MRS. CUTHBERT MERRICK, erect in her shining dogcart, watched the stout pony’s indolent advance with severity, but with forbearance. The road was steep and the day hot.

Far below, the ascent began among beech-woods that climbed from gentle valleys; than came the pine-trees, casting blue-black shadows across the dusty road, and when the hill-top was reached the lighter shade of lime and birch and beech again dappled the sunny whiteness.

Mrs. Merrick allowed the pony to pause here, and glanced round at the wide distances below with something more of distaste for the supremacy of her outlook than admiration for its beauty. The view from the hill-top was a grievance to her. They had only bucolic meadows, and trees of an orderly dulness, that didn’t even make Constable effects, to look at, below there, about Trensome Hall. But she turned her eyes resolutely from the unpleasing comparison, applied her whip smartly, and a minute’s quick trot brought her to her destination.

Along the road ran the low stone wall of a flower-filled garden; beyond the flowers a small stone house, its windows shining, faced the south-western spaces, and behind the house a sudden rise of pleasant summer woods saved it from bleakness in its lonely eminence. Indeed the house, though alone, was not lonely. It had an effect of standing with contented serenity in its long outlook over the pine-woods, the beech-woods, the rippled wave of low hill and valley, lapping one upon the other to the splendid line of the horizon.

So high, so alone, yet so set in beauty, so independent, with the half-clasp of its limes and beeches, the jewelled splash of flowers about it. The independence and serenity were almost defiant, Mrs. Merrick thought, as she looked with a familiar disapproval at the house, too large for a cottage, too classic, with its pillared door-way and balanced proportions, for its diminutiveness. It made one think of a tiny Greek temple incongruously placed, and to Mrs. Merrick it symbolized an attitude that had always bewildered and irritated her. The garden, too, irritated her and made her envious. Even at this late summer season its beauty was abundant. Her well-trained gardener at Trensome Hall, with the two boys under him, produced no such effects with all his wide opportunities. Her garden was like an official report; this was like a poem. Mrs. Merrick did not use the simile; she merely felt, as before, irritating comparisons.

Flowers grew in long lines from the house to the garden wall, eddying into broad pools of colour. In the delicate green shadow of the limes were Canterbury-bells, frail bubbles, purple and white, making in the shade a soft radiance, as though they held light within them. Beds of white pansies, thickly growing, looked like cream poured upon the ground; near them nasturtiums, a disordered host, dashed waves of colour against the wall.

As Mrs. Merrick sat looking, with some visible sourness, at the garden, a girl, carrying a spade and a watering-pot came round the corner of the house. She was dressed in a white cotton dress and wore, over smooth but loosened hair, a flapping white hat. She gave one an impression of at once flower-like freshness and most human untidiness. The black ribbon at her neck was half untied, her hat was battered; her dress was askew and dabbled with water. Unabashed by these infelicities, she set down her burdens, drew off her heavy gloves, and advanced through the purple and white and flame; smiling indifferently.

Mrs. Merrick’s smile as she put out her hand was obviously decorative. She presented an amusing contrast to the graceful disarray that greeted her. Her thin dry face was flushed above a rigid collar; a sharply tonged fringe and a netted miracle of twists and convolutions seemed appendages of the sailor hat—tilted forward and fastened to her head by a broad elastic band, a spotted veil and two accurate pins. She could but sit erect; her meagre body in its tightly buttoned bodice, was box-like. Her figure was her chief vanity; its “neatness” her aim, and the word with her signified a careful, unrelaxing compression.

“Gardening, Felicia?” she asked, glancing down at her niece’s earth-dogged shoes.

Felicia Merrick’s father and her own husband were brothers.

“Yes; digging all morning; weeding and watering most of the afternoon.” Felicia was thinking that to-day her aunt looked more funnily than ever like a collection of parcels strapped together for postal delivery. She was mentally tying a stamped label to her hat; the circle of the curl between the eyebrows was already a post-mark.

“Doesn’t Thomas do the digging? It must, I know, be hard to manage with one boy, but surely he could do the digging.”

“He does, unless I want to.”

“People can see you from the road—not that any one passes by here often.”

“Not often,” Felicia assented.

“I want to know if you can come down to us to-morrow for a week,” said Mrs. Merrick, allowing the antagonistic moment to pass, and after a slight hesitation Felicia answered, “Yes, thanks.”

Mrs. Merrick had often suspected that Felicia’s gratitude on these occasions was not up to the mark of the opportunities they gave her, and now, emphasizing the present opportunity, she went on, “You can’t fail to enjoy yourself. Lady Angela Bagley is with us. You have heard of her. I met her in London this Spring; we took a great fancy to each other. She is a wonderful woman—really wonderful. Such intellect, such soul, such world polish, and with it such saintliness. Everybody feels that about her; it helps one to know that there are such people in the world,” said Mrs. Merrick, sighing as she flicked the pony—“people who have everything the world can give, and who care nothing for it.” Felicia wondered from which of her recent guests her aunt had picked up these phrases which came oddly from her anxious materialism.

“I have often seen her picture in the ladies’ papers,” she replied; “it will be nice to see her.” She dimly remembered a narrow face, a mist of hair, a long, yearning throat, and she at once decided that she would not like Lady Angela and her soul.

“Yes, it will be nice for you. She takes an interest in everybody. Of course your father must come, too. There are some interesting men whom he will like meeting. Mr. Daunt, the young M.P., is a cousin of Lady Angela—the comet of the season, my dear;—most wonderful speech in the House—you probably heard of it; Imperialism—national prestige;—and a friend of his, Mr. Wynne, a most captivating person. He writes essays, he paints, he plays the violin; people are quite mad about him in London. You mustn’t fall in love with him, Felicia, for, charming as he is, he has no money.”

Felicia, her arms leaning on the wall, picked at a flake of loosened stone with only a dim smile of acknowledgment for this jest.

“And old Mr. Jones, the scholar, from Oxford; your father, I feel sure, will be eager to meet him. How is your father, Felicia? Plunged in books, I suppose. Is he writing?”

“Yes. He is well.”

“He will get ideas, I think, from Mr. Jones. I spoke of his book to Mr. Jones; he had never heard of it. I gave it to him; he looked through it last night. Of course, as he said, it is quite out of date by now.”

Felicia picked off another flake, and said nothing.

“So,” Mrs. Merrick went on more briskly—her niece had the faculty of disconcerting her even in the midst of apparent triumphs—“So it will be nice for him to talk things over with Mr. Jones. Here is Austin now. I thought that he would see or hear me.”

Mr. Austin Merrick came down the garden path at a sauntering pace, his hands in his pockets, breathing in the sunlit air as though the afternoon’s balmy radiance, rather than sight or sound of his sister-in-law, had lured him from his studies.

He was a tall man, with a stout, easy, indolent body and a handsome head. His eyes were of a vague but excitable blue; his thick grey hair haloed a clean-shaven face, delicate in feature, the nose finely aquiline, the lips full, slightly pursed, as if in a judicial weighing of his own impressions; his cheeks were rosy and a trifle pendulous. Loosely fitting clothes, a fluttering green neck-tie, a Panama hat, placed at the back of his head with a certain recklessness, carried out the impression of ease and of indifference.

“Ah! Kate,” he said. He approached the gate and gave her his large, white hand. His eyes passed over her face, and wandered contemplatively away to the landscape behind it, a glance that made Mrs. Merrick irritably wonder whether she had put too much powder on her nose.

“You and Felicia are coming to me for a week,” she said, again flicking her whip, and smiling with a touch of eagerness. “I mustn’t let you get rusty up here.”

If Miss Merrick had a faculty for disconcerting her aunt, her aunt had an equal faculty for “drawing” her father. His eye did not turn from the landscape, but it became more fixed and more pleasant as he said, “Ah, my dear Kate, rust, you know, is a matter of environment, and without my good little whetstone here I don’t fancy that the combined efforts of our not highly intelligent country people could save me from it—when I go among them. A mental fog, a stagnant dulness, you know, affect one in spite of one’s resolve to keep one’s steel bright. Up here we have our own little space of dry, bracing air—we keep one another sharpened, don’t we, Felicia? Rather uncomfortably sharpened, we sometimes find, when we come down from our tiny Parnassus.”

Smiling, speaking in his most leisurely tones, Mr. Merrick laid his arm around his daughter’s shoulders. She did not emphasize the effectiveness of the caress by returning it, or even by looking up, though her slight smile seemed to claim for his speech a jocular intention, while disavowing its magnificent complacency.

Mrs. Merrick’s sudden flush made evident her nose’s amelioration. “It is well to have the gift of idealization, Austin—it makes life far more comfortable. Will you risk rust, then, in coming to us, for a week?” The irony of her tone was not easy.

“One moment, Kate.” Mr. Merrick, still leaning on his daughter’s shoulder, stretched out a demonstrative forefinger. “Do you see that quite delightful effect—that group of trees melting against the sky—“ It was to Felicia alone that he spoke, naming a French painter of whom Mrs. Merrick had never heard. “He could do it; it’s like one of his smiling bits.” His eye still dwelt upon it as he said, “I am rather busy just now, Kate. I have a great deal of reading on hand. I am studying a rather obscure phase of that most obscure thing—German idealism; what caves they creep into, poor fellows! Any depth rather than face the sun, the unpleasant sun;—I can’t leave just now.”

“But a holiday would do you good.” Mrs. Merrick was forced to some urgency. Much as she wished this exasperating brother-in-law of hers to feel that she dispensed favours, she seldom met him in one of these sourly suave contests without being made to feel that she was receiving one. Indeed, her odd sceptical, scoffing brother-in-law, his solitude, his disdain, and his pagan-looking house as a background, was a figure she could not afford to miss from her parties—parties often so painfully scraped together—painfully commonplace when scraped. This year her party was surprisingly significant, but even in its midst Austin would count well as her appendage—would certainly redeem her from her husband’s heavy conformity, that simply counted for nothing. He impressed her, and she imagined that he must impress other people.

“I have a really interesting group,” she said, and she recited the list, adding, “Mr. Jones particularly wants to meet you. He found your book so suggestive—“ Mrs. Merrick, in pinching circumstances, was careless of consistency; she had no appearances to keep up before Felicia.

“Jones? Ah, yes,” Mr. Merrick repeated with benignity.

“A clever man, you know.”

“Not bad,” Mr. Merrick owned, indulgent in discriminating gravity. “That little book of his on Comte wasn’t half bad; you remember it, Felicia?”

Mrs. Merrick had not heard of the book on Comte; it was an added discomfiture. “You will come, then?” She gathered up her reins.

“May we leave it open, Kate? I can, I know, give you a day or two, but may I leave the time and number open? Felicia shall go to you to-morrow, and I will join you as soon as may be.” His face had regained its full serenity, and Mrs. Merrick was forced to accept the galling concession.

When she had driven off, Felicia picked up her spade and resumed her digging. Her father stood in the path watching her.

“Could one of Spenser’s heroines be imagined digging?” he mused. “The day, the flowers—you among them—bring Spenser to my mind.”

“I could imagine Britomart gardening if she had nothing bigger on hand to do,” said Felicia. “But I am not a Britomart type.”

“And yet you are not unbelligerent, Felicia;—an indolent, unroused Britomart. But I don’t see you in armour. Charming, that white dress drenched with sunlight.”

“And with water. I saw Aunt Kate disapproving; no wonder. I suppose we must go to her? Aren’t you sometimes rather tired of Aunt Kate and her parties?”

“My dear child, selfishness is the besetting danger of a congenial isolation such as ours. We must think of her and of your uncle. And then”—Mr. Merrick paused as his daughter made no reply—“it is well that you should have these distractions.”

“How refuse, when we have only German idealism as an excuse?” Felicia remarked.

“A very good one were we self-centred enough to urge it. But you may find these people interesting, Felicia; I really wonder that Kate managed to get people as interesting to come to her. Young Daunt is a very clever fellow. He speaks well and keeps a position of quite extraordinary independence.”

“What is he?—a Liberal?”

“Really, my dear Felicia—your ignorance of politics!” Her father laughed, half approving the indifference to the world’s loud drums such ignorance betokened. “Daunt, like all ambitious young men nowadays, is on the winning side; he is a Conservative; an under-secretary in the Admiralty.”

“Personally ambitious, do you mean?”

“When does one see any ambition other than personal, my dear?” Mr. Merrick asked mournfully, taking off his hat and rubbing his thick but delicate hand through his hair. “Devotion to an idea, self-immolation if need be, is no longer to be found in British public life.”

Felicia was stooping low to pick weeds, and her father seemed to be addressing himself to the landscape in general, as much as to her vague attention. “He is clever, as a man poor and determined on worldly success, and bound to succeed, is clever. It’s a cloddish cleverness, after all. This Wynne, now, is of an appealingly contrasted type. I’ve read a little volume of his somewhere; slight but sensitive, subtle, ironic; bound by no outworn faiths and making use of none for his own advancement; an observer merely, not a scrambler.”

Her head among her irises, Felicia observed, “Scrambling must be nice, I should think.”

She continued her weeding, when her father with an indulgent laugh had walked off to the house, and she smiled a little to herself as she worked; it was, for the youth of the face, a mature smile; a smile that recognized and accepted irony and yet kept a cheerful kindness. Her father made her wince when he faced the world. Alas! Aunt Kate, the world!

The most inappropriate Britomart simile lingered and saddened her as her thought rested on it. It was true, though, that all her life long she had burnished weapons, sharpened her sword and kept her heart high. Now, it was as if with that sad smile and a shrug for the miscalculation of past energy, she leaned on the useless sword and watched the triviality of life go by. How find deep meanings in such muddy shallows? Of what avail was the striving urgency of growth? Where were great objects for armed faiths? She stood ready, waiting for lions; and only jackasses strayed by. But though she could laugh at herself, and see the Britomart attitude as sadly funny, her hand had not slackened—she still held her sword. If a lion did come, so much the better for her—and for life.

CHAPTER II

ONLY one other person passed along the lonely sunny road that afternoon—the Rev. Charles Godersham, rector of the charming little Gothic church—where Mr. Merrick, emphasis in his negative, never went, and whose spire pointed upward, from the woodland below, a delicate and derisive finger at the culprit. The spire was the first thing Felicia saw every morning, and, under a sky of dawn, she loved it, perversely perhaps, for all the things it did not seem to say to the merely decorous well-being of the lives it guarded. It symbolized, to her, wings that would fly to risks, a faith that could be won only by fighting. And as Felicia found irony in most things, she found it every morning in her own uplifted contemplation of the symbol that rejected her.

Mr. Godersham, also, symbolized to her meanings more pleasant than those of their formal intercourse. He wasn’t at all a jackass, and he probably thought her father one, and as Felicia’s place was beside her father the barrier was effectual. He was a well-favoured, good-hearted, sane and smiling man of fifty, vexed only by the extreme ugliness of numerous daughters to whom he was devoted and by the hostility of Mr. Austin Merrick. He would have been glad to smoke or play whist with Mr. Merrick, tolerantly indifferent to his defiant infidelity; he would have cheerfully waived the relationship of parson for that of mere neighbour; and he did not ask Mr. Merrick to listen to his sermons; he knew that they were poor; he counted for more as man than as parson; but the personality of this recalcitrant, wandering sheep, his vanity and patronizing superiority of manner made even a neighbourly tolerance difficult. It was with an impersonal courtesy that he bowed to Mr. Merrick’s daughter as he rode by.

Soon after Felicia went in to give her father his tea. He was sitting in the small room that was, at once, library and drawing-room. Above book-filled shelves the walls were whitewashed, and against this background tall porcelains and bronzes showed their delicate outlines, and some fine mezzotints after Reynolds and Gainsborough their harmonies of golden-greys and blacks. In a corner stood an ivory-coloured cast of the Flying Victory of Samothrace, and above it the thoughtful bust of Marcus Aurelius looked down upon its arrested swiftness, its still and glorious strength. From open windows, where white curtains flapped softly, one looked over the garden and pinewoods and valleys to the sky of luminous gold.

One note, only, jarred; a charcoal drawing of a woman’s head, hung prominently. Feebly ill-drawn, its over life-size exaggerated its absurdity; the eyes monstrously large, not well matched, all beaming high light and sentimental eyelash; the nose and mouth showing a rigid, a cloying sweetness. This production was the result of one of Mr. Merrick’s rare fits of active self-expression, and, excellent judge of art though he was, he was completely blind to the grotesqueness of the caricature of his dead wife. He had drawn it, many years ago, from life, and claimed to see in it a subtle and exquisite likeness. Felicia suffered, though with the silent and humorous resignation characteristic of her, from living with it, even when a photograph of her mother, standing near, corrected its travesty of her charming countenance.

Mr. Merrick was sitting in a deep armchair, his attitude of complete ease harmonizing with the tranquil room, though his eyes, as he looked up from the review he was reading, were irate. “The modern recrudescence of mysticism is truly disheartening, Felicia,” he said. “Have you read this article?”

Felicia, on her way to the tea-table, glanced at the title he held out, and nodded.

“How long will the human race, like an ostrich, hide its head from truth and, in the darkness, find revelation?”

“Why shouldn’t they make themselves comfortable in any way they can?” Felicia asked, measuring her tea into the teapot.

“Comfort at the cost of truth is a despicable immorality.”

“Well—what is truth? How is the poor ostrich to find it out? Besides, papa, you are comfortable, and the truths you believe in aren’t.” Her smile at him was one of the comforts Mr. Merrick most securely counted on. Felicia, in every way, made him comfortable, even when she argued with him, and by half-droll opposition called out his refutations.

“My dear child,” he now said, “your logic is truly feminine. I have never shirked an intellectual consequence. If, for the moment, I enjoy certain satisfactions, I never forget that my position is that of the condemned prisoner.”

“We certainly have a nicely furnished cell.”

“Your mind evades the realities of the bars,” said Mr. Merrick, selecting, after a hesitation in the choice, a cake from the plate she handed him. “Once you have seen an ugly fact you turn your back upon it.”

“What better thing can one do with an ugly fact? What claim has truth or logic upon anybody in a world of atoms and their concussions? The only thing to do is to make oneself comfortable—with tea or mysticism as the case may be.”

Mr. Merrick received this flippancy with calm, convinced of an essential chime under superficial janglings. “You are, I am glad to say, Felicia, a woman who can think.”

“We do a lot of thinking,” Felicia assented. “How little else!” she could not repress. That her thinking had been for the most part lonely she was glad that her father never suspected, nor did he suspect a Puck-like fun she found in turning his own theories against him. He ate slowly now, his eyes raised in a train of thought that even his intelligent daughter, he felt, could hardly have followed. His own detachment from the shows of life was its theme. Suddenly, however, this contemplation was shaken by a more intimate, more stirring realization. “My dear Felicia,” he exclaimed, glancing rapidly at the tea-table and at the stand of eatables, “is not this the day for the frosted cake?”

“Grant forgot it, papa; you shall have it to-morrow.”

“There are only the small cakes, then?”

“And bread and butter.”

“It is really very careless of Grant, very careless. She should not have forgotten,” said Mr. Merrick, flushed, and as seriously aggrieved as a child. “Pray, speak sharply to her about it. I looked forward to the frosted cake to-day, freshly baked, warm, as I like it. It is very annoying. You are sure that she has not made it?”

“Sadly sure; I hoped you would not notice it.” Felicia looked at him with a touch of placid severity. “Have another of the small ones.”

“No—no, I thank you. I don’t care for them.” He had eaten three. The distressing episode curdled his mood for the rest of the day. A tactful and unexpected hors d’oeuvre at dinner effaced the grievance. It was with a species of tender, maternal malice that Felicia resorted to these cajoleries, herself making the peace-offering. And after dinner when he smoked, and she read Leopardi aloud to him, the frosted cake was quite forgotten.

When Felicia went up to her room her mind was running in a melancholy current that often underlay her surface ripple. She stood at her window looking out at the monotones of the night, and she sighed deeply. Self-pity caught her. This life of repression, of appreciation, of theory, how weary she was of it, how lonely she was in it! How wonderful it would be—she had a swift smile at herself for the turn of thought—to love, to be loved. She stood dreaming of this deliverance, this awakening.

Felicia’s ideas of love, despite the severely realistic literature and pessimistic theories that had nourished her youth, were as white, as gracious and as lofty as the shining crescent of the moon that hung in beauty over the pine-woods. She smiled, but with a little fear, analyzing the feminine waiting for a fairy prince, facing the fact that she was really ready to fall in love with the first nice person who presented himself for idealization. He must, of course, be possible; idealization had been impossible with the stupid men she had met at Trensome Hall; or the curate with his short legs and rabbit head. He must be possible—he must be delightful; and would he ever come? “Beware, Felicia,” she thought. “You are young; you are lonely; you are sentimental and idle; that’s a basis for mistakes and tragedies.” She laughed at herself, but as she leaned there and looked out, all the yearning, all the sadness and solemnity of the pine-woods, the moon and the sky, found an echo in her untried heart.

CHAPTER III

AUSTIN MERRICK had begun life inauspiciously. The younger son of an unimportant country squire, he had been none of the things which a younger son should be, neither industrious, nor independent, nor even anxious to please those who might help his disadvantages. He was helpless, and he would not recognize the fact; would ask for no help. He had loitered through college, fitting himself for no career, talking vaguely of a literary life and of a philosophic pursuit of truth. He was still pursuing it, very placidly, not at all chagrined, indeed quite the contrary, by the fact that his pursuit implied that other people’s apparent attainments rested on a highly illusory basis. Austin Merrick’s attitude had always been what it now was—a calm down-smiling from a hill-top upon other people’s dulness.

After travelling for some years, during which he published in the lesser reviews a few little articles of incoherent scepticism—the one book, as sceptical and even more incoherent, was of later date—Austin married a pretty American girl, who had a very small fortune.

Felicia Grey came from a little New England town, and after the death of a sternly practical father, a passionately transcendental mother, she seized upon an aunt, colourless and submissive, and came to Europe to see life.

She was highly educated and vastly ignorant. She intended to see life steadily, and to see it whole. The steadiness she certainly attained; she was fearless, eager, full of faith.

Austin Merrick met her at a Paris pension and his essentially irresolute soul was stirred by Miss Grey’s resolute eyes, eyes large and clear, like a boy’s. He stayed on at the pension and made Miss Grey’s acquaintance, an easy matter, for she had little conception of risks or of formalities, and regarded all individuals as offering deeply interesting experiences. The aunt sat reading Flaubert, with a dictionary, in her bedroom, finding the duty dimly alarming, and refreshing it by reversions to Emerson, while her niece went sight-seeing with the young Englishman whom the elder Miss Grey described in home letters as “very cultivated and high-minded,” adding that she imagined him to belong to an “aristocratic family.”

Felicia Grey’s crudeness, crisp and sparkling, Austin did not recognize; he thought wonderful in her what was only derivation, the absolute impartiality and courage of her outlook. She was startlingly indifferent to conventional claims, seriously uninfluenced by the world’s weights and measures. Austin, conscious in his inmost soul of being anything but indifferent and uninfluenced, leaned upon the support of her ignorant valour. She was as serene and strong as he pretended to be.

With her serenity and her indifference, she was immensely enthusiastic about the things she cared for. Humanity, Freedom, Progress,—these words with capital letters—that he already felt it to be the fashion to scoff at a little if one wanted to keep abreast of the latest scorn—were burning realities to Miss Grey, and as he was already in love with her, he did not dare to laugh at them. Indeed, Miss Grey had not much sense of humour, and did not understand subtle scorns. He was in love, glorying in the abandonment of the feeling, and very sincerely unaware that had Miss Grey not been modestly equipped with dollars he would not so have abandoned himself. It was, indeed, a very modest equipment, but with his own tiny allowance, that didn’t do at all—he was always in debt—would lift him above the material restrictions that had so long irked him. His indifference might really, then, equal hers.

He never had a more horrid shock than when one day she proved the reality of her indifference, terribly proved it, by speaking contemplatively of devoting her money to the cause of Russian freedom, and of making her own living by teaching. “It seems to me that one would face life more directly—more truly—like that,” remarked Miss Grey.

He controlled the demonstration of his dismay and for several days argued with her on the duties of even such small wealth as hers, its responsibilities and opportunities. He always impressed Miss Grey; she was the least arrogant of beings, and in spite of her steady seeing of life, took people exactly at their own valuation. She, too, thought Mr. Merrick very “cultivated and high-minded”; she equipped him further with a “great soul,” and, unconsciously to her maiden heart, thought him, too, very beautiful in his wise persuasiveness.

He persuaded her that a larger, richer, more helpful life was to be lived with money than without it, and, a few days later, that that life should be lived with him.

So Miss Grey went to England as Mrs. Austin Merrick, and she and her husband built the Greek temple on the bit of hill-top land that came to Austin through his mother, and in the Greek temple, under the rather pinched conditions that its erection left them in, Mrs. Austin passed fourteen very perplexed, helpless, and unhappy years.

She never recovered from the perplexity. Trying always to see great meanings, only small ones met her eyes. Not only was the mollusc-like routine of the life about her bewildering, for it was a dull country-side, but her husband’s character. She never doubted the great soul, but she never seemed clearly to see it. He was loving and devoted; he thought her perfect, as he thought all his possessions; she did not know that it was her echo of his imaginary self that he prized, that she was the living surety of his own worth, never felt that the key-note of his character was an agile vanity that sprang to defend him from any attack that might mean self-revelation. He was always clever enough to see her worth, but not clever enough to see that her intelligence grew blurred and groping when it turned its light upon the objects of her affection.

Her husband’s idleness bewildered Mrs. Merrick; not that she so saw it, or his shrinking from the test of action; but his life, in spite of its pompous premisses, had, in reality, little more actual significance than the lives of any of the neighbouring squires—if as much. What did she and Austin do in the world? her thoughts fumbled with the knife-like question.

She still saw in him the lofty thinker; but Austin Merrick’s mind was a lazy one, unfit for constructive affirmation; and as he happened to be surrounded by minds as lazy, unfit for any effort of destructive criticism, he found the attitude of superiority more attainable by opposition. He did most of his thinking in youth, when the current of scientific agnosticism caught him; he had gone with it, not helping it in any way, merely borne along, and he had gone no farther than it had gone, drifting into a sleepy backwater of its once flowing tide, unable to follow it into deepened channels. His mental development had stopped at an epoch newly conscious of the inflexibility of natural law and the ruin of the dogmas that seemed to contradict it, and Mr. Merrick had not, in reality, advanced beyond this first crude negation. The largeness of his doubts was the result not of deep thinking, but of a lazy lack of thought. His pessimism was caused more by the ignorant optimism he saw about him than by any thwarted spiritual demand of his own nature. He was, indeed, in the position, dubiously fortunate for him, of being twenty years behind the best thought of his time and fifty ahead of that of his neighbours, to many of whom Darwinism was still a looming, half-ludicrous monkey-monster, to be dispatched at the hands of a vigorous clergy, and naturalistic determinism an hypothesis that did not even remotely impinge upon the outskirts of their consciousness. But with all his complacencies, indolences, and attitudes, Austin Merrick was intelligent, dependent and affectionate, soured only by indifference, angered only by ridicule, and his wife in her relation to him knew nothing worse than that abiding sense of perplexity. She saw with difficulty the ironic side of life; the deepest draught of bitterness was spared her. She only dimly felt that life was tragic. Her small daughter surmised very early that it was grotesque as well as tragic. Felicia was thirteen when her mother died, leaving her with a radiant, pathetic memory. She always thought of her as a very young girl, and indeed Mrs. Austin with her clear gaze, rounded cheek, thick braids of hair coiled in school-girl fashion at the back of her head, looked hardly more than twenty when she died.

Felicia remembered the gaze, so funnily astonished in its tenderness, with which she watched her daughter, the gaze of a school-girl who had never quite grasped the fact of her own maternity. She was very tender, very loving, and poured all the baffled energies of her life into the uprearing of her daughter, who had been treated with the gentleness due to a child, the Emersonian reverence due to a human soul. Felicia remembered the naÏvely sententious aphorisms with which she armed her. “In this life to fail is to triumph,” was one, and the pathos to Felicia was in seeing that the aphorism was an unrealized truth in her mother’s own life. She had indeed “carried her soul like a white bird,” through the painful deserts of disillusion, a disillusion that only her daughter apprehended.

She left life ardent, loving and perplexed. The young Felicia was also ardent and loving, but not at all perplexed. Her clearness of vision did not trouble her steadfastness. She was very fond of her father, and she thought him very foolish; she resented keenly the fact that people more foolish than he should criticize him. She never mistook jackasses for lions, and her only title to commendation in her own eyes was that she, at all events, did not bray.

CHAPTER IV

MRS. MERRICK sent a cart for her niece’s box next morning, and Felicia set out in the afternoon to walk the two miles to Trensome Hall, happy in the buoyancy of a sunny, breezy day. She responded easily to sunshine and buoyancy, and, in spite of her pessimistic education, easily expected happiness. Sometimes it seemed that it might be waiting for her behind every bush, for youth and an ardent temperament are more potent mood-makers than rational reflection. And, indeed, it did lurk, smiling, behind all the bushes to-day, for Felicia’s mood was happy. She saw it in the blue and white of the high summer sky, in the sun-dappled woods, in the wild-flowers of the hedge-row; she heard it in the mazurka-like song of a bird hidden in green mysteries of shade; she felt it in the warm, fresh breeze that swayed light shadows across the road. It was only an intensifying of the sense of response when, at a turning of the road, she met a young man, who seemed quite magically to personify the breeziness, the brightness, the mazurka-like element of the day. Coming thus upon each other, both smiling to themselves, both looking, listening, and, as it were, expectant, it seemed only natural that their eyes should dwell upon each other with frank interest. Their steps slackened, a mute, pleased query passed between them, and the young man, doffing his hat, and giving Felicia as he did so a vivid impression of sunlit auburn hair, said, “I beg your pardon, but I am sure that you are Miss Merrick.”

“And you are Mr. Wynne,” said Felicia, for she was quite sure he was not the ambitious politician. Their certainty about one another was as natural as all the rest.

“I came to meet you,” said Mr. Wynne. “I heard that you were arriving this afternoon, and that you lived on top of a hill and had a wonderful garden; and as I love gardens and hill-tops I thought I would try to meet you as near them as possible.”

Maurice Wynne was also telling himself that he loved meeting Miss Merrick.

Felicia on this day was dressed in white. Her hat had a wreath of white roses, and, tying under her chin, shaded her thick, smooth hair—hair the colour of sandal-wood—and her pale face. He would have climbed any number of hills to see the face—so significant, so resolute, so delicate.

Her small, square chin, narrowing suddenly from rounded cheeks, her wide, firm lips, her nose and forehead, and the broad sweep of her eye-brows, had all this quality of resolute delicacy. In the pale yet vivid tints of her face her clear grey eyes seemed dark, and her eyelashes slanted across them like sunshine on deep pools of woodland water. Maurice was seeing all this, delightedly,—and that through the child-like moulding of the cheek, the lips’ sweetness, the eyes’ tranquillity, ran a latent touch of mischievous gaiety—a dryad laughing a little at her own new soul.

“You have missed the climb and the garden in meeting me,” said Felicia, “unless you follow this road straight on, and that will lead you to them——“

“Perhaps you will show me both on some other day,” said Maurice, “since I haven’t missed you.” He had turned to walk beside her, and Felicia, also making inner comments, reflected that a person so assured of his own graceful intentions could hardly be anything but graceful. His looks, his words, implied happy things with as much conviction as the bird still sang on behind them.

“It isn’t in any way an unusual garden, though the view from it is unusual.”

“I am sure that your garden is unusual—just as this first stage of my journey towards it has been. It is very unusual to meet a Watteau figure in a Watteau landscape.”

“If you had started a little earlier,” Felicia said, smiling, “and met me on the hill-side, I shouldn’t have been so in harmony. There the pine-woods are very grave, and a Watteau figure would have been incongruous.”

“Incongruous, but almost more delightfully unusual,” he returned; “there would have been a pathos in it then. I am a painter of sorts, and so I may tell you, may I not, that the picture you made as you fluttered in the shadow and sunlight around that green turn of the road, was quite bewilderingly radiant and charming?”

Felicia was amused and a little confused by the fact that he might say it, so oddly this young man seemed to have taken possession of her. Once more, that he should express his pleasure in her picturesqueness seemed as inevitable as the bird’s song. She could hardly feel that his rights were only those of a stranger. Anything she said, she felt sure, he would like, and a person who likes anything one says is no stranger. So, if he would, he might say that she was like a Watteau and had made a picture. She had experienced, for her part, something of the same sensation. Maurice had been a radiant and delightful apparition.

He was a slender young man, tall, narrow-shouldered, lightly made. Hair, small pointed beard, and the slight moustache that swept up from his lips, were of that vivid auburn. His skin was feminine in its clear pink and white. One might have felt the brilliancy of his eyes as hard had not their blue been so caressing. His look, with its intent sympathy, his smile, claiming intimacy with child-like trust, were all response and understanding. He enveloped one like a sunbeam. A species of sparkling emotion shone from him. He really dazzled Felicia a little. He was so much an incarnation of sunlight that her own happy mood seemed to have walked with her straight into a sort of fairy-tale—into a veritable Watteau landscape, at all events, where happiness was the only natural thing in the world.

As they approached the lodge-gates—they had been talking without pause of music, books, pictures, even about life—he asked her how she had guessed that he was Maurice Wynne—“Because there is only one of you—but there are several of us—Mrs. Merrick’s guests, I mean.”

“She told me about her guests. There were only two young men, and one of them sounded rather stately, overpowering, so I knew you were the other.”

“Poor Geoffrey!” Maurice ejaculated with a laugh, “how you have guessed at him! But he is a good deal more than that, all the same. And he is a tremendous friend of mine.”

“Is he? I hope you don’t mind my flippancy; it was founded on the merest scrap of conjecture.”

“It isn’t flippancy; it’s intuition. Geoffrey is that, only he is more. I don’t mind a bit—I wouldn’t mind flippancy, only I feel bound to testify. Geoffrey is the best of friends to me, you see; has been since our boyhood.” His smiling homage was an even nicer indication of character than his charm and happiness. Felicia inwardly accorded a cool approval to the stately friend.

“I suppose you have heard about the others, too,” Maurice went on; “Angela Bagley is another great chum of mine. I wonder how she will strike you. You must tell me—even if it’s flippant. She is clever, too; at all events, she is very effective.”

“Do you think they are the same thing?”

“Effectiveness is the only test of cleverness, isn’t it?”

“If the people one affects are clever, one must be clever to affect them, I suppose.”

“But if they are stupid?” smiled Maurice, “and such heaps of people are, aren’t they?”

“Yet it is clever to take that into account and to make what one wants out of their stupidity.”

“Ah, exactly; that is what Geoffrey does,” said Maurice. It was what she had imagined of him. “And such cleverness is, to you, a very ugly thing,” he added.

“Oh; I don’t know.” Felicia flushed a little, realizing that they were going rather far since it was of his friend they were talking. “It would depend, wouldn’t it, on what he wanted to get out of their stupidity?”

“He wants to get power.”

“Well, there again, for what end?”

“Isn’t power an end in itself?”

“I should think it ought to have an aim.”

“Such as making the stupid less stupid? raising the masses? all that sort of thing?”

“It is the part of the powerful person to say that.”

Maurice continued smilingly to look at her. “You won’t like Geoffrey,” he observed. “But though he hasn’t ideals I will say of him that he is dear of the usual reproach of the politician—he claims none. Now Lady Angela does,” he went on, in a sequence that again gave Felicia that rather alarming sense of sudden intimacy. “She lives under tremendously high pressure, you know.” They had passed down the uninteresting avenue, its trees marking sections of flat, green country, and as the house was reached Felicia felt the moment deferred for learning more precisely in what this pressure consisted.

CHAPTER V

MRS. MERRICK’S drawing-room overflowed with aesthetic intentions. Such intentions had come to her late in life, and, as a result, Middle Victorian warred with Morris and final, disconcerting notes of Art Nouveau. Circular plush seats enclosed lofty palms; sofas and chairs weirdly suggested vegetable forms; on walls and draperies was an obsession of pattern. Photographs, in heavy silver frames, in frames of painted glass, in screens and in hanging fan-shaped receptacles, swarmed like a pest of locusts. Mrs. Merrick’s painfully acquired taste had not had the courage of its new convictions; there were accretions, no eliminations, and the room seemed gasping with surfeit.

She sat among her possessions, near the tea-table, her head and shoulders dark against a window. Felicia, on entering the ugly room, always felt the sense of latent hostility; to-day it was more than ever apparent, perhaps in contrast to the new, warm sympathy beside her. Mrs. Merrick gave her a cold kiss, one or two cool questions, and a tepid cup of tea, and left her to dispose of herself as best she might, while she herself turned her quick, tight smile on Maurice Wynne. Carrying her tea-cup, Felicia went across the room to a solitary seat under the tallest palm, amused as usual by her own contrast to the tropics above her and the upholstered respectability beneath. She put her cup on a small and intricately hideous table, perforated, heavily inlaid, with distorted bandy legs—a table, Felicia thought, that seemed to totter up to one, winking and leering with all its decorations—and drawing off her gloves, she looked about her, interested in the latest turn of her aunt’s kaleidoscope.

Near Mrs. Merrick sat a stately young man; Felicia had felt that her adjective had found its subject on first entering the room, even before he had been named to her, and had risen gravely, tea-cup in hand; a young man of really oppressive good looks. His expression was not arrogant, showing, as he suavely surveyed his hostess, only a calm vacancy; but his profile was arrogantly perfect. One sought face and figure in vain for some humanizing defect, some deviation from Olympian completeness. He had the air, radiant and inflexible, of a sun-god. His height, too, was Olympian; his legs, terminating in long, slender shoes, were stretched out before him to quite a startling distance. Felicia’s quickened sense of latent hostility found nothing hostile in this young man; he was merely magnificently indifferent. Her genial maliciousness found him, too, rather funny; not even a sun-god had a right to be so magnificent.

An obvious cause for that quickened sense met her eyes as they left Mr. Daunt and turned to a dim corner on the other side of the room, a corner from which all hint of Mid-Victorian had ebbed, leaving Liberty hangings and deep cushions, inviting to pensiveness, in full possession. The presence among the cushions was, she felt, Lady Angela, and she and Lady Angela were bound to dislike one another; a glance told her that. Mr. Daunt amused her, but Lady Angela made her uncomfortable.

She was leaning back, her arms folded, talking to a small, pallid man—Mr. Jones, Felicia placed him—and in appearance she was very long and curiously incorporeal. It was difficult to define the woman in the swathing lines of her diaphanous black gown that seemed to trail like a shadow across the cushions. Strange ornaments gleamed dimly on her; clasps of turquoise and opal, sombre rings, a chain of heavy gems that curved among the curves of her laces. Her head seemed to hold forward the melancholy smile of her half-parted lips; her eyes were pale, shadowed to mysterious depths by long eyelids; soft dust-coloured hair haloed a narrow face and a long throat, the face so narrow that all the delicate features looked disproportionately large. There was an almost spectre-like effect in this emphasis of the means of expression and the meagreness of setting, and the expression itself, thought Felicia, was like a cosmetic, cunningly applied. A “touched-up” spectre. Lady Angela certainly did not please—nor amuse her either. Their eyes met more than once while she drank her tea, and each time Lady Angela’s seemed to rest on hers with a more insistent, more gentle pathos; they almost seemed to be consoling her for her isolation in a roomful of strangers, yet making her more conscious of isolation. It was with a sense of quick relief, pleasure, and, funnily, almost triumph, that she saw Maurice Wynne approaching her, his tea-cup in one hand, a plate of sandwiches in the other.

“You are being starved after your walk. I have been waiting for my opportunity to bring you something.” His eyes smiling steadily, as if over the new bond they had found, said to her, “You don’t like your aunt—nor do I. You are out of your milieu here. Nobody here is capable of appreciating you; but I appreciate you.” The smile was so infinitely more delicate than any such words that it flattered no vanity in her, only made her happy afresh in that new reliance on an almost comrade.

As Maurice joined her, Mr. Geoffrey Daunt’s head turned towards them, and he looked at the young lady in white under the palm tree, looked as though she had been another but more interesting palm-tree. He received a more perturbing impression than his imperturbable glance implied. He was displeased that Maurice should not be sitting beside Lady Angela, and displeased that the girl beside whom he was sitting should be so freshly young and pretty; and this dissatisfaction worked in him until he presently got up and went across the room to Lady Angela, interrupting her tÊte-À-tÊte with such an air of evident purpose that Mr. Jones arose and wandered away.

Daunt dropped into the vacant seat. “What have you been doing this afternoon?” he asked.

From his new position he could directly survey Felicia and Maurice; his eyes were upon them as he spoke.

“Writing to my friends,” Angela answered in a soft voice. She was a great correspondent, and it was quite understood by their fortunate recipients that her letters were to be preserved; future publication was a probability; Angela looked upon herself as destined to influence her time, after as well as before her death, and her friends were of the same opinion.

That Geoffrey Daunt, however, did not share this conviction of her significance was shown by his next placid question, “What about?”—quite implying that an alternative of souls or satin was equally interesting to him.

Angela had long ago told herself that she must not expect to be understood by this worldly relative. It was with the mildness of an intelligent forbearance that, as softly as before, she answered, “About how I feel life—theirs and mine.”

“You feel a good many things about it—don’t you?” Geoffrey smiled, though not mockingly, indeed, with a cool kindness. Both smile and kindness were keenly offensive to Angela, but with greater mildness, “I believe in feeling,” she returned.

“You and Maurice are alike in that.”

“Yes; with a difference; Maurice is a subjectivist; his feeling is an end; mine is a means.”

“For the good of others?” Geoffrey asked, and his tone denoted a perception of shades and meanings that his mask-like serenity did not imply. To be disturbed by the sinister smile of a Mona Lisa is one thing, but to suspect that the meditatively inclined head of a marble Hermes is gently quizzing one is a peculiarly baffling experience; it was one that Geoffrey often gave her. He was one of the few people, she told herself, who almost made her angry. She flushed now, ever so slightly, at the tone. Yet with a sweet patience that he should have felt as the turning of the other cheek, she answered, “I own that I try to live for others.”

“And Maurice for himself. So that the difference between you is that he is selfish and you unselfish; that, I own, is a great difference.”

Leaning her arm on the back of the sofa, Angela arranged the laces at her wrist.

“You have a talent for misinterpretation, Geoffrey;—wilful, isn’t it?—perhaps a habit caught in the scuffles of debate. But certain attitudes make misinterpretations by some people inevitable. One accepts it.”

“Misinterpret you, my dear Angela?” Geoffrey inquired, raising his eyebrows and looking not at her but at the young couple under the palm-tree. “I hope not. Surely I am right in assuming that to live for others is unselfish, and that you recognize it as being so.”

“I have owned to an aim—not to an attainment. Why is it that those who do not aim cannot forgive those who do?—try always to smirch the effort in the eyes of those who make it? I hope that I am not self-righteous, Geoffrey—I frankly recognize your intimation—why not make it as frankly?”

Geoffrey at this was silent for a moment or two, evidently not at all abashed by her discerning humility, and evidently thinking it over very lightly, as he would have thought over any unimportant fact put before him. Looking round at her and again smiling, he observed, “I am sure that you are very clever, and I am sure that you are sure that you are very good. I confess that I like to test your conviction by teasing you a little.”

“It would be better, Geoffrey, if, instead of ridiculing people, you were to sometimes try to help them by a little faith in them. Nothing is more maiming to an ideal not yet strong than ridicule; mine, happily, is strong, though I myself am weak.”

Geoffrey looked down at his shoe, turning his foot a little as though to observe the hue of his silk sock. He was silent, placidly silent; but it was now as if his thought had passed away from her and her words, and his abrupt change of the subject when he again spoke, as of a large mind turning from a trivial encounter with a small one, was anything but flattering. “Who is that girl?” he inquired.

Angela’s eyes followed his to Maurice and Felicia. She knew that Geoffrey’s interest in her, his relative, was only because of his interest in Maurice, his friend; knew that the match which for some years had seemed so imminent, and that by her friends was regarded as the quite disastrously bad match for her, was merely regarded by Geoffrey as the good match for Maurice. Angela had always hoped that Geoffrey saw the delay in final measures as caused by her own hesitation; and that at times he had tried to urge her to a decision, she had fancied more than once, and always with a soothing sense of sustainment. He knew Maurice so well; the hesitation, then, could not be Maurice’s, although to her weariness it so often seemed Maurice’s indecision and not his fear of hers that kept them apart. Looking now at the girl under the palm—the obvious link that Geoffrey had turned the talk to—she said vaguely, “A niece—a cousin—I forget which Mrs. Merrick said. A poor relation; this her one yearly peep at the world—the world to her. Quaint, isn’t it?”

“I shouldn’t like to be a poor relation of Mrs. Merrick’s,” Geoffrey observed. “An ugly woman,” he went on, adding, “The niece doesn’t look provincial.”

“No; oddly she doesn’t; not physically; but provincial in soul I should think. A curious little face, Geoffrey; ignorant, empty of all but a shallow joy in life. It hasn’t suffered, isn’t capable of much suffering. She looks like a soulless, sylvan creature; mocking, elusive, alluring.”

Geoffrey passed over the question of soul and body, reflecting that it was natural that Angela should show this funny spite. Maurice was clearly allured.

“Her dress isn’t provincial either,” he said; “its simplicity is extremely sophisticated. The dryad has found a dressmaker in her woods. She is a young lady who knows, at all events, how to dress.”

“And how to eat,” mused Angela. “Dear child, it’s really delightful to see such frank enjoyment of opportunity. That is her fourth sandwich.”

“I beg your pardon, it is her fifth.”

“You share Maurice’s interest.”

“Is Maurice so interested?”

“Isn’t he?”

“While I automatically count her sandwiches he meditates making a sketch of her.”

Again there was silence between them, and it was Angela who broke it with, “Why did you come here, Geoffrey?”

“Because Maurice came; I was glad of the chance of being with him in a quiet place where one can rest.”

“And why did Maurice come?”

Geoffrey responded promptly. “To see you—in a quiet place where he can see you.”

She let the assertion pass, forestalling a possible retort with—

“And I came for you and for Maurice and for Mrs. Merrick. I am fond of Mrs. Merrick.”

“Of ugly Mrs. Merrick? Really?”

“Really indeed. My likings are not founded on alluring faces or sophisticated gowns. I saw a good deal of her in London. She is interested in many of my objects. She is trying to grow.”

“And you are down here to help her. I hope that your efforts will bring something out. I confess that to me the plant looks dry and thorny.”

“Ah! that is because she is in such an arid soil. I can help her. She made me feel that, and I never refuse help.”

Her smile braved ironic retorts, but his answering smile was purely playful.

“Pray let me believe that you came solely for old friendship’s sake,” he said, “rather than for Mrs. Merrick’s.” And Angela was unable to repress an assenting though superficial lightness.

CHAPTER VI

GEOFFREY and Angela had a common ancestor from whom her father and his mother were descended. This person, in the reign of George III, was an obscure country solicitor, who, through a combination of happy inheritances, was able to aspire to and attain a marriage with an heiress of good family. Their wealth, his eagerness for advancement, her greater intelligence and more wily ambitions, signified power, and under the wife’s guidance they rose rapidly. He bought an old country estate, a seat in Parliament, and, since his vote was unvaryingly at the Government’s disposal, an Irish peerage soon rewarded him. He cringed and bullied his way to success; his wife schemed, coaxed and coquetted in the extremest forms of the latter term, if contemporary scandals were at all veracious.

Such an alliance was bound to prosper. Their wealth grew; their house in London was a social centre; their sons all well-placed, their daughters all well-married, inherited the father’s heavy determination, the mother’s nimble and remorseless dexterity. An English peerage crowned the edifice raised with such efforts, and the Earls of Glaston took their place among the more tawdry great names of England. They never distinguished the name, and after the first swift climb aspired to no further heights. They were wealthy, worldly, weighty. They held what they had, and held it firmly.

Angela’s father was a lazy, well-mannered man; nothing further could be said of him. Her mother had been pretentious, ambitious, and sentimental. She had quarrelled with her husband to the verge of open rupture; flirted with anybody of any importance to the verge of open scandal, and written a flimsy political novel interesting only from its thinly veiled personalities; she long posed as the typical femme incomprise, and just before her death she became fervently religious.

Angela had scorned her mother, and had avoided her as much as possible, finding in her later epochs grotesque echoes of her own sublimities. She could never bear to look into the distorting mirror that her mother’s character seemed absurdly to hold up to her.

Geoffrey’s strain of Bagley blood, on the other hand, had reached to no such heights. His mother, descended from the first Lord Glaston, and connected again, by various unimportant intermarriages, with the elder branch, married a country parson, and her abilities had chafed against all manner of restrictions.

The Rev. John Daunt had been a scholar, almost a saint, and all his wife’s tenacious worldliness had been unable to extract material success from these baffling qualities. But Mrs. Daunt, in spite of her Bagley blood, possessed the family characteristics in no petty or personal forms. The strain, in passing through the two or three generations of simple and dignified squires who had been her un-illustrious forbears, had run itself dear of its more vulgar elements. Mrs. Daunt had been as proud as she was eager. She would fight, but she would never cringe. She lived first in the hope of seeing her gentle husband rise to high places, and when, with not unkindly scorn, she realized his incapacity for self-advancement, she transferred her passionate and patient hopes to her son. For him she saved, slaved and battled. Geoffrey never learned, until shortly after his father’s death, that his own opportunities were won not only by his mother’s battlings, but by his father’s martyrdom.

John Daunt, in the midst of a life of service to God and man, found, in a time of darkness and dismay, that his faith, in any orthodox sense, had deserted him. His was not the mind that could combine Christian ethics with a genial scepticism as to the Articles of the Church he belonged to. With sad and tender dignity he opened his heart to his wife. He accepted her amazed indignation. Mrs. Daunt would as little have dreamed of questioning the Articles of the Christian faith as of thinking about them—they were part of the ecclesiastical machinery that one accepted as one accepted the other probably irrational bases of life. He bowed before her scorn of his weakness; but he was not prepared for her absolute refusal to further his intention of leaving the Church.

How were they to live, pray? The Rev. John had hardly thought of that. His own private income was barely sufficient for his lesser charities. His wife owned a small property, and when the practical question was put before him, he supposed that they could manage to live on that, and he would find something to do.

“Find something to do? You? You will merely sink in the world, and we will all sink with you. What of Geoffrey?” Mrs. Daunt’s eyes flashed fire as she asked this stinging question. Geoffrey was just entering the University, the honours of Eton thick upon him. He wished to ruin their child, then? The questions lashed him. He adored their child. She swept on: He, forsooth, would seek downfall for some morbid whim when men of ten times his significance managed to keep the peace between their conscience and their vows. And Mrs. Daunt was too clever to use the lash only; she turned to the ethical side of the question, the side on which alone he had looked, with such self-tormenting indecision. His influence; the love of his people for him; the light he held up among them;—what difference did the lamp make that held the flame?—the wrecking of others’ faiths involved in his abandonment of a leaking ship—she would not say that it did leak; but if it did, was it the place of a captain to desert his crew because he could not see through the storm? And he yielded, as much to his own self-doubt as to her; yielded, and yet afterwards, in an undercurrent of anguish beneath the flow of unchanged life, felt himself a traitor.

Mrs. Daunt one day, after the father’s death, told her son of the spiritual crisis that might have ruined his career, triumphant, though very tender towards her husband’s memory, in the strength that had saved them all from his weakness.

Geoffrey, a silent, undemonstrative young man, grew white. “It shouldn’t have happened had I known,” he said; “I could have made my way.”

“Made your way, my dear child!” cried Mrs. Daunt, angry in a moment, and yet more wounded than angered by this ingratitude. “Do your realize, I wonder, what it cost us to make you?—cost me, rather, for I did it all. Do you know how I have scraped and struggled? Do you know that every stick and stave I possess is mortgaged? You might have made your way, but it would not be the way you are in now. The height one starts from determines the height one attains.”

“No; only the time one takes to get there. I would rather have taken longer. I will pay off the mortgages as soon as possible,” said Geoffrey.

He was ungrateful, though never unkind. Even now, after this shock, for he had loved his father with the cold depth characteristic of him, he regained in a moment the decorous kindness due to a mother who had done an ugly thing for his sake; but he knew that it was decorous only.

Mrs. Daunt had never appealed for his tenderness, or worked for it; but when Geoffrey, after a merely stop-gap reading for the Bar, entered Parliament, and she saw all her desires for him realizing themselves, it was the lack of tenderness that, though she was scarcely conscious of it, poisoned all her happiness.

Living with him, laying the foundations of his effectiveness more firmly, seeing him, young as he was, a man of power and repute, she never recognized herself as a deeply loving mother, so absorbed were all her energies in the rapacities of maternity; but when she died it was with a dim yet bitter sense of failure; for Geoffrey had seen the rapacities only.

Apart from this essential failure, Mrs. Daunt knew only one other.

The match she had hoped for between Geoffrey and his cousin Angela could not be effected. She had not traced the causes of this failure further than a mutual indifference, almost an antagonism.

Even as a boy Geoffrey had said, when she probed him once as to his sentiments towards this significant young relative, “I don’t like her. She is an unpleasant girl, I think. I wish you wouldn’t ask her here any more.”

Mrs. Daunt had hoped that ambition, if not affection, would overcome this blunt, boyish aversion, for with Angela’s fortune to back him, Geoffrey’s career was sure of utmost brilliancy; but neither motive seemed forthcoming.

She died before seeing that Angela’s affections were centred on Maurice Wynne. She could hardly have suspected Angela of such folly, seeing Maurice as a charming young nobody, a mere satellite of Geoffrey’s, who had known him at Oxford and Eton, travelled with him, and was devoted to him, a devotion unresented by the mother, a charming relaxation in her eyes towards the lesser man. Maurice was poor, indolent, distinguished only by his air of distinction and a few trivial sallies into various fields of art; he had no other claims. She could never have seen in him the barrier to her hopes.

At present, three years after his mother’s death, Geoffrey’s position in the House was conspicuous, if somewhat insecure. He was the foremost of a group of clever young men, independent and given to exquisite impertinence; but though the group was impertinent, their chief was grave; he needed no small weapons. Insecurity did not menace his constituency; his voters were completely under his thumb, and he let them see that they were. He chaffed them loftily, never flattered them, and showed an assurance that was completely contagious; the average man became sheep-like before its conviction of leadership by right of real supremacy.

The insecurity lay in his poverty. It had not yet pinched him. His small income sufficed for the bread and butter of existence, and Lord Glaston, the decorative director of various companies, was glad to lend a hand to his brilliant young relative. Sagacious speculation, and even his winnings at cards and at racing formed no inconsiderable part of his resources. Towards these rather undignified methods of replenishment he had an air of dignified indifference that was not at all assumed. Ingrained in Geoffrey’s nature was the sense that power was his, and that money, the mere fuel of life, was a small matter upon which he could always count. This inflexible young man had a perfect faith in his own strength and in the plasticity of outward circumstance, a faith that had been thoroughly justified, as such faiths usually are, by his experience of life. He was ambitious, personally ambitious, yet the personality was no mean one. He believed in his own significance and in the beneficent ends that that significance, endued with power, could attain. The might of his will mocked at the minor aims for which smaller men might struggle. He intended to use the world for his own ends, and held, with all the ethics of evolution to back him—though Geoffrey did not appeal to these dubious sanctions—that in a great man’s ends the world also found its best.

He had no humanitarian ideals to weaken his self-regarding purposes. He was highly sceptical as to the merits, or even the potentialities, of humanity; recognized self-interest as its ruling motive, and was never blinded by this motive’s various disguises—idealistic, aesthetic, or philanthropic. That the disguises often deceived their wearers he quite owned; his kindness consisted in such cynical taking for granted; but he was keen to see the eternal greedy animal under the fine apparel, and tolerant towards the brother brute. He wished him well; thought it by all means advisable that he should wear fine apparel and be dull of sight; but his own gift of clear, dispassionate vision justified him, he would have said, had he ever sought to justify himself, in feeling towards the hoodwinked as towards tools that he could put to no better use than in using them for his own interest and for his nation’s interest. He and his nation, on the whole, were fittest, and he intended that each should survive to the best of its ability.

So far only outer circumstances had opposed him—and been walked through. He knew no inner antagonists. He was neither sensitive nor sentimental. His imagination pointed out pitfalls, but laid no snares for him.

Cooly critical of women, they aroused no illusions in him. Their feathers and furbelows in the way of feelings were often finer than the masculine decorations; but he suspected the little animal underneath of even meaner though more labyrinthine egotisms. Such a little animal, most exquisitely furbelowed—he granted her good taste in spiritual trappings—he considered Angela to be, and he was anxious that his friend should profit by her trappings, material as well as spiritual.

Oddly enough, he had never applied the animal simile to Maurice; this affection was boxed off, as it were, in a secure bit of heart, safely out of reach of reason, though he and Maurice had little in common. Art was Maurice’s object; his attitude that of the spectator at the drama of life. Geoffrey observed only that he might act; though not altogether inappreciative, art was to him the decoration only of life, the arabesque on the blade with which one fought; one might contemplate the arabesque in moments of leisure.

Maurice did not fight beside him; but he was an affectionate troubadour, who looked on at the combat and chanted it, often with friendly irony. He was much like a dependent and devoted younger brother. Geoffrey did not argue about him, and was fonder of him than of anything else in the world. He was glad of the restful week after a fatiguing session, and looked to see Maurice’s future settled, the arabesque engraved upon a good, solid blade of prosperity, before he left Trensome Hall.

CHAPTER VII

FELICIA was up early in the morning after her arrival, and while she made a leisurely toilet she was thinking, smiling as she thought, about the last evening. An altogether novel one in her experience.

She had never before been conscious of being interested in so many people, and, especially, she had never before been conscious of interesting anybody. Now she was almost sure that last night she had much interested one person. The brightest spot in this consciousness had been after her own performance at the piano. Various young women played and sang; Felicia’s place among them was an unimportant one. Miss Bulmer, as usual, distinguished herself in a passionate ballad, her eyes fixed on the cornice, her meagre white satin form swayed by emotions strangely out of keeping with the appearance of the singer. Miss Bulmer’s shouts of despair and yearning stirred, as usual, all the enthusiasm of which her audience was capable; and Felicia, when she sat down to the piano, was accustomed to the subsequent torpor, to the undercurrent of talk while she played, and to having Miss Bulmer, flushed and generous in her own triumph, lean over her and watch her fingering with an air of much benignity. But it was a new experience when she rose, among cool expressions of pleasure, while Miss Bulmer said, “You really do improve so much,” to have some one, some one who knew, and that some one Maurice Wynne, come forward all radiant with recognition, clapping his hands and crying, “Magnificent, simply magnificent! Where did you learn to play Brahms like that? I didn’t know that you really were a musician—I thought you merely played the piano!”

He stood, excited, delighted, smiling at her, and his enthusiasm went, an uncomprehended thrill round the room. Every eye turned on Felicia with a new discernment.

“But you mustn’t stop,” said Maurice; “she mustn’t stop, must she, Mrs. Merrick? Why didn’t you prepare us for this treat? You never told us that your niece was a genius.”

Mrs. Merrick, her square of pale mauve bosom, in its frame of yellow satin, deepening its tint, hastened to add her urgency to Maurice’s. “Is she not wonderful? We expect great things of her,” she said, for Mrs. Merrick was quick at adjustments.

Felicia’s placid eyes dwelt on her for a moment.

Maurice had taken Miss Bulmer’s place, for even Miss Bulmer felt that benignity was misapplied, and had looked at Felicia, not at her fingering, while she played.

It had been to Felicia a delightful, almost a bewildering experience.

Now when she was dressed she went to the window and leaned out. This view from Trensome Hall—the lawns frosted with dew, the near trees framing a long strip of sky, the early sunlight sparkling on jewel-like bands of flowers—was sweet and intimate. And hardly had she breathed in the chill freshness of the young day when her eyes met Maurice Wynne’s.

He was strolling below, finding evidently her own enjoyment. He waved his hand, smiling his good-morning, and Felicia, leaning out to smile at him, white among the creepers, felt the picturesque fitness of this beginning to a day, surely to be a happy one.

“Come down,” said Maurice. “How good of you to be up early. Let us have a walk before breakfast; we have heaps of time.”

Felicia needed no urging. She had intended to walk by herself, but a walk with this companion would be as different from ordinary walks as playing to him had been from playing to her accustomed audience. He was waiting for her at the small side-door, and they crossed the wet lawns and the glittering shrubberies, and left formality behind them in the deep lanes that led to the woods and that smelt of the damp, sweet earth. As they went he talked, mainly about himself, with an altogether un-English ease and equally without awkwardness or vanity. He talked of his work, of his friends, of his travels and point of view—as far as he could be said to have one. He seemed to be turning under her eyes the pages of a tender, whimsical, very modern book; counting so wonderfully upon her understanding. He took things very easily, at least thought most things only worth easy taking; yet there was something in that reckless eye, a restlessness, and, under its caressing smile, a melancholy, that made her think that something, perhaps, he might take hard.

“Do you ever have moods of despondency—despair?” he asked her, as they went through a winding path among the woods. Despair and despondency were black and alien things to speak of here, where the very shadows were happy, and where there was ecstasy in the sunlit vault of blue seen far above, beyond the sparkling green.

“Moods? No; I don’t think so,” said Felicia; “but I am sometimes horribly discontented—and when I am I can’t imagine anything that would content me.”

“Not anything?”

“Not anything—except everything. I mean being sure that everything is significant, worth while.”

“But it is worth while as long as it lasts.”

“But it doesn’t last!” She smiled round at him, for she was leading the way in the narrow path, and the white flounces of her dress brushed wet grasses on either side. “The sense of impermanence often poisons the worth.” She added, “Do you have moods?”

“Oh! frightful fits of the blues. It’s funny that I should talk to you about it; no, not funny that I should talk about it to you, but that there should be a you that made it possible. No one suspects me of blues except Geoffrey. I give him a glimpse now and then. That is really the way our friendship began. I was in a frightful state of mind one term at Eton, sinking in depths of scepticism and horror, and Geoffrey hauled me out, put me on my feet, and, once I’d done gasping, set me running, as it were, got up my circulation. He didn’t argue; but he wonderfully understood, and he promptly acted.”

“And do you have them, the moods, because things don’t last?” Felicia asked, looking ahead into the wood’s translucent green.

“No; not so much that as that things don’t come. I want so much more than I ever get. I want to feel everything—to the uttermost. I never get a chance to exercise my capacity for feeling. It is lack, you see, rather than loss that I dread.”

They had come to the edge of the wood where, beyond a stile, were meadows of tall grasses. Larks sang overhead. Maurice vaulted over the stile and held out his hand to her. Her eyes, looking down at him, showed a gravity, a little perplexity. “You don’t understand that?” he asked, when she stepped down beside him.

“No; I dread both.”

“I am awfully human,” said Maurice; “and I want the whole human gamut—but that’s all I ask.”

“But what is the human gamut?”

“That question from your father’s daughter! Your father, I hear, is a great positivist.”

“Well, his daughter asks the question.”

They walked on through the meadow, white with the lacey disks of tall field flowers.

“Do you know,” he asked, “how, after this, I shall always personify faith to myself?”

“Faith?”

“Yes. I shall see her as a smiling girl dressed in white, and walking among white flowers in the sunlight. I have guessed you, you see. The key-note of your life is a question.”

“Do you call the asking of a question, faith?” Felicia smiled.

“It’s faith to think it worth asking.”

Geoffrey Daunt was strolling in front of the house when they reached it. He looked at the two young people as they approached him with his observant, impersonal gaze. Felicia, in a mingled state of mind, happy, yet touched, even troubled, felt, as she met his gaze, a quick leap of almost antagonism. There was no criticism in it, no surprise or displeasure, yet her intuition told her that something in it commented unfavourably upon her companionship with Maurice. And with the intuition came a delightful throb of power. He was her friend, and she would keep him so. Already this first step into life seemed to have brought her among dumb contests. She would stand staunch and keep what was hers. Really, Mr. Daunt’s head, so high against the blue sky, with its classic white and gold, was ridiculously handsome. She nodded a smiling au revoir to Maurice and left them.

The two young men walked slowly along the gravel path towards the garden. Maurice was silent. With his head thrown back, his hands clasped behind him, he smiled as though over some grave, delightful secret. Reticence was an unusual symptom in Maurice.

“That’s a very pretty girl,” Geoffrey observed, reflecting on the symptom.

Maurice’s shoulders drew together with a gesture of irritable repudiation.

“Pretty! Don’t be so trivial!”

“Well—what was it Angela called her yesterday?—alluring, elusive?”

“Only as outdoor nature is. On Angela’s lips the terms would savour too much of a boudoir atmosphere; lace tea-gowns and languor. This child is a wild rose open to the sky, dewy, un peu sauvage; anything less alluring in Angela’s sense of the word was never seen.”

Geoffrey, who had heard a multitude of wild-rose raptures, received this one with composure.

“I assure you, Geoffrey,” Maurice went on, growing the more confidential for his momentary reticence, “I assure you that if I could afford it I would fall in love with that enchanting girl.”

“And since you can’t afford it, pray do nothing so nonsensical. Meanwhile, what of Angela?”

“You are really rather gross, my dear Geoffrey. Why meanwhile? Why drag in Angela?”

“Because, to speak grossly, she can afford to fall in love with you. Don’t flirt with this girl and risk trying Angela’s affection too far.”

Maurice again shrugged his shoulders irritably.

“My dear Geoffrey, Miss Merrick isn’t that sort. One flirts in the boudoir—not in the breezes of a heath. And then there is nothing to risk; I have no right to suppose that I have Angela’s affection.”

“Rot! my dear Maurice. You have done your best to win it. What has this last year of dallying meant?”

“Dallying, pure and simple, to both of us.”

“Yet you came down here——?”

“To go on dallying. I own it. But I’ve never yet made up my mind to find my culminating romance in Angela, and I haven’t any reason to believe that she hopes to find hers in me. We both enjoy dallying. We both do it rather nicely.” Maurice spoke now with his recovered light gaiety, and as though by holding the matter at arm’s length he were keeping it from the crude touch of bad taste with which Geoffrey threatened it.

The latter’s composure remained unruffled, but after a pause he said, “Frankly, Maurice, you will be a great ass if you don’t find the culminating romance in Angela. You know the importance of material considerations as well as I do, so I’ll not urge them, but add to them the fact that for some years you have been more or less in love with Angela and have led her and everybody else to suppose it—and they might help a very hard-up young man like yourself to a decision.”

“Not at all; they confuse all decisions. Don’t show me the nuggets under the flowers. The flowers alone must be the attraction—must charm me into forgetfulness of the nuggets. There might be some reason in my urging you to marry for money. Poverty in your life is a drag that my Bohemianism can throw off. You do want a rich wife badly; and treating marriage as an unemotional business episode wouldn’t jar upon you as it would upon me. When it’s got to be done I want to do it thoroughly; to fall in love so completely that I shan’t be able to write a sonnet about it. Now, I’ve written several sonnets to Angela.”

Geoffrey, who received these remarks imperturbably, now looked at his watch and observed that they must be going in to breakfast, adding, “I don’t urge an unemotional episode upon you. Your feeling for Angela is, I am quite sure, more than that. I only suggest that you don’t allow an emotional episode to interfere with more important matters. You’ve had quite enough of these experiments in feeling.”

“Ah! but suppose—suppose,” laughed Maurice, happy excitement in the laugh, again throwing back his head, again clasping his hands behind him, “suppose that this were the permanent emotion.”

“In that case,” Geoffrey answered, “I should be very sorry for you, and for Angela and for the wild rose.”

CHAPTER VIII

“YOU and Mr. Wynne seem to be great friends, Felicia,” Mrs. Merrick said to her niece on the following day. She was laying the papers and magazines on a small table in more even rows, the occupation a cover for a conversation significant, Felicia felt at once, but feigning desultoriness. Mrs. Merrick’s mind was of the order that infers matrimonial projects from the smallest indications, and to her vision the indications here were not small. Walks, talks, practisings on piano and violin—whatever Mr. Wynne’s projects, Felicia ought not to count upon them. Mrs. Merrick felt a certain acrid interest in her niece’s worldly welfare. A too sumptuous match might, indeed, have distressed her more deeply than a disastrous one; but Mr. Wynne was in no sense a good match, although he might be a luxury to which Lady Angela could treat herself. Marriage for Felicia must be a more serious matter, not quite of bread and butter, but of, at all events, a decent and secure establishment.

These were Mrs. Merrick’s thoughts while she sorted the papers and remarked upon the rapid friendship. “You know,” she said, laying the one magazine upon the other, “that he is very poor. I fancy he has no settled income at all.”

It had come, the inevitable grunt in the midst of the pastoral. Even in her displeasure, Felicia could feel some amusement in the sudden simile that suggested Aunt Kate as the unobserved pig in its pig-sty among the orchards and rose-hedges where she had been happily strolling. She could almost see a flexible, inquiring snout pushing between the palings, above it the scrutiny of an observant eye. The simile so softened the displeasure that her voice had all its indolent mildness as she asked, “What has his poverty got to do with his friendship, Aunt Kate?” After all, it was easy to lean over the palings, and with a stick, indulgently to scratch the creature’s back.

“Ah! nothing—nothing at all, no doubt, especially since it is said that he is all but engaged to Lady Angela. He has admired her for years.”

“And what then? Are any of his friendships a menace to his engagement do you think?”

“Of course not, Felicia. You jump at such odd conclusions. And I did not say that he was engaged, merely that he had admired her for years. It’s improbable that Lady Angela would accept him.”

“At all events, a friendship of two days’ standing can hardly be affected by anything you may or may not have heard. You mustn’t jump at odd conclusions, Aunt Kate.” Felicia could not repress this as she put her book under her arm and stepped from the window on to the lawn. In spite of the lightness of her tone, the grunt had come as an ugly interruption in a melodious mood. To hear such things did affect the two days’ friendship, though she did not believe them. She had known him for only two days, but the two days had been hers so exclusively that any other “admiration” must mean very little. Not that the two days meant much to either of them, she assured herself. They had only strolled among rose-hedges. A pity, though, that the pig-sty had to be faced.

On the lawn coming towards her were Angela, Maurice and Geoffrey. They personified the new life into which she seemed to have entered. To see them together pushed her back once more into the place of spectator. Felicia had time to recognize her own hurt and almost angry mood as she approached them and smiled at them in passing. But Angela, with a winning hand held out, detained her. “You are so fond of walking. Won’t you come with us? Just about the grounds?” she said. She drew Felicia’s hand within her arm. “I am not very strong, so I can’t make magnificent expeditions as you do—Maurice tells me—with him before breakfast. But even a little walk has twice the value if it’s a talking walk, don’t you think?”

“I suppose it has,” said Felicia, feeling a slight confusion as she walked between them.

“Though a silent walk, with a companion one cares for, has even more, perhaps,” Angela added. “Don’t you love silence?”

“I have had so much of it,” said Felicia.

“So much silence; how exquisite! Isn’t that a picture, Maurice, that she makes for us! Much silence ought to mean much peace, much happiness, much growth. You and your father on your hill-top; Maurice has told me of it.” Again she smiled from him to Felicia, the gentle link between them. “Do you understand one another so well that you need talk very little?”

“Oh! we talk a good deal, though we understand one another, I hope. I only meant that there was no one else to talk to, and that one could have so much silence as not to care much about it.”

Lady Angela made her feel immature and irritable; and could the shrinking irritability be simply—she asked it of herself with quite a pang of self-disgust—a latent sense of contrast, of jealousy? But it was prior to, deeper than, any possible jealousy; she could exonerate herself from the pettiness, though wondering if the deeper cause were more creditable. What creditable cause could there be for disliking Lady Angela, so exquisite, so tender, holding her hand so closely within hers as they walked? Yet she knew that she wanted, like a rude child, to push her away; and though that rudimentary instinct must be controlled, her eye in going over her went with something of a child’s large coldness.

Angela wore, on the hot summer afternoon, a trailing dress of white. A scarf of gauze and lace fell from her shoulders to her feet. Her arms and breast glimmered through dim old laces. Enfolded as she was with transparent whiteness, she looked exquisitely undressed—a wan Aphrodite rising through faint foam. Ridiculous, indeed, Felicia thought, that this spiritual creature should arouse in her a Puritanic rigour, so that she was glad of the crisp creak of her own linen frock, stiff with much laundering, quite badly cut, she unregretfully knew—a frock simply, and in no sense an ornament. She was glad that she had not put on her better dress, the white lawn, with its flutter and its charm. Let the contrast be as obvious as possible—as unbecoming to herself as possible.

“You must let me come and see you on your hill-top some day when I am here again,” Angela went on; “may I? I can’t tell you how people interest me. I have always loved to look at other people’s lives—haven’t I, Maurice?” Geoffrey walked a little apart, smoking; none of her pretty appeals included him.

“To meddle as well as look, you think—don’t you?” and her smile was now half sad in its humour.

“Oh, you meddle quite nicely,” Maurice said; “Let her meddle with you, Miss Merrick, if she longs to; it will give her lots of pleasure and do you no harm.”

“Rather scant encouragement for you!” laughed Angela, looking down, for she was the taller of the two, at Felicia; “but may I? What I really want of you is your help in a little general meddling here. I have been talking with your aunt about the village people. There seems so much to be done; and so much apathy, so much deadness. I am afraid it is a struggle for your poor aunt, and of course she has not the gift, the grace, the charm that you could bring to the struggle. What charities are you interested in? What do you suggest? You mustn’t think me a Don Quixote—tilting at other people’s windmills; but wherever I go I confess I try to do something. I want to help people. What else is there to live for?”

“I don’t help anybody,” said Felicia, nerving herself to resoluteness, for she disliked putting a smudge beside the flowing loveliness of Lady Angela’s signature; “I don’t know anything about the charities here. We never go to church, and the charities are connected with that. We are quite the black sheep of the parish, and black sheep can’t be of much use, except as warnings, I suppose.”

It was ugly, it was uncouth; Lady Angela made her feel both; and after the smudge was made there was silence for quite a long moment while they turned among the laurels of the shrubbery, she, Angela and Maurice still abreast, while Mr. Daunt and his cigar came behind them.

The fragrance of the cigar was pleasant to Felicia, gave emphasis to her reckless little sense of satisfaction in doing for herself in all their eyes, if need be. After all, they were not her life, and for having fancied herself a part, perhaps a rather important part, of one of their lives she needed, no doubt, this smart little dose of self-mortification.

But Angela, with a closer pressure of the hand, was speaking. “May I help you, then, to be of more use?” she said; “I know how circumstances—material circumstances—interfere. You live so far from the village, and your father’s interests, your interests, are intellectual, not ethical. You haven’t had an opportunity for thinking about all the responsibilities of this difficult life of ours. I should love to talk to you about it all—the giving of oneself, the life for others, which is the only true living. You haven’t seen the spiritual and practical side of things—for practical and spiritual are one in reality. We know, only to do.”

They had emerged once more upon the lawn, and Felicia was now between Angela and Geoffrey Daunt, who still strolled a little apart, looking at the tree-tops. Maurice smiled first at her and then at Angela, as though finding a whimsical humour in the situation. He must sympathize with Angela. How could he not? Did not she herself sympathize? Were not these thoughts her own familiar thoughts? Yet her one impulse was to disown them when put before her in that soft, rapt voice; she found herself contemplating them with no sense of communion, with a dull, hard indifference, rather. She almost thought that she preferred pigs behind their palings to seraphs in laces.

“I know very little,” she said; “I certainly do nothing.”

“Oh, come now!” Maurice broke in. “You talk to your father; you make a beautiful garden; you play magnificently. Do you call that doing nothing? And you were telling me last evening of the teas you loved giving in the garden to the village children—pets of yours. I have no doubt your teas give more pleasure than heaps of highly organized charities.”

“Ah! you do interest yourself then!” Angela turned on her a look of bright reproach. “How can you say you do nothing? I am so glad you have the children—so glad that you don’t shut yourself away in a palace of art; nothing is more dangerous than that.”

“That’s a hit at me,” Maurice declared; “I inhabit the dangerous palace, and don’t intend to come out of it, either, although Angela is always sounding her trumpet at its gate.”

Geoffrey, flicking the ash from his cigar, now asked, “Might not a shrine, conceivably, be sometimes as dangerous as a palace?”

The tide, Felicia felt, as far as it had a direction, was with her and against Angela; but the fact only heightened her angry discomposure. She would not be drawn into a contest with Angela; she would not bid for approbation. That she seemed to have gained it made her angrier. Mr. Daunt was a half-insolent coxcomb, and she did not want Maurice to defend her motives.

Angela’s eyes turned in a long gaze upon Geoffrey, who had asked his light question as casually as he blew smoke rings into the air. “My dear Geoffrey,” she said, “you say things at times that make me wonder whether you have not very delicate perceptions as well as a ruthless will. I don’t quite know what, to your mind, your meaning may be, but to mine it is deep. Any height that separates us from life is dangerous; is that it? Yet may not the shrine be brought amidst the turmoil, the suffering of life—so that those who see it may touch it and be healed?”

“It depends upon what’s in it, my dear Angela.” Geoffrey watched his last, and very perfect ring, float softly against the blue.

“A shrine implies some sanctified presence.”

“I am afraid that I haven’t much faith in miraculous healings.”

“In anything, Geoffrey?”

“In no words,” the Olympian answered. The sun glittered upon his golden head as he turned to smile at Angela with, Felicia felt, implacable indifference. Their walk had brought them near the house again.

“I must go and finish my book,” said Felicia; “after these shrines and palaces I shall feel that I am creeping into a ditch when I return to it. I hope that ditches aren’t dangerous, too.”

“Why do you also pretend not to be clever?” Angela asked her softly, suddenly, smiling closely into her eyes. “What is the book?” She bent her head to the title, looking up at once gravely. “You like him?”

“I said it was like creeping into a ditch. But there is a certain splendour to be found even in ditches—he shows it to one, I think.”

Angela put a hand on her arm; “Don’t read him. A lily should not look at ditches.”

“I am going to crawl to the very end of mine—muddy ordeal though it is,” Felicia declared, trying to keep defiance from her smile, and aware that the Olympian was looking at her and that she was flushing. Her detached student’s interest was probably branded in all their eyes with some crude and ugly interpretation. Well, let them think what they liked of her. She turned and went into the house. This had not been a melodious afternoon.

“Poor child!” sighed Angela, “poor child! What a milieu! An infidel papa and decadent literature.”

“Well, it has raised a lily, you see,” Maurice remarked.

“Has it?” said Angela. “Poor child. I long to help her.”

CHAPTER IX

ANGELA BAGLEY wore her idealism with conviction, so at home in it that she only saw herself dressed in its becoming lines and colours. But it was an idealism purely intellectual, a husk that hardly touched her inner life. Her thoughts dwelt upon lofty towers; her motives and actions often scuffled in the dust. Her meagre, self-intent nature grasped at power and prominence through the decorative spirituality, like the clutch, from precious laces, of a covetous hand. The scaffolding of her life had raised her above crude or coarse desires; she did not need to scheme for social gains and recognitions; but her sympathy, her tenderness, her claiming of highest aims were tools to her—though she did not know that they were only tools—tools in a complex modern world weary of hardness and cynicism; altruistic tools used always for an egotistic end.

In this quiet corner of the country there was no challenging of her effectiveness, but another, perhaps a deeper need, seemed threatened.

Angela was helplessly in love with Maurice Wynne. For years he had charmed her, baffled her, wrung her heart. She told herself that she would be the noblest influence in his life, not knowing that to gain that influence she would abase herself to any ignobility. Again and again she had almost thrown herself at his head—oh! ugly phrase!—Angela did not use it—shown him her heart, rather, though with a dexterity in the presentation of it that allowed her to feign only the giving of deep friendship if other givings were ignored. Again and again Maurice had retreated, though always with outstretched hands, hands that kept the clasp of friendship, a smile that salved her pride by recognizing only friendship in her smile. And now upon the devotion, the self-immolation of this love—for Angela was well aware of its romantic indifference to vulgar considerations—now when she was almost sure that she and Maurice were upon the verge of a final understanding, almost sure that at last she was to devote herself, immolate herself, and lift and redeem Maurice in so doing, now came this fear warning her against Felicia.

She had seen Maurice through many flirtations, and she was able to tell herself that this was no more than one; Maurice never concealed his raptures; his very frankness had consoled; but a deep distrust now whispered in her heart, and she armed herself.

The girl was blunt; she could be made to appear rude; she was ungracious, and could be made to appear ugly in her ungraciousness. And while fully conscious of the nobility of her own attitude in its stooping to the shallow little girl, in its rebuffed sweetness, she was by no means conscious that she had armed herself and that the attitude was her weapon.

The weapon was suddenly sharpened by the arrival next morning of Mr. Merrick.

Angela saw at once, in her first glance at the man, that Mr. Merrick might make his daughter appear very badly indeed. She saw it in his good looks, his complacency, his self-reference; in Geoffrey’s calm gaze at him, in Maurice’s kind, swift adapting of himself to the older man’s genial patronage—an adaptation, Angela knew, brimming with amusement; she saw these things in relation to Felicia’s attitude towards them, her placing of herself in a position where she could evade no weapons. Any that struck her father would strike her. She not only stood beside him, she stood before him. Angela in a swift simile saw her so standing, a funny, female, little Saint Sebastian, struck all over with shafts of lightly feathered irony. She could not help the simile, though thrusting away the satisfaction it gave her and lingering with a dissatisfaction that she would not analyze upon the possible nobility of this target attitude, a nobility that others, too, might see. Relief, as unanalyzed, came with the thought that there would be no beauty in Felicia’s stubborn yet unemphatic fidelity; no claim for sympathy. She could rely upon her to be thoroughly undecorative and without the glimmer of a halo.

“How kind you are, dear Mrs. Merrick,” Angela said to her hostess; “I see so the difficulty of your situation. Your brother-in-law is an intelligent man, with an altogether out-of-date intelligence, petrified in its funny pride. But what a character! What grotesque vanity! How he must jar upon you and your husband—could I fail to see it? And yet how kind you are to him and his untrained, untutored little girl. You are, I suppose, their only outlook on life.”

Mrs. Merrick saw Austin collapsing into a foolish insignificance, and where she had never before been able to feel him as insignificant was now enabled to see him with Lady Angela’s clearer vision. She saw herself, too, as very kind indeed.

To Maurice Angela spoke with a mere word and shrug. “What a type! That’s what isolation does to a shallow-pated egotist. Ballooned assurance! His mind is a mince-meat of little scraps from all the lesser thinkers of the century!” Since coming into the country she had not been so near Maurice as when they laughed together over the new-comer.

“He encouraged me magnificently this morning,” Maurice in his mirth confessed. Angela made no allusion to the daughter. Felicia, meanwhile, understood it all, finding her own lightness in comprehension slipping from her. The youthful indifference in which she used to seek refuge was failing her; she couldn’t tell herself with truth that she was indifferent, nor turn angry scorn into a laugh. Her aunt’s derivative discrimination made anger seethe too fiercely for a laugh, and her new little air of competent disapproval; her aunt, as incapable of judging as of appreciating him.

Felicia understood when Geoffrey Daunt, as her father took the floor—he was always taking the floor—got up and strolled away, quite as if he were in the House and a bore was speaking; understood Lady Angela’s sad and vacant eyes, and Maurice’s deft turning of the talk. Yes, her father was a bore, especially when he was treated as one; and, baffled by an unfamiliar atmosphere, conscious of the presence of new standards, he became flushed, foolish, sententious. In her feeling for her father was the maternal, protective instinct, and she saw him, now, among those too stupid to recognize his worth, too ungenerous to help his failings, a child bewildered by cold eyes and alien voices; and like a child he strutted, and shouted, and made himself lamentably conspicuous.

Since the grunt from Aunt Kate, since that discomposing walk in the garden, Felicia had avoided Maurice, though unsuccessfully, for the sense of his pursuing comradeship enveloped her, the anger that repulsed them all felt itself helpless, unjust, before his intently smiling eye that, seeing through her evasions, said, “I understand everything. Command me, you charming friend.” To keep silence towards him, to escape for solitary walks, or to shut herself into her room for her readings was not to evade that sense of comradeship shining in the sudden gloom.

It warmly irradiated gloom on the day after her father’s arrival, while at lunch she tried to talk about roses with Mr. Jones, and to hear her father monologuing, almost haranguing, at the other end of the table.

Uncle Cuthbert, rosy, good-tempered, loud-laughing, had succumbed to his brother’s vehemence, and watched him with an air of cheerful immovability. Gloom was upon Felicia and beneath it that heave of anger, ready to bubble up.

Maurice’s eyes meeting hers once or twice, was the one ray of light, strong, gay, sustaining. He was, indeed he was with her, however much against her all the rest.

“It’s an age of sham, of conformity,” Mr. Austin announced. “There seem no fighters left. The pseudo-believers have it all their own way, since apparently there is no genuine belief to oppose them. The spectacle is revolting. We have our political figure-heads cynically dissolving old faiths into vaporous metaphors—metaphors accepted literally by the masses. We have science tottering to a ruinous alliance with metaphysics. We have a church engaged in a dignified tug of war over a candlestick—the rival camps spattering one another with mud or holy water!” His audience was silent and Mr. Merrick, pushing back his plate and leaning his arm on the table as he sat sideways to it, continued in even more impressive tones, “Don’t, my dear Cuthbert, speak to me of faith, blind faith. Faith is a sort of intellectual suicide. With a fixed subjective faith one is cut off from all objective truth as, I think, Guyau said.”

He might as well have been talking Greek as far as the cheerful squire was concerned; had better, for tattered remnants of youthful learning still lurked in his wholesomely disencumbered mind.

“Ah well,” said Mr. Cuthbert, “all that’s beside the mark. One must have custom, you know, one must have conformity to keep things from going to pieces. Godersham gave us an excellent sermon on faith last week,” he added, looking genially around the table.

“Ah yes; then you advise a good deal of cutting,” Mr. Jones went on to Felicia, after the patient pause with which he had allowed the thunder of Mr. Merrick’s denunciations to roll by.

“Godersham on faith. I’ve no doubt of it.” The thunder rolled again. “You will always find material prosperity buttressed by conformity. As for the country going to pieces, that’s rubbish. It shrivels in its stiff shell.”

“I have the greatest regard for Godersham—the very greatest,” Mr. Cuthbert said temperately.

“I am not attacking individuals, my dear Cuthbert, but principles. You don’t follow me. I will put it as simply as may be. What I mean is that I despise the man who tells me that he believes, putting his own facile interpretation on the word, in the Thirty-nine Articles, who receives the benefits that such beliefs confer, while possessing a good deal less theism than Voltaire—let us say. I consider such a man morally culpable, and a system that perpetuates such dishonesty I consider a menace to the national welfare.”

Everybody was listening now, except, perhaps, Mr. Jones, whose mind still ran on his roses, and who, seeing Felicia’s attention turned from him, waited for a lull, his head bowed, frowning a little at the interruption. Lady Angela, leaning her brow on her hand, was smiling a wan smile of weariness and softest disdain. Mrs. Merrick looked her acid impatience. Maurice Wynne kept kindly eyes of comprehension upon Mr. Merrick’s flushed insistence. But it was Geoffrey Daunt’s face that arrested Felicia’s attention.

Leaning back in his chair, a long hand playing with his bread, he looked at her father with a look of indifferent yet keenly observant sarcasm. To Felicia the look was like a sudden slap upon her own cheek. She felt herself grow pale with anger. After all, what her father said was true, true, at all events, of most of those who heard him, comfortable conformists who would bow to any creed that insured comfort. And she did not care whether it were true or not. He was alone, and they were all against him. In the pause, awkward and hostile, that followed his tirade, she said, clearly, with a light defiance, tossing the words at all of them. “Hear! hear! papa.” She flung into the emptiness a flaming little banner of revolt. Geoffrey looked swiftly from her father to her. Her eyes had been on him while she spoke and now met his. In her face, steely in its steadiness as a drawn sword, he saw the whole drama of her thoughts and read the deeper defiance towards himself. It was at him the sword was pointed. For a long moment they looked at each other across the table. Geoffrey’s hand continued automatically to break his bread.

“Hear! hear! Miss Merrick.” Maurice echoed; he leaned forward, drawing her eyes from Geoffrey’s. “I put your glove in my helmet. But really, you know, Mr. Merrick—“ his smile, graceful, healing, turned from the almost ardour with which it had assured her of championship—“we shall plunge into such metaphysical depths if we are going to argue about faith.”

“Metaphysics!” Mr. Merrick ejaculated with impatience. He had glanced at Felicia’s banner rather fretfully, and saw now her banner, rather than his own bomb-shells, attracting the general attention. Turning his shoulder upon the trivial crew, he addressed himself once more to the task of forcing a way into his brother’s comprehension—overlaid with “crusts of custom.”

“A shallow infidelity is a very foolish thing, Felicia,” said Mrs. Merrick.

“Miss Merrick isn’t an infidel; she’s only a loyalist,” said Maurice.

Mrs. Merrick, not quite sure whether the highest culture as represented by Lady Angela required of her belief or scepticism, continued—

“Don’t you fancy, Lady Angela, that the Church will outlast all attacks?”

“I think more of the spirit than of the form, perhaps,” said Angela, who still leaned on her hand and still looked down; “but to me mere disbelief, especially when founded on egotistic self-assertion, is more repellent, since more crude and embittered, than the lowest forms of belief. Any symbol, however rudimentary, that enables the self to lose itself, is sacred to me.”

She was in the right, as she would always be in the right, Felicia felt; yet as she sat silent now, and not looking at Angela, she knew that the scorn she felt was not the impotent spite of mere wrongness.

Mrs. Merrick, murmuring her gratitude for this enlightenment, rose, and Lady Angela, her hand on her shoulder, walked beside her out on to the lawn. Felicia went into the drawing-room.

She could have wept with fury; but taking up a book, she read, intently, clearly conscious of every word, turning swift pages.

Presently she looked up. Angela had entered the room. Going to a desk near Felicia, she sat down and wrote. They were alone. Felicia read on. Suddenly, laying down her pen, smiling, Angela turned to her. “You were more a loyalist than an infidel—I understood. Only your father pained me so. My faiths, you see, are deep. I did not, through my pain, pain you?”

Felicia looked up from her book to meet this speech. Her face, over amazement, still kept the look of steely steadiness. “I am sorry that any one should think my father crude or egotistic; but a stranger’s opinion of him could hardly give me pain.”

This, Angela felt, was not pleasant. It was not what she had expected. She regretted her little speech at the table which, to quick intelligence, might savour of meanness—a stroke under cover of darkness; and Felicia must not suspect her of stooping to any contest; indeed, Angela did not suspect herself. And now Felicia seemed to drag her down into open warfare. It was not at all pleasant.

“You count me a stranger, Miss Merrick?” There was a real quiver in her voice.

“Do you count me as more?” Felicia asked.

“I want to count you as a great deal more.”

A rebuff, especially an open rebuff, was intolerable to Angela. She smiled now in her determination to win allegiance, even if an unwilling one, and, as she leaned across the desk, smiling, Geoffrey and Maurice came in. The moment could not have been more propitious; her loveliness of attitude and look must, she felt, contrast most advantageously with Felicia’s sullen stiffness. She let it tell for a moment and then slipped over to Felicia’s sofa, taking her hand and turning the smile, now, on the two men.

“I am telling Miss Merrick how splendid she was,” she said; “we all understood, didn’t we?”

Felicia, in dismayed astonishment, felt a net thrown round her. She broke through it, regardless of rents. “I don’t understand,” she declared. She rose, drawing her hand from Angela’s, confronting them. “I think trivial things had best be left alone.” With this, picking up her hat, she went to a mirror and deliberately tied it on, feeling a full composure over her hurry of angry thoughts. She did not care how uncouth she seemed. Angela should not force her to seeming trust when she felt only deepest distrust. Her eyes, in the mirror, met Maurice’s. Before she was conscious of the impulse she found that she had commanded him as a woman commands the man of whose obedience she is assured. At once he understood and answered.

“May I come too?” he asked.

“Do. I am going for a walk.”

This, then, must seem the reality that underlay it all; the struggle of two women over a man. Felicia’s face kept its hardness as she and Maurice went out. She had never struggled, yet her certainty of him, the fact that her departure with him had been a triumph, made her feel as if she had. She did not like the triumph, and walking silently over the lawn, Maurice beside her, she regretted the command. It implied a great deal; it accepted all that his eyes had implied to her. Smarting under this sense of humiliation, she could show no suavity to her companion, and the acute young man suspected that he had served his purpose in merely following her.

Maurice’s tact, as delicate as a woman’s, forced no sympathy upon her by an allusion to the scene they had just left. He talked lightly as they went through the shrubberies into the garden, for Felicia, forgetting the intention of her departure, did not speak of a long walk, and went slowly along the flower-beds, past the warm walls where fruit was ripening. She responded with grave smiles to his talk.

“Do you know,” he said presently, stopping before her in a narrow path where small fruit-trees cast shadows upon them, “to-day you are not a bit a Watteau, but a Romney? The shade your hat makes across your brows and eyes is all Romney—Romney at his best. Do you mind being told that you only remind me of beautiful things?”

Felicia, finding him, for the first time, almost tactless, made no reply. She picked a small pear from the tree beside her. “Now do you consider such a remark impertinent?” Maurice demanded. “You frighten me, you know. I feel in you such a farouche fastidiousness. Our idealist in the drawing-room, now, can accept positively blaring compliments.”

“Well, your appreciation of the shadow my hat makes could hardly be called that,” said Felicia, biting into her pear; “I suppose I hardly know how to accept compliments gracefully—never having had any made me before.”

“It’s too funny! But you know that I am incapable of blaring before you. You know that, don’t you?”

“How can I tell? I have known you just five days.”

“Still—you do know me.”

“Doesn’t Lady Angela know you too? and does she know that you consider your compliments to her blaring?” Felicia, over her pear, was smiling at him now with her dryad-like malice.

“Ergo, if she is deceived in me you must be, and I am not at all trustworthy.”

“No, no,” Felicia protested.

“No, no, indeed. Lady Angela doesn’t know me as well as you do—in spite of your nipping reference to five days—and for the simple reason that she doesn’t know herself; that inner blindness blurs all one’s outer vision, you know. I am fond of her, really fond of her—she is, on the whole, a very good sort. But she seldom means what she thinks she means—and that’s so disconcerting. Now you always mean just what you intend to mean.”

The memory of Aunt Kate’s grunt, dimmed already, was effaced by this frank analysis of his relation with Angela. Felicia hardly knew how deep was her own relief, but only glad that she was wresting no possession from anybody. When she came in after the subsequent talk, glancing and desultory as it had superficially seemed, her perturbation was of a new order. It was as if he had walked in upon her own particular garden—finding, during her momentary confusion, its gate ajar—had made its paths his own and, as it almost seemed, smoked a cigarette among its roses. Yet, with the perturbation, there was something perversely pleasing in the delicate desecration.

This alien fragrance flattered and fluttered her. She was becoming very intimate with Maurice Wynne, certainly not against her will, yet not altogether with it. Her will did not seem to count. It was such a new thing for her to talk about herself with somebody, her instinct was to hide behind her hedges; but Maurice found her every time, and she felt delight at being found. It seemed inevitable that she should like him, should know that he liked her, and tell him anything he asked.

And Felicia was becoming aware that there might be something more than liking. She looked quickly away from the suggestion, yet it charmed, intoxicated her a little to feel her power over this sympathetic young man. She could not pause to ask herself whether he embodied her ideals, whether, fundamentally, his meaning chimed with hers. His meaning seemed all in his smile, his understanding; and his shaft of real light, strong and sunny, made ideals pale, ineffectual. Life itself was hurrying her on and there was no time to pause, to analyze, to weigh her heart. She only surely knew that she was perplexed, happy, fascinated and a little frightened. If this were the fairy-prince he was not the grave one she had imagined, and if he were not the fairy-prince she would not in the least break her heart over it. No depths were touched; yet the heart might ache at the loss of the dear companion.

Meanwhile, his feeling for her made of all life a new and vivid thing.

CHAPTER X

THERE must be no more evasions. Felicia must see how much she counted with him, must recognize him as her champion, though championship might endanger more than he could allow her to guess. He didn’t much care what it endangered. To shut out the future and keep the present moment golden was Maurice’s philosophy.

He found Felicia in the library next morning, sitting high on the library steps, a pile of dusty volumes on her knees. Mr. Merrick was meditating an article on credulity and had asked her to find for him the eighteenth-century deists, for whom she had looked through rows of long undisturbed volumes. Felicia smiled somewhat grimly as she clapped together the covers of Bolingbroke and Shaftesbury. Her father’s articles rarely got beyond this initial stage of the accumulation of material. German idealism had been abandoned. “Why attack these castles of sand?” said Mr. Merrick.

From dust and the arid pages through which she glanced she looked down at Maurice.

“To-day you are not to escape me,” he declared. “I claim all to-day. You will practise?”

“I will. Why do you say I escape you?” She had to smile at his acuteness.

“Since the other day—in the garden—you have. Angela irritated you, Geoffrey irritated you, and I was included in the irritation. Isn’t it a little true?” He leaned against her steps, answering her smile.

“Perhaps a little,” Felicia owned. “I felt, perhaps, rather out of it.”

“So you are—out of it, with me.” His words were light, too, but she felt the underlying emphasis. “You see we feel things in the same way, see them in the same way; that sets us apart. It was unkind of you to bar me away from you—even for a day or two—and two days is a frightfully long time in a mere week.” His voice lifted itself from the almost gravity to which it had sunken; happily and sweetly, differences looked at and effaced, he went on. “I’ve something here I want you to see and feel with me.” He showed her the volume he held, Maeterlinck—delightful dreamer.

“At first he had nightmares, but now his dreams are sane; that’s an unusual quality for dreams. They seemed dreamed in sunlight, too, rather than in darkness.”

“This isn’t nightmare, but it’s not a sunny dream either. Sad dawn perhaps—or perhaps twilight; you must say.”

“I saw Mr. Daunt pass outside just then. He always spends the morning here. Shall we read it somewhere else?”

“Ah—let Geoffrey share it. I should rather like to see how Geoffrey would take it.” Maurice was reflecting that read to her alone the twilight dream might carry him too far. “You dislike him? Really?”

“Frankly, I don’t like him—but I don’t want to exclude him from the reading. We are hostile elements, you see. Anything so self-assured makes me feel frivolous, and yet, I do see something admirable in him. He was walking on the lawn, in the moonlight, last night, and he made me think, strange as it may seem, of Sir Galahad.”

“Ah!” Maurice beamed his delight at her perception. “You have seen the best thing in Geoffrey—the single-minded directness of his quest—its object is no Holy Grail; but his resolute advance has its beauty.”

“And he is very fond of you, I see that too. It’s a touch of human tenderness that makes him less chilling.”

“Yes, dear old Geoff; I think that I appeal to his one aesthetic fibre. I think he feels towards me as though I were a bit of very nice Limoges hanging on his wall. The colour pleases his eye. He would be sorry if I got broken.”

“No, no; you touch a deeper fibre than the aesthetic. I don’t believe he has any aesthetic fibres at all, or sees the colour in anything. How grey and rigid his life must be.” Geoffrey walked in as she said it.

Maurice greeted his friend gaily. “Just in time, Geoffrey, to hear a bit of poetry. I’m going to try its effect on you and Miss Merrick at once.” He turned his pages.

Geoffrey, laying down the morning paper he held in his hand, came to Felicia’s side.

“You are fond of poetry, Miss Merrick?”

Felicia had already observed his manner of humorous tolerance towards women. He smiled and made a remark as though offering a child a lollipop—and without consulting the child’s preference as to size, shape or colour.

“Sometimes,” she answered, looking down at him from her high seat on the steps. Their eyes had not met since that look of the day before. “Not too often.”

“I thought it could not be too often for the modern cultured young woman. Surely you can’t get too much of—Browning for instance?” and Geoffrey smiled up at her. She felt that a very large bull’s-eye was being kindly offered.

“Easily,” she retorted; “but let’s hear Maeterlinck, who has been waiting for you.”

Maurice had found the page. Leaning his elbow on the steps, he read—

Felicia, bending over her lapful of books, her elbows on her knees, looked at him, and Geoffrey looked at her.

He would have liked her eyes to turn gently upon him. Her eyes were like deep limpid water; they made him think of a still pool under sunny, autumnal trees. Felicia’s manner towards Maurice during these last days had entirely allayed his anxieties on his friend’s behalf. His newer impressions of her removed her from any conceptions of wild-rose flirtations. Her quiet air, now, of intelligent comradeship defined and limited the unsubstantiality of Maurice’s hopes. But that she smiled upon Maurice, that Maurice pleased her, was evident. And Geoffrey was sorry that he had not pleased her. She would not forget that silent mischance of the day before.

A vision of her father rose; a half-baked person; an absurd person; but he was sorry that the daughter should have seen that he thought him so, for he wanted the daughter to smile at him. He hardly knew that he wanted it, hardly knew that he was sorry, hardly thought at all as he stood, his hand on the shelf near Felicia’s shoulder, vaguely listening to pathetic words and looking at Felicia’s half-averted profile. He was conscious only of a curious feeling about Felicia, a feeling like the soft stretch into the present of a distant memory, an awakening, dim and touched.

Once when he was a boy, rambling on a summer day in the woods, he had come, rather torn and breathless, through a thicket, upon the sweetest, sunny space, set round with tall, still trees, thick with deep grass and open to the sky. He had flung himself down in the warm grass and lain for long looking up at the far, blue sky with its calm, sailing squadrons of clouds. Something in himself, some quality deep and unrecognized, the quality that made him nearer to his saintly father than to his mother with her worldly energy, had quietly arisen, had seemed to mingle with all the peace and beauty, to draw him to the sky, or to draw all the sky down into his own irradiated and happy heart. He had never forgotten the sunny loneliness; and he had never found the spot again. Felicia made him think of it, of the sweet grass and the still trees and the sky. And when he looked at her he seemed to have struggled through thickets to a sudden, an almost startling peace. But the poem was finished, and she was still looking at Maurice.

“Isn’t that the very heart of love?” Maurice asked.

She paused; she was touched; she did not wish to show how much.

“I should have wanted him to cry,” she said.

“No; I think that if I loved a woman,” Maurice turned the leaves of his book, “I should want her to smile.”

“I don’t believe it. I believe that you would rather she cried dreadfully.”

“You don’t think me capable of these heights of self-abnegation?”

“I was thinking of the heart—as it is. Now, I might have said it all—only, oh! how I should hope that he might be listening at the door!”

The slight tension in Maurice’s voice and look yielded to her swallow-like darts and skimmings; over deep waters perhaps.

“Base girl!” he cried, laughing.

“Base and natural. Isn’t the heart of love the longing to be loved? How could one miss such a chance—even if it meant more suffering for the loved one? Besides, it would be better for him that he should suffer.”

But Maurice persisted, his eyes on his book, “If I were dying, and suffering through her fault, I would rather she were ignorant of it—rather she smiled.”

“But you would rob her then of her right to suffer—of her right to love you more.” Felicia turned her eyes on Geoffrey. “What would you wish? Don’t say that you are as inhumanly noble as Mr. Wynne.”

“I don’t think we can in the least tell what we would wish.”

“So that my selfishness and Mr. Wynne’s magnanimity may both be illusory?”

“You are nearer the truth, I imagine. The poem seems to me rather mawkish,” Geoffrey added.

Felicia, laughing, stood up, handing her books to Maurice. “Papa goes this morning and wants these; I must take them to him. You have cleared the rather foggy atmosphere, Mr. Daunt, though I don’t think the poem mawkish.”

Before Geoffrey, Felicia might smile with reassuring composure, and Maurice seem intent only on the psychology of a love poem; but to both of them there had been deeper meanings, deeper recognitions under the little scene. The sense of tension had strained at both hearts. In Felicia was that more vivid sense of life—of an approaching crisis; in Maurice an open owning to himself that he was desperately in love. More desperately than he had ever been with anybody; and yet—what was he to do about it? He knew that Felicia could bring him nothing, or next to nothing; he himself was frightfully in debt, and unless some book or picture would write or paint itself into astonishing remunerativeness he could see no prospect of independence. Angela was certainly there; odd to realize, and rather humiliating, how, in spite of all his talk against marrying for money she had always been there, a comfortable cushion in his thoughts for anxiety to flop on and find ease. But then he had really been half in love with Angela; the refuge had never been a distasteful one; only some inner impetus was needed to make it really alluring; and it was with a new sense of insecurity that he realized that falling desperately in love with Felicia made the refuge impossible—as far as any real comfort in it went. There was an added fear in the thought that a new attitude in Angela might have made the refuge inaccessible.

Angela must feel herself neglected, though neglected only for a flirtation. Such a flirtation would leave their half-friendly, half-sentimental intimacy untouched, leave the path to the refuge clear; but did she guess that it was not a flirtation?—see that it was neither so little nor so much? And might she not, her long patience exhausted, marry somebody else? It was a painful thought. Maurice could hardly see himself without that vision of the cushion to flop on. Robbed of that final refuge, life offered ugly wastes of effort.

He scorned himself as he turned from these thoughts, turned resolutely to both the pain and joy of others. But Maurice could not dwell for long looking at pain. He would not look so far. The mere present was beautiful. If only one could keep it so; there was the difficulty; one couldn’t stand still; time shoved one, however unwilling, along, and at the end of the sunny vista was—pain; the flowers and trees that led to it could only bring a momentary forgetfulness. It would be base to make serious love to Felicia; and would she enhance the present? would she flirt? did he want her to flirt? The Watteau element in Felicia, her colouring and manner of knotting her hair encouraged these futile surmises as to whether the resemblance would extend to a permission of half-artificial, half-sincere coquetries. If she would be the Dresden shepherdess to his Dresden shepherd for the day or two remaining of their companionship—but he shook off such vagrant fancies with a real pang. Such fancies, after letting her know—she must know—that he would suffer so that she might smile! A deeper note had sounded. It would not in the least satisfy him to be her Dresden shepherd; she would never be his shepherdess; the Watteau resemblance went no further than that superficial frivolity. And the question that underlay all others was the one he had no right seriously to ask: Did she—could she—love him?

CHAPTER XI

HE had no right to ask it, and yet Maurice thought of it persistently and the next morning ushered in a most auspicious comment on such thoughts. He received quite a solid cheque for an article he had recently written—a cheque large enough to buy his boots for a whole year—and Maurice was fastidious about his boots; but not therefore logically large enough to make uncomfortable realities recede, as they did, behind a golden haze. Maurice’s moods easily alternated between golden hazes and black fogs.

Geoffrey went away on that morning—that, too, was the receding of an uncomfortable reality, for Geoffrey seemed to hold him by the shoulders, like a naughty, unreasonable child, and make him look at things he didn’t want to look at. He himself was to go on the next day. There was a familiar element of recklessness in the mood as he practised the violin with Felicia in the sunny, ugly morning-room. He was overstrung and happy, and the music they played, by its sadness, made happiness more blissful.

“I sometimes think,” he said, laying down his violin and leaning his arm on the piano, while Felicia still sat in her place, “that sadness is the most beautiful thing in life.”

In response to such moods Felicia usually became rather matter-of-fact, as now, when she said, “To look at, to listen to, not to live, perhaps.”

“But we shouldn’t be able to see or hear it if we hadn’t lived it.”

“It only becomes beauty, then, when we’ve outlived it, not while we are in it. People dress up their sorrows so,” said Felicia, turning vaguely the pages of the music before her; “they always remind me of the king in the fairy-tale, who had clothes made of air and thought himself sumptuously apparelled when he was really naked.”

“I believe you are right,” laughed Maurice, “and that it is only when we are happy that we enjoy looking at sadness.”

Felicia, though she smiled, was not feeling happy. She had waked to the realization that this and the next were the last days with Maurice, and there was a pang in the realization. She saw suddenly before her the empty months. To re-enter the old monotony after this flashing week was a prospect sad with a sadness that could not deck itself in illusion. But she did not want Maurice to know that she was sad; indeed, was it life or was it loss that made her so? She could not say.

“And since it’s a happy morning, shall we have some more sadness?” she asked.

“Not quite yet.” Maurice still leaned near her and looked at her. The golden haze was about them; it shut off everything else. She must love him; only that would content him. Why not find out, and let the future take care of itself? It probably would—her father could probably give them something. He would take to portrait-painting in earnest, write a lot of articles—very incoherent thoughts went through his mind as he contemplated Felicia and hesitated.

In the midst of this hesitation—could he risk a cramping poverty?—would it be base to find out whether she loved him—to make her love him—with no intention of taking such a risk? Felicia raised grave eyes to him. In their unconsciousness of such craven hesitations they seemed to sweep them from him. The clouded intentness of his blue eyes resolved itself—as if a wind had blown bare the sunny ardour of the sky—into a gaze of frankest adoration. He smiled at her silently, and the smile said, “I love you. You are near me. That is why I am happy.”

But Felicia, feeling only a strange fear, looked away.

“Felicia, dearest Felicia,” said Maurice. He took her hand. “I do so adore you. Tell me that you can love me?”

Was it fear or rapture? She did not know. She confessed;

“I suppose it must be that.”

“You do love me?”

“I suppose I do.”

“Oh!—darling!” he exclaimed. He put his arms around her, and, while she still kept her look of almost frightened gravity, he kissed at last his Dresden shepherdess.

It was altogether like an Embarquement pour CythÈre, Maurice thought, with the one little corner of his mind that could still see enhancing similes. They were setting sail in the golden haze—what need to ask where bound—to something happy it must be. And, flushed like a wild-rose from his kiss, Felicia felt, too, that swift sailing away into a sunny mist, felt, like the soft speeding through shining waves, relief at the leaving of hostile shores, delightful ease, the soothing of the ruffled frightened heart, afraid of life and of its own loneliness. Life, then, was good, since he loved her. The deliciousness of being loved, after that first shock of wonder—that slipping from the shore to the unknown sea, sang through her like the sea about a prow. Her new trust in life was like a wind bearing her on; with sails all set she went to meet its meaning.

“I almost felt that you loved me—I did not really guess it—but I felt, though it seemed so strange,” she said. She drew away from him a little—her hands folded on his breast—so that she might look at him.

“From the first moment I saw you; from the moment you came round that turning in the lane. You can’t claim any such pedigree of feeling!” He put his hands over hers. Their looks were deep, under the light smiles and the lightness of their words.

“I can see no other beginning—unless just now is one.”

“You did not know—not one bit—until just now.”

“Can one fall in love so suddenly?” she wondered.

“Yes, if one has been feeling love near one for so long.”

“And you really—really knew?”

“From the meeting in the lane. Something inside me said: Here—here at last she is. There was a bird singing near us—do you remember, darling? The bird seemed to say it, too. I was like an awakened Siegfried.”

“Oh—dear Maurice, it is too beautiful,” said Felicia, almost sighing. “Is this my empty life suddenly brimming over?”

She rose, leaving her hand in his, and they walked up and down the long room.

“Do you know you are the only person who has ever loved me?” she said. “Does that make me seem of less value?”

Maurice laughed his joyous laugh. “It only makes me seem of more; it is my mÉtier, that—to find, to recognize, to love rare and precious things. Who that has ever known you could have loved you, pray? Who could even have recognized you? But, dearest, that is my only value, that seeing it in others.”

The gravity, the wondering sweetness of her eyes were lifting him above even the joyous mood. He paused in their walk, looking back at her with a gravity almost sad.

“Idealize me, always idealize me, and I shall perhaps grow into some real value myself—for the reality now is so thin, so weak, so unstable. Something in you almost frightens me, Felicia.” And as he spoke she saw in his eyes a strange and sudden darkness.

“Something in me!” The appeal was too near and dear. It was she, now, who put her arms about him, who kissed him, bending his forehead down to her lips, saying, “Nothing in me shall ever frighten you. You will come to me to lose your fears.”

It was then that the wonder left her; then, in that moment of sudden appeal and her response to it, that she felt her own love as more than the taking of joy, and understood that in him was some deep need of her, and in herself the power to answer it.

Later on they were able in their happiness to laugh over the ridiculous suddenness of it all. Only a week! To fall in love in one week! What could they know of one another? Felicia teasingly asked him.

“What indeed!” Maurice retorted. They knew everything was the assurance underlying these playful scepticisms. And Felicia also asked—

“You never did care for Lady Angela?”

“Never—never—never!” said Maurice. In the light of his love for Felicia, casting all past fancies into shadow, the words were sincere. Not so sincere, but that could not be helped, was his answer to the next question—

“Nor she for you—not really, I hope?”

“Not really; not a scrap, really. She wants disciples, not lovers.”

Angela, watching them, her wan smile unchanged, through the last two days—the days of the happy secret—wondered, a poignancy in the wonder, if this were not less but more than a flirtation. A hateful supposition, hateful too the thought that it was upon Maurice’s common-sense only that she could count. She asked Felicia in the afternoon to walk with her about the garden, and she played her part with an exaltation that made it almost a reality to Felicia as well as to herself. She would love this girl who was rending her heart, and she would win her love. Once or twice a sad little commentary on Maurice slipped out—the emotionalism that made his moods independable, his purely aesthetic standards. Such comments were quite sincere. These characteristics in Maurice had often troubled her; she only hoped to lift this hard little girl who had enchanted him to a higher point of view than that of mere conquest—to see the responsibilities that followed it, to intimate, as it was only kind to do, that such conquest could not well be permanent. The bitter, unrecognized thought was that it might be Felicia who was entrapped, not Maurice. She could talk with magnanimity to an inferior nature, but candour and a pride more stainless than her own humility Angela could not forgive—and did not know she could not. She talked herself, however, into an almost tearful self-contentment, pressed Felicia’s unwilling hand, and told her how glad she was that they had met. “I hope it will all bear fruit. I believe that anything real does, you know.” Felicia was left in a state of some perturbation and confusion. She did not trust, but she was almost touched. It was after this talk that she asked Maurice the question about Angela, a question slightly tremulous; she felt that Angela might deserve pity.

Angela went to her room and knelt down before the serene and beautiful head of a Christ that she always carried with her.

“I have lived to my highest!—oh! I have,” she murmured; and at the sound of her own rapt and suffering voice the tears, long repressed, came.

“This agony must lift us both. He is the instrument on which to try my soul. Love must win, and I will win him; and keep him and redeem him; and I will redeem that poor flippant child who is able, just because she is so small, so blind, to blunder so among my heart-strings—to hurt me so.”

The love that swelled her heart at this moment was self-love. She did not know that she hated Felicia.

CHAPTER XII

MAURICE and Felicia walked along the lane where they had first met; she was going home and he to go that evening. It was a farewell walk. On the hill-top, in the garden he was at last to see, they were to say good-bye—good-bye for a little while. Felicia, in her new and blissful confidence, did not even think of asking for how long, it seemed sure to be so short. But Maurice was already asking himself the question, battling creeping doubts with passionate asseverations. And better than passionate asseverations was the meeting of such doubts by holding her more closely in the deep, lonely lane, dispelling shadows from his mind with a kiss. To hold her, to kiss her, was to keep alight a flame of joy within him, a flame that drooped and flickered when those sad thoughts blew over it; and without was sadness too; the fragrance of the white traveller’s-joy in the hedges seemed a sigh; the soft evening, the pale clouded sky, were grey-habited nuns, whispering of the crumbling of earthly hopes.

That Felicia heard no such whispers, no such sighs, her pensive but steadily gazing profile showed. The pensiveness was a dove brooding on a secure peace; her eyes, gazing ahead, had the gravity of a child’s seeing happy visions. He felt a pang of envy. Or was it ignorance that kept fear from her? Again he turned her face, white flower that it was, to him, bending his lips to hers. Only so he found some of her peace, her serenity.

Felicia, after the kiss, still looked at him. “I would do anything for you—suffer anything,” she said.

“I don’t want you ever to suffer for me.”

“I would almost rather. It would make even deeper roots.”

“And if the suffering were poverty, grinding poverty?—I am very poor, Felicia”—Maurice’s voice hurried, broke a little—“I have nothing.”

“I should like showing you how little I mind. We can both work. I have always thought that I might make something by giving lessons in music—or translating; I am a good linguist.” Her realism was a new aspect of her. Her steadiness, then, had not faced mere visions. But such realism perplexed, almost dismayed him. A laborious union had never entered his mind. Her words conjured up a grey picture of unrelieved effort, a wife striving beside him in obscurity. It hurt him more for her than for himself, though for himself it gave a tremor of shrinking.

“You work, darling! Absurd! Besides, London swarms with music-teachers, with translators. No, no; something will turn up for me. I can put such heaps of irons in the fire. I may suddenly become a popular portrait-painter—charge a thousand apiece for my pictures; two or three a year would keep us going beautifully. Or I may write a book.”

“Papa and I live on as many hundreds!” Felicia ejaculated, in her smile a touch of maternal tolerance for such improbabilities.

In his strong reaction from that grim picture she had so calmly drawn he could laugh at the thought of the little hundreds. Yet that even those base rungs of the ladder were not beneath his feet gave him a chill.

Among the pines, as they began to climb, the wind sighed, and the sun, far below and far away over the grey wastes of evening, made only a sullenly smouldering line of embers on a cloud-barred horizon. They paused to look back at it.

“How one feels the autumn—almost like winter already,” said Felicia, leaning against him. “It is like our music of yesterday morning, isn’t it?—a sadness so beautiful to look at from our happiness.”

But already Maurice’s momentary energy had crumbled. The melancholy of the wind, the sunset, seized him like a presage.

“Oh! Felicia,” he exclaimed, holding her closely, “will you always love me? You are so much stronger than I am.”

“But Maurice—dear—the only strong thing in me is my love for you.”

“No, no; not only that. You are not afraid so easily as I am. And this parting—you can bear it—with such calm!”

There was almost the sob of a reproach in his voice as he leaned his cheek to hers for comfort. The echo—as of an alien knock at the doors of her happiness, went through the peace, the radiance within. Tears sprang to her eyes.

“Why, Maurice!—calm! It’s only that loving you—having you to love me is so great, so wonderful, that even yet I can only feel the thankfulness—the beauty. Don’t you know that when you are gone my life will be only a waiting?” The tremor of pain in her, her trust in him, roused again a flare of his manliness.

“Not for long, dearest. Waiting isn’t a keen enough word for what I shall feel. Longing, longing, until I see you again.”

“Oh! it will be keener than mere waiting with me, too.” She felt dimly that she must not shackle him in the fight he was going to make for her by showing him what pain to her would be in the waiting.

They walked on. As they neared the house Felicia said, in a voice that had regained its quiet, “We must tell papa.”

Again in Maurice was that crumbling. The last embers of intoxication seemed, as she spoke, to die, to leave him looking at ashen realities. He would conquer poverty. Yes; but bind himself and her to face it—as yet menacing and unconquered? That would be to wrong her more deeply than she could understand. She must be free—free before the world; and fidelity to him merely a matter of feeling. And, thinking of freedom, his mind, with a pang of self-scorn, looked back for an ugly moment at the forfeited refuge—at Angela—not yet openly forfeited.

“No, dearest,” he said, flushing in the twilight and feeling that, in spite of its loss of intoxication, his love for her had never been so strong as in its uprising over such thoughts, “Not yet. Let it be our secret. My affairs are in such a mess—I must not go to your father until they are really straightened. I really ought not to have told you until they were straight; but I could not help that. It seemed almost weak-spirited to go without telling you, for such a grubby little reason—a reason that can’t touch us—but that must shut out others. Don’t you think so? Darling, I have not hurt you—already?”

Nothing in the bent, listening profile told him so; the fear came with a sudden glimpse of a craven self, lest she should see it too. But the eyes raised to his held, with a new patience, no new vision of him. Her smile in its grave acceptance of burdens still found joy in the bearing of burdens for their love’s sake. “No; how could it hurt me? I see that you are right. We will keep our secret to ourselves for a little while.” It was now her trust that seemed to him almost as terrible as the dreaded lack of it had been. Cruel, he thought, that mere material circumstance should toss one’s helpless mind like a shuttlecock from one fear to another. But—“Only a very little while,” he said, nerving himself to be what she thought him.

Felicia, pushing open the garden gate, stepped inside; the gate swung to. She held his hand over it.

“So this is the garden. It is exquisite to leave you here among all these flowers; to think of you loving me and waiting for me in all this serenity.” He smiled, looking quickly from her to the irises, the pansies, the roses. But the smile faded. “Ah! but how can I wait!—how can I bear to leave you!” His pain, his fear, surged up in the words. He hid his face on her shoulder, longing for a strength that would banish them; her trust in his strength hurt him too much to give it; but when she kissed him fear was soothed. Only—how would it be when she was no longer there to kiss him?

Her hand for a long moment had pressed his head to her breast; then she moved from him, saying, “You will be late for your train, dear Maurice, and I shall be late for my dinner. Papa must be waiting.”

Maurice, to spend this last day with her, was to take an evening train that would get him to London in time to catch the Scotch express. He must go sandwiched but dinnerless. They had laughed over the sacrifice. He had now, again, to laugh, brokenly.

“How can you think of trains?”

“I am thinking most of the train that will bring you back.” Once more her trust struck flame from him. “Ah!—soon! soon!” he said. They kissed silently. He saw the tears in her eyes and adored her for the strength that, for his sake, mastered pain and did not let her fear.

CHAPTER XIII

THE wonderful week seemed, as it receded into the past, to gain in wonder, to irradiate the present with ever-deepening meaning. Everything was beautiful; all relations beautified; for the unbeautiful ones she could feel no longer any bitterness. And into the superficial monotony of the old life Maurice’s letters came like chimes of bells breaking the stillness. He wrote constantly, letters of a quite recovered gaiety, giving his impressions of the people, the places he saw, showing her life as he saw it—as she some day should see it, beside him; and through all went the ardour of his homage, his longing.

Felicia, in answering, felt that she could with him be so entirely her whole self that she need not show her whole self; it was easier for her to give him her soul dressed in tender humour, beribboned with quizzical freaks of fancy. It was his understanding of her, his consequent perfect possession, that lifted her life into the new sense of power and freedom, for was it not freedom and power when every faculty was effective, bore fruit in his responsiveness?

Not till late October was the beauty of the new life touched by a breath of doubt or sadness. A dejection, then, showed itself in Maurice’s letters, a dejection that coincided with his return to London after his round of country visits, coincided with his taking stock, as it were, of his situation and looking his powers and resources in the face. The letters then became at once more passionate and more infrequent. He must not sadden his darling, and the analysis of his glooms could only sadden her. He was working—it gave him less time for writing—luckily for her. In her answers Felicia’s courage steadily smiled, held out an unfaltering hand to help him over the morass of melancholy; but the melancholy, more and more, like a fog closing round him, seemed to shut him from her. Her apprehensions from vague became cutting. She did not know a touch of distrust, but the separation, the sadness, hurt too much. “Come and see me; spend a day. We can walk in the woods. It will give you strength and me too,” she wrote.

Maurice only sorrowfully answered, in a letter like the slow rolling of big tears, that he must not; it wouldn’t mean strength, it would mean disablement. He must wait until he had more right to see her. He begged her to love—love—love him. After the glory of golden days and thoughts, of deep, glad breathing in a crystal air, this change was like a labouring breath, and like the change in the year—the grey and amethyst of late autumn. The old loneliness returned again and again, but with a poignant stab that no former loneliness had known. Bereavement seemed to hover near her.

Gathering late roses in the garden one day she faced, for the first time, her own fears—saw that they were fears. She had not heard for a week from Maurice, and his last letter had been little more than a plaintive sigh of self-pity. For the first time Felicia was asking herself if joy was not to be a distant, a far distant thing. She saw more clearly the forces against him—forces that her young ardour had barely glanced at; she did not distrust his love—that would have been too horrible a wrenching of the new doubled life, but she distrusted his strength before such obstacles.

The roses were fragrant, fragile, white, the outer petals streaked with a hardy red. When she had filled her basket she went to the gate and leaned over it, looking vaguely down the road. The thought of that summer evening was with her, the life there had been in it—deep, sweet life—in the pain, the trust. The facing of a long, blank patience was almost death-like, almost like the shutting of the eyes, a yielding of oneself to the earth, with a faith in final resurrection—where?—when?—who knew?—for all light in a shrouded present. Felicia shook off the simile, with a fear that Maurice’s plaintiveness was infecting her. He had more right to it—burdened fighter. Her love a burden?—again her heart dropped. She bent her face to the roses. Their sweetness went through her like a smile. She sighed, her eyes closed, over the relief of her own gratitude for such smiles. When she looked up again she saw a man’s figure among the pines below. It was only for a moment that her heart could stand still with joyous questioning—joy so keen that it seemed to leave the heart it passed from bleeding; for in another she saw that it was not Maurice, and then, with a wholesome surprise, the staunching of the wound, that the wayfarer was Geoffrey Daunt. In knee-breeches, shooting-cap and coat, he looked a veritable Apollo straying, incongruously garbed, through a landscape beautiful enough to match him. Felicia, finding still that wholesome staunching in surprise, watched the nearing perfection appreciatively for some time before definitely wondering what brought it there. He himself, as he approached, showed no surprise. His eyes, as he doffed his cap, met hers calmly. He had quite the air of having come to find her and of having expected to find her leaning on the gate and watching him.

Felicia held out her hand. “Are you with Aunt Kate? Have you been shooting? You haven’t lost your way?”

Geoffrey, while she asked these questions, held her hand over the gate and, though as unperturbed as ever, seemed somewhat at a loss for an answer. Dropping her hand, his eyes went from her to the house, the garden and away to the hills.

“You are high up here,” he observed. “No, I haven’t lost my way. I knew this road led past you. Yes, I am with your aunt for the week-end. I have been shooting.”

“It is rather good shooting, I believe. Uncle Cuthbert prides himself on it, I know.”

“Very good,” he answered, with still his vagueness.

“Well, won’t you come in and have some tea?” Felicia suggested, since the pause that followed grew long, and it suddenly occurred to her that however inimical she and Mr. Daunt might be there was yet a lack of even conventional hospitality in this survey of him over a closed gate.

“Thank you,” said Geoffrey, pushing open the gate and coming in, quite as if this, also, were what he had expected. As he walked beside her up the path he made no customary remark on the charms of house and garden—for the garden, with its Michaelmas-daisies and roses was still charming. His lack of aesthetic appreciation she had guessed, and in his quiet glance now was a business-like discrimination, as though he merely recognized a certain oddity and were classifying it. Geoffrey, meanwhile, was not wondering that he had come, for he had definitely intended coming, but was wondering a little what, exactly, he had intended in coming. To see Felicia Merrick. No further object was defined in his definite mind, where objects were clear-cut. He therefore turned from wonder and rested upon the attainment of his object, looking now at Felicia, observing the details of her dress—her blue serge frock, her narrow white lawn collar, the black bow under her chin—observing the curves of her thick hair, the freshness of her cheek—not as an artist would have done, with a keen consciousness of the picture they made, but with a very vivid feeling about their significance to himself. They meant that sense of charm; and, when her eyes were raised to his, there came that sense of sudden peace.

She paused before the door. “Would you like tea now, or shall I show you our view? It’s the proper routine—first view, then tea. There is a wonderful view up there from the top of the hill.”

“You shall show me the view another day,” said Geoffrey.

There quickly darted into her mind a strange query. Had Maurice sent him with some message? She said, summoning a smile, “Very well. And I don’t believe you care much about views, do you?”

“I don’t think I do; not much.”

She ushered him into the little hall. It was panelled in light wood, and its faint woodland fragrance made him think of pagan incense in some primitive temple. There was a leaping fire in the sitting-room, and the white austerity trembled with rose and gold; branches of larch in tall bronze vases glowed like a delicate mist of light. The freshness, the fragrance, the simplicity, all spoke of Felicia. She rang for tea, and, while she filled a bowl with her white roses, could not repress that inner urgency.

“It is long since I saw any of you. How are Lady Angela—Mr. Wynne?”

Her eyes were on the roses; she spoke calmly, feeling hypocritical. Geoffrey, standing near the fire, placidly replied that he had seen very little of them.

Her hypocrisy was successful; he could have surmised nothing. The excitement died, and the lesser question of his meaning there hardly stirred her indifference. He wanted tea; perhaps he even wanted to see her, which was nice of him and very unexpected. A weariness was in her as she joined him at the fire and held out her cold hands to the blaze.

In the little silence the oddity of the situation perhaps struck him too. Felicia, looking up from the fire, saw in his pre-occupied gaze at her some inner cogitation. He hesitated a moment, and then with grave courtesy asked, “Your father is well, I hope?”

“Very well, thank you.” She was still looking at him, and into both minds there flashed the memory of that silent drama at the table, and, seeing that he, too, remembered, Felicia was astonished, really touched, to see the Olympian suddenly flush deeply.

For a moment the dominating young man looked quite helplessly at her, and in this little silence something else passed between them; it refused analysis. Felicia could not have said whether pleasure or compunction were uppermost in her consciousness, she was so sorry for his discomposure, yet so pleased at his capacity for it. At all events enmity was over.

“About your caring for the view,” she said, going to the tea-table and busying herself with the spirit-lamp and kettle; “it doesn’t make you happy to look at beautiful things, does it? You haven’t at all cultivated your senses of seeing or hearing, have you?”

Geoffrey took some moments to bring his mind back to this level. The shock of his own emotion before that memory, his pain that it should be, his desire that it should not count against him with her, were new elements in himself that he contemplated with some bewilderment. “No; I haven’t had time for cultivating my senses,” he said, after the evident adjustment. “I hardly believe that they would be worth cultivating. Does that seem a guilty negligence to you? You are awfully well up in all that sort of thing; I could see it.”

“Indeed, I don’t at all exaggerate the importance of that sort of thing”; she smiled her amusement at the idea of finding his negligence guilty.

“Certainly there are more important things in the world,” Geoffrey answered, also with a smile. “I don’t understand making feelings—however exquisite—the object of life.”

“Nor do I—I hope you see that too.”

“Oh, yes; I see that.” He had evidently seen a good deal, and with the sense of groping for a new interpretation of him, Felicia asked—

“But what do you call the object of life?”

He was prompt, his eye echoing her amusement. “To express oneself actively; to do something; to succeed.”

“The artist may do all that.”

“The artist, yes; not the appreciator—the taster of life.”

“Well, as to doing something—does not that rather depend on what the something is? It ought to be something for other people, oughtn’t it?”

“You can’t do much for other people unless you have done a great deal for yourself: you are of no use to them unless you have much personal meaning. In doing all you can for yourself you probably do your best for others.”

Facing her beside the fire, he still smiled, but it was no longer the smile that offered a bull’s-eye. He really waited to hear what she would say.

Felicia’s eyes mused upon him for some silent moments; his cheerful conviction exercised a rather dissolving force upon her thoughts. Like sheep before the bark of a genial and business-like sheepdog she saw them scattering. It required an effort to arrest the silly dispersal.

“What wisdom and goodness the self should have that could dare say that,” she found, adding with a laugh for her own vagueness before his certainty, “You seem like an embodiment of the cosmic process!”

The tea was made, and as he sat down near the table, opposite her, Geoffrey remarked: “In its merely phenomenal aspect you mean, I suppose; the cosmic process in any other includes the ethical, you know.”

“Oh—I haven’t called your wisdom and goodness into question.”

She had never before, Geoffrey realized, shown him at once her malice and her kindness. Her smile, at last, was like the smiles at Maurice. He had the sense of sunny playfulness—reminiscent of childhood, and the big words they bandied were delightfully rebounding, gaily coloured balls.

“I must seem almost impertinent, I am afraid,” Felicia went on, “but I have to be—to keep up my courage. I never gave tea to a great man before. I suppose that you are a great man—for I can’t say that my littleness has any means of knowing. Impudence is the privilege of littleness, you see.”

“But not satire; that’s the privilege of equality or superiority; you have a perfect right to it. It’s only potentially that I can be called a great man.”

“Why, I see people reading whole columns of you—in the Times;—what is greatness, pray, if that isn’t?”

“You never read my speeches?”

“Never,” she confessed; “besides, you have only made one or two, you know, since I ever knew any thing about you.”

“Politics don’t interest you?”

“They might, if I came into any real contact with them. To read speeches is to see the flag without knowing what battles are going on under it.”

“What do you do?” he asked.

“Since I don’t read speeches? Not much, really. I am an embodiment of the dullest thing in nature—inertia. I exist—like the trees outside. Things happen to me; the seasons pass over me; perhaps I have a branch lopped off now and then. I express nothing that I can think of except indolent vegetation.” She really liked him so much that she had allowed her voice to gather a bitterness from her undercurrent of thought as she went on. She laughed, though half sighing as she added, “I am matter, you see—and you are motion. It must be nice to be a force.”

“Although you disapprove of the direction this force takes?”

“But I know nothing about its direction!” Felicia protested.

And presently, as from half-jesting their talk grew graver, she realized that the “force” was taking her into its confidence. It was as if he wanted to show her his direction—the battle under the flag. His whole visit had been an enigma; it now almost amazed her. She guessed how little sympathy was a necessity to him, and indeed he made no bid for sympathy. He sketched for her the political situation, his own attitude in it, the figures of his colleagues and their opponents, and calmly unravelled all the rather wilful knots her questions presented. She wondered, as his so unimpulsive frankness grew, whether he felt her at all as an individual, whether she were not, rather, a mere comfortable occasion on which he could take his ease and give himself the unwonted relief of thinking aloud. Whatever her office, she liked the force. He no doubt built with other people’s ideals and intended himself to inhabit the completed palace; yet she liked him. It was already late, and he had been there for almost two hours, when Mr. Merrick came in.

Felicia saw on her father’s face a mingling of amazement and gratification quickly composed into an over-emphatic dignity.

“I liked him ever so much,” said Felicia; when Geoffrey had taken his departure; “he is so different from what I thought.”

Gratification at the testimony to his daughter’s attractiveness warred in Mr. Merrick with the repudiating dignity. He stood firmly on the latter as he answered—

“I don’t care for the type. He does well enough for you to study”; and gratification rose again as he added: “That’s the worth of our position. We stand apart and let others come to us. We discriminate, judge, taste the flavour of life.”

“We certainly do little else!” said Felicia.

“Ah, my dear, what would you? What else for an awakened intelligence is there to do? You wouldn’t have me blindfold myself and rush into the political arena like this young ambitieux?—poor automaton! The fly on the wheel, fancying he drives the coach. We at least know that we are flies, and watch the fated turnings of the wheel with an understanding of our powerlessness.”

Felicia, wondering how he would manage such a rush, only murmured vaguely that she refused to believe herself a fly, and her father, tolerant of an accustomed flippancy, smiled, “Let us be duped by all means, but, as our exquisite Renan says, let us be knowing dupes.” He settled Geoffrey, in the phrase, to his own satisfaction.

CHAPTER XIV

WHILE Maurice moved from country house to country house, this migratory season, stretching on until the late autumn, he found it easy to keep his spirits in the golden-haze atmosphere, and his letters to Felicia in harmony with his spirits. The impression Felicia had made was deep enough to carry him through several months at the same pitch of determination, a determination more stable than any he had mustered when in Felicia’s presence; for Felicia made him face facts, and in these pleasant houses where he was appreciated and made much of, he faced only imaginations; it was easy to imagine himself potentially a rich man, when a rich environment put itself at his disposal, and when Felicia was no longer before him to make him feel that because he was not rich he must part from her. It was with a positive sense of injury that he met, when he came back to London, the brute facts. A terrific array of unpaid bills, a disconcerting army of duns, made the difference between actuality and imagination grotesquely apparent. He had to take several very deep steps into further involvements before the present ones were at all relieved, and present relief made a still more menacing future. Economy was certainly the first necessity, and after that work.

Maurice was quite convinced of his own willingness to dine off a chop when he had no invitation for dinner, yet it seemed far more fitting, when there was gold in his pocket, to think about an essay over a delicate little dinner at a first-rate restaurant. He had never found chops inspiring, and it was, though more costly, particularly inspiring when a friend was asked to share the delicate little dinner with him. He often thought of running down to Trensome Hall to see Felicia, but restrained the impulse with a self-control he could but find very magnanimous. It pained him still to write to her in a tone he felt to be hypocritical, yet he could not bring himself to tell her that all definiteness grew vaguer and vaguer, and that marriage was out of the question, for who knew how long. He would not say so yet, for who knew what might turn up? But what pained him most was to feel that the very pain of not seeing her was losing its poignancy. The impression she had made was deep, but it was being overlaid, effaced to a certain extent by others, for in his crowded life impressions were many. His easy, flexible, smiling nature followed almost inevitably the line of least resistance, and though when he thought of Felicia it was often with pangs of positively disintegrating gloom and self-reproach, he could but associate her, now that realities were before him, with a grey, drudging aspect of life that could certainly bring her no happiness. A hand-to-mouth existence was endurable only when unshared. Far kinder, for the present, to leave her dreaming of him on her lovely hill-top; kinder? It was necessary.

A few small orders momentarily padded the present, but the hard facts of the future were looming with a peculiar menace in the week that Angela came back to London in February.

Lord Glaston and his daughter installed themselves in the Eaton Square house that was part of Angela’s large inheritance from her mother.

Maurice never felt his environment so absolutely adapted to the needs of his taste as in Angela’s house, where nothing made bids for notice, and where the charmed spirit melted into mere acquiescence with surrounding harmony. He and Angela had together created much of the harmony, for the house had come to her frowning with Mid-Victorian rigours. They had sought furniture, pictures and porcelain together, and as he and Angela sat in the boudoir, with its pale eighteenth century tints, its subtly-carved furniture, and the mellow greys of its St. Aubins and Eisens, he felt that after a period of tumult and turmoil he was once more almost at home in an atmosphere all peace and suavity. A glance at the realities that prowled outside made this inner bower the quieter, and he could but remember that he had only to put out his hand to make it part of his life; had had only to put out his hand; he amended the slip loyally, yet lazily, too, as he leaned with Angela over a portfolio of old prints. Angela was at her best; gentle, unemphatic, and also a little lazy; not in her exalted mood that sometimes fatigued and made him satirical. She did not speak at all of Trensome Hall. It might have been a dream of no importance; it seemed indeed something like a dream to Maurice as he sat there, and a dream in which he had played a foolish and an ugly part—as one sometimes does in dreams.

Angela was at her loveliest. Her delicate face most pleased him when least serious, and now, as her long eyes glanced round at him, the dim gold of her hair almost touched his cheek, he felt that it would be curiously easy to slip an arm around her (her tea-gown, too, was perfect, seemed to invite encircling)—kiss her and say “Let this go on.” Of course he would not do it; Maurice wrinkled his brows a little as he looked at the print she held up.

“Do you know,” said Angela, again glancing at him, and seeing that he was not thinking of the print, “I have a plan, Maurice. You have never painted my portrait. I am going to give you an order. You must paint my portrait. I want you to begin at once.”

“That will be delightful,” said Maurice. From a pecuniary point of view the order indeed was highly welcome; from other points of view not exactly unwelcome, only a little disquieting.

“You must come here to do it,” Angela went on, patting the edges of the prints into place and closing the portfolio. “There is an excellent light in the music-room. I will wear white; I should like whiteness only on the dark of mere distance, an emerging soft and radiant from gloom. I do want you to make a success of it, Maurice; not only for my own sake, but for yours. You know, I think the time has come for you to strike some decisive blow. You diffuse yourself too much. You must write a great book, or paint a great picture. I want to be the picture,—selfish I!—I want to link myself, you see, with greatness.” She still patted the edges of her prints, speaking with candid sweetness.

Maurice, as was often the case, was half-charmed into taking her at her own valuation, as all candour, all sweetness, and, guessing at the further feelings underlying the frankness, he felt it peculiarly generous. After all, there was something coarse and petty in caution. She claimed nothing; why imply that she did by any reticence on his part? How ugly such a reticence would be!

“Will you inspire the book too? It’s my only chance for greatness,” he asked, smiling.

“Who knows? Perhaps I may.” Her answering smile was even lighter than his own. “But it can’t be consciously. You must find; I can’t give.” She got up and walked to the fire, displaying a back flowing with faultless lines from the sloping shoulders, their fragile, exaggerated grace, to the curve of the long, lace train. Angela was intellectually ensconced in mountain fastnesses, where any appeal not purely spiritual was stonily regarded, but her very beautiful body was as keenly conscious of itself, of its every pose and movement, as that of the crudest coquette. Angela’s coquetry was not crude; it wound itself through her mental attitude as pervasively, but as delicately, as the narrow black ribbons curved through the laces of her dress. It now said, “Look at me; follow me,” and Maurice, after the startled moment where he surveyed that queer little speech as to his finding and her not giving—was it a very clever, a very courageous, a very pathetic speech?—looked at her, and followed, joined her at the fireplace, and as her hand rested on the mantelpiece he put his, in an impulse he was hardly conscious of, lightly upon it.

Angela said nothing, but she lifted her appealing eyes to him.

“If I could paint you so!” said Maurice, removing his hand and wondering at himself. He did not go further than this, but the things that she might well have expected him to say after it made him uncomfortable.

Angela felt more than discomfort; it was a real anguish of baffled hope. Yet she was almost sure, now, that he would go further.

And by imperceptible degrees, during the mornings that followed in the music-room, he did.

He definitely determined nothing; the facts of life seemed to bear him towards a definition over which his will had no control. There was the past, the golden haze, the sweet golden haze, and sweet Felicia; but the self that had wandered into it with her already seemed illusory. The present self, its crushing necessities, its really tempting escape from them, was too vivid a reality to make memory of much avail.

Felicia had charmed him more deeply than Angela could ever charm; yet, since the self which had so truly loved her was already dim, unseizable, Angela’s half real, half artificial attraction counted for more than the dear impossible past.

The passionate sadness of the letters he sent to Felicia was sincere, for in writing to her he caught together all his memories, and they pressed on his heart with a great weight of regret. He wrote of hope deferred, of possible hopelessness, feeling courageous, and avoiding the worst pang of all—that dread of playing an ugly part in Felicia’s eyes—that dread of her seeing cowardice instead of courage—by telling himself that finally to renounce her would show the truest love for her. From these crises of almost despair he drifted on to a long silence, a kind silence surely, from which she must draw her own conclusions. She would of course take time in doing so, give him the benefit—poor darling!—of every doubt, and if, at the last moment, anything did turn up he could still claim her and explain the impossibility of writing when there was only despair to write of.

During these weeks of drifting he saw little of Geoffrey, and when they met, Felicia was as unmentioned as though, to both, she had been the slightest, least significant of episodes. With all his confiding tendency, Maurice could not well confide to Geoffrey that the wild-rose flirtation had become a serious love affair, and, in the same breath that the long dallying with Angela was on the verge of becoming serious too. With all his hard common sense Geoffrey might look unpleasantly askance at this taking on of a new love before the old was off, and until there was no chance at all of the old love being on again, Geoffrey might as well think him still engaged in undecisive dallying. The very fact of long intimacy, of the taking for granted of a closeness that made questionings unnecessary, kept their minds apart.

But on a morning in early March, Maurice, while putting the finishing touches to his portrait of Angela, was facing at once despair and an aching freedom. The day before had unchained at his heels a pack of howling debts; he had run before them to the only refuge; a letter, after a month of silence, that practically set Felicia free. He had wept in writing it, allowing the irrepressible tears to splash upon the paper, bitterly smiling at himself for the craven little consolation he recognized in this testimony to his grief. And, with the half appeal of the tears for pity, was another appeal—a spontaneous clutch at the brightness he must thrust from his life—for her love.

He would not clearly see that in so clinging he set himself—rather than Felicia—free. Heavy gloom had settled upon him, a gloom that filled the letter with dismal sincerity. That it had been sincere he felt to be proved by the fact that no sense of relief had followed its despatch. He was free, but free in a black world, and he felt, as a result, even less drawn to Angela than usual, even more unwilling to accept the now inevitable escape. But with the new sense of freedom was a new sense of recklessness, the sense that he had, in some untraceable way—(for what could he have done, disasters crowding thick upon him?) made himself only fit for the lower thing; so that, at all events, he might as well make the most of it.

Poor Angela! to be so accepted! The irony of it turned to pity for her as he looked at her sitting there in her white dress, pale, and with an air of deep weariness. She seemed to droop before him as she sat in the keen spring light; to droop, to appeal, and yet to be very proud, ready for resentment almost. Maurice saw all this, and his comprehension gave a touch of real emotion to his pity and to his recklessness. Pity for himself mingled with his pity for her. What a queer mess they were in—poor things!—both of them. His mind, sick with self-analysis, self-scorn and self-defence, lurched, exhausted, on to a longing for her to comfort him, to show him, in loving him, that he was not base, only fatally pursued by life.

When she stepped down from the stand that had been put at the end of the room, she did not, as usual, come to his side to see the progress he had made. She went to the window, her hands clasped behind her, a rigidity in the lines of her slender, half-swathed arms. Maurice painted for a moment, then looked at her, added another touch, stared at his palette, laid it down, and joined her.

She did not turn her head to him, and suddenly he guessed that there were tears in her eyes. His own grew wet again with that mingled pity. Her hand fell to her side. He took it in his. Still she did not look at him. She stood waiting, anything but proud, and yet ready in all the humiliation of her helpless avowal, to flash suddenly into scorn and anger. The something of splendour in this attitude gave Maurice the final impetus. He was glad to yield at last to feeling alone, to almost irresistible feeling. It was as though he had stood for long on the shore waiting for the tide, and that its slow rising had culminated in this sudden wave that just lifted him off his feet. Really she was lovely; she was piteous; and she could console him for being forced to take her. His arm went round her; he turned her head gently, saw the tears, and kissed her.

“Oh, Maurice!” her lips breathed under his, “how I love you!”

“And I——“ he stammered. “Angela—it has been—you understood—you are so horribly rich, and I so horribly poor.” He wanted her to console him for the fact that had tarnished everything, and the longing was so great that he grasped at this falsification of all his hesitation. It was rapture to Angela. He was transfigured by the avowal; and her heart, sick for so long with doubt, seemed to expand like a storm-beaten flower in sunlight. She herself was transfigured; saw that the starved, straining self she had known was a lower self, distorted, difficult to read clearly; this happy self was real at last. His arms were around her. She would be noble, beneficent to all the world. All who came near her would be the happier for her happiness. How weak she really was—who so needed love to lean on!

“I understood—I hoped it was that,” she said in a trembling voice.

At a step outside they moved apart, yet not soon enough Maurice felt, but for the significance of the situation to be very obvious to Lord Glaston as he came briskly in.

If Lord Glaston had ever felt dismayed by his daughter’s vagary he had long outworn the feeling. He was an easy-going man, cynical and tolerant; he liked Maurice. Angela could suit herself. He now threw Maurice a bright “Hullo!” hesitated for a moment, and, as nothing was said, he sauntered into the room and looked at the portrait. “Capital, really capital, Wynne,” he asserted. “A little too thin and woe-begone, perhaps.”

Maurice’s mind was revolving like a kaleidoscope; the dominant thought was that he could not yet make it an open engagement. And Angela would understand that they must see one another again before admitting the world to their new knowledge. He longed to escape, to think. He made his farewells, smiled at Angela, and departed.

CHAPTER XV

FELICIA received the letter on that early spring morning, and after the weeks of anguish and humiliating fear felt, with all her despair, the exquisite relief of pity. When he had been so cruelly silent the worst part of her pain had been the seeing of him as cruel—perhaps faithless. Now, as Maurice had hoped, she saw him beaten down, vanquished by fate. She was buried, dead, but in the darkness were no more struggles with nightmares. She read his letter quietly and did not weep, and after her morning duties were done, she went out—walked in her garden, in the woods, back through the garden to the road that led downwards among the pines. It was easier, as she walked mechanically in the fresh, chill, radiant day to grow one with her hopelessness, to accept the fact that the coffin-lid was really screwed down; easier to accept and not to think. She was afraid of sitting still alone.

Her head bent, her eyes followed the line of young grass that bordered the little footpath. Above, the pine branches still sparkled with moisture, and a tiny stream, a braided radiance ran singing a clear, shrill note beside her. Her life would go on, creeping in its narrow limits, like the footpath, with its bordering of green, no doubt; she could not see it yet, but it would grow. The sanity of the simile, after that screwing down of the coffin-lid on dead hope, was part of its bitterness. A sorrow like this would kill all great hope, cripple one, yet leave a capacity for trivial, monotonous alleviations that meant nothing. Yet as she told herself that she must try to see the ironic and sane aspect of the case, the fact of the grass border, the fact that tragedy would not keep its tragic demeanour, must try to see even the deeper sanity of the fact that the daily fulfilling of duty might come to sing a song like that of the thread-like brook beside the path, her eyes were filling at last with tears, and they were slowly rolling down her cheeks as she looked up to find Geoffrey Daunt confronting her.

Geoffrey was as unexpected, as handsome, and, apparently, as composed as ever. Three former visits had given to the unexpected a certain happy familiarity. She had been glad to see him, and although, as she looked at him through tears, she could not say that she was glad to see him now, there was relief in the sight, almost comfort in the sense of momentary escape from the crushing weight of full realization.

She was too well sunken in sorrow to feel minor embarrassments, and while she held out her hand she wiped away her tears with no explanatory word or look.

“How nice to see you. Are you again at Aunt Kate’s?” she asked.

Geoffrey, with an openness neither inquisitive nor indifferent, watched her dry her tears. She felt that he would have wiped away his own with as quiet a candour—imagine Geoffrey Daunt in tears!—and have taken it for granted that no one would ask questions. She could count upon his reticence. Already there were bonds of understanding between them.

He hesitated, however, for a moment before saying, “No; I came down to see you. Have you time for me?—time for a walk, I mean?”

She said that she had come out for a walk, and that he could have all the time he wanted, wondering if her changed looks struck him too forcibly. She knew that during these past weeks she had come to look very ghostly. Perhaps his way of turning his eyes from her now was part of the reticence.

“Where is the view you spoke of when I first came?” he asked. “You have never showed it to me yet.”

She answered, “I am glad that you remember that there is a view. We can reach it more quickly by going through the pine woods.”

They entered the grave, scented silences.

Geoffrey had not seen her for a month, and, more than she could have guessed, he found her changed. It had been with a conscious steadying of his countenance that he met her tear-filled eyes, and now, as with bent head she walked beside him, he looked at her fragile profile.

She was horribly changed, and her smile had shocked him more than her tears; it had the alien sweetness of death. What sudden sorrow had come into her life? What had happened to her? The new wonder mingled with the old one, the wonder that had been with him for months and that now knew itself.

The longing to help her grief and to speak his own new knowledge was like a cry in him, but he did not speak as they walked upward through the solemn aisles. He felt as if he and Felicia, she with her sorrow, he with his wonderful knowledge, were walking in some sublime cathedral where in their mutual ignorance they were yet secretly near each other. In his hard, strong heart was a trembling sense of consecration.

Suddenly, from the dimness, they were out upon the open hill-top. Pale sunshine, an azure sky, swept them around. They were high above all the surrounding country. Beneath them were the blue-black pine-woods, slopes of pale dun and green, the shadow and sunlight of hill and valley, and all the delicate tracery of tree and earth still unveiled. Among the vague purples of the lower woods the roads ran like white ribbons. Here on the hill-top the wind blew steadily, sadly, in spite of all the gold and azure. Felicia’s long black scarf fluttered against it, and she put her hand to her hat, standing looking away to the horizon, a slender silhouette of black, almost forgetting her companion, conscious only of her aching bereavement. She turned at last to Geoffrey, and found from the almost dreamy intentness of his gaze that he had been as absorbed in her as she in her own sad consciousness.

“How ill you look,” he said.

“I have been rather fagged this winter; sad; some branches have been lopped off; do you remember?” She did not want to talk with any nearness of her sadness; to speak of it, except at arm’s length, would bring her to the verge of tears. She owned to it frankly, yet with a lightness that went like a bird, luring him from the nest where sadness was hidden; but, unfalteringly, with no reticence now, he went toward it.

“Do you know that I care, deeply, that you should be sad?”

“I know how kind you are,” she said, feeling herself at a loss before the difference in voice and look. “So much kinder,” she urged herself on to say, grasping at her old rallying attitude, “than I had ever suspected you of being. Do you know, I didn’t imagine when I first met you that you were very kind. But don’t bother about my sadness. It’s of no importance.”

Under his eyes her lightness was lamentably out of tune. She paused with the sense of graceless discord.

“You don’t at all know why I have come to-day, do you?” he said. A tremor was in his voice, his look; the tremor, not of weakness, but of intense strength nerving itself. His beautiful face against the clear spring sky was white. He was not appealing; she felt in a moment that he would never appeal; but all the Olympian had suddenly become human and humanly shaken in its strength.

In a flash of deep astonishment she knew why he had come, and in her startled, gazing eyes he read her recognition.

“You see—you see—what I have come to ask. Wait—don’t answer. I don’t want to ask you anything yet. I want to tell you that you have changed all my life. I don’t mean that I care less about the things I have cared for. I care more, only differently.

“From the first, I felt you, hardly knowing what it was; you made me feel things I had hardly believed in. I came back to you, hardly knowing why I came, and then knowing that I loved you. Wait; let me say all this: it’s like breathing after stifling to tell you. Yes, it’s like light and air; you mean that to me. If you were my wife I could make life great—for you—with you. It would be a new world with you beside me. Wait, don’t speak—I see that I hurt you. You don’t care about me—yet. Unless there is somebody else, you shall care. But I want you to see, and believe that whether you love me or not, I shall always be there. As long as I live I shall be there. You must always call upon me. You must always trust me.”

He had spoken quickly, yet with a steadiness that had pushed aside the protests of her wonder, her gratitude, her pain. And even in the pause where he drew the long breath of his full avowal, his eyes on hers held her to silence.

“Now, will you tell me where I stand with you?” he said.

“What can I say,” she faltered. “You are so beautiful to me; I see it all—I believe it all. I can only hurt you.”

His question flashed upon her faltering. “There is some one else?”

“I love some one else.”

Geoffrey did not speak, and a deep flush went over his face.

He had been prepared, she saw, for long and patient fighting; not for this abrupt defeat.

“What can I say?” she repeated. Tears sprang to her eyes. His suffering struck like a blow on her own suffering. Her own heart answered the inarticulate anguish that his must hold.

“Don’t let us say anything,” Geoffrey replied. “Let us walk on a little.”

The longing to comfort him struggled with the cruel necessity for further truth. To speak it now seemed brutal. She was thankful for the respite his silence gave her. They had not gone toward the pines, but down the long, bare slopes to a little wood where the sunlight flickered among young birches and the promise of green breathed through the white and gold.

“One gets one’s breath like this,” said Geoffrey. He had not looked at her while they walked. Now, as they paused in the heart of the woods, he bent his eyes upon her. She saw that he had got his breath only to pick up again a weapon. A hope, stern in its determination, hardly concealed itself.

“Don’t think me impertinent,” he said; “you understand that one must grasp at anything. This some one; you are engaged to him?”

The world, with the question, reeled suddenly to Felicia. She was alone. She must say that she was alone. But at the clear seeing of her despair—the seeing of it stripped to him—her self-control gave way.

She leaned against a tree, hiding her face in her arm, and broke into helpless sobs. “I am not engaged,” she said.

“Ah!—then——,” She heard Geoffrey’s voice near her, above her, a voice whose compassion did not conceal a bird-of-prey quality—soaring, noble, yet seeing from afar a triumph.

That he should think her free because she was alone hurt her for him. She must shoot down that soaring hope.

And when she had said swiftly, on in-drawn breaths, “The some one is Maurice—we cannot marry—we love each other,” the silence near her was, indeed, like a slow throbbing to death.

She went on, monotonously, still with her hidden face: “Last autumn when he was here, we became engaged. It was a secret. He was too poor, and I have nothing. This morning I heard from him. He says that he is hopeless. He sets me free.” Her sobbing shook her again, and again the thought of what Geoffrey’s suffering must be smote too unendurably upon her own wound. “Forgive me—I am selfish. But to have you ask me that—this morning. I had hardly known what I felt until you asked me. And I feel as if it must kill me. I cannot bear it. I cannot!”

From her head, leaning against the tree, Geoffrey looked around at the sunlit wood. Her strength had broken to emotion. The disintegrating emotion that he had felt was rapidly solidifying into strength again. And, oddly enough, after hearing who the some one was; above all, after hearing—sharp on its indrawn breath—that “We love each other,” not a flutter of hope remained in him. The sincerity of her young, despairing passion put insurmountable barriers between them. He was able, so shut away from her, to think clearly of Maurice; Maurice’s situation—verging on the desperate as he well knew;—of Felicia; of their love for each other; not consciously crushing back the thought of his own disaster, but feeling it, under the thought for her, like the sea’s deep moan in caverns, far beneath the ground where he must tread firmly.

Felicia wept on: “If I could only see him!—it’s been so long. If I could only appeal to him!—I know—I know it’s for my sake; but if only I could make him see that I would rather starve with him than go on without him.”

Geoffrey looked back at her. Her hat and arm hid her face. The stillness of her attitude strangely contrasted with the shaken, passionate protest of her words.

A strand of her hair had caught in the bark of the birch tree. Geoffrey observed the shining loop for a moment while he thought. His love as well as his Olympian quality was being rapidly humanized. He felt now in her the weakness, the selfish recklessness of youthful love. Something illusory in his own adoration made it already seem far away. Yet it was hardly that he adored her less, but that he loved more nearly and with a new understanding of the child in her, the childishness that made her in her ignorance, her passion, dearer to him than when he had seen in her only splendid truth and courage.

Half automatically, seeing that she would hurt herself, he released the strand of shining hair, so gently that she did not feel the touch.

“That is pure fairy-tale, you know,” he said. “People can’t marry on only the prospect of starvation. How could Maurice have spoken with only that prospect to offer? I am not blaming him. I only want to understand.”

“We fell in love. How could he help speaking? To look was enough. We must have known that we adored each other. Oh, my poor Maurice! my darling Maurice! What he has suffered, too, I know—it is part of my own suffering—it aches and aches in me. But I would far rather suffer and die of suffering than not have known—not have had him tell me. At least now I have the memory. I know that we once were happy.”

Geoffrey did not wince. He was glad to feel her trust in her loss of all reserve; but, with his new insight, he felt in it, too, the helpless abandonment of a nervous break-down. She leaned against the tree exhausted, hardly able to stand but for the support.

“Sit down here,” he said, indicating a fallen tree-trunk, a felled and prostrate oak-tree whose shade had made the clearing where they stood. “All this has been too much for you. You are ill. I can see it.”

She obeyed him blindly, stumbling to the seat, her hand before her face.

He sat down beside her and, his hands clasped as he leaned forward, his arms upon his knees, he stared at the ground.

The distant fluting of a bird, reiterating with delicate precision its little loop of clear, soft notes, the urgent rhythm of a brook, joyous, melancholy, a shiver of bells in loneliness, were the only sounds. Felicia dried her eyes and raised her head.

How fresh and keen and hopeless all memory became in the midst of that young renewal. Her longing was like a sword in her heart. To see Maurice! If only she could see him! If only it were Maurice beside her. Like yesterday, it seemed, that distant autumn evening; the dim flowers, the sad sunset, and Maurice’s sad face.

The thought of the helpless longing near her, the useless love, brought a sudden self-reproach; it mastered the torment of recollection.

“See,” she said, in a shaken but different voice, “the snowdrops; they are all out.”

Geoffrey smiled. “I hadn’t noticed them.” He watched her as she stooped to pick the fragile white and green from the wet, black ground.

Her lovely, blighted face, pallid, wasted, looked among all the golden shimmer of the woods like death in the midst of life. A horrible fear went through him as she sat there, putting the snowdrops together, stem by stem. He had discovered his own former ignorance of life, of what feeling did to one. Could people die of disappointed love? With all his cynical knowledge of the world he found himself here, face to face with this broken-hearted love, a mere frightened boy, as ignorant as any boy of the life of feeling he had entered, groping, perplexed and astonished in his fear and adoration. Yet his man’s training availed him. He could have cast himself upon his knees, imploring her to live, to love him; at all events not to torture him by suffering; but above this immature aspect of his new self he kept all his air of resolute calm.

She had made a little nosegay of her flowers, winding a long grass around their stems, and now, turning to him, faintly smiling, she held them to him. “Will you have them?”

For a moment he held the hand and bent his head over it and the snowdrops. She felt the kiss among the flowers.

“I shall always think of you when I see them,” she said, looking away from him. “And you, when you remember to-day, don’t let it be a memory only of sadness; but of my gratitude—my wondering gratitude.” She paused, and as he made no reply, added gently, “I never dreamed you cared for me.”

“It came slowly—the knowledge that without you the world would be empty,” said Geoffrey.

“And is it empty now?”

“Oh, no,” he answered, raising his eyes to her; “you are here.”

Tremulously, afraid of hurting him, yet the longing to find comfort for him—for herself—urging her, she asked, “But does loving me—knowing how deeply you have made me care for you—does that keep the pain from being too great?”

Geoffrey again had his half smile. “Ah, if I don’t talk about it, you mustn’t think it’s not great. It would be less, too, if you were not so miserable.”

“Do you mean that if I were happy—married to Maurice—you would be happier too?”

Geoffrey, looking away from her, did not speak for some moments. Her question hardly required an answer. It was of its further suggestions he was thinking.

“Do you think that Maurice would make you happy?” he asked.

“I wouldn’t care. The word would mean such different things. Unhappiness with him would be happiness.”

“You love him—you are sure—so much?”

“You know; you must see.” She leaned her face into her palms, not weeping, with a weariness too deep for tears, and again her tragic sincerity made her seem far from him.

“You must have courage,” said Geoffrey, after a little while. He had taken out his pocket-book and laid the snowdrops neatly away within it. “You are both young. Maurice has talent.”

“Ah; how can I have courage if he has none? See how that embitters it all, even though I know that it is the truest courage in him to set me free. How can I hope when he tells me not to? For months I have had courage; for months I have hoped. Day after day when I woke I said to myself, ‘He will come to-day; he must come to-day!’ How I waited—how I hoped. And then came the time when the letters stopped. I don’t know how I lived. But now, in looking back, it all seems rapture; the time when I could wait—and could hope.”

Her long sighing breaths shook Geoffrey more than her sobbing.

“Ah! don’t suffer so!” he pleaded.

“But I want to suffer,” said Felicia. “The time will come when I won’t mind. Haven’t you that fear—the worst of all—that even the suffering will go? One does outlive everything one cares about. After a time there is only a dim regret. Life is so shrunken, that one can hardly remember larger hopes.”

“No, no,” said Geoffrey, as she raised her face; “you don’t really believe that. Perhaps you will suffer less, but it won’t be because you’ve grown littler. Things must come to you. You will keep things. And,” he went on, smiling, and seeing an answering smile, sad, infinitely touched, dawn on her weary face, “you have your feeling for beauty to help you; you read poetry. You play so wonderfully. You see snowdrops.”

Her eyes were on him while he spoke, while he smiled at her. She had a sense, startled, almost reverent, of losing herself in the contemplation of his beauty. Her mind, racked to a languor, could not clearly see the difference between her own passionately rebellious grief, self-centred in its longing for lost happiness, and his sorrow that over its slain hope knew a selfless suffering; but with the humility of dim recognitions came a dim peace. Her soul, like a storm-beaten ship, seemed entering a still harbour at evening.

“How you think of me. How dear you are,” she said softly. She had that image of torn, drooping sails; of a deep, safe sea; quiet, encircling shores, and the evening star. “You make me ashamed. I have thought only of showing you my own unhappiness. I see you—really see you—for the first time.”

She leaned toward him, and Geoffrey, in all the dreamy contemplation of her face, saw a yearning impulse to comfort, to atone, that looked a kiss, even guessed that in a moment she would kiss him; he had only to let that inner, sobbing self glance mutely from his eyes.

He rose, flushing a little. “Thanks,” he said; “you won’t forget me, I know.”

She understood the abruptness; it awoke her to a sense of the greater pain her unconsciousness might have given. Saying that now she must go home, she, too, rose.

Her thoughts, as she walked beside him, were grey, vague, peaceful like an evening mist. All was dim; but the harbour was about her. The tattered sails could sleep.

They left the woods near Felicia’s garden wall.

“And now I go back to those scuffles that don’t interest you,” said Geoffrey.

“But they do now, because of you.”

“I may come again? I shall never trouble you—you know.”

“Come whenever you can. I care so much, so much for you. I trust you so utterly. You are my dear friend.”

Her face, looking up at him, had the patient sweetness of a dead face. He could not free his thoughts from that haunting fear of death, of a world empty without her. And over the fear and pain of his broken heart was the rising, resolute will that, whatever his sufferings, hers must be helped. And helped soon.

He had shrunken from her kiss. Now, as if in pledge of his resolve, taking her head between his hands, he stooped to her and kissed her on the forehead.

Felicia, standing still, watched him walk rapidly down the hill. When the turn in the road had taken him from sight, she went slowly into the garden and leaned on the gate, as she had done for so many years in moods of happy or of weary idleness, through child and girlhood; in parting; in waiting; or in dreams as now. But this was so new a dreaming, that from it all her life, yes, even the recent life of anguish, seemed to fall into a long past.

Geoffrey’s kiss, Maurice’s desolate, farewell face, were both far away. Only a softly breathing self, bereft of a past, ignorant of a future, stood in a strange place where sight, sound, even sadness, were veiled in sleep.

CHAPTER XVI

GEOFFREY, on getting back to London, wired to Maurice that he must see him at once, and at about nine Maurice appeared in his rooms. It was a Saturday night, and Geoffrey was free.

Maurice had passed an afternoon of most acute depression. He had accepted the finality of his position, even accepted the fact that Angela was going to be very dear to him; but now, after months of vagueness, Felicia’s figure had again become vivid. He was pursued by the thought of her. What cruel tricks one’s brain played upon one, and how little one could count upon the permanence of any mood. The dream-like, half-forgotten Felicia had been a mood, then; but this starting to life again of keenest memory might be more than another flicker of feeling; might, perhaps, show something permanent; and in such permanence what pain! Maurice had found, so far, that his experiences of life fell soon into pictures; his own ego seemed untouched by them once it had moulded them into aesthetic forms. Sometimes to himself he seemed a mere capacity for feeling and knowing, that passed through the symbols of life and kept nothing from the transit. While he was in the seeming reality no one could feel more keenly or apprehend more surely and delicately, but the self that had felt and known became as illusory as the rest when the experience was over. He had believed that he had passed through such an experience in his love affair with Felicia; an experience brief and beautiful that, for her as well as for him, would make a sad, sweet memory, a picture that he could turn and look at without pain; a memory, after all, how far more precious than the ugly crudities that life together would probably have forced upon them. But for once his theories failed him. This experience would not arrange itself into a picture; it horribly started into life, smiled, appealed, made him agonizingly one with the life he had broken with. He saw in his conduct the stringent law of necessity—in Maurice’s philosophy all past fact became necessity—and not self-reproach so much as helpless longing tormented him.

There was relief in the sight of Geoffrey; in his severe practical room, with its rows of books, its piles of pamphlets and papers, its incongruous yet, in ultimate effect, sober, decorations of old racing and hunting prints, a mezzotint or two, some odd little landscapes from his boyhood’s home, sentimental rigid water-colours by grandmothers and great-grandmothers.

Maurice was feeling life so black and difficult that the air of sanity and composure, Geoffrey’s quiet glance and the undemonstrative nod with which he greeted him, looking up from some papers as he sat at his spacious and orderly writing table, steadied his nerves and made things seem at once more normal and more superficial. After all, to be normal, to live at all, one must keep on the surface, Maurice reflected. There lay Geoffrey’s strength.

“Sit down, Maurice,” said Geoffrey; “I want a talk with you.” He still held his papers, to which his eyes returned, and while he sorted them into several drawers, Maurice was more than ever inclined to feel that he had been feeble in giving way to such despondency. Things did adjust themselves. He would no doubt find sweetness in life again.

He wondered if he should speak of his engagement to Angela; it really was hardly less. Maurice had felt that their new relation must be kept secret, for a month or two at all events, for what could Felicia think if its announcement followed at once his despairing letter of renouncement, not of indifference, to her? But Geoffrey would keep secrets—though he would not understand his necessity for secrecy—how he should explain the necessity to Angela was already a perplexing question; and when Geoffrey’s matter was over, he might as well tell him that the culminating romance had at last been achieved.

The papers were arranged. Geoffrey locked a drawer, rose, and going to the fireplace, stood there facing his friend. Maurice had just decided that Angela herself could easily be drawn to a desire for secrecy; he could take for granted her shrinking from the world’s prying eyes; her love of the sweet intimacy and mystery their knowledge of each other surrounded by ignorance would give. In this more easy frame of mind he leaned back in his chair, clasped his hands above his head, and looked up at Geoffrey with an alertness partly affected, but also a relief. Anything that took him out of himself was a relief.

“Maurice,” Geoffrey said deliberately, “I went to see Felicia Merrick this morning.”

Maurice at once changed colour; he said nothing; he did not move; but his gaze became a stare. Geoffrey, noting these indications of emotion, and turning his eyes from them for a moment, went on. “I have seen her several times this winter; I have gone down for the purpose of seeing her. This morning I went to ask her to marry me.”

Maurice was aware, even in the instant of tumultuous sensation, that he ought to feel relief at this announcement as at a solving of all the strained situation; a healing irony for the swift resolving of the sad-sweet love-story into purest commonplace, might follow such relief; but, instead, his resentment and dismay were so overwhelming that he could almost have burst into tears. Geoffrey to marry Felicia—his Felicia? He could say nothing, and his face took on a rigid look of suspense.

“I had not seen her for over a month. I was shocked when I saw her.” Geoffrey allowed another slight pause to intervene between his sentences. “She is terribly changed. She looks to me as though she would not live; but that, no doubt, is a temporary result of what she has suffered. She told me, Maurice, that she could not marry me, and that she loved you.”

Maurice was white to the lips. In the light of Felicia’s faith his own faithlessness, seen suddenly in all its craven ugliness, stopped the beating of his heart.

“She said that you loved her, and could not marry her, and had set her free. Do you love her?” Geoffrey asked.

“My God!” Maurice exclaimed, still staring at his friend. Suddenly turning aside, he cast his arms upon the table, bent his head upon them, and burst into loud weeping.

Geoffrey looked at him for some minutes, then, turning away, he gazed down into the fire. He steadily saw a mean desire, the only foothold his hope had clung to, that Maurice’s attitude would show some obvious unworthiness, some triviality, a surprised and kindly consternation that would make of Felicia’s love a misplaced, girlish dream. He now seemed to watch that desire shrivelling in the flames, Maurice, too, suffered. There was simply no more hope.

Presently in choked tones Maurice spoke: “I adore her; I have from the beginning. Don’t you remember?” Through his grief the resentment showed itself.

“Yes, I do. At the time I thought it was unimportant. Later on, even had I not forgotten it, I should have thought it unimportant. You never spoke of it again. And had she been as indifferent to you as I thought, our friendship, yours and mine, Maurice, wouldn’t have stood for a moment between my wishes and her.” Before this firmness Maurice’s resentment, convicted of helpless folly, resolved itself into sobs again.

“You adore her, and you give her up?” Geoffrey asked.

“What can I do? Why do you ask? I am up to my neck in debt. I am worse than penniless. How could I let her hope on? How can I ask her to marry me?”

“Why did you ask her?”

“Don’t turn the knife in the wound, Geoffrey. Don’t be ungenerous. I was a fool, a weak, cruel fool, no doubt; but I loved her, and I couldn’t help myself. I hoped that something might turn up.”

“Why don’t you still hope?”

“I can’t, in the face of facts. I am unfit to earn my own living—far more hers. The only atonement I could make for my cruelty to her was to be crueller to myself, to set her free. You say that she is changed? Looks terribly——?”

Maurice had raised his head now, and with his arms still cast out upon the table, turned haggard eyes upon his friend.

“She looks terribly ill.”

“And she sticks to me, the little darling!”

“She certainly stuck to you,” said Geoffrey, still looking down into the fire. He had almost a half laugh as he presently added, “You surely would not have expected her not to! No, Maurice; you wouldn’t be here this evening if I had seen any hope of her not sticking.”

For any further meaning in these words as to his presence Maurice had no ear; they too disagreeably emphasized that sense of contrast with which his sorrowing mind was occupied. They made him involuntarily droop his head as he sat shifting the pens and ink-pot. The thought of Angela went with a shuddering sickness through him. In this silence came Geoffrey’s voice again, its mocking quality gone. Gravely now he said, “Maurice, do you want to marry her?”

At this Maurice started to his feet. “What are you talking towards, Geoffrey? Why did you ask me to come here? You love her yourself. Tell me the truth—do you hope to marry her?”

“I told you that I wouldn’t have asked you to come if I’d had any hope.”

“To marry her I’d sacrifice anything and everything,” said Maurice, altogether believing in what he said. At last he seemed to have seized hold of a real self. He and Felicia; all the rest was a dream.

Geoffrey still looked in the fire. He spoke musingly, with obviously no consciousness of superiority in his claim.

“To make her happy I would sacrifice a great deal. Maurice,” he said; “I will help you to marry her. That is the only way in which I can make her happy.”

Maurice stood stricken with stupor. His delicate skin turned from red to white. “Geoffrey,” he gasped.

“Will you make her happy?” asked Geoffrey, now turning his eyes upon him and looking at him steadily. A steadiness as great and, it seemed, as sincere, leaped to meet it in the other man’s responsive soul.

“Before God I will,” he said.

In silence Geoffrey took his head and shook it. He went back to the table and sat down at it again. “I can pay off your debts—I have made some lucky hits lately on the Stock Exchange, and I can raise some money on my property—its value has gone up a good deal in the last years. Out of my income we can set aside enough to help support you and your wife; what you have now, once it’s free, will do the rest, and her father no doubt can allow her something. If you are ever able with ease, to pay me back, well and good; but don’t bother over it. I shall get on well enough on my official salary and the rest of my income. And I am always lucky with my speculations; I shan’t be pinched.”

“Do you mean it, Geoffrey?” All that was best in Maurice rose in the solemn gratitude, the boyish, loving wonder of the question.

With this possibility breaking in a sudden dawn upon him the half-passionate, half-frivolous, half-tempted and half-unwilling dallying of the past months lost its dubious enchantment. It was the difference between Angela’s boudoir and a country meadow in spring. Freed from its pain, the thought of Felicia swept over him like music, Felicia, who not only seemed to embody the dew and the earliest lark and all things sweet and young, but Felicia, who called out all that was really best in him—his courage, his manliness, his willingness to face risks, Felicia so human, so dear, so understanding. Angela seemed an orchid, touched with drooping and promising no perfume, with her faded spiritual poses, her conscious spontaneity, her looking-glass idealism. He saw Angela as she was, with not even the glamour of her pathos to veil her.

Geoffrey had answered with an “Of course I mean it,” while Maurice’s mind whirled with the ecstatic contrast. “But how—how can I accept all this from you, Geoffrey?” he said at last; “it is splendid of you; it’s a magnificent thing to do. You are radiant and I am dingy. How can I accept it?”

“As I do it, my dear Maurice; and without any splendour on either side—for her sake.”

“And not for mine a bit, dear old boy?” Maurice asked with a half-sad, half-whimsical smile.

“Perhaps a little for you. If I didn’t care for you, didn’t think you worth her caring for, I wouldn’t do it; but that would probably be for her sake again. Candidly, I don’t feel for you much just now, or think much of you, except in your relation to her happiness. You understand that, of course, in another lover.”

“But it’s in another lover that I can hardly think of any of it. It is that that stupefies me. And in you, Geoffrey! You are the last man I should have thought capable of such self-immolating idealism.”

“It’s the best thing I can do for myself, isn’t it?” said Geoffrey, with, again, his smile that made light of high motives. “I wouldn’t do it if I had any hope of winning her from you. It is only natural that I would rather have her happy than miserable.”

“But, dearest Geoffrey”—the tears again rose to Maurice’s eyes as the wretchedness of a further possibility smote even his joy—“how can you tell that—with time—you couldn’t have hoped? People do outgrow their griefs; I might have flopped down to some second-best thing—she would have seen that I wasn’t really worthy—and have recognized that you were.” That it was, apart from Felicia’s future attitude, a fact already, not a mere possibility, came as a truth to Maurice with his own words. He saw Geoffrey sacrificing that possible future to an illusion; for he, Maurice, was unworthy, if he had told Geoffrey of Angela—ignoring, as he would have done, the love affair with Felicia—this happiness would never have come to him. By a chance that was half a cheat he had gained it, and a sob again rose in his throat, breaking his voice.

Geoffrey had winced at the words; he himself had thought of that future possibility. He answered Maurice’s inner fear and his own inner regret with a brief “She might die before she outgrew it.”

The fact soothed Maurice’s qualms. “Dear, dear old Geoffrey,” he said brokenly. “How we will both love you. It won’t hurt you, I hope, to see a lot of us.”

“I’m not such fragile material. I hope to see a great deal of you. But, one thing more, Maurice, she must never know about this; it’s between you and me. I lend you the money, let us say; she need only think it a lucky speculation, a legacy—what you will. Her father will expect nothing definite from an uncertain genius like you. I’ve thought about it, and this seems definitely best to me. There must be no bitterness in her cup.” He put his hand on Maurice’s shoulder as the young man stood beside him: “Come early to-morrow morning, and we will talk over details. And, Maurice, the sooner you go to her the better.”

CHAPTER XVII

AND Angela? This was Maurice’s first waking thought. In the bewildered joy and gratitude of the night before he had put Angela aside with the thankful reflection that Lord Glaston’s opportune entrance had saved him from actually proposing or actually being accepted. In this fact lay his escape—and hers. But with the day Angela’s personality unpleasantly reasserted its claim. His pity could but turn from Felicia, who no longer needed it, to Angela, an even greater pity, since the humiliation of her position was incomparably greater than Felicia’s had been. Indeed, for Felicia there had been no real humiliation; she had always had his heart, and only his poverty had prevented him from claiming her; but the unhappy Angela had been more wooer than wooed and he must leave her from motives infinitely more heart-rending to her than those of material necessity. What he should say to her was the thought that now harassed him; how tell her that for all his dallying he did not intend to marry her? How tell her that, when, in reality, he had intended marrying her, and she must have felt that he so intended? Above all, how was he to add that he was going to marry the woman he had loved since first seeing her? It was with a sickness of pity that he asked himself these questions. His cheek burned when he thought of the figure he would cut in Angela’s eyes, for she would see too clearly that if he loved Felicia he had behaved outrageously, only yesterday, to herself, in kissing her, accepting her avowal.

By the time that he went to Geoffrey’s he had decided in a definite recoil from the pain and humiliation—for both of them—that he simply could not see Angela. He was, in reality, going to jilt her, and he must not see her face to face when she learned the fact—this despite an undefined resolution at the back of his mind that she must not know that he had jilted her. She must be spared as much as possible.

He clung now to the thought of her idealism and magnanimity; they had never been very convincing qualities to him before, but he found himself insisting upon them now; they would surely shield him from too much scorn; she would understand and forgive. But what was she to understand?

The hour with Geoffrey was like a poultice on his wound—so mild and unemphatic was it. He left it with his prostrate fortunes set upon their feet, and the assurance of a very small but secure income irradiating the future. He suspected that Geoffrey’s future, in consequence, had become uncertain, but under the circumstances submission only was open to him; besides, the Government was securely seated in the saddle; there was no danger of Geoffrey’s losing office.

When Maurice was on the point of leaving—he had been slightly ill at ease during the interview, and Geoffrey’s calm perhaps a little forced—the latter said, detaining him with a hand on his arm, “I wrote to her last night. I wanted to make things easy for all of us. Here is the copy.”

Maurice, flushing deeply, read—

“I’ll go at once,” Maurice murmured, tears in his eyes. “My dear old Geoff.”

“You mustn’t make me ridiculous by your gratitude,” said Geoffrey. “And, my dear Maurice, I’m not altogether selfish. Your happiness does make me happy.” He looked at him as he spoke with the boyish, older-brother look of affection that Maurice knew so well.

But before he could go he must write to Angela. Yes, there was the wound opening again as he drove away from Geoffrey’s, and on reaching his rooms he found himself confronted by an envelope, a familiar, small, pale grey envelope, addressed in a familiar hand—Angela’s oddly large and demonstrative hand, that seemed to flourish banners of welcome or appeal. Maurice looked at it as though it had been a viper coiled on his mantelpiece. Its contents must, however, point out some decisive attitude for him; he must bear the venom. He tore it open and read, while a faint fragrance, like a sigh, rose from the delicate sheet—

Maurice stood stonily while reading this, and for some moments after its quick perusal. Then he rang for a district messenger—for even in the extremity of his difficulties, Maurice found these luxuries necessities, and sat down to his loathsome task. In his blinding self-disgust, his mind confused with pity for her and for himself, he almost wished that Geoffrey had not been so generous nor Felicia so loveable, so loving.

He took up the pen, feeling that no further delay was possible; at all events he would not see her face; and—

“My dear Angela,” he wrote; then, hesitating, thinking of the pathetic trust of her “dearest,” tore the sheet across, took another and began again with—

“Dearest Angela, I cannot come to-night. I am sure of your sympathy and comprehension in all things, and I must show what I feel for you by my utter frankness with you. I am going to marry Felicia Merrick.” Maurice paused when he had written this, and the vision of yesterday morning—Angela’s tears, the kiss, the embrace—surged over him. “I did not know this yesterday,” he went on, writing rapidly. “We must forget yesterday. You remember last autumn, at Trensome Hall, how immensely she fascinated me. You know, alas! since you have watched my weaknesses for so many years, my miserable impressionability. I find that I took my irresponsible love-making more lightly than she did. I find that where I thought I was behaving frivolously I was behaving abominably. She doesn’t take things lightly; she is a dear, simple little girl, and half serious trifling is not to her what it is to us.”

Maurice’s forehead burned as he wrote this. He was still thinking of Angela. She, though not a “dear, simple little girl,” did not take things lightly either, transcending the worldly, the frivolous standard by knowledge, not by ignorance; he knew that, and she knew that he knew it. But she would accept the escape his dexterity offered her, would see at once that in such acceptance lay the only escape from humiliation; and that all she could do was to own that she, unlike Felicia, had known half-serious trifling at its own worth and had known that Maurice was incapable of more than momentary seriousness. But having so smoothed her way—and at Felicia’s expense—stabbed Maurice with an intolerable sense of baseness. He stared for some moments at the page, then took it, again to tear it. At the same moment he heard the messenger’s ring. The sound brought cold reason once more to the surface. After all, Angela was the real sufferer. He laid down the sheet and thought. What could he say? Would it be even true brutally to tell her that he had loved Felicia all this time? Wasn’t what he had said really truer than that? Had not Felicia’s dear image grown dim? Was it not Felicia’s feeling (darling Felicia!) that took him from Angela? Did he not, after all, accept dependence and poverty for Felicia’s sake? Yes, it was ugly to think it, and only true on the surface, but if one went below the surface, where indeed in life was any truth to be found? He must face the ugliness of his own situation; and if in it he himself were ugly, it was the situation that had rubbed off on him. When one was in a sooty atmosphere one couldn’t escape smudges. By degrees the deeper truth would come to Angela; she would feel that his greatest love was, had always been, for Felicia; but the realization would come quietly, endurably; not in a hideous shock of awakening. And, for Felicia’s sake, he would be brutal enough, yes, he would—to intimate this even now.

He took up his pen and went on doggedly, though his hand trembled. “You must know that I should have allowed myself to be altogether serious had she not been penniless, and I, a sorry beggar. But in looking back it is difficult to see what one would have felt in different circumstances; I judged her from my own trivial standard and did not know her capable of a strength and gravity of feeling before which I am abashed. It is Geoffrey who has revealed the truth to me, and Geoffrey who has removed the obstacle of poverty that stood between us. Geoffrey has been wonderful. He loves her, and has made her happiness his object, and I am necessary to her happiness—perhaps to her very life. Geoffrey tells me that she seems to him almost dying. I never dreamed she cared so much. I am ashamed, bitterly ashamed, I am cured of triviality for ever.

“Dear friend, you will read between these lines, and, with all your goodness and understanding, feel for me, and know my sincerity when I call myself

“Ever your devoted friend,
“M. Wynne.

“PS.—Your sympathy for my hateful position will make you, I know, at once destroy this record of it.”

Five hours afterwards he was walking up the hill that led to Felicia. The journey had been a lethargy, and now, under the sweet spring sky, he felt his spirits rise at every stride. He paused, with an almost tremulous smile, at that turning in the lane where first they had met. How he had hungered for a sight of her in all these months of parting; he realized that now. After all, he could claim a little heroism for the self-control that had kept him from her. Smudges and heroism!—how oddly things got mixed in life! But smudges must be resolutely forgotten; he would live them down; he had already lived them down in the very determination never again to get smudged. In this environment that spoke only of Felicia, the thought of Angela was far away. When it drew near he turned from it with impatience—almost with resentment.

In Felicia’s garden the trees showed a frail web of green against the sky. A slender almond tree, in bloom, looked to Maurice like a little angel at the gates of Paradise. Life had exquisite, atoning moments; the joy of this one in its poignancy seized his throat in a choking sob so that he could scarcely breathe, and there was pain in the rapture.

The maid told him that Miss Merrick was in the sitting-room. Maurice pushed before her and entered, closing the door behind him.

Felicia sat near the window. She had changed terribly; yet she was more beautiful than ever. He understood her look of blankness; the greatness of her emotion drew all expression from her face.

A wave of adoration swept over him, and with it the thought of smudges, of his unworthiness, of her love and suffering struck through him, shattering his baser self. He stumbled forward and fell at her knees.

They were together, and for her—for him—the past was forgotten. Yet as Felicia leaned to him, happy with a gladness too deep for tears or smiles, dimly there drifted over her that sense of a dream, and in it, like a vivid start that comes in sleep, the thought of Geoffrey. It hurt her, and, again like the striving in a dream to recall, to grasp at, a meaning that sinks from us, she felt, dimly, for the hurt; was it for him?—for herself? The love in Maurice’s eyes drew her from dreams; yet in clasping him, loving him, she seemed to clasp and love some other cherished being; as a mother, holding her living child, feels in her heart an aching, shrouded love for the child that died before it breathed.