Amory sometimes thought, when she took her bird's-eye-view of the numerous activities that found each its voice in its proper place in the columns of the "Novum," that she would have allowed almost any of them to perish for lack of support rather than the Wyron's "Lectures on Love." She admitted this to be a weakness in herself, a sneaking fondness, no more; but there it was—just that one blind spot that mars even the clearest and most piercing vision. And she always smiled when Mr. Strong tried to show this weakness of hers in the light of a merit.

"No, no," she always said, "I don't defend it. Twenty things are more important really, but I can't help it. I suppose it's because we know all about Laura and Walter themselves."

"Perhaps so," Mr. Strong would musingly concede.

Anybody who was anybody knew all about Laura Beamish and Walter Wyron and a certain noble defeat in their lives that was to be accounted as more than a hundred ordinary victories. That almost historic episode had just shown everybody who was anybody what the world's standards were really worth. Hitherto the Wyrons have been spoken of both as a married couple and as "Walter Wyron" and "Laura Beamish" separately; let the slight ambiguity now be cleared up.

Mrs. Cosimo Pratt became on occasion Miss Amory Towers for reasons that began and ended in her profession as a painter; and everybody who was anybody was as well aware that Miss Amory Towers, the painter of the famous feminist picture "Barrage," was in reality Mrs. Cosimo Pratt, as the great mass of people who were nobody knew that Miss Elizabeth Thompson, the painter of "The Roll Call," was actually Lady Butler. But not so with the Wyrons. Reasons, not of business, nor yet of fame, but of a burning and inextinguishable faith, had led to their noble equivocation. Deeply seated in the hearts both of Walter and of Laura had lain a passionate non-acceptance of the merely parroted formula of the Wedding Service. So searching and fundamental had this been that by the time their various objections had been disposed of little had remained that had seemed worth bothering about; and in one sense they had not bothered about it. True, in another sense they had bothered, and that was precisely where the defeat came in; but that did not dim the splendour of the attempt. To come without further delay to the point, the Wyrons had married, under strong protest, in the ordinary everyday way, Laura submitting to the momentary indignity of a ring; but thereafter they had magnificently vindicated the New Movement (in that one aspect of it) by not saying a word about the ceremony of their marriage to anybody—no, not even to the people who were somebody. Then they had flown off to the Latin Quarter.

It had not been in the Latin Quarter, however, that the true character of their revolt had first shown. Perhaps—nobody knows—their relation had not been singular enough there. Perhaps—there were people base enough to whisper this—they had feared the singularity of "letting on." It is easy to do in the Boul' Mich' as the Boul' Mich' does. The real difficulties begin when you try to do in London what London permits only as long as you do it covertly.

And if there had been a certain covertness about their behaviour when, after a month, they had returned, what a venial and pardonable subterfuge, to what a tremendous end! Amory herself, up to then, had not had a larger conception. For while the Wyrons had secretly married simply and solely in order that their offspring should not lie under a stigma, their overt lives had been one impassioned and beautiful protest against any assumption whatever on the part of the world of a right to make rules for the generation that was to follow. No less a gospel than this formed the substance of those Lectures of Walter's; great as the number of the born was, his mission was the protection of a greater number still. The best aspects both of legitimacy and of illegitimacy were to be stereoscoped in the perfect birth. And he now had, in quite the strict sense of the word, a following. The same devoted faces followed him from the Lecture at the Putney Baths on the Monday to that at the Caxton Hall on the Thursday, from his ascending the platform at the Hampstead Town Hall on the Tuesday to his addressing of a garden-party from under the copper-beech at The Witan on the Sunday afternoon. And in course of time the faithfulness of the followers was rewarded. They graduated, so to speak, from the seats in the body of the building to the platform itself. There they supported Laura, and gave her a countenance that she no longer needed (for she had earned her right to wear her wedding-ring openly now), and flocked about the lecturer afterwards, not as about a mere man, but rather as seeing in him the physician, the psychologist, the expert, the helper, and the setter of crooked things straight that he was.

As a lecturer—may we say as a prophet?—Walter had a manner original and taking in the extreme. Anybody less sustained by his vision and less upheld by his faith might have been a little tempted to put on "side," but not so Walter. Perhaps his familiarity with the stage—everybody knew his father, Herman Wyron, of the New Greek Theatre—had taught him the value of the large and simple statement of large and simple things; anyhow, he did not so much lecture to his audiences as accompany them, chattily and companionably, through the various windings of his subject. With his hands thrust unaffectedly into the pockets of his knickers, and a sort of sublimated "Well, here we are again" expression on his face, he allayed his hearers' natural timidity before the magnitude of his mission, and gave them a direct and human confab. on a subject that returned as it were from its cycle of vastness to simple personal experience again. His every sentence seemed to say, "Don't be afraid; it's nothing really; soon you'll be as much at your ease in dealing with these things as I am; just let me tell you an anecdote." No wonder Laura held her long and muscular neck very straight above her hand-embroidered yoke. Everybody understood that unless she adopted some sort of an attitude her proper pride in such a married lover must show, which would have been rather rubbing it in to the rest of her sex. So she booked dates for new lectures almost nonchalantly, and, when the platform was invaded at the end of the Lecture, or Walter stepped down to the level of those below, she was there in person as the final demonstration of how well these things actually would work as soon as Society had decided upon some concerted action.

Corin and Bonniebell, Amory's twins, did not attend Walter's Lectures. It was not deemed advisable to keep them out of bed so late at night. But Miss Britomart Belchamber, the governess, could have passed—had in fact passed—an examination in them. It had been Amory who, so to speak, had set the paper. For it had been at one of the Lectures—the one on "The Future Race: Are We Making Manacles?"—that Miss Belchamber had first impressed Amory favourably. Amory had singled her out, first because she wore the guarantee of Prince Eadmond's Collegiate Institution—the leather-belted brown sleeveless djibbah with the garment of fine buff fabric showing beneath it as the fruit of a roasted chestnut shows when the rind splits—and secondly because of her admirable physique. She was splendidly fair, straight as an athlete, and could shut up her long and massive limbs in a wicker chair like a clasp-knife; and for her movements alone it was almost a sin that Walter's father could not secure her for the New Greek Society's revival of "Europa" at the Choragus Theatre. And she was not too quick mentally. That is not to say that she was a fool. What made Amory sure that she was not a fool was that she herself was not instinctively attracted by fools, and it was better that Miss Belchamber should be ductile under the influence of Walter's ideas than that she should have just wit enough to ask those stupid and conventional and so-called "practical" questions that Walter always answered at the close of the evening as patiently as if he had never heard them before. And Miss Belchamber told the twins stories, and danced "Rufty Tufty," with them, and "Catching of Quails," and was really cheap at her rather stiff salary. Cosimo loved to watch her at "Catching of Quails." If the children did not grow up with a love of beauty after that, he said, he gave it up. (The twins, by the way, unconsciously served Amory as another example of Dorothy Tasker's unreasonableness. As the mother of Noel and Jackie, Dorothy seemed rather to fancy herself as an experienced woman. But Amory could afford to smile at this pretension. There was a difference in age of a year and more between Noel and Jackie. No doubt Dorothy knew a little, but she, Amory, could have told her a thing or two).

On a Wednesday afternoon about a fortnight after Lady Tasker's visit to The Witan, Amory walked the garden thoughtfully. The weather was growing chilly, the hammock had been taken in, and her feet in the fallen leaves made a melancholy sound. Cosimo had left her half an hour before; certain points had struck him in the course of conversation which he thought ought to be incorporated in the "Life and Work"; and it was a rule at The Witan that nothing must ever be allowed to interfere with the impulse of artistic creation. For the matter of that, Amory herself was creating now, or at any rate was at the last preparatory stage that immediately precedes creation. Presently she would have taken the plunge and would be deep in the new number of the "Novum." For the moment she was thinking of Mr. Strong.

As she tried to clear up exactly what place Mr. Strong had in her thoughts she was struck by the dreadful tendency words and names and definitions have to attach themselves to vulgar and ready-made meanings—a tendency so strong that she had even caught herself more than once jumping to a common conclusion. To take an example, though a rather preposterous one. Had Dorothy, with one of her ridiculous advertisements waiting to be done, confessed to her that instead of setting about it she was thinking of a male person with a pair of alert blue eyes and a curiously mobile and clean-cut mouth (not that it was likely that Dorothy would have had the candour to make such a confession)—well, Amory might have smiled just like anybody else. She was not trying to make herself out any better than others. She was candid about it, however, which they were often not.

Still, the trouble about her feeling for Mr. Strong was to find a word for it that had not been vulgarized. She was, of course, exceedingly interested in him, but that was not saying very much. She "liked" him, too, but that again might mean anything. Her difficulty was that she herself was so special; and so on second thoughts she might have been right in giving an interpretation to Dorothy's actions, and Dorothy quite wrong in giving the same interpretation to hers merely because the data were the same.

Nor had Mr. Strong himself been able to help her very much when, a couple of days before, she had put the question to him, earnestly and without hateful false shame.

"What is this relation of ours?" she had asked him, point-blank and fearlessly.

"Eh?" Mr. Strong had replied, a little startled.

"There must be a relation of some sort between every two people who come into contact. I'm just wondering exactly what ours is."

Then Mr. Strong had knitted his brows and had said, presently, "I see.... Have you read 'The Tragic Comedians?'"—Amory had not, and the copy of the book which she had immediately ordered had not come yet. And then she too had knitted her brows. She had caught the trick from him.

"I suppose that what it really comes to is knowing yourself," she had mused; and at that Mr. Strong had given her a quick approving look, almost as if he said that if she put in her thumb in the same place again she might pull out a plum very well worth having.

"And not," Amory had continued, curiously heartened, "anything about the other person at all."

"Good, good," Mr. Strong had applauded under his breath; "have you Edward Carpenter's book in the house, by the way?... Never mind: I'll send you my copy."

He had sent it. It was in Amory's hand now. She had discovered that it had a catching and not easily identifiable smell of its own, of Virginia cigarettes and damp and she knew not what else, all mingled; and somehow the smell seemed quite as much an answer to the question she had asked as anything in the book itself.

Nor, despite Walter's special knowledge of these indications, could she go to the Wyrons for diagnosis and advice. For one thing, there was her own position of high patronage to be considered; for another, splendidly daring as the Wyrons' original protest had been, the Lectures had lately begun to have a little the air of a shop, over the counter of which admittedly valuable specifics were handed, but with a kind of "And the next article, please?" suspicion about it. Besides, the Wyrons, having no children, had of necessity to "chic" a little in cases where children formed a complicating element. Besides ... but anyway, Amory wasn't going either to Laura Beamish or to Walter Wyron.

She made a charming picture as she walked slowly the length of the privet hedge and then turned towards the copper beech again. Mr. Strong had said that he liked her in that dress—an aluminium-grey one, very simple and very expensive, worn with a handsome Indian shawl, a gift of Mr. Prang's, the mellow colour of which "led up" to the glowing casque of her hair; and she had smiled when Mr. Strong had added that Britomart Belchamber's rough tabards and the half-gym costume in which she danced "Rufty Tufty" would not have suited her, Amory, at all. Probably they wouldn't—not as a regular thing. Cosimo liked those, especially when the wearer was largish; indeed, it was one of Cosimo's humours to pose as Britomart's admirer. But Amory was small, and never shut her limbs up like a multiple-lever in a basket chair, but drew her skirt down a foot or so below her toes instead whenever she sat down. She fancied, though Mr. Strong had never used the word, that the "Novum's" editor found Miss Belchamber just a little hoydenish.

Amory wished that something would bring Mr. Strong up that afternoon. It was one of the days on which the editing of the "Novum" could take care of itself, and besides, they would actually be editing it together. For the next number but one—the forthcoming one was already passed—was to be their most important utterance yet. It was to indicate clearly, firmly and once for all, their Indian policy. The threatened failure of the monsoon made the occasion urgent, and Mr. Suwarree Prang himself had explained to Amory only the night before precisely what the monsoon was, and how its failure would provide, from the point of view of those who held that the present wicked regime of administration by the strong hand was at last tottering to its fall, a providential opportunity. It had struck Amory as wondrously romantic and strange that a meteorological condition half-way round the world, in a place she had never seen, should thus change the course of her quiet life in Hampstead; but, properly considered, no one thing in this wonderful world was more wonderful than another. It was Life, and Life, as she remembered to have read somewhere or other, is for the Masters of it. And she was beginning to find that after all these things only required a little confidence. It was as easy to swim in six miles deep of water, like that place in Cosimo's atlas of which the name escaped her for the moment, as it was in six feet. And Mr. Prang had talked to her so long and so vividly about India that she sometimes found it quite difficult to realize that she had never been there.

Still wishing that Mr. Strong would come, she slowly left the garden and entered the house. In the hall she paused for a moment, and a tender little smile softened her face. She had stopped before the exquisite casts of the foot and the arm. Pensively she took the foot up from the console table, and then, coming to a resolution, she took the arm down from its hook on the wall. After all, beautiful as she had to admit them to be, the studio, and not the hall, was the proper place for them.

With the foot and Edward Carpenter in her left hand, and the plaster arm hugged to her right breast, she walked along the passage and sought the studio.

It was called the studio, and there certainly were canvases and easels and other artists' paraphernalia there, but it was less used for painting than as a room for sitting and smoking and tea and discussion. It was a comfortable apartment. Rugs made islands on the thick cork floor-covering, and among the rugs were saddlebag chairs, a long adjustable chair, and a wide couch covered with faded tapestry. The room was an annex of corrugated iron lined with matchboarding, but electric-light fittings depended from the iron ties overhead, and in place of an ordinary hearth was a sort of stage one, with an imitation log of asbestos, which, when you put a match to it, broke into a licking of blue and yellow gas-jets. The north window occupied the whole of the garden end, and, facing it, was the large cartoon for Amory's unfinished allegorical picture, "The Triumph of Humane Government." High up and just within the door was the bell that answered to the button outside.

Amory was putting down the casts on a Benares tray when the ringing of this bell startled her. But as it rang in the kitchen also, she did not move to answer it. She stood listening, the fingers of one hand to her lips, those of the other still resting on the plaster shoulder. Then she heard a voice, and a moment later there came a tap at the door.

It was Mr. Strong.

He advanced, and did a thing he had not done before—lifted the hand she extended to his lips and then let it drop again. But Amory was not surprised. It was merely a new and natural expression of the homage he had never concealed, and even had Amory been vain enough to suppose that it meant anything more, the briskness of the "Good afternoon" that followed it would have disabused her. "Glad I found you," Mr. Strong said. "I wanted to see you. Cosimo in?"

Her husband was always Cosimo to him, but in speaking to herself he used no name at all. It was as if he hesitated to call her Amory, and refused to call her Mrs. Pratt. Even "Miss Towers" he had only used once, and that was some time ago.

Amory's fingers left the cast, and Mr. Strong walked towards the asbestos log.—"May I?" he said, drawing forth a packet of Virginia cigarettes; and afterwards he put the match with which he lighted one of the cigarettes to the log. Amory drew up a small square footstool, and put her elbows on her knees and her interwoven fingers beneath her chin. Mr. Strong examined the end of his cigarette, and thrust his chin down into his red tie and his hands deep into his trousers pockets. Then he seemed to plunge into thought.

Suddenly he shot a glance at Amory, and said abruptly, "I suppose you've talked over the Indian policy with Cosimo?"

It was nice and punctilious of him, the way he always dragged Cosimo in, and Amory liked it. She felt sure that the editor of the "Times," calling on the Prime Minister's wife, would not ignore the Prime Minister. But to-day she was a little abstracted—dull—she didn't know exactly what; and so she replied, without moving, "Would you like him here? He's busy with the 'Life'."

"Oh no, don't trouble him then."

There was a pause. Then, "I did talk to him about it. And to Mr. Prang," Amory said.

"Oh. Hm. Quite so," said Mr. Strong, looking at the toes of his brogues.

"Yes. Mr. Prang was here last night," Amory continued, looking at the points of her own slippers.

"Yes."

Again Mr. Strong's chin was sunk into his red tie. He was rising and falling slowly on his toes. His eyes moved ruminatively sideways to the rug at Amory's feet.

"Yes. Yes. I've been wondering——" he said thoughtfully.

"Well?"

"Oh, nothing really. I dare say I'm quite wrong. You see, Prang——"

"What?" Amory asked as he paused again.

There was a twinkle in the eyes that rose to Amory's. Mr. Strong gave a slight shrug.—"Well—Prang!——" he said with humorous deprecation.

Amory was quick.—"Oh!—You don't mean that Mr. Prang isn't sound?"

"Sound? Perfectly, perfectly. And a most capable fellow. Only I've wondered once or twice whether he isn't—you know—just a little too capable.... You see, we want to use Prang—not to have Prang using us."

Amory could not forbear to smile. If that was all that was troubling Mr. Strong she thought she could reassure him.

"I don't think you'd have been afraid of that if you'd been here last night," she replied quietly. "We were talking over England's diabolical misrule, and I never knew Mr. Prang so luminous. It was pathetic—really. Cosimo was talking about that Rawal Pindi case—you know, of that ruffianly young subaltern drawing down the blinds and then beating the native.—'But how do they take it?' I asked Mr. Prang, rather scornfully, you know; and really I was sorry for the poor fellow, having to apologize for his country.—'That's it,' he said sadly—it was really sad.—And he told me, frankly, that sometimes the poor natives pretended they were killed, and sometimes they announce that they're going to die on a certain day, and they really do die—they're so mystic and sensitive—it was most interesting.... But what I mean is, that a gentle and submissive people like that—Mr. Prang admits that's their weakness—I mean they couldn't use us! It's our degradation that we aren't gentle and sensitive too. You see what I mean?"

"Oh, quite," Mr. Strong jerked out. "Quite."

"And that's why I call Mr. Prang an idealist. There must be something in the East. At any rate it was splendid moral courage on Prang's part to say, quite openly, that they couldn't do anything without the little handful of us here, but must simply go on suffering and dying."

There fell one of the silences that usually came when Mr. Strong lost interest in a subject. Merely adding, "Oh, I've not a word to say against Prang, but——," he began to rise and fall on his toes again. Then he stepped to the Benares table where the casts were. But he made no criticism of them. He picked the foot up, and put it down again. "I like it," he said, and returned once more to the asbestos hearth. The silence fell again.

Amory, sitting on the footstool with her knees supporting her elbows and her wrists supporting her chin, would have liked to offer Mr. Strong a penny for his thoughts. She had had an odd, warm little sensation when he had picked up that cast of the perfect foot. She supposed he must know that it was her foot, but so widely had his thoughts been ranging that he had merely put it down again with an abstracted "I like it." Amory was not sure that any other woman than herself would not have been piqued. Any other woman would have expected him either not to look at the thing, or else to say that it was small, or to ask whether the real one was as white, or something foolish like that. But Amory was superior to such things. She lived on higher levels. On these levels such an affront to the pure intellect as a flirtation could not exist. Free Love as a logical and defensible system—yes, perhaps; or a combination so happy of marriage and cohabitation as that of the Wyrons'—yes again; but anything lower she left to the stupid people who swallowed the conventions whole, including the convention of not being found out.—So she merely wondered about their relation again. Obviously, there must be a relation. And yet his own explanation had been quite insufficient; it had been no explanation at all to ask her whether she had read "The Tragic Comedians" or whether she had Edward Carpenter in the house. No doubt it was flattering to her intelligence to suppose that she could "flash" at his meaning without further words on his part, but it was also a little irritating when the flash didn't come. And, now that she came to think of it, except that he allowed it to be inferred that he found Britomart Belchamber a bit lumpish, she didn't know what he thought, not merely of herself, but of women at all.

And yet there was a passed-through-the-furnace look about him that might have piqued any woman. It was not conceivable that his eyes had softened only over inspired passages in proof, or that the tenderest speeches his lips had shaped had been the "Novum's" rallying-cries to the devoted band of the New Imperialists. Amory was sure that his memory must be a maze of things, less spacious perhaps, but far more interesting than these. He looked widely now, but must have looked close and intense too. He pronounced upon the Empire, but, for all he was not married, must have probed deep into the palpitating human heart as well.

Amory was just thinking what a gage of intimacy an unembarrassed silence can be when Mr. Strong broke it. He lighted another cigarette at the end of the last, turned, threw the end on the asbestos log, and stood looking at the purring blue and yellow jets. No doubt he was full of the Indian policy again.

But as it happened it was not the Indian policy—"Oh," Mr. Strong said, "I meant to ask you—Who was that fellow who came up here one day?"

This was so vague that when Amory said "What fellow?" Mr. Strong himself saw the vagueness, and laughed.

"Of course: 'How big is a piece of wood?'—I mean the fellow who came to The Witan in a morning-coat?"

This was description enough. Amory's back straightened a little.

"Oh, Stanhope Tasker! Oh, just the husband of a friend of mine. I don't think you've met her. Why?"

Surely, she thought, Mr. Strong was not going to tell her that "Stanhope Tasker was an excellent fellow in his way, but——," as he had said of Mr. Brimby, Mr. Wilkinson and Mr. Prang!——

"Oh, nothing much. Only that I saw him to-day," Strong replied offhandedly.

"He's often about. He isn't a very busy man, I should say," Amory remarked.

"Saw him in Charing Cross Road as I was coming out of the office," Mr. Strong continued. "I don't think he saw me though."

"After his abominable manners to you that day I should think he'd be ashamed to look you in the face."

For a moment Mr. Strong looked puzzled; then he remembered, and laughed again.

"Oh, I didn't mind that in the least! Rather refreshing in fact. Far more likely he didn't notice me because he had his wife with him. I think you said he was married?"

Amory was just about to say that Mr. Strong gave Stan far more magnanimity than he deserved when a thought arrested her. Dorothy in Charing Cross Road! As far as she was aware Dorothy had not been out of Hampstead for weeks, and even then kept to the less frequented parts of the Heath. It wasn't likely....

Her eyes became thoughtful.

"Oh? That's funny," she said.

"What, that he shouldn't see me? Oh no. They seemed far more interested in electric-light fittings."

Amory's eyes grew more thoughtful still—"Oh!" she said; and added, "Did you think her pretty?"

"Hm—in a way. Very well dressed certainly; they both were. But I don't think these black Spanish types amuse me much," Mr. Strong replied.

Dorothy a black Spanish type!

"Oh, do tell me what she had on!" said Amory brightly.

She rather thought she knew most of Dorothy's dresses by this time.

A black Spanish type!

The task of description was too much for Mr. Strong, but he did his best with it. Amory was keenly interested. But she pocketed her interest for the present, and said quite banteringly and with an almost arch look, "Oh, I should have thought Mrs. Tasker exactly your type!"

Again the quick motion of Mr. Strong's blue eyes suggested an audible click—"Oh? Why?" he asked.

"Oh, there's no 'why' about it, of course. It's the impression of you I had, that's all. You see, you don't particularly admire Miss Belchamber——"

"Oh, come! I think Miss Belchamber's an exceedingly nice girl, only——"

"Well, Laura Beamish, then. But I forgot; you don't go to Walter's Lectures. But I wonder whether you'd admire Laura?"

"If she's black and Spanish you think I should?" He paused. "Is she?"

"No. Brown and stringy rather, and with eyes that open and shut very quickly.... But I'm very absurd. There's no Law about these things really. Only, you see, I've no idea of the kind of woman you do admire?"

She said it smilingly, but that did not mean that she was not perfectly candid and natural about it too. Why not be natural about these things? Amory knew people who were natural enough about their preferred foods and clothing and houses; was a woman less than an entrÉe, or a bungalow, or a summer overcoat? Besides, it was so very much more intrinsically interesting. Walter Wyron had made a whole Lecture on it—Lecture No. II, "Types and Tact," and Walter had barely touched the fringe of the subject. Amory wanted to go a little deeper than that. But she also wanted to get away from those vulgarized words and ready-made conclusions, and to have each case considered on its merits. Surely it ought to be possible to say that the presence of a person affected you pleasantly, or unpleasantly, without sniggering inferences of a liaison in the one case or of a rupture in the other!

Therefore it was once more just a little irritating that Mr. Strong, instead of telling her what type he did admire, should merely laugh and say, "Well—not Mrs. Tasker." If Amory had a criticism at all to make of Mr. Strong it was this habit of his of negatives, that sometimes almost justified the nickname Mr. Brimby had given him, of "Stone Wall Strong." So she dropped one hand from her chin, allowing it to hang loose over her knee while the other forearm still kept its swan's-neck curve, and said abruptly, "Well—about the Indian Number. Let's get on."

"Ah, yes," said Mr. Strong. "Let's get on."

"What had we decided?"

"Only Prang's article so far."

"But you say you have your doubts about it?"

Mr. Strong hesitated. "Only about its selling-power," he said with a little shrug. "We must sell the paper, you see. It's not paying its way yet."

"Well, I'm sure that's not Mr. Prang's fault," Amory retorted. "He's practically made the export circulation."

"You mean the Bombay circulation? Yes, I suppose he has. I don't deny it."

"You can't deny it. Since Prang began to write for us we've done awfully well in Bombay."

To that too, Mr. Strong assented. Then Amory, after a moment's pause, spoke quietly. She did not like to think of her editor as jealous of his own contributors.

"I know you don't like Mr. Prang," she said, looking fixedly at the asbestos log.

"I!" began Stone Wall Strong. "Why, you know I think he's a first rate fellow, if only——"

This time, however, Amory really did intend to get it out of him. For once she would have one of those hung-up sentences completed.

"If only what?" she said, looking up at him.

"Oh, I don't know—as you said a moment ago, there's no 'why' about these things——"

"But I did give you my impression. You don't give me yours."

"You did, I admit. Yes, I admit you did.... What is it you want to know, then?"

"Only why you seem so doubtful about Mr. Prang."

"Ah!" said Mr. Strong....

Those who knew Edgar Strong the best said that he was a man who, other things being equal, would rather go straight than not. Even when the other things were not quite equal, he still had a mild preference for straightness. But if other people positively insisted that he should deviate from straightness, very well; that was their look-out. He had been a good many things in his time—solicitor's clerk, free-lance journalist, book-pedlar, election-agent's minion, Vanner, poetic vagabond, and always an unerring "spotter" of the literary son of the farming squire the moment he appeared in sight; and the "Novum" was the softest job he had found yet. If the price of his keeping it was that he should look its owner's wife long and earnestly in the eyes, as if in his own there lay immeasurable things, not for him to give but for her to take if she list, so be it; he would sleep none the less well in his rent-free bedroom behind the "Novum's" offices afterwards. His experience of far less comfortable sleeping-quarters had persuaded him that in this imperfect world a man is entitled to exactly what he can get.

His eyes, nevertheless, did not seek Amory's. Instead, roving round the room to see if nothing less would serve (leaving him still with the fathomless look in reserve for emergencies), they fell on the Benares tray and the casts. And as they remained there he suddenly frowned. Amory's own eyes followed his; and suddenly she felt again that little creeping thrill. A faint colour and warmth, new and pleasurable, came into her cheeks.

Then with a little rush, her discovery came upon her....

She had got something from Mr. Strong at last!

Her head drooped a little away from him, and the hand that had hung laxly over her knee dropped gently to the rug. It was a delicious moment. So all these weeks and weeks Mr. Strong had cared that that foot, that arm, had been exposed to the gaze of anybody who might have entered the house! He had not said so; he did not say so now; but that was it! More, he had cared so much that it had quite distorted his judgment of Mr. Prang. And all at once Amory remembered something else—a glance Edgar Strong had given her, neither more nor less eloquent than the look he was bending on the casts now, one afternoon when she had lain in the hammock in the garden and Mr. Prang, bending over her, had ventured to examine a locket about her throat....

So that was at the bottom of his reserve! That was the meaning of his "buts"!...

Amory did not move. She wished it might last for hours. Mr. Strong had taken a step towards the casts, but, changing his mind, had turned away again; and she was astonished to find how full of meaning dozens of his past gestures became now that she had the key to them. And she knew that the casts were beautiful. Brucciani would have bought them like a shot. And she seemed to see Mr. Strong's look, piteous and frowning both at once, if she should sell them to Brucciani, and Brucciani should publish them to hang in a hundred studios....

The silence between them continued.

But speak she must, and it would be better to do so before he did; and by and bye she lifted her head again. But she did not look directly at him.

"It was very foolish," she murmured with beautiful directness and simplicity.

Mr. Strong said nothing.

"But for weeks I've been intending to move them."

Mr. Strong shrugged his shoulders. It was as if he said, "Well better late than never ... but you see, now."

"Yes," breathed Amory, softly, but aloud.

The next moment Mr. Strong was himself again. He returned to his station by the asbestos log.

"Well, there's Prang's article," he said in his business voice. "Am I to have it set up?"

"Perhaps we'd better see what Cosimo says first," Amory replied.

She did not know which was the greater delicacy in Mr. Strong—the exquisite tact of the glance he had given at the casts, or the quiet strength with which he took up the burden of editing the "Novum" again.