The flag, so casually suggested, became in effect a very favourite toy, both with Beaufort and his stepson. The one was a very ordinary little boy, the other a highly cultivated man. But they seemed to take equal pleasure in the flutter of the flag from the blue and white staff which Tom had painted with so much trouble, and in rushing out to pull it down when Lady Car in her little pony carriage drove from the door. They sometimes tumbled over each other in their haste and zeal to perform this office. And Beau’s legs were so much the longest. It gave him a great and scarcely just advantage over Tom.

Carry was pleased, she was touched and flattered, and such vanity as she had was so delicately ministered to, that for some time this little folly which took the air of homage to her, made her feel happy. To see the grave and gentle philosopher, with a long swift stride, almost stepping over the children to get at the cord, and pull up the fluttering flag, a brilliant piece of colour among the bare trees, as she appeared with her ponies in the little avenue! It was a little absurd, but so sweet. Edward did it, she allowed herself to imagine, as he had said, for a lesson to Tom—to teach him thus broadly though symbolically the honour that was due to his mother—not to Carry individually who never claimed homage, but to the mother whose claims, perhaps, the boy was not sufficiently conscious of. This was not at all the lesson which Beaufort had intended to teach Tom—but what did that matter? It had a certain effect in that way, though none in the way that Beaufort intended. It did give Tom an impression of the importance of his mother. ‘Mother’s not just a woman like the rest,’ he said to Janet. ‘She is what you may call a great lady, Jan, don’t you know? There’s Mrs. Howard and that sort; you don’t run up flags for them. Mother’s really something like the Queen—it’s in earnest. Beau thinks so. I can tell you he’s awfully proud of mother. And so am I too.’

‘Oh, Tom, so am I.’

‘Yes, but you’re just natural. You don’t understand. But me and Beau know why we do it,’ said Tom. And when he got back to school if he did not boast so much of his place in Scotland, having acquired an uneasy sort of doubt of its magnificence, he intimated that his parentage was not like that of the others. ‘When my people drive from the door the flag goes down,’ he said. ‘It’s such fun rushing and getting hold of the rope and up with a tug, as soon as they come into the avenue. Sometimes, when it’s been raining, the rope won’t run. It’s such fun,’ cried Tom, while even Harrison major’s mouth was closed. The flag was beyond him. As for Janet, she looked on staring and observed everything, and drew many silent conclusions never perhaps to be revealed.

But when the holidays were over Carry’s anxious expectations and suspense increased again. Beaufort kept to his new toy even when Tom was gone. He would interrupt his studies, springing up, whatever he was doing, to pull down or put up that flag, till poor Carry’s heart grew sick of the little formula which accompanied all her movements. She began to feel that he liked to be disturbed and that idling forth into the air to perform this little ceremony was more delightful to him than to get on with that work, which, so far as she could make out, was not yet begun. He had found more notebooks after Tom went away, but the notebooks now began to pall a little. And slowly, slowly, Carry’s eyes began to open. She never whispered it to herself, but she began to understand, as the years went on many things that were never put into words. She became first of all very sick of the notebooks and the wonderful number of them, and all those tantalising scraps which never came to anything. Her own little poem which she had begun had gone no further. The dawning of genius—but the dawn was still going on. It had never come to be day yet. Would it ever come? Slowly, reluctantly, this began to be revealed to her, broken by many gleams of better hope, by moments when she said to herself that she was the most unjust woman in the world, grudging her husband the leisure in which alone great thoughts can develop—grudging him the very quiet which it had been the desire of her heart to attain for him. The most unjust of women! not his wife and assistant, but his judge, and so hard a one! It was bitter sweet to Carry to be able thus to condemn herself; but it did not change the position of affairs.

One evening they were seated together in a happy mood. It was summer, and it was some years after the incidents above described. Carry by this time knew almost everything about Beaufort, and what he could not or would not do. And yet her expectations were not quenched. For it is hard to obliterate hope in a woman; and now and then at intervals there would still spring up little impulses in him, and for a few days she would forget (yet all the same never forget) her dolorous discoveries and certainties. It was after one of those Élans when he had displayed every appearance of being at work for several days, and Lady Car’s heart despite of a thousand experiences had risen again, that in the evening, in a very sweet summer twilight, they sat together and watched the stars coming out over the tops of the waving trees. Janet, now grown almost to her full height—she was never very tall—had been wandering about flitting among the flowers in her white frock not unlike (at a distance) one of the great white lilies which stood about in all the borders. It was early in July, the time when these flowers are at their sweetest. The air was full of their delicate fragrance, yet not too full; for there was a little warm breeze which blew it over the whole country away to the heather and gorse on the Haslemere side, and brought back faint echoes of wilder scents, the breath of the earth and of the moors. Janet had been roaming about, never without a glance through the branches at the two figures on the lawn. She was like one of the lilies at a distance, tall for fourteen, though not tall for a full-grown woman, and slim too in the angularity of her age, though of a square solid construction which contradicted all poetical symbols. She had always an eye upon them wherever she went. Nothing had changed her spectator attitude, not even the development of many tender and loyal feelings altogether unknown to the outer world. So far as appeared outside, Janet was still the same steady little champion of her brother that she had been from her baby days, and not much more. The pair who were seated on the lawn were as always conscious of the girl’s presence, which was a certain restraint upon their freedom. There was not between them all the same ease that generally exists in a family. Though she was quite out of hearing, they did not even talk with perfect freedom. When she had gone to bed, called by the all-authoritative nurse of whom even her mistress was a little afraid, Beaufort drew a long breath. He had a sort of habitual tenderness for Janet as a child who had grown up under his eyes and was one of the accessories of daily life. But yet he was more at his ease when she was gone. ‘How dark it is getting!’ he said; ‘the light comes from the lilies not from the sky, and Janet’s white frock, now she has gone, has taken a little away.’

‘My poor little Janet,’ said Lady Car. ‘I wish I could think she would be one of those who give light.’

‘Like her mother. It is a pity they are so little like you Carry. Both the same type, and that so much inferior. But children are very perverse in their resemblances as much as in other things.’

‘Nobody can say Janet is perverse,’ said Lady Car with that parental feeling which, though not enthusiastic itself, can bear no remark upon the children who are its very own; and then she went back to a more interesting subject. ‘Edward, in that chapter you have just begun——’

‘My dearest, let us throw all the chapters to the winds. In this calm and sweetness what do we want with those wretched little philosophical pretences? The world as far as we can see it seems all at peace.’

‘But there is trouble in it, Edward, all the same, trouble to be set right.’

‘Not much, so far as we can see. There is nothing very far wrong in our little town: every “poor person,” as you ladies call them, has half-a-dozen soft philanthropists after him to set him right; and we don’t even see the town. Look at all those dim lines of country, Carry. What a breadth in them, and no harm anywhere, the earth almost as soft as the sky! Don’t let us think of anything, but only how sweet it all is. I am glad that shrubbery was cut away. I like to see over half the world—which is what we are doing—as far as eye can carry, it comes to much the same. May I light my cigarette?’

‘Edward,’ she cried, ‘it is all quite true. There is not much harm just here; but think how much there is in the world, how helpless the poor people are, how little, how little they can do. And what does it matter that we all try a little in the way of charity? Right principles are the only things that can set us all right. I have heard you say a hundred times—in the old days——’

‘You have heard me say a great deal of nonsense in the old days.’

‘Was it all nonsense,’ cried Lady Car, ‘all that was said and thought then? There seemed so many splendid things we could do; set up a standard of higher justice, show a better way both to the poor and the rich, and—and other things. I love the landscape and the sweet evening, Edward, oh so much! and to sit and look at them with you, and to feel all the peace around us, and the quiet, and that there is no reason why we should not be happy; but better than that I should love to see you lift up that standard, and show the better way, you who can do it, you who understand all the problems. That is what I wish, that is what I have always wished—above all, above all!’ she cried, clasping her hands. The enthusiasm of her sensitive nature overwhelmed Carry. She could not contain herself any longer. ‘I would rather even not have been happy and seen you great and doing great work,’ she said.

He stretched out his hand and took hers which he held and caressed softly. ‘My dear little enthusiast!’ he said.

‘Don’t say that, Edward!’ she cried quickly; ‘that was all very well in the old days, which you say were nonsense. I was only a girl then, but now I am middle-aged and not to be put off in that way. I am not a little enthusiast, I am an anxious woman. You should not put me off with phrases of the past.’

‘You are always a girl, Carry, if you should live to be a thousand,’ he said with a faint laugh. ‘If you were so middle-aged as you say, you would be content with results as we have them. Here we are, we two, together with all the happiness we once so eagerly looked forward to, and which seemed for a time hopeless—very well off, thanks to you. Able to surround ourselves with everything that is delightful and pleasant, besides the central fact of being together, able to help our poor neighbours in a practical way: thanks to you again. Not so much as a crumple in our bed of roses—not a thorn. My dear, that is what you would think of, if you were middle-aged as you say.’

‘Then let me be a silly girl, as in the old times,’ she cried, ‘though it was all nonsense, nothing but nonsense, as you say.’

‘Softly, softly,’ he said, taking her hand again, ‘let us discriminate, Carry. Love can never be nonsense which has lasted like ours. My love, you must not blaspheme.’

‘Love!’ she cried. Carry’s whole frame was trembling, her heart beating to her feet, to her fingers, in her throat. She seemed to herself only to be a slim sheath, the merest covering for that convulsive heart. There was something like—could it be scorn in the inflection of her voice. He took her by both hands now, throwing down the cigarette which had betokened the entire ease of his mind, and drew her towards him. Something like alarm had come into his tone, and something like indignation too.

‘Carry,’ he said, holding her hands fast, ‘Carry, what do you mean? Not that my love was nonsense, which never wavered from you, notwithstanding everything—not that you distrust me?’

The darkness is an advantage in many an interview like this. It prevented him from seeing all that was in Lady Car’s face, the impetuous terrible question, the impulse of wild scepticism and unbelief, the intolerable impatience of the idealist not to be altogether restrained. Her eyes asked what her lips could never say. Why did you leave me to be another man’s wife? Why let me be strained, humbled, trodden under foot? Why expose me to all the degradations which nobody could impose on you—and why, why? But Carry said none of these things. She could not. There are some things which the religion of the heart forbids ever to be put in words. She could not say them. He might have read them in her eyes, but the darkness kept that revelation from him which would have been more startling than anything Beaufort had ever encountered in his life. Finally Carry, being only a woman, and a sensitive and delicate one, fell into the universal feminine anti-climax, the foolishness of tears. How often does their irrestrainable non-sequitur put the deepest reasons out of court, and turn the most solemn burden of the soul into apparent foolishness—a woman’s tears, which often gain a foolish cause, but as often lose a strong one, reducing the deep-hearted to the level of the shallow, and placing the greatest offender in the delightful superior position of the man who makes allowances for and pardons! Beaufort gathered her into his arms, made her have her cry out upon his shoulder, soothed and calmed and caressed her out of her passion of feeling. If any one could have whispered in his ear what was in the passionate heart that throbbed on his shoulder! but he would have smiled and would not have believed. She was a little enthusiast, still the same young ethereal poet as ever, a creature made up of lovely impulses and sympathies and nerve and feelings—his sweet Carry, his only love.

After this evening Lady Car had a little illness, nothing of any consequence, a chill taken sitting out too late on the lawn, a headache, probably neuralgic—a little ailment, quite simple, such as ladies often have, keeping them, in their rooms and dressing-gowns for a day or two. A woman scarcely respects herself who has not these little breaks from time to time, just to show of what delicate and fragile stuff she is made. But she emerged from her room a little different, no one could quite tell how, with a different look in her face, quieter, less given to restless fits, more composed and gentle. She had always been gentle, with the softest manners in the world, so that the change was not apparent to the vulgar. Beaufort perceived it for the first day or two, and it gave him a faint shock, as of something invisible, some sudden mystery between them; but the feeling passed over very quickly with a conviction of the utter absurdity of any such impression. Janet, who had never any words in which to convey her discoveries, and no one to say them to if she had found the words, saw it more clearly, and knew that something had happened, though what she could not divine. There were some faint changes scarcely perceptible, but developing gradually, in Lady Car’s habits too. She was less in the library with her husband, abandoning this custom very slowly in the most natural way in the world, compelled by other duties which naturally, with a daughter growing up, became more important every day.