mistress; she and Miss Verinder understood each other—they played with the cat in its kitten stage, they made much of the solemn and probably very aged parrot. Seemingly they were just two old maids together.

During this period the illustrious name that had been whispered in Kensington drawing-rooms sounded at intervals loud and clear on the public tongue. As hitherto in the career of Dyke, he was alternately lost to view for long stretches of time and lit up by a blaze of publicity for brief spaces. Throughout the year 1897 those deserts of Australia hid him completely. Then early in 1898 he was very much before the world again. His book Sunshine and Sand gave the history of his most recent vicissitudes and successes, and appearing at a moment when the ultimate confederation of the Australian Colonies was being widely discussed, the book, as critics said, was not only more entrancing than any novel, it took its place as an indispensable volume of reference for all students of imperial history. Also at some time early in this year 1898 he was in London, being interviewed by newspapers and delivering a lecture before the Royal Geographical Society. Then the dark curtain promptly descended upon him once more. He had been sent to examine the interior of British New Guinea and to explore any unvisited islands to the east of it; and the newspapers had not much to say about him for two or three years, except that he was alive in spite of the insatiable craving of the cannibals with whom he now consorted. Then came the publication of Among the Papuans in two bulky volumes, which the press welcomed with compliments similar to those showered upon his previous work. Critics said that since there could be little doubt that the Crown would cede its interests in New Guinea to the Commonwealth of Australia as soon as that federation should be finally constituted, these two illuminating and compendious volumes of Mr. Dyke’s appeared at a most opportune hour. Then soon one heard that Mr. Dyke was in the United States lecturing, and trying to collect money for another Antarctic voyage, which should start, as he hoped, in 1902, or at latest in 1903. The lecture tour closed stormily in a pitched battle with American critics who had thrown doubt on his records of the Patagonian pigmies and the Andine temples. The noise of this contest echoed loudly even on our side of the Atlantic.

Thus Miss Verinder was not allowed any true chance to forget the man who had been so much to her. For her, one must suppose, even the occasional mention of his name, a mere newspaper reference to him, should prove stirring to the memory, if not absolutely upsetting to her peace of mind. And above all, those books of his—always running into a new edition or being advertised by the publisher as about to appear in a cheaper form! The earlier ones, too, got themselves reissued—First Antarctic Cruise (1888); The Second Cruise (1890); “At all booksellers, uniform with A Walk in the Andes”; and so forth! Perhaps she was reading one or other of these works and suffering in consequence, when she lay indisposed behind her shut doors, or suddenly and abruptly disappeared from the flat altogether on one of her strange lonely excursions. Louisa, growing older and sterner every year, merely reported that Miss Verinder was unwell and could see no one; or that Miss Verinder had left London and it was quite uncertain when she would return.

Moreover, had Miss Verinder been in any danger of forgetting the man himself and his more intimate characteristics, she received at least one sharp reminder.

On a certain winter afternoon his father came to call upon her, by appointment.

“I was so glad to get your note giving me permission,” said the elder Mr. Dyke. “It is very kind of you.”

“Oh, not at all,” said Emmie; using, as so often happens when we feel that an occasion is momentous, the tritest and most simple form of words. “Do please sit down”; and she indicated that she wished him to choose the sofa as his seat. Her nerves were fluttered and her thoughts in some disorder during these first civilities.

“It is a great pleasure, Miss Verinder, to make your acquaintance.”

“And I,” said Emmie earnestly, “have wanted to know you, Mr. Dyke. I have wanted it so much—so very much.”

“Thank you. It is good indeed of you to say that. I should have wished to come long ago—but, well, somehow I did not venture”; and he had a smile that seemed to shoot like an arrow into Emmie’s gentle breast and set it throbbing with exquisite pain. Almost, for that instant, Anthony might have been there smiling at her. “No, I wished to do so—but one is always afraid of seeming intrusive. Only when he wrote to me—”

Mr. Dyke sat then upon the sofa, and they began to talk about his son.

He was a much smaller man than Anthony, very thin and spare, and yet obviously possessing something of Anthony’s iron strength; so that, although sixty-four or sixty-five years of age, he gave one an impression of a person who will go on living for a great while without ever growing really old. He too had blue eyes and a straight nose, but one could not imagine this face becoming hawklike or fierce. He was quite dignified, yet devoid of all commanding or majestic attributes. His manner, reminding her of Anthony’s now and then in its deferential courtliness, more particularly as expressed by bowing the head, was quite that of a man of the world. And Emmie noticed that his sacred calling was not indicated by the slightest sign in the clothes he wore. Then as her nerves steadied themselves, while he went on talking and she listening, she thought of nothing beyond the one fact that he was Anthony’s father.

He was telling her about Anthony’s birthplace, their home in Devonshire, and the time of Anthony’s boyhood. “Endells—that is the name of our house, you know—quite a small place, but in a way very charming—to us, at least—we all love it. Close to the sea, you know. Endells—so many places in our part of the world have a plural name. Abertors—that’s the big place, the show-place. An old house, ours, you know—and the most delightful old church close by, on our own ground. I am, you know, what they used to call ‘a squarson,’” and he smiled again. She could bear it now; and it was not really Anthony’s smile. It was full of goodness and kindness, but it had not that warm flood of light as of the sunshine bursting through splendid dark clouds and making the whole world happy. “At the time I speak of, I was still doing my clerical duties. I hadn’t then turned lazy and handed everything over to a curate. And will you believe it, Miss Verinder? I then thought that Anthony, when he grew up, would be ordained and follow in my footsteps. His mother thought so. Poor dear”; and he sighed. “We lost her before he was fourteen. As a boy he was religious—unusually religious. But now, I fear—well, you know his inmost thoughts a great deal better than I do. We won’t speak of that.”

Then, continuing, he said he felt it would interest her to hear that as a boy Anthony showed no sign of the adventurous spirit. “Isn’t it strange, Miss Verinder? But so it is.” He was a dreamy boy, loving mystical books, with a hankering after magic, astrology, and spiritualism. He had never been seen to read tales of travel. Nor was he fond of athletic sports. He did not care for riding. “You know, there are hounds of course within reach of us. And sometimes he would follow them on foot, but never on horseback. Always a prodigious walker.” Then Mr. Dyke laughed gently. “He would not come in to meals. It worried his poor mother, and our housekeeper—who had been his nurse—used to say nature never put a clock or dinner bell inside Master Anthony’s stomach as it does with other children. He would climb along the cliffs and lie on his back on some ledge or other, looking at the sky or watching the seagulls, and dreaming—dreaming hour after hour; the whole day often, in summer. All one can imagine is that during these long reveries great purposes were slowly shaping—unknown to himself perhaps. At any rate not one single word about it did he utter to me—and we were friends, Miss Verinder—a very real affection, thank God, remained always between us two—I fancy, something more than is common with fathers and sons.” And Mr. Dyke paused to blow his nose. “Not one word until he was approaching his nineteenth birthday. Then he said to me—I was never more astonished in my life—he said, ‘Father, I can’t stand this any longer. I am starting for Africa to-morrow.’ Just like that. And he went, you know.

“The rest—if a father may say so—is history. It is, isn’t it, Miss Verinder? Now I musn’t tire you by too long a visitation. But I felt that these little early details would interest you. They are so little and yet so much. And they should certainly come into his life when it is written. I think it is a mistake in biographies to omit all the slight and seemingly trivial details and give one only the big events. Nothing is trivial in the lives of really great men.”

Miss Verinder assured him that she had been enthrallingly interested; and, taking leave, he detained her hand in his for a moment while he asked if he might call again in a few days’ time before he returned to Devonshire. She was conscious during these moments of a constraint or uneasiness that he had seemed to feel even when he was talking to her so gently and kindly. It had been as if the talk was merely superficial, and that beneath it there was a communication that he desired to make but could not. Now it seemed that this had risen close to the surface, and with her hand in his, she braced herself to meet it. Perhaps that mental preparation on her side, detected and misunderstood, was sufficient to check him again; for, without saying anything further, he went away.

Thinking about this afterwards, Emmie felt that it had spoilt everything. It was not difficult to find interpretations of a reticence or shrinking that would check Mr. Dyke’s flow of words and make him hesitate each time that he approached a fuller confidence; yet if such thoughts, however natural they might be, were really in his mind, she did not wish ever to see him again. If they were not there, then she wished, without doubts or self-questionings, to enjoy the immense comfort and support that the sight of his face and the sound of his voice gave to her. She determined at once to lay the doubt at rest, and when, fulfilling his promise, he reappeared at the flat, she asked him a very simple question.

“Mr. Dyke, do you blame me for what I have done?”

“Blame you? Oh, how could I? How can I? Oh, my goodness, no,” said Mr. Dyke, in visible agitation, and he sprang up from the sofa and stood looking down at Emmie, who was seated on one of her lowest chairs. “But I see what you mean. A clergyman? I feared you might think—That is why I have been so anxious to see you. That is what I wanted to say—but it was so difficult.” He was stooping, and he took her hand and raised it to his lips. “To tell you my gratitude to you for your love of my son. And that I, just as much as he, can measure the extent of your sacrifice—its nobility and its completeness.”

The barrier between them falling thus, she was free to take such comfort from him as he could convey. They sat on the sofa together now, and patting her hand and calling her his dear Emmeline, he talked again of Anthony.

That afternoon he told her among other things the story of Dyke’s miserable, fatal marriage. Although the mother of Dyke’s wife and her other relations were dreadfully common people, the girl herself was decently educated and showed a certain refinement inherited from her father, who had been both a gentleman and a scholar. Unhappily, she inherited from him also the strain of madness that in his case had led to violent mania and suicide. Before Dyke ever saw her, incipient insanity at least had declared itself in the daughter, and, as was discovered afterwards, her wretched relatives had been warned by doctors that it would be a monstrous wickedness to allow her to marry anybody at all. But when the ardent, impetuous Anthony fell into their hands they made remorselessly short work of him. He was then only twenty-one, just back from his first visit to Africa, full of chivalry and altogether devoid of caution; and to such people as these he would naturally seem a grand prize. The girl—Mr. Dyke believed—practised no deception, and indeed was wholeheartedly in love with her splendid wooer.

Three weeks after the wedding she entered an asylum in the Midlands, and she had remained there ever since. She was incurably insane—with a sort of dull religious melancholia that flickered up into mildly homicidal tendencies at intervals. Dyke from the beginning had taken every possible measure for her comfort and security. It was a good asylum, and the annual charges were not light. In order to insure the payment of these, Dyke had invested money left to him by his mother; so that, whatever happened to him, the asylum would continue to receive the half-yearly amounts. For a considerable number of years he had not been allowed to see his wife—or rather, she had not been allowed to see him; for the sight of him threw her into a dangerous kind of excitement. But Dyke was never in England without paying a visit to the asylum. He went down there, to make certain that she was being properly treated; after an interview with the doctors, one of the attendants guided him to some part of the grounds where he could stand unobserved and watch her as she passed by in charge of her nurse. In this manner he had seen her many times.

Her mother and the other relations had more or less blackmailed him as long as they lived, and he had been generous to them in spite of the wrong they had done him. Now they were all of them dead, except an aunt—a horrible old woman who from time to time wrote abusive letters to Anthony and his father.

“A sad case, my dear Emmeline. And I must say I find it difficult not to condemn the cruelty of a law that refuses to annul such marriages. I should tell you that my boy tried to obtain release by appealing to the law courts. Yes, he brought a case—but without success.”

One after another the years glided past. In 1904 Anthony Dyke, the explorer, was about to do his third Antarctic cruise in command of an expedition that had been organized for purely scientific purposes, and with no intention of pushing far south. But newspapers said that it would be strange if Dyke did not make some sort of dash and attempt to lower the record that he himself still held.

Long before this year of 1904 the number of people who condescended to be aware of Miss Verinder’s existence had largely increased. After the tea-sellers there had come in due course clergymen or church lay-helpers; for, however much you may disapprove of a lady’s former way of life, you cannot be so uncharitable as to preclude her from herself exercising the virtue of charity; and, moreover, the acceptance of a donation or subscription commits you to no real friendliness. Then came a chance acquaintance who had been warned against her but could not bother about the warning, or thought that in regard to scandal there ought to be a statute of limitations; and, adopting this broad-minded view, they even asked her to dine with them quietly and at short notice—more especially when they were at their wit’s ends to find a fourth for bridge. Then she began to be “taken up again,” as they termed it, by a few of her old friends—the few still remaining in the locality. Staggered by the countenance given to her by Mrs. Bell, or moved to pity by their own reflections on her lonely blameless life, they essayed a smile and nod when they passed her in the street, and, encouraged by her unresentful courtesy, a little later attacked Louisa with a packet of their visiting cards.

So the legend of Miss Verinder’s wickedness slowly tended, if not yet to fade and die, at least to lose its strength and high colour. Young people yawned and refused to learn when elderly people narrated the legend for their benefit. “Hot stuff,” was she, when she was young? But all that must have been a mighty long time ago. It was as if the house walls absorbed whispers concerning her past, instead of echoing them as they used to do. It was as if the varnished front doors and plate glass windows of the straight, correct roads, conspiring with iron rails and neat rectangles of grass and gravel in the gardens of the squares, had now determined, if they could, slowly to obliterate all vivid recollection of a glaring irregularity. It was as if the whole monotonously respectable neighbourhood had said to its parasitic inhabitants, “We never experienced anything of the sort till then. Let us now try to forget that it ever happened.”

At last her family forgave her, and for form’s sake insisted that there should be some slight intercourse, although Miss Verinder herself declined or evaded any resumption of real intimacy. To her relatives it had become so very awkward to go on cutting her, and with all the children growing up, to have an aunt that mustn’t be mentioned. It was far more convenient to know her and name her again. Margaret Pratt was now the mother of five and putting on flesh rapidly. But, because of her shortness, she could never hope to be as big round as Mrs. Verinder. Eustace had married with the utmost propriety, and his wife in an equally becoming manner had given him first a female and then a male infant. It was Eustace who advised a reconciliation with his erring sister, and Mr. Verinder at once agreed.

Mr. Verinder had been badly shaken by the South African War—a rebellion, a defiance of authority, that should not have been called a war at all; during the early reverses he could not sleep at night, although he doggedly declared at the breakfast table that he was not anxious and that everything would could right in the end. He sincerely mourned the death of Queen Victoria, that august lady who had been as fond of the Albert Hall as he was himself. He described this great loss as “the breaking of a link.”

Already, in Mr. Verinder’s opinion, his beloved neighbourhood was changing. He could not disguise from himself that it was not all that it used to be. That old closely-bound society was breaking up. The war had shaken things as well as people. New ideas were creeping in, with a new monarch on the throne; that grand old British institution, the dinner-party, was threatened by the new fashion of entertaining at restaurants.Then soon he began to suffer in health, and submitting to the most terrific of all possible upheavals, he consented to sell his house and go to live with Mrs. Verinder at Brighton. Mrs. Verinder had fallen in love with Brighton, having there found a row of houses almost exactly like Prince’s Gate—same colour, same porches, cornice, everything; only smaller, and therefore requiring a less ample and more easily managed style of household.

From Brighton Mr. Verinder wrote to Emmeline inviting her to spend Easter with them, saying that Eustace, Margaret, and the little people would be there, and all of them glad to see her. He underlined that word all; but Emmeline could not accept the invitation.

It was a comfort to the kindly feeble old man to be able to write to Emmeline now and then, or to talk about her once in a way at dinner; and it was an immensely greater comfort, a comfort always with him, to know that the ancient dreadful affair was so completely over and done with. To his mind, Emmeline had finally lived it down. He knew that Dyke had been in England during these years at least twice, and—again without the aid of detectives—he had ascertained that Emmeline had not renewed relations with the man; indeed, had not even attempted to see him. All the time Dyke was in London the last time, Emmeline had been away somewhere in the country. She did not return to that little flat of hers until the man had gone once more. All this Mr. Verinder had learned from Mrs. Bell, who vouched for the truth; and he admired his daughter’s fortitude and strength of mind in thus running away to avoid any possibility of temptation.

A closed chapter. Yes, thank goodness, over and done with.