Lady Channice did not go and rest. She sat on in the shadowy room gazing before her, her hands still clasped, her face wearing still its look of fear. For twenty years she had not known what it was to be without fear. It had become as much a part of her life as the air she breathed and any peace or gladness had blossomed for her only in that air: sometimes she was almost unconscious of it. This afternoon she had become conscious. It was as if the air were heavy and oppressive and as if she breathed with difficulty. And sitting there she asked herself if the time was coming when she must tell Augustine.

What she might have to tell was a story that seemed strangely disproportionate: it was the story of her life; but all of it that mattered, all of it that made the story, was pressed into one year long ago. Before that year was sunny, uneventful girlhood, after it grey, uneventful womanhood; the incident, the drama, was all knotted into one year, and it seemed to belong to herself no longer; she seemed a spectator, looking back in wonder at the disaster of another woman's life. A long flat road stretched out behind her; she had journeyed over it for years; and on the far horizon she saw, if she looked back, the smoke and flames of a burning city—miles and miles away.

Amabel Freer was the daughter of a rural Dean, a scholarly, sceptical man. The forms of religion were his without its heart; its heart was her mother's, who was saintly and whose orthodoxy was the vaguest symbolic system. From her father Amabel had the scholar's love of beauty in thought, from her mother the love of beauty in life; but her loves had been dreamy: she had thought and lived little. Happy compliance, happy confidence, a dawn-like sense of sweetness and purity, had filled her girlhood.

When she was sixteen her father had died, and her mother in the following year. Amabel and her brother Bertram were well dowered. Bertram was in the Foreign Office, neither saintly nor scholarly, like his parents, nor undeveloped like his young sister. He was a capable, conventional man of the world, sure of himself and rather suspicious of others. Amabel imagined him a model of all that was good and lovely. The sudden bereavement of her youth bewildered and overwhelmed her; her capacity for dependent, self-devoting love sought for an object and lavished itself upon her brother. She went to live with an aunt, her father's sister, and when she was eighteen her aunt brought her to London, a tall, heavy and rather clumsy country girl, arrested rather than developed by grief. Her aunt was a world-worn, harassed woman; she had married off her four daughters with difficulty and felt the need of a change of occupation; but she accepted as a matter of course the duty of marrying off Amabel. That task accomplished she would go to bed every night at half past ten and devote her days to collecting coins and enamels. Her respite came far more quickly than she could have imagined possible. Amabel had promise of great beauty, but two or three years were needed to fulfill it; Mrs. Compton could but be surprised when Sir Hugh Channice, an older colleague of Bertram's, a fashionable and charming man, asked for the hand of her unformed young charge. Sir Hugh was fourteen years Amabel's senior and her very guilelessness no doubt attracted him; then there was the money; he was not well off and he lived a life rather hazardously full. Still, Mrs. Compton could hardly believe in her good-fortune. Amabel accepted her own very simply; her compliance and confidence were even deeper than before. Sir Hugh was the most graceful of lovers. His quizzical tenderness reminded her of her father, his quasi-paternal courtship emphasized her instinctive trust in the beauty and goodness of life.

So at eighteen she was married at St. George's Hanover Square and wore a wonderful long satin train and her mothers lace veil and her mother's pearls around her neck and hair. A bridesmaid had said that pearls were unlucky, but Mrs. Compton tersely answered:—"Not if they are such good ones as these." Amabel had bowed her head to the pearls, seeing them, with the train, and the veil, and her own snowy figure, vaguely, still in the dreamlike haze. Memories of her father and mother, and of the dear deanery among its meadows, floating fragments of the poetry her father had loved, of the prayers her mother had taught her in childhood, hovered in her mind. She seemed to see the primrose woods where she had wandered, and to hear the sound of brooks and birds in Spring. A vague smile was on her lips. She thought of Sir Hugh as of a radiance lighting all. She was the happiest of girls.

Shortly after her marriage, all the radiance, all the haze was gone. It had been difficult then to know why. Now, as she looked back, she thought that she could understand.

She had been curiously young, curiously inexperienced. She had expected life to go on as dawn for ever. Everyday light had filled her with bleakness and disillusion. She had had childish fancies; that her husband did not really love her; that she counted for nothing in his life. Yet Sir Hugh had never changed, except that he very seldom made love to her and that she saw less of him than during their engagement. Sir Hugh was still quizzically tender, still all grace, all deference, when he was there. And what wonder that he was little there; he had a wide life; he was a brilliant man; she was a stupid young girl; in looking back, no longer young, no longer stupid, Lady Channice thought that she could see it all quite clearly. She had seemed to him a sweet, good girl, and he cared for her and wanted a wife. He had hoped that by degrees she would grow into a wise and capable woman, fit to help and ornament his life. But she had not been wise or capable. She had been lonely and unhappy, and that wide life of his had wearied and confused her; the silence, the watching attitude of the girl were inadequate to her married state, and yet she had nothing else to meet it with. She had never before felt her youth and inexperience as oppressive, but they oppressed her now. She had nothing to ask of the world and nothing to give to it. What she did ask of life was not given to her, what she had to give was not wanted. She was very unhappy.

Yet people were kind. In especial Lady Elliston was kind, the loveliest, most sheltering, most understanding of all her guests or hostesses. Lady Elliston and her cheerful, jocose husband, were Sir Hugh's nearest friends and they took her in and made much of her. And one day when, in a fit of silly wretchedness, Lady Elliston found her crying, she had put her arms around her and kissed her and begged to know her grief and to comfort it. Even thus taken by surprise, and even to one so kind, Amabel could not tell that grief: deep in her was a reticence, a sense of values austere and immaculate: she could not discuss her husband, even with the kindest of friends. And she had nothing to tell, really, but of herself, her own helplessness and deficiency. Yet, without her telling, for all her wish that no one should guess, Lady Elliston did guess. Her comfort had such wise meaning in it. She was ten years older than Amabel. She knew all about the world; she knew all about girls and their husbands. Amabel was only a girl, and that was the trouble, she seemed to say. When she grew older she would see that it would come right; husbands were always so; the wider life reached by marriage would atone in many ways. And Lady Elliston, all with sweetest discretion, had asked gentle questions. Some of them Amabel had not understood; some she had. She remembered now that her own silence or dull negation might have seemed very rude and ungrateful; yet Lady Elliston had taken no offence. All her memories of Lady Elliston were of this tact and sweetness, this penetrating, tentative tact and sweetness that sought to understand and help and that drew back, unflurried and unprotesting before rebuff, ready to emerge again at any hint of need,—of these, and of her great beauty, the light of her large clear eyes, the whiteness of her throat, the glitter of diamonds about and above: for it was always in her most festal aspect, at night, under chandeliers and in ball-rooms, that she best remembered her. Amabel knew, with the deep, instinctive sense of values which was part of her inheritance and hardly, at that time, part of her thought, that her mother would not have liked Lady Elliston, would have thought her worldly; yet, and this showed that Amabel was developing, she had already learned that worldliness was compatible with many things that her mother would have excluded from it; she could see Lady Elliston with her own and with her mother's eyes, and it was puzzling, part of the pain of growth, to feel that her own was already the wider vision.

Soon after that the real story came. The city began to burn and smoke and flames to blind and scorch her.

It was at Lady Elliston's country house that Amabel first met Paul Quentin. He was a daring young novelist who was being made much of during those years; for at that still somewhat guileless time to be daring had been to be original. His books had power and beauty, and he had power and beauty, fierce, dreaming eyes and an intuitive, sudden smile. Under his aspect of careless artist, his head was a little turned by his worldly success, by great country-houses and flattering great ladies; he did not take the world as indifferently as he seemed to. Success edged his self-confidence with a reckless assurance. He was an ardent student of Nietzsche, at a time when that, too, was to be original. Amabel met this young man constantly at the dances and country parties of a season. And, suddenly, the world changed. It was not dawn and it was not daylight; it was a wild and beautiful illumination like torches at night. She knew herself loved and her own being became precious and enchanting to her. The presence of the man who loved her filled her with rapture and fear. Their recognition was swift. He told her things about herself that she had never dreamed of and as he told them she felt them to be true.

To other people Paul Quentin did not speak much of Lady Channice. He early saw that he would need to be discreet. One day at Lady Elliston's her beauty was in question and someone said that she was too pale and too impassive; and at that Quentin, smiling a little fiercely, remarked that she was as pale as a cowslip and as impassive as a young Madonna; the words pictured her; her fresh Spring-like quality, and the peace, as of some noble power not yet roused.

In looking back, it was strange and terrible to Lady Channice to see how little she had really known this man. Their meetings, their talks together, were like the torchlight that flashed and wavered and only fitfully revealed. From the first she had listened, had assented, to everything he said, hanging upon his words and his looks and living afterward in the memory of them. And in memory their significance seemed so to grow that when they next met they found themselves far nearer than the words had left them.

All her young reserves and dignities had been penetrated and dissolved. It was always themselves he talked of, but, from that centre, he waved the torch about a transformed earth and showed her a world of thought and of art that she had never seen before. No murmur of it had reached the deanery; to her husband and the people he lived among it was a mere spectacle; Quentin made that bright, ardent world real to her, and serious. He gave her books to read; he took her to hear music; he showed her the pictures, the statues, the gems and porcelains that she had before accepted as part of the background of life hardly seeing them. From being the background of life they became, in a sense, suddenly its object. But not their object—not his and hers,—though they talked of them, looked, listened and understood. To Quentin and Amabel this beauty was still background, and in the centre, at the core of things, were their two selves and the ecstasy of feeling that exalted and terrified. All else in life became shackles. It was hardly shock, it was more like some immense relief, when, in each other's arms, the words of love, so long implied, were spoken. He said that she must come with him; that she must leave it all and come. She fought against herself and against him in refusing, grasping at pale memories of duty, honour, self-sacrifice; he knew too well the inner treachery that denied her words. But, looking back, trying not to flinch before the scorching memory, she did not know how he had won her. The dreadful jostle of opportune circumstance; her husband's absence, her brother's;—the chance pause in the empty London house between country visits;—Paul Quentin following, finding her there; the hot, dusty, enervating July day, all seemed to have pushed her to the act of madness and made of it a willess yielding rather than a decision. For she had yielded; she had left her husband's house and gone with him.

They went abroad at once, to France, to the forest of Fontainebleau. How she hated ever after the sound of the lovely syllables, hated the memory of the rocks and woods, the green shadows and the golden lights where she had walked with him and known horror and despair deepening in her heart with every day. She judged herself, not him, in looking back; even then it had been herself she had judged. Though unwilling, she had been as much tempted by herself as by him; he had had to break down barriers, but though they were the barriers of her very soul, her longing heart had pressed, had beaten against them, crying out for deliverance. She did not judge him, but, alone with him in the forest, alone with him in the bland, sunny hotel, alone with him through the long nights when she lay awake and wondered, in a stupor of despair, she saw that he was different. So different; there was the horror. She was the sinner; not he. He belonged to the bright, ardent life, the life without social bond or scruple, the life of sunny, tolerant hotels and pagan forests; but she did not belong to it. The things that had seemed external things, barriers and shackles, were the realest things, were in fact the inner things, were her very self. In yielding to her heart she had destroyed herself, there was no life to be lived henceforth with this man, for there was no self left to live it with. She saw that she had cut herself off from her future as well as from her past. The sacred past judged her and the future was dead. Years of experience concentrated themselves into that lawless week. She saw that laws were not outside things; that they were one's very self at its wisest. She saw that if laws were to be broken it could only be by a self wiser than the self that had made the law. And the self that had fled with Paul Quentin was only a passionate, blinded fragment, a heart without a brain, a fragment judged and rejected by the whole.

To both lovers the week was one of bitter disillusion, though for Quentin no such despair was possible. For him it was an attempt at joy and beauty that had failed. This dulled, drugged looking girl was not the radiant woman he had hoped to find. Vain and sensitive as he was, he felt, almost immediately, that he had lost his charm for her; that she had ceased to love him. That was the ugly, the humiliating side of the truth, the side that so filled Amabel Channice's soul with sickness as she looked back at it. She had ceased to love him, almost at once.

And it was not guilt only, and fear, that had risen between them and separated them; there were other, smaller, subtler reasons, little snakes that hissed in her memory. He was different from her in other ways.

She hardly saw that one of the ways was that of breeding; but she felt that he jarred upon her constantly, in their intimacy, their helpless, dreadful intimacy. In contrast, the thought of her husband had been with her, burningly. She did not say to herself, for she did not know it, her experience of life was too narrow to give her the knowledge,—that her husband was a gentleman and her lover, a man of genius though he were, was not; but she compared them, incessantly, when Quentin's words and actions, his instinctive judgments of men and things, made her shrink and flush. He was so clever, cleverer far than Hugh; but he did not know, as Sir Hugh would have known, what the slight things were that would make her shrink. He took little liberties when he should have been reticent and he was humble when he should have been assured. For he was often humble; he was, oddly, pathetically—and the pity for him added to the sickness—afraid of her and then, because he was afraid, he grew angry with her.

He was clever; but there are some things cleverness cannot reach. What he failed to feel by instinct, he tried to scorn. It was not the patrician scorn, stupid yet not ignoble, for something hardly seen, hardly judged, merely felt as dull and insignificant; it was the corroding plebeian scorn for a suspected superiority.

He quarrelled with her, and she sat silent, knowing that her silence, her passivity, was an affront the more, but helpless, having no word to say. What could she say?—I do love you: I am wretched: utterly wretched and utterly destroyed.—That was all there was to say. So she sat, dully listening, as if drugged. And she only winced when he so far forgot himself as to cry out that it was her silly pride of blood, the aristocratic illusion, that had infected her; she belonged to the caste that could not think and that picked up the artist and thinker to amuse and fill its vacancy.—"We may be lovers, or we may be performing poodles, but we are never equals," he had cried. It was for him Amabel had winced, knowing, without raising her eyes to see it, how his face would burn with humiliation for having so betrayed his consciousness of difference. Nothing that he could say could hurt her for herself.

But there was worse to bear: after the violence of his anger came the violence of his love. She had borne at first, dully, like the slave she felt herself; for she had sold herself to him, given herself over bound hand and foot. But now it became intolerable. She could not protest,—what was there to protest against, or to appeal to?—but she could fly. The thought of flight rose in her after the torpor of despair and, with its sense of wings, it felt almost like a joy. She could fly back, back, to be scourged and purified, and then—oh far away she saw it now—was something beyond despair; life once more; life hidden, crippled, but life. A prayer rose like a sob with the thought.

So one night in London her brother Bertram, coming back late to his rooms, found her sitting there.

Bertram was hard, but not unkind. The sight of her white, fixed face touched him. He did not upbraid her, though for the past week he had rehearsed the bitterest of upbraidings. He even spoke soothingly to her when, speechless, she broke into wild sobs. "There, Amabel, there.—Yes, it's a frightful mess you've made of things.—When I think of mother!—Well, I'll say nothing now. You have come back; that is something. You have left him, Amabel?"

She nodded, her face hidden.

"The brute, the scoundrel," said Bertram, at which she moaned a negation.—"You don't still care about him?—Well, I won't question you now.—Perhaps it's not so desperate. Hugh has been very good about it; he's helped me to keep the thing hushed up until we could make sure. I hope we've succeeded; I hope so indeed. Hugh will see you soon, I know; and it can be patched up, no doubt, after a fashion."

But at this Amabel cried:—"I can't.—I can't.—Oh—take me away.—Let me hide until he divorces me. I can't see him."

"Divorces you?" Bertram's voice was sharp. "Have you disgraced publicly—you and us? It's not you I'm thinking of so much as the family name, father and mother. Hugh won't divorce you; he can't; he shan't. After all you're a mere child and he didn't look after you." But this was said rather in threat to Hugh than in leniency to Amabel.

She lay back in the chair, helpless, almost lifeless: let them do with her what they would.

Bertram said that she should spend the night there and that he would see Hugh in the morning. And:—"No; you needn't see him yet, if you feel you can't. It may be arranged without that. Hugh will understand." And this was the first ray of the light that was to grow and grow. Hugh would understand.

She did not see him for two years.

All that had happened after her return to Bertram was a blur now. There were hasty talks, Bertram defining for her her future position, one of dignity it must be—he insisted on that; Hugh perfectly understood her wish for the present, quite fell in with it; but, eventually, she must take her place in her husband's home again. Even Bertram, intent as he was on the family honour, could not force the unwilling wife upon the merely magnanimous husband.

Her husband's magnanimity was the radiance that grew for Amabel during these black days, the days of hasty talks and of her journey down to Charlock House.

She had never seen Charlock House before; Sir Hugh had spoken of the family seat as "a dismal hole," but, on that hot July evening of her arrival, it looked peaceful to her, a dark haven of refuge, like the promise of sleep after nightmare.

Mrs. Bray stood in the door, a grim but not a hostile warder: Amabel felt anyone who was not hostile to be almost kind.

The house had been hastily prepared for her, dining-room and drawing-room and the large bedroom upstairs, having the same outlook over the lawn, the sycamores, the flat meadows. She could see herself standing there now, looking about her at the bedroom where gaiety and gauntness were oddly mingled in the faded carnations and birds of paradise on the chintzes and in the vastness of the four-poster, the towering wardrobes, the capacious, creaking chairs and sofas. Everything was very clean and old; the dressing-table was stiffly skirted in darned muslins and near the pin-cushion stood a small, tight nosegay, Mrs. Bray's cautious welcome to this ambiguous mistress.

"A comfortable old place, isn't it," Bertram had said, looking about, too; "You'll soon get well and strong here, Amabel." This, Amabel knew, was said for the benefit of Mrs. Bray who stood, non-committal and observant just inside the door. She knew, too, that Bertram was depressed by the gauntness and gaiety of the bedroom and even more depressed by the maroon leather furniture and the cases of stuffed birds below, and that he was at once glad to get away from Charlock House and sorry for her that she should have to be left there, alone with Mrs. Bray. But to Amabel it was a dream after a nightmare. A strange, desolate dream, all through those sultry summer days; but a dream shot through with radiance in the thought of the magnanimity that had spared and saved her.

And with the coming of the final horror, came the final revelation of this radiance. She had been at Charlock House for many weeks, and it was mid-Autumn, when that horror came. She knew that she was to have a child and that it could not be her husband's child.

With the knowledge her mind seemed unmoored at last; it wavered and swung in a nightmare blackness deeper than any she had known. In her physical prostration and mental disarray the thought of suicide was with her. How face Bertram now,—Bertram with his tenacious hopes? How face her husband—ever—ever—in the far future? Her disgrace lived and she was to see it. But, in the swinging chaos, it was that thought that kept her from frenzy; the thought that it did live; that its life claimed her; that to it she must atone. She did not love this child that was to come; she dreaded it; yet the dread was sacred, a burden that she must bear for its unhappy sake. What did she not owe to it—unfortunate one—of atonement and devotion?

She gathered all her courage, armed her physical weakness, her wandering mind, to summon Bertram and to tell him.

She told him in the long drawing-room on a sultry September day, leaning her arms on the table by which she sat and covering her face.

Bertram said nothing for a long time. He was still boyish enough to feel any such announcement as embarrassing; and that it should be told him now, in such circumstances, by his sister, by Amabel, was nearly incredible. How associate such savage natural facts, lawless and unappeasable, with that young figure, dressed in its trousseau white muslin and with its crown of innocent gold. It made her suddenly seem older than himself and at once more piteous and more sinister. For a moment, after the sheer stupor, he was horribly angry with her; then came dismay at his own cruelty.

"This does change things, Amabel," he said at last.

"Yes," she answered from behind her hands.

"I don't know how Hugh will take it," said Bertram.

"He must divorce me now," she said. "It can be done very quietly, can't it. And I have money. I can go away, somewhere, out of England—I've thought of America—or New Zealand—some distant country where I shall never be heard of; I can bring up the child there."

Bertram stared at her. She sat at the table, her hands before her face, in the light, girlish dress that hung loosely about her. She was fragile and wasted. Her voice seemed dead. And he wondered at the unhappy creature's courage.

"Divorce!" he then said violently; "No; he can't do that;—and he had forgiven already; I don't know how the law stands; but of course you won't go away. What an idea; you might as well kill yourself outright. It's only—. I don't know how the law stands. I don't know what Hugh will say."

Bertram walked up and down biting his nails. He stopped presently before a window, his back turned to his sister, and, flushing over the words, he said: "You are sure—you are quite sure, Amabel, that it isn't Hugh's child. You are such a girl. You can know nothing.—I mean—it may be a mistake."

"I am quite sure," the unmoved voice answered him. "I do know."

Bertram again stood silent. "Well," he said at last, turning to her though he did not look at her, "all I can do is to see how Hugh takes it. You know, Amabel, that you can count on me. I'll see after you, and after the child. Hugh may, of course, insist on your parting from it; that will probably be the condition he'll make;—naturally. In that case I'll take you abroad soon. It can be got through, I suppose, without anybody knowing; assumed names; some Swiss or Italian village—" Bertram muttered, rather to himself than to her. "Good God, what an odious business!—But, as you say, we have money; that simplifies everything. You mustn't worry about the child. I will see that it is put into safe hands and I'll keep an eye on its future—." He stopped, for his sister's hands had fallen. She was gazing at him, still dully—for it seemed that nothing could strike any excitement from her—but with a curious look, a look that again made him feel as if she were much older than he.

"Never," she said.

"Never what?" Bertram asked. "You mean you won't part from the child?"

"Never; never," she repeated.

"But Amabel," with cold patience he urged; "if Hugh insists.—My poor girl, you have made your bed and you must lie on it. You can't expect your husband to give this child—this illegitimate child—his name. You can't expect him to accept it as his child."

"No; I don't expect it," she said.

"Well, what then? What's your alternative?"

"I must go away with the child."

"I tell you, Amabel, it's impossible," Bertram in his painful anxiety spoke with irritation. "You've got to consider our name—my name, my position, and your husband's. Heaven knows I want to be kind to you—do all I can for you; I've not once reproached you, have I? But you must be reasonable. Some things you must accept as your punishment. Unless Hugh is the most fantastically generous of men you'll have to part from the child."

She sat silent.

"You do consent to that?" Bertram insisted.

She looked before her with that dull, that stupid look. "No," she replied.

Bertram's patience gave way, "You are mad," he said. "Have you no consideration for me—for us? You behave like this—incredibly, in my mother's daughter—never a girl better brought up; you go off with that—that bounder;—you stay with him for a week—good heavens!—there'd have been more dignity if you'd stuck to him;—you chuck him, in one week, and then you come back and expect us to do as you think fit, to let you disappear and everyone know that you've betrayed your husband and had a child by another man. It's mad, I tell you, and it's impossible, and you've got to submit. Do you hear? Will you answer me, I say? Will you promise that if Hugh won't consent to fathering the child—won't consent to giving it his name—won't consent to having it, as his heir, disinherit the lawful children he may have by you—good heavens, I wonder if you realize what you are asking!—will you promise, I say, if he doesn't consent, to part from the child?"

She did look rather mad, her brother thought, and he remembered, with discomfort, that women, at such times, did sometimes lose their reason. Her eyes with their dead gaze nearly frightened him, when, after all his violence, his entreaty, his abuse of her, she only, in an unchanged voice, said "No."

He felt then the uselessness of protestation or threat; she must be treated as if she were mad; humored, cajoled. He was silent for a little while, walking up and down. "Well, I'll say no more, then. Forgive me for my harshness," he said. "You give me a great deal to bear, Amabel; but I'll say nothing now. I have your word, at all events," he looked sharply at her as the sudden suspicion crossed him, "I have your word that you'll stay quietly here—until you hear from me what Hugh says? You promise me that?"

"Yes," his sister answered. He gave a sigh for the sorry relief.

That night Amabel's mind wandered wildly. She heard herself, in the lonely room where she lay, calling out meaningless things. She tried to control the horror of fear that rose in her and peopled the room with phantoms; but the fear ran curdling in her veins and flowed about her, shaping itself in forms of misery and disaster. "No—no—poor child.—Oh—don't—don't.—I will come to you. I am your mother.—They can't take you from me."—this was the most frequent cry.

The poor child hovered, wailing, delivered over to vague, unseen sorrow, and, though a tiny infant, it seemed to be Paul Quentin, too, in some dreadful plight, appealing to her in the name of their dead love to save him. She did not love him; she did not love the child; but her heart seemed broken with impotent pity.

In the intervals of nightmare she could look, furtively, fixedly, about the room. The moon was bright outside, and through the curtains a pallid light showed the menacing forms of the two great wardrobes. The four posts of her bed seemed like the pillars of some vast, alien temple, and the canopy, far above her, floated like a threatening cloud. Opposite her bed, above the chimney-piece, was a deeply glimmering mirror: if she were to raise herself she would see her own white reflection, rising, ghastly.—She hid her face on her pillows and sank again into the abyss.

Next morning she could not get up. Her pulses were beating at fever speed; but, with the daylight, her mind was clearer. She could summon her quiet look when Mrs. Bray came in to ask her mournfully how she was. And a little later a telegram came, from Bertram.

Her trembling hands could hardly open it. She read the words. "All is well." Mrs. Bray stood beside her bed. She meant to keep that quiet look for Mrs. Bray; but she fainted. Mrs. Bray, while she lay tumbled among the pillows, and before lifting her, read the message hastily.

From the night of torment and the shock of joy, Amabel brought an extreme susceptibility to emotion that showed itself through all her life in a trembling of her hands and frame when any stress of feeling was laid upon her.

After that torment and that shock she saw Bertram once, and only once, again;—ah, strange and sad in her memory that final meeting of their lives, though this miraculous news was the theme of it. She was still in bed when he came, the bed she did not leave for months, and, though so weak and dizzy, she understood all that he told her, knew the one supreme fact of her husband's goodness. He sent her word that she was to be troubled about nothing; she was to take everything easily and naturally. She should always have her child with her and it should bear his name. He would see after it like a father; it should never know that he was not its father. And, as soon as she would let him, he would come and see her—and it. Amabel, lying on her pillows, gazed and gazed: her eyes, in their shadowy hollows, were two dark wells of sacred wonder. Even Bertram felt something of the wonder of them. In his new gladness and relief, he was very kind to her. He came and kissed her. She seemed, once more, a person whom one could kiss. "Poor dear," he said, "you have had a lot to bear. You do look dreadfully ill. You must get well and strong, now, Amabel, and not worry any more, about anything. Everything is all right. We will call the child Augustine, if it's a boy, after mother's father you know, and Katherine, if it's a girl, after her mother: I feel, don't you, that we have no right to use their own names. But the further away ones seem right, now. Hugh is a trump, isn't he? And, I'm sure of it, Amabel, when time has passed a little, and you feel you can, he'll have you back; I do really believe it may be managed. This can all be explained. I'm saying that you are ill, a nervous breakdown, and are having a complete rest."

She heard him dimly, feeling these words irrelevant. She knew that Hugh must never have her back; that she could never go back to Hugh; that her life henceforth was dedicated. And yet Bertram was kind, she felt that, though dimly feeling, too, that her old image of him had grown tarnished. But her mind was far from Bertram and the mitigations he offered. She was fixed on that radiant figure, her husband, her knight, who had stooped to her in her abasement, her agony, and had lifted her from dust and darkness to the air where she could breathe,—and bless him.

"Tell him—I bless him,"—she said to Bertram. She could say nothing more. There were other memories of that day, too, but even more dim, more irrelevant. Bertram had brought papers for her to sign, saying: "I know you'll want to be very generous with Hugh now," and she had raised herself on her elbow to trace with the fingers that trembled the words he dictated to her.

There was sorrow, indeed, to look back on after that. Poor Bertram died only a month later, struck down by an infectious illness. He was not to see or supervise the rebuilding of his sister's shattered life, and the anguish in her sorrow was the thought of all the pain that she had brought to his last months of life: but this sorrow, after the phantoms, the nightmares, was like the weeping of tears after a dreadful weeping of blood. Her tears fell as she lay there, propped on her pillows—for she was very ill—and looking out over the Autumn fields; she wept for poor Bertram and all the pain; life was sad. But life was good and beautiful. After the flames, the suffocation, it had brought her here, and it showed her that radiant figure, that goodness and beauty embodied in human form. And she had more to help her, for he wrote to her, a few delicately chosen words, hardly touching on their own case, his and hers, but about her brother's death and of how he felt for her in her bereavement, and of what a friend dear Bertram had been to himself. "Some day, dear Amabel, you must let me come and see you" it ended; and "Your affectionate husband."

It was almost too wonderful to be borne. She had to close her eyes in thinking of it and to lie very still, holding the blessed letter in her hand and smiling faintly while she drew long soft breaths. He was always in her thoughts, her husband; more, far more, than her coming child. It was her husband who had made that coming a thing possible to look forward to with resignation; it was no longer the nightmare of desolate flights and hidings.

And even after the child was born, after she had seen its strange little face, even then, though it was all her life, all her future, it held the second place in her heart. It was her life, but it was from her husband that the gift of life had come to her.

She was a gentle, a solicitous, a devoted mother. She never looked at her baby without a sense of tears. Unfortunate one, was her thought, and the pulse of her life was the yearning to atone.

She must be strong and wise for her child and out of her knowledge of sin and weakness in herself must guide and guard it. But in her yearning, in her brooding thought, was none of the mother's rapturous folly and gladness. She never kissed her baby. Some dark association made the thought of kisses an unholy thing and when, forgetting, she leaned to it sometimes, thoughtless, and delighting in littleness and sweetness, the dark memory of guilt would rise between its lips and hers, so that she would grow pale and draw back.

When first she saw her husband, Augustine was over a year old. Sir Hugh had written and asked if he might not come down one day and spend an hour with her. "And let all the old fogies see that we are friends," he said, in his remembered playful vein.

It was in the long dark drawing-room that she had seen him for the first time since her flight into the wilderness.

He had come in, grave, yet with something blithe and unperturbed in his bearing that, as she stood waiting for what he might say to her, seemed the very nimbus of chivalry. He was splendid to look at, too, tall and strong with clear kind eyes and clear kind smile.

She could not speak, not even when he came and took her hand, and said: "Well Amabel." And then, seeing how white she was and how she trembled, he had bent his head and kissed her hand. And at that she had broken into tears; but they were tears of joy.

He stood beside her while she wept, her hands before her face, just touching her shoulder with a paternal hand, and she heard him saying: "Poor little Amabel: poor little girl."

She took her chair beside the table and for a long time she kept her face hidden: "Thank you; thank you;" was all that she could say.

"My dear, what for?—There, don't cry.—You have stopped crying? There, poor child. I've been awfully sorry for you."

He would not let her try to say how good he was, and this was a relief, for she knew that she could not put it into words and that, without words, he understood. He even laughed a little, with a graceful embarrassment, at her speechless gratitude. And presently, when they talked, she could put down her hand, could look round at him, while she answered that, yes, she was very comfortable at Charlock House; yes, no place could suit her more perfectly; yes, Mrs. Bray was very kind.

And he talked a little about business with her, explaining that Bertram's death had left him with a great deal of management on his hands; he must have her signature to papers, and all this was done with the easiest tact so that naturalness and simplicity should grow between them; so that, in finding pen and papers in her desk, in asking where she was to sign, in obeying the pointing of his finger here and there, she should recover something of her quiet, and be able to smile, even, a little answering smile, when he said that he should make a business woman of her. And—"Rather a shame that I should take your money like this, Amabel, but, with all Bertram's money, you are quite a bloated capitalist. I'm rather hard up, and you don't grudge it, I know."

She flushed all over at the idea, even said in jest:—"All that I have is yours."

"Ah, well, not all," said Sir Hugh. "You must remember—other claims." And he, too, flushed a little now in saying, gently, tentatively;—"May I see the little boy?"

"I will bring him," said Amabel.

How she remembered, all her life long, that meeting of her husband and her son. It was the late afternoon of a bright June day and the warm smell of flowers floated in at the open windows of the drawing-room. She did not let the nurse bring Augustine, she carried him down herself. He was a large, robust baby with thick, corn-coloured hair and a solemn, beautiful little face. Amabel came in with him and stood before her husband holding him and looking down. Confusion was in her mind, a mingling of pride and shame.

Sir Hugh and the baby eyed each other, with some intentness. And, as the silence grew a little long, Sir Hugh touched the child's cheek with his finger and said: "Nice little fellow: splendid little fellow. How old is he, Amabel? Isn't he very big?"

"A year and two months. Yes, he is very big."

"He looks like you, doesn't he?"

"Does he?" she said faintly.

"Just your colour," Sir Hugh assured her. "As grave as a little king, isn't he. How firmly he looks at me."

"He is grave, but he never cries; he is very cheerful, too, and well and strong."

"He looks it. He does you credit. Well, my little man, shall we be friends?" Sir Hugh held out his hand. Augustine continued to gaze at him, unmoving. "He won't shake hands," said Sir Hugh.

Amabel took the child's hand and placed it in her husband's; her own fingers shook. But Augustine drew back sharply, doubling his arm against his breast, though not wavering in his gaze at the stranger.

Sir Hugh laughed at the decisive rejection. "Friendship's on one side, till later," he said.

---

When her husband had gone Amabel went out into the sycamore wood. It was a pale, cool evening. The sun had set and the sky beyond the sycamores was golden. Above, in a sky of liquid green, the evening star shone softly.

A joy, sweet, cold, pure, like the evening, was in her heart. She stopped in the midst of the little wood among the trees, and stood still, closing her eyes.

Something old was coming back to her; something new was being given. The memory of her mother's eyes was in it, of the simple prayers taught her by her mother in childhood, and the few words, rare and simple, of the presence of God in the soul. But her girlish prayer, her girlish thought of God, had been like a thread-like, singing brook. What came to her now grew from the brook-like running of trust and innocence to a widening river, to a sea that filled her, over-flowed her, encompassed her, in whose power she was weak, through whose power her weakness was uplifted and made strong.

It was as if a dark curtain of fear and pain lifted from her soul, showing vastness, and deep upon deep of stars. Yet, though this that came to her was so vast, it made itself small and tender, too, like the flowers glimmering about her feet, the breeze fanning her hair and garments, the birds asleep in the branches above her. She held out her hands, for it seemed to fall like dew, and she smiled, her face uplifted.

---

She did not often see her husband in the quiet years that followed. She did not feel that she needed to see him. It was enough to know that he was there, good and beautiful.

She knew that she idealised him, that in ordinary aspects he was a happy, easy man-of-the-world; but that was not the essential; the essential in him was the pity, the tenderness, the comprehension that had responded to her great need. He was very unconscious of aims or ideals; but when the time for greatness came he showed it as naturally and simply as a flower expands to light. The thought of him henceforth was bound up with the thought of her religion; nothing of rapture or ecstasy was in it; it was quiet and grave, a revelation of holiness.

It was as if she had been kneeling to pray, alone, in a dark, devastated church, trembling, and fearing the darkness, not daring to approach the unseen altar; and that then her husband's hand had lighted all the high tapers one by one, so that the church was filled with radiance and the divine made manifest to her again.

Light and quietness were to go with her, but they were not to banish fear. They could only help her to live with fear and to find life beautiful in spite of it.

For if her husband stood for the joy of life, her child stood for its sorrow. He was the dark past and the unknown future. What she should find in him was unrevealed; and though she steadied her soul to the acceptance of whatever the future might bring of pain for her, the sense of trembling was with her always in the thought of what it might bring of pain for Augustine.

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