I

On a sunny morning in mid-January Louie Causton went to see, but not necessarily to be seen by, her father. Captain Cecil Chaffinger accompanied her. As they walked across Richmond Park they talked.

"You're sure the walk isn't too much for you, Mops?" said the Captain solicitously.

She pressed his arm. "No, I'm ever so much better for it."

"We could get a cart or something at the Star and Garter, you know."

"I'd much rather walk, Chaff. We can take the train back."

"All right, little Mops."

They walked for a few minutes in silence; then—

"That woman wasn't—wasn't a beast, was she?" Chaff asked.

"Mrs. Leggat?"

"If that's her name. I mean, there was no row?"

"Not the least in the world."

The Captain tugged at his moustache. "H'm! Not like you. Ever leave anywhere without a row before, Mops?"

Louie laughed a little. "Now you mention it, I don't think I ever did," she admitted. "But there wasn't a word said. She knew, and I knew she knew. So I cleared out. That was all. She made me some beef-tea before I left."

Again they walked in silence.

The daintiest of hoar-frosts lay over the Park; on Putney Heath they had passed skaters. The keen wind had reddened the Captain's nose, and Louie could not help smiling as he took out his handkerchief for the twentieth time. She had remembered Mr. Mackie.

"Ought to have a silk one a day like this," Chaff grunted, blowing hard. "Makes you perfectly raw.... I say, dear old Mops——"

"What, old boy?"

"Anything I could have done, you know——"

She squeezed his arm again. "I shall be giving you plenty to do presently. And you say he's not a bad sort."

"Oh——" said the Captain doubtfully.

"Well, you'll take me in, and then wait outside till I've seen for myself."

But at that Chaff rebelled. "Hanged if I do—dash it all, it's a public-house! You'll find me in the parlour or whatever it is."

"How old is he?"

"Let me see: he'll be fifty. Yes, he'll be fifty. Your mother's fifty-four."

"You'll remember your promise, Chaff?"

"About where you are? Oh, I'll be mum as the grave. Don't you forget yours."

"No. You shall come and see me."

The Captain sighed. His Mops was a strange being. That fool Moone had taken the wrong way with her, but a better way might have been found than this. Well, Chaff would have a word or two with Mr. Buck Causton himself.

They continued their walk.

When Louie had first resolved that she would seek her father, nothing had seemed more natural. In prospect, the thing had been simplicity itself. But it was, somehow, less simple now. Indeed, its difficulties had increased with every step she took. What about Buck? Must he necessarily make her so very welcome? Suppose, when she made her announcement, he should shake hands, ask how her mother was, offer her tea (or whatever publicans did offer ladies), say he had been very glad to see her, and let her go again? How, in the face of that, could she say: "I am your daughter; I really don't know why I have come; I have stayed away a good long time, but here I am, needing friends; why I need friends I will explain to your wife." Was it not likely that Buck had had more than enough of her family?

Had Chaff, as they descended to Kingston, once more urged that she was on a wild-goose chase, as likely as not she would have turned back at the first word.

They reached Buck's public-house—The Molyneux Arms, near the corner of Kingston Bridge.

"Well," said Chaff, stopping, "what do we do now, Mops?"

"We go in, I suppose," said Louie. Without pausing, she moved towards the largest door (there was "Public Bar" written upon it) of an establishment that, if it lacked the garishness of a modern drinking-palace, was yet not quite the red-curtained, lattice-windowed, Christmas-number hostelry of Louie's imaginings. But Chaff, with a "No, not there," drew her round the corner to a quieter door, where small bay-trees stood in green tubs. The step had a brightly polished brass sill and a thick rubber mat perforated with the name "Molyneux Arms." Beyond the little vestibule were double doors with cut-glass panels and a diagonal brass bar on each and a piston for automatic closing at the top.

"Perhaps you'd better wait here," said Chaff.

"All right," said Louie, now heartily wishing she had not left her new abode in Mortlake Road, Putney.

With a soft sigh of the piston, the brass-barred doors closed behind Chaff.

This entrance lay in a short blind alley off the main street, the end of which seemed to be closed by a stableyard. Somebody over a brick wall was walking a horse over cobbles, and a man's voice muttered, "Come up." There was a light clashing of harness, and the same voice began a soft but strong singing, hoisting itself to the higher notes as if the interpolated aspirates had been so many stirrups:

Then a back door opened, and a woman's voice was heard.

"A gentleman to see you, James."

The song ceased. "A what, Susan?" said the man's voice. "Remember——"

"A gentleman—in a top hat," said the second voice.

"You know that travellers sometimes have top hats, Susan," cautioned the first voice.

"I'm sure it's a gentleman, James——"

"Very well, let us hope you're not mistaken and that you were hooked up behind. Ask the gentleman to wait a minute."

The voices ceased.

Instinctively Louie had walked to a half-open coach door and had looked through. She saw a bright little picture. A horse was being put into a gay yellow trap, and the man who was buckling the harness had begun to sing again:

All that Louie could see of him was a pair of glossy black boots and a pair of grey check trousers cut close about the knee. The harness twinkled; the horse's coat shone in the sun like Mr. Jeffries' hair; and somebody within the stable was running water into a bucket. Then the man came round the horse, and she saw him—cropped silver hair, long dewlapped chin, and a back and shoulders that might have served Henson's turn yet. And as Louie watched, with no more emotion than if the scene had been one on a coloured bioscope, he sang again:

Then, as she watched, it came over her for the first time that she had planned and was performing a suspect thing. She had no right to inspect this man and then to know him or not to know him, as she chose. He had no less right to inspect her. She, not he, stood to gain; cards on the table, then; either she must go away at once, taking Chaff with her, or else take her courage in both hands without further spying.

Which was, perhaps, as much as to say that she had already seen and was willing to risk it.

She passed through the half-open door into the yard.

Yet even as she advanced she had a final cowardice. By a man at any rate, anything would be forgiven her, and she really had had a long walk.... There was a bench by the stable door.... But she pulled herself together. No, not that. She was not faint, only very, very pale. She continued to advance.

Then Buck looked up, and their eyes met.

They say of a newly born infant that your first impression of facial resemblance is that to which the child, grown a man, will return. So perhaps it was for one moment with father and daughter. But, if so, it passed instantly. Buck made an upward, deferential gesture of his fore-finger.

"Sha'n't be three minutes, m'm," he said. "Now, Judson, the lady's here! He's just ready, m'm. A beautiful day!"

Then something in Louie's look seemed to strike him.

"It is for Mrs. Allonby's, m'm, isn't it? For one-fifteen; one-fifteen Allonby, Richards, seven to-night. You needn't have come; he'll be there sharp."

Louie was looking steadily at her father. "You've made a mistake," she said.

"What? Hi, Judson! What's this?"

"I came—I came—with the gentleman who's just asked for you. Don't you—don't you——" she faltered and stopped.

"But aren't you from Mrs. Allonby's?"

Louie was conscious that she was becoming pitifully flurried. She could not believe now that she had ever thought this would be an easy thing to do. And she would have to do it all herself; he had a handsome, slightly pompous face, but it was not the face of a man who apprehends things by intuition. She tried again.

"You are Mr. Causton, aren't you?"

"Beg pardon, m'm? You see, one ear——" The Piker had burst the drum of one of Buck's ears. He inclined his head. "What did you say, m'm?"

Suddenly Louie put one hand on the shaft of the trap and sank half sitting on the step. The trap dipped. Her pallor was now extreme.

"The gentleman who wishes to see you——" she began again.

"Yes, m'm?"

"I—I came with him——"

"Yes, m'm—aren't you well, m'm?"

"Don't you know me?"

"If it isn't Mrs. Allonby's, one-fifteen——" said Buck.

"His name—the gentleman's name——"

Then, as the horse lifted a foot, she slipped a little on the step. She might not have fallen, but his old and instinctive muscular discipline counted for something. Buck had made a remarkably swift movement, and his arm now supported her. Suddenly she surrendered her weight to him.

"Here, m'm," said the astonished Buck, "come and set down on the bench."

Louie turned up entreating eyes. "You can't guess?"

"If it's Richards, seven——"

"The gentleman's name—I came with—is Chaffinger——"

"You said——?"

"Chaffinger."

She was too close to him to notice that he too had suddenly become white. He still held her, but slowly half a cubic foot of air came from his chest. Probably with a purely mechanical movement he set her on her feet. His hand was at his sound ear.

"Will you say it again, m'm?" he said huskily.

Louie did so.

"Cap-Captain Chaffinger, m'm?"

"Oh," Louie choked, "don't call me 'm'm'!"

"You did say Captain Chaffinger?"

Then, leaning limply against the shaft, Louie began to speak low and rapidly.

"Send me away if you like—perhaps I was stupid to come—but I wanted—I wanted—I couldn't bear it any longer—I'm all alone—father! I'm Louie—Louie——"

Only Buck's Maker knows whether even then he fully understood. His grey eyes were stupidly on her grey eyes. Her voice, as she continued to mutter broken phrases, possibly lost itself in his deaf ear; but some other sense informed him that she was telling him that she was his daughter—his daughter——

And then at one of her phrases, he seemed to come sluggishly to life. He repeated the phrase after her.

"Putney, m'm? Did you say Putney?" he said.

"Yes, I live there——"

"You live in Putney? Whereabouts in Putney?"

"Mortlake Road."

Buck made another sluggish effort. A quarter of a century and more before he had said to the Honourable Emily: "The Bible, Miss?" Now he said to his daughter:

"The Mortlake Road?"

"I suppose so."

"You live there?"

"Yes."

Now Mallard Bois and Trant were more than geographically remote from Buck. They had the immeasurable remoteness of the Scarisbricks. But Putney was near. To keep himself in spring and condition, he frequently walked over to Putney. Putney was a place you could walk to, and it had streets and houses and a green Tillings' bus. And they rowed the boat race there. Therefore, while it outraged all Order that a Scarisbrick should live there, that fact nevertheless brought his daughter into the same world with himself. For the first time he looked seeingly at her, and as he looked, there vanished, more quickly than a finger is snapped, whatever images of her had beguiled his fancy through the years.

This, then, was she, standing against the shaft with head back, lips parted, brows entreatingly drawn, her whole pose an appeal.

"Father," she was saying, smiling crookedly through those rare things, her tears——

Judson came out of the stable. Buck gave him a curt order, and the trap moved away. Its departure left Louie standing by the little bench outside the stable door. Buck had taken a step towards her. He was murmuring something quite ridiculous—something about "strictly for the gentry." Perhaps he remembered that had his little girl been a little boy he would have given her instruction for nothing at the Sparring Academy in Bruton Street.

All in a moment he passed his arm about Louie. Scarisbrick or not, she was going to be a Causton and his for once—just for once. In an hour he might be calling her "m'm" again, but just for once—his face was beautiful.

"That little girl," he said foolishly, holding her with as gentle a fear as if she had been still in her cradle.

Louie's answer was to faint suddenly on his breast.

But of the Molyneux Arms in a moment. A word about Mortlake Road first.

Two houses had been thrown into one to form the establishment at which Louie had now resided for a week. Officially it was a nursing home; actually it accepted declared invalids and quite well but unrobust lodgers alike. Miss Cora Mayville "ran" it; her cousin, Miss Dot Mayville, was "sister," and from four to eight uniformed nurses came and went continually. None of them had theories, moral, social, or of any other description; to them things were as they were. Nurse Meekins made Louie's bed as who should say, "Helpers of people in trouble do not go beyond their proper business"; Nurse Chalmers brought her letters or called her to dinner in the narrowminded spirit of one who leaves the systematics of charity to others. All were reprehensibly incurious and shockingly affectionate, and so far was Louie's case from being peculiar that, in the eyes of the law at any rate, Miss Dot Mayville was herself twice a parent. Twice (when, from reasons Lord Moone could have explained, the real parents had refused to do so) she had signed the birth-certificates of undesired infants. This irregularity the registrar for the district held perpetually over her head. She laughed, and held other things over his head in return. They were engaged to be married.

It was to this retreat that Buck drove Louie back that January evening, cutting "Richards, seven" without compunction. Poor Chaff had been sent off soon after lunch; there was somebody else to fetch and despatch his Mops now. Buck lifted Louie from the trap and rang the bell of one of the two brass-plated doors. A German youth dressed as a waiter appeared, and Buck bade him hold the horse. Then he went with Louie up to her room. He took off her hat and coat for her; he seemed unable to leave her. He had learned how it was with her.

He had hardly turned a hair at the news. He accepted it as part of the Scheme of Things. To him also indiscretions were of two kinds—indiscretions, and the indiscretions of the Scarisbricks. Only a wistful look had crossed his face; he had hoped Louie's somebody was a gentleman otherwise than in the top-hat sense of the word; and Louie had reassured him about that. For the rest, it was not for Buck to inquire into the private affairs of these great ones. He would as soon have allowed the young German who held the horse to inquire into his own.

"That little girl," he said once more, holding her away from him at the side of her bed.

"And you won't call me 'm'm,' daddy?" Louie laughed.

Buck gave it thought; it was not so simple as it looked. "And you really took daddy's name?" he asked. He had asked it twenty times already.

"Of course."

"And told all those young ladies?" (Louie had related the incident of Burnett Minor and the "Life and Battles.") "All about daddy and the Piker?"

"Of course!"

Buck found it too wonderful. He enfolded his little girl again.

"But you must go now," Louie said by-an-by.

"But I can come in the morning?"

"Yes. And, daddy——"

"Little girl?"

"You'll be good to poor old Chaff? He's fond of me too."

Buck promised that he would. Had there been none other, the tantrums of the Honourable Emily were no doubt bond enough between them.

The next morning Buck had to be told that eight o'clock was too early for a visit, and so, on the next morning again, he did not turn up until eleven. After that eleven became his accustomed hour. Wet or fine was the same to him, and he cancelled all afternoon orders for the trap; his little girl must have the trap at her disposal for a daily drive. And because his fidelity to the Social Order and their own professional tolerances amounted in Louie's case to pretty much the same thing, the nurses one and all fell in love with Buck.

And here, once for all, or at any rate for a long time, a cogent matter may be dismissed, even as those pagan nurses dismissed it. It is Louie's conviction of moral guilt as apart from her persuasion of the practical inconveniences of it. Louie Causton would have been poor stuff for the hot gospeller to practise upon. There were things she would have had undone, and that not merely because the consequences pressed upon her; as they could not be undone, she had begun the tune and intended to fiddle it out. What she saw fit to hide her historian hides also. Louie seized what happiness she could, and it served. She was sorrier for Chaff than she was for herself. She would have been less happy had she taken Uncle Augustus's way out.

And whether the days were happy or not, at any rate they were peacefully alike. Breakfast with the nurses, a morning or afternoon drive with Buck or a walk along the river bank or on Putney Heath, tea (if they drove) perhaps at Kingston, supper with the nurses again, and bed—that was the tale of them. She kept her promise to Chaff; several times he came to see her. Twice he met Buck. At these meetings the shade of the Honourable Emily almost visibly presided.... Chaff tried to talk of "Lives and Battles," Buck of the same—it was not for him to choose topics before his betters. And once, but once only, Buck brought Mrs. Buck, formerly Susan Emmidge, the chemist's servant at Mallard Bois. He hooked her up behind himself before they left Kingston, and Louie did her the same service at the end of the visit. For the rest, if Louie wanted to see her father's second wife she had to go to the Molyneux Arms to do so.

II

As the singer of "The Pilgrim of Love" Buck was known far and abroad up the Thames. It will be believed that he contrived to get an infinite personal pathos into the song; he also made of it, by means of those gratuitous aspirates, an affective athletic exercise in breathing.

As he closed his eyes at each soaring, the effect was as if he inwardly looked back on that remarkable pilgrimage of his own. Bidden to marry, he had married; bidden to unmarry and to marry again, he had done so; and at a word from Louie he would have taken up the pilgrimage once more.

But while Buck exalted the Scarisbricks high above himself, so also he exalted himself high above all beneath him. He ruled the Molyneux Arms with a rod of iron. Only mediately and through him would the two barmaids have dared to address Louie; and his wife's position was altogether anomalous. It was only because Louie would have it so that she sat down to tea with them; and, what with her hooks and eyes and Buck's perpetual admonitions, there was little rest but the grave for her either. Buck subscribed to the Almanack de Gotha and Modern Society; these were always to hand; but The Licensed Victuallers' Gazette, which he took in the way of business, was kept out of Louie's way. Mr. Mackie he would have torn from limb to limb. Far more royalist than the king was Buck; Radicalism was chaos, which word he pronounced "tchayoss." Of pugilism, save to Chaff, he never spoke. "God bless the Squire and his relations."

And (Louie thought) God bless this simple-hearted father of hers also. Buck in the ring had been a better man than Uncle Augustus in the House of Lords, and Henson would not have looked twice at Chaff. Granted he was pompous; with a little more pompousness her mother would have come more creditably out of that old affair. So much for the Scarisbricks. Already, in January, Louie loved her father; by March his daily visit was a necessity of her life. She had been right; her destiny was quite as likely to be bound up with Buck and his beer-pumps as with anything in that dingy old Business School.

Of the Business School she still thought a good deal, however. She could not forget the interesting little drama of which she had seen, as it were, the first act. Somehow, time and distance had simplified some of its details without diminishing her interest in it, and, as she walked along the Putney towpath by day, or lay awake in her white-painted room at night, she wondered that this should be so. By the brutal logic of events, Rainham Parva should have been nearer to her than Holborn; but Rainham Parva seemed now disproportionately remote. Why?

Had the conclusion which persisted in presenting itself not been impossible, perhaps she would not have faced it so frankly. It was impossible—manifestly absurd—that Mr. Jeffries should have any hold on her imagination. Therefore she allowed herself to consider it. No doubt the fancies which filled her head would pass and be forgotten.

Give them a month, then—two months.

She gave them that, and more. They did not pass. But that, no doubt, was due to the curious interrupted story. She felt as if she was reading an interesting serial tale, for the next instalment of which she was suddenly required to wait another month. She wanted to know what was going to happen among the fair, perky boy, the girl who resembled Polly Ross, the lionlike Mr. Jeffries, and that apocryphal fourth actor in the piece. When she had learned that she would close the book. In the meantime she occupied herself, as serial readers do, with guessing.

The spring was advancing towards May when there happened something that suddenly precipitated her guessings. Buck still came daily, but she walked more in the back garden of the nursing home now and less on the heath and on the towpath, and drove, when she did drive, more slowly. Sometimes on her drives a nurse accompanied her. Her doctor found her health excellent.

The thing that happened began with Richenda Earle. Some weeks before, Louie had had a letter from Richenda forwarded from Sutherland Place, which she had neglected to answer; and Richenda had apparently written again, this time to her sister. Louie now gathered that Mrs. Leggat had kept the reason for her disappearance from Mr. Weston, but not from Richenda. By way of Richenda and Mr. Weston it had now reached the Business School. A hastily scrawled letter from Kitty Windus informed Louie of this. Kitty wanted to come and see her.

Well, there was no reason why Kitty should not come. Louie wrote and told her so.

She came on a Saturday afternoon. It was not urgently necessary that Louie should have received her in bed, but the recollection of the spinster's peering eyes held some obscure prompting. Moreover, to receive Kitty in bed would be an intimation that the call must not be a long one, and she had arranged its duration with Miss Dot Mayville.

"Miss Windus," Miss Dot announced, and Kitty entered.

She had brought Louie a bunch of violets; that was the first of several new amenities Louie noticed in her manner. Louie discouraged the second amenity, which was a shy motion as if to embrace her. And the third showed when, after a few minutes in which Kitty's fluttered spirits had become a little calmer (she was not the one to turn her back on people in trouble, she had said, let others hold up their heads as they pleased), she wistfully took Louie's hand on the coverlet. She had cried over Louie a little. Her eyes were still wet.

"Of course—but I don't know whether you've heard—I might have been just like everybody else, only something else has made an awful difference too," she said, her eyes downcast.

"Oh? What else?" Louie asked a little offhandedly. She had not wanted to be wept over.

"Oh, then you haven't heard.... I'm engaged. I've been engaged nearly two months."

"Really? Then I must congratulate you. Is it a secret who to?"

"No," said Kitty. "It's to Mr. Jeffries."

Slowly Louie sat up. She turned, as if, like Buck, she had been deaf on one side. "Who?" she asked.

"Yes. To Mr. Jeffries. Since early in March. You remember he told Archie there was somebody?—and," Kitty became suddenly voluble, "I couldn't believe my ears at first. I'd never dreamed—never dreamed. And after I'd been such a beast—I don't mean a beast exactly, but getting at him, you know. I was just as bad as the others—about his baths and all that. Oh, I did feel ashamed—as mean as mean—oh!" She choked a little. "I don't mind saying it now, but I'd—I'd begun to be afraid I should never get off!"

"Yes—no, I mean," Louie murmured, dazed.

"Just fancy, it's being me! That night, when he asked me, I thought I should have gone clean off it. Sometimes I can hardly believe it yet. I hadn't a notion—not a notion! And it makes everything perfectly wonderful, knowing a man's so struck on you, though he is quiet and don't say much about it. Of course they mean all the more, that sort. We walk along the streets, but he won't let me stop out late for fear of tiring me, and he always takes me right to the door, and I'm trying hard not to be selfish, but it makes me so sorry for other girls who haven't got off—and perhaps if I sell some of my shares to start us with we can get married next year—if he gets a permanency, that is."

Louie was still thunderstruck. Mr. Jeffries engaged to—Kitty Windus! That unnamed personage was—Kitty Windus! She, Louie, was asked to believe that, in the face of all she had seen!

"I am glad," she found herself murmuring again.

"Did you guess?" Kitty asked eagerly. She would have given her ears to be told that somebody else had guessed.

"No," Louie replied, and added, seeing Kitty's fallen face: "I should have thought Mr. Merridew. You seemed such great friends."

At that Kitty broke in: "Poor Archie! I said it made one selfish.... His father's very ill. We were going on Putney Heath to-day, all four of us, Archie and Evie and Jeff and me; but Archie had a wire to go home this morning, poor Archie, and so I'm going to meet the others by-and-by. But anyway, if anything does happen, he'll be able to get married as soon as he likes—he's an only son."

At this Louie was even more startled. Mr. Jeffries and the Soames girl together at that moment! She remembered those irrevocable looks.

"So Mr. Merridew and Miss Soames are engaged, then?" she said.

"Well," Kitty admitted, "it comes to the same thing. They're as good as. I wish Jeff was coming into a bit, like Archie."

"You say they're here, at Putney, this afternoon?"

"Jeff and Evie? Yes. I'm meeting them at five."

Even as Louie was inwardly predicting that Kitty would not see her Mr. Jeffries at five, Miss Dot Mayville entered. But Louie did not want Kitty to go just yet. She wanted to know more of this extraordinary development of her drama. "May we have some tea?" she asked, and Miss Dot went out again. Louie lay back on her pillow and frowned at the foot of her white-painted bed.

"It's very kind of you to give up your afternoon to me," she said by-and-by.

"Oh, my dear, as if I wouldn't!" Kitty broke out almost reproachfully. "I keep telling myself I mustn't be selfish, when Jeff and I have years before us—I'm just beginning to realise it—years—and, oh dear, here I am, selfish again, talking all about myself and never a word about you."

But Louie did not want words about herself. She wanted to hear all, all, about Kitty and Mr. Jeffries. The thing became more incredible moment by moment.

"I'm sorry about Mr. Merridew's father," she said presently. "I suppose Miss Soames is very much upset?"

"Frightfully," said Kitty. "But Jeff's looking after her. It was he who persuaded her to go out this afternoon. It's better for her than moping indoors."

"Perhaps Mr. Merridew asked him to."

"Oh no. He only got the wire this morning. But it isn't a surprise. Jeff saw him last night——" She checked herself. She had no gibes about brown-paper parcels now.

"Well, you'll be quite a courting quartet," said Louie presently, with a brightness she did not feel.

"Yes; jolly, isn't it? But there, I'm simply not going to talk about myself one moment longer. I feel a regular beast. But it's only because I'm so happy. Now let's talk about you. How long are you going to be here? What sort of people are they? Isn't it fearfully expensive? Are you frightened?"

The suppressed inquisitive questions and Louie's preoccupied parries lasted through tea. At a quarter to five Kitty rose. Again Louie found herself wondering whether Kitty would see her Mr. Jeffries that day. Kitty bent over her.

"I should like to kiss you, dear, if you'd let me," she said timidly. "You wouldn't believe what a difference it makes. And I'd love to come again; I love little babies. Now I must run. I won't say a word to Miriam Levey; you know what she is—but I simply must learn not to say those things. Good-bye, dear."

And she was off, waving her skimpy hand from the door.

Louie did not know why her heart should ache already, as at a premonition—for she had no certitude. Indeed, in all that portion of her relation to Mr. Jeffries she had no certitude; but she was only a little less certain on that account. Already she entirely rejected the figment in which Kitty so pathetically believed. Months before she had snapped her fingers at his impudent tale of a shadowy fiancÉe; now she wondered whether he had not been caught in his own trap and found himself compelled, by mere daily exigencies, to give that shadow substance—the substance of Kitty. Impossible—and yet the conceivable alternatives were equally impossible! Incredible that he should have chosen Kitty for his stalking-horse—yet whom else had there been to choose? If this really was a putting-upon the Business School, Mr. Jeffries would see to it that his dupe was as known as his purpose was secret. That left him three candidates from whom to choose indifferently—Kitty, Miriam Levey, and herself.

In her indignation she was unconscious of the pink that crept like a danger signal into her cheeks.

That poor, unconscious, betrayed woman!

Good gracious! It was blackguardly and monstrous! Kitty of all women! To have "predestined spinster" written large all over you was bad enough, without being played upon thus and then cast back into spinsterhood after all! And this new softness of Kitty's, this timid opening of the heart, this new, awkward unselfishness, these pathetic little maxims of conduct! The man must be a cur. Deliberately to waken a heart that was sealed, asleep and not unhappy, and then to leave it to a pain it must keep for ever—good gracious!

Still ignorant of the tell-tale red in her own cheeks, she found Mr. Jeffries vile.

But she must be just to Mr. Jeffries. Perhaps she was wrong. Perhaps there was—nay, there must be—something she didn't know. Why, even if Mr. Jeffries could be so cruel, Kitty herself could hardly be so blind. Struggle with new magnanimities as she would, jealousy was native to Kitty, and jealousy has sharp eyes. No, she, Louie herself, was building a fantastic fabric. It was mere common-sense that Kitty must be supposed to be capable of looking after herself.

But it was one thing to tell herself that she must suspend her judgment and another to do it. That theory of hers seemed to unroll itself brightly and convincingly before her again. She would discard it when she found one that better explained the known facts. Mr. Jeffries was with Evie Soames at that moment. Louie's thoughts flew to Evie Soames.

It was then that she became conscious that her cheeks were hot. It was then also that she told herself angrily that they were not, and found them grow hotter still. The hotter they grew the more she denied their heat. Why should they grow hot? And even granting that they were hot, wasn't this imposture that was being practised on Kitty enough to make anybody's cheek hot? That was it. That discovery made, she admitted the heat—for Kitty's sake. That that great, taciturn, clever man should be infatuated by that pretty fool she resented—for Kitty's sake. That his sleek head, bright as the coat of Buck's horse, should stoop over that empty dark one she found ironically unfit—for Kitty's sake. She told herself all this, forgetting that she had just set Kitty's engagement down also as an absurdity. Her indignation would have been neither more nor less honest had Mr. Jeffries engaged himself (as according to her theory he might quite well have done) to Miriam Levey.

Or to herself.

She lay, the colour coming and going.

At last she roused herself and sat up. "Pretty thoughts for an expectant mother!" she muttered. "I'll go downstairs and talk to Dot."

She dressed, and descended to the nurses' sitting-room in the basement.

Miss Dot and her Registrar were there; they had just come in from a walk. They were telling of a nightingale they had heard sing near Queens Mere. "Oh, and we saw your friend again, the one who came to tea," said Miss Dot, turning to Louie.

Louie pricked up her ears. "Oh? Alone?" she said quickly.

"Yes. Coming down Putney Hill."

"Yes, she said she was going to take a walk," Louie remarked.

But to herself she cried with conviction: "I knew it—I knew it—I knew it!"

For the rest of the evening she was lost in her own thoughts. Miss Cora Mayville worked a hand sewing machine; Miss Dot and her Registrar played bÉzique at a separate table; other nurses, in print aprons or cloaked and bonneted, came and went; but Louie sat and gazed into the fire. When spoken to she smiled mechanically and then resumed her gazing. There was no more continuity in her thoughts than there was in the shape of the flames that illumined her grey eyes. Roy appeared in them for a moment or two—she had seen Roy's name in The Gazette a week before—and then Roy was supplanted by Burnett Minor. Her old French governess at Trant popped up for no particular reason, and then she too gave place to Mr. Mackie. She heard Buck saying again, "That little girl"—and then came a wrangle between Dot and her Registrar. In the adjoining kitchen she heard sounds of frying, and then somebody came in to lay the table for supper. The gas rose and whistled as the stove in the next room was turned off. The three night nurses came down. Louie had her gruel where she sat, and at half-past nine went upstairs again. She got into bed, and dreamed that night that she was dancing with Mr. Jeffries again at the breaking-up party. Her hand lay like a willow leaf in his. "You understand," he was saying to her; "it's no good hiding things from you; you've got the key of it all. It had to be somebody, and you'd left. There was only Kitty for it. You see what an ignominious thing you escape. Don't tell me how degrading it is; I know it; but I'd do it a thousand times for the woman I loved and meant to marry."

Louie knew, in her dream, who that was.

Then she awoke with a start. The street lamp outside, shining through the venetian blinds, made long bars of light on the walls and ceiling. The hot-water bottle at her feet was cold. She heard the creaking of Dot's bed in the little dressing-room adjoining, and the minute ticking of her watch on the table by her bed-head. But what had woke her had been the sound of her own reply, in her dream, to Mr. Jeffries.

"You'll shuffle Kitty off," she had replied, still dancing with him, "but I should have found a way to keep you."

Then, with a deep sigh, she turned and went to sleep again.

III

Her boy was born towards the end of June. Her mother did not visit her; instead, she sent a letter the chief characteristic of which was fright that she had dared even so far to disobey her brother. Louie understood, and in her dictated reply made allowances. She wondered whether she should write to Roy also, but in the end did not. The child was born at three o'clock in the morning; he was hardly six hours old when Buck arrived. The old champion stood looking down on his little girl's little boy. It was long before he spoke.

"I wasn't let see you," he said, two big tears rolling down his cheeks.

"You shall teach him to box, daddy," said Louie, smiling up at him.

But Buck shook his head. "No, no," he said gently—"except just to take care of himself—when he's fourteen, perhaps—if I'm here. Swimming, not sparring. They're a queer lot, them in the ring."

"You must go now, Mr. Causton," said Miss Dot.

The boy was thirty hours old when there arrived for him a great case of toys suitable for a child of four. Buck and Chaff had been round the toyshops together. Mrs. Buck, disobeying her husband for the only time in her life, came by stealth with a flannel binder that might have enwrapped a six-pounds' child; Jim (as Louie had decided to call him), weighed ten pounds, beef to the heel.

He throve at once, and continued to thrive.

The pair of them were the pride of that pagan Putney Nursing Home.

The first of the two incidents that may be allowed to close this portion of Louie's story was a second visit by Kitty Windus to Louie.

She came at ten o'clock at night, and only with difficulty obtained admission. She was allowed ten minutes, on the condition that Louie was awake. Louie was awake. Kitty neither lifted her veil nor asked to see the child. There was no trace now of her little maxims of conduct; she spoke agitatedly, and out of a stinging, jealous pain.

"I've come to ask you something, Miss Causton, and you've got to tell me," she announced, without preface. "I've a right to know."

"Speak a little lower," said Louie, glancing at the babe. "Sit down and tell me what it is."

But Kitty would not sit. Incapable of grandeurs of style, she nevertheless attempted them.

"I don't know whether you happen to be aware what people are saying about you," she said. Her boat-shaped hat and Inverness cape gave her a little the appearance of a scanty tree with which some topiary artist had done his best.

Louie could not help smiling a little; she could have that kind of thing out with herself without calling in Kitty.

"My dear! Of course I know they might be saying anything!" She drew her child a little closer to her.

"Suppose we keep the my dears till we've finished talking," said Kitty coldly. "I mean what they're saying at the Business School."

Louie spoke quietly. "I suppose you mean about me and my boy?"

"Yes, I do mean that, and I've come to ask you to your face; I'm not the one to beat about the bush! I want to know who——" There was no need for Kitty to complete the sentence.

"You won't know that," said Louie, more quietly still.

"Ah! perhaps you won't tell me because you daren't?"

"I've not told anybody, and I'm not going to tell you. I'd die first. Perhaps before we go any further you'll tell me why you want to know?"

"You don't suppose I'd ask you if it wasn't my business, do you?"

Slowly Louie turned her eyes on her. She spoke slowly too. "We should get on more quickly if you didn't jump so to conclusions," she said. "I don't know what your conclusions are, but you seem to have made your mind up about something. If you'll change your tone I'll talk to you; if you won't, I won't."

At that Kitty began to sob. She had to lift her veil in order to put a wisp of wet handkerchief to her eyes. But she changed her tone.

"I only want to know," she said. "And I don't want to know if it isn't my business. But I have seen him look at you, and he did dance with you, and when they said——"

"Who said?" Louie interrupted; but she had already made a guess. "And said what?"

"Jeff, of course," Kitty replied. "Miriam Levey noticed him looking at you first, but after that I saw for myself. And you did dance with him. I might forgive him, but I'd never, never forgive you."

Louie suddenly put a question. Apparently it was for nothing less preposterous than that question that Kitty was here.

"One moment," she said. "Do you mean there's something about Mr. Jeffries and myself you want to know?"

"Yes; and I mean to know," Kitty snapped.

"And that's all?"

"Enough, I should say!"

"Please hear me out. In fact"—Louie paused for a moment and then rapped out sharply—"you want to know whether my lover was Mr. Jeffries?"

"That'll do to be going on with," said Kitty sullenly.

"Then I'll tell you if you'll tell me who said he was."

"I don't see what that's got to do with it, but I'll tell you if you like. Archie Merridew said so. There!"

Archie Merridew!—But Louie restrained her gasp. "Thank you," she said. "May I ask whether you've asked Mr. Jeffries? He might be in a position to know, you know."

"No, I haven't."

"But evidently you've seen something in his manner that would make it not quite impossible?"

"I tell you, you've danced with him, and he's looked at you in a sort of way—more than once, Miriam says—and you're trying to shuffle out of the question," said Kitty, her suspicions aflame again.

"Oh, I'll answer the question! If it had been he"—she glanced at the little head under her breast—"I'd tell you in a minute—for my baby's sake, you see. But it was not; and you might have saved yourself a journey if you'd gone to him first. And now please tell me a little more."

Kitty still looked at her suspiciously. "You said you'd die sooner than tell," she cried quaveringly.

"You mean you don't believe me? Well, I can't make you. If I told you the truth you'd just think I'd made up a name."

"It was somebody else?" cried Kitty eagerly.

If it wasn't Mr. Jeffries, naturally—there was the child——

"Oh, I want to believe you!" Kitty suddenly broke out.

Louie laughed desperately. "Well, my dear, you may. If it was so, I suppose you'd get it out of me. It isn't, that's all. And now I think I've a right to know exactly what this Mr. Merridew has been saying."

Kitty looked hard at her for one moment longer, and then sank on her knees by the side of the bed. She had no choice but to believe. She broke into a torrent of words, low-spoken, not to rouse the child. Louie heard them, amazed. Slowly her incredulity turned into contempt.

The horrid little beast! But, after all, she was not surprised. It was all in his character. Perhaps he had been drunk; perhaps it was merely a fancy-stationery idea of humour. Not that she minded a straw; she laughed; she supposed she was there to have stones thrown at her; it was merely a little annoying that they were not thrown straighter. She could picture the over-pocket-monied little bounder, measuring all pecks out of his own bushel, leaning up against a bar somewhere, probably too fuddled to distinguish his own humorous fancy from a story of life with names given, and believing it himself by the time he had repeated it once or twice.

The little worm!

"But," she said presently, disgustedly smiling, "you remember when I came to the School, and that I asked you who Mr. Jeffries was——"

"Of course!" said Kitty, suddenly entirely believing. "How absurd! But oh, I do love him so."

Louie mused.

"And he—Mr. Jeffries—knows nothing about this, you say?" she asked presently.

"No. He thinks something's wrong. He's been teaching at the School, you know, and of course he must have wondered what was the matter all this last week."

"It's a week since Mr. Merridew—did me this favour?"

"Yes. But perhaps Jeff thought——" She checked herself.

"What? I think I ought to know what Mr. Jeffries may have thought."

Kitty hesitated, and then, with a little burst, told her. It was curious. It appeared that Mr. Jeffries had been very hard up indeed, so hard up that, quite recently, he had actually had to take a position as a commissionaire. It was known, and possibly he had set any oddities of behaviour towards himself down to that.

A commissionaire! Louie was astounded.

"And aren't you going to tell him?" she managed to get out.

"I must, the very next time I see him."

"You mean to-morrow?"

"I don't know. You see"—Kitty hesitated again—"he's left the School. Practically been dismissed. He's got some work at Bedford now."

"Dismissed on account of this?"

"I expect so."

"And now, of course, you've got to tell him that you believed this?"

Kitty dropped her head on the bed. She gave a little moan. "I don't know how I shall ever do it!" she groaned in the bedclothes.

Louie considered herself entitled to agree that it wouldn't be easy.

Presently Kitty rose. She crossed to Louie's mirror and adjusted the boat-shaped hat. Then she came back to the bedside again and craned her head forward.

"May I see the baby?" she asked.

"Another time, I think," said Louie, her lips compressed.

Kitty left.

Louie's mind was in a whirl. At her request, Kitty had turned out the gas before leaving, and only a nightlight glimmered on the little invalid's table. She gazed at it. So she too had been haled into the drama!

On the young fancy stationer she wasted never a thought, either of indignation or of anything else; but Kitty—Evie Soames—Mr. Jeffries—Roy—herself!—What a nightmare—what a pantomime! What an incredible genius this Mr. Jeffries seemed to have for getting himself into complications and dragging other people after him! It might well have puzzled anybody—anybody who had not the key of the puzzle—to know which among them all he really had honoured with his choice! Only Miss Levey seemed to be immune. Surely, for the sake of completeness, he could have found a way of dragging her in too!

Louie had to hold her key exceedingly firmly in order to retain even that lunatic theory that seemed to be the truth.

By dint of holding fast, however, the theory still stood the strain. Evie Soames and Mr. Jeffries were still the central figures of the piece. Kitty was still the stalking-horse behind which, for whatever reasons, he machinated. She herself was still merely dragged in at the whim of a vicious little scoundrel over whose tongue whisky and calumnies ran indifferently, and this little beast was still engaged, or all but engaged, to Evie Soames. Yes, the triangle re-established itself. Kitty and herself were no more than imported complications. The big man and the red-waistcoated youth were still the protagonists, and they faced one another over the stupid little head of Evie Soames.

And yet Louie, lying with her boy at her breast and blinking at the nightlight, refused to class herself with the superfluous Kitty. She did not see herself in a "walking on" part. Though she made her entry late, something told her that she would have a word to say—or else it was a botched and mangled piece indeed. Of life itself as a botched and mangled piece she had no conception; though she kept her thoughts of Him locked within her own breast, it was still the bed of them that there was an Artist over all. But for a false start she would have been on the stage now, and she would have given a voice to that pitiful part of poor Kitty's. Say she had not left that Holborn School when she did—she remembered that breaking-up dance—had one more opportunity like that been given to her——

Then in the darkness she coloured violently. She had realised her own thoughts. This was as much as to say that she would have accepted Kitty's rÔle—would have consented to be an understudy—would, like other understudies, have ousted the principal in time—would have topped the bill with a man the latest of whose mysterious activities was that he had been a commissionaire——

She loved, or was on the point of loving, Mr. Jeffries——

"Nonsense!" she ridiculed herself.

But nonsense or not, it was stronger than all her efforts to think about something else. Perhaps it was her own false start that set her wondering, and ever returning to her wonder, whether he had not made one too. He seemed to have set up the figure of Evie Soames in his own imagination, and probably had not looked at Evie Soames as she actually was since. He seemed to have his full share of that masculine vanity which will have nothing to do with the compromise by which the world jogs on; his rapt, lion's eyes might see visions afar off, and he would not as much as know that his shins were black and raw with the bruises of the hard facts among which he stumbled. Little as Louie knew of him, she thought she knew that. Lucky Evie Soames, who might be as stupid as the mud beneath her feet, yet in one man's blind, far-seeing eyes could do no wrong!

But of course it was nonsense that Louie should have to recognise Evie Soames for her rival.

Yet, on one other point, as she lay with the babe at her breast and her eyes fixed on the little flame of the nightlight, she was already prepared to make a wager with herself. Her theory was still only a theory; she could not prove it; but it could prove itself. It would work out or it would not work out; if it worked out—well, Louie was a woman, and no woman hesitates for a single moment to put on the mantle of the prophet. Indeed, she had prophesied long before. "Circumstances are strong," this Mr. Jeffries who had since been a commissionaire had admitted when she had danced with him, "but is anybody ever beaten unless they deserve to be?" And he had taken his failure in the examination as a sign that he ought not to have gone in for it, and had refused to enter again. Yes, the earthenware vessel was on the point of collision with the one of bronze, and which would break the months or the weeks or the days would show. Kitty must not think that it availed a predestined spinster anything that she got engaged; Mr. Jeffries would never marry Kitty.

And if Louie herself had returned to the Business School after Christmas——

Her dream of how she had danced with him, and he had said "You understand," and she had replied, "I should have found a way to keep you," returned vividly to her——

She would have found a way.

Then she remembered that which even then had stood between.

Excitedly she clutched her boy to her—he woke with the pressure, and gave a little croaking cry.

This, then, was the first of the two things that remained to be told about this part of Louie's story.

For the second of them she had neither years nor months to wait, but a bare fortnight. A very few words will tell it.

One evening after the boy had been put to bed she went down into the nurses' parlour and helped Dot and Nurse Chalmers to overhaul the blouses in which the doctors operated. Besides themselves, only Miss Cora was present; she was reading an evening paper. Louie saw her purse her lips and then throw the paper away. Presently Louie, tossing a patched blouse aside, reached for the paper.

A few minutes later Miss Cora, with a "Why, what's the matter?" started forward and bent over her. Louie had gone deathly white.

"It's nothing—I shall be all right presently," she muttered, her eyes closed.

Miss Cora took the paper. The page at which she herself had last looked was still uppermost. It contained an account of a suicide.

"What is it, dear?" Miss Cora asked again. "Not that?" She pointed to the paragraph. Indeed, there was little else of interest on the page.

"I shall be all right in a minute," Louie murmured again.

There was nothing remarkable about the suicide. A young man had hanged himself behind his bedroom door, and a verdict in accordance with the evidence (which, it was suggested, was largely medical) had been returned. He had left a letter for his mother, precisely like almost every other such letter, and parts of it were quoted. The young man's name was Archie Merridew. He was to have been married on the morrow.

"Is that it?" Miss Cora asked again.

Louie nodded.

"Did you know him?"

Louie made no reply.

They are experienced women at nursing homes; especially about suppressed medical evidence they are able to draw conclusions. The next morning a few rapid guarded words passed between Louie and Miss Cora. The effect of them was to give Louie a sudden feeling of nausea. Miss Cora's whispered explanation seemed only too probable. That also was all in his character.

"That's it, you may be sure," said Miss Cora. "They ought to be lethal-chambered, nasty little sewer-rats; one of 'em's saved them the trouble at any rate. Did you know the girl he was going to marry too?"

"Yes," said Louie.

"Well, she's had an escape. But don't think about it. You have your own little boy. Come into the garden till your father comes and then have a nice long drive. Shall we wrap Jimmy up and let him go with you?"

That, then, was the second thing; but already Louie had heard a prophetical whisper in her soul.