The winter months of 1917 passed sadly for anyone who was condemned to live in the depression of London. I was well enough to go back to work in February, but I stayed on at "The Sanctuary," because, with all its nerve-racking discomfort, I had not the heart to go away when both Bertrand and George pressed me so warmly to remain. Three, they said, were less depressing than two, though I came to doubt it. For the tenth time, we seemed to be entering upon the last decisive phase of the war; Germany had begun her unrestricted submarine campaign, it was inevitable that America should abandon her neutrality. (Since the Presidential election and with every day that brought intervention nearer, our press became less scornful of the President; it ceased to misquote and misinterpret phrases about a nation that was too proud to fight or a peace without victory.) But the race would be hotly contested. The submarine campaign at sea, a win-through-at-all-costs offensive on land had to put Germany in a position to dictate terms before the incalculable weight of American arms was thrown into the scale against her.

Men wore grave faces in those days. Though few could give accurate figures of the tonnage which was being sunk daily or of the stocks of food on which we could depend, everyone knew that prices had soared until they had to be arbitrarily fixed by the Government; everyone knew that already certain foods were unprocurable and that the privations were unlikely to grow less. Meatless days and three-course dinners were but the beginning, and Bertrand, who was by now almost reconciled to the continuation of war in the hope that it would discredit the new Government, shook his head gloomily at me and wondered morosely how long the proud-stomached people of England would consent to go on short commons.

And it was not only in food that the shortage was being felt. Omniscient critics, who had a figure and a date ready for every question, whispered that, since the Somme campaign, we were short of recruits to the extent of a hundred thousand men, and the whisper, growing in volume, was the signal for a campaign, half malicious, half patriotic, and wholly mischievous. The unessential industries must yield up their young men, the civil service must be purged of its indispensables, and, that not even one fish should slip through the meshes of the net, those who had been exempted, rejected or discharged from the army, were required to present themselves for re-examination. The campaign evoked one flash of opposition, not serious in itself, but of interest as a symptom of turbulent discontent; mass meetings of discharged soldiers, each with his silver badge, assembled to declare their intention of not being sent out again until others had done their share.

"The wheel has swung the full circle now," said George one night. "I was up before a board to-day. The doctors seemed to feel that it was a personal score for them that my eyes weren't bad enough for me to be rejected; but, when they came to my heart, they were quite indignant. They couldn't pass me on that, but it was a personal grievance and I shouldn't have been a bit surprised if they'd tested me to see if I'd been chewing cordite.... I suppose it's not to be wondered at; I'm not as keen to go out as I was two and a half years ago; I shouldn't be keen at all, if it wasn't for the feeling that I'm left, that all my friends have been killed.... And they must get men from somewhere. This Russian revolution is a very fine and hopeful thing in itself, but the Russians are so much absorbed in it that they can't spare time to bother about the war, and the Germans are withdrawing the best part of their troops from the East. I don't know where you're going to get men from. The papers keep yapping about Ireland, but I wonder how many of their inspired leader-writers know anything about the country."

It was one of many discussions, when George would come home late and tired from his office, Bertrand later and more tired from the House.

"If Germany threw up the sponge to-morrow!" George began one night, "what should we have gained? The flower of our manhood's been destroyed, we're smashed financially, the money market of the world has shifted to New York, and we shall spend the rest of our days paying the interest on our debt, trying to repair the damage.... I don't care to think of the labour troubles we're going to have when we try to get back to peace-time rates of wages or when the men find that their jobs have been done as well or better in their absence by women. And what's it all for? I get most infernally sceptical at times. As poor Beresford used to prove with chapter and verse, in every war of this kind there's always been a school of optimists to say that such a scourge will never be seen again. And it always is.... As for social or moral elevation, with the spirit of lynch-law and the methods of the press-gang.... It'll all be the same!"

"It can't be quite the same after so universal a shake-up," I objected.

George shook his head wisely.

"In the early days, when men of our class were enlisting as privates, even lately, when rankers were getting commissions, I used to think that some of our social angles would be rubbed off, but just you have five minutes' talk with an Old Army officer about the 'temporary gentlemen' in his battalion, who've been fighting side by side with him, mark you! While you're on the desert island, your Admirable Crichton may come to the top, but once get him back in London with a drawing-room and a servants' hall!... I agree in theory with people like Raney, who say we must get value for the lives we're spending, but I can't do it! Nobody can do it. The men out there who are paying the price want to forget about the whole thing, they'll come home at the end as they come home now on leave, to attend to their own affairs, to enjoy themselves, to make up for lost time and recapture the years they've wasted in the trenches. And the people who've never been out have forgotten all the old good resolutions; they're as tired of the war as the soldiers, tired of drudgery, discomfort, economising; they want to forget it and enjoy themselves and get back to the old life. Frankly, Stornaway, it still makes you sick to hear of the way our prisoners are treated and that sort of thing, but you don't any longer regard this war as a crusade, do you? There's too much eighteenth-century diplomacy about it, too many compensations, too much balance of power. It was one thing to send a forlorn hope to Belgium, one thing to say that the German military machine must be broken, but when it comes to conscribing men to coerce Greece or win Constantinople for Russia ... I wonder when the accursed things will end."

Bertrand roused himself to light a fresh cigar. From the angle at which he held it in his mouth, no less than from the way that he screwed up his eyes and peered into the shadows of the rafters, I prepared myself for a paradoxical and probably pretentious generalisation.

"I sometimes feel that war is the new expression of our national activity," he began. "Don't the Rolls-Royce people build only for the Government? Well, that's typical of a gigantic state-socialism which has grown up in a night; you can't build a house or buy a suit of clothes until war-needs have been satisfied. Production, transport, distribution have all been taken over; you've an army of controllers directing the machine; and in time we shall dress as we're told, eat the quantity of food we're allowed, move here and there, do this and that, as we're ordered. At one age we shall be drafted into the army, at another we shall be knocked on the head to save feeding; there'll be birth-rate bonuses amounting to state-subsidised polygamy.... Everything that a man did in the old days for his own benefit or amusement,—his daily task, his career, his material output, his accumulation of wealth, his pioneer-work in developing and improving the world, his family-life, even—will now be directed to feeding the war. I don't complain; we're united in a labour gang of forty million souls, and our job is to turn out a better war than Germany. I don't see where it's going to stop and I don't see who's going to stop it. Not the soldiers, because they're shot if they disobey an order; not the Government, because they're the Board of Directors."

"You'll only stop it by a general strike at home," George answered reflectively.

Bertrand spread out his hands with a gesture of sweet reasonableness.

"And who's going to carry through a general strike? The people with small fixed incomes can't make themselves heard, and, for all the rise in prices, your industrial wage-earner has never been so prosperous; besides, whenever prices become too high, the Government steps in and controls them, subsidises producers. Again, it's not pleasant to be told that your sons and brothers are being killed because you won't turn out shells."

George wriggled his shoulder-blades impatiently.

"But, if you make it plain that you're not going to turn out shells, the killing stops automatically. If anyone would only come off the high horse and discuss concrete terms!"

Bertrand shrugged his shoulders and blew a scornful cloud of smoke.

"But people are getting used to the killing," he objected. "Three years ago—take anyone you like, Jim Loring; he could only die as the result of illness or an accident; even if there were a war, he wasn't a soldier. And it came like a sort of icy grip at the heart.... Nowadays a man becomes a soldier, whether he likes it or not, at eighteen. They get mown down at twenty instead of dying in their beds at seventy. And, as we grow accustomed to it, on my soul! George, we cease caring. People who come back from Paris tell me that there's a sort of hedonistic fatalism there—the restaurants never so full, money never so prodigally squandered. And anyone who knows anything knows that French credit in America is gone! So it isn't the calm, undismayed spirit of the Spartans at ThermopylÆ; it's hysteria, carelessness. I've little doubt that with certain obvious differences you'd find the same thing in Berlin, assuredly you'd find it in Vienna. And we're getting it as badly."

It was due to the house in which I lived, but I suddenly realised that for a twelvemonth my emotions and interests had strayed from battlefields where thousands of men were daily laying down their lives for conflicting ideals; they were engrossed in the contemplation of a middle-aged bachelor, taking advantage of a blind man to carry off his wife. And Mrs. Tom Dainton, one of the earliest widows in the war, had married again. And Lady Maitland and her friends were wondering whether the risk of sudden death would nerve young Pentyre to marry Lady Sally Farwell.

"You're not very encouraging, Bertrand," I said.

"And yet, if you take a long view, you can see light," he rejoined unexpectedly. "The same scientific development which gives you chloroform gives you also poison gas; and, until you can disarm the world and make one nation of it under a single police, each war becomes more horrible than the last. At the same time international divisions and values may be becoming obsolete; the stronghold of Gibraltar may be the target for long-range Spanish guns; we may all of us thankfully throw down our weapons before we have to fight under changing conditions. You remember when war broke out, George? You were going to stay with Jim Loring, and I went to Paddington with you; we all shook our heads gravely and said, 'Thank God! We're an island!' Well, insularity would have been a source of greater weakness than strength, if the perfection of submarine warfare had gone pari passu with the development of trench warfare; and we may want to cry 'quits' before the submarine makes any further progress. Or take aerial transit. With any luck, George, you'll live to see mail and passenger services through the air all over the world. Germany can't get to the Far East without the leave of Russia, she can hardly get to America without sending her air-ships over someone else's territory. All these international barriers have changed their values."

George looked at his watch and dragged himself to his feet.

"I think I shall turn in. A discussion of this kind is very purifying for the soul, no doubt, but it doesn't get you any forrarder. Dear old Raney could usually be counted on to produce some Mark Tapley consolation at the end of the evening, but I doubt if even he's got any superabundance at the present time."

Bertrand emptied his tumbler, and we moved slowly towards the door.

"Have you heard anything of him since he went back?" I asked.

"He's written once or twice on business. I send him a line two or three times a week to say how Sonia's getting on, and I'm going down there for the week-end pretty soon. You can't tell much from a dictated letter—or from him, if it comes to that," he added with a sigh.

It must have been two or three days after this night that Lady Loring came to me with a worried expression and the announcement that Sonia would have to keep her bed until after her confinement; against this sentence the doctor allowed no appeal. Thereafter I found myself spending a considerable portion of the day in the sick-room. Sonia had overcome her earlier antagonism and after her first unburdening of spirit was prepared to discuss herself and her history with a frankness that amazed me until George told me that it was one of her most unchanging characteristics and one that was not solely stamped upon her by a desire to talk about herself. At the end of a week I had received a full and most unflattering account of her girlhood.

"I was frightfully attractive, of course, but I must have been odious," she began engagingly. "Every other woman hated me, and I used to take it as a great compliment, but I don't think I should now. I want to be liked, I always did; but I never took any trouble, I went out of my way to exasperate men. I don't know why people stood me—people like George, I mean, who didn't pretend to be in love with me. I must either have been a first-class flirt, or I must have been a genius, or else I must really have had qualities that I didn't recognise."

I had a full history of her engagement to Loring, over whom her facile triumph had exasperated her, so that she picked quarrels day by day until the engagement was broken off and she made, if not the match, at least the most widely discussed scandal, of the year.

There was another man called Claypole or Crabtree (as she always alluded to him as Tony I never entirely discovered his surname) to whom she had been engaged before Loring came on the scene. I had his history, too, sandwiched between accounts of the men whom she had not married for one reason or another, and the rich Jews like Sir Adolphus Erskine, whom she had fascinated and bled; throughout she talked like an artless child describing her first ball. On some subjects she was inexorably reticent; I never heard why she had fallen in love with O'Rane and married him, and in all the hours that I sat with her she never alluded a second time to the stages of her estrangement from her husband. An hour daily for a fortnight told me little, perhaps, about Sonia, but it shed a searching light on girls of the class to which she belonged.

2

As the days went by I found myself allowed to spend less and less time with Sonia. She had hypnotised herself into believing, as a matter of duty and necessity, that she was ill, tired and suffering at a time when half the amount of persuasion would have made her feel that she had never been more comfortable in her life. It was hardly cowardice, for George had told me anecdotes of her endurance in the hunting-field which shewed that she was capable of supporting pain; but the obsession made her a difficult patient.

"Only three weeks more," I used to be told; "only a fortnight more."

Then she began to count in days, and I saw her face lengthen and her eyes dilate, as though the Wild Ass's Skin were shrinking in her hand. She was morbidly curious to find out from Lady Loring how much unavoidable pain she would have to feel; the doctor was questioned again and again until he warned her that she was preparing the gravest consequences for her child and herself. And it was after he had gone that she whispered a terrible prayer that the baby might be born dead.

When the conversation was reported to me, I felt that drastic steps would have to be taken, if she was to be kept from going mad herself and giving birth to an imbecile. I took George into my confidence and sent him for his week-end at Melton with a string of rhetorical questions and a bulletin which brought O'Rane the same night to London, where he stayed until Sunday evening, while his neglected guest billeted himself on the Headmaster and accepted the hospitality of the Common Room. I was by myself, dozing over a book, when the library door was flung open, a gigantic Saint Bernard ambled in and a drenched and breathless figure demanded if anyone was there.

"What on earth brings you to London?" I asked.

"Sonia. I gathered from George ... I say, something's got to be done, you know."

He stood with his eyes open and set on me, his lips parted to shew a gleam of white, and one hand mopping his coat, more, I think, for distraction than in any hope of drying it.

"I don't quite know what you think you can do," I said dubiously.

"If she's awake——" he began eagerly.

"You'd frighten her out of her wits," I interrupted. "And you can ask Lady Loring, if you don't believe me. What you can do—to-morrow morning,—is to let it be known that you've come up—to lunch with a man or collect some books—and, if she'd care to see you, she can. But I think you've rather acted on an impulse, you know."

"I couldn't stay down at Melton, if there was anything I could do by coming up."

"I'm afraid that you'll find that there isn't."

His underlip curled obstinately.

"We'll see. I took a solemn vow that I'd see her through...."

I said nothing, remembering that he was Irish and a romantic; his simple-minded talk of oaths and obligations belonged to another age and another land.

In the morning I asked Lady Loring whether it would be prudent to let O'Rane see his wife. I was referred to Sonia herself, who received the news of her husband's presence without visible surprise and hesitated for what seemed five minutes before answering. Then she picked up a hand-glass from the table by her bedside, looked long at her reflection and laid it down with a sigh; there was a second spell of indecision before she told me she was not well enough to see anyone.

"I think she's gratified by your coming," I told O'Rane, "but she'd rather not have any visitors at present. It's not hostility to you, but a woman loses her looks to some extent at a time like this, and I think she's sensitive about it."

"But she knows——" He interrupted himself suddenly, and his voice became softly wistful. "D'you appreciate that I've never seen my wife since she was my wife!"

"I don't think she always does," I answered. "But the trouble in her mind won't be removed by your sitting and talking to her sweetly for half an hour, when she doesn't want to see you."

O'Rane's normal composure was breaking down, but he recovered himself with an effort.

"I might have been a rather more civil host to George, at this rate," he murmured.

At dinner that night we talked of a subject which illness and other work had driven into the background. The war had shattered many of my fine boasts of what I would do, if I were a millionaire, and new outlets had to be found for the Lancing fortune. I had already decided that Ripley Court could be put to no better use than as a richly endowed haven of rest for those whom the war had made incapable of ever helping themselves again. There were men, I knew, concealed mercifully for themselves and the world from inquisitive or pitying spectators, who had marched into battle and returned from the operating-theatre blind and without limbs, mere trunks surmounted by sightless heads, yet—I was told—glad to be spared even such life as remained to them. They were to be my first care, and, when the last had died, there would still be sufficient incurable cripples without the adventitious aid of modern warfare to keep my hospital full. There was opportunity, too, for bringing comfort and resignation to the demented, the paralysed and the blind. As I saw O'Rane's interest quickening, I told him that I wanted him to be one of my trustees.

He hesitated until I feared that he was going to refuse.

"One of them?" he asked in doubt.

"I shall appoint several, but they must be all young men; I want the best of their lives."

"If I act," he answered slowly, "I should have to act alone. I'm in the early thirties still——"

"You would find it more than one man's work."

"Ah, but I could give the whole of my life to it." I started to interrupt, but he raised his hand. "And, furthermore, I should allow you to impose no conditions; the money would have to come to me as it came to you, and you would have to let me play ducks and drakes with it as I liked——" He paused to laugh wistfully. "You've had admirable opportunities of observing how satisfactorily I arrange my own affairs; but I couldn't undertake the responsibility otherwise. You see, you might try to impose conditions that I didn't like; and then my heart wouldn't be in the work. Or your conditions might become obsolete with the changing state of society, as has happened with every trust that has been in existence for more than a hundred years. But, above all, you know that, if you want to help your fellow-creatures, you must do it at discretion and not by looking at a deed to see if you're allowed to. Do you know the story of Bertrand's fifty-pound note?" "I don't think so."

O'Rane's eyes lit up with laughter.

"Get him to tell you the full saga; I can only give you a synopsis. Years and years ago some man asked for a loan of five hundred pounds, and Bertrand, to cut the interview short, said he'd present him with fifty. The man said he didn't want it as a gift, wouldn't take it as a gift.

"'Well, please yourself,' said Bertrand; 'you call it a loan, and I'll call it a bad debt; but I'm very busy, and you won't get any more. Good morning.'

"The man talked a good deal about impending ruin, hinted at suicide and told Bertrand that he would be responsible for turning an honest woman on the streets. Bertrand went on with his writing, and eventually the fellow pocketed the note and got up.

"'I hope to pay this back within three months,' he said stiffly. 'It's not what I expected, but I can't afford to refuse it.'

"'Don't pay it back to me,' said Bertrand, who was beginning to feel rather ashamed of himself. 'Hand it on to someone else who's in a tight corner, and, when he's ready to pay it back, he can lend it to his next friend in distress.' Then a little bit of the old Adam peeped out, and he added, 'Remember it's a loan; you must tell the next man so and you've no idea how many men and women we shall save from ruin and suicide.'

"Well, Bertrand never expected to hear another word, but a year or two later, he received a letter of thanks from a young barrister, whose wife had had to undergo an operation; then from a doctor in Sunderland who hadn't known how to pay his rent; then from a girl who'd lost her father and wanted money to pay for learning shorthand and typing. The fifty pounds have been in circulation for about eighteen years, and from time to time Bertrand still gets a letter from some out-of-the-way corner of the world.... Of course, I'm living on charity now, but, when I was competing equally with my fellows, an odd fifty pounds might have come in very handy. That's what I mean by helping people at discretion."

"There's a difference between fifty-pounds and twenty-five million," I pointed out.

O'Rane smiled to himself and then shook his head.

"Not so much as you might think," he said.

"I wonder how you'd use it."

His face became slowly fixed and grim.

"I wouldn't let any boy go through what I've had to face," he murmured. "It may be fortifying for the character, but that sort of thing can be overdone. The Spartan youth who allowed a fox to gnaw his vitals ended up, I have no doubt, with an immensely fortified character but also with a grievously impaired set of vitals. You know, a boy without parents——"

He broke off and began to whistle to himself; then remarked unexpectedly:

"I wonder whether this will be a boy.... But, boy or girl, it must be an awful thing to lie waiting for the birth of a child that you hate in advance, that's got to be hidden——"

He buried his face in his hands and sat without speaking.

"Is that what's happening?" I asked, for Sonia had never consulted me even in her most expansive moments.

He nodded abruptly.

"She doesn't want anyone to know that she's ill or why she's ill; no one else does, and we trust all of you. As soon as the child's born, it's going to be smuggled away.... It will be properly looked after, of course, and all that sort of thing, but it will never be allowed to know its own parents. All the arrangements have been made, and I gather that the doctor has been—most sympathetic and helpful." He smiled with scornful bitterness and sat for a minute without speaking. "I was surprised to find a woman like Violet touching the suggestion with the end of a pole; she was a bit surprised, too, I fancy, because she sort of excused herself and hoped Sonia would relent later on, but it was absolutely necessary to humour her in every way at present.... That kind of thing always sticks in the throat of a man—like a woman who refuses to have a family at all.... I don't know, I suppose I'm superstitious; I should feel that, if I brought a child into the world like that—furtively, shamefacedly, wrapping a blanket round it and carrying it out of the back door in the dead of night.... Wouldn't you, too, Stornaway? Wouldn't you feel that you were putting a curse on the poor little brute? And I can't imagine a woman deliberately doing that to another woman's child—let alone her own. Picture the child—later on-growing up.... Even if it never knows the manner of its birth, wouldn't you rather expect it to learn stealing in a Dickensian slum and to end up on the scaffold? I suppose it's all very fanciful and morbid.... But the other seems so infernally unnatural. I thought it wasn't done. I thought a mother would no more treat her own baby like that, whatever the provocation, than a man would hit a woman in the breast."

At O'Rane's age I might have thought the same thing.

"Doesn't anybody else know?" I asked.

"George may have told the Daintons; I didn't," he answered, smoothing the wrinkles out of his forehead. "We shall all have to rack our brains before the time comes, God knows. Violet says I must make a point of being in the house in case anything happens. If Sonia—dies, I mean, it would look funny my not being with her."

"And if other people have to be told?"

O'Rane's nose came down on his upper lip in a withering sneer.

"I suppose it means one or two trusty and competent nurses, and the child will be kept in another part of the house. And, later on, London air won't suit it, and it will be sent with a governess to the sea, educated abroad.... My God! I was educated abroad!" He coughed apologetically and relieved his feelings by pacing up and down in front of the fire. "Where had we got to?" he asked absently. "Oh, yes! Well, a boy like that—I assume for some reason it's going to be a boy—might owe the whole of his career, his life, his happiness and power of doing good entirely to a chance meeting with some man who chose to pay three hundred a year on his account for so many years. But it's the personal touch, the personal relationship that must be established!" He swung round in his walk and faced me. "All my life I've wanted to be Prince Florizel!" he cried. "I wanted to be able to lend a hand to distressed young Americans who found unexpected dead bodies in their Saratoga trunks, I wanted to find comfortable and remunerative positions at my court for the conscience-stricken survivors of the Suicide Club. But with the untrammelled disposal of your estate——"

"Wouldn't it pall, if you didn't have to make the money before you gave it away?" I asked.

"I don't think my interest in human beings would ever pall," he answered. "There's such a devil of a lot of them, and they're all different. When I got into the House, I stood as a Tory, and George was rather offended, because he said I was the most revolutionary nihilist he'd ever met. I could never call myself a democrat, though, because democrats deal in mobs, and I only see a mob as composed of individuals, all different, all absorbingly interesting—with bodies to be kicked and souls to be damned, if your preference lies that way. I can't deal with people as types. I can't classify them; each one is much too real, too personal. And, if you're like that, you end up as a nihilist, because all government is based on generalisations, mostly inaccurate and wholly inadequate. As we're finding out." He put his watch to his ear and listened. "I must be making my way to the station," he said. "I'm not taking an active party line at present, but I seem to find a growing sense that the old governing classes haven't measured up, haven't made good in their own job. We've had three specimens since the war started.... I always feel that in universal nihilism I should come to my own. Now I must fly! Forgive me for talking so much!"

3

George returned to London the following day in a better temper than, I fear, would have been mine, if I had been invited to the country and abandoned by my host within an hour of my arrival. Melton week-end parties have long been famous, for Dr. Burgess has had through his hands perhaps a fifth of the younger statesmen and barristers, authors, clergymen and soldiers of the day. Any old Meltonian can claim a bed, and it will be found for him in his old house, at the Raven or in lodgings; he dines on Saturday night in Common Room as a matter of course and lunches with Burgess next day as a matter of right. Strangers from less fortunate foundations are jealously excluded, but I attended one dinner as a Governor and found a Law Officer on my right, a silk from the Commercial Court on my left and a twice-wounded Brigadier opposite me. The food was tolerable, the wine good; the conversation indiscreetly well-informed. George told me that, when he was in the House, he could only find out what was going on by spending a week-end at his old school.

"I had one bad moment on Sunday afternoon," he confessed, when I asked for news of O'Rane. "We'd all been lunching with the old man, and he asked me to stay behind. It was rather reminiscent of certain regrettable meetings in my extreme youth.... I knew what he was going to talk about and I knew it would be no good for me to beat about the bush. The door had hardly closed before he put it to me what was the matter with Raney. I had to tell him everything, you can't hide things from Burgess. For that reason I wasn't sorry that Raney had bolted here; he'd never forgive me, if he guessed I'd given him away."

"But it won't make any difference, will it?" I asked.

"Oh, Burgess has got too much of God's commonsense. But Raney can't stand being pitied. Burgess will only allude to it, if he convinces himself that it will do some good. I'm afraid I don't see how it can; poor old Raney's just got to set his teeth once more and go through it single-handed...."

A week later Bertrand, George and I were gossiping over a last cigar, when Lady Loring entered with a grave face. The doctor had that moment left after his evening visit to Sonia.

"I think it's time we sent for David," she said without preamble.

"You're certain?" I asked. "He's in the middle of term."

"If we're keeping to our plan," she answered unenthusiastically. "Any moment now——"

Bertrand stumped across the library to a writing-table.

"I'll send him a wire," he said. "Time enough for appearances, if he turns up in the course of to-morrow. How is she?"

Lady Loring shrugged her shoulders carelessly and then turned quickly away.

"She's all right—physically," she answered. "But if you left a bottle of prussic acid within reach.... That's what frightens me so much. Until to-night she was so keen to go on living that she could face almost anything, but to-night I believe she doesn't care about it any more. She wants to slip away and end everything, get rid of all her difficulties...."

4

O'Rane arrived at "The Sanctuary" next day half an hour after I had finished luncheon. This time his wife consented to see him, but only after some hesitation.

"You mustn't go away!" she whispered to me. "If you—if you see I'm getting tired, you know...."

O'Rane came into her room with a smile, kissed her hand and then felt for a chair, where he sat in silence for perhaps three minutes until Lady Loring entered to say that it was time for her patient to rest.

"I never asked how you were feeling," he said, as he got up to go.

"I'm all right—at present," Sonia answered. Then a shiver ran through her, communicating itself to her fingers until I saw his hand tighten over them.

"It's going to be all right, Sonia," O'Rane whispered.

She lowered her eyes and stared dully across the room.

"It can't be all right."

"I'll make it all right."

The corners of her mouth began to droop miserably.

"Of course, if I die ..." she began with a catch in her breath.

O'Rane dropped on to one knee and drew her two hands into his own.

"It's much more fun living, sweetheart!" he whispered. "And you're going to live, you're going to make whatever you like of your life. If you want me, I shall always be at hand, as I am now; and, if you don't want me, I shall keep away. I owe you so much, my darling; you must give me the chance of paying you back a little bit. When we married, I didn't give either of us a fair trial, I forgot the life you were accustomed to, I forgot that my own life wasn't like everyone else's; I just went ahead, doing everything that came natural to me, and it never occurred to me that I was making you unhappy. Forgive me, Sonia!"

She dragged one hand away and covered her eyes.

"I don't know that I've got much to forgive," she murmured, and I could see her lips curving to a wistful smile.

"I shouldn't have asked you, it I didn't need it. Sonia, you're going to be brave, aren't you?"

"Yes."

"Promise?"

The lines of her throat tightened.

"You know what my promises are worth, David."

"If you promise, I know you'll keep it. And then I shall want another promise—two more, in fact. I want you to promise not to worry, and you must promise not to feel any pain. Will you do that, sweetheart? I've come up all the way from Melton, you know."

She withdrew her hand, and I saw that her face had become suddenly pale and that her eyes were tightly closed.

"I can't promise that, David."

His voice caressed her, as though he were talking to a child.

"I think you can, darling. Do you remember when you sprained your ankle, skating at Crowley Court, and you started to cry with the pain and I said I wouldn't carry you back to the house until you'd promised to stop crying and not to let the ankle hurt any more? You promised quickly enough then, and it's much more important now. If you'll promise that now, I'll do anything you like."

She smiled wistfully a second time, then drew his head down to her own and whispered something. I heard him say, "You won't. I swear you won't, Sonia." Then he drew himself upright, waved his hand and walked to the door.

I sat with him in the library, while he attacked a belated luncheon and plied me with questions about his wife. Her whispered request, he told me, was that she might, if possible, be kept from seeing the child when it was born, and on this he hung a string of questions to find out what steps we had taken to secure the best doctors and nurses, when the birth was expected, whether anyone else knew.

"We've told no one," I assured him, "since you asked us not to."

"I told Burgess," he said. There was a long silence. "I—told him everything.... I mean, one does with Burgess. I found it wasn't news to him. George had told him—weeks ago.... One does with Burgess," he repeated, smiling.

"What did he say?" I asked.

"He was rather helpful."

"George told me that he wouldn't trouble to talk to you about it unless he saw his way to help you," I said.

O'Rane finished his meal and lay back in his chair.

"I went in and told him that I wanted a day or two's leave, if he could possibly spare me; I told him Sonia was going to have a child.... He waited for some time and then said, 'The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?' Said it as if he meant it, too; it was like trying to get extra leave in the old days; as a rule he'd accept any excuse, however bad, provided it was given in good faith; I once got an extra half for the whole school because it was so hot that, as I told him, we'd much prefer not to be working.... Well, I told him the whole truth—all about Sonia and myself, all about Grayle...." He paused as though breathing hurt him, then smiled wearily.

"It may have been good for my humility of spirit, but I can't say it was very edifying for Burgess.... I told him that Sonia's been dancing in the shadow of a volcano, that we were always on the verge of an appalling scandal and that it was more by luck than anything else that it had been averted. I described to him how we'd smuggled her home and what we were going to do to keep the child away from her.... Have you ever told a long story and discovered at some point that it's falling extraordinarily flat or that someone's shocked? Burgess never said anything, and of course I couldn't see his face, but—I don't know whether you understand me—the silence seemed to become more intense at times. I felt that his eyes must be on me and I—not to put too fine a point on it—I began to feel rather frightened.... If I could have seen.... I knew from his voice when he first spoke that he was sitting down; and I suddenly remembered a most awful row I'd had with him when I was about sixteen. He sat there then with his back to the window, and I stood in front of him arguing and arguing; it was a little matter of discipline, and he'd decided to fire me out.... Well, I went through just the same thing this morning. I—I felt I was owning up; and I'd have given anything in the world to see his face.... You know how you spin out the explanation ... and rather overdo it ... you're too plausible and you feel the whole time that you're not getting it across.... I went on and on ... and finally I stopped short; it wasn't any use, he knew everything—even if George hadn't told him.... I became stiff and dignified and said once more, 'If you can shift the work round so that I can be away for a day or two——' Then I heard him scraping for a light—and sighing—and throwing the matches away.... God! until you're blind, you've no conception how many things you hear. You wouldn't notice the sound of a wooden match falling in the grate, but I did; and, though I've given up smoking because I can't taste tobacco, I felt a little smarting at the back of my nostrils as Burgess got going with his pipe...."

If ever a man talked to gain time, it was O'Rane at that moment.

"What advice did he give you?" I asked him at length.

"He didn't give me any—advice. But, when I'd finished, he said he'd pull the time-table about and that I could stay away as long as I liked. I knew he'd say that. Well, in the ordinary course I should have said 'Thank you' and cleared out, but I didn't find it easy to move. Burgess sat there, sucking at his pipe; I stood there—and I felt a perfect fool, because I was beginning to blush. And the old man said, 'Well, David O'Rane?' and I said, 'Well, sir?' And then there was another silence. And then he said, 'Thou hast no further need of me'—You know the way he talks? I did thank him then and was starting to the door, when he called out, 'Thou art at peace in thine own mind?' That rather stung me, and I told him that, all things considered, I didn't think I was wholly to blame; and he answered rather enigmatically that, if I wasn't careful, I should be. I asked him what he meant."

O'Rane left his chair and took up a familiar position at the fire-place, resting his arm on the high chimney-piece and leaning his head on the back of his hand.

"Burgess is a curious man," he resumed dispassionately. "I don't think he ever had any children of his own, but he's got—well, an extraordinarily human imagination. He began talking about this poor kiddie—who isn't born yet—and pointing the contrast between his life and the life of any other boy, who'd have a father and a mother fussing round him, whenever he had a bit of wind in his poor little tummy, and playing with him and watching him, as he began to crawl and talk, and trying to make him understand that it wasn't the end of the world when he was miserable trying to cut teeth.... The old man didn't spare me," said O'Rane with a quivering laugh. "I had about twenty years of the boy's life compressed into twenty minutes; the way he'd go to school, frightfully shy and with no one to see him through, no one to give him half a sovereign at mid-term; and the way he'd get a remove or find himself in the eleven—with nobody to brag about it to; and the way he'd go on to a public school and work his way through the green-sickness period of dirty stories and foul language—without anyone to tell him that he was becoming rather a pitiable little object.... And the portentous age, when he'd be head of his house, and the days when he'd want to ask his father what Oxford used to be like in the prehistoric days.... After twenty minutes or so I told Burgess that I didn't see it was my look-out."

"Well?" I said, as O'Rane hesitated.

"I think it was damned unfair," he burst out, but the resentment in his tone was unconvincing. "Burgess was a friend of my father, he knows all about me, I've told him every last thing about myself.... I don't suppose even George knows, but the old man used to invite me to help tidy up his library, if I wasn't taking Leave-Out, and of course I was as happy as a clam; and we used to talk, and I told him things that kept me awake half the night,—but he always seemed to have forgotten them next day. Well, I suppose after my father died I did have rather a—crowded youth; and Burgess asked me if I wanted to send my son through the same mill.

"He's not my son," I said.

"Thy wife's son, laddie," he answered.

O'Rane turned wearily from the fire and began to pace up and down the room.

"I told him!" he exclaimed. "I said that, if it hadn't been for that, Sonia and I could have forgotten everything and come together again. You remember? I was ready—ah, dear God in Heaven! I was ready! And then I heard that this had come between us, that there was going to be a permanent reminder, a permanent barrier, a permanent alien something in our lives. That was the first time I saw you were right, the first time I appreciated we could never forget and go on as if nothing had happened. My love for Sonia hasn't changed. If—if anything happened to the child.... But as long as it's there! I told Burgess that, though I agreed with him in principle, I was very sorry, but I couldn't help it. It was Grayle's business. He asked me if I thought Grayle was likely to accept his responsibilities; I told him I saw no indication of it. He said nothing to that, and I made another bolt for the door. He called me back and asked what I proposed to do. I said I'd told him already.

"He didn't stop me, and I got back to my rooms in the Cloisters. I began to pack a few things, but the whole time I was feeling that I hadn't explained properly and that Burgess rather despised me. I got extraordinarily excited and angry over it, until at last I left the packing alone and went back to his house to justify myself. The man shewed me at once into the library, and it was only when I got inside that I realised that all this time Burgess ought to have been taking the Sixth for Tacitus. Instead he was still in his chair, still sucking at his pipe. I fired away, full of indignation, and went through the whole weary business from the beginning, just as I'd done before. He never interrupted me, never said a word till I'd finished. Then he told me pretty bluntly that he was only indirectly interested in me and that what he wanted to find out was why the child should be penalised, why I, who knew something of what it would have to go through, persisted in making it face the music for no fault of its own. I was pretty well worked up, but I tried to be reasonable and asked him what he suggested I should do. He never hesitated a moment this time! He told me it was my duty to treat the child as if he were my own son, never to let him or anyone else know what had happened before he was born, but to devote myself to him as if he were—well, not my own son, not someone for whom I was naturally responsible, but someone who'd been entrusted to my care. He said, if I didn't—with the experience I'd got to back me.... Somehow, the way he put it, Stornaway...."

He brought his walk to a conclusion as abruptly as the sentence and dropped heavily on to a sofa, as though glad that a necessary task was finished, yet awaiting criticism from me and obviously prepared to argue as vehemently against me on one side as he had argued against Burgess on the other.

"In practice, what do you propose to do?" I asked.

"I've been trying to think the whole way up from Melton. I suppose we shall have to behave as though the whole world knew Sonia was going to have a baby, it will have to be our child. And I suppose we shall live like other people who are kept from divorcing each other because of their children. Nominally we shall share the same house, and I suppose things can be arranged so as to spare Sonia.... But Burgess has convinced me. We've no right to think of ourselves or wash our hands of responsibility or try to score off other people at the expense of the child. I've promised her that she shall never see it.... I don't know, I suppose this is one of the things that men and women are temperamentally incapable of seeing with the same eyes; but, whoever the father was, whatever the history, I should have imagined that any woman would fight for her child against all the powers of creation; it was like a stab when Sonia first said she hoped the child would be born dead, it was another stab when she begged me—begged me to promise.... I promised right enough; it was the only thing to do, but I can't let it rest at that. If she's well enough to talk, I want to make everything quite plain to her now; otherwise I must explain afterwards...."

As we finished dinner, Lady Loring came down to say that Sonia was asking for her husband. I was not present, I am glad to say, at their interview, but it did not last more than five minutes, and at its end O'Rane looked in for a moment to say that he proposed to walk as far as the House of Commons for a breath of fresh air. Neither by word nor tone did he invite anyone to accompany him; and on his return he went upstairs without coming into the library. I called for a bulletin on my own account before retiring for the night, and Lady Loring warned me that I must be prepared for anything at any moment. Sonia had worked herself from hysteria into something hardly distinguishable from delirium; forgetting that she had already seen her husband, she had sent for him a second time and a second time implored him to spare her the sight of her own child; Lady Loring, who had been on duty all day, was not allowed to rest, and, as I passed the door, the lights were burning and I caught the sound of voluble chatter.

For an hour I tried to sleep, but the intermittent hum of voices, the creak of feet passing rapidly up and down the passage, still more the indefinable suspense kept me awake. For another hour I tried to read, but I was always interrupting myself to listen; and at two o'clock I pulled a dressing-gown over my pyjamas and returned to the library. To my surprise Bertrand was dozing over a book, while George sat writing letters on his knee. Both looked up, blinking with dull fatigue, as I came in.

"I wonder how long this racket's going on," Bertrand growled, as he walked across to fetch himself a drink. "She'll kill herself at this rate. And—what—almighty fools—the three of us are—to be here at all!"

"Has Raney come back yet?" George asked me. "I was told he'd gone for a walk—like a wise man."

"He was sitting outside her door, as I came down," I answered.

Grumbling inarticulately, Bertrand went back to his book. George looked at me long enough to see that I was too tired to talk, then began a fresh letter. I prowled in front of the bookcases, trying to find something that I had the mental energy to read. It was shortly after four when O'Rane hurried silently into the room and telephoned for the doctor.

5

Thirty hours—the fag-end of a broken night, a day and another night—passed before O'Rane appeared. The painful silence of the house was violated only by guardedly light steps and hushed voices. Bertrand and George took their meals at the club; I stayed behind, neglecting my work and subsisting on tinned tongue, stale bread and cold water, to run errands, answer telephone calls and carry up trays of food to Lady Loring. At first I believed that poor Sonia was trying to hypnotise herself and intensify her own tortures, but in time a new gravity settled on the faces of the doctor and nurse.

I had never before been in a house where a confinement was taking place; I do not wish to repeat the experience. Whenever I carried up a meal, Lady Loring or the trained nurse would say vaguely, "I'm afraid she's having a bad time," but for the rest I was left to myself in the great silent library with my senses strained to catch any sound from the familiar white bedroom where I had spent so many days with Sonia, trying to distract her thoughts. O'Rane, from the moment when he telephoned for the doctor, had been with her. There was some ineffectual attempt to banish him from the room, but Lady Loring afterwards let him stay and admitted that his personality was keeping Sonia from the surrender which she sometimes seemed ready to make.

When he came into the library at breakfast-time on the second day, his clothes were shapeless and dusty, his face unshaven and grey with fatigue.

"The doctor says it's a boy," he told me hoarsely. "Is there any water in the room? I've had nothing to eat or drink since first I went up there; and then I must get some air into my lungs."

He sighed and dropped limply on to a sofa.

"How's Sonia?" I asked him.

"They can't say yet. She's doped. They've given her as much as they dare, as much as her heart will stand.... My God! I'm glad I'm not a woman! I can understand their having one child, because they don't know what's in store for them, but their courage in having a second ...!"

I poured him out a cup of coffee and buttered him two slices of toast.

"I wouldn't try to talk overmuch," I told him.

"It's a bit of a relief to me," he answered with a smile. "All this time——" He lifted his right hand above his head and began stiffly to open and shut the fingers. "I was gripping her wrist," he explained; "I only let go twice, and the first time it was bruised purple, as if she'd shut it in a door.... And nobody said anything.... Sonia kept getting spasms of pain which made her moan or cry out, and her nerve gave way from time to time ... and then I—I tried to hypnotise her, I found that by repeating 'Sonia, Sonia, Sonia' very distinctly and very low, I could capture her mind.... God! how it got on my nerves!"

The first cup of coffee was followed by a second, which he gulped in scalding mouthfuls, asking at short intervals what the time was and how long he had already stayed away.

"Violet and the nurse are pretty well beat out," he explained; "I want to pack them off for a bit of a rest while I mount guard. And we've got to shift the boy before Sonia comes round...."

"You're not moving him—yet?"

"Only to another room. I—I promised her, you see."

He bade me a hurried good-bye and disappeared upstairs until the middle of the afternoon. George came in after luncheon, put half a dozen breathless enquiries and returned hot-foot to his office. Bertrand had a question in the House, but, as soon as he could get away, he came and demanded a full report.

"You don't gather when the child's to be moved?" he said, when I had done. "I—— This is an extraordinary business, Stornaway. I've lived a devil of a long time and I've done some pretty odd things and mixed with some pretty curious people and all that sort of thing, but I'm hanged if I've ever done anything like this before. What are we all up to? I feel I've been stampeded."

"Well, neither of us is doing anything very active," I pointed out, looking at my cigar and book.

"We're countenancing it. If you sat by and watched a drunken man making pipe-lights out of five-pound notes.... What have they decided to do? I don't understand them; I can't keep pace with them."

In so far as I had been admitted to O'Rane's confidence, he had decided to keep the child in London until it could be safely moved and then to send it with its nurse to a cottage which he had mysteriously acquired on the South coast. And there his plans for the time being had ended.

"He's apparently committing himself to three households," Bertrand cried. "The first because his wife refuses to live with him, the second because he wants to make his friends believe that they are living together, the third because he requires a home for his wife's child, which in time will come to be regarded as his child...."

"I've got no influence over him," I said in protest against his tone of injury.

Bertrand shook his head gloomily.

"When once he's made up his mind—it doesn't matter how fantastic a thing may be...."

The door opened, and O'Rane came in to repeat his request of the morning for water and any food that was available. He had found time to shave and change his clothes, but I have never seen a man more utterly exhausted.

"Is there any news?" Bertrand asked.

"She's doing—very fairly, I think," he answered with a drawl that was almost a stammer. "The effect—drug, you know—wearing off. She woke up—for a few moments. Now getting some natural sleep."

I put a stiff dash of brandy into the water and watched O'Rane's grey cheeks colouring.

"Did she seem comfortable?" I enquired.

"Comfortable?" he repeated with a laugh. "The physical relief, you know.... Whatever happens now, she's free from pain, she's bound to feel better and better.... When I was wounded, there were times when I thought I couldn't bear it; the nurses told me that I said quite clearly, 'It's no use hurting me any more; I can't stand it.' Dear souls! as if they could help it! And one did stand it.... But, when the pain began to abate, when you didn't have to keep yourself braced up against it, I went as limp as a rag. It was like the end of a long fever.... After that, whether I was asleep or awake, I always knew that the real hell was over. There might be little twinges in unexpected places, but the pain was over, over. And the feeling of weakness was so delicious! Like an endless repetition of the glorious moment when you're just dropping off to sleep.... That's how Sonia is now."

The next report came after dinner, when the doctor had concluded his evening visit and she had been put to sleep for the night.

"She's had a frightful time," he told us, "and there's always the possibility of a relapse, but I know she's not going to relapse, I'm not going to let her."

"And the child?"

"Oh, he's all right."

The next morning O'Rane joined me at breakfast after a night's unbroken rest. Despite a mild protest from the nurse, he had insisted on staying in Sonia's room and had slept in his clothes on the floor for twelve hours on end.

"She's had a wonderful night," he told me, exultantly. "And the boy's doing magnificently. They seem to think it'll be reasonably safe to move him to-morrow. And then, if all's well with Sonia, I shall go back to Melton. I shall only want to talk to her, if I stay any longer; and, as it is, if a board creaks or anyone touches the bed.... That good angel Violet has promised not to go until everything's all right. Don't you think she's been wonderful? Violet Loring, I mean. I'd got no sort of call on her."

"I don't know that the baby upstairs has any great call on you," I answered.

"We—ell, you can't open an account with a thing twenty-four hours old," he laughed. "I say, Stornaway, I had no idea that babies were so small. Hullo, that's Violet's step! There's nothing wrong, is there?"

Lady Loring had come in to say that Sonia was asking for him. He hurried upstairs, leaving his breakfast unfinished, and did not return for a couple of hours. I asked him whether there was anything amiss, for there was an unfamiliar frown on his face.

"No, but it was curious ..." he began hesitatingly. "You remember how she made me promise.... Well, I went in and asked her how she was, and she said she was feeling better.... And then she asked about the child ... wanted to know whether it was a boy or a girl ... wanted to know how it was.... It ended by my carrying him in for her to see.... I was in two minds whether to do it, because she was working herself up to a pitch of great excitement, but I thought it would only make things worse, if I refused. She wanted to see what he was like, you know, whether there was even the remotest resemblance.... She gave a sob, when I brought him in, and said, 'He's got my eyes.' I'm afraid the whole thing excited her rather. She suddenly got the idea that she oughtn't to have asked me to bring him in. Poor mite! he's not responsible for his own father, and I told her that if we started quarrelling over a thing like that.... Another curious thing, Stornaway; I have always imagined that I should hate the very existence of the child; when I was first told what was the matter with Sonia, I felt that there was a sheet of fire between us. I don't feel that now; I feel that Grayle has passed utterly out of our lives. As for punishing that poor, helpless little creature.... I suppose you hate babies, but I wish you'd have a look at this one and tell me what he's like. I've always thought what fun it would be to have a son and watch him growing up.... I should have thought that Sonia, that any woman, after all she's gone through.... Still, when you've been treated as Grayle treated her, when you've waited in dread and horror all these weary months...." He broke off in perplexity, which only lifted when he suddenly began to smile. "You will have a look at him, won't you? And tell me what he's like. He's going to the country to-morrow."

After dinner that night I made my way to the bedroom which had been temporarily converted into a nursery. It was dark and empty, and I walked to the door of Sonia's room in search of Lady Loring. A low sound of voices penetrated to the passage: I knocked and went in to find O'Rane standing by the bed with a thickly swathed child in his arms, while his wife lay with her hand in Lady Loring's, looking up at him.

"I hope you're feeling better," I said to Sonia.

"David says you haven't even seen him yet," she pouted, disregarding my words. She stretched our her arms to the slumbering child. "Darling, you're being rather left out of all this, aren't you? But if you will go to sleep when the loveliest things are being said about you.... My blessed, I've waked you!"

There was a half-perceptible movement under the long shawl. O'Rane's arms began to rock gently.

"Take him back, David," Sonia begged. "And then just come in for one moment to say good-night. I feel so feeble that I simply can't stand more."

As he left the room, Lady Loring nodded to me, and I prepared to follow her. Sonia was lying with closed eyes, but, as I moved, she raised herself and beckoned with one hand.

"Mr. Stornaway! Just one moment before he comes back! They want to take my baby away. I know I asked them to, but that was before.... You won't let them, will you? He's mine, mine! David thinks I'm saying it because I ought to, because everybody would expect me to, but I'm not! On my honour I'm not! I'd go through it again rather than let them take my baby away."

"He won't be taken away, if you want to keep him," I promised her. "Good-night, my dear Sonia. Go straight off to sleep and don't worry about anything. If you want your child, David won't try to steal him. You're sure you want him?"

"David?"

"I meant the boy."

A smile dawned on her tired face.

"I want so much! I always have.... Oh, I know you despise me, and you're quite right. I despise myself. But I must be loved, I can't get on without it. And I've been, oh! so lonely!"

She gave a little sob. I felt a hand on my arm and turned to find Lady Loring shaking her head and pointing to the door.

"Tell me anything I can do to help you, Sonia," I said, "and I'll do it. Now good-night. You've got to go to sleep, and I shan't let David even say good-night to you."

I met O'Rane in the passage and carried him off to the library.

"Lady Loring wants to get her off to sleep," I explained. "You and the child between you have rather excited her. If you will take my advice, you'll go back to Melton by the first train to-morrow. The two of you are wearing each other out. I'll do whatever's necessary here."

"But I can't leave her yet."

"You can and must. You've got your work to do. O'Rane, you may remember that I've advised you a good many times to face facts and end this business. In your greater wisdom you've always refused——"

"You never seemed to appreciate that I loved Sonia."

"Indeed I did. But I thought we agreed that there were some tests which the greatest love in the world couldn't survive."

He took up his stand by the fireplace, smiling to himself and rocking gently from heel to toe with his hands in his pockets.

"I thought so, too. But wouldn't it be a fair-weather love? I treated Sonia badly, and she treated me worse. Until I married, I always thought that marriage was an easy, straightforward business; you just fell in love, and there was an end of it. If I spoiled her life because I hadn't the imagination, the consideration.... I'm sorry, Stornaway, I can't discuss it. One's pride is rather involved. I always said that I loved her more than a man had ever loved a woman before; if I can't prove it.... But I'm boring you."

"I'm only tired. So are you, so's everyone. We'd better all go to bed. Promise me one thing. If you go in to say good-night to—your wife, don't stay more than a moment."

THE END