I

Some time or other during the period of my engagement to Miss Windus (an episode of my history I am now approaching), I happened to remark on the pleasant arrangement that had removed many of the temptations of London from Archie Merridew's path by giving him a "home from home"—the wholesome influence of the Soames' house in Woburn Place. My charmer agreed with me that no arrangement could have been happier. It is of that arrangement that I must now speak. But first I must tell you as much as I can recollect of the party with which the Christmas term closed.

Little as things of that kind appeal to me, I had been to that breaking-up party. Why I had deliberately sought this misery I find it difficult to say. It had been Miss Levey who, the very evening before the result of the Method examination had been announced, had broached the matter to me, and that of itself would doubtless have decided me had it not been for Miss Causton, who had come up just as I was refusing.

"Mr Jeffries says he won't come!" Miss Levey had said, turning to Miss Causton, "but we want a few of the seniors as guests—you and Mr Mackie and Mr Weston—you're the lights of the college, you know."

I had been quite unaware that my mental comment on her "we" had shown in my face (she was quite twenty-five), but apparently it had, for she had added, with a laugh that had struck me as contemptuous even of herself, "Oh, I call myself a junior too!" and had turned away.

Of course I ought not to have gone, and, after I had learned of my failure in Method, I had been on the point of renewing my refusal. But then there had seized me an almost mad desire to see how much I really could endure with a smile (Evie and Archie, of course, had been among the first to accept). So the very thing that ought to have kept me away had driven me there. Of this extreme of perversity I am afraid I must ask you to find what explanation you can. I am merely setting down the thing as it occurred.

So I had gone, though, to Miss Levey's disappointment, sans "lady," and had had, moreover, the pleasure, such as it was, of also disappointing those who had expected that my failure in Method would plunge me into gloom. I was far beyond gloom. Mere gloom would not have expressed my feelings; it would have lacked the ecstasy of my misery. So I daresay I had appeared, not less, but more cheerful than my ordinary, and perhaps that was even set down as courage that was merely the numbing of sensibility.

A most extraordinary experience to me that party had been. On the occasion of the Method examination screens and tables had had to be imported, but this time the opposite had been done, and all day half-a-dozen of the students had been busy, stacking desks and tables away in the old ledger-room and clearing the lecture-room for dancing. The senior classroom had been turned into a refreshment-room, and an upright piano had been got in and lifted upon Weston's lecturing dais. Blackboards indicated the way to the ladies' cloak-room (the library) and that of the men (the room with the washbowls), and by the time I had arrived, at half-past eight, everybody had assembled. Nine had been fixed as the hour when dancing was to begin.

Sisters and friends had brought up the number of women to perhaps a dozen, and Miss Levey had not failed to remark on my coming alone. Her short legs had started to bring her to me almost before I had looked about me.

"Oh, Mr Jeffries—then you haven't brought a lady friend!" she had reproached me. "I hope you understood that the invite was for two!" At this, setting my face into a rocky smile that had remained on it thence forward, I had looked at her over her fan.

"Oh?" I had said. "Then it was my 'lady friend,' not me, you wanted to see?"

But she had been equal to me. "Oh no—but there are three times as many gentlemen as ladies, you know. Come and let me introduce you——"

But I had evaded this, preferring, in the words of Mackie, who had passed just then, to "paper the wall."

From my station by the thrown-back folding-doors of the lecture-room, with that carved smile on my face for all the world as if my heart had been temporarily atrophied, I had been able to look even on Evie almost unmoved. The whole scene had been a haggard but quite painless nightmare to me. When, at nine o'clock, the piano had begun to play, I had watched the men in their black sparrow-tails and white gloves, stooping, posturing, offering arms, revolving, as if the picture had been a flat representation, lacking a dimension, the blackboard behind the pianist and the old bells like interrogation-marks above his head quite as important as the moving figures. And I had smiled and smiled. After all, one might as well smile as not. Once you had got the smile into its place it was just as easy. Really it would have been the taking of it off again that would have required the mental effort.

It was as I had stood there that Miss Causton had come up to me and asked me if I did not dance. Her voice, as she had done so, had hardly detached itself in my mind from the noise about us, and even her figure, lending as it were its own life to her dress of oyster-grey, had seemed no less flat and diagrammatic than the rest of the scene. "No," I had said, and "No," she had repeated, with a nod, "getting the piano up and down would be more your style, for it nearly killed those boys this afternoon.... But won't you let me teach you?"

"I've no gloves."

"Gloves!" she had said softly.

And so, since besides smiling one may as well dance as not, I had taken a dancing lesson from Miss Causton. But we had only gone twice round the room—for which, considering my weight, I could hardly have blamed her, and then, panting a little, she had proposed a rest. And in the very bay from which I had once overheard her conversation with Miss Windus I had talked civilities to her, still smiling. I had asked whether she was coming back after Christmas and had been told "Yes," and when, by-and-by, as being less trouble than thinking of a new one, I had put the same question to Miss Levey, I had got a "Yes" from her also. After that I had worked that question really hard, putting it at least once more to Miss Levey, and once to somebody who was not at the college at all, after which I had found a new one, I forget what, making two quite useful social accomplishments. Once again Miss Causton had come up to me. "——since you don't come to me," I remember her saying; "I should like some coffee." But she had barely tasted the coffee I fetched her—I remember wondering whether I ought to take her to the coffee or fetch the coffee to her—and then, just in the middle of my third brilliant conversational find, she had suddenly got up and left me.

And so on. The last had been similarly phantasmagoric. I had smiled when Evie had come up and said reproachfully: "You can dance with Louie!" and again when she had said: "I should like something to drink—no, you mustn't fetch it—when you're asked for those things in the middle of a dance it means that somebody wants to sit out with you—but, oh dear! I forgotten that this was Archie's, and here he is!..." It hadn't hurt much but I had had enough. The last person I distinctly remember speaking to was Miss Levey, who had said that I really must bring "somebody" to the next social. They had still been dancing when I left.

Now that the disaster of my failure had befallen me, a year must elapse before I could make a second attempt; and so it became quite unnecessary that I should return to the college after the Christmas vacation of a month. The faraway autumn would be early enough for that. The fees, small as they were, came fearfully heavy on me, and I could study in the Patent Office Library for nothing.

But I wished to return in January. My many reasons for this are clear to you. To the more obvious of them I will only add, that I seemed now to be doomed to remain at Rixon Tebb & Masters' for another year, and, now that that strange and rather frightening calm of that night of the breaking-up party had passed, I simply could not face the time ahead without the alleviation, or at least the change of pain, that the prospect of seeing Evie afforded.

So I decided to continue my course.

The days until the college should reopen on the 21st of February were—I almost said purgatory to me, but in truth they purged me little. It was the rainiest and muddiest of Christmas weeks; nobody was out of doors who had a fire to sit by and leisure to sit by it, and the streets were a bobbing of umbrellas and a squirting of mud about the turned-up trousers of men and the skirts of women lifted to their wearers cared not where. I tried to make the use of dubbin take the place of the resoling of my boots, and in my chamber, which was warmed only by my oil-stove, my garments never dried. It was a short week at Rixon Tebb & Masters', we were paid short too, and I shall never forget my Christmas dinner of that year. For a fit of desperation and impotent rebellion took me. I went for a change to another "pull-up" than my usual one, and there paid tenpence for a wholly insufficient dinner. I rebelled, I say. I brought my fist down on the table, and out of sheer recklessness ordered the whole lot over again. This proved too much for me. I couldn't eat half of it, but I didn't care. How I was going to recoup myself for the double cost afterwards I didn't know. If I had to have more money, I knew I should have to get it somehow, that was all.

That was a villainous Christmas for me!

And I was alone—Archie at Guildford, Evie and her aunt I didn't know where, perhaps at Guildford too, everybody with homes to go to and faces to talk to over a fire. Archie's absence, too, cost me several sixpences—the price of the hot baths I could not very well ask for at his quarters while he was away. I spent my evenings in the Patent Office Library, where it was warm.

I was glad when Christmas was over. I felt somehow that I was not missing quite so much.

Then those who had been away for a holiday came back; the second and third weeks of January passed; and on the twenty-first, a Monday, I went to the college again, as piteously joyful as if I had been an outcast returning to open and welcoming arms again.

There were changes at the college. New students had come, several of the old ones had left, among them Mackie, whose course was finished, and we had a new "professor," who, it was said, was to start an advertisement-writing class. But the biggest gap seemed to be left by Miss Levey and Miss Causton, neither of whom, in spite of their answers to my question at the breaking-up party, had returned. Miss Levey, indeed was not returning; she had got a job; and I do not conceal that this was a small relief to me. It put an end to the hints and guessings and pertinacities that might still further have embarrassed my not very clearly explained situation. But Miss Causton, I gathered, had merely not come back yet. As it turned out later, she did not come back. But nobody knew yet. So, until she should do so, Evie and Miss Windus remained our only two woman students.

It is plain that I had had to think out a plausible reason for my own return. I neither wished, nor would it have been credible of me, to be regarded as one of those high-and-dry relics (every college and school has them) who wear on to middle age seeing whole generations of juniors out, and become pathetic "institutions" merely because they had not initiative to stop doing what they have once begun. So I had hit on an explanation of my reappearance that, as it subsequently turned out, cut two ways. In one of these ways it proved magnificently sufficient for me; in the other it proved inadequate with an inadequacy that I only partly rectified when I became engaged to Miss Windus. In a word, I had had an idea.

My idea was this:

Starting from the old "Method" course (which, despite my failure, I knew back and forth and inside out), I had begun to evolve for myself a whole new course of private study. Much of this, I anticipated, I should be able to pursue at the college; for the rest the British Museum and the Patent Office Library would serve. The germ of my notion lay (or at least began) in certain questions that bore on the consolidation of Commercial Distribution; and I fancied, rightly as it turned out, that my idea was in harmony with the broader developments of the day. More than that I need not say. All that concerns this story is that my new inspiration landed me straightway in a dilemma. On the one hand, the newness of the idea proved to be the foundation of my fortune, on the other, because of its very newness, and because it surpassed the terms of the then known, it appeared to those who wanted to know "what Jeffries was about," a subterfuge and a blind for something else. In a small sense, as you are aware, it was that; in a larger one it emphatically was not.

It is odd what difference a New Year makes in such colleges as ours. The influx of new students always drives the older ones more closely together, so that a person with whom the previous term you had little more than a nodding acquaintance becomes, when you meet again, almost an old friend. You have memories and associations in common that the new-comers know nothing about, and quasi-amicable rearrangements are made. I may say at once that it was not this that finally drove me into Miss Windus's arms, but it helped in the early stages by breaking down other resistances, and so made our extraordinary subsequent relation possible.

Evie had told me, on the night when I had first walked home with her to Woburn Place, that she usually went home either alone or else with Miss Windus, who lived in Percy Street, Tottenham Court Road; and while I, of course, had gone no farther than the gate, Miss Windus, I knew, had on more than one occasion gone in to supper. In the new order of things (which included Archie's "home from home") the three of them not infrequently went to Woburn Place together, and I began to see his light near the Foundling Hospital more and more rarely as I passed. Of course it didn't at all follow that because he was not in his own quarters he was at Woburn Place; I knew for a fact that very often he was not; and I learned from Mackie, whom I ran into one evening as I was returning from Rixon Tebb & Masters', and to whom I forced myself to talk, that on at least one recent occasion Master Archie had been seen flying a none-too-steadily-balanced kite in the neighbourhood of Leicester Square. The "home from home" was a capital one from the point of view of Mrs. Merridew, no doubt; but from that of Miss Soames the aunt, into whose house, whether she knew it or not, some whiff at least of another atmosphere was being brought, the thing seemed very open indeed to question.

Evie, I could see now, was lost in love of him; and I sometimes wondered whether I was not becoming hopelessly one-idea-ridden to suppose that it could all possibly end in any but the plain and obvious way—by her marriage to him. Changes that I shall speak of presently were taking place quickly in myself, and perhaps it was the first sign of them that sometimes, when I found myself utterly spent and broken, melodramatic magnanimities rose in my brain. In these moments I was tempted to throw up the struggle, to take myself off somewhere, and to leave them to arrange matters as they would. I wonder—I wonder!—whether I should have had the strength to do it!

And I wonder too whether, had I done it, it would have been "strength" at all! I hardly think it would. I will not generalise about slack young men and blind and innocent girls; I am not concerned with collective morals; but I was concerned with the given case, and already saw how things would almost inevitably turn out. Archie, after the manner of his kind, would sandwich in his visits to Woburn Place with more suspect pleasures; presently there would come some accident of detection, or there would not; if there did he would make a more or less (probably less) clean breast of it, and if there did not it would become a question of how far he would go with Evie. At that also I could make a guess. A "home from home," is not quite what it seems when the home contains a young creature who follows the befriended young man about with soft and adoring eyes; parents and aunts notice these things; one day something would happen; and Archie, who never took any other line, would take the line of least resistance and, seeing that it was expected of him, become formally engaged to her.

And then what? Ah, I foresaw that too!

She would be, as the expression goes, "no worse" for him. For that also he lacked the courage. He would sloven himself and her into a love that would soon prove irksome to him, a bitterness to her, and pure only on a technicality. I knew his breed; To the best of them Woburn Place is Woburn Place, and Leicester Square Leicester Square; and to the worst of them these two things quickly interpenetrate and weld. And what would that mean for her? I looked at my love; I looked about me at other sad and disillusioned women who have survived their fair dreams as examples of the way in which this love-slovening actually works out; and I shuddered.

No, a magnanimous removal of myself would not have been "strength" at all.

Yet if you think I became engaged to Miss Windus merely that I might have a pair of eyes frequently in Woburn Place, there you are wrong again. I became engaged to her because I had no choice. The contributory causes were several. Among the earlier of them had been a conversation I had had with Archie Merridew a week before the examination in Method.

After I had been at pains to give out the information that I was engaged as it were at large and without further particularity, I had begun, as you have already guessed, to be the victim of my own ingenuity. Our committances have this way of taking matters into their own hands. I had quickly found it impossible to be thus unspecifically betrothed. Too many questions had instantly sprung up, and Archie, if not Miss Levey, had known too much about the circumstances of my life.

At first I had tried to fob him off by speaking of "some girl in the City," but that had been useless. If that was so, he had wanted to know (probably having gossipped it all over with Miss Levey), why did I never see her in the evenings, and why was I so often at liberty on Saturday afternoons and Sundays? I had protested, I had made jokes. How, I had demanded, did he know where I passed my spare time?... Well, he knew (he had retorted) where I spent five evenings out of the seven!

Miss Levey, you see, had started him, and it amused him to go on.

And so his intrusiveness had begun to narrow me down to the college itself.

This had given me the choice of just two inamorata—Miss Causton and Miss Windus (for I still supposed that Miss Causton might walk into the college as usual any evening). To the latter lady I was at that time exceedingly averse; and on the night of this conversation of which I speak, after Archie had been almost beyond endurance jestingly importunate, I had all but declared myself point blank for the absent Miss Causton. (The conversation had taken place in his rooms.)

"The question is, Archie," I said gravely, looking at him with sharp doubt in my eyes, "can I trust you? I suspect you've already set something going, you know."

He had coloured a little. A mere honourable understanding was never in the least binding on him, and I was never quite sure to what extent the exaction of a definite promise would be so.

"Oh, dash it all, Jeff!" he had scoffed rather awkwardly, "anybody'd think you were ashamed of it! All I said was quite harmless—really——"

"I know," I had commented, "meaning no harm. Nine-tenths of the harm in the world's done that way. I don't know that I don't prefer the man who means harm; at least he knows what he's doing.... But why are you so curious about it all?"

His curiosity, I knew, was nothing more or less than a slack indulgence of his desire to hear a secret. He had too Miss Levey's racial gift of turning these things to account. But he had put it rather differently.

"Oh, just friendly interest," he had replied, slapping his jacket pocket. "Where did I put my cigarette case?... We are friends, aren't we?"

"Rather less so when you go chattering about me."

"Sorry, old man," he had replied contritely, though his contrition had been less for his blabbing than that I apparently had taken it amiss. "I didn't think—you didn't tell me not—it slipped out——"

"Well, well—no great harm's done. But if I were you—" if I had hesitated it was merely for a private and subtle relish "—I'd take a memory powder, to use an expression of Miss Windus's."

(You will remember how I had come to overhear that expression, and you may see, by turning back, the precise context of the allusion.)

Archie had been sitting in his favourite attitude, with his stockinged feet against the pilaster of the fireplace. He had twinkled again.

"I don't think it can be Miss Windus," he had chuckled again. "Anybody can see you can't stand her."

"Oh? Sorry I've allowed that to appear."

"And the college isn't exactly swarming with girls," he had continued.

I had told him that he was dragging the college in entirely on his own responsibility.

"Oh no!" he had said promptly, with a far too cunning glance at me. "You don't put me off like that, old boy! I've got you down to that, and I'm going to hold you to it! Serve you right for your dashed secretiveness! So if it isn't Miss Windus, and it isn't Miss Soames——"

At that I had been able quite calmly to jest. I had fetched up a laugh.

"Steady a minute," I had said. "If you're really bent on going into the Sherlock Holmes business you'll have to do it properly, you know—give reasons for your eliminations. Accuracy's everything. Let's have your reason for ruling Miss Soames out."

"Good old Jeff," he had remarked, laughing; "accurate even in his jokes! Well, say Evie's a young twenty, and you're a damned experienced old thirty—how will that do?"

I believe, taken with all the rest, that it had seemed to him perfectly conclusive.

"That's better," I had approved. "I only meant that if you're going to be methodical you must be methodical, that's all. Good mental training for you, my boy."

"So it is," he had agreed, with the forthcoming examination in his mind. "I say—we'll have a shorthand speed-test presently—but first I'm going to drag this out of you...."

And by-and-by I had all but made the confession that it was Miss Causton whom I adored from a distance and hesitated to approach.

Another contributory source to this oddest freak of my life was the terms on which I had returned to the college. That wide and unexpected development of my new studies was no explanation to anybody but myself; I had confessed myself, through Archie, to be in love; and the more closely I applied myself to my mysterious work the less mysterious did my whole conduct appear. Yet on the whole, even if Miss Causton had returned at once, I might at the last have feared the hazard with one at once so suspiciously open and problematically deep as she; and there was no allowing matters to remain as they were. There was only Miss Windus for it.

You see the mess I had landed myself in.

Yet my unhappiness in all this was only a part of a general change that was quickly leavening me throughout. It was a change altogether for the better. I was sick, sick of shifts and tricks and meannesses. I was no less sick of them in myself than I was when I encountered them in the Sutts and Polwheles among whom my life was passed. I panted for a clearer air and a more spacious prospect; I panted for these things because Evie had loosened the band that had confined the wings of my own spirit. And with my own spirit thus freed, I would find a way to escape from the cage of my circumstances. Once I had done with that old life I would have done with it for ever. And, strange as it may seem, it was because hope was at last greyly and tardily dawning for me that I entered into my last despicable tortuousness with Kitty Windus.

II

For as I got deeper into my studies I began to see in it nothing less than the finger of Providence that I had failed in the second part of the examination in Method. That frustration altered the whole course of my life. I am, of course, speaking in the light of subsequent events, but I see now what a mere pass would have meant—a sort of success no doubt—but a success in a narrow and short-reaching attempt.

Up to that time my plan had been to qualify myself by means of certificates, to find a billet elsewhere, and then, with Rixon Tebb & Masters' recommendation of steadiness and sobriety, really to begin in some firm where promotion was possible otherwise than by our bottle-neck of a junior clerkship. I had actually had the choice of no less than two such firms, and had been already wondering what I should do with my extra twelve shillings a week—for I should have begun at thirty shillings.

And then I had failed.

Well, heaven be thanked for it. In that failure I sounded, for the last time—but no; for the last time but one—the bass-string of my poverty.

For now, as I saw my new work gradually unfolding, it sometimes so excited me that I could hear my own heart thumping in my breast. Do you know that feeling—that in your brain there is already born, and growing apace, an idea that you do not believe to be guessed at by any creature in the world except yourself? As a matter of fact I now know that my idea was being simultaneously worked upon elsewhere. Sir Julius (then "Judy") Pepper was pegging away at it in his back room in Endsleigh Gardens, hardly a mile from where I brooded over it myself; and if you have never heard of the association of Jeffries and Pepper you know very little about these things. Still, all was in darkness then save for that single ray far ahead that seemed to indicate a way out; and even now I have only just begun my life's work—the keying up to concert pitch of certain branches of commercial distribution that, by the time I and my successors have finished, will make men wonder how such a phenomenon as, say, the railway strike of last year could ever have been possible.

Nor was this deepest peace that the man of action knows—his certainty about what his task in the world must be—the whole of my spirit's unexpected re-birth. This held out the promise of material—and shall I say "ethical?"—well-being; and my eyes were now opened to more than that. I hesitate to call this new thing "religion." I would rather define it as the clear and immutable knowledge that all things do work together to an end, good, bad or morally unconnoted. It was a perception of powers and forces, not at variance, but working in harmony towards some cosmic consummation. I don't think that is religion. I don't think it would save a soul. But it not only saved, but made altogether its own, my reason. I believed in the power and divinity of a thing, if not in those of a Being. And I believe that I should have got further even than that.

And if it be true that we treat the world as we are treated by it, this changed my attitude to all with whom I came into contact. I am not thinking now of Kitty Windus, for she, poor soul, was but an episode, though one I have found is hard enough to make away with. I am thinking of Sutt, of Polwhele, of the proprietor of my public-house, of the drivers and porters of my restaurant, of the men and women, seen and to be seen no more, who passed me in the streets. And I am thinking of Evie Soames.

For it was side by side with her sweetness that I conceived all this authority and strength and vision to exist. It was all, I knew not how, hers—hers and mine. I could not successfully resolve a problem nor work out an equation but something within me cried, "That is ours, my love!—something seized from the limbo of things-not-known-yet, for you, dear, and for me!" I could now even bear to work away from her, in another room of the college, among the files of the Patent Office, at my own place. When her face rose, as it ever did, between me and my paper or page, I knew peace now, not jealousy. Had I put into words the thoughts that then filled me those words would have been, "Yes, my own—you see what I'm doing—it is for us, and it won't be long—go away, sweetheart, but not very far." And so I dreamed harder and worked harder than I have ever done in my life, and both came easily to me, because I had at last clearly seen my goal.

Yet you are not to suppose that I was not unwinkingly wakeful too. This was my inner life, and it informed, but did not abate, the vigilance of my outer one. I think that three times out of four I knew (at first at any rate) when Archie had been to Woburn Place, and perhaps twice out of four when he had sought a lower pleasure elsewhere. It would take too long to tell you how I ascertained all this. I did so under a mask of casualness that practice and my new-born hope had now made quite easy.

And so I come to my acceptance by Kitty Windus.

Espionage upon Woburn Place was only a part, and by far the lesser part, of it. I had my impossible position to explain. And not only had I to explain it, but my original lie had left me only one other way of explaining it—the giving up of Evie once for all. That I could have more easily done months back than I could now that hope had brought her so (I speak comparatively) tantalisingly near. I admit that the chance that I might be introduced at Woburn Place as Miss Windus's fiancÉe did weigh, and horribly. I no longer hated her. I pitied her. I do not mean that this pity was in the least degree akin to love in that word's sense as between man and woman; but by salving a little my self-content it did, practically, help me to carry the thing out. But I swear, however much I may appear to put myself upon the defensive in doing so, that of itself the prospect of Woburn Place would not have swayed me.

I have not the heart to remember the earlier stages of my duplicity. Too many crawling things lie beneath that stone of my life for me to wish to turn it over. Let me summarise by saying that, by a slow and nicely calculated relaxing of my stiffness, and a gradual and lingering and gratuitous prolongation ever and again of certain opportunities of intercourse, I had, by the beginning of March, so counterbalanced my former aversion that, in a word, anything might happen, and at any moment.

Poor, lonely, starved spinster heart! I have far more ruth for what I did to you than for what I did to another!

But let me, before I go on, see whether there was anything during the months of January and February that I may not omit.... No, I think there is little. Miss Causton still remained away; I pursued my new investigations; that segregation of newness of the first-year students relaxed a little, but without affecting that slight unconscious coming together of the older ones that it had brought about; and I think Archie Merridew divided his time between Woburn Place and Leicester Square pretty equally. I think that is all. I pass on.

It was in Lincoln's Inn Fields that I entered into a pledge with Kitty Windus that I had no intention of ever redeeming. I had not thought when I had left the college that night that it would come so quickly. I had planned a long walk, and, passing through Great Turnstile, had come upon Miss Windus looking into the window of an antique shop. I had stopped and gazed with her, and then, presently moving away, we had passed together into the square.

She told me afterwards that she had been merely aimlessly wandering, having been to Woburn Place the evening before and fearing to weary her welcome there by going again the next night; but I did not know this then. Therefore, when presently she stopped at the corner where the street leading to Kingsway now is and said, "Well, I think I'll go back," I was a little surprised. Then I understood and laughed.

"I'm so sorry," I said, "I thought this was your way. I don't know that it's particularly mine—I was only taking a stroll—so if you don't mind I'll walk back with you."

Thereupon we turned back into the Fields.

It was this mutually made discovery that neither of us was pressed for time that brought simultaneously into our minds some slight self-consciousness that for the first time in our lives we should be thus killing an hour in one another's company. Her own embarrassment presently gave expression to this.

"How nice," she said, after we had walked half the length of the central garden railings in silence, "to feel sometimes that you haven't got to talk if you don't want to!"

The remark, commonplace as it was, gave me a new glimpse of her. I knew that she read a better class of novel than my Evie, and with the results you might suppose. I don't seriously believe that Evie's "scions of noble blood" and the rest of her novelette paraphernalia had any point of contact with real life for her, but Miss Windus carried over the triteness she got from her reading into her thought and speech. Therefore, since I myself, though no eloquent speaker, believe that tongues were made to talk with, I again laughed a little.

"Yes," I replied, "provided always that you aren't silent merely because you've nothing to say."

I think this penetration, such as it was, struck her with quite remarkable force; and, as the novels provided no reply to it, she was again silent for a time. We were approaching the corner of Great Turnstile again, but I don't think she noticed it. We turned down by Stone Buildings and began to complete the circuit of the Fields.

"Mr Merridew said you were very clever," she remarked at last. "What do you study all by yourself in the senior classroom, Mr Jeffries?" she asked, the quizzical little triangles of her eyes turned up to mine in the light of a lamp that hung like a beacon over the garden railings. She wore a plaid Inverness cape and a boat-shaped hat that night, I remember, and would doubtless have worn rubber heels had those articles been invented. Never woman made a slighter physical appeal to man than she.

"I'm not quite sure myself yet," I replied, as truthfully as made no matter. "Part of it at any rate is human nature in business."

"I love human nature," she said.

I knew I had only to speak. In the light of the wrong I was about to do her I freely forgave her all her past pretences towards myself. All grapes had been sour to poor Kitty, and I didn't doubt she had made brave attempts, and still braver concealments of failure. Baboon or anybody else, there she was at his pleasure so her reproach be but taken away. For already I had decided that it might as well be now as later.

"Yes," I answered, as if absently, and we walked on.

The night was slightly frosty, and over the houses to the north of the Fields the glare of Holborn shone rustily. There were few people about. As we walked, by this time almost used to the strangeness of one another's company, I wished that the central garden of the square had not been closed; at least she would have had the association of a tree and a plot of grass to go with her plighting. But I knew that such weaknesses as this were not safe, and shut peremptorily down on them. She seemed so pathetically small and skimpy by my side, and had I yielded even a little I could almost have persuaded myself of a tenderness for her. This I refused to do. I would do nothing to make easy for myself what would by-and-by prove cruel enough for her.

We were half way round the Fields on our second circuit before I spoke again. I moistened my lips and steeled myself.

"Miss Windus," I said.

I think a tremor took her instantly with my change of tone. She looked up, but I did not hear whether she said anything.

Nor did I say anything. Our hands, as we walked, were close together. I took hers.

She made no attempt to draw it away, and we walked so. Presently I took the hand in my other one, and this brought it across my breast. I daresay she felt the beating of my heart.

"Kitty," I whispered.

She pressed against me a little.

I don't think it ever entered her head that I intended anything but just that we should walk, for that one night, round Lincoln's Inn Fields like this. I don't believe she thought of anything. With even that heel and paring of love she was content—just to walk so, to-morrow if it was to be, if not then at any rate to-night, with her hand in a man's and her shoulder pressing lightly against a man's shoulder.

Well, she had it.

"Kitty," I whispered again. This was in a dark shadow on the south side of the Fields. Without prearrangement we had ceased to walk, and were standing together, she with her face turned downwards and away, quite ready to give me all she supposed I wanted of her.

She couldn't murmur my name in return. She didn't know it. It was, for her, merely "Man." But instead she gave me that for which I stooped over her. She gave it with a heartrending impulsiveness throwing back her head suddenly and leaning her bosom on mine. I felt a pair of dry, slightly cracked lips on my own and was conscious of an odour of clothes.... Then we separated again.

"Oh," she said, with a shaky little exhalation of her breath, "I ... I didn't think you'd ever look at me—Jeff!"

This last was a quick invention, to cover her ignorance of my Christian name.

She meant that she hadn't thought that anybody would ever look at her. Every shred of the old pretence of the pertinacities and annoyances of strangers had fallen from her. She lifted up her face again—and again—as if by present gluttony to forestall insatiable hungers of the morrow and the morrow after that.

For a minute I was well-nigh resolved out of sheer compassion to keep my word and marry her.

And even then—think of it!—she had no idea that I contemplated what was, indeed, my sole reason for action—an acknowledged engagement. She never dreamed I meant to marry her. It was I who spoke of this, half-an-hour later. By that time we had been to the bottom of Chancery Lane and back, and were in the Fields again, once more in that same shadow where I had kissed her first. She looked at me.

I can hardly write it. There was first a gleam of fear in her eyes, and then a leaping.

"Jeff!" she cried in a loud voice that cracked.

I had to catch her as she began slowly to sink at the knees.

So I became engaged. At the college it was a nine days' wonder, but I let them wonder. So did Kitty Windus, merely pretending that the thing had been for long a secret understanding. Archie, I remember, smirked through some form of congratulation when I told him: "What, not Louie after all!" but it was only when Evie Soames flung her arms about Kitty Windus' neck and well-nigh about mine also that I began really to wonder what could possibly come of it all.

III

During those little pauses and lapses of study in which men scribble abstractedly on the margins of paper, idly forming letters or noughts-and-crosses or inexpert attempts at portraiture, I myself had a way of filling my blanks at that time that may serve to explain the change that had more and more come over me. I used to rub with a pencil, as evenly as possible, two little squares of grey, and then to put into the middle of the first of them a spot as black as my pencil could make it, leaving in the second a similar spot, but one of clean white. Unless you have tried it you may not believe the difference in effect. The black spot of the first seems to make denser and darker the whole square; but the white one lightens and relieves it as the sun does when it struggles through a mist. By what law of optics this is to be explained I cannot tell; I can only say that if Kitty Windus, wondering what I studied all by myself in the senior classroom, had come upon me at these times, she would have found me pondering over these marginal trifles as in some way a symbol of my own life.

For had it not been for this gloomy blot of my betrothal to her I would not now have exchanged my life for that of any man I knew. So did hope now irradiate it. I was still an eighteen-shilling Agency clerk; I still lived in a red and green loft over a public-house; but I now believed in myself, longed to be able to respect myself, and had already grimly resolved that others should respect me.

I was in this state of mind when I first set eyes on Angela Soames.

I was taken there, of course—to Woburn Place, I mean—by Kitty Windus. It was within a week of our engagement, so that I had not to wait long for these first-fruits of my extraordinary position. That night was the second time I walked with Evie to her abode, for Archie followed a few yards behind with Kitty Windus. We had dropped into this arrangement on leaving the college, as men tacitly pay each other's partners the courtesy of their attentions.

When I have said that Evie's home was in Woburn Place I have gone a long way towards describing it. She lived in one of those large apartment houses that are full of Japanese, Americans, and Indian law students, with a half-pay officer here and there. She and her aunt had rooms of their own upstairs, but they dined in the large common dining-room downstairs, at a table that would almost have resembled that of a public dinner had it not been for the gaps left by the absent boarders, several of whom were always dining elsewhere. I never saw that table full. I have tried to carry on a conversation with my neighbour across two intervening empty chairs. I have had to accept the highly polished civilities of Indians and Japanese, who have refused to disturb me when I have removed a rolled napkin in a numbered ring and put a flat and freshly ironed one in its place. One met niggers and gouty subjects and antiquated old ladies in the hall and on the stairs; and I was quite prepared to find Miss Soames the aunt one of these last.

But she was not in the least so. There was not very much more difference between her age and my own than there was between mine and Evie's—though of course what difference there was was all on the wrong side. She was, I should say, forty-three or four, and I wondered the moment I saw her how she had got through these forty odd years and remained Miss Angela. Let me say at once that she had no secret sorrow (though Kitty always vowed she had). When, later, she told me, with the greatest self-pluming in the world, that she "could have been married" more than once or twice, she told me nothing I should not have guessed; but merely to have had these opportunities seemed entirely to content her detached and unruffled and rather aimless soul. She had had the refusal of them—and she coquetted with that. She had avoided the pains of marriage—and remained the white-haired ingenuÉ. It later became one of Kitty's irritating tricks to "wish she had hair like that"—a beautiful tower of it dressed À la Marquise; but in nothing else could Kitty ever have resembled Angela Soames.... But perhaps I may be wrong in my estimate after all. Perhaps no man can really understand that kind of woman, who cannot lose all herself even when she marries and loses not very much less when she does not. Evie, I concluded, probably had her passion for abandonment from her mother.

I was introduced to the elder Miss Soames in her sitting-room. This apartment, like herself, seemed to trail even into Woburn Place hems and fringes of past prosperity. The room itself was not much more than a cold-blue-papered, corniceless box—but, as the first of a number of odd little contrasts, a shield-shaped embroidered firescreen hung on a slender stem near the fire. The door was painted yellow and grained—but a pair of handsome silver candlesticks stood on the mantelpiece. There was a threadbare lodging-house carpet—and a black bear-skin hearthrug, the head of the animal worn bald by Miss Angela's paste-buckled slipper. And so on. On the round table stood a rosy-shaded lamp (that did not change to a corresponding shade of green as you looked). Miss Angela herself wore a soft old grey with a thin Indian silk shawl cast over her shoulders, and I remembered, as I looked at her, certain former angry conclusions I had come to about her. I took them all back. Charmingly unsure of herself in everything, from her love affairs downwards, she might be, but she did not parrot precepts about the "less fortunately circumstanced." We shook hands, and I was told that I might smoke. Archie had come in smoking.

I did not talk very much during this my first call. Indeed, Miss Angela murmured, as if to herself, some half-mischievous, half-tactful remark about an "ordeal"; and my slight nervousness passed as part of Kitty's "showing off" of me. But the others made up for me, and I listened, smiling, but silent except when I was directly addressed.

This I presently was by Miss Angela, and on a point no less interesting than the way in which Archie spent his evenings. It had already appeared that he was to celebrate a birthday two days thence, and Miss Angela had asked him to spend the evening with them.

"You've given us a very cold shoulder lately," she said; "why, your mother's been remarking on it!" She pulled a faded tapestry hassock towards her with her foot, the fire being too hot to allow her to make use of the bear's head, and reached for a paper fan with which to keep the heat from her face. "I hope it's not you who take up all his time, Mr Jeffries?"

I answered that it was not, and Evie, who had removed her hat and coat and was now tidying her hair before the mantelpiece mirror, laughed.

"Mr Jeffries' time is spoken for now—isn't it, Kitty?" she said.

I saw her look at Archie as she said it. He was astride the hearthrug, allowing the smoke of his cigarette to stream up his nostrils, and she, as she arranged her hair, had to look at herself almost over his shoulder. Her occupation left the whole of her young bosom quite defenceless had there been a pair of arms to pass about it, and the soft look she gave him was a double provocation. But he did not return the look. He moved a little aside, also finding the fire hot, and flipped his cigarette ash into the fender.

"I don't think an engaged girl ought to come between a man and all his old friends," Kitty pronounced. Her look at me was a promise that she would never come between me and Archie.

Miss Angela gave a contented little laugh.

"Ah, you all say that at first! Well...." She glanced past Evie at me, and took me into her confidence with a private smile. It was as if we two older ones understood that there was something in process that must not be disturbed. "But if you don't come, Archie," she added, "I shall write straight to your mother! You'll come too, Miss Windus?"

Kitty glanced at me.

"Oh, of course I mean Mr Jeffries too!" said Miss Angela archly.

"Oh, of course him too!" quoth Archie, from the hearthrug, loosening his scorching trousers. "Two hearts that beat as one—you bet—twopence into a penny show now, Jeff!"

And again Miss Angela, with a look this time past him, seemed to invite my attention to something.

You may guess that my attention needed little inviting. So far, my surmise, that she adored him while she took the admiration a little impatiently, seemed to be pretty near the mark; and I was confirmed in this when she presently sat down on the companion hassock beyond the end of the fender, and, with her face a little averted, sank into moroseness. It was merely because her glance as she stood before the mirror had not been returned, but I myself had known too well what it was to be uplifted and cast down again by these nothings not to understand.

And Archie too understood, if the jocular and would-be easy manner in which he tried to drag her into the conversation again meant anything. I suspected that this was not the first incident of the kind that had occurred between them. Presently he had twice addressed her directly without getting more than the shortest of replies; and the third time he did so (he, Kitty and Miss Angela had been talking about some indifferent matter) he added the words, "that is, when Evie's found her tongue again."

My darling had a temper of her own. "I didn't know I'd lost it," she said, with a little perverse snap.

Then she dropped into her sulks again.

"These lovers' quarrels!" Miss Angela's private smile to me seemed to say; but this time I evaded the discreet invitation to participate.

"Well," Archie said presently, looking at his watch, "I must be off; I've a chap to meet. Thanks, Aunt Angela (beg pardon; I know you don't like being called that). I'll come on Thursday, then."

But Miss Angela exclaimed: "A man to meet! At this hour!"

Archie took his hat from a chair. "Yes. About a dog. Why not? Fox terrier," he added facetiously; "must make sure they've got over the distemper, you know. Thursday then. You two are staying a bit, I suppose?" he invited us.

He made his adieux; but almost before the door had closed behind him Evie had risen from her hassock.

"You'll excuse me, won't you?" she said quickly. "I've got a headache. I shall go straight to bed. Good-night."

And she followed him out—whether straight to bed or not I don't know. Kitty and I followed shortly afterwards.

And now that I've got to this Woburn Place portion of my story I may as well, while I am about it, skip the two intervening days and come to the evening of Archie Merridew's birthday.

Thursday was not in any case one of Evie's class evenings, and on that Thursday she must have been very busy indeed. We were to go to supper at eight; and as the routine of the boarding house did not provide for private entertainments the aunt and niece had had all to do themselves. The supper was therefore of necessity cold, with the exception of some hot soup, which I suspect to have been heated over a bedroom fire; and for the furnishing of the round table with the pink-shaded lamp Miss Angela had rummaged in drawers and trunks and bundles, with notable results. White heavy plates with the name of the boarding house contained within an oval garter were set between common knives and delicate and worn old silver forks and spoons, really beautiful glass finger-bowls stood on straw mats with a circular hole in the middle; and a long slender-handled punch-ladle stuck up out of the cheap earthenware jug full of home-made lemonade.

I suspect, too, that Evie had changed her mind a dozen times about the height of her dress at the neck; and probably her aunt's guidance had led her finally, since she had no special dress for the evening, to reject the compromise of altering her blouse to an intermediate V. Her dark hair had been newly washed. A softer lace than Kitty Windus' came quite up to her ears, and Miss Angela had lent her a pearl ring, which seemed to be mutely asking to be transferred to the finger next to the one on which she wore it. She was in white, with a longer skirt than usual; Miss Angela wore the old grey and Indian silk shawl she always wore; and Kitty looked prettier than I have ever seen her in a spotted blue foulard (I think I have that right) with wonderfully crimped sleeves and a cameo brooch at her rather wiry throat.

She and I arrived before Archie, who, indeed, was a full quarter of an hour late. When he did turn up, there mingled with his apologies the bumptious assumption of ease with which he sought to make a joke of his negligence. He came in noisily, as if he intended to make the party a success out of hand; and before he had been in the room half-a-minute a whiff told me what I had instantly surmised from the brightness of his eyes—that he had been drinking sherry and bitters already.

"Thanks, Aunt Angela—but that's not all, I hope!" he cried, as Miss Angela wished him many happy returns of the day.

And he skipped to her, passed his arm about her waist, and kissed her.

"Hope you won't mind for once, Jeff," he went on, dancing to Kitty Windus. Kitty both stiffened rigidly and flushed with excitement as he kissed her also on the cheek-bone.

"Here—I'm going all round now—where's Evie?" he demanded.

But Evie had slipped out of the room.

We sat down to supper.

I found Archie insufferable. He made the whole running with an ignorant egotism that caused my fingers to itch to box his ears. More than once he contradicted Miss Angela flatly, instantly trying to redeem the grossness by laughing loudly and crying, "Excuse my frankness—no offence—only Archie's way!" He made so familiar both with Kitty and myself that, out of mere hostility to him, I came very near to an alliance with her. Evie, I saw, was miserable. How much she knew about his habits I could only guess; I think that already she knew more than a little; but his had been the fortune to reveal her to herself, and I am not sure whether that ever wholly dies. I think it has since died as much as ever it can.

"But," Miss Angela said by-and-by, seeking to quieten him, "I've forgotten to ask you how your father is. Better, I hope?"

"The pater? Oh, he's all right; it's only a bilious attack. Afraid he got poisoned with some foie gras he ate—jolly good tack I call it—I'll have some more, please. And what's that you've got to drink there, Evie?"

Evie poured him out some lemonade. He looked at it, but made no remark on it.

"Here's your foie gras—have some cress with it," said Miss Angela.

And so we fÊted his lordship.

After supper there were nuts and almonds, which we ate sitting round the fire. I say "we," but Archie had what was left afterwards. With a "Half-a-mo," he had gone out, and I myself thought our party much pleasanter without him.

But as he remained away, Miss Angela had no choice but to say presently: "What can have become of our young man? I wonder if you'd mind fetching him, Mr Jeffries!"

I went, and found him.

He had picked up, on the stairs or in the hall, a Japanese with whom he had contracted some sort of acquaintance, and I heard his call as I passed the half-open door of the dining-room.

"Here—Jeff!" he called. "Hold on—I sha'n't be a minute—come and let me introduce you to Mr Shoto—Mr Shoto, Mr Jeffries."

I distrust that too affable little race from the other side of the world, and I gave Mr Shoto the most perfunctory of nods. Archie was having a very golden whisky and soda with him.

"Come along—you oughtn't to clear off like this," I said curtly. "Miss Soames is asking for you."

"All right—good old Angela—just a minute till I finish this. We were talking about Japan, or rather Mr Shoto was. Tell him that about the Yoshiwara, Shoto."

But that cunning little alien had evidently summed me up already, and had a different choice of subject for me.

I haled Archie back. I wondered, as he sat down by Evie, whether he would have another man about another dog to see presently, but he hadn't. Magnanimously he gave us the whole of the rest of the evening. This he did in spite of the cold encouragement he got from Evie. Twice, I was certain, while his face did not cease to be animated with the talk he gave the rest of us, his hand sought hers behind the arm of his chair; but she drew away. Nevertheless she drew away discreetly. By doing so openly she could have shown him up, but evidently she did not wish to show him up. There was no irreconcilable difference between them. She was angry, but not to the point of refusing to make it up afterwards. And I knew she was not far from unhappy tears.

Kitty and I were the first to leave. This was at half-past eleven, and I had no desire to outsit Archie. He would either leave in another half-hour, which would leave him time for another golden whisky and soda, or, setting the smoothing over of Evie's ruffled temper before the attractions of the public-house, would linger till after closing-time, when there would be no hurry. To see which alternative he would take didn't on the whole seem to be worth waiting for.

So Kitty and I took our leave; and as I walked with her to Percy Street—where she had two rooms over a modiste's—I—and she too—had to suffer as best we might the kind of thing I will relate in the next chapter.

IV

From the beginning she wanted one thing, I another. She was prepared to "love" me (as if it had been a matter of will, to which, nevertheless, I am quite certain she would faithfully have adhered) on the condition that that heart of hers should be no longer a parched pod; but I wanted no more of her than that my name should be linked with hers as that of her suitor. To me the appearance was the indispensable thing; she wanted the substance. And she was already plaguing me for it.

God knows I gave her what I could give. Afterwards, when all was over, she still had the memory of it. I hope she found comfort in it.

For of course it was precisely over that which was Evie's, and which I was resolved to keep for Evie, that we were locked in a grapple. She lisped and besought and cajoled. Before I began sometimes utterly to forget that we were betrothed at all I could often have groaned aloud at her inexpert playfulness; and I doubt whether the wit of man could have devised a more acute torture than that which I now began to undergo at her unsuspecting hands.

For Archie's birthday was early in March, and already the crocuses were out, and the barrows in the streets were so aflame with daffodils that the flowers almost illuminated the faces of the sellers of them. It was still cold and backward, but the days were long past the turn, and while single twigs were still of a wintry iron hue, in the mass they took a softness, and the vistas of the parks had perceptibly changed. In the streets of the wealthy in which I walked the house-painters were at work, painting doors and railings and window-boxes; and even at my King's Cross corner the railway companies' announcements told of the coming summer. Spring was breaking in London—spring, the merry time of the year—spring, when lovers cannot keep asunder—and when Kitty and myself could not, yet must, keep asunder.

In the streets I knew I was fairly safe. Her hand on my sleeve filled me with no repugnance. Let me, for example, tell you of our walk back to Percy Street on that night of Archie's birthday-party.

As we crossed Tottenham Court Road she slipped her hand into my overcoat pocket, and my own encountered it there. It held it. It retained it along dark Percy Street, and still retained it when we stopped together at the side door next the window with the two fly-blown hats on pedestals that formed the whole of the modiste's display. There I would have left her; but "Don't go just yet, Jeff," she begged; "just eentie walk?"

"Well, a short one," I said.

We turned up Fitzroy Street into the Marylebone Road, but I was wary of the dark empty spaces about Regent's Park. The streets and the crowds for me. Indeed I may say that during this period of our "walking out" no couple in London sought solitude as I sought to avoid it; and I resolutely suppressed the thought of what was going to happen when the warm days should come and she should ask me to take her to Richmond or Epping or Kew. It was no good meeting that horror half way.

Therefore. "Well," I said, as we approached Portland Road Station again, "hadn't we better be turning? It's getting late."

"I suppose so," she sighed reluctantly, with a pressure of my arm. "Let's go this way."

She indicated one of the darker side streets. We took it.

By-and-by we stood by the modiste's window again. That is not a very reputable neighbourhood, and as she stood there, lingering out our talk to the thinnest of excuses, I guessed what was in her mind. But the general environment of laxity only produced a primness in her. In being all that she should be, she was sometimes a good deal more. Still, there was no harm in dallying with a secret thought.

But under all circumstances she ever displayed a sort of tempted prudishness.

"You and Evie and Miss Soames must come in one Sunday and have tea with me," she said resignedly at last, allowing the thought that some day I might go up with her to recede.

"That will be charming," I replied.

Then she sighed. "It has been so lovely tonight!"

"In what way?" I asked, forcing a smile.

"Archie was horrid, and you, Jeff——"

Yes, I remembered that hostility to Archie certainly had resulted in a rapprochement between ourselves.

"Well," she said at last, lifting her face, "good-night, dearest—I know who I shall dream of!"

I kissed her, heard the sound of her key in the lock, and, turning, saw her little face still looking through the half-closed door after me. I returned to King's Cross by way of Woburn Place, but there was only a glimmer of light within the fanlight of Evie's dwelling as I passed. Perhaps Archie had chosen the whisky and soda after all.

I soon saw that only by means of a studied unemotionalness should I be able for long to head her off from the things she sought; and I set about the creation of this atmosphere without loss of time. In this I found my far-reaching ambition useful to me; I had simply to be preoccupied with business to be spared much. I had not to play this part. I actually was a ferment of new plans. That my absorbing ambition was all for her sake was allowed to pass as understood. And when she began to make touching attempts to be interested in my affairs, I, lest a worse thing should befall me, encouraged her. I talked fully and freely, knowing that I ran no more risk of betrayal than Napoleon did when he laid before a Russian peasant woman unacquainted with French the plan of campaign he feared to trust to his own staff. This I did as the almonds pushed forth their pink, and the plane-trees budded, and the building birds sang loudly. Once she called me her building bird.

I had had to tell her, vaguely, about my employment; and I was also vague about where I lived. Here her own tempted timorousness helped me. It was not difficult for me to be stern about the proprieties, and indeed, as she saw this, and began to feel perfectly safe with me, she even affected a liberality of thought. "Why not?" she would sometimes ask almost defiantly; "why not see one another in our own places—if there was nothing horrid?"

And for that I usually found a surprised stare answer enough.

But the hunger was on her, and I had to give her morsels. That was a haggard horror. It was the more horrible that her vanities always turned on the things of which she had the least reason to be vain. As an affectionate and devoted and dull spinster my heart was often soft to her; but her coquetries would have made an angel groan. For example: her hands were not remarkably pretty; her fingers had almost the pinkness, and a little of the shape, of the smaller claws of a freshly boiled crab; but she gave them no rest from display. I was sometimes commanded, with a vapid imperiousness, to make much of them. And once, on a seat on the Embankment, she yielded to a temptation never far removed from her. It was at night; unnoticed, a portion of her hair had shaken loose; and, suddenly becoming aware of this, and doubtless with some idea of maddening me with the thought of something prohibited, she put up her hands, shook down the short mass on her shoulders, and grimaced at me. The next day she begged, with a shamed face, that I would try to forget this sin in her—for apparently she had intended it as sin; but I had nothing to forget. All that I remembered was the contrast, as she had put the hair up again, between the bosom under her uplifted arms and that other bosom from which Archie Merridew had turned away as Evie had stood before the mantelpiece mirror in Woburn Place.

Her dwelling, which I first visited with Evie and her aunt, was on the first floor of the modiste's at the back. Her sleeping apartment I never saw; and of her sitting-room I have no very clear memory now. There was a penny-in-the-slot gas-meter on the landing, I remember, and the floor of the room into which one walked was covered with a greenish jute "art square," with the wide spaces of bare boarding about it stained with Condy's Fluid. The previous occupant had left on the walls a "French boudoir" paper with a pattern of thin vertical lines and tiny garlands of pink rosebuds (Kitty had cleaned it with dough on taking possession). The furniture was scanty, with a good deal of muslin about it, and a sewing-machine stood in the back window, which looked over a restaurant yard. When she had more than two visitors at once she had to fetch an extra chair from her bedroom, and from the sound her heels made at these times I gathered that that room was uncarpeted.

As by quickening degrees she began to accept her unlooked-for situation more as a matter of course, her thoughts naturally turned to the future and that I found to involve her whole attitude to Life. The things we were to do "when we were married" were dictated by the narrowness of her outlook. She had about a pound a week of her own money, I don't know exactly where from, but I think from some tramways Edgbaston way, and this sum, together with whatever she might be able to earn for herself, was practically the limit of her conception of any income she was ever likely to have. From the stories she told me of her earlier years I gathered that she came from a social stratum in which the men are lords indeed, sometimes "in work," sometimes "out," and apparently content during these last vicissitudes to be dependent on their wives or sisters or mothers. It seemed to me such a pitiful little world, of milliners, lodging-house keepers, music-mistresses, fancy needlewomen and daughters in offices; and I was given the corresponding male standing. As with the men her cousins (her nearest relatives) had married, if I should ever happen to earn money, well and good; if not, so much the worse. She reckoned only on her weekly pound and her own efforts. And as I learned that Cousin Alf and Cousin Frank were boundlessly optimistic, and looked forward to a future no less bright than that of which I felt the certitude within me, I soon discovered that I was merely indulged in what in her heart she set down as vapourings. It was the woman who, in her experience, "kept the home together," and she was prepared to keep me.

"Well," I laughed, "I daresay I shall learn to pare the potatoes as well as Cousin Alf in time."

But she smiled a sad, wise little smile. I might joke, but she knew.

"And it's just possible that some time or other I may make a pound or two," I said, smiling back.

"There'll be your clothes and pocket-money," she replied.

So I was to be kept—kept by virtue of my masculinity, as one keeps a dog to bark. I was to be kept, I divined, somewhere in a suburb, in a house the smallness of the rent of which would be exactly balanced by the increased cost of the season ticket that would take me daily to my work, when I was "in." Even when I was "out" I was to be treated with a nice consideration, for she "never had liked to see Frank washing up—it looked so unmanly," but as she said nothing about cleaning boots or fetching coals, these things apparently were not unmanly. And I wondered whether the Alfs and Franks were more numerous than I had thought, or were becoming so. Small wonder their women treated them with almost contemptuous tolerance, blazing out once in a while into a row. And I now see that in this sense I wronged Kitty when I said she was one of Life's takers. There are always two sides to a thing, and on this side she wanted nothing but to give.

But, willing as she was to do all this in the future, I soon discovered that she wanted her small solatium in the present. In the matter of little treats and outings I did not compare very favourably even with her Franks and Alfs. As you know, I simply had not the necessary shillings. And so I began (I knew) to appear "near" and "close" to her. One Friday evening, as we left the college together, she allowed as much to be seen.

"Jeff," she said suddenly, as we approached the corner by the Oxford together, "do you know, you've never taken me to a theatre yet!"

Personally I have never greatly cared for the theatre; but it happened that I had spoken to her once or twice rather off-handedly that evening, and was not unwilling to make amends. Besides, the theatre might save a walk in Hyde Park. I pumped up a vivacity.

"No more I have," I replied. "Good idea. It's too late to go to-night, but we might have a walk round and see what's on."

She fell in with the suggestion gleefully, and we walked down Charing Cross Road and Shaftesbury Avenue, looking at theatre announcements as we went. At the Circus we turned along Coventry Street, and presently found ourselves opposite the Prince of Wales'. I think it was La Poupee that was running there; if it wasn't it was some other piece that seemed light; and as I like, when I do go to the theatre, to be amused rather than instructed, I plumped for La Poupee as against Kitty's suggestion—some stern and ennobling tragedy. I had drawn my week's money that evening. It would be a sorry business if, with all those years of Alfing and Franking before me, I could not once in a while spare five shillings out of my eighteen; and so we elected for La Poupee for the following evening.

We went. We waited for perhaps two hours outside the pit door, but, as Kitty said when at last we did get inside, our places were worth it. When we were married, she said, we ought to be able to afford at least one theatre a month—she didn't in the least mind going to the gallery—and it would be something to think about for the next month. She didn't intend, when we were married, to get rusty. We were going to have our little outings like other married people, and if I continued, when we were married, to like light things and she serious pieces, we would choose in turn. And so on. I only half heard. I was spreading my remaining ten shillings over the week to come—ten shillings, mark you, not thirteen, for I had had to buy Kitty a ring, for which I was paying at the rate of three shillings a week.

Nothing happened at that performance of La Poupee. I am merely telling you this in order that you may see exactly how we stood, not at the crisis of our lives, but during the intervening stretches. I added to the problem of the coming week by giving a shilling for a box of chocolates, and no extravagance I have ever committed brought me a richer return than Kitty's look of pleasure. I suppose that really this was all that was demanded of Alf and Frank—a trifling, unexpected superfluity once in a while. Lucky fellows! I, however, was neither a Frank nor an Alf, my dreams were not the mere beguilings of an idleness; and neither during my courtship (my real one, I mean) nor thereafter was I going, in any woman's heart, to lord it on so little.

V

I remember the Sunday on which Evie, Miss Angela and I first took tea with Kitty Windus for two reasons. The first was that Miss Angela, who at first had begged to be excused, had come after all (knocking on the head my plan of walking back with Evie alone). And the second was Kitty's asking me to remain behind after the others had taken their departure.

We had gone at four o'clock; and even as the three of us had walked towards Percy Street together (I had picked the others up on my way) I had wondered what had suddenly come over Evie. She had seemed pale and jumpy and morose, and had scarcely spoken a word during the whole of our walk. Nor had she said very much more as we had eaten the hot muffins and drunk the tea Kitty had provided. Indeed, the greater part of the talk had been between Miss Angela and myself, and even that had languished.

Then suddenly Miss Angela had said something that had, I thought, explained matters. Archie's father, whose illness Miss Angela had asked about on the evening of the birthday-party, had taken a sudden turn for the worse, and Archie had been summoned to Guildford the day before.

"Well, we must hope for the best," Miss Angela had concluded. "There's no need to begin moping yet, child——"

Miss Angela also had jumped at my own explanation of Evie's moodiness—that now that Archie was in trouble his misdoings were forgotten.

I was to learn my error half-an-hour later, when Evie and her aunt rose to depart.

I, of course, had intended to leave with them; but as I held the door open for them to pass out Kitty said: "You stay for a few minutes, Jeff; I've something to tell you.... Good-bye, Evie dear. I do hope your cold will soon be well, Miss Soames——"

And she waved her hand to them as they passed down the stairs.

I swore under my breath, but there was no help for it. I followed Kitty back into her sitting-room. She crossed to the fireplace and sank into a canvas deck-chair with her back to the sewing-machine. I remained standing, with my hat in my hand, at the other corner of the mantelpiece.

She had allowed her head to fall back against the sagging canvas, and had closed her eyes.

"Sit down," she said, without opening her eyes, and, wondering what was wrong, I reached for her bedroom chair and sat down.

"What's the matter?" I asked, a little alarmed already, though I knew not why. I wondered if anything had been discovered about myself. There were, as you know, plenty of such things to discover.

Her eyes still remained closed, but her head fell a little on one side. It was not until I had asked her again what was the matter that she spoke.

"It's—it's dreadful!" she moaned. "I—I can see you haven't heard——"

"What is? Come, come!" I said, with some concern but more impatience. "No, I've not heard anything to take on like this about—unless you mean something about Archie's father?..."

"No, it's nothing to do with Archie's father. Oh, I can't possibly tell you, Jeff——"

It was on the tip of my tongue to say that in that case it was of little use my remaining; but she went on.

"Just a minute," she said. "You haven't heard ... about Louie Causton?"

I was certainly surprised. You will remember that I had not set eyes on Miss Causton since the evening of the breaking-up party, when she had danced twice round the room with me, sought me out again subsequently, and told me what the result had since falsified—that she was returning to the college in the new term.

"No," I said abruptly. "What about her? Nothing wrong, I hope?"

But she only sobbed, "Oh, Jeff!" and with her eyes still closed put out a helpless hand.

I had to approach and take the hand before I learned what the mystery was. I don't know whether you have already guessed it. I hadn't, but for all that my surprise, great as it was, passed even in the moment of Kitty's broken whispering in my ear. I had known Louie Causton for a deep, still pool; I don't think any revelation whatever could have added to my respect for her powers of irony and nonchalance; and yet when I say that my surprise passed it passed only to return. Good gracious!... I seemed to hear her carefully lackadaisical voice again as she had munched nougat: "So long since I've seen a man, my dear" ... and other circumstances, unmarked at the time, flashed on me now.

A child!

"Good gracious!" I breathed again in consternation.

My next thought was of Evie.

I was kneeling by Kitty's chair, holding her hand. I asked quickly:

"Does Evie know of this?"

"Yes."

"And does she know you're telling me?"

"Yes."

"And of course Miss Soames does not know?"

"No."

"She thinks as I thought, that it's about Archie's father Evie's so upset?"

"Yes; but perhaps she is about that too a little. I'm horribly upset, Jeff."

This last I took as a hint that the effect of this very startling intelligence on Evie was not the first thing to be considered.

"Yes, yes.... I see...." I murmured.

We were silent, and I felt Kitty's fingers move within my grasp. They pressed mine more closely.

"Don't leave me just yet, Jeff," she begged faintly. She was genuinely prostrated.

"No, no," I said. "Let me think for a minute...."

The next moment my brain was buzzing with thought.

I knew that only some such contact with plain raw actuality as this had been lacking in order to make Evie's transition from girlhood to womanhood complete. No longer now was she the fair young tree standing over its sprinkling of delicate discarded sheaths; this puff of Life's east wind had carried away the last of them. She had heard of these things, and so in a sense knew of them; but that somebody she knew ... that it should have come so near ... yes, poor shocked heart, that finished it. Archie's insupportable vanities had begun her enlightenment; the menace of his father's condition had touched her with the fringe of its shadow; and now this revelation had come upon her.

Mr Merridew's illness, moreover, had a plainly seen peril for me. I knew that if anything happened Archie would immediately have enough money to marry on, and my own labours—all that I had planned and done from the first moment of my loving her to this present hour when I sat in Kitty Windus' back room holding Kitty's hand—would go for nothing. They, Evie and Archie, would probably marry, and I—I knew this in that moment for a certainty—I, from sheer yielding, should find myself married to Kitty Windus the moment I could scrape the money together.

I gave a soft groan. I don't know whether Kitty supposed my groan the commiseration for Louie Causton.

Yet what else, if I had chosen a different line, could I have done? Nothing! My shrinking heart cried, Nothing! What was I to have spoken to a young girl of marriage? An Agency clerk—with dazzling hopes! A dweller over a sordid public-house—and a dreamer of visions! The possessor of a single suit of presentable clothes, the knees of which I was even now deteriorating past remedy—and of a heart tapestried with purple and gold, filled with an almost insensate ambition!

And I saw Evie only at all on the well-nigh insupportable footing that I was the betrothed of Kitty Windus!

Oh, if I had but had two suits of clothes, and thirty-six shillings a week instead of eighteen shillings, I think I would have cut the knot there and then and have sought Evie out that very night and asked her to marry me!

Then after a time I became more practical. Things, even the heart-breaking small things of my life, were after all slowly changing. One of these things was that my slavery at Rixon Tebb & Masters' was already promising to draw to a close. I have not yet spoken of this. Let me do so, briefly, now.

Once more I had been looking for a billet elsewhere, and this time I had excellent hopes of success. The post for which I had applied would not be vacant for six weeks yet, but I had forced a personal interview with one of my prospective employers, and had done what I had intended to do—impressed him strongly with a sense of my mental capacity. He had promised me his interest, and, unless he forgot it again (which, of course, was not impossible), I might have at least enough for one to live on before long. And once more my wider hopes were, I knew in my soul, not illusions. Soon there would remain only the bond that tied me to Kitty, and, with that broken, I would no longer envy even Archie Merridew that luck and weak charm of his that in the past had so often seemed more valuable than all I possessed.

But Kitty, lying back in her deck-chair, had opened her eyes again. They were full of softness and fright. She spoke.

"I wonder, Jeff—whether——" she said timidly and stopped.

"You wonder what, Kitty?" I asked gently.

"I know how strict you are—and if you say no I won't—but if I might go and see her——"

"Miss Causton?"

"Not if you don't wish it, Jeff——"

I considered.

"Has she asked you to go?"

"No—but if you wouldn't mind—very much——"

It mattered little to me, but I had to pretend to ponder deeply.

I really don't know whether I felt sorrow for Miss Causton or not. She was altogether beyond my comprehension. For all I knew my sorrow might be an impertinence. So I must seem to ponder.

"Where is she?" I asked.

"She's taken rooms in Putney."

"Alone?" I asked, with a quick glance at Kitty.

"Oh yes!... Until June or July, that is——"

"It is then that she expects——"

"Yes.... And I thought, Jeff, that perhaps next Saturday—we shall be out that way——"

We had arranged a little excursion for the following Saturday, the four of us—Evie and Archie, and Kitty and myself. We were to wander on Wimbledon Common.

"I never really knew her well, Jeff, understood her, I mean," she went on, "but after all I did see a good deal of her. It's horrible, when I remember the things she used to say.... And—and—you've made such a difference to me, darling—I wasn't going—to be married—before.... I should like to go, Jeff—just once," she begged.

"You wouldn't commit yourself to anything?"

"Oh no!"

"Does Evie want to go too?" I asked.

"No. She says she couldn't bear it. She cried half last night as it is."

"Then you'd call on your way next Saturday, and meet the three of us later?"

"Yes."

"Very well," I concluded. "You'd better go."

She threw her arms impulsively about my neck.

Then a change came over her. I think the change began with the failure of the supply of gas from the penny-in-the-slot meter. She had arranged for her little party a pink tissue-paper shade about her milky globe, an idea she had borrowed from Woburn Place; and slowly its colour faded. I had several pennies in my pocket. Quickly I felt for them.

But she moved closer to me. I was still on my knees by her deck-chair.

"Don't bother about it—just for once, Jeff," she murmured.

She could do it with impunity now. After what had passed our situation could hardly be commonplace, and our nearness was as little compromising as nearness ever can be. She luxuriated in her little perilous letting-go—could toy with, and yet be immune from, a danger.

Slowly the gas expired, and the firelight glowed on the blue and white check tablecloth and the disarray of tea-things upon it. On the back wall of the restaurant yard was a square of orange light which the shadow of a waiter's head crossed from time to time. I don't know that with some men—Mackie, for instance—her position would have been all she supposed it to be, but, poor heart, she had had little enough experience from which to surmise that. And I myself could hardly be said to be there at all. She lay in my arms; and in whatever false sweet fancies she lay endrowsed she was not alone. I had my torturing vision too. It was neither of her nor of Louie Causton, that vision. I was trying to persuade myself that she was another than Kitty Windus.

VI

Of our visit to Wimbledon on the following Saturday I intend to say as little as may be. When you have read it you will not, I know, ask my reason.

Archie did not appear. This time he had cause enough. The wire which was handed to me at Rixon Tebb & Masters' a little before Saturday midday (Polwhele brought it to me with a look that said plainly, "What next?") announced that his father had died during the night, and he had despatched it from Victoria Station on his way down to Guildford. Instantly my heart leaped.

Kitty was going to see Miss Causton. If, this new tidings notwithstanding, Evie would still keep to the engagement, I should have an hour with her alone.

I persuaded Evie to come. At first she obstinately refused, but I had the support of Miss Angela, to whom I privately whispered the desirability of "taking her mind off it." We left Woburn Place, the two of us, called for Kitty, and sought the Putney 'bus. Kitty left us at the corner of a street off the New King's Road, and Evie and I passed on to the bridge.

That was about four o'clock, and Kitty was to rejoin us near the Windmill at an hour that would depend upon the length of her stay with Miss Causton. She expected to be at the Windmill by five.

But at five there was no sign of her, nor had she appeared by half-past five. At a little before six I said to Evie, "She'll know we've gone on to the nearest place to tea, and will follow us. Let's go——"

Not far from the Windmill, on the Wimbledon side, there is a sort of small hamlet, with cottages and alleys and split-oak palings, and a refreshment house at the end of a garden. There Evie and I had tea, and there we sat after tea, waiting for Kitty. I talked of this and that, all very much away from the two subjects uppermost in her heart, and by half-past six I had given Kitty up.

"She's missed us," I said. "We may happen to run across her, but it's no good waiting here. Shall we take a turn before we go back?"

We left the refreshment-room, and walked among the gorse and birches in the direction of Queen's Mere.

It was a green and amber evening, with the shadows already deepening over Coombe Woods and the calling of homing rooks in the air. Here and there in the glades family parties still continued to play games with a ball that was quickly becoming difficult to see, and lovers appeared among the coppices. The blackthorn was over, and the may hung in sprays of delicate drooping buds; and in the south-west hung the pale sickle of the new moon. Evie and I, saying little, dropped down a steep over-grown alley that led to the mere, and it was in a sandy bottom at the foot of the alley that I heard a distant rasping call. Another call followed it, and then a throaty thrilling, and then another short series of acrid and moving calls.

It was a nightingale.

By the time we had reached the motionless amber-green water it had broken into full song.

I cannot tell—hitherto I have not attempted to tell—the mystery of that eve and of the song with which it rang. I cannot speak—nor would I if I could—of the responses that eve and that song called up in my heart. It was, I think, for both of us as if that bird's voice cried aloud all that we had left unuttered during the past few hours. Even Louie Causton, even Archie's father, had their part in it. It was as if that voice spoke of the feeble and infinitely moving wonder of birth—of the impinging of that relentless shadow that closes all—and of the griefs and joys and smarts and healings again of the brief passage from that unknowing to this forgetting again. All this crowded upon me in that exquisite agony of notes. And more came, until I could hardly endure it. There was no poignancy, no utter melting and surrender, that those importunate wellings did not give to the falling night. The unattainable greatness of Life and our own puny reachings forth for that greatness—Life's glory and the indignities of the miserable livers of it—Life's majesty and the nosings and burrowings of the fallen heirs to that majesty—all these shortcomings were reconciled in the song; and what man would be, that for an hour he was. I fail in expressing this; Evie, I am sure, did not seek to express it; but in that loud and lost and anguished outpouring, raptures and torments were folded together as in an Amen.... For one moment only I shuddered; I had remembered that but for an accident I might have stood by that water, listening to that song, with Kitty Windus, but the physical convulsion passed, and the bird sang on.

I had not looked at Evie. I do not think she knew she had drawn a little closer to me. Other listeners had been attracted by the melody, but we stood in a shadow, near a rill that fell into the mere. The water was nacre; the moon's sickle in it was a thin blade of amethyst; and I thrilled unspeakably as the bird's song changed without warning to long, low, caressing notes that drew the heart out of me as the nectar-bag of a floret is drawn from a flower. I heard Evie's slow sob.

Oh, might I but have crushed out that other nectar, to transmute into honey of our own!

Suddenly Evie flung herself on my breast, sobbing and strangling. Her fingers worked at the lapel of my collar; by bending my head I could have touched her small white knuckles with my lips. I was conscious that in my efforts not to do this I bared my teeth like a dog, but I remembered in time that to snatch was to lose. It was not my bosom against which her bosom heaved—it was the nearest sentient resting-place on which she could lay it. Her unhappiness and her happiness, her dream and her disillusion, her knowledge and her already failing hopes, rushed together in her sobs. Her love of a wastrel and her love for all he was a wastrel, and that hidden and sacred nook from which Louie Causton had ruthlessly ripped the curtain—for the pure strangeness of these things her tears gushed forth. I felt the long heave of her body.

"Come, come, my dear!" I said, with an infinitude of tender encouragement, close to her ear.

"Oh—oh—oh!" she sobbed.

"Dear, dear girl!" I murmured, passing my arm about her to support her.

But at that moment I could no more have said or done more than this than I could have sued for a favour by the bier of a scarce-cold lover.

"Hush, poor child!" I whispered, patting her shoulder. "Come, let's go. Let's leave that dreadful bird."

"Just a—mi—mi—minute——" she quavered. "I—I—love it—and I can't bear it——"

Even so did I love, and yet could scarce bear to hold the tender form in my arms.

Presently we left the mere, mounted the dark lane, and began to cross the common. Her hand was now on my sleeve, and it did not leave it again. Once her fingers made an impulsive little pressure on it, which, I cried sternly to my heart, I must not regard. But God knows the war there was between the sweetness of it and my fortitude.

"Jeff," she said more quietly by-and-by, using that name for the first time. "I—I couldn't have borne it if it hadn't been for you. It was too—too——"

"Never mind, dear," I soothed her. "Let's walk a little more quickly—your aunt will be wondering what's become of you——"

She laughed tremulously. "Kitty will be wondering what's become of you," she said. Then she added timidly, "She's a lucky girl!"

"Oh? Why?" I asked.

"You're so—so——"

But she did not say what.

We turned down Putney Hill.

I said I should say little of this, and I shall say no more. I took her home, but did not go in with her, neither, though I ought to have done so, did I seek Kitty. I went home, but all that I knew of my getting there was that I found myself sitting, with my hat and coat still on, on the edge of the bed in my red-and-green-lighted apartment.

They were turning out from the public-house below when at last I rose sluggishly and began to prepare for bed.

For half the following week I was outside and beyond myself.

But exactly a week, less a day, from that Saturday on which I had held Evie in my arms there dropped a thunderbolt into my life. On that Friday evening I had gone as usual to the cashier for my wages, and he had paid me; but as I had turned away again with my eighteen shillings he had said, as if giving utterance to an afterthought, "Oh—Jeffries—we find we shall not require your services after this week. You can have your notice in writing if you would prefer it."

And he had turned to pay Sutt, the next man in the queue.