Baltazar was not long in carrying out what, in bitter self-colloquy, he called his Flambardian campaign. He deliberately absented himself from his work in the Mundham office and gave up all his time to Sorio. He now encouraged this latter in all his most dangerous manias, constantly leading the conversation round to what he knew were exciting and agitating topics and bringing him back again and again to especial points of irritation and annoyance.

The days quickly passed, however, and Adrian, though in a strange and restless mood, had still, in no public manner, given evidence of insanity, and short, of course, of some such public manifestation, his treacherous friend’s plan of having him put under restraint, fell to the ground.

Meanwhile, Nance’s preparations for her marriage and for their entrance into their new home advanced towards completion. It was within three days of the date decided upon for their wedding when Nance, who had had less time recently at her disposal for watching her sister’s moods, came suddenly to the conclusion, as, on a wild and stormy afternoon, she led her home from the church, that something was seriously wrong. At first, as they left the churchyard and began making their way towards the bridge, she thought the gloom of the evening was a sufficient reason for Linda’s despairing silence, but as they advanced, with the wind beating in their faces and the roar of the sea coming to them over the dunes, she came to the conclusion that the cause lay deeper.

But that night—it was the twenty-eighth of October—was certainly desolate enough to be the cause of any human being’s depression. The sun was sinking as the sisters started for their walk home. A blood-red streak, jagged and livid, like the mutilated back of some bleeding monster, lay low down over the fens. The wind wailed in the poplars, whistled through the reeds, and sighed in long melancholy gasps like the sobbing of some unhappy earth-spirit across the dykes and the ditches. One by one a few flickering lamps appeared among the houses of the town as the girls drew near the river, but the long wavering lines of light thrown by these across the meadows only increased the general gloom.

“Don’t let’s cross at once,” said Linda suddenly, when they reached the bridge. “Let’s walk along the bank—just a little way! I feel excited and queer to-night. I’ve been in the church so long. Please let’s stay out a little.”

Nance thought it better to agree to the child’s caprice; though the river-bank at that particular hour was dark with a strange melancholy. They left the road and walked slowly along the tow-path in the direction away from the town. A group of cattle standing huddled together near the path, rushed off into the middle of the field.

The waters of the Loon were high—the tide flowing sea-ward—and here and there from the windows of some scattered houses on the opposite bank, faint lights were reflected upon the river’s surface. A strong smell of seaweed and brackish mud came up to them from the dark stream.

“What secrets,” said Linda suddenly, “this old Loon could tell, if it could speak! I call it a haunted river.”

Nance’s only reply to this was to pull her sister’s cloak more tightly round her shoulders.

“I don’t mean in the sense of having drowned so many people,” Linda went on, “I mean in the sense of being half-human itself.”

The words were hardly out of her mouth when a slender dusky figure that had been leaning against the edge of one of the numerous weirs that connect the river-tides with the streams of the water-meadows, came suddenly towards them and revealed herself as Philippa Renshaw.

Both the girls drew back in instinctive alarm. Nance was the first to recover.

“So you too are out to-night,” she said. “Linda got so tired of practising, so we—”

Philippa interrupted her: “Since we have met, Nance Herrick, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t talk a little. Or do you think the people about here would find that an absurd thing for us to do, as we’re both in love with the same man, and you’re going to marry him?”

She uttered these words so calmly and in so strange a voice that Nance for the moment was too startled to reply. She recovered herself quickly, however, and taking Linda by the arm, made as if she would pass her by, without further speech. But Philippa refused to permit this. With the slow dramatic movement always characteristic of her, she stepped into the middle of the path and stopped them. Linda, at this, hung back, trying to draw her sister away.

The two women faced one another in breathless silence. It was too dark for them to discern more than the vaguest outlines of each other’s features, but they were each conscious of the extreme tension, which, like a wave of magnetic force, at once united and divided them. Nance was the first to break the spell.

“I’m surprised,” she said, “to hear you speak of love. I thought you considered all that sort of thing sentimental and idiotic.”

Philippa’s hand went up in a quick and desperate gesture, almost an imploring one.

“Miss Herrick,” she whispered in a very low and very clear tone, “you needn’t do that. You needn’t say those things. You needn’t hurt me more than is necessary.”

“Come away, Nance. Oh, please come away and leave her!” interjected Linda.

“Miss Herrick, listen to me one moment!” Philippa continued, speaking so low as almost to be inaudible. “I have something to ask of you, something that you can do for me. It isn’t very much. It isn’t anything that you need suspect. It is a little thing. It’s nothing you could possibly mind.”

“Don’t listen to her, Nance,” cried Linda again. “Don’t listen to her.”

Philippa’s voice trembled as she went on, “I beg you, I beg you on my knees to hear me. We two may never meet again after this. Nance Herrick, will you, will you let me speak?”

Linda leapt forward. She was shaking from head to foot with fear and anger. “No,” she cried, “she shall not listen to you. She shall not, she shall not.”

Nance hesitated, weary and sick at heart. She had so hoped and prayed that all these lacerating contests were over and done with.

Finally she said, “I think you must see, you must feel, that between you and me there can be nothing—nothing more—nothing further. I think you’ll be wise, I think you’ll recognize it afterwards, to let me go now, to let me go and leave us alone.” As she spoke she drew away from her and put her arm round Linda’s waist. “In any case,” she added, “I can’t possibly hear you before this child. Perhaps, but I can’t promise anything, but perhaps, some other day, when I’m by myself.”

She gave one sad, half-sympathetic, half-reproachful glance, at the frail shadowy figure standing mute and silent; and then turning quickly, let herself be led away.

Linda swung round when they were some few paces away. “She’ll never listen to you!” She called out, in a shrill vibrating voice, “I won’t ever let her listen to you.”

The growing darkness, made thicker by the river-mists, closed in between them, and in a brief while their very footsteps ceased to be heard. Philippa was left alone. She looked round her. On the fen side of the pathway there was nothing but a thick fluctuating shadow, out of which the forms of a few pollard-willows rose like panic-stricken ghosts. On the river itself there shimmered at intervals a faint whitish gleam as if some lingering relics of the vanished day, slow in their drowning, struggled to rise to the surface.

She moved back again to the place where she had been standing at the edge of the weir. Leaning upon the time-worn plank rotten with autumn rains, she gazed down into the dense blackness beneath. Nothing could be seen but darkness. She might have been looking down into some unfathomable pit, leading to the caverns of the mid-earth.

A deathly cold wave of damp air met her face as she leaned over the plank, and a hollow gurgling roar, from the heavy volume of water swirling in the darkness, rose to her ears. She could smell the unseen water; and the smell of it was like the smell of dead black leaves plucked forth from a rain pool in the heart of a forest.

As she leaned forward with her soft breast pressing against the wooden bar and her long slender fingers clutching its edge, a sinister line of poetry, picked up somewhere—she could not recall where—came into her mind, and she found her lips mechanically echoing it. “Like a wolf, sucked under a weir,” the line ran, and over and over again she repeated those words.

Meanwhile Nance, as they returned across the bridge, did her best to soothe and quiet her sister. The sudden appearance of Philippa seemed to have thrown the girl into a paroxysm of frenzy. “Oh, how I hate her!” she kept crying out, “oh, how I loathe and hate her!”

Nance was perplexed and bewildered by Linda’s mood. Never had she known the girl to give way to feelings of this sort. When at last she got her into their house, and had seen her take off her things and begin tidying herself up for their evening meal quite in her accustomed way, she asked her point-blank what was the matter, and why to-day, on this twenty-eighth of October, she had suddenly grown different from her ordinary self.

Linda, standing with bare arms by the mirror and passing a comb through her heavy hair, turned almost fiercely round.

“Do you want to know? Do you really want to know?” she cried, throwing back her head and holding the hair back with her hands. “It’s because of Philippa that he has deserted me! It’s because of Philippa that he hasn’t seen me nor spoken to me for a whole month! It’s because of Philippa that he won’t answer my letters and won’t meet me anywhere! It’s because of Philippa that now—now when I most want him”—and she threw the comb down and flung herself on her bed—“he refuses to come to me or to speak a word.”

“How do you know it’s because of Philippa?” Nance asked, distressed beyond words to find that in spite of all her efforts Linda was still as obsessed by Brand as ever before.

“I know from him,” the girl replied. “You needn’t ask me any more. She’s got power over him, and she uses it against me. If it wasn’t for her he’d have married me before now.” She sat up on the edge of her bed and looked woefully at her sister with large sunken eyes. “Yes,” she went on, “if it wasn’t for her he’d marry me now—to-day—and, oh, Nance, I want him so! I want him so!”

Nance felt an oppressive weight of miserable helplessness in the presence of this heart-stricken cry. As she looked round the room and saw her various preparations for leaving it and for securing the happiness of her own love, she felt as though in some subtle way she had once more betrayed the unhappy child. She knew herself, only too well, what that famished and starving longing is—that cry of the flesh and blood, and the heart and the spirit, for what the eternal destinies have put out of our reach!

And she could do nothing to help her. What could she do? Now for the first time in her life, as she looked at that lamentable youthful figure, dumbly pleading with her for some kind of miracle, Nance was conscious of a vague unformulated indignation against the whole system of things that rendered this sort of suffering possible. If only she were a powerful and a tender deity, how she would hasten to end this whole business of sex-life which made existence so intolerable! Why could not people be born into the world like trees or plants? And being born, why could not love instinctively create the answering passion it craved, and not be left to beat itself against cruel walls, after scorching itself in the irresistible flame?

“Nance!” said the young girl suddenly. “Nance! Come here. Come over to me. I want to tell you something.”

The elder sister obeyed. It was not long—for hard though it may be to break silence, these things are quickly spoken—before she knew the worst. Linda, with her arms clutched tightly round her, and her face hidden, confessed that she was with child.

Nance leapt to her feet. “I’ll go to him,” she cried, “I’ll go to him at once! Of course he must marry you now. He must! He must! I’ll go to him. I’ll go to Hamish. I’ll go to Adrian—to Fingal! He must marry you, Linda. Don’t cry, little one. I’ll make it all right. It shall be all right! I’ll go to him this very evening.”

A faint flush appeared in Linda’s pale cheeks and a glimmer of hope in her eyes. “Do you think, possibly, that there’s any chance? Can there be any chance? But no, no, darling, I know there’s none—I know there’s none.”

“What makes you so sure, Linda?” asked Nance, rapidly changing her dress, and as she did so pouring herself out a glass of milk.

“It’s Philippa,” murmured the other in a low voice. “Oh, how I hate her! How I hate her!” she continued, in a sort of moaning refrain, twisting her long hair between her fingers and tying the ends of it into a little knot.

“Well, I’m off, my dear,” cried Nance at length, finishing her glass of milk and adjusting her hat-pins. “I’m going straight to find him. I may pick up Adrian on the way, or I may not. It rather depends. And I may have a word or two with Philippa. The chances are that I shall overtake her if I go now. She can’t have waited much longer down by the river.”

Linda rushed up to her and clasped her in her arms. “My own darling!” she murmured, “how good you are to me—how good you are! Do you know, I was afraid to tell you this—afraid that you’d be angry and ashamed and not speak to me for days. But, oh, Nance, I do love him so much! I love him more than my life—more than my life even now!”

Nance kissed her tenderly. “Make yourself some tea, my darling, won’t you? We’ll have supper whenever I come back, and that’ll be—I hope—with good news for you! Good-bye, my sweetheart! Say your prayers for me, and don’t be frightened however late I am. And have a good tea!”

She kissed her again, and with a final wave of the hand and an encouraging smile, she left the room and ran down the stairs. She walked slowly to the top of the street, her head bent, wondering in her mind whether she should ask Adrian to go with her to the Renshaws’ or whether she should go alone.

The question was decided for her. As she emerged on the green she suddenly came upon Sorio himself, standing side by side with Philippa. They both turned quickly as, in the flare of a wind-blown lamp, they perceived her approach. They turned and awaited her without a word.

Without a word, too—and in that slow dreamlike manner which human beings assume at certain crises in their lives, when fate like a palpable presence among them takes their movements into its own hand—they moved off, all three together, in the direction of the park gates. Not a word did any of them utter, till, having passed the gates, they were quite far advanced along that dark and lonely avenue.

Then Philippa broke the silence. “I can say to her, Adrian, what I’ve just said to you—mayn’t I?”

In the thick darkness, full of the heavy smell of rain-soaked leaves, Sorio walked between them. Nance’s hand was already resting upon his arm, and now, as she spoke, Philippa’s fingers searched for his, and took them in her own and held them feverishly.

“You can say what you please, Phil,” he muttered, “but you’ll see what she answers—just what I told you just now.”

Their tone of intimate association stabbed like a knife at the heart of Nance. A moment ago—in fact, ever since she had left her by the weir—she had been feeling less antagonistic and more pitiful towards her vanquished rival. But this pronoun “she” applied mutually by them to herself, seemed to push her back—back and away—outside the circle of some mysterious understanding between the two. Her heart hardened fiercely. Was this girl still possessed of some unknown menacing power?

“What I asked Adrian,” said Philippa quietly, while the pressure of her burning fingers within the man’s hand indicated the strain of this quietness, “was whether you would be generous and noble enough to give him up to me for his last free day—the last day before you’re married. Would you be large-hearted enough for that?”

“What do you mean—‘give him up’ to you?” murmured Nance.

Philippa burst in a shrill unearthly laugh. “Oh, you needn’t be frightened!” she exclaimed. “You needn’t be jealous. I only mean let me go with him, for the whole day, a long walk—you know—or something like that—perhaps a row up the river. It doesn’t matter what, as long as I feel that that day is my day, my day with him—the last, and the longest!”

She was silent, feverish, her fingers twining and twisting themselves round her companion’s, and her breath coming in quick gasps. Nance was silent also, and they all three moved forward through the heavy fragrant darkness.

“You two seem to have settled it between yourselves definitely enough,” Nance remarked at last. “I don’t really see why you need bring me into it at all. Adrian is, of course, entirely free to do what he likes. I don’t see what I have to do with it!”

Philippa’s hot fingers closed tightly upon Sorio’s as she received this rebuff. “You see!” she murmured in a tone that bit into Nance’s flesh like the tooth of an adder. “You see, Adriano!” She shrugged her shoulders and gave a low vindictive laugh. “She’s a thorough woman,” she added with stinging emphasis. “She’s what my mother would call a sweet, tender, sensitive girl. But we mustn’t expect too much from her, Adrian, must we? I mean in the way of generosity.”

Nance withdrew her hand from the arm of her betrothed and they all three walked on in silence.

“You see what you’re in for, my friend,” Philippa began again. “Once married it’ll be always like this. That is what you seem unable to realize. It’s a mistake, as I’ve often said, this mixing of classes.”

Nance could no longer restrain herself. “May I ask what you mean by that last remark?” she whispered in a low voice.

Philippa laughed lightly. “It doesn’t need much explanation,” she replied. “Adrian is, of course, of very ancient blood, and you—well, you betray yourself naturally by this lack of nobility, this common middle-class jealousy!”

Nance turned fiercely upon them, and clutching Sorio’s arm spoke loudly and passionately. “And you—what are you, who, like a girl of the streets, are ready to pick up what you can of a man’s attentions and attract him with mere morbid physical attraction? You—what are you, who, as you say yourself, are ready to share a man with some one else? Do you call that a sign of good-breeding?”

Philippa laughed again. “It’s a sign at any rate of being free from that stupid, stuffy, bourgeois respectability, which Adrian is going to get a taste of now! That very sneer of yours—‘a girl of the streets’—shows the class to which you belong, Nance Herrick! We don’t say those things. It’s what one hears among tradespeople.”

Nance’s fingers almost hurt Sorio’s arms as she tightened her hold upon him. “It’s better than being what you are, Philippa Renshaw,” she burst out. “It’s better than deliberately helping your brother to ruin innocent young girls—yes, and taking pleasure in seeing him ruining them—and then taunting them cruelly in their shame, and holding him back from doing them justice! It’s better than that, Philippa Renshaw, though it may be what most simple-minded decent-hearted women feel. It’s better than being reduced by blind passion to have to come to another woman and beg her on your knees for a ‘last day’ as you call it! It’s better than that—though it may be what ordinary unintellectual people feel!”

Philippa’s fingers grew suddenly numb and stiff in Sorio’s grasp. “Do you know,” she murmured, “you ‘decent-feeling’ woman—if that’s what you call yourself—that a couple of hours ago, when you left me on the river bank, I was within an ace of drowning myself? I suppose ‘decent-feeling’ women never run such a risk! They leave that to ‘street-girls’ and—and—and to us others!”

Nance turned to Sorio. “So she’s been telling you that she was thinking of drowning herself? I thought it was something of that kind! And I suppose you believed her. I suppose you always believe her!”

“And he always believes you!” Philippa cried. “Yes, he’s always deceived—the easy fool—by your womanly sensitive ways and your touching refinement! It’s women like you, without intelligence and without imagination, who are the ruin of men of genius. A lot you care for his work! A lot you understand of his thoughts! Oh, yes, you may get him, and cuddle him, and spoil him, but, when it comes to the point, what you are to him is a mere domestic drudge! And not only a drudge, you’re a drag, a burden, a dead-weight! A mere mass of ‘decent-feeling’ womanliness—weighing him down. He’ll never be able to write another line when once you’ve really got hold of him!”

Nance had her answer to this. “I’d sooner he never did write another line,” she cried, “and remain in his sober senses, than be left to your influence, and be driven mad by you—you and your diseased, morbid, wicked imagination!”

Their two voices, rising and falling in a lamentable litany of elemental antagonism—antagonism cruel as life and deeper than death—floated about Sorio’s head, in that perfumed darkness, like opposing streams of poison. It was only that he himself, harassed by long irritating debates with Baltazar, was too troubled, too obsessed by a thousand agitating doubts, to have the energy or the spirit to bring the thing to an end, or he could not have endured it up to this point. With his nerves shaken by Baltazar’s corrosive arts, and the weight of those rain-heavy trees and thick darkness all around him, he felt as if he were in some kind of trance, and were withheld by a paralysing interdict from lifting a finger. There came to him a sort of half-savage, half-humorous remembrance of a conversation he had once had with some one or other—his mind was too confused to recall the occasion—in which he had upheld the idealistic theory of the arrival of a day when sex jealousy would disappear from the earth.

But as the girls continued to outrage each other’s most secret feelings, each unconsciously quickening her pace as she poured forth her taunts, and both dragging Sorio forward with them, the feeling grew upon him that he was watching some deep cosmic struggle, that was, in its way, as inhuman and elemental as a conflict between wind and water. With this idea lodged in his brain, he began to derive a certain wild and fantastic pleasure from the way they lacerated one another. There was no coxcombry in this. He was far too wrought-upon and shaken in his mind. But there was a certain grim exultant enjoyment, as if he were, at that moment, permitted a passing glimpse into some dark forbidden “cellarage” of Nature, where the primordial elements clash together in eternal conflict.

Inspired by this strange mood, he returned the pressure of Philippa’s fingers, and entwined his arm round the trembling form of his betrothed, drawing both the girls closer towards him, and, in consequence, closer towards one another.

They continued their merciless encounter, almost unconscious, it seemed, of the presence of the man who was the cause of it, and without strength left to resist the force with which he was gradually drawing them together.

Suddenly the wind, which had dropped a little during the previous hour, rose again in a violent and furious gust. It tore at the dark branches above their heads and went moaning and wailing through the thickets on either side of them. Drops of rain, held in suspension by the thicker leaves, splashed suddenly upon their faces, and from the far distance, with a long-drawn ominous muttering, that seemed to come from some unknown region of flight and disaster, the sound of thunder came to their ears.

Sorio dropped Philippa’s hand and embracing her tightly, drew her, too, closely towards him. Thus interlocked by the man’s arms, all three of them staggered forward together, lashed by the wind and surrounded by vague wood-noises that rose and fell mysteriously in the impenetrable darkness.

The powers of the earth seemed let loose, and strange magnetic currents in fierce antipodal conflict, surged about them, and tugged and pulled at their hearts. The sound of the thunder, the wild noises of the night, the strange dark evocations of elemental hatred which at once divided and united his companions, surged through Sorio’s brain and filled him with a sort of intoxication.

The three of them together might have been taken, had the clock of time been put back two thousand years, for some mad Dionysian worshippers following their god in a wild inhuman revel.

Inspired at last by a sort of storm-frenzy, while the wind came wailing and shrieking down the avenue into their faces, Sorio suddenly stopped.

“Come, you two little fools,” he cried, “let’s end this nonsense! Here—kiss one another! Kiss one another, and thank God that we’re alive and free and conscious, and not mere inert matter, like these dead drifting leaves!”

As he spoke he stepped back a little, and with a swing of his powerful arms, brought both the girls face to face with one another. Nance struggled fiercely, and resisted with all her strength. Philippa, with a strange whispering laugh, remained passive in his hands.

“Kiss one another!” he cried again. “Are you kissing or are you holding back? It’s too dark for me to see!”

Philippa suddenly lost her passivity, slipped like a snake from under his encircling arms, and rushed away among the trees. “I leave her to you!” she called back to them out of the darkness. “I leave her to you! You won’t endure her long. And what will Baptiste do, Adriano?”

This last word of hers calmed Sorio’s mood and threw him back upon his essential self. He sighed heavily.

“Well, Nance,” he said, “shall we go back? It’s no use waiting for her. She’ll find her way to Oakguard. She knows every inch of these woods.” He sighed again, as if bidding farewell, in one fate-burdened moment, both to the woods and the girl who knew them.

“You can go back if you like,” Nance answered curtly. “I’m going to speak to Brand”; and she told him in a brief sentence what she had learned from Linda.

Sorio seized her hand and clutched it savagely. “Yes, yes,” he cried, “yes, yes, let’s go together. He must be taught a lesson—this Brand! Come, let’s go together!”

They moved on rapidly and soon approached the end of the avenue and the entrance to the garden. As Sorio pushed open the iron gates, a sharp crack of thunder, followed by reverberating detonations, broke over their heads. The sudden flash that succeeded the sound brought into vivid relief the dark form of the house, while a long row of fading dahlias, drooping on their rain-soaked stems, stood forth in ghastly illumination.

Nance had time to catch on Adrian’s face a look that gave her a premonition of danger. Had she not herself been wrought-up to an unnatural pitch of excitement by her contest with Philippa, she would probably have been warned in time and have drawn back, postponing her interview with Brand till she could have seen him alone. As it was, she felt herself driven forward by a force she could not resist. “Now—very now,” she must face her sister’s seducer.

A light, burning behind heavy curtains, in one of the lower mullioned windows, enabled them to mount the steps. As she rang the bell, a second peal of thunder, but this time farther off, was followed by a vivid flash of lightning, throwing into relief the wide spaces of the park and the scattered groups of monumental oak trees. For some queer psychic reason, inexplicable to any material analysis, Nance at that moment saw clearly before her mind’s eye, a little church almanac, which Linda had pinned up above their dressing-table, and on this almanac she saw the date—the twenty-eighth of October—printed in Roman figures.

To the servant who opened the door Nance gave their names, and asked whether they could see Mr. Renshaw. “Mr. Renshaw,” she added emphatically, “and please tell him it’s an urgent and important matter.”

The man admitted them courteously and asked them to seat themselves in the entrance hall while he went to look for his master. He returned after a short time and ushered them into the library, where a moment later Brand joined them.

During their moment of waiting, both in the hall and in the room, Sorio had remained taciturn and inert, sunk in a fit of melancholy brooding, his chin propped on the handle of his stick. He had refused to allow the servant to take out of his hands either his stick or his hat, and he still held them both, doggedly and gloomily, as he sat by Nance’s side opposite the carved fireplace.

When Brand entered they both rose, but he motioned them to remain seated, and drawing up a chair for himself close by the side of the hearth, looked gravely and intently into their faces.

At that moment another rolling vibration of thunder reached them, but this time it seemed to come from very far away, perhaps from several miles out to sea.

Brand’s opening words were accompanied by a fierce lashing of rain against the window, and a spluttering, hissing noise, as several heavy drops fell through the old-fashioned chimney upon the burning logs.

“I think I can guess,” he said, “why you two have come to me. I am glad you have come, especially you, Miss Herrick, as it simplifies things a great deal. It has become necessary that you and I should have an explanation. I owe it to myself as well as to you. Bah! What nonsense I’m talking. It isn’t a case of ‘owing.’ It isn’t a case of ‘explaining.’ I can see that clearly enough”—he laughed a genial boyish laugh—“in your two faces! It’s a case of our own deciding, with all the issues of the future clearly in mind, what will be really best for your sister’s happiness.”

“She has not sent—” began Nance hurriedly.

“What you’ve got to understand—you Renshaw—” muttered Adrian, in a strange hoarse voice, clenching and unclenching his fingers.

Brand interrupted them both. “Pardon me,” he cried, “you do not wish, I suppose, either of you, to cause any serious shock to my mother? It’s absurd of her, of course, and old-fashioned, and all that sort of thing; but it would actually kill her—” he rose as he spoke and uttered the words clearly and firmly. “It would actually kill her to get any hint of what we’re discussing now. So, if you’ve no objection, we’ll continue this discussion in the work-shop.” He moved towards the door.

Sorio followed him with a rapid stride. “You must understand, Renshaw—” he began.

“If it’ll hurt your mother so,” cried Nance hurriedly, “what must Linda be suffering? You didn’t think of this, Mr. Renshaw, when you—”

Brand swung round on his heel. “You shall say all this to me, all that you wish to say—everything, do you hear, everything! Only it must and shall be where she cannot overhear us. Wait till we’re alone. We shall be alone in the work-shop.”

“If this ‘work-shop’ of yours,” muttered Sorio savagely, seizing him by the arm, “turns out to be one of your English tricks, you’d better—”

“Silence, you fool!” whispered the other. “Can’t you stop him, Miss Herrick? It’ll be pure murder if my mother hears this!”

Nance came quickly between them. “Lead on, Mr. Renshaw,” she said. “We’ll follow you.”

He led them across the hall and down a long dimly lit passage. At the end of this there was a heavily panelled door. Brand took a key from his pocket and after some ineffectual attempts turned the lock and stood aside to let them enter. He closed the door behind them, leaving the key on the outside. The “work-shop” Brand had spoken of turned out to be nothing more or less than the old private chapel of Oakguard, disassociated, however, for centuries from any religious use.

Nance glanced up at the carved ceiling, supported on foliated corbels. The windows, high up from the ground, were filled with Gothic tracery, but in place of biblical scenes their diamonded panes showed the armorial insignia of generations of ancient Renshaws. There was a raised space at the east end, where, in former times, the altar stood, but now, in place of an altar, a carpenter’s table occupied the central position, covered with a litter of laths and wood-chippings. The middle portion of the chapel was bare and empty, but several low cane chairs stood round this space, like seats round a toy coliseum.

Brand indicated these chairs to his visitors, but neither Nance nor Sorio seemed inclined to avail themselves of the opportunity to rest. They all three, therefore, stood together, on the dark polished oak floor.

On first entering the chapel, Brand had lit one of a long row of tapers that stood in wooden candlesticks along the edge of what resembled choir stalls. Now, leaving his companions, he proceeded very deliberately to set light to the whole line of these. The place thus illuminated had a look strangely weird and confused.

Certain broken flower-pots on the ground, and one or two rusty gardening implements, combined with the presence of the wicker-chairs to produce the impression of some sort of “Petit Trianon,” or manorial summer-house, into which all manner of nondescript rubbish had in process of long years come to drift.

The coats-of-arms in the windows above, as the tapers flung their light upon them, had an air almost “collegiate,” as if the chamber were some ancient dining-hall of a monastic order. The carpenter’s table upon the raised dais, with some dimly coloured Italianated picture behind it, inserted in the panelling, gave Nance a most odd sensation. Where had she seen an effect of that kind before? In a picture—or in reality?

But the girl had no heart to analyse her emotions. There was too much at stake. The rain, pattering heavily on the roof of the building, seemed to remind her of her task. She faced Brand resolutely as he strolled back towards them across the polished floor.

“Linda has told me everything,” she said. “She is going to have a child, and you, Mr. Renshaw, are the father of it.”

Sorio made an inarticulate exclamation and approached Brand threateningly. But the latter, disregarding him, continued to look Nance straight in the face.

“Miss Herrick,” he said quietly, “you are a sensible woman and not one, I think, liable to hysteric sentimentalism. I want to discuss this thing quite freely and openly with you, but I would greatly prefer it if your husband—I beg your pardon—if Mr. Sorio would let us talk without interrupting. I haven’t got unlimited time. My mother and sister will be both waiting dinner for me and sending people to find me, perhaps even coming themselves. So it’s obviously in the interests of all of us—particularly of Linda—that we should not waste time in any mock heroics.”

Nance turned quickly to her betrothed. “You’ll hear all we say, Adrian, but if it makes things easier, perhaps—”

Without a word, in mute obedience to her sad smile, Sorio left their side, and drawing back, seated himself in one of the wicker chairs, hugging his heavy stick between his knees.

The rain continued falling without intermission upon the leaden roof, and from a pipe above one of the windows they could hear a great jet of water splashing down outside the wall.

Brand spoke in a low hurried tone, without embarrassment and without any sort of shame. “Yes, Miss Herrick, what she says is quite true. But now come down to the facts, without any of this moral vituperation, which only clouds the issues. You have, no doubt, come here with the idea of asking me to marry Linda. No! Don’t interrupt me. Let me finish. But I want to ask you this—how do you know that if I marry Linda, she’ll be really any happier than she is to-day? Suppose I were to say to you that I would marry her—marry her to-morrow—would that, when you come to think it over in cold blood, really make you happy in your mind about her future?

“Come, Miss Herrick! Put aside for a moment your natural anger against me. Grant what you please as to my being a dangerous character and a bad man, does that make me a suitable husband for your sister? Your instinct is a common instinct—the natural first instinct of any protector of an injured girl, but is it one that will stand the light of quiet and reasonable second thoughts?

“I am, let us say, a selfish and unscrupulous man who has seduced a young girl. Very well! You want to punish me for my ill-conduct, and how do you go about it? By giving up your sister into my hands! By giving up to me—a cruel and unscrupulous wretch, at your own showing—the one thing you love best in the world! Is that a punishment such as I deserve? In one moment you take away all my remorse, for no one remains remorseful after he has been punished. And you give my victim up—bound hand and foot—into my hands.

“Linda may love me enough to be glad to marry me, quite apart from the question of her good fame. But will you, who probably know me better than Linda, feel happy at leaving her in my hands? Your idea may be that I should marry her and then let her go. But suppose I wouldn’t consent to let her go? And suppose she wouldn’t consent to leave me?

“There we are—tied together for life—and she as the weaker of the two the one to suffer for the ill-fated bargain! That will not have been a punishment for me, Nance Herrick, nor will it have been a compensation for her. It will simply have worked out as a temporary boredom to one of us, and as miserable wretchedness to the other!

“Is that what you wish to bring about by this interference on her behalf? It’s absurd to pretend that you think of me as a mere hot-headed amorist, desperately in love with Linda, as she is with me, and that, by marrying us, you are smoothing out her path and settling her down happily for the rest of her life. You think of me as a cold-blooded selfish sensualist, and to punish me for being what I am, you propose to put Linda’s entire happiness absolutely in my hands!

“Of course, I speak to you like this knowing that, whatever your feelings are, you have the instincts of a lady. A different type of woman from yourself would consider merely the worldly aspect of the matter and the advantage to your sister of becoming mistress of Oakguard. That, I know, does not enter, for one moment, into your thoughts, any more than it enters into hers. I am not ironical in saying this. I am not insulting you. I am speaking simply the truth.

“Forgive me, Miss Herrick! Even to mention such a thing is unworthy of either of us. I am, as you quite justly realize—and probably more than you realize—what the world calls unscrupulous. But no one has ever accused me of truckling to public opinion or social position. I care nothing for those things, any more than you do or Linda does. As far as those things go I would marry her to-morrow. My mother, as you doubtless know, hopes that I shall marry her—wishes and prays for it. My mother has never given a thought, and never will give a thought, to the opinion of the world. It isn’t in her nature, as no doubt you quite realize. We Renshaws have always gone our own way, and done what we pleased. My father did—Philippa does; and I do.

“Come, Miss Herrick! Try for a moment to put your anger against me out of the question. Suppose you did induce me to marry Linda, and Linda to marry me, does that mean that you make me change my nature? We Renshaws never change and I never shall, you may be perfectly sure of that! I couldn’t even if I wanted to. My blood, my race, my father’s instincts in me, go too deep. We’re an evil tribe, Nance Herrick, an evil tribe, and especially are we evil in our relations with women. Some families are like that, you know! It’s a sort of tradition with them. And it is so with us. It may be some dark old strain of Viking blood, the blood of the race that burnt the monasteries in the days of Æthelred the Unready! On the other hand it may be some unaccountable twist in our brains, due—as Fingal says—to—oh! to God knows what!

“Let it go! It doesn’t matter what it is; and I daresay you think me a grotesque hypocrite for bringing such a matter into it at all. Well! Let it go! There’s really no need to drag in Æthelred the Unready! What you and I have to do, Miss Herrick, is, seriously and quietly, without passion or violence, to discuss what’s best for your sister’s happiness. Put my punishment out of your mind for the present—that can come later. Your friend Mr. Sorio will be only too pleased to deal with that! The point for us to consider, for us who both love your sister, is, what will really be happiest for her in the long run—and I can assure you that no woman who ever lived could be happy long tied hand and foot to a Renshaw.

“Look at my mother! Does she suggest a person who has had a happy life? I tell you she would give all she has ever enjoyed here—every stick and stone of Oakguard—never to have set eyes on my father—never to have given birth to Philippa or to me! We Renshaws may have our good qualities—God knows what they are—but we may have them. But one thing is certain. We are worse than the very devil for any woman who tries to live with us! It’s in our blood, I tell you. We can’t help it. We’re made to drive women mad—to drive them into their graves!”

He stopped abruptly with a bitter and hopeless shrug of his shoulders. Nance had listened to him, all the way through his long speech, with concentrated and frowning attention. When he had finished she stood staring at him without a word, almost as if she wished him to continue; almost as if something about his personality fascinated her in spite of herself, and made her sympathetic.

But Sorio, who had been fidgetting with his heavy stick, rose now, slowly and deliberately, to his feet. Nance, looking at his face, saw upon it an expression which from long association she had come to regard with mingled tenderness and alarm. It was the look his features wore when on the point of rushing to the assistance of some wounded animal or ill-used child.

He uttered no word, but flinging Nance aside with his left hand, with the other he struck blindly with his stick, aiming a murderous blow straight at Brand’s face.

Brand had barely time to raise his hand. The blow fell upon his wrist, and his arm sank under it limp and paralysed.

Nance, with a loud cry for assistance, clung frantically to Sorio’s neck, trying to hold him back. But apparently beyond all consciousness now of what he was doing, Sorio flung her roughly back and drove his enemy with savage repeated strokes into a corner of the room. It was not long before Brand’s other arm was rendered as useless as the first, and the blows falling now on his unprotected head, soon felled him to the ground.

Nance, who had flung open the door and uttered wild and panic-stricken cries for help, now rushed across the room and pinioned the exhausted flagellant in her strong young arms. Seeing his enemy motionless and helpless with a stream of blood trickling down his face, Adrian resigned himself passively to her controlling embrace.

They were found in this position by the two men-servants, who came rushing down the passage in answer to her screams. Mrs. Renshaw, dressing in her room on the opposite side of the house, heard nothing. The steady downpour of the rain dulled all other sounds. Philippa had not yet returned.

Under Nance’s directions, the two men carried their master out of the “work-shop,” while she herself continued to cling desperately to Sorio. There had been something hideous and awful to the girl’s imagination about the repeated “thud—thud—thud” of the blows delivered by her lover. This was especially so after the numbing of his bruised arms reduced Adrian’s victim to helplessness.

As she clung to him now she seemed to hear the sound of those blows—each one striking, as it seemed, something resistless and prostrate in her own being. And once more, with grotesque iteration, the figures upon Linda’s almanac ticked like a clock in answer to the echo of that sound. “October the twenty-eighth—October the twenty-eighth,” repeated the church-almanac, from its red-lettered frame.

The extraordinary thing was that as her mind began to function more naturally again, she became conscious that, all the while, during that appalling scene, even at the very moment when she was crying out for help, she had experienced a sort of wild exultation. She recalled that emotion quite clearly now with a sense of curious shame.

She was also aware that while glancing at Brand’s pallid and unconscious face as they carried him from the room, she had felt a sudden indescribable softening towards him and a feeling for him that she would hardly have dared to put into words. She found herself, even now, as she went over in her mind with lightning rapidity every one of the frightful moments she had just gone through, changing the final episode in her heart, to quite a different one; to one in which she herself knelt down by their enemy’s side, and wiped the blood from his forehead, and brought him back to consciousness.

Left alone with Sorio, Nance relaxed her grasp and laid her hands appealingly upon his shoulder. But it was into unseeing eyes that she looked, and into a face barely recognizable as that of her well-beloved. He began talking incoherently and yet with a kind of terrible deliberation and assurance.

“What’s that you say? Only the rain? They say it’s only the rain when they want to fool me and quiet me. But I know better! They can’t fool me like that. It’s blood, of course; it’s Nance’s blood. You, Nance? Oh, no, no, no! I’m not so easily fooled as that. Nance is at the bottom of that hole in the wood, where I struck her—one—two—three! It took three hits to do it—and she didn’t speak a word, not a word, nor utter one least little cry. It’s funny that I had to hit her three times! She is so soft, so soft and easy to hurt. No, no, no, no! I’m not to be fooled like that. My Nance had great laughing grey eyes. Yours are horrible, horrible. I see terror in them. She was afraid of nothing.”

His expression changed, and a wistful hunted look came into his face. The girl tried to pull him towards one of the chairs, but he resisted—clasping her hand appealingly.

“Tell me, Phil,” he whispered, in a low awe-struck voice, “tell me why you made me do it. Did you think it would be better, better for all of us, to have her lying there cold and still? No, no, no! You needn’t look at me with those dreadful eyes. Do you know, Phil, since you made me kill her I think your eyes have grown to look like hers, and your face, too—and all of you.”

Nance, as he spoke, cried out woefully and helplessly. “I am! I am! I am! Adrian—my own—my darling—don’t you know me? I am your Nance!”

He staggered slowly now to one of the chairs, moving each foot as he did so with horrible deliberation as if nothing he did could be done naturally any more, or without a conscious effort of will. Seating himself in the chair, he drew her down upon his knee and began passing his fingers backwards and forwards over her face.

“Why did you make me do it, Phil?” he moaned, rocking her to and fro as if she were a child. “Why did you make me do it? She would have given me sleep, if you’d only let her alone, cool, deep, delicious sleep! She would have smoothed away all my troubles. She would have destroyed the old Adrian and made a new one—a clear untroubled one, bathed in great floods of glorious white light!”

His voice sank to an awe-struck and troubled murmur. “Phil, my dear,” he whispered, “Phil, listen to me. There’s something I can’t remember! Something—O God! No! It’s some one—some one most precious to me—and I’ve forgotten. Something’s happened to my brain, and I’ve forgotten. It was after I struck those blows, those blows that made her mouth look so twisted and funny—just like yours looks now, Phil! Why is it, do you think, that dead people have that look on their mouths? Phil, tell me; tell me what it is I’ve forgotten! Don’t be cruel now. I can’t stand it now. I must remember. I always seem just on the point of remembering, and then something in my brain closes up, like an iron door. Oh, Phil—my love, my love, tell me what it is!”

As he spoke he clasped the girl convulsively, crushing her and hurting her by the strength of his arms. To hear him address her thus by the name of her rival was such misery to Nance that she was hardly conscious of the physical distress caused by his violence. It was still worse when, relaxing the force of his grasp, he began to fondle and caress her, stroking her face with his fingers and kissing her cheeks.

“Phil, my love, my darling!” he kept repeating, “please tell me—please, please tell me, what it is I’ve forgotten!”

Nance suffered at that moment the extreme limit of what she was capable of enduring. She dreaded every moment that Philippa herself would come in. She dreaded the reappearance of the servants, perhaps with more assistance, ready to separate them and carry Adrian away from her. To feel his caresses and to know that in his wild thoughts they were not meant for her at all—that was more, surely more, than God could have intended her to suffer!

Suddenly she had an inspiration. “Is it Baptiste that you’ve forgotten?”

The word had an electrical effect upon him. He threw her off his lap and leapt to his feet.

“Yes,” he cried savagely and wildly, the train of his thoughts completely altered, “you’re all keeping him away from me! That’s what’s at the bottom of it! You’ve hidden Nance from me and given me this woman who looks like her but who can’t smile and laugh like my Nance, to deceive me and betray me! I know you—you staring, white-faced, frightened thing! You don’t deceive me! You don’t fool Adrian. I know you. You are not my Nance.”

She had staggered away, a few paces from him, when he first threw her off, and now, with a heart-rending effort, she tried to smooth the misery out of her face and to smile at him in her normal, natural way. But the effort was a ghastly mockery. It was little wonder, seeing her there, so lamentably trying to smile into his eyes, that he cried out savagely: “That’s not my Nance’s smile. That’s the smile of a cunning mask! You’ve hidden her away from me. Curse you all—you’ve hidden her away from me—and Baptiste, too! Where is my Baptiste—you staring white thing? Where is my Baptiste, you woman with a twisted mouth?”

He rushed fiercely towards her and seized her by the throat. “Tell me what you’ve done with him,” he cried, shaking her to and fro, and tightening his grasp upon her neck. “Tell me, you devil! Tell me, or I’ll kill you.”

Nance’s brain clouded and darkened. Her senses grew confused and misty. “He’s going to strangle me,” she thought, “and I don’t care! This pain won’t last long, and it will be death from his hand.”

All at once, however, in a sudden flash of blinding clearness, she realized what this moment meant. If she let him murder her, passively, unresistingly, what would become of him when she was dead? Simultaneously with this thought something seemed to rise up, strong and clear, from the depths of her being, something powerful and fearless, ready to wrestle with fate to the very end.

“He shan’t kill me!” she thought. “I’ll live to save us both.” Tearing frantically at his hands, she struggled backwards towards the open door, dragging him with her. In his mad blood-lust he was horribly, murderously strong; but this new life-impulse, springing from some supernatural level in the girl’s being, proved still stronger. With one tremendous wrench at his wrists she flung him from her; flung him away with such violence that he slipped and fell to the ground.

In a moment she had rushed through the doorway and closed and locked the heavy door behind her. Even at the very second she achieved this and staggered faint and weak against the wall, what seemed to her rapidly clouding senses a large concourse of noisy people carrying flickering lights, swept about her. As they came upon her she sank to the floor, her last impression being that of the great dark eyes of Philippa Renshaw illuminated by an emotion which was beyond her power of deciphering, an emotion in which her mind lost itself, as she tried to understand it, in a deep impenetrable mist, that changed to absolute darkness as she fainted away.