1

As I write, the war has been in progress for two and a half years, and it is beyond the wit of man to foretell how much longer it will continue, though there is the annual feeling that peace will come before the autumn. In August we shall reach the end of the three years which Lord Kitchener had in mind when he began his preparations, but I for one look forward to the summer of 1917 with greater apprehension than ever I felt a year ago. During 1916 I was the unconscious psychological victim of men like Grayle who were so convinced of our predestined failure under the existing rÉgime that they went some way towards convincing me. In June the field of war was extended by the Bulgarian inroads into Greece, and, though we talked still of the "Russian steam-roller," it was not until July that the Austrian counter-drive in Russia and Italy was checked. The New Army, which had been so grandly raised, went into action at the Somme and covered itself with immortal renown; we did not quickly see how much had been spent and how little achieved—"Six hundred thousand casualties and an unbroken German front," as Grayle declared to me in the Smoking-Room at the House one night.

Grayle's political sense was good in that from the breakdown of the Somme offensive he saw that the days of the Government were numbered. Ministers never recovered the prestige which they had lost in the Irish rising. The disastrous expedition to the Dardanelles was being discussed so widely and bitterly that an enquiry had to be instituted; so with the no less disastrous expedition to Mesopotamia; and, as more men were frittered away in Salonica, we began to wonder whether we should not have to hold a third enquiry, indeed an enquiry into every subsidiary enterprise which every amateur strategist in the Cabinet undertook in any theatre of war.

There were many who began at this time to swell Grayle's clamour for a change,—a series of changes, indeed, simultaneously in the Ministry which was weak enough to embark on this succession of costly failures and in the soldiers who failed to achieve success with such conditions of men, material and ammunition as the Germans had never equalled in the days when the balance tipped highest in their favour. I had, myself, always simulated rather a superior aloofness, for I felt that, as the war was a bigger and longer enterprise than my fellows would admit, so we must be prepared for greater failures in coping with it. Yet I can see now that I began to listen less impatiently to the critics. The War Office at this time was in the charge of a distinguished soldier who had had the vision and courage to prophesy a long war and whose personality and reputation were of inestimable value in creating the armies which came to bear his name. Largely on newspaper prompting, the Government had made Lord Kitchener Secretary of State for War, and the country as a whole was reassured by the presence of an expert military brain in the deplorably civilian councils of the cabinet. There was a simple-minded faith, which expressed itself in Maurice Maitland's phrase, "Leave it to K."; a volume of work which no single man could accomplish was thereupon trustingly concentrated in the hands of one who loved to hold as many strings as possible. Stagnation in the War Office gave way to chaos, until one function after another—recruiting, equipment and munitions—were withdrawn from his grasp and confided to others. Later the Staff control was separated from the political control, and Lord Kitchener gave no orders that were not countersigned by his Chief of Staff; later still an effort was made in the cabinet to deprive him of an office which he had ceased usefully to fill. He was sent to inspect the Eastern theatre of war; he was sent also to Russia....

I am unlikely to forget a day when I was lunching with Bertrand at the Eclectic Club. Maitland sat down with a blank face and said, "I've got some bad news for you men. K's been drowned. He was going out to Russia, and his ship—the 'Hampshire'—was sunk by a mine or torpedo—they don't know which, and the North Sea must be full of loose mines after this Jutland action. The sea was so rough that the escort had to turn back almost at once...." Some time passed before we could discuss Maitland's news, for Lord Kitchener had been so imposing an idol, so aloof and mysterious—until you met him at close quarters, as I had done a few days before, when a deputation of us waited on him and sought enlightenment on subjects which we could not discuss openly in the House—so well-established and unshakable; we never expected him to die in the middle of the war, certainly we never dreamed of a death so fortuitous, unnecessary, so much the freak of Providence.

"Yet I'm not sure it's not the best thing for his reputation," Maitland said. "Felix opportunitate mortis, you know. There's a whole crop of failures to explain, and his prestige must have suffered. Don't you sometimes feel that we want a clean sweep, Stornaway?... I'm a soldier myself, but it was a great mistake, whatever people may think, putting a soldier at the War Office...."

The news was being cried in the streets, as I went back to my department; half-way through the afternoon a messenger came into my room to say that all blinds in all government offices were to be drawn; that night, Yolande told me, was the worst she had known since the tidings reached her nearly two years before that her brother had been killed in the retreat from Mons. Wave after wave of men poured from the leave-trains and surged into her canteen, demanding confirmation of this story which was being whispered at the coast. And, when she told them or pointed to the official report, they still, would not believe it. He was the man under whom they had enlisted....

Yet, when a civilian was once more at the head of the War Office, I believe that a new embarrassment was substituted for the old. As the Somme campaign had failed to achieve a decision, men like Grayle openly resumed the criticism which they had suspended for a few months and demanded the removal of the responsible Commander in Chief and the Chief of the General Staff. Thereupon two schools arose in the Press, the House and, I believe, the Cabinet; the civilian backers of Sir William Robertson and Sir Douglas Haig pitted themselves against their civilian detractors; individual commanders were surrounded by social cliques and supported by individual Ministers and papers. I was told by Grayle and by the section of the press influenced by him that we wanted a reconstruction of the Ministry and of the Higher Command; I was told by the Press Combine that Sir Douglas Haig was the one general of outstanding genius whom the war had brought to the surface.

Between the two I confess that I lost my temper. Even with South Africa and the Antwerp expedition to his credit, Grayle was no more fit to appoint or depose a Chief of Staff than I was to cast a play or select a prima donna. But I found it difficult to say who was better placed than either of us. Grayle certainly was a pragmatist.

"Results! results!" he would declaim at me. "I want the contract put out to tender. Can you or can you not break the line? What men and guns do you want? Here they are; you may have three months, and, if you fail, no dignified home commands, but the completest breaking a man's ever had. That's the way Napoleon would have done it; that's the way the Germans would do it."

Grayle was very active in the summer of 1916. I could see him drawing together and co-ordinating the scattered groups of disaffected critics, and my mind went back to George Oakleigh's account of the "Stunt Artists." There was the Liberal Ginger Group, the Conservative Ginger Group, the Mesopotamia Group, the Dardanelles Group, all firing occasional volleys into the arms and legs of the Ministry, none daring to fire at the head or heart. The apparently strongest man in the House at this time was Sir Edward Carson. Not content with criticism, he could force the Government to bring in a bill, modify a bill or drop a bill. Glad indeed would Grayle have been to consolidate opposition under such leadership, but at this season unity was regarded as the first requisite; no one was yet prepared to split the Government or the country into rival factions.

If not active, I was at least very assiduous in my attendance during those summer months. I was assiduous, too, at my office and in my department. The last act of the O'Rane tragedy at which George and I had assisted hit me as hard as the death of a very dear friend. I had thought that I had outgrown other people's troubles; I found that I was younger than I thought. When I met Bertrand or George, I shunned discussion of the subject; when I went to Melton, I will say frankly that I avoided a meeting with O'Rane. During May I fancy that the others joined me in my conspiracy of silence, and we were aided by events. I read one day that a certain Peter Beresford, described as an author, had been prosecuted for issuing a pamphlet entitled "Lettres de Cachet," which was calculated to undermine the loyalty, discipline, and moral of the army; the pamphlet was confiscated, and its author sentenced to a term of three months' imprisonment. Whether he repeated his hunger-strike or not, I had no means of knowing, as he passed out of my life on his arrest and only re-entered it many weeks later.

Mrs. O'Rane had disappeared as completely and far more mysteriously. In the early months of the year, quite apart from deliberate meetings at her house or Grayle's or Lady Maitland's, I had caught sight of her at least once a week lunching or dining in a restaurant or chattering to one or other of her many admirers at a play. After the catastrophe, though I probably dined and lunched in as many of her favourite restaurants as before, I never met her. There was a vague assumption that she was in the country. One night, as I was smoking a cigarette in the entr'acte at some theatre, Gerald Deganway came up, screwed his eye-glass in place, squeaked a welcome and asked whether I had seen Sonia lately. I told him that I had not. He rather understood that she was staying with her people at Crowley Court.... After consultation with O'Rane, George transferred himself to Westminster to look after his uncle and to keep the household in commission. I believe that he forwarded letters to Melton and I have an idea that there was a second vague assumption that she was with her husband at the school. The ties and relationships in social life were so much disorganised by the war that no one was ever surprised by an unexpected meeting or a failure to meet; everyone was too much occupied with his own business to care.

I had convincing evidence of this one day when I received a call from Lady Dainton. She wished to equip Crowley Court as a hospital for shell-shock cases—anyone could deal with ordinary wounds and operations; there was no adequate scheme for treating these nervous derangements, and she felt that her house was unusually well adapted for the purpose. After we had thrashed out her proposal, I undertook to recommend my Emergency Fund Committee to make a grant. There our business ended, and, as I walked with her to the door, she looked at her watch.

"It's no good," I remember her saying. "I hoped to leave time for a call on Sonia, but I shall only miss my train, if I try. It's really dreadful how driven we all are. I never have a moment for anything, don't you know? This is the first time I've been in London for months, I've seen nothing of Sonia for I don't know how long—Ah, surely, that taxi's disengaged? I mustn't miss it. This petrol shortage is really the last straw. As if we hadn't enough discomfort before, don't you know?"

I returned to my desk with a pusillanimous sense of relief. The Daintons, then, neither knew nor suspected what had become of their daughter. The secret was in the keeping of the O'Ranes, the two Oakleighs, Beresford and myself. Somehow the disaster seemed hardly so complete while there was no public scandal, and neither the Oakleighs nor I were likely to add that last touch. For the others I could not speak; Mrs. O'Rane or Beresford or both might welcome a petition for divorce; no one knew what was passing in O'Rane's mind.

Before term was a month old, George went to Melton on a roving commission.

"I would as soon spend a week-end with a well-bred block of ice," he confided to me on his return. "He was courteous, hospitable—nothing too much trouble to make me comfortable. We talked by the hour of fellows who'd been at school with us, things we'd done—you know, endless ridiculous anecdotes of how somebody's leg had been pulled, how we'd got into some appalling row together. As a rule I find school 'shop' rather fun, but Raney might have been reciting the kings of England with their dates. He was utterly lifeless and mechanical; never a smile.... When we went into Common Room for dinner, he played up and was a different man; they chaffed him, and he chaffed them, and we dug out more school 'shop' and he threw himself into it heart and soul. It was the same on Sunday, when a pack of his boys came and talked to him after evening chapel; he didn't let them see there was anything up. It had been the same when the enigmatic Miss Merryon came in the morning; the usual smile.... Of course, he never came within a thousand miles of mentioning it.... When I left on Monday, I told him that I wanted to invite myself again before the end of the term, and then we did get to grips a bit. He shook hands and said, 'Look here, old man, it spoils your week-end and—I don't want to be ungracious—it doesn't do me any good. I've got to go through this alone."

From George's sigh I felt that in this he was at one with O'Rane.

But, if not more than six people knew what had happened, there were many who would be more curious to find out than Lady Dainton had shewn herself to be. It was easy enough for Bertrand or George or one of the servants to say that Mrs. O'Rane was away from London and then to hang up the receiver of the telephone, but it was a different matter as the weeks went by and as the more pertinacious enquirers called in person. I could sympathise with George. The only person likely to interrogate me was Grayle, and from the fact that he never mentioned Mrs. O'Rane's name I judged that they had quarrelled finally and finally parted on the night when I was privileged to meet them at the Berkeley. I had enough psychological curiosity to wonder what had happened when she hurried out into Piccadilly after him. Grayle had assuredly scored a game when he asserted himself and made her run after him; but the game had been won when he was too tired to be desirous of winning it.

My first tidings came to me at the end of May from my niece. She and her husband were dining with me one night at my hotel, and she asked me whether I had been at "The Sanctuary" lately.

"I've been very busy," I told her. "And I believe Mrs. O'Rane's away."

"She's not away," Yolande answered: "I saw her at Harrods' yesterday. That's what made me think of it."

Yolande, then, knew nothing of what had happened.

"I wonder when she got back," I said as unconcernedly as I could. "Did she tell you?"

"We didn't speak." Yolande's expression became hostile. "I suppose I dislike her every bit as much as she dislikes me, but so far we've kept up appearances. I bowed to her yesterday, and she couldn't help seeing me, but for some reason best known to herself she thought fit to cut me."

"She couldn't have seen you," I said.

"She couldn't help seeing me," Yolande repeated.

2

Three days later I myself met Mrs. O'Rane in Hyde Park. Remembering Yolande's experience, I determined that she should not cut me and, as we had no opportunity of pretending not to have seen each other, I blocked her path, bowed and held out my hand to her.

"I've not seen you for weeks," she said with a composed smile. "You've not been to America again, have you?"

"I've been kept very busy at the House and in my department," I answered. "Have you been away?"

"For week-ends and things." She glanced collectedly round to assure herself that she was not being overheard. "Why did you button-hole me like this, Mr. Stornaway?"

I suppose my real reason was that, if there had to be any cutting, it should not be by her; and I had not made up my mind how to act when we found ourselves suddenly confronting each other at the park gate.

"When a man meets a woman he knows——" I began.

Mrs. O'Rane laughed with soft, repellent scorn.

"As if you didn't know everything."

"That is, I believe, an attribute of the Almighty," I replied.

For a few moments she was absorbed in the task of digging with the end of her parasol round the edge of a prominent black pebble. As the dry earth crumbled, the pebble worked loose, and she was free to hit it away and look up at me again.

"You know enough."

"For what?" I asked.

She sighed and waved her hand across the dusty, unshaded walk.

"For passing by on the other side."

"Habit is sometimes very strong," I said.

We stood looking at one another reflectively for a few minutes, each perhaps wondering why the other did not make an excuse to break away. I found her so self-possessed that it was difficult to believe what I knew to be the truth. I have met unfaithful wives before, I have seen men and women living in many kinds of social outlawry, but with none of them did it seem to make so little difference as with Mrs. O'Rane. She was not defiant, she was hardly even callous; and her manner was so natural that I felt the last six months might well have been blotted out of her life. Once she lowered her eyes to look at the little platinum watch; then raised them again with a friendly smile. She was dressed with unostentatious distinction in a blue coat and skirt, with a high collar to the coat and a tight-fitting amber-coloured waistcoat with round, pageboy's buttons; there was a high-crowned hat to match the coat, white gloves, grey stockings and black shoes with a pearl-coloured border. Though her eyes were tired and her cheeks a little pale, she looked wonderfully young and carefree.

"You thought I wouldn't do it," she said at length, more to convict me of bad judgement, I think, than to defend her own conduct. "Men are so curious.... You all had the clearest warning, only you wouldn't take it. You wouldn't see that it was the only thing left for me to do."

"And you are still of that mind? You feel it was the right thing?"

"It depends what you mean by right," she answered slowly. "Most people would say it was wrong, but then most people are fools. And none of them could possibly know what I had to go through," she added through her teeth.

"They'll never know that," I said, "because you'll never be able to tell them. As long as you're happy——"

"I'm very happy," she interrupted.

"And you think you'll continue to be?"

"No one can answer that.... I'm happier than I was. You, of course, think that I've behaved criminally. I only feel that we made a mistake. I thought David loved me, and he—didn't. I believe he thought he loved me.... I made every possible allowance for him, I did everything a woman could do to make a success of our life, but you must have seen enough to know that he never gave our marriage a chance. I was ready to put up with everything until he humiliated me in my own house. Then it was time to admit we'd made a mistake and to get out of it as soon as possible." Her parasol was again at work on the hard-baked gravel. "If he'd hated me, if he'd enjoyed hurting me, he couldn't have done better. I never knew what men were capable of before."

In my turn I looked at my watch and held out my hand.

"I have not criticised you, Mrs. O'Rane," I said, "so I prefer not to assist in any criticism of your husband."

Her lips curled into a sneer.

"You haven't criticised me in words," she qualified.

"I am trying to suspend judgement till I know the facts. You will admit that it requires prima facie justification when a young wife leaves a husband who worships her—I will cut out the offending phrase, if you like—leaves her blind husband——"

I have only once seen Mrs. O'Rane's beauty of face wholly desert her. At the word "blind" her cheeks flushed, her eyes grew hot and the line of her mouth became broken and unsightly. Months before, Bertrand had told me that her husband's blindness was the one thing restraining her, and, though she had lashed herself into disregarding it, she evidently could not forget it. I could see that a passionate retort was maturing, but she pressed it back and took my hand.

"Good-bye," she said. "Remember, I didn't ask you to speak to me. This is a matter between David and myself. You needn't think it was an easy thing to do, but I faced it, I've gone through the worst——"

"Not more than six people in the world know that you're not living with your husband," I put in.

She hesitated, and I could see her lips compressing.

"I'm ready for that, too," she assured me, valiantly enough.

"Where are you living?" I asked.

"You must excuse me if I don't answer that. Good-bye."

As I walked on towards my office I wondered what use I ought to make of my chance meeting. Yet how would O'Rane or George be benefited by knowing that she was living—was probably living in London? And this was all that I could tell them save that, however great her provocation, however unheeding the passion which had possessed her and allowed her to receive a lover in her husband's house to punish her husband, she was not yet insensible to every twinge of conscience: I had succeeded in once flicking her on the raw.

Then I blamed myself for wasted opportunities; if I had been less conventionally suave, less afraid of a noisy scene, I might have put many more questions even if I received as few answers. Her life with O'Rane was over, but what was she going to put in its place? He could divorce her, of course, and she could marry Beresford—when he came out of prison. I never felt, however, in the days before the catastrophe that she loved Beresford;—to be adored and admired by him was one thing, but I never regarded him as more than a diversion, when no one else was by to flatter her. Even had the passion been there, I could not imagine her marrying such a man. The blue coat and skirt, the high-crowned hat and patent-leather shoes did not accord with a rusty sombrero, Harris tweeds and a loose, orange-coloured tie; I recalled the bizarre, bachelor rooms of Sloane Square and, in exaggerated contrast, Mrs. O'Rane's ermine coat, as I had seen it when I surprised them there. In any day I dare swear that she could not tell whether she had spent five pounds or five hundred; but, if she did not know how much she squandered in a year, at least she could be sure that it was far more than she would ever get from Beresford. And, if she did not propose to marry him, where and how would she live? Would she try to drag out a few more months or years as his mistress with the four or five hundred pounds a year which her father allowed her? Where and how was she living now?

To a long list of idle questions I added one more and asked myself how I was to behave, if I met her again. It was not easy to avoid her at the second encounter when I had forced myself upon her at the first; it was certainly no easier to continue as O'Rane's friend and to meet his wife as though nothing had happened.

An unsolved problem spoils my temper, and I was with difficulty even civil when a messenger came into my room to say that Lady Maitland wished to see me. She was shewn in and proceeded straight to the point. Was it true that under this ridiculous Military Service Act all men under forty were to be dragooned into the army? I must remember how kind I had been in finding a position for her son in my office. Well, he had come home the previous evening and told her of a report that all young men were going to be taken. It made no difference that he had only been allowed to attest on condition that he could not be called up without leave of his chief. That was all a scrap of paper, apparently. Every case had to be submitted to the War Office, every man given a certificate of exemption or packed off with the roughest clerks and factory hands into the ranks. What was she to do? It was intolerable.

It argues, if not self-control, at least great gratitude for past hospitality that I did not remind Lady Maitland of the first dinner I ate on English soil after my release from Austria, when she deafened me with her denunciations of the young shirkers who stayed at home and allowed others to die for them. I was finding no fault with her boy, who might be all that she said; I had seen him twice and pushed him hastily into a fool-proof room where he read the "Times" and acted as prÉcis-writer for one of my colleagues; if he were unfit for the army, there was a chance that he might be rejected, though embittering experience taught me that it was only a chance. If he were passed as fit, the first girl in the street could take his place after a day's instruction, and the office would be rid of a young man who was doing no good to himself or anyone else with the number of whiskies and soda which he found time to consume on his way to the office or with the cigarettes which he smoked all day when he had made his reluctant way thither.

"Has he been medically examined?" I asked Lady Maitland.

"It would be a waste of time," she answered. "I tell you, that boy is a mass of nerves."

"Well, send him before a medical board with a letter from your own doctor," I suggested.

To judge from her expression, my proposal was unexpected and inadequate.

"Isn't the best thing for you to send a letter to the War Office?" she asked. "Bertie tells me that his work is very technical."

I was grown tired of that word through many a "conscription scare" and I resented its presence on the lips of Lady Maitland, who had been too free with her taunts ten months before, too disparaging of the volunteer army and too easily insistent on the conscription from which she was now trying to extricate her boy.

"He had to learn it," I reminded her. "And, if he died to-morrow, somebody'd have to learn it in his place. If you want to move the War Office, surely your husband's the man to do it."

"I don't like to bother him," she answered.

As she walked to the door, I felt that I had lost a friend. It says much for her magnanimity that I was invited to the house within a week to be told that the War Office—without encouragement from Sir Maurice—had behaved most sensibly, reviewing the junior members of my department en bloc and granting them all certificates of exemption on the grounds of indispensability.

"We seem drifting back to the old life very much," said George, pensively watching the bubbles break on the champagne, when I told him, with some distaste, of my interview. "Here we are eating and drinking as usual, I'm always being invited to dances.... We're getting used to this infernal war, you know, Stornaway, and we shall lose it, if we can't put up as relatively good a show as the fellows who are being killed. I suppose we're too far away from the front even with an occasional air-raid to remind us."

"I was glancing through my diary the other night," I told him. "There's hardly a reference to the war. The political situation, my own work——"

He laughed a little sadly.

"If I kept a diary, I'm afraid I should find a good deal of it devoted to Raney and his wife."

"I did," I told him.

He looked up quickly and then lowered his head until his chin rested on his fists.

"God! that has been a tragedy!" he groaned. "It's the biggest tragedy of my life, bigger than when Jim Loring was knocked out. Presumably it was all over with him in a few minutes or hours or days at most.... But that poor devil Raney—he's some years younger than I am."

"What is he doing?"

"He gives no hint. It's about as much as he can stand—the agony of it—without trying to analyse it or think what he's going to do next. Did I tell you I went down there again? Well, I did—in spite of what he said. I've a convenient young cousin whose people are over in Ireland—Violet's brother, you met her at dinner with me at the Berkeley—and I can always legitimately go and see him. It was rather less of a success than my last visit. The first person I ran into was Lady Dainton, who asked me to shew her the way to Raney's quarters. She couldn't make it out, she said, that she'd written to Sonia about a concert at the hospital, written twice and had had no reply. Obviously she was away from home, but apparently it was nobody's business to forward letters." George smiled ruefully. "It was a hit for me, though she didn't know it. I send all letters to Raney, and Sonia's go in a special envelope marked 'For filing only'; it was a formula he and I agreed on, so that Miss Merryon could just chuck them into a box unopened.... I don't believe even she suspects, though it's bound to come out.... And she's in love with him, and that's supposed to sharpen a woman's intuition.... Well, I've no doubt Lady Dainton's letters were in the box with the rest, but that didn't bring her much nearer getting them answered. I felt I must really leave Raney to deal with her, so I said I'd promised to call on the Head and would come back later.... By the way, Burgess sees there's something up; he'd see there was something up if you built a brick-wall round it. When I went into his study, he looked at me for about five minutes, stroking his beard between his thumb and first finger. 'He is thine own familiar friend, whom thou lovest,' he began without any beating about the bush. 'I know the whole story, sir,' I said. 'If I thought for a week, I couldn't think of anything worse. If I may make a suggestion, sir, the kindest thing you can do is not to notice anything.' Burgess stroked his beard a bit more; then he said—'The adder is not more deaf.' But I'm prepared to bet he's made a very shrewd guess."

"Did you gather how O'Rane disposed of Lady Dainton?" I asked.

George shrugged his shoulders.

"He had to say that Sonia wasn't at 'The Sanctuary' and he had to admit that he didn't know her address at the moment. Fortunately, Lady Dainton is so ready to think ill of him and so very unready to think ill of her darling daughter that she never dreamed or suspected what had happened. I don't know whether she went further than thinking that Sonia was staying with friends and that Raney wasn't sufficiently interested in her to discover her whereabouts; perhaps she did, for she took the opportunity of saying that it was monstrous for him to desert his wife like this for three months at a time, but that, on her honour, he didn't deserve to have a wife, if she was to be condemned to the life he had led at Melton or in London. Raney was smiling to himself and saying nothing, when I came in, so she turned her batteries on to me. As a rule she frightens me into agreeing with anything she says, but this time I did pluck up courage to tell her that, in my opinion, when two people married, they must be left to work out their own salvation. There's a certain irony there, Stornaway,—I was conscious of it at the time—when you think of the way you and Bertrand and I laboured to keep their boat from capsizing. She didn't appreciate the irony, though; she only thought I was being rather rude. That didn't matter so long as I got rid of her."

He pushed away his plate, sighed and rose from the table.

"Did you have any talk with O'Rane?" I asked, as we went upstairs together.

"That depends on your definition of talk," he answered with a joyless smile. "We emitted words at each other. It—I don't mind telling you, Stornaway,—it hurt like sin to find that I couldn't get near him. I suppose it was a compliment to our friendship that he didn't try to cut jokes as he did when I dined with him in Common Room the last time, but it was an unfilling sort of compliment.... No, to offer him any kind of sympathy would have been to get myself pitched out of the room. I felt that. He was in a suit of mail.... I should have thought—but then I've not been through it and, please God! I never shall. It did hurt, though, because there hasn't been much that we've kept from each other all these years."

He laughed a little at his own sensibility. I thought for a moment and then told him of my meeting that day in Hyde Park. From behind their rimless glasses, his eyes were fixed unwaveringly on mine, and at the end he made no comment.

"What line do you propose to take if you meet her?" I asked.

His brows set in a forbidding frown, and, when he spoke, it was between closed teeth, and his voice trembled.

"I think I told you, my instinct is to get her neck between my two hands and shake her as a terrier shakes a rat. I suppose that would be out of place in the more public parts of London, so I shall walk quietly past her. What induced you, knowing all you did——"

"I have no idea why I did it," I said, quite humbly.

"Are you going to do it again?"

"My dear George, once more, I have no idea. I'm like O'Rane in that I haven't been in the mood to analyse or make decisions. I've shirked them. I've deliberately tried to keep my mind occupied with other things so that I shouldn't have to think about this miserable business. Most of us are doing that, I fancy."

He was silent for many moments, and I fancied that he was visualising my meeting in the light of an early summer morning in Hyde Park with Sonia O'Rane, brown-eyed, red-lipped, redolent—to the senses—of purity and young freshness.

"As long as that swine's under lock and key," he said at length, "she can't make a move. And, when he's out, they're bound to hold their hand till they see what Raney's going to do, whether he's going to face a divorce—when I say 'face,' it's on her account, of course. He'd stand anything for himself, but I don't know that he'd let any damned two-and-one junior put questions to Sonia—I don't know, and he doesn't know...." He covered his face with his hands. "God in Heaven! Stornaway! I remember when I was the oldest fourth-year man and he was a freshman and she was nothing at all—a lovely little slip of a girl who'd been sent up for Commem. in place of a woman who'd failed us. Raney'd loved her ever since he'd first set those god-sent eyes of his on her, and they solemnly got engaged that night—when he was nineteen and she a baby three years younger...." The rising voice which was beginning to make our neighbours turn curiously round stopped of a sudden. "Sorry! I'm apt to break out every time I think of that boy coming back from the front ... and not letting it make that much difference to him ... and starting again at the bottom for God-knows-the-how-manyth-time—and then—this.... Well, Raney's not in a state to say whether he'll divorce her or not, what he will do, what he wants to do. You're quite right, we're none of us in a position to analyse. By the way, what do you propose to do, if you run into Beresford?"

"I don't see myself engaging him in conversation," I said.

3

As a false merit seems still to attach to frankness, let me record that, when I met Beresford some three weeks later, I bowed to him and subsequently went up and exchanged a few words. This meeting also took place in Hyde Park, I was again making a slight dÉtour for the sake of seeing the flowers and once more I turned in at Albert Gate and was nodding before I saw who had nodded to me. When I recognised Beresford, there was a moment's impulse to stalk away, but I am glad to say that I did not yield to it.

He was sitting in a bath-chair, out of the wind and in the sun, alternately dozing and waking with a start to look at the flowers and then close his eyes again. I have seen sick men in various parts of the world, but I doubt if I ever saw one who was still alive and yet looked nearer death. All flesh had disappeared from his face, until the bones of jaw, temple and nose threatened to cut through the waxen skin; his eye-lids were more vermilion than pink, with a permanent dusty-grey shadow darkening the hollow sockets. One hand lay exposed outside the rug, so thin that it seemed as if the bones must grate together; the other pressed painfully to his side whenever he began to cough.

"Why, how do you do?" he exclaimed in a weak whisper, bowing a second time, as his eye-lids flickered open and he found me watching him.

"You look remarkably ill," was all I could say.

"I'm better than I have been. It was really rather a close shave this time. They evidently felt it was a point of honour not to be beaten again and they kept me there just twenty-four hours longer than I could conveniently stand. I wasn't conscious of anything,—I hadn't been for some while before and I wasn't to be for some time after—but they had a bad scare. After doing their best to kill me for five days, they spent five weeks trying to keep me alive—so like war and peace, you know; wasteful, irrational and utterly, utterly purposeless. In a few weeks' time I shall be where I was when last we met; the Government will have kept me quiet for perhaps two months and will have expended a portion of a magistrate's time, ditto ditto prosecuting counsel, and six weeks' bed, board, share of prison staff and really first-rate medical attention. No one could have been better treated when once they were afraid they'd killed me."

He tried to laugh, but only succeeded in making himself cough. As he shook and rocked, growing momentarily pink and then reverting to a deathlier white, as I watched that bag of tuberculous bones being held together by a nervous refusal to die, I shared the sense of waste which O'Rane had once expressed to me. An impulse came to me, and I acted on it before I could give myself time to be cautious and niggardly.

"If I can get you out to South Africa, will you go?" I asked him.

He tried to speak before he had finished coughing, and the attack redoubled in violence.

"That would be playing their game rather too much," he said with a skeleton's grin.

"You're playing their game as quickly and more permanently by staying here."

"You mean I'm going to die? Now, there you're wrong. Of course, I shall die some time like everyone else, but I'm actually getting better now. If you'd seen me a month ago——!" He looked round at the flowers with eyes that burned feverishly. "I've got so much to do, there's so much to live for! Don't you feel you can't die, you won't die, when you see all the new leaves with that shade of green which seems only to last for a day before it becomes dark, dull, mature, dirty.... And the first flowers—before we've had time to be sated with them. This is June, summer.... And long before that, the little pink, sticky buds bursting everywhere.... And those curious fluffy things which you find on some shrubs and which seem to serve no purpose in nature.... I shall die in the autumn, when I do die; I couldn't in the spring, when the whole world's renewing itself and there's so much to do. God! there is so much to do!"

He smiled to himself, and his eyes suddenly closed. It was more than time for me to be on my way, but the scrape of my heel on the gravel roused him, and he held out his hand.

"It was kind of you—about South Africa, I mean,—but I can't get away—for reasons which I needn't discuss. And in any event it isn't necessary; I'm going to get well without that."

I shook hands and turned my steps eastwards. There are few things more painful than the dying consumptive's belief that he will recover. Beresford called me back with a cry that brought on another fit of coughing.

"I'm in my old quarters," he said. "You were rather—disgruntled by your last visit, I remember, but, if you've got over the shock and can ever spare a moment to call——"

This time I shook my head without hesitation or compassion. I do not remember ever being more affronted. A chance encounter in the street might be excused me; one may be pardoned for not upbraiding one's worst enemy when he is as near his death-bed as Beresford was; but it was another thing altogether to condone the past and acquiesce in the present. It was also what Mrs. O'Rane had virtually challenged me to do, when she lost her temper in Beresford's flat and asked whether I should continue to know her when she had come to live with him.

"I shall not call," I said. "Good-bye."

Thereafter I denied myself the walk from Albert Gate to Hyde Park Corner and went to my office through Belgrave Square and the Green Park.

I kept my own counsel about our meeting and went on with my own work, trying not to think of the O'Rane tragedy until it was brought to my notice by a chance encounter with O'Rane himself. I was deliberately not seeking his company, but I was pleased when he joined me in the Smoking Room at the House.

"Your voice at least is quite unmistakable," he said with his old smile. "So is Grayle's. The people who beat me are most of the Irish and a sprinkling of the Labour men—fellows who don't open their mouths from one end of the session to the other. And I'm here so little that it's slow work learning. Still, I'll back myself to be right ninety-five times out of a hundred, if I've heard a voice more than once. Do you know whether old Oakleigh is about?"

"I saw him here before dinner," I said.

"I promised to walk home with him. Why don't you come along, too? There's nothing of any interest on, and you can smoke in greater comfort at my place. Let's see if we can hunt him out."

Bertrand had sat down late, and we found him finishing his coffee in an almost deserted dining-room. It was still light, however, when we got outside, and we strolled at an easy pace along Millbank to "The Sanctuary." I had not been there since the night nearly three months before when O'Rane's life was broken in two. As we walked, I thought of the other night when Grayle and I met him for the first time, when, too, he had carried Beresford on his own back into the now empty house. He could not but be thinking of it himself, and I hardly knew whether to pity or admire him the more for his unembarrassed way of admitting us to his secret without suffering us to allude to it.

Unlocking the door, he went ahead to turn on the lights, came back to relieve us of our coats and bade us help ourselves from the side-board, while he opened a box of cigars. Perhaps from nervousness he talked rather more than usual and shewed himself unnecessarily solicitous for our comfort; otherwise we might have been sitting, as we occasionally sat ten months before, waiting for Mrs. O'Rane to come back from the theatre.... I confess that I started—I believe we all started—when we heard a taxi draw nearer and nearer, turn out of Millbank and stop at the door. Bertrand and I were facing the room, and we both of us gave a quick glance over our shoulders. O'Rane continued talking unconcernedly, only stopping when the curtain was pushed aside and George came in.

"It's a great thing to have a place where you can be sure of a drink after licensed hours," he remarked contentedly. "I've had no dinner and not much lunch; and I've left the Admiralty this moment. This war's got beyond the joke some people still think it. Don't mind me, Raney, I'm going to fend for myself and eat solidly for the next half-hour. What's the question before the House?"

He seated himself on the arm of my chair with a hunk of bread and cheese in one hand and a tumbler of whiskey and soda in the other. We were talking of the way in which our original intervention on behalf of Belgian neutrality had been overlaid by the nationalist ambitions of Italy in south Austria, France in Alsace-Lorraine, and by the frankly imperialist trend of Russia towards Constantinople and of ourselves towards Mesopotamia and in Africa and the Pacific.

"It may have been wise, it may be necessary," said O'Rane dubiously. "Perhaps you couldn't bring Italy in without promising Trieste and the Trentino, perhaps you couldn't keep Russia in without promising Constantinople."

Bertrand sighed and then yawned.

"I wonder if we've not bitten off more than we can chew," he growled. "I went through the phase of 'crushing Prussian militarism,' cutting up the map of Europe with a pair of scissors.... I hope nobody will put me up against a wall and shoot me, if I now doubt the possibility. I don't believe we can crush Prussian militarism."

"We—can't."

The words, spoken in a familiar, sneering drawl, came from behind me. Bertrand and I swung round in our chairs to face the door; George leapt to his feet, letting fall his bread and cheese and discharging a torrent of whiskey and soda into my lap. If the ghost of Peter Beresford had walked in to reinforce Bertrand at the point where their doctrines most nearly touched, he could not have dumbfounded us more. But it was not Beresford's ghost. The July night was descending so slowly that we were content with a single lamp in the middle of the room. In the gathering dusk by the door, standing out against the orange glow of the door-curtain, I saw Beresford himself, leaning with one hand on a stick and grasping a shapeless soft hat with the other. He was as waxen of complexion and almost as cadaverous as when we met in the Park three weeks before, but he had made a spasmodic effort to seem collected on entering, and the sneer in his voice was reproduced by a suggestion of swaggering contempt in his attitude.

I wondered helplessly and almost without anger why he had inflicted this outrage upon us. Trembling and speechless, Bertrand propelled himself slowly to his feet; speechless and breathing quickly, George took two steps forward. We were all too much preoccupied to look behind and see what O'Rane was doing until I heard what I can only describe as a rattle in the throat; Beresford's eyes opened wider, and he took a half-step back; I turned my head in time to see O'Rane spring like an animal on its prey, both arms outstretched and both feet off the ground. There was a thud, as the two fell together, a gasp from Beresford, the noise of boots scuffling on polished boards and then a silence only modified by laboured breathing.

George was the first to move.

"He'll kill him!" he called back to us. "Help me separate them!"

As quickly as an old and a middle-aged man could move, Bertrand and I hurried to his assistance. O'Rane was straddling Beresford's body, pinning both arms to the floor with his knees and gripping his throat with both hands until the eyes glared in the early stages of asphyxiation and the mouth fell open, gobbling hideously. The face was swollen and mulberry-coloured by the time that we could see it, and the first feeble resistance had given place to the dreadful placidity of physical exhaustion.

"You fool, you're murdering him!" George roared, slipping both hands inside O'Rane's collar and putting forth a reserve of strength which lifted assailant and assailed bodily from the ground. "Pull his hands away, you men!"

I caught O'Rane's left wrist in both hands, but the polished floor gave no purchase to my feet, and I might as well have tried to pluck a propeller from its shaft. His arms were like flexible, warm steel. When I planted my foot against his shoulder, it was like resting it on masonry that quivered slipperily, but never yielded.

"Fingers, man, fingers!" George shouted again. "Pull 'em apart, twist 'em, hurt him!"

I take no pride in having followed his advice save in so far as it saved the boy from the scaffold. Bertrand and I, each with our two hands, gripped O'Rane's third and fourth fingers, tugged and twisted until a stifled cry of pain broke from his lips. George was shaking him like a rat, and at last the grip relaxed and Beresford's head fell with a second thud on the floor.

"Don't let go!" cried George. "Now, Raney, will you swear on your honour not to touch him again?"

There was a sullen, long silence varied by the rip of rending clothes and the clatter of feet, as O'Rane made three unsuccessful plunges forward.

"You're—hurting my—hand!" he panted at length with the whimper of a little child.

George shook his head at me passionately.

"Will you swear on your honour, Raney?"

"Let me—get at him!" O'Rane sobbed.

"We'll break your fingers off at the knuckles if you don't swear!" George returned through clenched teeth.

There was a second silence, a last plunge.

"I won't touch him," sighed O'Rane.

We stepped back, panting and mopping our foreheads; then Bertrand walked to the nearest chair and subsided into it; I leaned against a sofa; George stood for a moment, rocking from his late exertion, then pressed one hand to his heart and hurried into the street, covering his mouth with a handkerchief. O'Rane stood where we had relaxed our hold on him, bending and unbending his tortured fingers; Beresford lay motionless and silent.

George's re-appearance with a request for brandy galvanised us all, but chiefly O'Rane, who walked up to him with out-thrust lips and cried:

"You can clear out of this, George Oakleigh, and I don't advise you to come back here."

"Don't be a fool, Raney," George answered wearily.

"If you hadn't put them up to it——"

"That's precisely why I did it. It was the only way of stopping you. Don't think I enjoyed it, old man." He caught O'Rane's right hand between his own two and patted it, as if he were caressing a woman. I learned afterwards that in addition to losing his sight O'Rane had been wounded in both hands. "Go and get some brandy—or wait, I'll get the brandy, while you lift Beresford on to a sofa. I've pulled my heart out of place."

Between us we made a rough bed and tried to bring the unconscious man round. His heart was fluttering like a captive bird, and for longer than I cared to count there was no other sign of life. At last the eyes opened for a moment, and I saw George relax his labours and lead O'Rane to one side.

"You'd better go to bed, old man," he said. "I'll report progress later, and we'll get him away as soon as we can. You'll only make things worse, if you're here when he comes round."

To my surprise, O'Rane allowed himself to be led away, and George returned to share our vigil. A second and third time the eyes opened; twice Beresford tried to raise himself and once his lips moved in soundless speech.

"Don't try to talk," I said, as I gave him some water to drink.

He closed his eyes, and a quarter of an hour passed before they opened again.

"W—w—why——?" he stammered suddenly.

"Don't—try—to—talk," I said again.

"But w—why did he do that?" Beresford persisted with slow obstinacy. "Is he m—m—mad?"

George, Bertrand and I stared at him and then at one another.

"Don't try to talk yet," was all that I could find to say.

4

Bertrand allowed himself to be sent to bed at midnight, but George and I took it in turns to watch by Beresford's side. We had a doctor in, but the danger was past before he arrived, and his only orders were that we must report any change. Until dawn we tried sleeping for an hour and watching for an hour, but, as an opal light came to warm the rafters on the west side of the room, George sacrificed his turn to sleep and joined me on the sofa.

We looked at each other for some moments without speaking, both equally tired, dishevelled, unshaven and perplexed.

"Well?" I said at length.

"Well?" he echoed. "By the way, I promised to report progress to Raney; and I never did. I don't see what we can say at present. We've got to clear this up before he comes down."

"What do you think?" I asked.

George hesitated.

"The fact of the fellow's coming here at all——" he began slowly.

I nodded.

"We must wait till we can question him direct," he went on evasively.

"But, if we're right, he mustn't know," I put in.

"Till everyone knows," sighed George.

Beresford stirred restlessly, and the sound of a moan silenced us.

"If—" George began again in a whisper. I nodded. "God above! if we hadn't managed to pull him off in time!"

I put my finger to my lips, as Beresford stirred again.

"He's waking."

We were sitting in a line with his head and outside his field of vision, unless he raised himself on his elbow, which at present he was incapable of doing. We saw his eyes open and close again, open and close again, the opening each time growing brisker than the faint closing, until he was strong enough to stare about him and take in two-thirds of the room. I saw wonder dawning in his face as he found himself unexpectedly in familiar surroundings; he carried his hand to his head in the effort to remember how he had got there; then his fingers mechanically slid down to his throat, and I watched him gingerly exploring certain purple marks. Abruptly his eyes closed for another long quiescence, but he was gaining strength and at the next opening he dragged himself unsteadily to a sitting posture, clapped both hands to his temples and slowly turned his head until he had brought the whole room under observation.

"Where's Sonia?" he demanded abruptly, looking at me with flickering eyelids.

"She's not here at the moment," I answered.

He stared uncomprehendingly until a pain at the bruised back of his head made him wince and despatch one hand to assess the danger.

"How long——" He winced again. "How long have I been here?"

"Since last night," I told him. "You had a fall."

He continued to stare at me without comprehension and then grew suddenly indignant.

"Had a fall?" he repeated. "I didn't have a fall. What d'you mean? It's all coming back to me now. I was dining—I don't know where I was dining, but afterwards I thought I'd come round and see Sonia.... Why did O'Rane attack me like that? Was he mad?"

George's foot pressed lightly against mine.

"What do you mean—'attack' you?" he asked with fine simulation of surprise.

"He attacked me," Beresford persisted doggedly. "He knocked me down." His eyes closed once more. "Where's Sonia?" he asked again.

"She's staying with friends," George answered. "I say, I shouldn't talk too much, if I were you. You're looking rather cheap, and I hear you've been pretty bad."

For the first time Beresford was able to twist his features into a malevolent grin.

"I'm putting on weight again now," he boasted. "You'd look cheap, if you'd gone through what I have."

"How long were you in prison?" I asked.

Beresford sighed and shook his head.

"I don't know. I was unconscious for some days at the end. They arrested me on the third, the trial was on—I forget...." He lowered himself till he was lying full length on the sofa.

"They arrested you on the fourth, you say," I began with a glance at George.

"The third. My birthday," he corrected me, caressing his bruised throat with one hand. "There was a ring at the bell, and I got out of bed and went to the door, expecting to find the postman. Instead of that, there was an inspector with a warrant. He asked whether I was Mr. Peter Beresford, read me the warrant. He wouldn't let me shave, I remember; I suppose he was afraid I might cut my throat; and I was only allowed to have a bath on condition that he was in the room. I don't know which was the more embarrassed...."

He paused to laugh feebly, and I withdrew to the window and checked his date by my engagement book. George raised his eyebrows to me and at my nod tiptoed to the door and made his way to O'Rane's room.

"What happened last night?" Beresford demanded, covering his eyes with the hand that had been feeling his throat and rubbing his bruised head with the other. "Was everyone drunk?"

"I can't quite explain now," I said.

Whether O'Rane had been to bed or not, he was washed and shaved, dressed and booted, when George went into his room at five o'clock. Beresford was reported out of danger, and after some hesitation George asked again to be given the fullest account of O'Rane's unexpected return two months before.

"I'll tell you my reason now," he said, as O'Rane's expression hardened. "I want to make certain—I'm advocatus diaboli,—I want your evidence that it was Beresford at all."

"Evidence? I heard him, she admitted it! Who else could it be? And he comes back here——"

"Steady on, Raney, this is no way to conduct a trial. I'm going to get Stornaway up here, if I can, and we're going into this very thoroughly."

Beresford was sleeping so tranquilly that I left him without compunction. Upstairs the court of enquiry had been joined by Bertrand in pyjamas, dressing-gown, and slippers; George was sitting on the bed with a blotter and writing-pad on his knee, O'Rane walked to and fro with the noiseless tread of a cat. We were all grey-faced and haggard in the diamond, five-o'clock-in-the-morning light. I found myself a chair, and the proceedings opened with a repetition of the story which Bertrand had given me as second-hand. It was more temperate and less dramatic, as O'Rane told it two months after the events; it was slightly fuller, but in no respect did it vary substantially from the earlier account.

"I'm not a lawyer." George said at the end, looking up from his notes, "whether you'd get a divorce on that, assuming you wanted one ..." he added quickly, as O'Rane's eyes narrowed. "We haven't finished yet, though. You say Sonia admitted it?"

O'Rane nodded and then seemed to repent his nod.

"She didn't deny it," he said to correct himself. "I say, you fellows don't want me to go into this part of it, do you? It's not very pleasant for me. I'll just tell you that I assumed it was Beresford——"

"Why did you assume it?" I interrupted.

"She was very intimate with him. She used to talk—I thought it was in joke, of course, a silly joke that I didn't like—she used to talk about going off and living with him, if we ever had a disagreement about anything. Besides, I'd heard him hopping out of here and down the stairs on one leg. I naturally assumed.... And she accepted it. I—I can't tell you what we said to each other, but it was never in doubt, it never has been in doubt till this moment."

George pursed up his mouth and shook his head reflectively.

"This is only telling us what the sergeant said," he observed. "However, let's get every shred of evidence before we let Beresford open."

He looked enquiringly at his uncle, who shrugged his shoulders a little impatiently.

"It's not evidence," Bertrand began. "I'm old-fashioned, I daresay I attach too much importance to trifles; I can only give you what I've seen and heard."

It was indeed not direct evidence, it was not even circumstantial evidence. Mrs. O'Rane had been very intimate with Beresford; when he was lying ill at "The Sanctuary," she would sit stroking his hand; they sometimes remained together until a very late hour, and she thought nothing of kissing him good-night. On his side Beresford made no secret of his infatuation.

"Neither made any secret of anything!" growled Bertrand, thumping his fist on his knee.... "I suppose it's the modern method.... I don't understand it. That's why I say my evidence is no use. If you get up and tell them they've no business to be kissing, they'll retort that it was all open and above-board, that I was present as often as not.... And it's true. I used to come in late from the House, I used to come in at all hours when I was on Special Constable duty; there they were, billing and cooing and not in the least embarrassed by me. You'd have said they rather liked an audience."

The unhappy O'Rane was wincing at every sneer or word of disapproval. Two months before he would have turned it off with a laugh, as everyone else did, and protested that it was Sonia's way and that we did not know Sonia.... But, if he could have been induced to speak frankly, he would probably have agreed with me that some of his wife's friends and a good deal of his wife's behaviour were meretricious.

"I'd better add my testimony, while we're about it," I said. The boy winced again, and I could see him bracing himself.

I told him how at his request I had called on Beresford to warn him against running his head any further into the trap which was being laid for him. I described his obvious anxiety to get rid of me, the embarrassment of our meeting, when Mrs. O'Rane came in, her light-hearted assurance that I should be really shocked, or something of the kind, if I knew how often she had visited her patient at such an hour. It was not pleasant work, but I spared O'Rane nothing that my memory retained.

At the end George crumpled his notes into a ball and rose from the bed with a yawn of mental and physical exhaustion.

"As I said, I'm not a lawyer," he observed. "If Raney were bringing a petition, there's a hundred-to-one chance in favour of his getting a decree; I suppose there's a six-to-four chance on circumstantial evidence that you could bring the charge of misconduct home to Beresford." He paused to frown in perplexity, unconscious that the word "misconduct" had cut O'Rane like a lash across the face. "If it weren't for last night," he muttered. "It's—almost incomprehensible. Unless he came to make a clean breast of it, to tell Raney to divorce her and be damned...."

O'Rane stopped short in his cat-like prowl and faced us.

"The only thing is to see Beresford," he said. "You'd better come with me. I can tell something from his voice, but of course I can't see him. Watch his mouth, don't look at his eyes; it's the mouth that gives a man away, when he's lying."

The library was stale with cigar-smoke after our long vigil. Beresford was asleep, but the noise of our feet roused him, and he sat up blinking at O'Rane, who was a pace before the rest of us.

"Why did you attack me last night?" he demanded the moment that we were in sight.

O'Rane came to a standstill with his hands in his pockets, swaying slightly from heel to toe.

"We'll go into that in a moment, if you don't mind," was the answer. "What was your motive in coming here?"

I had Beresford under vigilant scrutiny, and his surprise was real or uncommonly well assumed.

"To see Sonia, of course," he replied. "I didn't know you were at home. Do you usually try to murder people who come to see her?" he demanded with weak truculence. "I know, of course, that you neglect her and ill-treat her yourself."

O'Rane rocked contemplatively to and fro, nodding thoughtfully to himself.

"When did you last see my wife?" he asked suddenly.

"I can't tell you."

"You've got to tell me, Beresford."

"I'm afraid I can't. I spent six weeks in prison and I've had another fortnight getting convalescent. It was some time before that."

"You have got to tell me the day, the hour and the place."

Beresford lay back with his mouth obstinately shut.

"Come along!" O'Rane cried.

"I can't and I won't. It was some time shortly before I was arrested. If you want to find out any more, you can ask her."

I refreshed my memory with a glance at my pocket-book.

"You were arrested on the third of May, you told me," I said. "Going back three weeks, I can definitely trace one occasion on which you met Mrs. O'Rane——"

Beresford's pale face suddenly flushed.

"If you're going to drag in your foul-minded suspicions about that," he cried, "have the decency to wait till Sonia's here."

"I told you that Mrs. O'Rane was away," I reminded him. Then I took O'Rane by the arm. "I want to have a word with you."

I was too tired to labour upstairs again, and we could be by ourselves outside. There was a haze over the river, rising almost before my eyes, as the sun climbed higher. A succession of young factory girls hurried along the Embankment on their way to work; one or two early carts rumbled over the cobble-stones in the neighbouring streets, and a chain of three black barges glided noiselessly towards Westminster Bridge. All else was still. I caught sight of my dusty boots, the cigar-ash on my waistcoat and a pair of grimy hands,—the whole desecrating the clean clarity of the summer morning.

"Well?" said O'Rane.

I put my arm through his and walked towards the river.

"I'm prepared to bet that the last time Beresford saw your wife was when I spoiled their tÊte-À-tÊte in his rooms," I said. "He doesn't know I've told you already and he's in dread that I'm going to. Didn't you feel that? And it's not that he's afraid of you—I don't think he's physically afraid of anyone;—he doesn't want you to know that she was foolish enough to come to his rooms at such an hour."

O'Rane disengaged his arm and rested his elbows on the parapet and his chin on his hands.

"This was three weeks—before?" he asked.

"I don't believe he's met her since. I don't believe it was him."

He shook his head slowly.

"I couldn't see him, of course; I've told you I didn't get near enough to touch him, but I heard him going across the room and down the stairs on one leg. You aren't in a mood then to weigh your suspicions very judicially.... I taxed Sonia with it. My God! I can't go through it again, we were both of us out of our minds, I don't know what we said! But I assumed it was Beresford—I remember I kept on using his name. She never denied it. If it wasn't Beresford ...?"

"Let's first of all establish whether it was Beresford," I suggested.

He hesitated a moment longer and then pulled himself abruptly erect, took my arm and walked quickly back to the house. Bertrand and George, a pair of strangely disreputable figures, were dozing in arm-chairs; Beresford had his eyes open and fixed on us the moment we were inside the room.

"You wanted to know a few minutes ago why I attacked you," began O'Rane. "I'm going to tell you, but I should like to ask one question first. Are you aware that my wife is no longer here?"

"So Stornaway told me—twice," Beresford answered wearily.

"Do you know she's—left me?"

"I'm not surprised. I'm only surprised she ever came back. I don't know why she ever married you."

O'Rane paused to steady himself.

"I believed until recently that she had left me for you," he went on. "Now you can understand, perhaps, why I behaved as I did last night. I can't offer any apology worth having."

As he stopped speaking, he held out his hand almost timidly. Beresford stared at it contemptuously for a moment; then his cheeks flushed, and he took it.

"You can imagine I don't want this to go any further," said O'Rane in a matter-of-fact voice.

Beresford pulled him close to the couch.

"I—I don't think I'm there yet," he whispered. "Say it all over again, will you? Sonia's left you? She used to say she was going to, but that was only to tease you."

O'Rane's lips were quivering, and his voice trembled.

"I'm afraid it's all grim earnest," he said.

"She's left you? O'Rane, she couldn't! She loved you so much! I—I often thought you didn't treat her properly, you were frightfully unsympathetic sometimes, but there was nothing you could do to force her to this!"

Bertrand roused himself to control the excitement of Beresford's voice, which was beginning to react on O'Rane.

"Deal with realities, young man," he grunted. "The facts are as stated."

Beresford disregarded him and turned to O'Rane.

"But where is she?"

"We don't know."

"You don't know who she's with?" His face became suddenly more hopeful. "You've no proof that she's with anyone? She went away once before, remember."

A smothered sigh broke from O'Rane.

"I think I may say positively that she's with someone. She's not merely staying with friends. I'm afraid I thought it was you and I must beg you to forgive me."

He tried to smile and again held out his hand.

"You needn't have thought it was me, O'Rane," said Beresford quietly.

"No. But I only heard a lame man hopping away on one leg. And I was seeing red."

"But you could both of you trust me! If there'd been a moment's danger, I'd never have seen Sonia again. I'm not the only lame man in London. You might have picked on Grayle before me, if she hadn't hated him so much."

O'Rane covered his eyes with his hand.

"I thought of you both," he said. "When I heard the man going short on one leg, I felt certain that it must be one of you.... It's extraordinary how quickly you think at a time like that. I remember wondering whether I should be equal to tackling Grayle, if it were him.... Then I knew it couldn't be, because he'd insulted Sonia in some restaurant, and they'd had a row. Besides, he was in France at the time. And so I decided that it must be you. I'm sorry. You couldn't expect me to behave quite—dispassionately, could you? I'm only glad it has been cleared up. I'm afraid you'll have to stay with me again till we've patched up last night's damage. You can understand that for Sonia's sake this mustn't be talked about. When people want to know where she is, I—I usually say she's staying away and I—don't—quite know—when she's coming back...."

5

At the end of August I contrived a holiday for myself on the north coast of Cornwall, where Lady Pentyre had been good enough to offer me a house. Yolande and her husband accompanied me, and on a passing impulse I pressed O'Rane to join us. We could have given him society and some kind of mental distraction, but the House was still sitting, when I left London, and he made this an excuse for declining. In his place George came for a week, to be followed by several of Yolande's colleagues and friends, whom she invited—I am fairly sure—less for themselves than for the chance of giving an inexpensive holiday to some exceedingly tired women.

It was a fortnight of pure enchantment. We rose at eight and walked over hot, spongy turf to the precipitous cliff-path which led us to our favourite bathing-place in our chosen bay. We bobbed and basked in a sea of liquid sapphire under a blazing sun and only left the water when hunger drove us home. Through long, happy mornings all four of us scrambled like children over the rocks, in and out of unexpected pools, slipping on treacherous bunches of sea-weed and cutting our feet on the cones of a mollusc's shell. We were always so wet and unpresentable by luncheon-time that there was nothing for it but to bathe again and put on dry clothes, which made us late and ravenous, so that we gorged ourselves on dishes which were becoming unprocurable in London and then lay sleeping repletely or glancing at the papers until it was time for another walk among the gorse and heather, a last descent to the foreshore where the Atlantic lay drowsy under the setting sun, creaming and lapping the black and dun rocks.

The papers, when we mustered energy to read them, brought us better news each day. Pressing north and west, the Italian and Russian armies were taking their revenge for the damaging thrust which each had lately sustained, and Austria-Hungary, squeezed simultaneously on two sides, had to adopt the unwelcome and desperate expedient of handing over the eastern troops to German command. The precarious hold on Salonica was strengthened by the safe landing of reinforcements, and, before we left in September, Roumania had thrown in her lot with the Allies.

Even in London, where for two years the soldiers on leave from any front had found individual self-depression and national self-depreciation flourishing most luxuriantly, became infected with brief optimism. In September a report from General Headquarters announced that an infantry advance had been assisted by a mysterious new mechanism that rolled its uncouth way imperviously through the rain of bullets and shrapnel which poured on to its armoured sides, some land battleship which dropped unconcernedly into craters and climbed as unconcernedly over fortifications and chance dÉbris of houses, an invention—the first of British initiative in the war—that bestrode enemy trenches and spattered a hail of death on either hand, a good-humoured steel giant that convulsed the troops until they held their sides and forgot to advance, a something, in fine, that the English soldier with his genius for happy and meaningless nicknames decided to call a "tank."

Old Bertrand, who had a pretentious theory to explain each new set of facts, enunciated a new art of war with the text "Machines versus Men;" the rifle-man to the savage with a spear in his hand was as the machine-gun to the rifle-man—or the tank to the machine-gun. War had been revolutionised, and our old calculations of effectives and losses must go by the board.

The mood of optimism passed as quickly as it had come. Hardly had we finished triumphing over German machine-guns with our tanks, overcoming the Zeppelin menace with our anti-aircraft guns—there was smart sport in October, amounting almost to a battue,—when the autumn campaign ended and we settled down to count the cost and prepare for a third winter. The figures of our losses made the Somme a Pyrrhic victory, and there was troubled wonder where the new drafts were to be found. Ireland, which had been left in suspect and timid neglect—like a dog which has snapped once and may snap again, but is quiet for the moment—became once more a public interest as a candidate for conscription. And ships were mysteriously scarce. And food prices were exorbitant. And the Government was tired, lethargic, void of initiative....

"Thank God! my duty as a citizen is done when I've paid my taxes!" Bertrand Oakleigh exclaimed one night at the House. "I'm glad I'm not a farmer, I'm glad I'm not mixed up with industry. I should be unpatriotic if I didn't double my output of foodstuffs and unpatriotic if I kept one potential piece of cannon-fodder to grow 'em; I'm a pro-German if I manufacture for export to keep up the foreign exchanges—Victory versus Trade!—and Lord knows what I am if I don't cheerfully pay taxes on a business I've had to close down. If I lose money, nobody sympathises; if I make any, I'm called a profiteer, and someone takes it away from me.... Curious how a phrase or an abusive nickname dispenses the people of this country from using such wits as a niggardly Providence has given them! You've only to whisper something about a 'hidden hand,' and a crowded meeting of City men will sit and hypnotise themselves into thinking that there's an active service of secret agents—with poor Haldane as Director General—quietly penetrating our social life and paralysing our efforts in the war. Hidden hand! Pacifist—they can't even throw their absurdities into decent English! Profiteer! We're so astonishingly petty as a nation! I wonder if the same thing's being reproduced in all other countries—the old 'Nous sommes trahis' nonsense.... They're all governments of old men, too,—and they're tired—and no one outside knows what they've had to go through—and everybody's nerves are snapping. I'm sometimes surprised that these fellows have lasted so long, but I think their days are numbered. If you throw your mind back, you'll remember a phase when Asquith's worst political enemies said he was indispensable, the only Prime Minister, the one man who could hold the Government and the country together. You don't hear that now; we've outgrown that phase. Now people are openly saying that he's not master in his own house, that we shall never win the war so long as he's in the saddle, that they'll turn him out the moment they can find someone to put in his place.... Lloyd-George would be in power to-day, if his friends in Fleet Street could be sure that he wouldn't hanky-panky with the Army.... To read the papers, you'd think it was the cumulative effect of reverses like Gallipoli and Mesopotamia, the shortage of food, and the fact that we've done nothing to increase our home production, and our failure to grapple with submarines. It's deeper and blinder than that.... It's because the Government hasn't won the war that it will fail; and any new Prime Minister will fall in exactly the same way, unless he can win it. Results! results! That mountebank Grayle is quite right; he represents average, unthinking, third-rate, violent opinion, and that opinion's becoming articulate. As I've told you before, I don't think a change will do any good, because we set ourselves too big a task, we started on too high a moral plane. I suppose I should be called a 'pacifist' if I suggested that that phase was over and that we'd better moderate our tone before we're compelled to."

The particular non-party War Committee headed by Grayle was waking to activity after its suspended animation during the summer campaign. In his paper, in conversation at the Club and still more in the Smoking Room of the House he was calling for more vigour in administration.... The House of Commons position was curious, he informed me; if he could be sure of a certain number of votes—he would not trouble me with the figures,—we could have a ministry after our own heart. There followed an interval of perhaps five minutes, in which I allowed him to do all the talking. The Unionist members of the Coalition were sick and tired of this eternal "Wait and See;" there would be a secession the moment that a better alternative government had been sketched out; you had only to call a Unionist party meeting and put it to 'em straight. But you didn't want to take an unnecessary toss, you couldn't afford to supply powder and shot to rags like the "Daily News," which were always talking about an intrigue and saying that no government could exist with the Germans in front and back-stabbers behind....

"Nothing's settled yet," he told me after considering academically the offices for which we were both fitted. "But you know the constitutional theory; you're not justified in upsetting a government unless you're prepared to go to Buckingham Palace and take on the job of forming a new administration. Excuse me! I want to have a word with Oakleigh."

The following day I asked Bertrand under what guise the devil had appeared to him, but he had evidently been less patient.

"Grayle went away with a flea in his ear," he grunted. "He's been worrying me so long that I had to stop it once and for all. God knows, I don't care about this ministry; I shouldn't have much faith in any ministry formed out of the present House—the best talent's already on the Treasury Bench—and I don't believe in bringing in your superman from outside—the House of Commons can't be learned in a night, and even a government department needs study. What I object to in Grayle is his picking on me as one of his fifty or sixty new allies; you can picture him buzzing round with his fellow-conspirators—'Shall we try Oakleigh and Stornaway? They're solid, moderate, old members—highly respected. They don't add anything to the common stock, of course, but they carry more weight than the men who are always talking and playing an active part. We might try them, their names would look well on the prospectus—inspire confidence, you know.'" He chuckled maliciously. "I suppose I'm getting very old, but I can't stand young men's conceit in the way I once did. Grayle's like a boy just down from Oxford, doing everything for the first time and imagining that no one's ever done it before. Does he really think this is the first political intrigue in history? I recommended him a course of Disraeli's novels—to improve his technique. Good God! I was playing this game of detaching wobblers and handing out offices that were not in my gift and mobilising the solid, moderate, highly respected old members under Gladstone! I toiled and schemed to keep the Liberal Party out of Rosebery's hands; I was making new parties and pigeon-holing possible cabinets all through the Morley-Harcourt days, I was intriguing to keep C.-B. in command when the Liberal Leaguers intrigued to kick him into the Lords. I've been through it all; and be hanged if I didn't do it better than Grayle!"

Perhaps my manner was too sympathetic. Certainly I was not to escape so easily as Bertrand had done, for Grayle met me leaving the House and offered to drop me on his way home. I accepted because I was nominally amicable with him, because I did not want a wet walk to my hotel and because I could not decently refuse. He talked persuasively the whole way home and was obviously chagrined when I did not invite him into my rooms. He rang me up at breakfast next day and tried to secure my presence at luncheon; once at my office in St. James' Street, once in my department, and once again, when I was tranquilly dining with the Maitlands, I was called to the telephone with an apologetic but urgent request that I would arrange a time when Grayle could have five minutes' conversation with me.

My position was simple and clear. I would be neither bribed nor bullied into any kind of office, I would give no blank cheque for the future to Grayle or anyone else, but I should no doubt be found voting with him against the Government—or with the Government against him—as I had done in the past, judging every division on its merits. A note on my dressing-table informed me that Colonel Grayle had telephoned from the House at eleven.... I picked up my hat, buttoned my coat again and turned my steps towards Milford Square; a far more patient man might be excused for thinking that Grayle was making a nuisance of himself.

The servant who opened the door informed me that Colonel Grayle was out.

"I'll wait," I said. "I've got to see him."

"But he's out of town, sir. He didn't say where he was going or when he'd be back. He very often goes away like that."

The man was sleek of appearance and glib of speech, well-experienced, I thought, in shutting the door to people whom his master did not wish to see. But I did not fall within that category, and Grayle had plagued me sufficiently to justify reprisals.

"When did he go away?" I asked.

"Before dinner, sir."

"Ah, then he must have changed his plans," I said. "He telephoned to me from the House half an hour ago; he's been trying to get hold of me all day, but this is the first opportunity I've had. Is Mr. Bannerman in? If so, I'll talk to him till Colonel Grayle comes in."

"Mr. Bannerman has moved into rooms of his own," the servant told me, yielding ground reluctantly.

I walked into Grayle's smoking-room and left the man to warn him that I was in effective occupation and that he must yield to the inevitable and come down to see me, if he were already at home, or submit to a few minutes of my company when he returned. A moment later I saw that he could not yet have come back from the House, as a pile of letters awaited him on the table and the whiskey and soda set out for his refreshment were untouched. "A model servant," I said to myself, "to have everything ready when you do not expect your master home." I mixed myself a drink and was preparing to light a cigar when I found that I was without matches. On going into the hall, I found my sleek, glib friend mounting guard, as though he expected me to slip out with my pockets full of silver.

He produced a box of matches and struck one for me. As I began to light my cigar, a taxi drove into the square and drew up opposite the house.

"What name shall I tell Colonel Grayle?" asked the servant, as he held open the smoking-room door for me.

Before I had time to answer, I heard a latch-key grating in the lock; the servant moved forward and stopped irresolutely; then the door opened to admit Mrs. O'Rane. Our eyes met for a moment, and for the first time since I had known her I saw her out of countenance. In another moment it was all over, for I had backed into the smoking-room and pushed the door closed. I heard her clear, rather high voice asking whether Colonel Grayle was home yet. The servant murmured something in reply, and I caught the sound of his footsteps growing fainter along the flagged passage. Mrs. O'Rane turned the handle and came in to me, once more self-possessed and in control of herself; there was neither embarrassment nor defiance in her manner; she greeted me as she had once before greeted me, when I first met her at "The Sanctuary."

"I hope you've not been waiting long," she said. "Vincent's usually home by this time. There's not an all-night sitting or anything, is there?"

"Not so far as I know," I answered. "Mrs. O'Rane, I don't think I'll stay any longer."

She looked at my newly lighted cigar and untouched whiskey and soda.

"It's just as you like," she said. "It seems a pity to run away without seeing him, though. I presume you came to see him and not me?"

"I came to see him. I didn't know you were here."

"But I've been here the whole time. Didn't you know that?"

"We didn't."

"But where else was I likely to be?"

"Your husband never suspected that Grayle had any hand in it. I fancy you and Grayle did your best not to enlighten him. You let him think it was another man, and Grayle gave an alibi. I suppose it was all right; I'm not versed in the ethics of the thing."

I made a step towards the door, but Mrs. O'Rane was in my way.

"Yes, I don't know why Vincent said that," she observed reflectively. "Unless he thought that nobody was ever going to know.... But I'm not quite so abandoned as that. I warned you all, I told you my old married life was over; and I was free to start another. As for not enlightening anybody, it's not my business to correct all the mistakes people choose to make.... Now that you've been here, you can report everything you've seen. I'm not hiding anything, and you can say I'm not ashamed of what I've done and I'm quite prepared for all the world to know. He can divorce me as soon as he likes."

The discussion did not make me want to stay any longer in the house, and I had to ask her to let me pass.

"You can tell him that," she added carelessly.

"I don't know that he contemplates divorcing you," I said. "He's never mentioned the subject."

"But he'll have to. He can't go on being nominally married to me, when I'm—well ..."

"Are you sure you don't mean that your own position will be a shade less discreditable when Grayle marries you?" I asked. "Frankly, you haven't been thinking of your husband very much, have you?"

She sighed impatiently.

"You will keep on speaking of him as my husband."

"He is."

"Until he divorces me."

"Unless he divorces you," I substituted.