I

The man who was sitting at the writing-table had not raised his head for half an hour from between his hands.

When at last he lifted his face, after a third knock upon the door, the prints of his fingers were branded across its grayness in livid streaks.

The hall-boy who entered, after waiting vainly for permission, handed him a telegram, which he opened and spread out on the desk before him.

He stared at it blankly, with his temples upon his wrists, until the boy, tired of waiting, asked if there were any answer.

Terence turned and looked at him as though unable to account for his presence.

The boy repeated his question, and Terence shook his head, resting it again upon his hands as the door closed upon the messenger, gazing down uncomprehendingly upon the thin pink sheet.

Presently, however, the meaning of what lay before him filtered into his consciousness. It was an invitation of no moment, but it needed a reply. He drew out a sheaf of forms from a pigeon-hole, wrote a refusal, rang for the boy, and sent it off.

The incident passed at once from his mind, but it had disturbed his absorption.

He rose and paced slowly and aimlessly about the room, gazing blindly out of the window and at the engravings upon the walls. There was something curious in the combined looseness and stiffness of his movements: he seemed literally to be dragging himself about.

When he sat down again he turned his chair slightly from the table, and leaning back in it, stared out at the gray day with a look of dazed pain upon his face.

So he remained while an hour went over; as still, as empty, as a deserted house.

Then, with a deeper breath and the same confused slowness in his movements, he drew an envelope from his pocket, and spread out the sheet within it upon the desk. The lines it carried covered but a single page, and he had read them through a dozen times.

They came from a woman whom he had loved more than his own soul, and they cast him, with freezing contempt, out of her sight for ever.

He read the bitter words again, hoping their sharp edge would make a wound of self-respect in the consciousness they had benumbed. But he tried in vain to hurt his pride, or by any fresh vexation to escape from the torment of his thoughts.

Earth is jealous of its anodynes, even of pain that brings oblivion or of death that means release. He refolded the letter and returned it to his pocket, knowing that in half an hour he would be reading it again.

Meanwhile a new impulse moved him.

Leaning forward, he slid back a secret door in the top of his desk, and took from the space behind it a bundle of letters. They were in envelopes of almost every hue and shape, but all were directed by the same hand, in a vain weak sprawling character.

Terence drew the packet towards him, and set his fingers on the string.

Then with a shudder he pushed it from him, and thrust his face into his hands.

Under those harlequin covers were hidden the one chance of happiness for his life, and the reputation of a woman.

He could make them yield which of the two he chose; but the other must be destroyed.

II

It was nearly two years since he had first seen his name written in that hand, a very short while after he had made acquaintance with the writer.

She had stirred his curiosity from the moment he met her; partly by something tragic in her beauty, which was indubitable; partly by some quality which he found repellent even in her attraction. She bore a well known name, but her husband's estates were encumbered; every place he had was let, and they entertained but little. Terence had known the latter slightly for some years, and disliked him extremely. He was a man with a predilection for any sport in which something suffered, provided it could be followed in comfort; and he openly lamented having married for love—as he termed it—instead of putting up his peerage to the bidding of the States.

Terence had pitied any one who might have to do with him, and was thus already at a sympathetic angle on meeting his wife.

She surprised him by her detachment from the world in which she lived. She viewed it with vague eyes, knowing of its happenings only from what was told her, and divining neither their probability nor their consequence.

Nothing, dropped into her mind, seemed to fructify: it lay there like seed upon a rock. To Terence, whose chief resource was his ignorance, such detachment appeared incredible.

He thought her beauty of itself would have proved a sufficient link with life, or with at least the deadlier forms of it which wear the name in London. A woman with her eyes was generally enabled to foresee some of the surprises in the Book of Judgment. Men looked to that.

But it was clear to Terence that she foresaw nothing. If corruption had approached her, it had failed to get not a hearing only, but a seeing. Whatever place there might be for it in her heart, there was plainly none in her intelligence: she did not even know it by sight.

Terence guessed that from the men she knew, and by the way she knew them. She had evidently no instructive sense of a bad lot. A bad woman had that, and often added hatred to it; a good woman had it, and added pity. She had it not at all.

He found consequently no compliment in the gracious way she had received him, and no seduction in the enquiring sadness of her eyes. Since the meeting was at Ascot, and she was exquisitely dressed, he tried all the frivolous topics he thought might interest her; then some of the serious ones which interested him. She seemed about equally bored with either, and he was surprised when she asked on parting, with a curious gravity of request, if he would come and see her.

He saw her twice in town. She had named her day, but he had forgotten it and gone on another. So she wrote, finding his card, to arrange a meeting, and, after it, offered him another afternoon. Terence was on each occasion her only visitor, and surmised that he was not so by chance.

Yet he found it difficult to account for the privilege.

They seemed to have little in common, not even the tongue in which they talked. Both appeared to be translating their thoughts before speaking them.

Terence felt stupidly ineffective, and wondered in what straits of tedium she might be living on receiving, a day or two later, an invitation to spend a week end at Wallingford, where her husband had taken a summer house.

He hesitated; (to be desired despite such a show of dulness seemed almost pathetic); accepted, hoping that work would intervene; but in the end, went.

He told himself that it would be outdoor weather, a house party, and he should see little of his hostess.

It was outdoor weather; but the party had been arranged for pairing, and he saw little but his hostess.

They spent the days upon the dozing river, and sat together late into the warm nights upon the lawn.

He knew nothing about women, and did not understand their ways. Therefore he was gravely interested in the account she set before him of her groping soul.

He had never imagined any conception of existence so out of touch with reality as were her beliefs. Her idealism would have discredited a schoolgirl's fiction, and she clung to it as though there were some merit in being deceived.

Such determination to remain in the dark almost angered him.

"But men and women aren't like that," he expostulated more than once.

"That's what people are always telling me," she replied pathetically: "but why aren't they?"

He hadn't, as he assured her, the remotest notion; his interest lying, not in what men weren't, but in what they were.

He tried to impart that interest in her, but without success.

If men were the brutes they seemed proud to be, she asserted vigorously, she didn't care how ill she knew them.

But it was clear that she had higher hopes of humanity than she confessed, and it would have been clear to any one but Terence that those hopes were becoming centred on himself.

What men said of him had roused her incredulous admiration, and he seemed to dislike women as much as he respected them. His honesty, his deference, and his grave good looks attracted her from the first; his sympathy and discernment riveted the attraction. He reproved her optimism in vain; for was he not its embodiment?

Terence, unconscious of being anything but a somewhat poor companion, discussed the sentiments she suggested, growing ever more astounded by her severance from realities, and more touched by her unhappy days.

Of her husband's life he knew more than she had surmised, but she had surmised enough to make wifehood an indignity. His unfaithfulness, as a stye by which she had to live, soured for her every odour in the world. She had not the vigour to ignore it, nor the courage to escape. She had dreamed of marriage as a royal feast; she woke to find herself among the swine.

The discovery would have hardened some women into defiance; some would have sheltered with it their own intrigues; but the shock cowed in her all further curiosity in existence. If life were really like the bit she had tasted, she preferred to starve. The other men she met seemed as horrible as her husband; they had the same speech, the same jests, the same dissipations.

She shrank more and more into herself; even women revolted her by their tolerance of men's presumptions.

Then Terence came. Like a plant grown in darkness, her anaemic delicacy of thought responded with an unhealthy exuberance to the first ray of sunlight. She listened to his silences and found them refreshing; then she drew him into speech.

He spoke of much that she could not understand, but his obscurities were an intoxication, and not, as those of other men, a dread. She felt there was something wide and fine behind his words; a coherence, an integrity; she was vaguely pleased to feel it there, though its quality did not interest her at all. What did was her own expansion in the atmosphere of sympathetic confidence it had created.

Her expansiveness was, at times, distasteful to him. The secrets of a woman's moral toilet-table may be more disconcerting than those her boudoir guarded. To be discursive about either seemed to him to lack the finer reticence of life. A man's sight, if he could see at all, was a sufficient sentry to his admiration; and the little it allowed him he might be suffered to enjoy. To label the false wherever one found it would be to leave a world only fit for fools.

Terence, however, wronged her by imagining her confidences habitual. He suggested the insecurity of entrusting such things to men.

"To men!" she exclaimed, shrinking. "Do you suppose I do?"

He did; but renounced the conception penitently in view of her dismay, and lent a more consciously honoured, if more embarrassed ear. But compassion overcame his embarrassment; and he thought less often of her indiscretions than of her loneliness.

She asked him to spend a week at Wallingford when the season was over.

"I have very few friends," she said; "and no one but you has ever helped me to understand."

He wondered to what he had helped her, and whether he would recognize it if she told him; but he did not wonder if he might remit the helping; the disadvantage in the gift of oneself being that the giving is never at an end.

So he came to Wallingford again in September, when the moonlight fell nightly on white veils of mist, and the world took on a golden ripeness in the mellow silent days.

Some letters, in the meanwhile, had passed between them; letters which might have made Terence uneasy had he known what they meant. Instead, he answered them, and consigned their intentions to the chaos of feminine incomprehensibility. Some of that chaos took a shape during his second stay at Wallingford sufficiently definite and disconcerting.

It was probably only what had been put, to no purpose, in her letters, but it had another significance when spoken with rather uncomfortable pauses and lit with the intensity of a woman's very lovely eyes.

To mistake its meaning was impossible; to ignore it seemed to Terence a contemptible discretion. He could not withdraw his sympathy because it had been so dangerously misapplied, but he tried, with fraternal frankness, to abstract from it the odour of personality with which she had scented it.

He hoped to animate her with the big issues of life, but to a woman there is often no issue bigger than a man's devotion.

As they hung in the skiff beneath the birches of the mill-pond one breathless afternoon, she let him realize the fruitlessness of his intentions.

The sun that filled the drowsy air fell in dazzling patches on her white frock; there was not a sound save the dull drone of the weir, and deep in the shade a kingfisher sat motionless above the water, like a blue flame upon the bough.

She had been silent for some while after his last remark, looking away from him towards the river; then, to Terence's dismay, she leant forward, hiding her face in her hands, and began to sob.

He was paralyzed by his ignorance of any cause for tears, perplexed with self-reproaches, helplessness, and pity. It seemed equally absurd to ask why she was crying, or to offer comfort until he knew. He sat wretchedly mute for some moments, and at last begged her to let him hear what ailed her.

She did not answer till he had repeated the request, and then faltered between her sobs: "Oh, you wouldn't understand, you couldn't understand: I've got no one to care for me, no one, no one!"

He could think of no response to that which did not sound inane. He had not heard a woman cry since his sisters left the schoolroom, and no other form of consolation occurred to him than the brotherly caresses which had served him then.

Yet not till his ineptitude and apparent apathy became intolerable did he lean forward from the thwart and rest his hand upon her knee.

With the channel of that touch between them, the soothing trifles became easy which had been impossible of speech before.

Uncertain of what she might find consoling, he spoke as to a child whom he had found in tears; a murmur merely of the gentleness and pity which were in his heart.

She paid, for some time, no heed to him, but her sobs relaxed, and presently, though with her face still hidden, she laid a wet hand on his.

"Do you really mean it?" she faltered searchingly.

"Of course I mean it," he replied, wondering what his meaning was supposed to be, but resolute to stand to this poor creature for any kindness and fortitude there might be in the world.

"You're very, very good," she said; but her eyes had in them, even to his discernment, an appreciation of another sort of worth.

That was at the beginning of the afternoon; yet, though he sculled her up stream later, to taste, melting in the heated air, the moist coolness under Bensington weir, and higher, afterwards, to the "Swan" for tea, she made no reference to that understanding which was by him so little understood.

But she was more than usually silent, and there was a dream-haze across the purple depths of her eyes, which only parted when she looked at him. Then the wonderful colour seemed to flood them, and she smiled faintly in the furthest crevice of her lips, as though they had been touched by the tips of some feathery pleasure.

But to Terence that sweetness of a shared secret in her smile was immensely discomposing.

That, he recognized, when he came to look back, was the moment of warning.

At that he had his fears, never stirred before; at that he should have taken flight.

Flight was the way of men; of men timorous and importuned; perhaps, often, the only way. But he had not the courage for such a show of fear; even flight seemed to affront a woman's confidence.

A sheaf of letters at breakfast offered him that bridge of fabulous affairs over which so many a man of wider experience would have escaped. But he gave it never a thought. Where was fraternity in the world if one had to flee from the first woman who dared to claim it? He would as soon have fled from an infectious fever!

There were closer points in the comparison than he supposed—though the world does not equally admire the man who imperils the safety of his life and him who risks the peace of it—but perception of them would not have changed his mind.

He stayed because he could not go.

The morning of the day that followed was spent by every one on the shady lawn. It was too hot for even the theory of movement, and plans were postponed until the afternoon. Terence had meant to sketch a piece of stonework at Ewelme Church, but found himself engaged by his hostess to drive her to Nuneham.

Whether she intended to go there or not, she pleaded the heat as an excuse for deferring the start till it became too late to make one.

They had tea in the little Doric shrine that overlooked the river, and she took him afterwards up to the wood that rose behind the house.

Seated on a stile within it, against which he leaned, she told him the dream with which her eyes had been clouded the day before; told it with a hesitating persuasiveness which made dissent seem brutal; the dream of an ethereal alliance to which the man should bring a life, and the woman a use for it.

Terence listened stupefied as the naÏve unsteady voice made out its astounding offer. She had gathered somehow his desire for such a thing; the magnifying power of her vanity must have revealed it in all he did and said. And her abysmal lack of humour concealed its grotesque disparities. He, so it seemed, was to contribute his existence, and she, a smile.

But if its seriousness was an absurdity, its absurdities were serious. Terence heard them with grave lips; heard in them, too, the diffident whispers of his pity swollen by her fancy to a blare of passion.

It was serious enough as she sounded it, and sad enough too. Disillusionment, even the gentlest, seemed out of the question.

How, to a woman who rides, triumphing in his devotion, through the barriers of her decorum, is a man to say, "I do not love you"?

There was nothing less that could be said: nothing less, at least, that was not a lie: for less, to her ears, would have said nothing. Love alone was her warrant, her title; and she had thrust his love into her helm.

There could be no other disillusionment but to take that from her, and to take it from her was to drag her to the dust.

So Terence listened. The bronze stems of the hazel saplings shone before him like prison bars, but he nodded now and then as she spoke her faith, and gazed at the golden air that burned beyond them in the west.

"I've never trusted any man enough," she ended, "to tell him all that I've told you; but you've made me believe in you; I don't know how. I suppose it really is because you're good and true. But are you quite, quite sure I mean so much to you, and that caring for me won't spoil your life?"

"One never knows what may spoil one's life," said Terence gravely "and seldom what may spoil another's; but I think it's true that you may trust me, and I'll try to be to you the friend that you desire."

He gave her his hand with boyish candour; and she held it, saying nothing, and not looking into his face.

When she released it, presently, she slid from the stile; and, turning, faced the sunset which had gilded his hair.

She was standing close to and partly in front of him, and so watched with him for a while, in silence, the setting splendours of the day.

Then, with a little sigh, she leaned back against his shoulder. Thus they stood some moments longer without a word; Terence braced to bear her weight; braced mentally to meet whatever might be coming, conscious of the beat against him of her quickened breath.

Then, with her dark head tilted back, she turned her face slowly towards him till it almost touched his lips.

For an instant he hated her, fiercely, impotently. The next, he put his hand gently upon her shoulder and kissed her cheek.

III

That kiss dated naturally a new era in their relations; not outwardly at first, to an appreciable extent, but with a difference immense in implication, in understanding.

Terence, forced to stay at Wallingford a day longer than he had intended, tried to put the added time to profit.

He saw that the chief danger lay in the hazy country of her expectations.

Her life had been turned upside down with joy, its dulness was on fire with an undreamed-of satisfaction; and she neither knew nor cared what might come next, so long as it kept the flame that was lit in her alive.

She lived for the unexpected, and she would show no discrimination in accepting it. Everything in that land was so new to her that no one thing seemed more alien than another; nothing had a special air of peril or of safety, of warning or of promise: all things were equally and perturbingly improbable, and supreme.

Terence realized how vague suddenly had become all her boundaries of conduct, and desired without delay to fix a frontier beyond which neither of them should go.

He would withdraw from nothing that his kiss had even seemed to promise; but he wished to put what it had not inalterably beyond her reach.

The optimism of such a hope can only be accounted for by his absolute ignorance of women; but her shyness, in a situation so strange to her, seemed to justify it while he remained at Wallingford.

But later, as her letters began to multiply, he realized how profound was his mistake. She rode her fancy wherever it led her, and he might as well have tried to fix a frontier for the north wind.

She wrote persistently of his love, of its greatness, its gladness, its splendid illumination of her life.

Her exultation in a thing which had no real existence was terrible to Terence.

Her dull unhappy being was transformed by a miracle as wonderful as that which creates the glory of painted wings from a withered chrysalis.

And he had wrought it. He, by some ignorant magic, had set her life afloat on pinions frailer and more resplendent than a butterfly's, to touch which roughly was to destroy her.

That was, of course, too brutal to be thought of. He must accept what he had done, however little he had meant to do it; must trust to time to dull its marvel and bring the woman back to earth.

But there seemed little likelihood of that at first, and with the increasing rapture of her letters Terence grew ever more dismayed.

Yet if he tried to lure her down to sanity, an agonized reply would be flung at him by the post's return, only to make his fears more vivid, and to compel from him, in sheer abasement, an expression of sentiment which he not only did not possess, but would have shrunk from possessing.

"Swear," she had written, not once, nor twice; "swear that you love no other woman; that you have never loved another woman; that I fill all your thoughts!"

Those were easy oaths, and true; but they did not content her. It was not enough that no other woman had a lien upon his past: his whole existence must be proscribed for her.

"Tell me," she prayed, "that I shall be everything to you always! It kills me to think that any love could move you after mine. I cannot have renounced my pride, my honour, my self-respect, for less than that."

He could but smile unmirthfully at her renunciations. His were privileges, it seemed, to her thinking, that any man might sigh for; though apparently they were to include a monastic seclusion from the world of sense, a virginity devoted, not to her passion—and for passion a man might be content to live or die—but to her sentimental fancies.

"Say," she pleaded, unsatisfied by his replies, which to such extortionate demands could be but vague, "say that I alone of all the women in the world can ever satisfy all your longings; that it would seem a degrading sacrilege to let any other woman come after me even in your thoughts! Tell me, even though I die, that my memory must keep you true."

He gazed at that for a day to get his breath, but the delay was all too long for hers.

"Write, write," she panted, on the morrow; "I cannot live unless I hear from you. Have you no feeling for a woman's dignity that you can give me over in this way to its scorn? I fling everything that I possess before you, and you find it not even worth acknowledgment."

What could he say? How could he answer her? Her blindness was sublime, detestable, ridiculous, as you were pleased to view it; but to blindness one could never refuse a hand.

Distressed by a necessity of which he had been the unwitting cause, Terence extended his. But his ignorance mitigated his foreboding; he still trusted to time.

Time, however, brought him but little comfort. If her letters became saner, it was only since he had thrown her insanity a sop. When they met a month later his difficulties were increased.

At first she had entreated him to win her respect by a display of repression.

He was to be as other men were not, to keep her staunch by an undreamed-of virtue. The lover's heart must animate to her perception only the unimpeachable kindness of the friend.

She had her wish, but had it, perhaps, in a perfection for which she was not prepared.

She seemed determined to leave no doubts as to his fortitude. She hung upon him so literally that he had to exert not moral fibre only to support her.

She drooped like a wreath about his shoulders, while he gazed, grim and ashamed, upon her hair.

But she drew no consolation from his strength. It was not strength, she told him, but indifference; she had asked for a sentry, and he had given her a statue.

She tried to soften the statue by every feminine artifice, even, at last, by kissing its irresponsive face.

He, invincibly simple, smiled at the wiles he thought were used to try him; and stiffened himself into the pose he had been convinced was her desire.

If it ever had been, she outlived it before long. Its end was advertised by an hysterical outbreak, which Terence never could recall without a shudder.

They were both, at the time, in town, where they met two or three times a week, and he had called to bring her some tickets.

She was sitting on a lounge in a remote corner of the room, and gave him her hand with blank indifference.

Unequal always to resolve her moods, he sustained a monologue from the fireplace on the trifles of the hour, until her persistent silence compelled him to ask its cause.

She replied listlessly, after some pressing, that it must be of no importance since he could ignore it.

She had merely been deceived in him, that was all: a common thing with a woman. He had proved himself to be just a man, like every other; and not the man of men she had supposed him.

It had amused him, no doubt, to win her love; now, it seemed, he was tired of it.

He had spoilt her life, he had destroyed her faith; but such things, of course, weren't worth mentioning: the great matter was, naturally, that a man should not be bored.

Now, she supposed, they might as well end the farce between them, so that he could amuse himself elsewhere. All she had lived for was over for ever, and she did not care what became of her.

She poured out the indictment to his bewildered ears in the level tones of utter apathy; but when it was done she flung herself violently across the head of the lounge in a tempest of passionate tears.

Terence, despairing of any further fitness or sanity in the affair, resigned himself to the situation with a sigh, and knelt beside her for an hour, until she appeared to draw from his caresses a renewed confidence in life.

He left her, sufficiently depressed himself, and expecting anything but a letter which reached him on the morrow by the earliest post.

It must have been written very shortly after his departure, which she had done her utmost to delay, yet it proclaimed her as too shamed by what had happened ever to meet him again, unless he felt himself strong enough to prevent such scenes in the future.

Feeling strong enough for nothing, he left her letter unanswered for a day, and received, on the next, eight pages of aggrieved reproaches for having forsaken her in the hour of her greatest need.

That was but the prelude to many meetings of as strange a kind. He never knew in what mood he should find her, nor in which she might wish to find him.

He believed her revulsions of propriety to be sincere, but felt she had no business with so many, especially since he offered her every assistance to avoid the need of them. He respected her for the first, pitied her for the second, endured the third in silence, and then began to hate them.

He did not expect a woman to know her own mind, but he thought her ignorance might be more agreeable.

So passed what was for Terence a very melancholy winter. He bore it with a resignation nerved by the near prospect of escape to a berth in Paris, which had been as good as promised him when it became vacant. Meanwhile Downing Street saw more of him than usual, and he took every opportunity of immersing himself still deeper in his work.

The post he had been expecting became available in March, and, too modest to urge his claim or to remind his patron, he was mortified to find one morning that it had been filled by another.

He accepted his ill-fortune silently, and only learnt a month later to whom he owed it.

He was enlightened then by accident, the peer, in whose gift the appointment practically lay, happening to express a regret that Terence had not seen his way to accept it.

"To accept it!" he replied, laughing. "It wasn't offered me."

"It wasn't offered you," said the other slowly, "because a certain friend of yours told me you had determined definitely, for the present, not to leave England."

Terence met the speaker's searching glance, which smouldered with admonition.

"I see," he smiled. "My own fault entirely."

He understood to whom the "certain friend" referred, as well as the warning against feminine influence in his chief's eye; and, for a moment of sick disappointment, he burned to confront the woman who had betrayed him with his knowledge of her perfidy, to fling this piece of unimagined baseness in her face, and so be rid of her.

But he realized ruefully within an hour that no such release was possible, at least for him. She had but done this thing to keep him near her.

She would plead that to stoop to such an act of treachery to the one who was dearest to her only proved how ungovernable was her love. There would be another horrible scene. She would threaten again to kill herself. And in the end he would succumb. Each sacrifice he had made for her only committed him to a fresh one. She had cultivated weakness in order to revel in his strength; he had pauperized her with his soul. Had she been a woman of rages, of pride, of resentments, it would have proved another matter; but how was it possible to hurt a thing that clung about one's neck.

So he said no more of his discomfiture, bitter as it was to his ambition as well as to his hopes of freedom. Her querulous exactions had already alienated his sympathies, so that it was no harder now to be kind to her than it had been before.

And he was glad to know definitely what he had to fear from her, even though the definition was so inclusive. He determined to loosen, slowly and gently, those tendrils of sentiment by which she clung to him, which were so enfeebling her self-support.

But he saw that he had little to hope for save from time and the natural infidelity of her sex.

IV

Time, unfortunately, seemed arrayed against him, for it was in April of the same year that he met Miss Lilias Anstruther.

Their meeting summed up the possibilities of love at sight. He loved her as she passed him on the stairs, and she him, as she afterwards confided, while he was being led to her for introduction, an occasion which has—for an Englishman, at any rate—small opportunities of display.

But love at sight is such a miracle to the seer that he never imagines its duplication. Terence saw nothing on Miss Anstruther's features but the attention an intelligent woman might show to any man with a name in the making.

She imagined, in the stern set of his, boredom at having to make himself agreeable to a merely pretty girl.

There was, in his mind, no doubt, enough to complicate a glance of admiration, since he saw between him and her the jealous presence of another woman.

What that presence meant to him, now, he realized with despair.

He had endured in silence its unscrupulous intrigues; he had schooled himself to meet the most preposterous of its requirements. But then he stood alone; the worst that could be done him was the most that he need fear. He could live secure since only he could suffer.

Now! He lost his breath as he thought of it.

He saw Lilias several times that month. He did not notice that it seemed easy to see her. That she had a hand in that facility would have been the last thing to strike him.

Love had come to him in the extravagant splendours it only wears for those who find it late, with the eyes still unsoiled through which youth sought it. For, to the boy, love is only a white angel, but the man sees it iridescent with the colours of his accumulated years of hope.

It was not surprising that Terence, who had never even imagined himself in love before, and whose every instinct forbade a paltering with its substitute, should have been overwhelmed by this putting forth of an enchantment he had long ceased to expect.

He kept his head from early habit, which made the danger of losing it in Miss Anstruther's presence almost a delight, and he banished the acknowledgment of his happiness from every part of him but his eyes.

There, however, in the glow of an accustomed kindliness it could escape recognition, and there too it was often absorbed in a stern anxiety when he faced the risks of its discovery by the other woman.

From her he kept, with a man's timorous diplomacy, every echo of the girl's name, until he learnt they were acquainted. Then he had to endure an inquest on his concealment, and the woman's suspicions were fertilized by his replies.

They found food for growth later on in what she was pleased, perhaps rightly, to imagine a preoccupation in his manner.

She was, of course, aware of his effort to dilute what was emotional in their intercourse, and to replace it with a tender and unashamed fraternity.

Of that he made no secret; and she made very little of her resolve to thwart it.

He had but small success but more than he expected. He declined several invitations to Wallingford during the summer, where she had again a house; and when he went in August, found her, thanks partly to the persistence of some exacting and undesired guests, more malleable than she had ever been before.

He had been so attentively kind to her during the season that she found no excuse to upbraid him, yet she showed by a dozen disdainful poses how fiercely she resented his determined friendliness.

Meanwhile he had seen little of Lilias. His devotion to her was too sensitive and too entire to allow him even to offer her his company while he had still, however occasionally, to bestow his kisses on another woman. That woman too was still a moral charge upon him, and a source beside of incalculable danger.

What she would not do was clearly not everywhere conterminous with what she should not.

He had sufficiently realized that his happiness would never appeal to her apart from hers, and that there would be a stormy finish where hers ended. But he still trusted in time, and was satisfied with the slight progress towards reasonableness in their relationship.

Her letters continued to upbraid him with his neglect; but they began to hint at a reciprocal attitude.

She too, they threatened, could be indifferent; the time might come when to his appeal there would be no response.

Terence prayed devoutly for that day to hasten, as the months went on; and ran down in November, ostensibly for a week's hunting, to a house in Leicestershire where Miss Anstruther was staying.

Knowing the country better than he, she offered to pilot him, and took him under her charge with a delightful assurance, which allowed him no voice nor choice of his own while out of doors.

She rode straight, but used her head, in cutting out a line, to nurse her horse, and showed a most unfeminine appreciation of distances, save when the hounds were running late away from home.

During the long easy amble homeward in the dusk, on such occasions Terence might have been led to doubt that it was inadvertence which had secured him so much of her company, had he not arrived at conclusions of much greater moment.

To have found, at thirty-five when such discoveries are being despaired of the woman for whom his life had waited for whom, unknown, it had worn its innocence untainted, was sufficient of itself to monopolize his thoughts.

In her presence he became young again; young in interests, in expectancy, in purposeless energies. The whole desire of the man was in focus for the first time in his life.

Lilias gave him her company but no other sign of liking; yet her company was of itself sufficient to make him insanely content.

Still his fears made him cautious. The prize was too great, the thought of failure too consuming, to admit of risk.

So he let the winter go without a word to her of what was eating out his heart, using what chances offered for seeing her, but making none that might attract comment, and all the while attenuating the link that bound him to the other, and trying to accustom her to do without him.

He seemed in that to be making headway.

She wrote more and more rarely to him, and never in the expansive fashion of the past, and if he kissed her on parting, as occasionally she insisted, it added no warmth to his farewell. Yet he still misdoubted her, and would not have put his fortune to the touch had Fate not forced his hand with the announcement that Miss Anstruther was leaving for India in the spring.

He looked in vain for ways to stop her, but shyly, and conscious of a new distance in her manner, as though she thought his interest might be more explicit.

On that he spoke. Her evasions, chilly with the disdain of every honest woman for a philanderer, were intolerable. He saw the risk he ran either way of losing her, but chose that which gave him, at any rate, fighting chances, and told her of his love.

Three days followed in the blue of heaven; then he came back to earth, and took up his trouble.

The other woman was at St. Raphael, so he had to write. He would have vastly preferred to tell her face to face what he had done. He had no courage for a fight in the dark; he wished to see the blow come back, and meet it. But there were reasons insuperable against that.

He expected an intemperate reply, but nothing so wildly bereft of reason as that which reached him. It was shrill with threats which turned his blood to ice and then set it boiling with indignation; threats which seemed to echo from some shrieking purlieu of the Mile End Road.

Her soul revolted, she wrote, at what he had done. He had thrown her away like stale water. His selfishness had made her life unbearable. Her pride, her capacity for caring, her whole womanhood had been hurt and crushed to death.

She went about feeling there was no meaning any more in anything. He had hardened and embittered her nature to a terrible degree.

He had hurt her so unendurably that it didn't seem to matter how she hurt others.

Love and truth and honour had become a farce, and loyalty was an unnecessary scruple.

She ended by saying she did not know how long she could go on bearing it in silence. The only fair thing seemed to be to tell Miss Anstruther everything that had happened, and let her judge between them.

Despite the sense of his integrity, and a dreary memory of the months devoted to her whims, Terence almost felt himself to be, as he read her impeachment, the unspeakable brute that she described.

He even tried to excuse her horrid and unexpected forms of speech; the clamour, the invective, the dismal absence of reserve. If she had overleapt the bounds of decency he had given her the impetus, and to be startled by such an exhibition only argued his inexperience.

Yet even his generosity could not acquit her. He remembered her repeated wail, "Tell me I haven't spoilt your life!"—a cry which no ardour of his assurance seemed able to satisfy. Well, now she had the only proof that could appease her conscience, and this was the result. He showed her that his life was still whole, and she itched to break it beyond repair.

His resentment quickened. Surely it was more than should be asked of a man's benevolence to sacrifice his life to no purpose for a woman's mistake.

He wrote urgently, and as he thought in reason; but the letter read to her as a wrathful menace. He had explained that in trying to hurt others she might hurt herself the more, since to alienate Miss Anstruther would be to make a lifelong enemy of himself.

She replied in such spiritless dejection that he had to try to comfort her. She asked why he had been in such a hurry to supersede her; and though his patience of many months seemed to him misnamed as hurry, he explained the circumstance which made him speak.

Many letters passed between them: letters coloured on her part by a childish irresponsibility and persistence, and on his by an attempt, a fatal attempt, to treat her as a child, and to let her hug the little salves to her vanity which she invented daily and submitted piteously for his confirmation.

Terence discovered, when it was too late, that sooner than allow that any one could supplant her in his affection, she had pictured his proposal as a man's heroic sacrifice of himself to a girl's forwardness, and his letters had unconsciously confirmed her fatuous invention.

Consoled by it, she wrote to Lilias a letter of congratulation, and her correspondence with Terence grew heavy with the odour of a shared and precarious secret which she, at least, would make honourable pretences to ignore.

Terence, at his wit's end for peace, capitulated to her self-complacent theory, after a half-hearted attempt to take it from her.

To destroy her faith in it seemed needlessly unkind, seeing how much her faith in everything else appeared to be bound up therein. And if her comfort in it was false, false it had been all along, from the days when for her sake he had fostered it. Now, at any rate, it brought comfort to them both.

He was shown the letter Lilias had received from her, and thought his danger at an end. Yet he went softly, not daring to own the intensity of his happiness even to himself. He tried to keep the joy of it from his mind, to walk humbly as a mortal should, lest the gods might grow jealous of his exulting dreams.

Yet at times, despite his caution, at the higher tides of his delight, he would laugh up in the face of heaven, not arrogantly, but with the overrunning sense of his content.

A woman's lips had breathed their ephphatha upon his eyelids, and he looked out upon a new world.

New, since her beauty, like a crystal spar, lent a rainbow border to all things beyond it. His life seemed lifted by a spread of wings at every touch of her fingers.

There was a magic in her influence, that fed from the soft reluctance of her body the fuel that burned in his. A magic on which he lived between their meetings, and for whose strange infusion he fainted while they were apart.

He told her, laughing, that he was almost frightened to be such a slave; and though she paid no heed to the assertion, it sank with melting heat into her heart, and unknown to him the girl's breast throbbed, behind its shy demurs, with a fierce exultation in the sense that swayed him.

So two months passed, the two months when even the English earth seems mad, mad with the surge of its triumphant greenness, and with the singing flood of birds that fills it from the south.

From the south, too, came, in May, the other woman, giving Terence notice of her return, and telling him that she only wished to see him if he felt a meeting was not impossible.

He replied that nothing could make it impossible but his ignorance of her address, which she had omitted to send him.

He called the day after it arrived. He had no avidity for the interview; but, seeing that he would be certain some day to meet her, thought the sooner the safer.

She received him with a curious prescribed coldness, warmed in the strangest way by glances of reproachful pity. She spoke in a compressed tone, and Terence expected that at any moment she would scream and seize him. The prevision was so strong that, on leaving her, he practically backed to the door, keeping his eye deterrently fixed upon her, as though she were some savage creature that might spring upon him if he turned his head.

She took the line throughout that, despite his perfidy, he was to be regarded with a grieved compassion; and she met his profession of attachment to the woman he was about to marry with the sad smile of a lenient unbelief.

Once or twice the raging bitterness of a soul pent up behind it threatened to engulf the passive monotony of her speech, and the dull eyes glowed as though about to scorch him; but nothing deplorable happened, and Terence breathed a deep relief as the door closed behind him and shut off, as he trusted, from his future the only danger that threatened it.

His confidence, however, did not live for long. Scarcely more than a week later something serious in Miss Anstruther's face checked him as he greeted her.

"Yes," she answered to his eyes, "there's something I want to ask you. Is it true, as you told me, that you had never loved any one before you met me?"

"Yes," he said.

"Did you never give any one cause to think you loved her?"

"Not with intention."

"But you might have without meaning to?"

"I did, without meaning to."

"Oh, you know?" she exclaimed.

"Yes," he said, "I know. May I ask how you do?"

"No," she replied; "I'd sooner not tell you that. I only wanted to be told it wasn't true."

"But it is true!" he objected.

"Oh, not what matters," she breathed. "Did she care for you very, very much?"

"She cared a good deal more than I deserved," he said gravely; "and more unspeakably than I desired."

"But she didn't find that out?"

"No, she didn't find it out. Think what finding out would have meant to her."

The girl was silent for a moment.

"Did you kiss her?" she asked, below her breath.

"I did many things I would have preferred not to," he said quietly; "but what they were you could not wish, I think, to learn from me."

"On account of what I know?" she asked.

"I don't know what you know," he replied; "but I think that no man who has shared, however unwillingly, a woman's secret, has any rights over it but those of burial."

She gave him her lips with a smile, and made no further reference to the subject before they parted. She was going into the country, and he was not to see her for ten days.

He spent some part of them wondering idly whence her information had come, but he was in no mood to make enquiry where it might have been effective, and had put the question from his mind, when, at the end of the week, he received from Lilias a feverish note saying that everything between them depended on his reply to something that she must ask him. Would he let her know the first moment he could come.

He named the next morning, but, when leaving his rooms on the way to her the letter was delivered which changed the face of the world for him, and hung the future on his choice of an alternative.

The letter was short, and passionately scornful. It admitted no challenge, no reply. She had seen, it said, all he had written to the other woman, and she despised him so utterly that she felt no pain in parting from him for ever.

That was all. Yesterday he held for her all the beauty and the savour of the world, to-day she loathed him as a leper. In an hour she had repudiated the most sacred convictions of her soul.

She had learnt his fineness at every turn of his thoughts. Her spirit, that had touched his at first so timidly, had come to seek with passionate security its most intimate caress. There was nothing she had not revealed to him, no shame so sweet nor so secret which she had feared to let him know.

And now!

"If I had loved a devil unawares," reflected Terence sadly, "I hardly think I would have cast her out like that. Love should not, for its own dignity, degrade so easily what it has ennobled."

Yet not for a moment did he resent the ruthlessness of her letter. His love had indeed exalted her above possibility of that.

He had lost her! It was of nothing less that he could think. For some while he did not even wonder how the astounding change had come. Her brief note said nothing; nothing of what had happened in that momentous fortnight, nothing of the source of her enlightenment, nothing even to excuse the feeding of her suspicions on letters of his which were not addressed to her.

It left, indifferently, everything to his conjecture; but conjecture was not difficult.

The tragic ending of his hopes was the outcome, he had little doubt, of his last visit to the other woman. She saw him then as hers no longer; saw in him too, perhaps, in spite of his concealments, a radiance which her love had never wrought, and realized, with cruel clearness, how entirely he was another's.

And so, inflamed with jealousy beyond endurance, she had determined that no one should possess him if she might not, and had used her pain, malignantly, to poison the other's pleasure.

That poison took no doubt at first the form of hints; a woman's pitying innuendoes, which had roused the girl's suspicions and been the cause of her demands. And when she repeated his disclaimer, further proofs, he supposed, were mentioned, and finally the letters had been produced.

As the story of those two short weeks took shape in his mind—the profitless destruction done to his life and to another's by a woman's venomous malice—he could, in the fierceness of his despair, have made an end to her with his naked hands.

At that, ashamed of himself, he smiled, remembering the frequent vaunting of her pride and the affectations of her honour. This was strange work for either of them. But then a woman's honour was so detachable.

She had it if you had it; and if you hadn't it, neither had she. In that way her morality never placed her at a disadvantage. She could always be as noble or as mean as her opponent.

He smiled again, more grimly, to think that on him of all men such a fate had fallen. That he who all his life had shrunk from women should be execrated as a philanderer! Surely ironic comedy could go no further?

And to consider, beside it, the kind of man, for whom London is too small a harem, wedded gratefully, reverently, every day, by the kind of woman who found him unworthy, the kind of man, alas! to whom all too probably, to appease that terrible vanity of a trumpeted indifference, she might fall: to the first brute who desired to possess her.

Her fineness would not save her! Had it ever saved a woman yet from such a fate? By the blaze of his wrath he seemed to see the reason.

Woman had no fineness, no sensibility, no subtlety of discernment. Her fastidiousness was an affectation, like the cut of her skirt: she wore each because it was the fashion. It was made for her, not by her, and was no part of her at all.

But his anger could only for an instant find fuel to feed it in the woman he loved. It turned at once against the other, and his thoughts turned with it to her letters, the only bond between them which remained.

They formed the packet of many coloured papers which at last, blind with scorn to their sanctity, he had drawn from its secret place.

He had kept them without defined intention; certainly with no premonition of needing them in his defence; so far as he could remember, only to remind himself how that strange disturbance of his life had come about.

But now, as his anger burnt the better part of him, he saw another use for them. They alone could justify, could extenuate what he had done. No man who had endured an undesired love could read them and condemn.

But a woman? That was another matter. And a woman, too, who had adored! How would she read their raving violence?

Would she believe that the woman who wrote so wildly of the surrender of herself had never dreamed of giving him more by it than her lips.

He wondered. Women were so hopelessly ignorant of one another. So unable to conceive as womanly any qualities but their own; so unable to believe even in the existence of a compulsion which would not move themselves.

Well, whether she believed or not, whether she would divine and forgive, or be confirmed in her contempt, there remained no other way to move, nor even to approach her.

It was horrible to have received such letters from a woman one did not love, more horrible still to use them in one's defence. But she had left him no alternative.

It was through her offence that he came to be fighting for what was dearer than his life. Was any right left her to complain of his weapon?

Besides, as he assured himself, he would only be enlarging a story which she had told: it was her tongue, not his, that had proclaimed it. And whether happiness or despair came to him from the event, it could at least bring her no change of fortune.

But with the very assertion of her security came apprehension from a possibility he had not foreseen.

What if Lilias, finding that those letters in no way absolved him, but proved the woman guilty of an unforgivable perfidy, should turn vengefully against her the secrets which they held?

The fear swept clear his clouded honour. Here was he answering a woman's baseness in the very fashion he had impeached as her habitual use.

He was fighting her malicious treachery with a betrayal as infamous, and which could be no whit excused by hers.

The sacredness of such letters could not be altered by circumstances; love had written them for love's eye only, and they must be held inviolable though love turned to hate.

And it was not only his personal honour that restrained him, but the honour of love itself; the silence, the gravity which every great service imposes upon those who have borne it; the duty of handing down unsullied, unspoken of, the proud name the brave tradition to those that come after.

It was because Love had indeed touched him with its sceptre that he could shield in silence one who had worn its name unworthily even while under it she had stabbed him to the heart.

He laid his hand upon the packet to return it to its place. Then, with sudden hesitation and a rueful smile at the sense of his own weakness, he rose and carried it across to the grate.

He laid it on the coals and lit a match beneath it; and, as he turned away again towards the window, heard in the blaze his hope and his despair together flame indifferently to the sky.