MRS. CUTHBERT MERRICK looked about the little room with a scrutiny cautious and acute. Almost a year had passed since Felicia’s marriage, but the summer and winter had been a prolonged honeymoon abroad, and the young couple were only just installed in their new home. This was a small, high flat in Chelsea, overlooking the river, and the smallness of the flat, its height, and the rather sullen aspect of the farther shore it overlooked satisfied Mrs. Merrick of a very limited income. Mr. Wynne’s income seemed wrapped in a Bohemian mystery; but the drawing-room offended her, as Felicia’s garden had done. She could sympathize with a limited income, but to forgive the graceful ease derived from it was, once more, a difficult task, so difficult that Mrs. Merrick felt shrewd suspicions as to extravagance. An interior, fresh and spotless as a white sea-shell, the austere suavity of eighteenth-century furniture, old prints and old porcelain, were perhaps Bohemian, but they were not economical. The drawing-room was crowded with people too, and a further offence lay in the fact that Mrs. Merrick surmised in the crowd a latent distinction. There was only a dubious consolation in the dowdiness of some of Felicia’s guests; Mrs. Merrick knew that duchesses had disconcerting capacities for dowdiness; but at all events, with one or two exceptions, the crowd could hardly be called “smart.” It was a word holding for Mrs. Merrick a significance at once distressing and alluring, and she ate her sandwich with more gratification after deciding that it did not apply here.

Familiarity entered in the person of Geoffrey Daunt, who, after a pause beside Maurice, made his way directly to Felicia’s tea-table, and Mrs. Merrick was glad to see that Felicia had at all events the good grace to flush slightly as she greeted him. That Felicia had in all probability been indifferent to this brilliant match was as much of an affront as her furniture. Mrs. Merrick’s brain had bubbled with conjecture during those winter visits; she had found herself regarding Felicia with almost a sense of awe, and springs of eager affection had sprung up to welcome Geoffrey Daunt’s potential bride. A certain contempt had replaced the awe; only sheer love-sickness could have led to a refusal; a refusal perhaps to be regretted when love-sickness wore off and reality grew plain again; yet Mrs. Merrick felt herself at a disadvantage before the bewildering indifference. At all events Felicia did flush.

Shortly following Geoffrey, Lady Angela came, with her soft unobtrusiveness that yet drew all eyes upon her, and, almost over-setting her tea-cup in her eagerness to greet and claim her friend, Mrs. Merrick sprang to meet her.

“Yes, this is my first sight of them. Isn’t it very charming, very exquisite?” said Angela, looking vaguely about her. She had not flushed in greeting Maurice; a smile, a clasp of the hand, and she had glided past him. “Are they not a most fortunate young couple? I am so thankful to have my dear Maurice so happily settled. His roving irresolutions were a pain to me. Ah! Geoffrey is here already, I see. I had hoped, in coming late, to find them alone; people are going. Are you for long in London, dear Mrs. Merrick? Will you come and see me soon?” She detached herself suavely, and Mrs. Merrick was presently joined by a dull country neighbour who pinned her in a corner with tiresome church talk.

People were going—only a group remained about Maurice at the other end of the room, and in the midst of farewells to them, Geoffrey and Felicia’s first meeting since her marriage took place as episodically as the departure of the least significant of guests. He was rather glad that it should be so bulwarked by conventionality. He stood beside her and watched her in her new character of wife and hostess. She was both very girlishly; indeed she was little changed, though changed from the death-like Felicia of the walk that seemed so long ago. She was the girl he had first known, her face expressing only with more emphasis both its old gaiety and a deeper gravity. She was the same, emphasized rather than changed, and that her old air of easy indolence was touched now, as she smiled and talked, and shook hands, by a little awkwardness and abruptness was due, Geoffrey guessed, to her wish to have people gone, really to see and speak to him.

When Angela, among departing guests, appeared, Felicia had another, a deeper flush.

“Is this your first meeting, too?” asked Angela, looking from Geoffrey to Felicia, as she held the latter’s hand. “Geoffrey has become a greater man than ever while you have been away, Mrs. Wynne; but you are no doubt au courant of all his news?”

“Yes; he kept us posted,” said Felicia. She and Geoffrey had written regularly and a little perfunctorily, letters of pleasant friendliness, making no allusion to depths.

“He hasn’t kept me posted,” said Angela, taking a chair beside Felicia, and leaning forward over her tea-cup, her arm on her knee, in an attitude habitual with her—an attitude at once sibylline and saint-like. “I have seen so little of you, Geoffrey—only heard of you. How are you?”

“All right. And you?”

“Wearing out my scabbard,” she said with a fatigue that made no attempt at lightness. “That is the fate of all of us who dedicate our lives to anything, isn’t it? It does one good to see these young people, doesn’t it, Geoffrey? Life smiles on them, doesn’t it? It does one good,” she repeated, while her eyes went from him to Felicia.Angela always bored her cousin; to-day she irritated him, especially when she took a chair and the sibylline attitude. His talk with Felicia was obviously and indefinitely postponed. If not the irritation, the boredom, at all events, showed itself in his “To be with people who aren’t wearing out their scabbards.”

“Yes,”—Angela did not look up from her tea-cup—“people who have in their lives what one longs to put into everybody’s life.”

“You mean that we are dedicated merely to happiness?” Felicia smiled, a little disturbed, as she remembered she had long ago been, by Geoffrey’s manner of mild ridicule.

“No, no; only that it has dedicated itself to you. You must let me come often and look at you. You must let an old friendship like mine and Maurice’s be included in the new relationship. I am included, am I not? just as Geoffrey, I feel sure, is. You, too, must think of me as an old friend, Mrs. Wynne. You must make use of me if there are any things you want to do, any people you want to meet. You must let me help you in your quest. I can hand on to you a good many of the toys that make a London season enjoyable.”

Felicia felt her old hostility rising; for the sake of a pathos she surmised in Angela, she controlled it, asking, still lightly, as she arranged her tea-cups, “What quest do you mean?”

“Why, the quest of youth and happiness—success in life. It is a pity that it should be seen as a toy before the time comes for a sad seeing of things. I always think of you as the lover of life personified, always see you crowned with roses and walking under sunny skies.”

Felicia, re-filling Geoffrey’s cup and helping herself to a slice of bread and butter, made no comment on this vision. But Geoffrey did not let it pass. “What do you mean by life?” he asked.

Angela still seemed to muse. “Oh, in this instance, I don’t mean life in its sense of expansion through self-sacrifice, of self-achievement through renunciation, but in the happy, finite sense, the illusion through which we must rise to reality, the rose and sunlight sense, the bread-and-butter sense, in fact,” she added, raising her eyes to Felicia and smiling.

“Why not pÂtÉ de foie gras sandwiches?” asked Felicia; “they are even happier. Do have one.”

“Yes, the pÂtÉ de foie gras sense, too. My first impression of you was that—None for me, thanks. Do you remember, Geoffrey, we first saw Mrs. Wynne eating sandwiches?—five, I think you made the number—and isn’t it right and fitting that she should have sandwiches and roses? I want her to let me give her all I may.”

Felicia now leaned back in her chair, folded her arms, and fixed on Angela a look both firm and gay. “Why do you think such things of me?” she asked.

“Things?—what things?” Angela’s smile was neither firm nor gay. She felt suddenly confronted, before a witness, too, and she remembered Felicia’s crude disposition for forcing issues just when one most intended avoiding them. Geoffrey’s cold, unvarying eye was upon her. It was a married hostility she had before her, and, in the little moment of confusion, she saw clearly her hatred of Maurice’s wife. Yes, she was again face to face with hate; but they pushed her to it; for she had come as love personified, as a most magnanimous angel, and she had the right to scorn both Maurice and his wife if Maurice’s letter had spoken the truth—if Felicia’s love and Geoffrey’s charity had forced him into marriage. But had it spoken the truth? Had it? That question had beaten in her brain for months. And the suspicion that Maurice, still talking in his group at the other side of the room, avoided her, filled her with an added bitterness which only an exaggeration of her outward self enabled her to hide.

“What things?” she repeated, conscious that she seemed to blink before something blinding.

“Horrid things!” Felicia decisively, though still gaily, answered.

“My dear child!” Angela breathed with a long sigh. “What have you been thinking of me? What do you mean?”

“I haven’t set out on a quest for roses and sandwiches. I don’t ask for either. You don’t really know me at all, so please don’t talk about me as if you did.”

Her manner, that put the episode on a half-playful footing, completed Angela’s discomfiture. Unless she showed her hate, what should she say? Flight was safer than possibility of shameful exposure. She rose to go, murmuring, as she took Felicia’s hand: “I am sorry—sorry. You have not understood.”

“It seemed to me that you did not.”

Maurice was approaching them at last, and, the impulse of flight arrested, Angela rejoined: “I am afraid that you hardly want me to understand.” Maurice was beside her; she could safely say it, sheltered from rejoinder by his eagerness.

“You are not going, my dear Angela?” He took her hand, speaking very quickly. “I haven’t seen you. Do stay.” Meeting his eyes where a shallow sincerity seemed to glitter over depths he could not show, Angela recovered herself and could again take up a weapon.

“I am afraid that I am not really wanted, my dear Maurice,” she said, standing between husband and wife, still holding Felicia’s hand as he held hers, smiling from one to the other, a brave, kind smile. “I am afraid that I am a quite unnecessary fourth here. Our old trio has another head. I had hoped that I might, as a friendly hangeron, not be in the way; but I am. I feel that I am.”

“Trio? Oh, you mean Geoffrey?” Maurice was perplexed, yet spoke with a gallant lightness—the concealing glitter emphasized, while Geoffrey, all placidity, queried—

“Was I ever one of a trio? That’s news to me.”

Angela turned her head to glance at him.

“So you will forsake me—even in the past? Well, I abdicate all claims.”

“But we don’t—we don’t, my dear Angela! We don’t abdicate our claims to you. It’s not a trio,” said Maurice, “it’s a circle—isn’t it, Felicia? Let us all join hands. Come in, Geoffrey.”

“No, no,” Angela softly echoed his laugh. “I will come again—and look at you all. But indeed I abdicate all my tiny claims. Remember me, my dear Mrs. Wynne, if I can ever be of any use.” She pressed Felicia’s hand and turned away. Maurice went with her into the hall. Her wrap lay there and he held it for her.

“You may trust me, Maurice, for ever,” she whispered, as she slid into it. She did not meet his glance of helpless confusion; but she knew that all glitter had left him.

Driving away in her carriage, she leaned her head back in the corner, where she shrank and burst into tears.

In the drawing-room the last people were going, Mrs. Cuthbert among them. “I hear your father is coming to live with you, Felicia,” she said.

“Yes. It is too lonely for him now.”

“He won’t be able to let the house, I fear.”

“For the present the house is to be shut up, and we may go down to it for week-ends.”

“It is always a rather dangerous experiment, you know, Felicia, a third person between a young couple.”

“We must risk it,” Felicia laughed.

When, after this final grunt, her aunt had gone, she and Geoffrey were alone.

He was standing at the window, and she joined him there and looked out at the silver river with a slow russet sail upon it. The sense of peace and confidence, felt on the day of their last meeting, was with her; but it was more easy to speak with perfect openness since she need not speak of themselves.

She repressed the impulsive “How she dislikes me!” that might seem to claim his sympathy for her painful part in the recent little drama; she need never claim his sympathy; and a curious sense of loyalty to Angela made her substitute, “How I dislike her. You must know it, so I may as well say it.”

“That explains her unpleasantness, you think?” Geoffrey’s voice was as detached and impartial as if he were questioning the validity of a dubious clause in a dubious bill.

“Yes, if she feels my dislike even when I try not to show it. Perhaps she didn’t mean to be unpleasant.”

“Perhaps she didn’t know that she meant it.”

“But it’s pitiful—if she thinks she has lost friends.”

“Pretty brazen of Angela—that assumption.”

“But aren’t you rather cruel?” She tried to smile, but a glance at her face showed him how hurt, how tossed by conjecture and regret she was. Geoffrey did not speak his own crueller thought, a thought in which he recognized a complacent vindictiveness—“She is furiously jealous of you.” Accepting her reproach he merely said, “Angela makes me cruel. I enjoy showing her her own real meaning.”

“That is indeed cruel—to enjoy it. I hate showing her, and yet I feel forced to let her know what her meaning seems to me. But I’m more sorry than I can say for it all—for her being in my life in any way. Yet she is in it. She is the centre of Maurice’s old life. Most of his friends are hers, and she was his nearest friend—next to you. She blights everything.” Her voice had a tremor.

“That is tremendously exaggerating her importance. I shouldn’t have suspected you of such weakness. She doesn’t really make you sad?”

“She does, rather.”

“Only on her own account then—not on your own.”

Felicia again recognized the acuteness in him that she had at first been so blind to. Yet even to him she must pass in silence over Angela’s deepest pathos. “Oh, on my own, too,” she said. “I am quite weak enough for that.” She added: “You always make me show my weakness. I seem to find strength in showing it to you—your strength, I suppose.”

“Do you? Thanks.” Geoffrey looked at her. “You do remember, then, that I’m always there?”

“Always.” She looked back at him.

Nothing had changed between them since, in that long, still, strange moment, he had kissed her good-bye.

The little silence that followed her “always,” was unbroken when Maurice entered. Maurice, since making automatic farewells to his last guests, had stood perfectly still in the hall where Angela had left him, looking down.

Her words, spoken before Geoffrey and Felicia, had impressed him but lightly, unable as he was to grasp their context, in comparison with the words she had said to him at the door—words how well left unspoken! Their apparent magnanimity had been almost ignoble; he felt it, and the recognition of ignobility in her roused in him a sudden tempest of fear and self-reproach.

For, actually, during the last wonderful months, he had forgotten Angela. Hardly had she done more than hover in his thoughts once or twice, a memory at once pathetic and poisonous. It had always vanished, like a dark alien bird, fading in the depths of a noonday sky. He was no longer the hunted, unstable—yes, the base man who had written that letter. He was Felicia’s husband. He was in a new life, clear, fresh, radiant, and the old one was a strange, soiled dream.

When Angela had entered the room it had been like seeing a ghost arise. He had felt a throb almost of terror. The sweet and new actuality enabled him to master it, to glance at the past and accept the fact that he still was slightly linked to it, in Angela’s consciousness if not in his own. The acceptation enabled him to look at the link with more equanimity. After all, Angela’s very coming proved how such fruitless episodes dropped away from people; she, too, accepted the comfortable, everyday interpretation, that of a half-emotional trifling that had come to nothing and was, by now, nothing to either of them. But all the same he had, at first, found it really impossible to go and talk to her. He had not seen her since that morning in the music-room, since he had seen tears in her eyes and kissed her—it had not been then, with her at all events, a half-emotional trifling. The realization, like a physical sensation, still trembled, startled, under all his coerced confidence, while he had talked and laughed. He had glanced constantly at Felicia while he talked, Felicia sitting between Geoffrey and Angela; his Felicia! A creature so free from any smudge. And he had smudged her—for Angela’s sake, and for his own. The cowardly letter was an eternal barrier between him and Angela. And now her reassuring words fastened his fear and self-disgust upon him. Not fear of Angela betraying him, Angela was not base; besides, she could gain nothing by betraying him; besides, the letter was destroyed: it was a vague ominous fear of something indefinable and dangerous.

He stood in the little hall, and the thought of the last year’s sunshine almost smote tears to his eyes, looked back at from this sudden blackness. He threw back his head and shoulders, seeming with the physical gesture to shake it off, defined it as one of his moods, rose defiantly above it, and, when in the drawing-room he joined his wife and friend, came between them, putting a hand on the shoulder of each, returning peace, a sense of protection and happy certitude, made him take a long breath.

“How good this is!” he said.

They both smiled at him.

Dear, best old Geoffrey. He stepped perfectly into his place, neither holding back from it nor making it over-significant. The thought of his astonishing debt to Geoffrey brought no heartache; gratitude was for Felicia as well as for himself, for Felicia, too, was so happy. To show Geoffrey the happiness he had created was the only return he could make him; to show it frankly could give no pain to such magnanimity. That the magnanimity had its tragic element a soul quick to divine and sympathize like Maurice’s felt; but all he could do, now, was to keep his friend’s tragedy beautiful. And he vowed he would. Geoffrey should never regret, for Felicia would never regret. There was almost a sob of thankfulness in him as with this welling up again of strength and confidence he stood between them, leaning on them, and looked out at the shining river.

CHAPTER II

FELICIA did not regret; she accepted the fact of an achieved happiness almost as unquestioningly as Maurice; but there had been for her a phase of questioning and readjustment, a phase of acute loneliness when, with stupefaction, she realized that she had married a man whom she hardly knew.

It had been a strange, and for a time a disintegrating experience to see on what slight bases she had built the fabric of her devotion—to see that she had loved his love for her and that him she had hardly seen at all. Afterwards, with a tender sanity and wisdom, she had pushed new foundations under the edifice of their common life, new and stronger, surer props, no longer relying upon her need of him but upon his of her. She had the faculty for holding happiness, and, with something of the serenity and strength of nature, for making it over again when the first hold proved to be on something illusory. And, in this re-making, what had seemed illusion became real, once more, with a deeper reality. Understanding him, and loving him for himself, his love for her regained its value. But from the readjustment to life a new sense of gravity, of the risks one ran, had come to her. In looking back on her despair when she had almost lost him, she saw the something passionate and reckless, the quality of desperateness that must always make danger. Had Maurice not proved loveable her own vehemence would have been the cause of disaster, and since that fatal disaster was escaped, she felt herself strong enough to face any others, to adjust herself to any painful requirements of life.

The clear-sighted seeing of her husband had in it this element of pain. It was as if in all the outer courts of life she had found indeed the happiest companionship, but in the inmost temple a deeper loneliness, a loneliness that now—and this was the secret of achievement—meant strength and not weakness.

In all the tests of life he depended upon her, and his setting of his clock by her time frightened her sometimes, lest that inner strength should fail them both. She was the upholder; Maurice responded; he never inspired. She had moments—and in them the loneliness was ghastly—of seeing him as unsubstantial, elusive, almost parasitical in his charm; but the charm itself, his clasping and exquisite response, was too near and dear for these moments to be more than mere flashes. She brought from them a maternal gentleness of tolerance, and her own joy in being loved was still too deep for her to feel weariness. She had not yet clearly seen, with all her understanding, that beyond this sunny domain of his adoration she would always be alone.

A dissatisfaction that was hardly a pain was the purposelessness of their lives; it was a life of appreciation merely, appreciation of themselves, their friends, books, music, pictures.

“Darling, we have heaps and heaps of time for doing things; let’s just enjoy them now—while we are young and can. You don’t want me to be a County Councillor, do you? You don’t want, yourself, to sit on committees and be useful—like Angela, do you? There are such quantities of useful people in the world.”

Felicia had not suggested County Councils or committees, though she did attack his laziness, for Maurice had never been more lazy.

The goad was gone—the goad of obvious and pressing need, and, as if on a summer day of rowing, another hand had taken the sculls, he lay back in the boat and looked happily, thankfully, at the sky and woods and water.

“I shall work, then,” Felicia declared; “it’s only fair that I should. You have a right to lounge, but I, who have lounged all my life, must prove to you that I meant what I said—do you remember?”

Their tiny income just sufficed. “If a pinch comes I’ll set to,” Maurice affirmed. But Felicia said that she didn’t need to be pinched; she wanted to set to as a preventive to pinches. She was a good linguist and she found some translating to do. Through Maurice’s numerous literary relations there was quite a nice little field of endeavour open to her, and she persisted in ploughing it. Maurice laughed at the determination with which she shut herself up every morning.

“You must wait for inspiration,” she retorted; “but there is no reason why this hack-work of mine shouldn’t keep off a pinch for ever.”

Adjustment to a constant and growing anxiety was necessary when her father arrived for his long visit, a visit whose length, Maurice eagerly insisted, must be indefinite. He saw that his insistence, generous as she must feel it in a lover, gave pleasure to Felicia, and he pressed Mr. Merrick for a promise of indefiniteness.

But Felicia felt at once that her father, as usual, jarred. She had no need to explain her father to Maurice; understanding was Maurice’s strong point; very cheerfully he found her father a bore. Unfortunately, though quick, Mr. Merrick could not be expected to grasp the unflattering impression nor to suspect from Maurice’s attitude of bright acquiescence that Maurice found in acquiescence the easiest way of getting rid of him. Mr. Merrick’s dogmatic intolerance could only weary or amuse a mind so fundamentally sceptical. Felicia realized that it was for her sake that Maurice smiled and acquiesced, but she felt it, in consequence, incumbent on her to be very exact in acquiescence, with the really funny result that it was, at first, more and more upon Maurice that Mr. Merrick counted. It was the knowledge that he counted upon an unreality that made the anxiety, the pain, for Felicia. The little tangles of silent misconceptions on one side, of discernments on the other, drew constantly into knots, and Felicia found herself contemplating such a knot with discomfort one day after a talk with her father.

She went into Maurice’s studio at the back of the flat, finding, in his ease over a volume of French verse, an added cause for irritation.

“Maurice, have you encouraged papa to publish that article on ‘Credulity’?” she asked.

“It is vieux jeu, you know,” Maurice confessed, glad of the occasion for frankness, and putting his arm around her as she stood beside his deep chair.

“Do I know?” said Felicia, smiling irrepressibly, though unwillingly, as she met the limpid blue of his eyes.

“It is all true enough, as far as it goes,” said Maurice, hardly recognizing her vexation and wishing to be consolatory. “Sit down on the arm of the chair, dear, and don’t stand so still, so stiff, so disapproving.”

“All that is true in it has been said a hundred times; the rest is as shallow, as trivial as possible.”

She yielded to his pull and sat down on the chair-arm.

“He takes a very crude view of religion,” Maurice owned. “One doesn’t approach it from that point of view nowadays; the whole ground of contest has been shifted.”

“Exactly. Why didn’t you tell him so?”

“Tell him, dearest? Hurt him? How could I be so brutal? Wouldn’t that have hurt you?”

“Not so much as your encouraging him to do a thing that you know to be foolish,” said Felicia, looking over Maurice’s head and feeling that vexation could easily express itself in tears. With a quick change of tone, looking up in sudden alarm at the eyes that had not met his, he said: “You are displeased with me?”

Alarm was such a new note that Felicia’s breast echoed it, transforming it to instant compunction. Her eyes dropped to his.

“Have I been horrid? I think I was displeased.”

“Please forgive me,” said Maurice gently, a smile of relief answering her smile and irradiating his face; “I thought you would like me to please him, to encourage him; upon my word I did.”

“I know. I know you did it for me. But I don’t like you to do anything that isn’t absolutely——“

She hesitated, still smiling compunction upon him, and, still gently, as if with a little humorousness for the trite virtue of the word, Maurice supplied “True?”

“Well, yes; to yourself I mean. I mustn’t be your standard. You must have your own.”

“Ah, you mustn’t ask that of me. I loved you, you know, for what I lacked.”

“But I do ask it of you,” said Felicia, and, leaning against his shoulder, glad to have him look with her at the well-unravelled little knot, she went on: “You see, in your kindness you aren’t really fair to him—nor to me either! He was quite cross with me just now when I tried to dissuade him—quoted your opinion of the article. And he has sent it to the magazine you recommended—oh, Maurice, I was displeased!”

She put her cheek against his head. To confess her displeasure seemed to efface its cause; especially when Maurice kissed her hand and repeated, with touching surrender to her fastidiousness, “Please forgive me. I’ll never do it any more.”

Perhaps, because of a certain individuality in its violence, the essay on “Credulity” was accepted, and Mr. Merrick’s assurance, which had been rather pricked and ruffled since his arrival in London, was restored to its unstable placidity.

Felicia was conscious of a consequent triumph in his manner towards herself.

“The old sword isn’t rusty yet,” said Mr. Merrick; “it can still do execution. I fancy it has lopped the heads off a few more falsehoods.”

Felicia was silent; she understood that Maurice perforce must smile; and with these necessary smiles, hostages to the past, went Maurice’s new endeavour “not to do it again,” that by degrees revealed to Mr. Merrick that Maurice, no more than Felicia, was to be counted upon.

Maurice’s geniality deserted him one day when Mr. Merrick made an assault upon the non-rational elements in the faith of a Roman Catholic friend, and next morning Felicia, arranging some books in the studio, heard in the adjacent dining-room her father’s pugnacious tones: “The fellow is merely an ass; I wonder you can tolerate him. I pinned him with his winking virgin!”

“My dear father,” Maurice’s voice returned, and she wondered whether her father felt to the full its cutting quality, “we are all of us asses to one another, so that the one virtue we should strive for is tolerance. I hope that in the future you will exercise it towards my guests and in my house.”

“Oh, very well; by all means,” said Mr. Merrick, resentful, but hesitating to express his full resentment. “I will merely vacate your drawing-room on such occasions, since I am not apt at falsity.” The words were sunk in the large rustling of his newspaper.

“I should, if I were you, merely avoid taking a bludgeon to other people’s beliefs; it’s not a seemly thing—a bludgeon in a drawing-room.”

Maurice, when Felicia entered, was cheerfully pouring his coffee after the cheerful remark, though there was in his eyes as he looked up at her, and then at Mr. Merrick, flushed and silent behind his newspaper, a touch of anxiety.

“Did you hear, darling?” he asked her, when, after breakfast, they were alone.

“Yes. I am so sorry. You will be patient, Maurice. He has got the habit of bludgeoning—he thinks it right.”

“Patient, my sweetheart! Did I seem impatient? It was really for his sake I spoke. He gets himself so misjudged.”

“Yes, yes. It was right of you to speak.”

“Only I did not intend you to hear.”

“Why not? You must always intend me to hear anything you say.” She smiled at him, really happier in this more accurately seen situation than she had been for some time. It was easy to bear with slight discords if their own harmony were perfect.

But in consequence Mr. Merrick assumed his manner of the sulky child, and Felicia felt her husband’s eye upon her as, in all his encounters with his father-in-law, he adjusted his attitude to what he imagined she desired of him.

CHAPTER III

“WHAT ages it is, Maurice, since we have really talked together!” said Angela. Maurice, indeed, had avoided meetings all the spring, and Felicia’s unexpressed reluctance had made much adroitness in evasion unnecessary. His world was drifting away from Angela’s world, and in the consequent shrinking he perhaps recognized how large a background she had put into his life; but a background with Angela standing out upon it was well lost; Maurice did not regret it.

But they had met at last, and he had taken her down to dinner, and she sat beside him now, her long eyes, steady, enigmatical, upon him, her mouth, stiffened a little with its smile; her white garments, as usual, seeming to slide away from her thin, white shoulders. That the shoulders were very thin, Maurice noticed, and then, on looking into her face, that it was almost haggard. The hint of delicate wrinklings was upon it, like a pool of wintry water when some desolate wind breathes over its first thin veil of ice.

For really the first time since he had put her out of his life with the letter, a swift, poignant pity went through him, followed by an eager clutch at the hope that pity, by now, was pure impertinence. And the letter, with all the sacrifices that it had made to her, had given him the right to put her out of his life. Following the short ease of the hope that she had ceased to love him was the thought that she might still believe that he loved her. With an ugly vividness some phrases of the letter flashed into his mind, and suddenly, under her steady eyes, he felt himself growing hot.

“No,” he said, beginning to eat his soup, “we have both been busy, haven’t we?”

“Have you, Maurice?” Angela also bent her head to a delicately raised spoon—eating seemed always a graceful concession in her, a charitable keeping in countenance of the grosser needs of others. “I haven’t seen the great picture or the great book yet.”

Though feeling that indolence in artistic production was not to be struggled against, the fact, freshly remembered, that Angela knew how that indolence had been made facile, gave Maurice a hotter sense of burning cheeks. “Not as I should have been,” he confessed. His confusion was so apparent to himself that after a slight pause it seemed only natural to hear Angela say, in a low, unemphatic voice, as she played with her fork, “Do you mind this—so much? Don’t on my account. I am completely seared, Maurice.”

And as he could find no answer: “We must meet, you know. Can’t you pretend calm, as I do?”

She had not accepted then the way of escape; the way of escape would have meant a miserable crouching. She would never pretend that it had been a trifling. She had loved him, and she would crouch to no pretence. She took for granted the bond of a mutual understanding between them.

“You make me feel like a felon,” Maurice murmured.

“It must be, then, some wrong in yourself to make you feel that,” Angela returned quietly; “the retaliating attitude is not mine, Maurice.” Then, as the talk about them cloaked them less, “What have you and Mrs. Wynne been doing lately? I have been so sorry to have seen so little of her—so sorry that you could never come when I asked you. I have asked you twice this spring, you know. She is prettier than ever”—Angela leaned forward to look down the table—“and so Geoffrey evidently finds her. Is Geoffrey more fortunate than I? Does he see much of her?”

Though knowing Angela well, Maurice was not capable of suspecting her of treacherous little hints and warnings. “Not much,” he answered; “he drops in to tea now and then. He really is busy, you know,” Maurice added, “so we are not very fortunate in seeing him often, either.”

“Geoffrey, without knowing it, is becoming more anxious for place than for power,” said Angela, “and not only as a means to power but as an end in itself. It would be a rather black outlook for him, wouldn’t it, if the Government were to go out? I suppose he could fall back on the Bar.”

She spoke with a musing vagueness. Maurice was not looking at her, and her eyes were on his charming profile, on the quick colour that flamed again in his cheek. She suspected herself now of cruelty, knowing that her love sought ease in cruelty. His dear, enchanting profile! She looked at it with a turn of her sick heart, even while speaking the cruel, vague words.

“Dear Maurice!” she murmured, “I didn’t mean that! Indeed, I forgot for a moment why office must be so important to him. There need be no pain in it for you—beyond the blundering frankness of my reference to what you let me know;—I can’t get over that habit of frankness with you. But Geoffrey chose to so shackle his career.”

“He knows,” Maurice stammered, “that if he were to feel a shackle I would abandon——.”

“Ah, but would you?” said Angela as he paused. “Though that is why, for your sake, more than his—I know your sensitiveness—that is why, dear friend, I had hoped that this year would be for you an incentive to energy rather than lethargy. You are more shackled than he is—I want to see you free. I wish—I wish,” she smiled with quite her old sweet lightness now, “you would let me try to help you. Can I inspire no longer?”

But Maurice could feel no sweetness, or, if sweetness there were, it was to him poisonous. Had he, indeed, opened himself to this? He could find no words.

“Dear Maurice, how you distrust me,” she murmured, “how you forget that such a friend as I know myself to be takes it too much for granted, perhaps, that she has all her old rights; the right to be true; the right to help. Forgive me, I have hurt you, I see. I couldn’t hurt you if you trusted me. Is Mr. Merrick, here, too? Ah, yes, I see. I read to-day his article on ‘Credulity.’”

In the turmoil of his feeling, helpless astonishment, distrust indeed, yet a self-reproachful pity pervading it, Maurice almost gasped with relief at the change of topic. She was speaking on normal levels where he could breathe; she was smiling kindly, no longer with that over-significant sweetness that stung and bewildered, and with a comprehension of his pain, she had turned from it.

“Isn’t it appalling!” he laughed—he would have laughed at anything said in that normal voice—“it’s unfortunate weakness of his, that beating of dead lions, to which Felicia and I have to yield.” Angela also laughed. “My dear Maurice! I see it all. It is rather pretty. There’s a pathos in it, so far as you and she are concerned.”

“Of course, we were done with all that crude naturalism in the eighties,” Maurice said. “I am afraid Felicia and I find the grotesqueness of his attack painful rather than pretty or pathetic;” and with the relieved sense of respite, of free breathing, he humorously enlarged upon this grotesque side of the situation.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the table, Geoffrey and Felicia talked with their sense of peaceful confidence. That she made the music of his life, the sad yet stirring music, she could but know: how much she was its object she had not guessed. But the time seemed far away when she had seen his object as a rather pompous ambition, symbolized in her roguish imagination by a statesman statue with roll of papers in hand, and commanding brow, set high and overlooking conquered territory.

She had become rather indifferent to his objects, the man himself was so staunch, so living, so moving onward.

They talked now of slightest things, the slightness proving how far intimacy had travelled, comparing childish memories. It was pretty to glance down these innocent vistas in each other’s lives. Felicia told of the day when she had locked herself in the attic, intending to starve herself to death, in passionate resentment at some fancied wrong, and of how, unable to turn the key again when her fear overcame her longing for vengeance, too proud, in spite of fear to call for rescue, she had remained there through a night of lonely horror.

Geoffrey’s reminiscences of naughtiness were more staid. He had never been very passionate or resentful. “I was a conceited little beggar and always kept cool.” At a very early age, after a whipping from his mother, he had looked up at her, laughed and said, “Do you want to go on?” “I knew nothing would make her angrier: I must have been an exceedingly disagreeable child.”

Both Maurice and Angela, during pauses in the dinner-table talk, were conscious of this happy rivulet, Maurice listening and finding some of its peace, until, seeing that Angela also listened, his peace was jarred upon.

After dinner, in the drawing-room, Geoffrey again joined Felicia, and Maurice, making his way half automatically to Angela, who sat turning pages in a corner, felt a sharper pang of shame. That Angela should know Geoffrey’s secret was, in some inexplicable way, a baleful fact. He was conscious of a wish to ward off balefulness as he sat down beside her, and an impulse better than the merely self-protecting desire brought sudden, sincere words to his lips. “Angela, you have really forgiven me, haven’t you?” he said. If she had really forgiven him he was safe, Felicia and Geoffrey were safe; Angela herself was freed of that baleful aura which his own sick conscience cast around her. She had put away her book. The light was dim and her face in shadow. He could not see the expression upon it as she sat silent for some moments, her hands turning, mechanically and quickly, the fan upon her knee; suddenly they were quiet and she said: “I have forgiven you—if what you said was true.”

“True? How could it not be?” Maurice stammered, conscious at once that his impulse had been unwise.

“It could not be if you loved her most.” He was silent, struggling with his thoughts.

“You love her most—now,” Angela said with a distant, a tragic touch of questioning.

“She is—my wife.”

“And therefore you love her most: for the past—loyalty to your wife must seal your lips. If it were so! Yet it is hard—hard to forgive, Maurice, not the pain, not the bewildered pain, but the crippling of my life, the blotting out—for a time—of my heaven. And how could I forgive if you robbed me of even my right to a memory? Of even my dead joy?”

“But—I told you—that I was unworthy—that I was undependable; that I couldn’t depend on my own feeling——“ Maurice stammered on.

“You tried to help me so,” said Angela quickly, “and it was that that I could not forgive—your smirching of it all; but you told me, too, to read between the lines. I did; I believed what I read there.”

Even there she had only read that he loved her; not that he loved her most. There was the intolerable, the unforgiveable. She rose, feeling that she must leave him or burst into sobs. “I understand,” she said. “You must, for her sake, be loyal to the past. I won’t ask further. Now I will go and talk to her.” She went across the room to Geoffrey and Felicia, leaving Maurice in a miserable perplexity.

Should he have been bravely brutal? Told her that the first truth, of past and present, was his love for Felicia? Yet the minor truth was there—the truth Angela clung to as her right—that he had loved her, too, if only for the moment; could he, in the name of the larger truth, rob her of it? He was not able clearly to see what he most wished or regretted—that he might never see Angela again, that he had ever seen her, were perhaps the clearest wish and regret.

Angela sank into a seat beside Felicia. She had still that sense of a strangled sob in her throat. A spiteful little comment floated, strawlike, upon the passionate sea of her thoughts; she grasped it, repeating to herself, “Cheap, alluring little creature.” It helped her to evade the sob and to bear the contemplation of Felicia’s beauty. Oh, yes, she had a certain beauty, a creamy childishness, the obvious charm of soft white and cloudy ambers that had brought Geoffrey to her and won her husband’s shallow heart to constancy. Creaminess, childishness, cheapness would always count for most in this strange world of irony and pain.

“At last I can escape to you,” she said. “You have been so surrounded all the evening, and Maurice and I have been reminiscing; I can never, it seems, find you quite alone”—she smiled at Geoffrey—“but Geoffrey hardly counts, does he? Isn’t it odd—have you noticed it—that I have hardly spoken with you except before Geoffrey, and perhaps, with me, Geoffrey does count—a little uncomfortably? I seem to arouse all his cynicism, and it’s difficult to be quite oneself in the face of even a friendly cynicism. I always fancy that we could really get at one another, Mrs. Wynne, if we could achieve a tÊte-À-tÊte.”

“How selfish, my dear Angela.” Geoffrey, stretching his long legs in a low chair, did not even offer to accept the open hint. “You don’t get rid of me like that. I refuse to miss you.”

“Isn’t that a palpable evasion?” Angela turned her smile from him; “we must play Pyramus and Thisbe to his determined wall. Only please make allowances for acoustic disturbances; a voice heard through a wall may be misinterpreted.”

Felicia, ready to be amused and to make things easy, laughed at the wall’s stubborn presence. “I can’t urge him to miss you. If he is cynical we will simply leave him—plantÉ lÀ. He is more the schoolboy, though, than the cynic.”

“You find the kindest interpreter, Geoffrey. Well, as a schoolboy then, don’t let him pull off my legs and wings for love of mischief. What have you been doing all this time?”

“Simply jogging on,” said Felicia, finding in Angela’s application of her simile a certain justice. There was, indeed, in Geoffrey’s ruthlessness an element of cruel glee.

“Maurice tells me that he has been lazy. You must whip him up; you must spur him; it’s fatal to Maurice to be allowed to jog. He must race neck-to-neck with some incentive or he soon falls to mere grazing. He is the racer type. But your father hasn’t been jogging,” Angela continued, telling herself before Felicia’s not very responsive look that she must try some other interest—any allusion to Maurice would rouse the hostility of this jealous little wife. “What a gallop, indeed, his article on ‘Credulity’!—Maurice and I have been talking about it.”

Felicia’s eyes turned on her father, who was standing in isolation and assumed indifference before the fire-place. She felt, in seeing him, that familiar throb of indignant pity. No one could realize more acutely than she the qualities in him that made for unpopularity; but it was his ineffectiveness more than his vanity, his lack of power more than his assumption of it, that made the world fall away from him. Her judgement of her father always passed, with a swift self-condemnation, into a judgement of human unkindness. She brought her eyes back to Angela, her good temper chilled; there was sudden hardness in her look as she said: “Have you?”

“Yes,”—Angela smiled tender comprehension upon her—“I do understand. Only I don’t feel quite as you and Maurice do about it. I don’t feel it either so grotesque or so painful. I like the combativeness of it, the way he hurls himself at windmills. You take it too seriously. It’s a thing to smile over, not a thing to be distressed about.”

Felicia’s stare had become frozen, and before it she faltered, suddenly and gently.

“As an old friend of Maurice’s—as a friend of yours—you allow me to understand—and be sorry for the pain, don’t you?”

Felicia had risen, an instinctive recoil from something snake-like.

“No, I don’t allow any pity that divides me from my father,” she said. “You misunderstand my husband—and the privileges of your friendship for him.”

She had not known what her intention was in rising; but now, looking at her father, she turned and went across the room to him.

Angela watched her in silence. With an effort she brought her eyes back to Geoffrey, who, still stretched out in his chair, met them with a sardonic smile. She felt as if Felicia had put a gash across her face and as if he were pitilessly jibing at it. Her hand, again turning her fan, trembled as she said, “Mrs. Wynne has a talent for coups de thÉÂtre.”

“And you for carrying daggers up your sleeve, Angela. I perceive that walls might be useful.”

“You are blinded, I know, to her cruelty. It is she who uses daggers. My sympathy was real—a sympathy that any friend might have expressed—I supposed, of course, that she felt with her husband. Her bitter misconception of me distorts every effort I make to touch her.” The pathos and nobility of her words seemed to Angela her own nobility and pathos. Her eyes filled with sincerest tears.

“Dropping dramatic metaphors, Angela, I certainly think that since you can’t speak to Mrs. Wynne without making yourself highly disagreeable, you’d better give up trying to speak at all.”

Geoffrey rose. With something of the cheerful and inflexible mien of an Apollo, turning, bow-in-hand, from the slaughtered children of Niobe, he walked away.

CHAPTER IV

“WHAT did you and Angela have to say to one another?” Maurice asked. He and Felicia were driving down the polished sweep of Piccadilly alone, for Mr. Merrick disliked crowded hansoms, and the long silence had been unbroken. Leaning back in her corner, her cloak folded tightly around her, Felicia had gazed blankly at the powdery blue of the sky, the thickly sprinkled lights beneath it, her heart a chamber of angry misery. Maurice’s question, its light curiosity like the aimless fumbling of a key, suddenly unlocked and threw open the door.

“Maurice—Maurice,” she said under her breath, yet it was like a cry, “why did you talk to her about papa’s essay?” Maurice’s curiosity, had been a little less aimless than its lightness implied, but he felt now as if she had fired a pistol at his head.

“What did she say?” he asked quickly and sharply, revealing his fear.

“She said that she was sorry for us, and understood it—that you had told her we disliked the article.”

“We did—you know,” said Maurice after a moment, and, as he saw the pale oval of his wife’s face turn upon him: “She spoke of it; I didn’t think of concealing what we felt. I can’t think that she meant to be impertinent.” It struck him, even now, as odd that he should be venturing an excuse for Angela at the moment that his thoughts were assailing her with a passionate vindictiveness.

“Maurice, Maurice,” Felicia repeated, in a voice empty now even of reproach. It was a deep, a weary astonishment.

“Dearest, don’t misjudge me; don’t make a mountain out of a mole-hill. You know how one slips into such things.” He leaned forward on the apron of the cab to look his insistent supplication into her eyes, but hers refused to meet them. “And she is an old—old friend, my precious Felicia; one can’t mistrust one’s friends. It seemed perfectly natural to talk it over.”

“Oh, Maurice, how miserable you have made me!” They were in the smaller streets nearing Chelsea, and she covered her face with her hands. In an agony of remorse he put an arm around her shoulders, beginning now to see his culpability with her eyes, exaggerating it with his magnified imagination of her contempt. He—who had encouraged his father-in-law to publish the wretched thing—he to jest about it with a woman whom he fundamentally distrusted! He could find no further words. They reached the house in silence. Mr. Merrick, who had arrived just before them, was inclined to talk, but, kissing him good-night with a certain vehemence, Felicia went at once to her own room and after a few moments Maurice followed her.

She had already taken off her dress, and, in a white dressing-gown, was hastily unpinning her wreath of hair. Maurice, in the mirror, met the deep look of her eyes. His face was pallid as he stood hesitatingly near the door, not guessing that anger was already gone and that the anguish at her heart was dread of loss of love for him, dread of some insurmountable barrier—would treacherous weakness be such a barrier?—coming between them. Now she turned, and seeing him standing there, white, not daring to supplicate, she stretched out her arms to him. He sprang to her.

“Oh, Maurice, don’t—don’t—don’t,” she stammered incoherently, not clearly knowing what she wished him not to do. She dropped her face upon his shoulder. “Don’t let me ever—not love you. Hold me always.”

“Felicia, you almost kill me.”

His pallor, indeed, as she looked at him, shocked her. In the sudden realization of the torture he had suffered the thought of its cause grew dim and even trivial. What barrier could ever come between such a need, such love, and her?

“My poor Maurice, how unjust I have been. How hasty, how cruel. I do understand. With her one can’t be straight. She led, you followed; how could you not? How could any one dear and trusting evade her? I do see it all. You are not to blame. Oh, Maurice, how pale you are!”

She sank into a chair, her arms around him, and he knelt beside her, leaning like a little child his head upon her breast.

“It is one of my horrors,” he said. “For a moment I saw myself as you might see me. For a moment I thought I might lose you.”

“Darling Maurice—never, never. I hated her so—that blinded me. I hate so to think that she was ever near you—has any claim. Perhaps it is almost a mean jealousy. Forgive me. Kiss me. Let us laugh at it.”

In his mind a thought, almost an inarticulate sob of terror and longing, rose—rose and shook him. “Tell her now, tell her all.” Terror quenched longing. How explain? How seem anything to her but unutterably base? He could never show her that craven spectre of the past. The real self that clung to her could not risk losing her. He could not smile. He kissed her, his eyes still closed, saying, “Don’t take your arms away until the horror is quite passed.”

CHAPTER V

THE spring and summer were over and autumn already growing bleak when Geoffrey one afternoon drove to Chelsea. He drove there often, on his free Wednesdays and Saturdays, since the Wynnes, after their round of country visits, had returned to London, usually finding Felicia alone, for Maurice was really working at a portrait, and Mr. Merrick spent most of his time at his club, watching life from its windows with an ironic eye. At tea-time Maurice would appear, tired yet merry, from the studio; friends came in, the quiet shining hour broke into sparkling facets; but the hours alone with her were personal possessions to Geoffrey, jewels that strung themselves in a rosary through his weeks and months. They talked, or Felicia played to him, declaring that his taste for music grew; they often sat silent, she sewing and he watching her. The thickets had been thorny of late, he had discovered that a curtailed and uncertain income could make life curiously nagging and difficult, but from these brambles it was comforting to look at the atoning cause of them. The hours with her so justified his first groping simile of the sunny opening among trees, grass, clouds and sky. His confidence in her happiness irradiated his own problems.

This afternoon the confidence received a little shock. He came late, after tea-time, and walking before the maid into the drawing-room had time, before Felicia saw him, to grasp the disturbing significance of her attitude. She was sitting alone near the window, her elbows on her knees, her face in her hands. For a moment he thought that she was crying, and, like a pang, the memory of sunlight among young birches, snowdrops, a distant bird-song, went through him.

Felicia, however, was not crying; and as she looked round at him, he saw that the attitude might have been one of merely momentary weariness.

“I was almost asleep,” she said.

Taking up a bit of sewing she began to talk about the political prospects. “I hear that you are not altogether in sympathy with the Government,” she said.

“I’m not—not altogether.”

“I even hear that you may resign.”

“Perhaps I would,” said Geoffrey, leaning back and smoothing his hand over his hair, “if I could afford it. I serve my own purposes better by remaining in office.”

“Do you mean that you can’t afford—financially—to risk failure?” Felicia asked. “I never associated you with compromise.”

“It’s not my own failure, but the failure of the policy I believe in that I might risk by refusing to compromise. One fights for one’s cause in politics with all sorts of weapons. As for personal failure, I may not be put to too stringent a test; I may make enough money to float me to absolute independence. Did you know that I was a ferocious gambler—and not only on the Stock Exchange, but with cards?”

The placidity with which he showed her his faults always amused Felicia, even when she could not share it. He made no effort to win good opinion—not even hers.

“I have heard, and to tell you the truth I am sorry about the cards.”

“Why?”

“I don’t like the idea of a pastime becoming so significant. To say the least of it—it’s not fitting.”

“Well,” said Geoffrey, laughing, “I won’t do it any more. You are quite right.”

“Oh, not on account of what I say, please,” she protested, slightly flushing; “you must judge for yourself.”

“So I do. I have judged. You may be sure I would never yield anything I believed in—even to please you. I have always disliked the significance cards might come to assume, so I yield, and gladly, since it does please you.”

“That is a relief. I could not bear to be a standard. And I can’t believe,” she added, “that your winnings at cards can have any significance for your career.”

“Ah, any stick counts in the raft that keeps one floated. But as for my career, if I’ve an object, you mustn’t think it a career. I don’t bother much about my career. I’m a converted character, you see.”

“Converted! You? From what and to what?”

Felicia’s face, on its background of sky and river, turned on him the look he loved—fond and mocking. He returned it, smiling, but gravely. “It is quite true. It’s not that I care less for my ambitions, but differently. My goal has shifted, and everything is at once more simple and more complex; the aims are bigger and far simpler; the fight is bigger, too, but more complex than when the fight was personal. I shouldn’t mind failure, really, or beginning over again. You converted me, you see.”

“I?” said Felicia, with more sadness than surprise.

“Yes, you. Your courage, your sincerity, your faith, that wasn’t the least blind but counted the costs and took the risk every time. Oh, don’t protest; indeed, I hardly know how or why I felt it of you; merely my whole interpretation of things began to twirl on another axis. The idealistic philosophies of my college days came back to me—with all sorts of personal meanings in them. I began to trust life and its significance, since I trusted you so utterly.”

“You almost terrify me,” said Felicia; “would the world turn round the other way again if I proved horrid?”

“Oh, no, that is done with. If you proved horrid I would suffer, but the world would continue to turn in the right direction—despite your wrongness.”

“Ah, that’s a real conversion then.” Felicia rose, laying down her work. She was touched, near tears. Standing beside him and looking down at him she said, “Shall I play to you?”

“Do,” said Geoffrey, but taking her hand he held it for a moment, adding quietly, in almost a matter-of-fact voice, “Dear.”

He had let go her hand as quietly when Angela was ushered in.

Angela and Felicia had not met since that night of the past spring, and the parting then made future meetings improbable.

Felicia had put Angela and Angela’s meaning behind her, and had not doubted that Angela would acquiesce in mutual forgetfulness. It was astonishing and very disconcerting to see again this spectre rise, and rise, as always it seemed, in Geoffrey’s presence.

She advanced into the room, smiling vaguely—vaguely hesitating, an intentness under the hesitation.

Felicia still stood beside Geoffrey, and before he, too, rose, and faced the unwelcome guest, their attitude almost implied the clasp of hands that Angela had not seen.

Her eyes fluttered quickly from one to the other and then fixed in a long gaze on Felicia.

“Dear Mrs. Wynne, I wanted to see you alone,” she said.

Geoffrey, at this, turning his back, strolled to the window.

Angela’s purpose swiftly put him aside, would not linger; “I won’t wrangle with Geoffrey; besides, he really makes no difference,” she said. “For such a long time I have wanted to see you—ever since that night—but you have been away, and so have I. I have been wretched about that night. I could not bear to think that you misunderstood me so cruelly. I have come to beg you to forgive me. It was presumptuous of me to think for a moment that you would care for what I thought or felt, or that my sympathy could be anything but indifferent to you. It was only a blunder. I did not realize that you disliked me so much.”

Felicia’s amazement struggled between a dim belief and a vivid disbelief. The uppermost feeling came out, but in a dismayed voice, for that half-belief plucked at her—“I think that you have always disliked me—really I do.”

“I have longed to love you!” cried Angela; “longed to love you—if you would let me;” and, as she heard the intolerable beauty of these words, she burst into tears.

Felicia turned her eyes on Geoffrey; his back to the window, he leaned on the window-sill, folding his arms. Stupefied, Felicia’s eyes questioned him, “Shall I believe her? Shall I put my arms around her?” It was her impulse, the quick response of her tenderness to suffering. But under the impulse something strong held her back, something that made it a false one, partaking of the falseness that aroused it; and Geoffrey’s sombre look at her seconded the distrust. She stood silent and helpless.

Angela uncovered her eyes. “Don’t you believe me?” she asked.

“I will try to,” Felicia stammered, “if you will give me time—help me to——“

“You are very pitiless,” said Angela in a voice that had caught back its full self-control. “Very hard and pitiless.”

“What can I do? I cannot trust your affection; really I cannot. That is the truth.”

“It is that that is hard and pitiless—to think of one’s truth more than of another’s pain.”

“You always say the right thing,” Felicia answered gravely; she could but recognize the other’s seeming right; there was no irony in the words.

“I have come to you with love,” said Angela, controlling an anger that made her voice tremble slightly, “and you have rejected me. I have given you my best. But sincerity and love shrivel before such cruel scepticism as yours. I am sad, sad for you, because to the sceptic all life must turn to ashes. You are the spirit that denies: I don’t distrust my own flowers because when you look at them they die. I am sorry for you. You live in a world where I cannot breathe. Good-bye.”

She had turned away, thrilling with her spiritual splendour. From apparent failure she sprang to triumph. And, with a final flashing vision of a Pilgrim’s Chorus marching past Venusburg to a kingdom of the sky, she added, resting eyes of saintly solemnity on her antagonist: “God bless you.”

She was gone; and not moving, not looking at Geoffrey, Felicia said, “I have been horrible. I could not help it.”

“You are all right,” said Geoffrey, coming from the window, “you seemed pretty horrible, and that gave her one of the best times of her life. You positively buckled the wings on her shoulders. But she knows you’re right, and she won’t forgive you for it, either.”

“To have a person who hates you say ‘God bless you’—it frightens me.”

“Nonsense. It was an ugly missile, I own; but it’s the worst she can shy at you. Now come and play for me,” said Geoffrey.

CHAPTER VI

ANGELA walked away breathing quickly. Her exaltation still floated her above her anger, but through the anger and through the exaltation a deep sense of injury and humiliation rose again and again, bringing tears to her eyes. And under what circumstances had Felicia rejected her outstretched hand, striking down its patient pitifulness? The suspicions of her first entrance into the room gathered around her, cloaked her warmly; there was a shiver in that sense of humiliation. Exaltation, too, was a cold thing if one suspected that others did not see one as exalted. Angela hardly knew that the hot currents of feeling that poured through her heart were those of hatred.

And hardly had she walked five minutes than she met Mr. Merrick, strolling in all his handsome dignity down the street.

There was no project in Angela; only the blind instinct to seize him, to use him; a weapon, perhaps an avenging weapon.

A fire was blazing in her, and by its glare through darkness she saw only fitfully her own desires. She held out her hand with a quick smile. “Dear Mr. Merrick, I had hoped to see you to-day. Will you walk back with me a little?”

She realized that Mr. Merrick’s slight knowledge of her could not be a very friendly one, but she guessed him to be susceptible to atonement.

Firmly and quickly she went on, “I have always wanted to talk to you and always missed the chance. We disagree, I think, about many things—and disagreement always attracts me. I long at once to get the larger sight, to test my truths by other’s truths. I so respect honesty, conviction, talent, even when used for purposes that oppose my own.”

Mr. Merrick, feeling a deep surprise and, perhaps, a touch of suspicion, bowed gravely and turned to walk beside her.

“I have so wanted to ask you about your life, about the steps of thought that have led you to your present position; for you must recognize that it is a position—and that to have achieved it implies responsibilities.”

Still with large gravity Mr. Merrick inclined his head, finding no ready words in answer to such comprehensive interest.

Angela was not wanting in humour, and a malicious thought of MaÎtre Corbeau, sur un arbre perchÊ, flashed through her mind. He evidently accepted her implied homage as a making of amends fully due to his distinction.

“I have tried so often to really know you,” Angela said, smiling plaintively, though lightly; “especially since reading your essay on ‘Credulity’ last spring. But I can never find you.”

“Ah, yet I am often at home at this hour.”

The touch of surprised suspicion was gone; Mr. Merrick spoke with benignity.

“Ah, but it’s difficult, you see.” Angela’s smile gained at once in gaiety and plaintiveness. “I had so hoped to see more of you all; I hoped when your daughter came to London that as an old friend of her husband’s—he is like a brother to me—was, I perhaps should say—she would let me be her friend too. London is a big, ugly place for a fresh young creature. I know it so well. I should have liked to hold her hand as it were, while she made her first steps in the muddy, slippery world.”

Mr. Merrick looked now a trifle perplexed, and Angela felt that she had gone a little too fast as he said, “I have been with Felicia from almost the beginning of her London life; and since I fancy that I know the world better than any young woman can know it”—he inclined himself to Angela with a slight, paternal irony of manner—“she has had her hand held. I have watched over my young nestlings,” Mr. Merrick added, smiling kindly upon her.

“Yes, yes,” she hurried to say, “a man knows more, of course—can guard from anything obvious; but the things to be guarded against in our complex modern life are not the obvious things; they are breaths, whispers, vague touches in the dark. Dear Mr. Merrick,”—her gentle look had now its rallying touch of boldness—“men do not hear or feel the things I mean. And, again, you are a man of the world, but your daughter is not a woman of the world. I know what you have wished for her—to keep your rose-bud sheltered, the dew still upon it; so often the ideal of the father when he has seen life in all its dangerous reality. You have succeeded; she is a rose-bud with the dew on it. Dear Mr. Merrick, keep it dewy.” Her smile straight into his eyes was grave, steady. MaÎtre Corbeau was flattered by her words, her look. The vague self-distrust that often fluttered in him, that fear of perhaps lacking what she so delightfully saw in him, was still. He had hardly grasped the significance of her allusions.

“You see,” Angela went on quietly,—she was by now quite sincerely in the very frame of mind her words fitted, warning, protective, benignant, exalted in his eyes so that the mood of that final “God bless you” was with her again, a mist that shut out flames,—“You see, your daughter is younger than I am. In one sense—it may sound odd, but I am very clear-sighted in all matters of sympathy—in one sense I doubt whether she could understand you as I do.”

Angela’s voice was as mild and smooth as milk and honey as she glided to another turn of her labyrinth. “There is an inevitable narrowness, intolerance, in youth; something cruel in the clearness of young minds, unable to see beyond their own acuteness. It didn’t surprise me that neither she nor Maurice appreciated your essay. I disagreed with it, but I saw the bigness of my opponent, saw all the thought and life and suffering that underlay every sentence; and when I realized that they saw only the little superficial things, that they laughed at the shrubs and thickets and didn’t even look up at the mountain, I felt all the strange situation, all the pain it must be to you; felt, forgive me if I say too much, your loneliness.”

Mr. Merrick was amazed, perhaps more amazed by this revelation of some unkind disloyalty in his children, than gratified by Angela’s sympathy. But though he could feel little gratitude he felt no distrust; and his injuries suddenly lowered, even larger than he had fancied. Maurice too! There was treachery then as well as disloyalty. The sudden grievance could not be kept down.

“I am surprised at Maurice. He urged me to publish, seemed to see nothing but the mountain,” he said.

Angela felt a hasty recoil from this false step; she had imagined the dissuasions both Felicia’s and Maurice’s.

“Oh, about Maurice I don’t know,” she said quickly; “it was in my talk with her about it that I saw her dislike—and only inferred his.” She felt that she had dogged all sorts of funny, half-hidden little dangers—Maurice’s aroused enmity was the plainest of them—and what was she racing towards? what her object? She could not see. Felicia took all from her, would share not a jot or tittle of her rich possessions; well then, she would keep what came. Besides, Felicia was in peril. Yes, there was the object. She heaved a sigh as it emerged once more before her.

Mr. Merrick, after a silence not without its dignity, forbearing further comment on the revelation, went on: “Yes, loneliness is the lot of age. Youth is narrow. I don’t complain; one can’t when one understands. Before her marriage Felicia was my complaisant little echo. I filled her mind with all it owns. Now other interests have pushed me out.”

The object, the beneficent object, was now so clear, that the dubious meaning of that sudden dodge was comfortably obscured; with one’s eye on a beacon one could no longer glance at these wayside mishaps. She had a look of quiet homage for his generosity, as she said, “As to interests that push you out I hardly care for one. Your daughter’s feeling about your essay could hardly have been spontaneous in your complaisant echo; it’s the rarest women, the strongest only, who do not echo some one; I imagined that in this case she echoed her husband, but I see the larger influence. My Cousin Geoffrey was with your daughter when I came this afternoon. I hoped to see her alone—to see you; but I felt that I was interrupting. He admires your daughter greatly. The dewy rose attracts after dusty, practical life; it’s pleasant, after turmoil, to inhale the perfume. As I say, frankly, it is an influence that I regret.”

“He is Maurice’s most intimate friend,” said Mr. Merrick quickly.

She felt his involuntary clutch at the answer to an intimation he hardly recognized.

“Yes, he is,” she assented, “but not the friend I would have chosen for Maurice either. Maurice wants an ideal in life, an impetus away from dreams and dilettante dawdling into noble action. Geoffrey is pinned to activity, indeed, but hardly in its noble forms; pinned rather to the practical, the expedient, the continual compromise of political life that tends, I think, to eat away all sense of moral responsibility. Not a good influence for either of your nestlings. I am very frank, Mr. Merrick, but I have known both these men so well, since boyhood. Geoffrey is strong, and Maurice, with all his charm, is weak; the contrast must tell. Geoffrey predominates over Maurice and will, I fear, over your daughter. Already we have found his influence working. Women echo the strongest. Here I am, at home. It was so good of you to come with me. I am so glad of our talk. Won’t you lunch with me and my father on Friday? Lord Challoner is to be with us—a clever man; he will be delighted to meet you. You and he will talk while papa and I listen. I love to watch minds striking sparks. You will come?”

“With pleasure.” Mr. Merrick’s varying emotions culminated for the moment in gratification. Lord Challoner was a very clever man; Lady Angela well known as a very clever woman. The responsibilities of his recognized worth wrought in him as he walked homeward.

CHAPTER VII

THE talk had been as suave as the ascent of a rocket; and once its destined height attained its transformation into successive explosive shocks swiftly followed. Felicia, shortly after her father’s return, burst into Maurice’s dressing-room. She had known a tormenting doubt of her own distrust; now her indignation was sure of itself, her distrust was justified; there was almost a relief in the fulness of her anger.

“Maurice, what do you think has happened?” she demanded.

Maurice was just finishing his dressing. He looked round at her inquiringly, laying down his brushes. Felicia’s indignations were rare, and therefore rather alarming; but seeing that this indignation was in no way connected with himself—Felicia’s whole aspect irradiated a sense of union, a conviction that he was to second her in her indignation—he took up the brushes again and put a finishing touch to his hair. “What is it?” he asked, wondering if Mr. Merrick had suddenly become insufferable, and rather hoping that such was the case and that Felicia would initiate a movement to get rid of him. “Nothing to bother you about your father, dear?” he added.

“Exactly. You remember last summer—Lady Angela and papa’s article? She came here this afternoon and asked me to forgive her. I couldn’t; it seemed cruel, I know; but I felt through and through me that I must not trust her. She went away, forgiving me, and now papa tells me that she met him and has been talking with him, and that he finds her charming, and that he is going to lunch with her! Imagine the audacity!”

Maurice, looking at her in the mirror, had turned white, feeling serpent-coils tightening about him again.

“How astonishing!” he ejaculated. But more than astonishment, he felt a sickening fear. What had Angela intended? What did she now intend?

“We must prevent it,” said Felicia. “I hate, dear, to bring you into it, but you must see as I do that it’s impossible. Try to explain it to papa; try to make him feel that she cannot be trusted, that she will poison everything; that in trusting her he divides himself from me.”

Maurice had begun to tie his white cravat, but his fingers fumbled with it, and he realized that they were trembling. Uppermost in his mind was a hope, clutched at, that Angela’s proffered friendship had been sincere, a dread lest Felicia’s rejection of it should call down upon her Angela’s revenge; for after all had not Angela, under the circumstances, behaved with extraordinary generosity? And what a weapon she held—and withheld—the weapon he himself had put into her hands. It was the thought of this weapon, turned against his wife’s breast, and murdering there her love for him, that made him white.

“I will tell him, dear, anything you like,” he said, in a voice she recognized as strange. “And she was here, you say, this afternoon? Felicia, dearest”—he had managed now to draw through the loop of the white tie—“weren’t you a trifle hard on her?—a trifle cruel, as you say? She is a visionary creature. She probably came to you with a real longing for reconciliation; and if she had offended you it had been unconsciously—through taking too much for granted. You know you misjudged her last summer. You remember, darling, you said you did.”

Something like terror was freezing Felicia’s anger. She steadied herself with the effort to look at and to understand Maurice’s point of view. “I said so because I wanted to make it easy for you; because I longed to believe myself in the wrong. Even now, I long to believe it. Perhaps I am unjust; perhaps she is right in what she said of me—that I am hard, cynical; perhaps she has really always wanted to be my friend. I can’t think it out; I only feel that I cannot trust her, that she is false, and that she is getting power over papa. Why, I don’t know, except that she loves power, and that through him she may strike at me; for what I feel most of all, and I have always felt it, Maurice, is that she hates me.”

“Dearest,”—Maurice searched a drawer for a handkerchief—“I know all you feel; but you do grant, don’t you, that your dislike of her, instinctive from the first, may blind you to some real sincerity in her? I don’t think she hates you; she is jealous. I am afraid, though it’s caddish to say it, that she did care a good deal about me, and that that’s the root of it. Her impulse is really kind, but your instinct makes you feel the pain and bitterness under it. Understanding it all, as we do, it seems really cruel to push her away, to break with her utterly.”

“We must, we must,” said Felicia, “for her sake as well as ours, we must.”

“Why, dearest?” Maurice tipped some perfume on the handkerchief.

“It can only be more pain and more bitterness for her if we don’t. What can I mean to her? What can you mean to her? And I have broken with her. Oh, Maurice, surely you see that it must be.”

He turned to her now, and saw that tears were running down her cheeks.

Caution left him. “Dearest!” he exclaimed, his arms about her in a moment, “rather than hurt you I would walk over ten thousand Angelas. Dearest, don’t cry; I will do my best. I’ll try and dissuade your father—an ugly task for me. Poor Angela was my friend.”

“Oh, Maurice, say that I do not come between you and anything real.”

Hiding her face on his shoulder, it comforted her to think herself weak, and he, with his larger, kinder comprehension, strong.

“You are the only real thing,” Maurice answered. He felt that he forced her to imply herself wilful in wrongness; and his fear lest she were more right than she guessed made his triumph seem dangerous.

---

Felicia said that she would not come in to dinner, and Maurice walked slowly to the drawing-room, pausing for a moment over his thoughts in the little hall. Felicia’s parting kiss had quieted his worst fear—the fear lest her love suspected past wrongs in him, a baseless fear he now saw, and with this steadying of the nerves he could see the other fear as baseless too. Angela would never turn despicably on him; besides, even if she did, Felicia would never believe her, her jealousy would piteously interpret her desperation. There was further relief in thinking Felicia unjust. The thing must be patched up, and Felicia brought to see that common fairness demanded a certain toleration of Angela.

Mr. Merrick was reading a paper with a pretence at absorption, and Maurice guessed that he was very angry. Neither commented on Felicia’s absence, and they went in silence into the little dining-room.

“So you are going to make friends with Angela,” Maurice observed lightly, when the servant had gone.

“Felicia has spoken to you, I infer,” said Mr. Merrick, sipping his soup in slow and regular spoonfuls. His father-in-law’s aggressively noisy manner of imbibing soup had long been a thorn in the flesh to Maurice. It was peculiarly irritating to-night. He could but hold Mr. Merrick responsible for all the vexatious situation. Silly, gullible old fool! He could almost have uttered the words as the sibilant mouthfuls succeeded one another. How obvious, in looking at him, that Angela could only have captured him as a tool. To think that, again cast the danger-signal on the situation, made it more than vexatious. Maurice forcibly quieted his mental comments, since to think his father-in-law a silly old fool roused again his worst suspicions of Angela.

“Naturally, she has spoken to me,” he said.

“I trust that you do not share her morbid hatred.”

“I don’t know about a morbid hatred,” Maurice answered, controlling his impatience with the more success now that the soup was done. “I see a very normal antagonism of temperament. Angela is all artificiality, and Felicia all reality; but I do think,” he added, “that Felicia has the defects of her qualities. She scorns artificiality too quickly. Her scorns outshoot the mark. I don’t think that poor Angela, with all her attitudinising, meant any harm this afternoon. Why should she? It was, I own, rather hard on her to come to beg for forgiveness, and to have Felicia refuse to forgive her.”

Mr. Merrick had not dared openly to express his angers and grievances, for then he must reveal their source, and that he felt to be inadvisable; but the latent angers only awaited their opportunity.

“Upon my word! Forgiveness for what?” he demanded.

Maurice recoiled as Angela that afternoon had recoiled. He had intended a cheery, mending talk, and he had not intended that it should lead him to this. He could not tell Mr. Merrick the cause of Angela’s visit—that he had jested with her over the very article he had urged him to publish.

“I don’t quite know what happened,” he said, searching his mind for a safe clue. “Felicia, as you know, didn’t like that article of yours; Angela spoke to her about it—it was in the summer—there was some misunderstanding; Felicia resented her sympathy.”

Matters were becoming clear, luridly clear, to Mr. Merrick’s mind, and Angela gained all that Felicia lost. “Indeed,” he said, ominously, “she criticizes her own father and resents the frank and more intelligent criticism of a friend.”

“No, no!” Maurice was feeling a rush of stupefaction. What had he done? This was not the clue. “Felicia, as far as I understand, didn’t initiate the criticism—resented Angela’s.”

“I see; I understand. It is the proffered friendship she rejects; the community, not the criticism.” Mr. Merrick felt that in Angela’s interpretation of the scene he held a touchstone of its real significance, invisible to Maurice. And how noble had been her further reticence. His anger rose with redoubled vigour over the slight obstacle Maurice had thrown before it. “I see it all,” he repeated; “the quixotic generosity of Lady Angela’s seeking for reconciliation, and Felicia’s rejection of her. As I say, a morbid hatred, and that only, explains it, and it explains it all.”

Maurice was silent, with a sort of despair he felt that so, in its false truth, the situation must rest.

“At all events,” he said, “I don’t suppose that under the circumstances you will really care to accept this invitation of Angela’s.”

“I have accepted it.”

“Grant that it’s a bit indelicate of her to steal such a march on Felicia. It looks like retaliation, you know.”

Mr. Merrick flushed. “I do myself and her the honour to think that it looks like friendship for myself.” Fresh lights were breaking on him every moment. Dewy roses in danger; perilous influences. “I do her the further honour,” he went on, “to believe that Felicia’s rejection of her does not alter her wish to do well by Felicia. For my part I will do my best to atone to her for the cruel affront that she has received at my daughter’s hands.”

Maurice, after the uncomfortable meal was over, almost feared to go to Felicia’s room with his news of defeat. He feared, too, with this new weakness born of his new self-disgust, that her love already had taken on that shadow of suspicion and distrust that he dreaded. He was feeling a sort of giddiness from the hateful pettiness of complexity that enmeshed him. He even imagined he might find her crying in bed, and dinnerless, a horribly effective form of feminine pathos that he had never yet had to face in her. The sight of a tray outside her door reassured him as to the dinner, and it was with a sense of exquisite relief, a sense of dear, sane, commonplace effacing silly doubts that he found her engaged in the very feminine but very unpathetic occupation of tidying her drawers.

She sat—her lap filled with gloves, ribbons and handkerchiefs, and was folding and rearranging, apparently intent on her occupation. Her eyes, as she looked round at him, gave him once more that sense of quiet security. She had faced the situation, seen its triviality, recovered her humour and her calm. Maurice at once saw the situation as only trivial too.

“Well?” Felicia asked, laying a lawn collar in its place.

“Well, dear, I’m afraid he is unmalleable. He is going.”

Felicia’s face hardened a little, but not, he knew, towards himself.

“He sees the strain, the unnaturalness he makes?”

“Try not to mind, dear. You’ll find that it will adjust itself.”

Maurice had not guessed, nor had Felicia herself even, the almost panic sense of dismay and danger that underlay her determined activity, her determined cheerfulness. Angela seemed to threaten all her life. Worst of all, though Felicia clung blindly to her instinct, she seemed to threaten her very power of judging, feeling clearly. Darts of self-distrust went through her, and following them, strange disintegrating longings to justify Angela by that self-distrust, to own herself hard, cruel, and to find peace. Her mind played her these will-of-the-wisp tricks, tempting her—to what bogs and quicksands? Under the shifting torment only the instinct held firm, and with shut eyes it clung to courage as her only safeguard; courage to face the tangled life, and the greater courage needed to face the tangled thoughts and conscience. It kept the quiet in her voice, her eyes, as she answered now.

“I mind, of course; but I believe that with time he will come back to me. I shan’t oppose him. As long, dear, as she doesn’t come between you and me, it’s really all right.”

CHAPTER VIII

“YES, it had become impossible,” said Geoffrey. He was standing before her in the little room overlooking the river where they so often talked. “I couldn’t submit to being dragged helplessly at the wheels of a chariot that I would have driven in precisely the opposite direction.” He smiled a little as he added, “So you see before you a ruined man. Are you pleased with me that I’ve embraced failure?” Lightness of voice went with the smile, and, superficially, the old manner of holding out a sugar-plum to a child.

Felicia, knowing what his resignation of office meant to him, was too much distressed by what she felt beneath the lightness to respond in the playful key.

“You are not a ruined man,” she said; “I’m not pleased that you should call yourself that. You really can’t afford to re-enter the House as an independent member?”

“No,” said Geoffrey, shortly; “I can afford nothing but drudgery.”

“Drudging with you will only be a stepping-stone back to power.”

He was studying her as he stood before her, seeing suddenly after his momentary self-absorption, her pallor and thinness. She almost reminded him of the ghostly Felicia, the Felicia of tears and helpless grief; the Felicia of that distant day among the birch-woods. This Felicia was not helpless, not weeping, not quite so wan, but her looks made an ominous echo. He took a seat beside her. “Your father still goes constantly to Angela?” he asked.

Felicia nodded gravely, yet without plaintiveness. Geoffrey made no comment on the affirmation. In silence for some moments, he told himself that this daily growing alienation accounted for the air of pain and tension.

“I must actually seem to you to whine over myself,” he said, presently. “Of course, I know that the drudgery is only a stepping-stone. I must fill my pockets with ammunition; find the pebble for my sling before I confront Goliath again. But tell me something.... I may ask it?” He hesitated. Under his light firmness he knew a shattered, groping mood. He could not think with clearness either for her or himself, and only felt that he must ask.

“Anything you like,” Felicia answered gravely.

“Are you happy?”

He had never come so near as in asking the question; they both felt it. Some barrier was gone; the barrier of her happiness, perhaps. Felicia knew that the little moment suddenly trembled for her with that sense of nearness; in another she felt that her sadness would be a stronger barrier.

She looked up from her sewing.

“You know what I feel about papa and Lady Angela. I feel it foolishly perhaps.”

“Apart from that, it’s a pain, I know, but one can adjust oneself to pain.”

“Apart from that, am I happy? What do you mean by happiness?”

“Are you satisfied? Is your life growing? Is it glad?” Each question was a stone thrown into a deep, deep well of sadness, but she answered with serenity over these shaken depths, even smiling at him with a flicker of the old malice. “It would not grow if I were satisfied, nor, perhaps, if I were altogether glad.”

She saw by the look of accepted gloom that came to his face that he knew himself banished from that moment of nearness, and over the barrier felt herself putting out a hand of tender compunction and comradeship, as she went on more gravely, “I think I am happy, but happiness is not a thing one can look at. It’s like a bird singing in a tree—one parts the branches to see it and it is silent.”

“You hear it singing, then, when I don’t ask you questions?” He had grasped the metaphorical hand, understanding and grateful; understanding, at all events, as much as she herself did.

“Yes; and when I don’t stop to listen for it.”

They talked on again: of his situation, his projects, but these things were now far from their minds. The fact of his broken life no longer held Geoffrey’s thoughts; they were in a chaos of doubts and surmises. He had ruined himself, then, that she might hear the bird sing, and it was silent; and was it only silent? Had it flown? For the first time since he had played the part of a happy fate in her life he knew a passionate regret for what he had done. No doubt, no surmise, touched her love for her husband. The regret was for the chance he had lost—that other chance of making her happy. Why hadn’t he ruthlessly held on to the advantage circumstance gave him, the advantage not only over Maurice’s poverty, but over Maurice’s weakness? A lurid thought went over that weakness. Would he, Geoffrey, whatever his poverty, have given her up? The “no” that thrilled sternly through his blood told him that to his strength the triumph might have come. He only quelled the tumult by remembering her strength. Dubious peace—to think that her strength would never have let him hope; her strength was great, no doubt, but was it as great as he had imagined? And would it have held her faithful to a finally fickle Maurice? Above all, would it have outmatched his own through years? The tumult was rising again, and he saw that the sudden, wild regret had been like the opening of a flood-gate to such tumults. He must endure them with as much composure as he could muster from contemplation of the fact that the past was irrevocable, that he had given her to her husband, and that she loved her husband; the last fact in particular laid a chill, sane hand on retrospect.

He and Felicia were still talking when Mr. Merrick entered.

Far from assuming a culprit’s humility, Mr. Merrick’s demeanour of late showed, towards Maurice and Felicia, an aggressive indifference, and towards Geoffrey a portentous gravity. He had made a habit of coming in upon tÊte-À-tÊtes, taking up a book, and seating himself, with a frosty nod and air of remonstrant determination that was more than a hint for Geoffrey’s departure.

Geoffrey had ignored the hint on several recent occasions, continuing to talk until Maurice’s appearance seemed to relieve Mr. Merrick from some sense of grim obligation; he would then arise, with no word, and stalk away. Geoffrey felt amusement in watching these manoeuvres, giving very little thought to their significance, and finding a schoolboy fun in the conviction that he annoyed Mr. Merrick very much by outsitting him. But to-day he was in no mood for annoying Mr. Merrick; Mr. Merrick’s appearance, indeed, annoyed him too vividly for him to feel the fun of retaliation. He got up at once, and before the other had taken his place near the window.

“Good-bye,” he said, taking Felicia’s hand; his eyes lingered on her pallor, her wanness. “I won’t silence the bird any more. I’ll see you soon again. Tell Maurice I’m sorry to miss him.”

He departed, and Mr. Merrick, arrested in his usual routine, paused, book in hand, on his way to his chair.

His frustrated passive energy took form in speech. He sat down and opened the book, observing, “I am sorry, Felicia, to be obliged to send any of your guests away.”

Felicia had noticed and wondered at the interruptions, hardly suspecting them of purpose, but now all manner of latent irritations leaped up in her. To-day, especially, she had resented her father’s appearance. She had needed Geoffrey, the haven of his silence and his strength. After that one strange moment of inner trembling, the old sense of quiet skies and an encircling shore had returned, and she had rested in it.

Now, looking up, her face sharpened with quick suspicion and quick resentment, she asked, “Obliged? Send my guests away? Indeed, papa, you could not do that.”

Her voice rather alarmed Mr. Merrick; it revealed a more resolute hostility than he had suspected; and real hostility, final or open hostility between him and his child, Mr. Merrick, in his heart of hearts, feared more than any calamity. Flattered vanity, injured trust, real anxiety for her welfare, had all helped to float his new independence, but he never contemplated really sailing away from her. He nerved himself now with the thought of his duty. Swinging his foot, speaking with measured definiteness, his eyes on his book, he said, “I shall at all events do my utmost to protect you from an undesirable intimacy.”

Felicia’s quick heart guessed at the alarm that nerved itself, and now, after the moment in which her anger rose, her sense of the ludicrous shook the anger to sudden laughter.

“Papa! how ridiculous!” she exclaimed. “Really, your prejudices shouldn’t make you say and do such foolish and such futile things. Mr. Daunt is my dearest friend—Maurice’s dearest friend.”

“It is a friendship I regret for both of you. Maurice is weak, Mr. Daunt is strong; he dominates you both.”

“What folly, my dear father!”

“Very well, Felicia, folly be it. I can only say that your conduct in this, as in other respects, deeply distresses me. You are altogether changed.”

“I changed? In what respect?”

Mr. Merrick paused to review swiftly all the respects, before saying, “You have become cynical, ungenerous, disloyal.”

Felicia’s amusement hardened to stern gravity. She grew even paler, laying down her sewing as she said, “Ungenerous? Disloyal? I?”

“You, Felicia. It has given me the very greatest pain.”

“How have I been ungenerous? disloyal?”

Her father did not meet her eyes.

“You have been ungenerous to a very noble woman, who only asked to be your friend. You have been disloyal to me.”

“To you!” Her interjections were like swift knives, cutting at his careful deliberateness. “What do you mean?”

“You thought fit, moved by this influence that I deplore—quite apart from its open antagonism to my claims on you—to scoff and jeer at my essay. It would have been enough to have expressed your dislike to me alone.” His eyes now turned to her.

She gazed at him with an almost stupid astonishment. Suddenly she rose. As if some hateful revelation had torn stupefaction from her,—“That horrible woman!” she cried.

“It was your husband who told me,” said Mr. Merrick quickly.

“Maurice told you that I had scoffed at your essay with that woman?”

Her eyes now had a corpse-like vacancy, very unpleasant to meet; only his consciousness of integrity enabled Mr. Merrick to keep his own steady.

“Scoff is perhaps too strong a word. You allowed her to see to the full your dislike, your scorn, and then repulsed her sympathy. That is what Maurice gave me to understand, and that, I don’t fancy you can deny, is the truth.”

Felicia, looking now about her vaguely, sank again in her chair. Her silence, her dazed helplessness, tinged Mr. Merrick’s displeasure with a slight compunction.

“There, child,” he said, rising as he spoke, “don’t feel like that about it. Any injury that I may have received is fully forgiven. The only real harm is your irrational hatred,—don’t stare like that, Felicia—your irrational hatred, as I say, and the influence that I protest against and must always protest against.”

Still she was silent, though her gaze had dropped from him. Her silence, her look of disproportionate dismay, perturbed and rather embarrassed him. He yielded to the magnanimity of a pat on the head as he passed her on his way out of the room, saying, “Think it all over; think better of it all.” Pausing at the door, he added, “She bears no grudge, not the faintest; understands you better than you do yourself, my poor child.” She still sat, lying back in her chair, her eyes cast down, her hands intertwisted in her lap. It was uncomfortable to leave her so, but after all, the punishment was deserved, her very silence proved as much; and he had done his duty.

Felicia was hardly conscious of his presence, his voice or his going; the words went over her head like the silly cries of a flight of cranes; when the door was closed it was as if the cranes had passed. She was alone on a great empty moor, it seemed, an empty, lowering sky above her.

This, then, was the truth. Her husband was a false, a craven man. Fiercely, yet with a languid fierceness, as of slow flames, feeling an immense fatigue, as though she had been beaten with scourges, her thoughts stripped him of all her sweet seeings of him. Shallow, impressionable, weak, his love for her the only steady thing in him; his loyalty to her as unsteady as a flame in the wind; his love, perhaps, steady only because she was strong. She could feel no pity; rather she felt that she spurned him from her. In her weariness it seemed to her that for a long time she had been trying to love him, and that now the effort was snapped. And her scorn of him passed into self-scorn. Fatal weakness and blindness not to have seen him truly from the first, not to have felt that her craving for love, her love for his love, had been more than any love for him. In her deep repulsion from him and all he signified, his individuality and its fears, its sadness, its devotion, were unreal to her, blotted out in scorn—scorn, the distorter of all truth—as unreal as her love for it had been. And with her recognized weakness and despair came, with the memory of that trembling nearness, the thought of Geoffrey, and her heart suddenly cried out for him, for his strength, his unwavering truth. She closed her eyes, holding the thought close.

Some one entered, and she opened her eyes on Maurice. He had worked all the afternoon. The sitter was gone. He beamed with conscious merit, deserving her approbation, quite like a child let loose from school; smiling and radiant.

He came to her as she lay sunken in the chair, leaned to her for a kiss, and paused, meeting the hard fixed look of her eyes.

“What is the matter, dearest?” he asked, and his heart began to shake.

“Why did you tell papa that lie?”

He hardly understood the question, but her tone struck through him like a knife. “What lie?”

“You told him that I talked to Lady Angela of my dislike for his article.”

“Didn’t you?” Maurice asked feebly, for his brain was whirling. The added baseness did not urge her voice from its horrible, icy calm.

“I, Maurice? When you—you only talked to her of it?”

“Felicia, I swear you have mistaken it. Don’t kill me in looking like that. Let me think. I told him—yes—I had to explain how it happened—your anger towards Angela, your sending her away. I muddled into the whole thing. I suppose I let him think that you had talked. How could I tell him that it was I? For Heaven’s sake, be merely just, darling,—Felicia,—how could I tell him that, when I am half responsible for his publishing it? You remember the mess I got into to please you?”

“To please me? You are a coward, Maurice.” She turned her eyes from him.

Maurice stood before her, miserably, abjectly silent. Moments went by, and still she sat with stern, averted eyes that seemed to look away from him for ever. It was not even as if she paused to give a final verdict; it was as though in her last words she had condemned him, and as if, now, he were a thing put by and forgotten.

But though, her brow on her clenched hand, her eyes fixed, half looking down, she seemed a figure of stony immutability, more than if she looked at him, she was aware of his misery, his abjectness, his piteous loss of all smiles and happy radiance. Her own words—“a lie,” “a coward,” echoed. Insufferable shocks of feeling, indistinguishable, immense, went through her; and suddenly the surging sense of her own cruelty, his piteousness, made a long cry within her. She could not bear to be so cruel; she could not bear to have him suffer. The inner cry came in a stifled moan to her lips. “Maurice!” She covered her face with her hands. He fell on his knees beside her, his heart almost broken by sudden hope. They clung together like two children. “Forgive me; forgive me,” she repeated. “Forgive me. Nothing—nothing could deserve such cruelty. My poor, poor Maurice; I didn’t love you. I was so cruel that I didn’t love you any longer.”

She looked into his blue eyes, his face, quivering with sincerity. With the confession, the awful moments of hatred drifted into nightmare unreality. His need of her, his love for her, were the only realities; they engulfed the vision of herself—dry, bitter, bereft of her love for him. It flitted away—a bat—in the sad, white dawn. It was she, who, holding him to her, explained, to herself as well as to him, how it all happened; an involved, sudden twist of circumstance before which he had been bewildered, weak. “And weakness is more forgiveable—so far more forgiveable than cruelty, dear—dear,” she said. “Horrible I! to have had such thoughts.” She could forgive him. She could not forgive herself for having hated him. The very memory trembled in her like a living thing. No tenderness was great enough to atone.

Later on, when Mr. Merrick appeared, Maurice rose, and with unflinching distinctness put the whole piece of comic tragedy before him, sparing himself in nothing. After the searing torture he had undergone, he felt no pain in the avowal. Mr. Merrick’s red displeasure rather amused him, so delicious was the sense of utterly redeeming himself in Felicia’s eyes. It was Felicia who felt the pang for her father’s wounded vanity and for the ugly picture that Maurice must present to him.

“You have behaved in a way I don’t care to characterize,” Mr. Merrick remarked, when Maurice had finished with “If I had only had Felicia’s courage at the beginning—only frankly told you that I didn’t like the article—if I hadn’t been over-anxious to please you and her, I wouldn’t have got myself into such a series of messes.”

And now Maurice, his head held high, his thumbs in his pockets, looking as if, with gallant indifference, he were facing cannon that he scorned, replied that he deserved any reproach.

“Maurice has been weak, too complaisant,” said Felicia, “but there has been a half-truth in all he said; he kept back the whole for fear of hurting you. Forgive us both.”

“You have nothing to forgive in Felicia,” said Maurice; “she has been the target, I think, for all our egotisms to stab.”

“Indeed, Maurice, indeed. I am not in any way aware of having wounded my child except where your tergiversation opened her to my just reproach. If she has been a target you have hidden behind it.”

“Exactly.” Maurice received the raking fire with undisturbed equanimity. “In future you’ll remember that whatever I say she can never deserve reproach.”

Felicia was protesting against this too sweeping defence, when Mr. Merrick interrupted her with “I only beg that in the future you will not whet your consciences on my feelings. Pray consider me, if only slightly.”

Felicia looked, when her father went out, too dejected as a result of this scene of dauntless penance.

“Smile, smile, darling,” Maurice begged, raising her hand to his lips, and feeling like a knight returned to his lady, shrived of misdeed by peril bravely fronted.

“Tell me it really is all over. Tell me that I pleased you—that it was what you would have hoped of me.”

“Yes; you were all that I wished. It is only that I am sorry for him. He is like a hurt child, Maurice.”

“He will forget and forgive in a day or two. We will pet him; make much of him. Can I do anything more to feel that I am fully loved again?”

She leaned her forehead against his arm, tired with a spiritual and bodily fatigue that made her voice dim and slumberous as she answered, “Don’t ever remind me that you were not.”

CHAPTER IX

THE news of Geoffrey’s resignation of office was a tonic to Maurice’s new energy. It spurred him to fuller deserving of such sacrifice. He finished the portrait over which he had been loitering, with a sudden vigour that seemed in its auspicious result to promise more originality than he had ever shown, and in pursuance of the new resolution, he accepted another order—a dull and wealthy old ecclesiastic in a cathedral town—an order, in spite of remunerativeness, that he would certainly have refused a month before, as absolutely clogging to all inspiration.

“I shall have to leave Felicia to you for perhaps over a fortnight,” he said to Mr. Merrick, as, in a hansom they drove to an evening party. Felicia preceded them with the friend at whose house they had dined.

Maurice had carried out his project of “petting” his father-in-law, but in spite of his butterfly manner of gaiety Mr. Merrick’s mood showed little relaxation; his wounds were deep; they rankled; and now he received the news of guardianship, which Maurice imparted with an air of generous self-sacrifice, gravely.

“It’s our first separation,” Maurice added. “You will have her all to yourself. My loss will be your gain.”

His smile left Mr. Merrick’s gravity unchanged. The opportunity seemed to have come for the discharge of a painful duty.

“That I am to have Felicia all to myself, I question,” he said, looking ahead at the swift lights of the moving town; for he did not care to meet his son-in-law’s eyes while he seized the opportunity.

“Well,”—Maurice good-humouredly yielded to his funny exactitude—“not altogether; her friends will relieve guard now and then.”

It was wiser to reach his purpose by slow approaches; Mr. Merrick evenly remarked, “My guard shall be unbroken,” adding, “It will be doubly necessary.”

He was rewarded by a light note of wonder in Maurice’s voice. “You seem to take it very seriously, my dear father.”

“I take it seriously, Maurice.”

Even from Mr. Merrick’s complacency such magnified significance was perplexing; Maurice turned an inquiring gaze upon him.

“What are you talking about?” he asked.

“I regret this departure of yours, Maurice. I beg you to reconsider it.”

“My dear father, what are you talking about?”

“You should not leave Felicia. She is exposed to certain influences—to a certain influence—that I deeply disapprove. She is unruly, reckless. I pretend to no further authority. She defies me.”

“Will you explain yourself?” The patience of Maurice’s tone was ironic.

“I will speak plainly, since you force it. Mr. Daunt is too much with Felicia.”

“Geoffrey! He can’t be too much with her.”

Maurice’s nerves, since the last scene with Felicia, had been on edge. Only a contemptuous amusement steadied them now. Mr. Merrick’s paternal anxiety, alloyed though it was with the latent desire to hit back, was sincere; Maurice saw in it only a pompous, an idiotic impertinence.

Mr. Merrick’s voice hardened to as open an hostility as his son-in-law’s.

“People notice it. There is talk about it. I will not stand by and see my child’s name become the plaything of malicious gossip.”

“Who notices it? Who talks about it? What utter and damnable folly!”

“I decline to enter into an unbefitting altercation with you, Maurice. Your friend is obviously in love with your wife, and Felicia allows him to be too much with her.”

“Is this pure imagination on your part? I know, of course, that there’s never been any love lost between you and Geoffrey.”

“I have been warned,” said Mr. Merrick, reluctant, yet with redoubled dignity.

Maurice’s smouldering nerves struck to flame, and an ugly illumination glared at him. “This can be no one but Angela,” he said.

It was difficult to keep dignity under eyes that seemed to take him by the throat; in the struggle to look firmly back Mr. Merrick was silent.

“Come. Own to it. The venomous liar!” Maurice added in a low voice, studying the revelations of the other’s wrathful helplessness.

“I have no wish to deny it, and I must forbid you to speak in that manner of a woman who honours you by calling you her friend.”

“I know Angela better than you do,” Maurice laughed. His fury almost passed away from its derivative object.

“The fact remains that people talk, and that truest kindness warned me of it.”

“If people talk it’s she who makes them. I’ve known—ever since I married her—that Geoffrey loved Felicia.” Maurice flung him the truth scornfully.

“Yet you speak of lies!”

“I know my friend, and honour him, as you don’t seem to know or honour your daughter.”

“I know human nature as you don’t seem to know it. It’s a dangerous intimacy. I insist on my right to protect my daughter.”

“You insult her by claiming such a right. Don’t speak to me of this again.” Maurice, as he said it, grew suddenly white with a new thought. “And never dare,” he added, turning eyes that quelled even Mr. Merrick’s fully-armed championship, “never dare tell Felicia that you have discussed her with that woman.”

“You may be sure that I would not expose Lady Angela to Felicia’s misconception.”

Mr. Merrick, in his realized helplessness, cast about him for some retaliatory weapon. He seized the first that offered itself. “And since my meaning as Felicia’s father seems gone, I had better go myself. I am not needed, since you say so, by either of you.”

It was the idlest threat. In utter astonishment he heard Maurice answering, “I’ve thought more than once of suggesting it. By all means.”

“I will remain with Felicia while you are away.”

“As you please.”

“I will leave directly after your return.”

“When you will.” Maurice’s voice was quieter. The unexpected prospect of relief mollified him. “It’s a pity, for Felicia will suffer, but she herself must see that it doesn’t do. You have made life too uncomfortable for both of us. And after this! Well, you’ve made things impossible. For a time you had better realize what your daughter is away from her, realize how little she needs any one’s protection. It’s settled then; you go, on my return.”

Mr. Merrick bowed. He was aghast, outraged, more than all, wounded. The hurt child whimpered and then fairly howled within him, while, in silence, he smiled ironically. They reached their destination, Maurice in a growing rage that for once obliterated his fears. It was like strong wine that uplifted, made him almost glad.

He left his father-in-law and made his way through the crowded rooms in search of Felicia. He needed to look into her limpid eyes after this hissing of serpents. But instead of Felicia he found Angela.

For the distasteful monotony of these assemblies Angela had always an air of patient disdain; and to-night, under a high wreath of white flowers, her face more than ever wore its mask of languid martyrdom. She was in white, perfumed like a lily.

Maurice felt a keener gladness on seeing her. His wrath, running new currents of vigour through him, carried him past any hesitation. At last he would have it out with Angela.

“I want to speak to you,” he said. “Is there any place where one can get out of this crowd?”

Angela saw in a flash that a crisis had arrived; and in another that she had been working towards such a crisis, living for it, since Maurice had cast her off. For a moment, beneath the rigour of his eyes—to see Maurice unflinching was a new experience—her spirit quailed, then soared, exulting in the thought of final contest. Since he wished it—yes, they would speak openly. He should at last hear all—her hate, her love, her supplication. She was an intimate in the house where Maurice and Felicia were formal guests; her quick mind seized all possibilities. “Yes,” she said, “there is a little room—a little boudoir. No one ever goes there on nights like these.” Her self-mastery was all with her as she moved beside him through the crowd. She was able, over the tumult of hope and fear, to speak calmly, to smile at friends her weary, fragile smile.

“Aren’t these scenes flimsy and sad?” she said. “How much happiness, how much reality do they express, do you think?”

Maurice forced himself to reply. “They express a lot of greediness and falseness; those are real enough.”

“That is true, Maurice,” she said gently; “so true that I sometimes think I would rather be a washerwoman bending in honest work over my tubs; one would be nearer the realities one cares for.”

They left the reception-rooms, and she was silent when faces were no longer about them. She led him down a passage, across a book-filled room, a student’s lamp its only light, and softly turning the handle of a further door, opened it on the quiet of a little room, discreetly frivolous with the light gaiety of Louis XV decorations, empty of all significance but that of smiling background for gay confidences or pouting coquettries. Not exactly the background for such a scene as she and Maurice must enact, yet Angela triumphed in the contrast. Tragic desolation, splendid sincerities would gain value from their trivial setting. Her passion, her misery, would menace more strangely, implore more piteously among nymphs and garlands.

She dropped into a chair, and put out her hand to a jar of white azaleas. She asked no question, but she looked at him steadily. Maurice had closed the door and stood near it, his back to it, at a distance from her. The sound of the world outside—the world that smiled and pouted—was like the faint hum of a top.

“How have you dared warn my father-in-law against Geoffrey?” asked Maurice. He was nerved to any truth.

Angela made no reply, her long, deep eyes on him while, automatically, her hand passed over the azaleas.

“How could you betray my confidence in you? What a fool I was to trust you!”

“Betray you?” she murmured.

“You pursue me and my happiness!” Maurice cried, and hot tears of self-pity started to his eyes. Her eyes dropped. That his hand should deal this blow!

“I pursue you?—and your happiness, Maurice?” she repeated.

“Can you deny it? Since we came back to England you have been a poison in our lives.”

She was struggling with the moment’s dreadful bitterness. Over the bleeding pain of it her sense of his cruel injustice sustained her to a retort: “I have betrayed nothing. You are the only betrayer, Maurice. You betrayed my love; you betrayed your wife to me.”

“Great heavens!” Maurice dropped his forehead on clenched hands, “it was to spare you!”

“I guessed it,” said Angela, while her hand still passed lightly over the azaleas.

They were silent for a moment, and presently in a voice, steady, even gentle, she went on, “I have wished, sincerely wished, to be your wife’s friend. Even after she refused my friendship, I have wished to guard her, at least, from malicious gossip. You know what London is. You and I and your wife live in among people who regard old-fashioned scruples intellectually, not morally; but your wife’s position is not great enough to allow her to be reckless. Even without such knowledge as mine to reveal it, Geoffrey’s love for her makes her conspicuous. They are here together to-night. I saw them at a concert the other day; met them in the Park before that. When last I went to your house I found them together, alone, and—I understand your wife, Maurice—she would think no harm of it—I think she had just kissed him; no harm, Maurice,”—before his start her voice did not quicken, “she would imagine that she kissed him as a brother. He held her hand, I think. I felt it my duty to put petty conventions and reticences aside, and for her sake, for your sake, Maurice, to warn her father, with all delicacy, all caution. I believe it, with all my soul, to be a perilous intimacy. That is my betrayal.”

Maurice’s brain swam with the picture she flashed upon it. Only for a moment;—Felicia’s smile went like a benison over it. Even if it were true, he could look at the picture, after that first pause of breathlessness, steadily. Even if it were true, he could smile back, understanding.

“Geoffrey has all my trust,” he said; “I have all Felicia’s love.”

“You think so,” said Angela quietly. Again her eyes fell before his, but her face remained fixed in its conviction of sincerity.

“How dare you, Angela.”

Still looking down, she went on as steadily as before, her voice anchored with its weight of woe,—how he loved Felicia!—“I dare because I believe that she loves him most. Her love for you and your weakness is maternal by now. I know it, I feel it; I can see it when she looks at you and at him. She loves him as she has never loved you. And I! Oh, Maurice—Maurice—I!” She suddenly cast her arms upon the table, her head fell upon them; terror, regret, and passionate longing swept over her; her voice broke and she burst into sobs. “Couldn’t I have let her go from you? Has it not been nobility in me to guard her—for you? She has never loved you, and I—Maurice, you know, you know—how I have loved you, how I love you! Forgive me! Have pity on me!”

Maurice, frowning darkly, sick with unwilling pity, hating to feel that she deserved pity and that he hated her, turned his eyes away. She had terrified him too much; had dared to lay desecrating hands on the thing dearest to him in the world. Something, and not the least best thing in him, froze before her cry for pity and made him incapable of forgiveness. For once in his life he hardened into resistant strength.

His silence was more horrible to Angela than any look, any word. She raised her head and saw his averted eyes. Only humiliation remained for her. She rose. Her wreath of flowers, loosened, had slipped to one side, she put up a vague hand to it, moaning “Maurice!”

Still he looked away, with odd, startled eyes that did not think of her. The wonder of the shot that had passed through his heart was still felt more as a surprise than as a pain.

She knew that she would always see him so—erect, beautiful, startled from a shot. She tottered to him; she fell before him and grasped his arms. “Oh pity me! Don’t be so cruel. What wrong have I done? Despise me—but pity me.”

“I cannot,” he said.

“Then kiss me—once—only once.”

“I cannot,” he repeated, still not looking at her.

“Have you never loved me? Never really loved me—as you love her?” she said, shuddering and hiding her face as she crouched at his feet.

“Never!”

Swaying, trembling violently, she arose. She threw wide her arms, seized him, and closing her eyes to his look of passionate repulsion, kissed him on his brow, cheek, lips, before, almost striking her from him, he broke from her, burst open the door and left her.

CHAPTER X

“GEOFFREY, dear old boy, walk home with me, will you?” On the steps, after seeing Felicia and her friend into their carriage, Maurice put his hand through Geoffrey’s arm. “I’ve had a row with my father-in-law—would rather not see him just now.” They crossed the square together. Maurice was feeling no reaction to weakness after his strength. The scene was like a distant memory, and that strange shot that had hurt, had pierced him with such a pang—not of suspicion, not of foreboding, but of wonder, deep, sad wonder.

He felt a sort of languor after pain, and, as they walked, went on dreamily: “Such a queer evening, Geoffrey, horrible!—yet no, splendid too. Facing things is splendid isn’t it? I want to tell you something, Geoffrey—to confess something—I want you to know. That winter—when I thought I could not marry Felicia, I went pretty far with Angela. I thought everything was up with me; I didn’t care much where I drifted. And I did drift. Nothing much more than there has always been, Geoffrey; with Angela it was never a case of playing with fire, the danger was of getting frozen into the ice. It was abominable of me—caddish;” Maurice’s dreamy voice had a dignity that seemed to hold all other reproach than his own at arm’s length, a dignity so strange and new that Geoffrey even at the moment’s great upsurging of bitterness, regret and question could repress it as unworthy, not only of himself, but of Maurice. “Abominable—abominable,” Maurice repeated, “for I let her think—more than ever—that I cared—something. She is odious to me, Geoffrey. I can’t be just to her.”

Geoffrey said nothing, but his quiet profile made confidences as easy as peaceful breathing; the confidences that could be told. The others—ah! that distant wailing of regret. But in this dreamy mood even that was very distant. “Perhaps, dear old fellow—if I’d told you—on that night, you wouldn’t have cared to help me.”

Maurice stated the fact calmly, looked at it calmly. “In that case—what would I be, Geoffrey?—if you and Felicia had not made me?”

In the still, sleeping town, chill with a coming dawn, they were as near as spirits, walking together through old memories.

“I would have cared to help you—and her,” said Geoffrey.

“Ah! well; perhaps;” Maurice sighed a little. “While I’m away, Geoffrey, see a lot of Felicia, and, Geoffrey, see that Angela doesn’t get near her. Her silly old father dislikes you, but you won’t mind that. He suspected you of being in love with her, so I informed him that he was right. Dear old Geoff! You will see after her?”

“I don’t mind the father; I would mind making it difficult for her to get on with him.”

“Oh! you won’t. He’s had to accept it. I wouldn’t like to go if you weren’t here to see after her. So you don’t regret making me?”

“Making you and her so happy?” Geoffrey smiled, humouring his child-like mood.

“I do make her happy? You see it. It’s your reward, my dear friend. That’s what I want to say to you. I’ve said it often enough to myself. You shall never regret it, so help me God.”

Without looking at him Geoffrey put his hand on Maurice’s, pressing it firmly. Dimly, he felt, among crowding shapes of accepted sorrow, only a peace, a thankfulness.

“You see,” Maurice stammered, “I should die without her. She is life to me, Geoffrey. You don’t know what you’ve given me—I hardly knew. She is life to me—that’s all; and I should die without her.”

The talk with Geoffrey seemed like a dream the next day. It was not real; Maurice’s conscience could not call such faint confession real. Yet, in spirit, it had been more real than the reality which eyed it sadly. In spite of sadness it went with him like a thought of peace, of safety.

Felicia, when she heard of her father’s proposed and accepted departure, acquiesced with even more cheerfulness than he had hoped for, and when Maurice, flushing a little, told her of Mr. Merrick’s resolution to protect her, she said that she had suspected that. “I am glad you let him know the truth, too. It’s really better to let him see that he has only discovered what no one wishes to conceal.” She looked musingly up at her husband. Though she looked clearly, no consciousness in her answering his flush, a faint trail of cloud drifted—faint and far—across the quiet sky of her thoughts, or was it a little wind that blew apart the veil of white serenity, showing darkness behind it? That turning of her weariness and wretchedness to Geoffrey—the memory of it was like the drifting cloud, or like the revealing wind. Dimly the darkness faded. The turning had been because of cruel passion, that horrible moment of mistaken hatred. The cloud melted, or was it self-reproach that once more drew the veil of tenderness across the dark?

Maurice, gazing, saw only the musing thought.

“I can’t blame him—really—either, Maurice. You and I know how Geoffrey loves me, but we can hardly expect papa to see that as an accepted fact nor to recognize the calibre of such a love.”

It was his recognition of the calibre of Geoffrey’s love that kept Maurice’s faith high above even a self-dishonouring twinge of jealousy. Yet the sadness, as for might-have-beens in which he had no share, still was with him. The vision of that unseen kiss was with him too. He did not believe it true, though his love for Felicia almost claimed it true; it beautified her—that kiss of reverent pity and tenderness. The toad Angela flung became a flower on Felicia’s breast; that he could smile at such a vision was his flower, too; but the vision was part of the sadness. He saw himself shut out from a strange, great realm—colourless, serene, like a country of glorious mountain peaks before the dawn, a realm that he, in some baffling way, seemed to have defrauded for ever of its sunrise. He put aside the oppression, saying, “You don’t mind, so much then, his going?”

“I am sorry, of course. But he made things too difficult. It will be easier to get back to the old fondness if we are not too near. And he will enjoy, when things blow over, coming to us for short visits.”

The prospective peace, he saw, left her, with a sort of lassitude, a little indifferent to her father’s pathos. Before this placidity his sadness became a sudden throb of gloom.

“You do mind my going?” he asked.

Felicia was sitting on the window seat and had looked down into the street far below for his coming cab. She glanced up quickly at him as he stood beside her, seeing the shadow in his eyes.

“Dear goose!” She drew him down on the seat, her hand in his, “Mind your going? I hate it. But it’s only for a fortnight—less, if you are lucky with your work.”

“Only a fortnight!” Maurice repeated, half playfully, but half fretfully too. “You can say that! It’s our first parting, Felicia. It seems to me an eternity before I shall see you again.”

She still looked into his eyes, seeing, under the playfulness, the fretfulness, all that he had suffered during these last weeks of entanglement. Leaning her head on his shoulder, she said dreamily: “Don’t go.”

“Really?” Sunlight streamed through clouds, “Really you say don’t go? And my duty? my work? all the virtues you make me believe in?”

“I want to keep you near me, to comfort you for it all,” Felicia said. He understood the reference to his pain. The very sweetness nerved his growing strength, the resolution to be worthy. With his arms around her he whispered that he adored her and that he would go and work so well that she should be proud of him. She listened, her eyes closed, yet, when he had spoken, still dreamily she repeated, “Don’t go.”

“Are you tempting me? because if you are, if you really want me to stay, I can’t go.”

She did not reply for a long time, lying quietly against his shoulder, her hand in his. They heard the cab drive up.

“I suppose you must go,” she said, “Yes, of course, you must. Only, isn’t it happy, sitting here together? You must go, though I want you to stay, for I really am sensible; I know there is a grown-up world; but sitting here makes it seem unreal, and I think of sweet, silly things, like children’s games on a long summer afternoon.”

She straightened herself, sighing, smiling, then as she looked at him, she saw that his eyes were filled with tears. In her eyes sudden tears answered them.

“It’s that we have been rather unhappy, isn’t it, dear Maurice?”

“Never, never again,” he whispered; and, in a voice that took her back to such a distant day; “Do you remember once, long ago, when I first knew you, I told you that it was lack, not loss, I dreaded—it’s only loss I dread now, for my life is full. And with you to prop me I am growing into such a real personality that I shall lose even my cowardly dread of loss. I’ll never make you unhappy any more.”

“Ah! but what about me? It’s I who have made you unhappy, dear. Forgive me everything. You shall have no more dreads.”

She leaned to kiss his forehead, rising, her hands in his. Compunction for the weakness that had showed him her unwillingness to let him go, smote her. Her strength more than ever, now that it was triumphing, must nerve his growing strength.

“Never, never again,” she repeated. “So go, dear, have all the virtues. We will both work. The eternity will pass.”

CHAPTER XI

MR. MERRICK, when Maurice had gone, made no reference to his own expulsion, and faced his daughter at meals in frigid silence. They saw little of each other now. Felicia was busy with her writing, with her friends. The days passed quickly. Geoffrey appeared punctually every day, but only for short visits. He told her that the readjustment of his life to its lower key kept him frightfully busy. He looked jaded, harassed.

Over these visits Mr. Merrick, oddly enough, no more mounted guard. Indeed, beneath the frigidity, the hurt child had howled itself into a frightened silence. Mr. Merrick’s foundations seemed giving way beneath him, and, to add to the sense of general crumbling, he had not heard from Angela for many days. That his child should cast him off made a desolation so large that it was only dimly realized. Angela’s defection was a concentrated, a sharp bitterness. He evaded its contemplation by accusing himself of over-imaginativeness—nerves on edge—no wonder—and went to her one afternoon at tea-time. Maurice’s fortnight was nearly over, and the time of his own departure drew near. Already he had meditated a retreat on Paris, a week there to make the descent from London to the country less of a horrid jolt.

Angela was at home, alone, and looking, to Mr. Merrick’s sharpened suspicions, colder, different. She was so white, so haggard that he hoped that ill-health and not change towards himself might be the cause of difference. At all events she was hardly beautiful, and something in her face, baffled, rapacious, dimly suggested a hovering, hungry bird of prey. Mr. Merrick felt uncomfortable, and, weakness in discomfort taking shelter in appeal and pathos, he found himself announcing to Angela his virtual dismissal from his children’s roof. After all, as he reflected, it was in a sense Angela’s doing. She might now at least from the frankness of the intimacy she had made between them, show him comprehension and compassion.

“To speak plainly, I’ve been turned out,” he said, stirring the cup of tea she had handed him.

“Turned out?” repeated Angela, with an impersonal vagueness, quite as if it had been a stray dog of which they were speaking.

Mr. Merrick’s suspicion grew past alarm to resentment, and resentment cowered under a more sturdy manner of pathos as of one who faced fate’s unjust bolts with erect bearing and unconquerable gaze. “Our friendship, it seems, is unforgiveable. It was a choice between it and them. I couldn’t submit to such intolerable dictation.”

Angela felt as if, after a long drowning swoon under water, she were being resuscitated to painful life by blows upon her head. She, so blameless, having done no wrong except love with a fatal fidelity; she, crushed, humiliated, was to feel another lash. Even her kindness to this pompous fool was to be made a scourge for her.

Mr. Merrick saw that she grew more white as, with folded arms, she drooped her head and looked up at him from sombre brows. “They can’t forgive you that? They hate me so much?”

“Apparently,” said Mr. Merrick, his growing sense of the indignity of his situation giving him a deeper gloom of manner. “The crisis was brought about by my venturing to warn Maurice on the subject you have spoken of.”

“And you told him who had warned you? I see.”

Mr. Merrick took hasty refuge before the cutting quality of her voice. “He sprang at the conclusion and defied me to deny that it was you. He was outrageous. I have had to defend you as well as myself, Lady Angela.”

“He accused me of falseness?”

“Insolently.” It was well that she should know how much he had had to champion her. “I don’t care to recall the terms.” But Mr. Merrick was feeling an odd satisfaction in recalling them. His heart, before this rebuffing friend, before her icy eyes and icy voice, was calling out for Felicia—Felicia whom he had lost because of this,—did she not suggest something snake-like? His wounded affection, his wounded vanity, longed for such comfort as Felicia alone could give. It would be well could he believe Lady Angela—if not a liar, at least a presumptuous busy-body. His first impressions of her were flooding his mind again.

“I could not forgive the insolence,” he said, “although I can conceive it possible that you and I have been to a certain extent mistaken. Such a mistake must naturally wound Maurice and Felicia.”

Angela leaned back in her chair, her long eyes on him, and he felt, like a palpable atmosphere, the enmity between them.

“As it happens, Maurice told me that he had always known of his friend’s love for Felicia,” he pursued. “It’s in no sense an ordinary case of attraction, you see. A Dante and Beatrice affair. He has absolute trust in his friend, Maurice has, and I, of course, have absolute trust in Felicia. Not that I approve; I would have felt it my duty to protest in any case.”

“You think that I imputed some wrong that was not there, and that owing to me this breach has come between you and your daughter?” said Angela.

“I hold you in no way to blame. Without a full knowledge of facts—Maurice’s knowledge the most important of them—one may naturally draw false inferences. We were both a little hasty in judging.” Mr. Merrick essayed a generous smile.

A deep flush passed over Angela’s face. For a long moment she was silent, her eyes on him; then, in a voice harsh and monotonous she said—

“I hardly know what facts may mean to you—or inferences. Maurice, before he married your daughter, told me that Geoffrey had paid him to marry her. They live upon Geoffrey’s money. He has ruined his career for your daughter’s sake. These are further facts, Mr. Merrick. Have I indeed been a little hasty in my inferences?”

Mr. Merrick, his tea-cup in his hand, his face with as yet merely a look of wonder on it, sat dumb.

“You now see the knowledge that underlay my warnings. What Geoffrey’s motives were I cannot say; purely disinterested, perhaps; apparently your daughter was dying for love of Maurice. Whether they have remained so disinterested is for you to judge. But I hope you will acquit my warnings of hastiness.”

“Maurice told you?” Mr. Merrick repeated. He chiefly felt a deep, personal humiliation.

“As he told me everything at that time.”

Mr. Merrick rose unsteadily, putting down his tea-cup upon the table. “The scoundrel!” he said.

“Which one do you mean?”

“The scoundrel! I mean Maurice. She shall know him.”

Angela’s eyes glittered.

“I think it well that all the truth should be known,” she said.

CHAPTER XII

THAT evening, by special messenger, a note reached Angela. “Will you come to me,”—the words crossed the page with the swift steadiness of an arrow—“and repeat to me the calumnies that you have spoken to my father. I shall regard a refusal as a retractation.”

Angela traced her own answer with a deliberateness that savoured to her mind of unwavering benevolence. “I will be with you at eleven to-morrow morning. Do not think that I come as an enemy. Be as strong to hear the truth as I to speak it.”

She kept the boy waiting while she copied and re-copied the words into a larger, firmer script in which there should be no hint of threat or unsteadiness.

Between the sending of this acceptance of challenge and the hour of the interview next day Angela’s mind, like a wreck, was tossed from shuddering heights to engulfing abysses. Since the moment when she had crawled at Maurice’s feet her image of herself had been broken, unseizable. She no longer knew herself, she, the uplifter, a crouching suppliant. What she had further done—that final, passionate abandonment where vindictive fury, worship, and desperate appeal to the very rudiments of feeling were indistinguishably mingled,—she could not look at steadily. Yet, in swift glances as at something dazzling and appalling, she could just snatch a vision of a not ignoble Angela. There had been splendour in those hopeless kisses, a blinding splendour; she must veil her eyes from it.

Most terrible of all was the seeing of herself slip and slide from a serene eminence down into a slimy, warring world. The betrayal of Maurice had not been in her ideal of herself; it forcibly abased her to a level of soiling realities—hatreds, jealousies, revenges. With sick revulsion she could imagine herself feebly turning—though bones were broken—feebly crawling up again from the abyss, either by some retractation, or by withholding from Felicia the ultimate humiliations she could inflict upon her. She might evade the cruellest truth; spare her the deepest wounds and so hug once more the thought of her own loyalty to the man who had struck her from him, a loyalty crowned with a halo of martyrdom.

But so to turn would be to own herself abased; to see herself in the mud; and Angela could not for long see herself in the mud.

Then, in the swing of reaction, her head reeled with the old illusion of height; she was again on her illumined pinnacle, ruthless through very pity, wounding with the sharp, necessary truth; stern to the glamour of a loyalty grown craven, saving Felicia from a falsity that must corrode her life. A pitiful, relentless angel. She saw the sword, the wings—white, strong, rustling, the splendid impassivity of her face.

Yet on the pinnacle the darting terrors of the abyss went through her. Was not the truth what Maurice had said—what he had looked—so horribly looked—and not what he had written; that he had written to spare her; had never loved her? She turned shuddering from the thought as she had shuddered at his feet. If that indeed were truth he must convince Felicia of it. The fact of his written words was there, surely unforgiveable; the fact of Geoffrey’s love was there; was not the fact of a dim, growing love for Geoffrey there too? She had said it; she believed it; and again, upon the pinnacle, the hands of miry hopes clawed at her. Hardly could Maurice forgive the betrayal. Yet—had he not once loved her? The memory, sweet and terrible of that far-away spring day—his kiss and his embrace—faltered, “yes,” though it wept in saying it. Should Felicia prove to him that Angela had only spoken truth might not the showing of the letter be one day forgiven by a man scorned, abandoned? She had been forced to the showing by all their guilty incredulity, and to save Felicia from the trap laid for her, to save her from Geoffrey’s scheming passion—so could she dress her motive—had pointed out the trap, the danger. Where lay her guilt, if, after this, Felicia chose to verify all her prophecies by walking straight into the trap? It had not been to kill her love for her husband, but to warn her of Geoffrey’s love that the letter was shown. So her thoughts groped in the dubious future; and when despair flung her back again on the black present, hatred, hatred for Maurice, and the recklessness of hatred, caught her, clasped her, sustained her from falling, and hurried her on all trembling with the final thought that if hope were dead, there was nothing to lose in betrayal, nothing to gain in loyalty.

As she drove next morning to Felicia, the day’s clear sunlight, the almost wintry freshness of the air, lifted her mood once more to steadiness. She beat off debasing visions, pushed away miry hands, told herself that neither hope nor hatred was with her. And she felt herself standing high in sunlight as she waited for Felicia in the little drawing-room, its windows open on the blue, the brightness. She felt herself in tune with purity and radiance. Dressed from head to foot in spotless white, the long flowing of her fur-edged cloak monastic in simplicity, the white sweep of a bird’s breast about her head, she was as pitying and as picturesque as a sculptured saint looking down through centuries of woe from the lofty niche of a cathedral; and a more human but as consolatory a simile showed her as a Dorothea waiting in all her tender strength and helpfulness for a fragile, tawdry Rosamund.

But when Felicia entered, and as she turned to her from the window, a mood as high, as inflexible as her own,—higher, more inflexible, she felt, in a crash that had a crumbling quality—met her in Felicia’s eyes. For a moment Angela was afraid, felt herself rocking in her niche; in the next the recollection of her truth upheld her. Truth, pity and tenderness; with these she would meet this stony, hating creature.

“You see,” she said, “I have not refused to come to you.”

“You had to come, after what you had said,” said Felicia.

It was a preliminary only; the pause before conflict. Angela’s eyes went over her. Felicia wore her customary blue serge, her lawn collar and black bow. In her place, Angela thought, she would have felt the effectiveness of an unrelieved black dress; a comment followed by a further recognition of Felicia’s indifference to effectiveness that left another little trail of fear. She had slept; well, perhaps. Her eye-lids showed no languor. Her face was white, cold, composed. Hardly fragile. Certainly not tawdry. From this re-adjustment to reality Angela glanced out at the sky. She must grasp at all her strength. She must pray for strength. With her eyes on the sky her mind sped hastily through the uplifting supplication—haunted as it sped by a thought of pursuit that gave a shadow-simile of a fleeing through caverns.

But she brought back gentle eyes to Felicia. “Mrs. Wynne, you have never understood me; never believed me; you have always misunderstood, and mistrusted me, as you do now. I have been forced to this,” said Angela, keeping all her quiet while Felicia stood before her with her stony face. “I have watched you like a child wandering in the dark. I have seen you come to the brink of a pit in the darkness. I have put out my hand to save you. That is all my fault.”

“By the pit, you mean, I suppose, Mr. Daunt’s love for me. As my father told you, I have known, my husband has known, from before my marriage, that he loved me. You did not only warn. You lied. About my husband,” Felicia’s eyes did not change, as she said the word, looking straight at Angela. Since the night before when her father had told her vile falsehoods she had felt not one doubt of Angela’s falsity. A white heat of utter scorn had never left her. She would have scorned her too much to see her had not her father’s frenzied belief pushed her to this elemental conflict. She would tell Angela again and again that she was a liar.

“How you hate me,” Angela now said.

“And how you hate me.”

“I do not. I pity you. I want to help you.”

“I will pity you if you confess that you have lied.”

“If it were to help you I could almost do it—though that would indeed be to lie. I believe that truth is the only helper. Your husband was paid to marry you.”

Felicia’s eyes received it unflinchingly.

“It may be so. Geoffrey is generous enough; Maurice is enough his friend to accept his help. I will ask him to tell me all the truth. Your implication was that my husband married me through pity.”

“You are very sure of people’s love for you.”

Angela saw herself lashed by the hatred of these two men, by the scorn of this woman whom they loved. Her voice shook.

“I am perfectly sure of their love.”

“Yet your husband’s love was not always yours.”

She was horribly unmoved by half truths; this again she accepted. “Maurice may once have cared for you. Since he has known me he has loved me. I cannot spare you when you come between me and my husband.”

“Since he knew you he loved me—loved me most!” Angela could scarcely draw her breath. “He married you from pity—it is not a lie—loving me. And I loved him—I love him now! It is the cross of my life! It crushes me!” Her breast panted with the labouring breath; she threw her cloak back from her shoulders and kept her hands at her throat, even then conscious of the gesture’s dramatic beauty. “He is unworthy of it—that I know. He is incapable of the sacred passion I feel. He loves most the one he is with, and when he was with me—before you took him from me—he loved me most—before God I believe it—and with the best love of which he is capable. I would have lifted him—inspired him—he used to say I would. He told me that he loved me and that only my wealth had kept him from me—the day that Geoffrey came with his news of you. I would have redeemed him had not you made a claim on his weakness, his pity.”

“I know that you are lying,” said Felicia. But as she listened, as she spoke, old doubts, old fears flitted across the dimness of the past.

“Then,”—Angela’s breath failed her; she drew Maurice’s letter from her breast and put it in Felicia’s hand—“read that,” she half whispered.

And as she did this she knew that she had rolled to the very bottom of the abyss. It was only a glance of horrid wonder. She could not look at herself. She could not turn her eyes from the moment’s supreme vengeance. She stood watching her rival—her victim—yes, yes, those voices from the abyss were true—watched her cheeks grow ashen, her eyes freeze, her beauty waver, change to something strange, rigid, mask-like.

But Felicia, as she read on to the end, and then, mechanically turning to the first page, read once more, did not think of Angela or even know that she was there. As she read and the blood seemed slowly crushed out of her heart, she forgot Angela, forgot herself, fixed in a frozen contemplation of Maurice’s perfidy, a trance-like stare at him and at Geoffrey; Maurice who had abased, Geoffrey who had exalted her. Geoffrey held up from the dust, where Maurice struck her, some piteous, alien creature. But this new revelation of Geoffrey was dimmed again by the written words and the thought they hammered on her brain: “My husband’s words.” Then at last identity whispered “of me.”

They ran, the words, like flame, scorching, blackening her past with him. Meanest, weakest, cruellest. Most dastardly of all, most loathly, was his love for her, his facile adaptation of his life to hers, his fawning dependence on the nature nearest him. Most horrible it was to know—for she knew it—that he indeed loved her. An acted lie—while he could betray her to another woman—would have made him less odious to her. That he could at once love and betray was the horror.

She hated him. She had shut her eyes again and again so that in seeing too clearly she might not love him less; they were widely open now and they saw more than the loss of love.

With all the force of her crucified trust and tenderness, all the passion of her shattered pride, she hated him.

Raising her eyes she saw Angela standing and looking at her. Angela was distant, unreal, a picture hung before dying eyes. She felt no hatred for Angela; instead, with the terrible clearness of her new vision, she felt a far-away and contemptuous pity. She saw both herself and Angela caught in the same net of falsity; both she and Angela in their struggles were piteous. Angela had been ugly in her struggle, but she could not feel that she hated her.

She turned her head away, looking vaguely around her at the room that had become unfamiliar, ominous. A chair was near her, one she and Maurice had bought together. She sank upon it thinking dimly—“This was home.”

“You see—I did not lie to you,” said Angela. That Felicia should show no anger, should not writhe and curse beneath the foot upon her neck, made her wonder—in another of those crumbling flashes—whether indeed her foot was upon Felicia’s neck. She had struck her down, she had humbled her, but was she not now to be allowed to forgive, to staunch the wounds with magnanimity and sorrow? Was it possible that the horrid image of her was the true one? Was it possible that Felicia too, was seeing her in the mire?

She repeated: “You see I did not lie to you.”

“No,” said Felicia, folding her husband’s letter as she spoke, “you didn’t lie.”

Her very voice had the charred, the wasted quality; life had been burned out of it.

“And can you not believe now that I never hated you?” said Angela.

Felicia leaned her head on her hand, closing her eyes. “I don’t care. It makes no difference to me.”

Angela felt herself shut out, infinitely remote from the other’s consciousness. Tears rose in her eyes, almost a sob in her throat. “How cruel you are. What have I done to deserve such cruelty? I have only tried to help you.”

Still with her hidden face, Felicia sat silent, thinking of Maurice, of Geoffrey, only vaguely hearing Angela’s words.

“And then how human;—after all I am human. See how intolerable it was to me, your scorn of me, your rejection of me when I meant only good, when I knew that he had loved me most; when I knew how infinitely I loved him.” It comforted her to feel the tears running down her cheeks and, in her poor, stricken humanity, to seem noble to herself in her avowed abasement. “Perhaps I have been jealous—oh, how can I tell? Perhaps I made too high and impossible an ideal for myself and thought that I could conquer that yearning to be loved. Can’t you pity me? Can’t you see what I have suffered in seeing him with you?”

Felicia, looking on the ground, mechanically pushed back the hair from her forehead. The picture indeed was in a piteous attitude; she knew it, although she could feel nothing.

“Yes, I am sorry for you. It has been horrible for you,” she said, but with the weariness that a soldier, lying shattered, helpless, upon a battlefield, might show towards the tormenting clamours and lamentations of a wounded enemy beside him. She wished to be allowed to bleed quietly to death. These alien hands plucked at her for a help, a sympathy she could not give. She was sorry; but when one was shattered one could only know that one was sorry and be tired.

Angela’s weeping was stilled for a moment. After all, it was not pity that she wanted. She wanted to be lifted from the nightmare of abasement; to feel herself looking down once more; to be the consoler, the binder of wounds—not the suppliant; not the recipient of an indifferent dole. She approached Felicia, putting out her hand to her.

“And you know—dear—dear—child, how I pity you. Ah, let this pity, this mutual agony unite us, Felicia—you who have lost only an illusion, I who have lost a reality. Can we not see each other more clearly now? Can we not understand—and kiss each other—like sisters?”

Maeterlinckian visions—a tower, a sad blue sea, a great blue sky, white birds, wandering, beautiful souls in pain—crossed her mind, enhancing her consciousness of beauty. It was beautiful, what she said, and she must look beautiful, leaning in whiteness, with her outstretched hand, the tears of her deeper sorrow upon her face, towards this fallen comrade. This would atone for all, be the spiritual significance of all the tragic drama, this union of suffering sisters. She drooped softly upon the figure in the chair, encircling it.

But with a violence that made Angela reel back, almost losing her footing, Felicia started to her feet. Staring, white, shuddering, she looked at the other woman.

“Don’t touch me. You must not touch me.—Go away—you are horrible,” she said. “You fill me with horror.” Her voice was hoarse, shaking.

Angela had retreated from her, and while they looked at each other across the room, a strange struggle and change showed itself in her face. Felicia’s conviction entered her. She felt herself evil. She felt herself horrible.

With terror and malignancy she gazed for a long moment, and then, in silence, she went from the room.

Felicia heard the trail of her long skirts, like the dry swift rustle of a snake, cross the hall, and heard the door close softly upon her.

CHAPTER XIII

FELICIA stood at the window looking from the hill-top over the rain-dimmed country. It was early afternoon and in the steady grey, unbroken by a cloud, high over the grey land that melted to the sky, was a bleak, diffused whiteness that told where the sun was. Since her arrival the day before the rain had poured down ceaselessly, imprisoning her in the lonely house. Her father, after the scene of her hateful avowal, her escape from his fury of sympathy, had gone to Paris for a week. She had left him packing in the flat; he would join her later.

Felicia had taken one of the maids with her in her flight from the desecrated new to the old home, and had wearily aided her in making it liveable. The sitting-room where she now stood, after her half-tasted lunch of tea and fruit and bread-and-butter, was cheerless, for the more intimate books and pictures were in London; the furniture without its chintz covers was shabby, and the fire after long smoking, only now forced its way to a sullen brightness through heaped-up logs. She turned to glance at it once or twice, mechanically conscious of housekeeping duties. It had quite done smoking; it was going to burn. Presently, before the blaze, she would sit and rest—and sleep; there had been no sleep last night in her desolate room between the blankets of a hurriedly improvised bed; the maid protesting against damp sheets. Felicia had wondered indifferently, as they worked together, what the kind girl thought of this ominous pic-nic impromptu; she thanked her inwardly for the dumb discretion of her class. There was nothing more to do now. Chintz-covers—she glanced at the chairs that looked flayed without their proper coverings; but those had better wait until just before her father’s arrival; for him she must manage cheeriness as well as the bare comforts of life. Until he came all she wanted was stillness, warmth, a bed to creep into at night.

Felicia’s mind was fixed on two points, one past, one future—the writing of a letter yesterday to Maurice and his finding of it when he returned to-night—or to-morrow morning. She saw herself in the pause between a dagger’s uplifting and its stabbing fall. She had known no pity in writing; she felt no pity for the reading. Her mind, indeed, went with a sullen quiet—much like the flames among their logs—through the well-remembered words.

“I am leaving you to-day and I will never see you again. Lady Angela has showed me the letter you wrote to her before we were married. You did not even marry me through generous pity; Geoffrey forced you to it. You betrayed him to her; you betrayed me to her. You gave me your sham in return for my reality. Do not tell me that you loved me then, and now. That is the worst of it. Such love is a sham. I despise you. I see only falseness and cowardice in you. And through all this ruin I see Geoffrey as he is—and I see myself. I see now that I love him. You know that your honour—a strange word to write to you—is safe between our hands; but I love him as much as I hate you; the thought that he is there helps me to live. It is through your baseness that I see all his nobility. Do not write to me, for I shall not answer. These are the last words that you shall ever see from me.”

This letter was lying on Maurice’s dressing-table waiting for him.

There had been a fierce exultation in writing it, as at escape from a stifling cavern; and the sense of having flung the soiled and tattered past behind her, wrenched manacles of pity and tenderness from her bleeding flesh, of having run, naked, free, into the night—the cold, calm night, upheld her. But at moments those written words whirled oddly in her mind. “To him? From me?” She would think it dizzily; and dread clutched at her heart, dread of she knew not what, except the fate that had made the writing inevitable. A Felicia cruel enough to write it was as strange as a Maurice base enough to make her cruel.

But, she told herself, leaning her forehead against the cold window pane, to think herself cruel was still to idealize Maurice. He would suffer—for a day, a week, a year perhaps; would, fancying that he had truly loved her, feel remorse, despair; but when her love was no longer there to call forth his response the fancy would soon die. His love for her was no doubt as real as anything in him was real; but no love in Maurice could be more than fancy. His buoyancy would float him once more, and life once more be sweet to him. Life would always, in spite of certain moments of black whirlpool, be sweet for Maurice.

She could even imagine a sentimental bond growing between him and Angela. Angela was horrible enough for any cleverness. Her passion had a sincerity that would give life to any lie. She would twist facts into some becoming shape, build her bower and beckon Maurice into it. A shuddering seized her thoughts of Angela; she turned from them.

The rain now dashed on the window. The pallid memory of light was gone from the sky. Fold upon fold of deeper darkness covered it. The trees shook in the rising gusts of wind.

There was the turn of the road that she had often watched through so many years, longing for it to bring life to her. Well, she had had her wish. She had met her lions. She could not feel herself ennobled by her contests. It rather seemed that the lions had mangled her.

As she stood, pressing her forehead against the window and looking at the storm, she saw a figure, leaning to the steep ascent far down the road, a tall man’s figure under an umbrella.

Figures were few on the road, and, on such a day, a casual stroller improbable. Her heart leaped to a terror of Maurice coming in person to plead and expostulate. Impossible that her letter had not forbidden all pleading and expostulation. It could not be Maurice.

It was not, as she saw, with a drooping of the breath in a relief so great that she knew how great the foolish terror must have been, as the figure, after a momentary disappearance, came nearer in that turn of the road. The long waterproof, the slanted umbrella, still made identity a conjecture; but already the steady stride, the grave, decisive carriage had a familiarity that hurried a new and deeper fear on the first. Not Maurice; not her father; obviously not Uncle Cuthbert. Could it be Geoffrey?

Since the day before, Geoffrey had been for her a figure aureoled and pedestalled—strange transfiguration of the statesman statue!—lifted high, far away, in his almost saintly strength; a figure to be gazed at with thanksgiving for its smile upon herself; but still so strange in its new setting that any nearness of regret or tremor had not touched her.

But to see Geoffrey now—now that she was his—and knew it.—The thought shook her with regret, fear, unutterable sadness.

It was Geoffrey. She drew back from the window as he approached the house. Regret was for the past, sadness for the future, but the fear was for the present and it seized her like the storm. He was perhaps not so high, so aureoled, so saintly. Wild surmises flashed lightnings through her mind, that seemed to rock like an empty bird’s nest in a shaken tree. Had Maurice returned? Had he in a frenzy of anger or despair showed Geoffrey her letter? Had Geoffrey come to claim her on the strength of her own avowal?—come to claim her?—to take her away?

She had no time to analyze the terror of such surmises—what they implied of disillusion in him—or to look at the rapture that ran a dreadful radiance through terror and disillusion. That there should be rapture was perhaps the terror’s root. She heard him in the hall ridding himself of the dripping umbrella and waterproof. Why, after all, call it disillusion? Perhaps strength not less saintly than that of renunciation lay in a solemn claiming. His nobility had chained them. Might not nobility now break the chains? But could he break them? Was not her strength to be counted with? She was asking herself the final question—in a gasp—as he came in.

His white, intent face admitted of many interpretations, even of one altogether new to her, for she felt in it something of a hesitation, a perplexity, that suggested weakness. For once he was not sure of himself; or, rather, not sure of what he was to do. Felicia, near the window, looked silently at him.

“It’s true, then, you have left him?”

His eyes sounded hers as though he, too, were finding new meanings in her.

“Yes, I have left him. Who told you?”

“Your father. He was just leaving the flat. He was very incoherent. All I could grasp was that.”

He did not know then, and any revelation of what his attitude would be when he did know was adjourned. Felicia, feeling suddenly how faint she was, how weak from want of food and sleep, went past him and sank into the deep old chair before the fire.

“Sit down. You must be tired. You had to walk from the station? There was no fly?”

“No. I didn’t mind the walk.” Geoffrey did not sit down; he took a turn or two up and down the room.

“Your father said that you would never go back to your husband.”

“I never will.”

“You have ceased to love him, then?”

“Absolutely ceased.”

Geoffrey had paused now near the window, and was looking out. She could guess of what he was thinking; of that walk in the spring woods, and the girl who had said that to be unhappy with the man she loved would be happiness. He was thinking that he had tried to give her happiness and that he had failed. And presently, without turning, he said, “May I ask why?”

The thought of the spring day dwelt with her, infusing all the present tragedy with a tender, an exquisite pathos—like the spring’s—like the day of distant bird-songs and melancholy brooks. She owed him everything. Might he ask?

“What may you not ask?” she said. “There is nothing that I have a right to keep from you now. This is why. Lady Angela showed me this—yesterday.” Without turning her head she held out the letter. “It was written, you will see, the day after you and I walked together—when you told me that you loved me—when I told you that I loved him.”

Geoffrey’s hand was on the letter. For a moment, as her memory chimed with his, he grasped her wrist and she felt his kiss upon her hand.

He did not know. In the silence that followed, while, behind her chair, he read, Felicia was wondering, wondering—would he discover it? Should she hide it? Should she tell him? Was it not indeed his right to be told? Did she not owe it to him to let him know that a reward—though such a tragically belated one—had at last come to him? Even to hesitate seemed to smirch him with that fear of disillusion; or, her mind followed it further, hunted it down, while she breathed quickly—was it the possible rapture that made the real dread—the rapture of seeing him claim her and of admitting his claim? With an almost lassitude she thrust the balancing thoughts from her. How could she know what she felt or what she was, until the truth was there spoken and looked at between them? The circle had brought her back again to the first question. Should she tell him? She could not answer it. She closed her eyes. Suddenly she thought sharply, “I must not tell.” She wondered if it was an inspiration; it seemed to have no sequence. So oddly does the most logical thing in life, the rewarding illumination of a conscience and character strengthened by strife, dazzle the obviously linked, the bewildered and bewildering intelligence. Like the revolving light of an unseen lighthouse it flashed out. A moment after it seemed unreal. Yet the memory of it would almost automatically guide a way among reefs and breakers and siren whirlpools. Felicia did not think all this. She kept her eyes closed and breathed more quietly. Geoffrey stood silent, and she knew, without looking round, that he had finished the letter.

“Now you see. Now you understand all,” she said.

He made no answer. She opened her eyes, turned in her chair. He had mastered any horror, though his expression had the strained look of having been wrenched from horror to the resolute facing of a mystery to be tracked. He seemed to gaze through her at it.

“Now you see. Now you understand,” she repeated. “I do, Geoffrey.”

She had never called him by his name before.

His eyes now rested on hers.

“Let me tell you,” she said, still leaning her head and shoulder against the side of the deep chair while she looked at him, unshaken now and calm. “Let me tell you that I see you and know you—and understand. Don’t ever think that it has been wasted, or regret it, or feel that it has made sorrow where you meant it to make happiness. At first I could see nothing but my rage, my humiliation: but that has drifted away. I hardly feel anything now except my gratitude to you for your wonderful nobility—your love. To see it—to know it—is worth the suffering.”

He could feel the tempests over which the calm had been won, and the calm moved him more than sobs or outcries. He looked from her head—the dear, proud head—to the letter that had laid it in the dust, and the conquered horror for a moment quivered across his face.

“How could he. To you.” It was not question or exclamation, but a deep, sickened wonder.

“He had to. He did not love her enough to face your scorn—and my pain; he didn’t love me enough to face hers. Fear is the very root of him.” She paused, a question like a whip-lash cutting her. “You thought he loved me? You would not have given me to mere pity?”

“I?” Geoffrey’s stare was almost boyish.

“I?—who loved you enough to give you to the happiness you cried for?” it said.

“Forgive me for the mere thought. I have been such a chattel—a thing to be tossed appeasingly to a rival.” Again she closed her eyes. “It makes me dizzy sometimes.”

Geoffrey wandered off again to the window. He could not contemplate her pain, and for a long time there was silence in the room while he gazed, as Felicia had gazed, over the desolate country. The rain swept around the hill-top like a mantle; all but the nearest trees were blotted out.

Geoffrey was thinking of Felicia, of Maurice, holding his thoughts steadily from a dangerous thinking of himself; he needed to hold them steadily. He was seeing Maurice, his Maurice—how near his heart he only now clearly saw when at once that heart seemed to spurn him, with a wicked joy in his baseness, and then to catch him back, lamenting—seeing the boy, loving, impulsive, full of fears and intrepidities, needing always the strong arm to fall back on; the man, so boyish still, so weak, so generous; the sad friend of the other night, who, whatever his falsity, had spoken truth; and the poisonous letter was growing in his thoughts to the simile of some fatal trap that had caught his friend in a moment of dizziness and imprisoned him in baseness. Such baseness! Unforgiveable. And yet—was it essential? Still holding his thoughts away from the aspect where Maurice’s baseness would serve himself, he balanced that question of the real significance of the baseness. Something in his mind, wrenched with his refusal to see the other aspect, bled, panted, protested. Then came dying throbs. He grasped at last his own decision.

He did not turn from the window as he said, “You must go back to him.”

Her long silence showed, perhaps, a speechless horror. He turned to her. She still lay back in the chair. He came before her. She raised empty eyes to him.

“I know that he loved you; you know, as I do, how he loves you now, how incapable, now, he would be of it.” She made no reply. There was no reproach in her eyes, no pain or rebellion, only a strange, still depth where he could see nothing. His decision reinforced itself as it felt a quiver of blind presage run through it.

“He was a base coward. I feel it for you as deeply—more deeply than you can for yourself. He was in despair of marrying you and he dallied with Angela—well, if he were half in love, what matter now? He had been in love half a dozen times before he met you. All those young emotions are games; Maurice was playing at life. He needed reality, and he has lived into it with you. I saw him cry with despair when he thought he had lost you; I saw his rapture when I told him he could marry you. I can guess what happened afterwards. He was afraid of Angela—and sorry for her, and he wrote her this lie. Yes, he was a liar and a coward—what of it? You have made him over. He is a different man. Say that he still is weak as water—what of it? He adores you; I know it—and you loved him—once. You gain nothing by leaving him, and he loses everything—everything. You are his only chance. He will go to pieces without you.”

Her silence, those deep, empty eyes on his, almost exasperated him with the sense of fighting in the dark—he knew not what—but fighting some force in her, strong in its still resistance. And not in her only; in himself he felt a rising host of shadowy, veiled opponents.

He walked away from her up and down the room. “Only the other night—how I understand it now—he was trying to tell me all he could. He spoke of remorse and of his love for you, Felicia; he said that he would die without you.”

“Do you really want me to go?” Felicia asked.

Geoffrey, glancing at her, saw that she had covered her face with her hands. He stopped in his impatient walking, his back to her. “I want what is best for him, and for you. You know I’m not a sentimentalist. I think a woman better off, more secure, more sure of a rightly developing life even with a husband she thinks she can’t care for, than drifting about by herself; a dubious rebel against conventionality; forced into an exaggerated dignity, an exaggerated uprightness; conscious that she has to be explained and justified; cut off from her social and domestic roots—a flower if you will, and a very sweet and spotless flower,—but a flower kept alive in a vase of water, under cover, in an artificial temperature, liable to shatterings—to witherings; not a flower well rooted in the earth, growing, with the wind and sun about it.”

“Witherings? Shatterings? What if the very ground one grew in is poisoned? You want me to go back to him—not loving him; do you want me to go back hating?—for I do hate him.”

Geoffrey still paused.

“I want you to go back understanding him; pitying him. Bother love.”

That memory of the lighthouse flash could no longer guide in this darkness where a blind and wilful giant’s hand steered for a shore of reefs and precipitous cliffs intolerable for shuddering flesh to look upon. She herself must grasp the helm and turn the ship straight to the open, unknown sea.

“Do you want me to go back, loving you?” she said.

“Loving me?” Geoffrey repeated, and the giant indeed reeled back, as if from a staggering blow. His arm fallen, the ship in a moment had whirled round and fronted the tempestuous elements.

Her final question had been asked as evenly, as monotonously as the others. She went on: “I wrote and told him that I despised him—hated him, that I would never go back to him. And I told him that I loved you. He will get that letter to-morrow—perhaps to-day.”

Geoffrey turned to her. All thought was struck to chaos. Maurice, Felicia, himself went like storm-blown birds through the mind that had been too steady—in the steadiness a rigidity tempting to an ironic, shattering blow. And in the chaos Maurice sank back—back, and down—where he had chosen to be, by his own act; and Felicia rose like dawn over the darkness. He approached her, leaned over her.

She opened her eyes to him.

The beat of the rain against the windows sounded as if from great distances. They were near in grey solitude, the world fading to emptiness; they were near in the enfolding storm, in the sound that was like a deeper silence. Neither spoke and neither smiled; into the mind of neither man nor woman came the image of a kiss or an embrace. Looking deeply into each other’s eyes they seemed to see an eternity of awe and wonder. It was Geoffrey who first spoke.

“I felt it.”

“You did not know it, Geoffrey.”

“I touched something in the dark.”

“I would not have told you if you had not wished to send me back to him.”

“Why not, Felicia?”

Her eyelids for a moment fell, almost as if she mused.

“It seemed to make things less simple—more difficult.”

“More difficult, perhaps,” said Geoffrey, “but more simple, too, I think. Have you known for long?”

“Only, clearly, yesterday; but it seems now as if it had been there—oh—for long, long—since the beginning perhaps. I can’t tell. I can’t see. But so strangely, Geoffrey, not touching or harming my love for him, giving it strength indeed, I believe, as you gave me strength.”

Still she seemed to muse, quietly; with down-cast eyes in speaking, but, in her pauses, raising that grave eternity of look to him.

“The threads go back and back—and they turn round one another. I can’t see them separately till now—when his is broken. You remember when you kissed me, Geoffrey, at the edge of the wood? It was then—it must have been then—that the threads ran together. And ever since you have been woven into my life—into my love for my husband—I don’t know what was you and what was I.”

His hand on the back of the chair, he still leaned over her. Felicia rose, drawing a long breath. She walked to the end of the room; went to the window; turned to face him.

“Ah! Felicia,” said Geoffrey. Looking at her with a sadness almost stern, he clasped his hands together in a gesture curiously uncharacteristic of him; significant of his helpless pain.

“Yes, yes,” she said, “I know. Why did I make the mistake? Why did I not see who was the man I must love? Geoffrey, I would rather have you reproach me than listen to myself.”

“Did you think I would reproach you? Did you think I would add that? I, too, was blindfolded,” he said, looking away from her.

His voice was the voice of frozen tears.

They stood silent, his suffering beating at her heart. She knew that a word from her would unlock flood-gates.

And a great wave of longing rose in Felicia, engulfing her utterly, so that she knew for some moments that seemed eternal nothing but its thunder and its restlessness. She had already seen in herself, in her love for Maurice, this capacity for recklessness, and now a deeper tumult roared in her ears. For this was the man she loved. Through mistakes and misery they had found each other. Why not fall upon his neck and shut her eyes to all that distant world? Why not cry out to him, Take me away? His strength would never lift a finger to tempt her weakness; but was there not in him a new and beautiful weakness that would not resist the appeal of her strength, her courage? Would appeal not be courageous? To see that weakness in him was a craving that shook her through and through as she stood there with her fixed, contemplative face.

She closed her eyes, dazzled by the thought, and it was as if the wave echoed far above her head, and in the sudden stillness of its depths she knew them black and dangerous.

But in that moment of deep struggle it was not the thought of danger or of duty that gave her strength to strike upward to the air. It was the thought of Geoffrey and of the ruin that such an abandonment would make in his life. More than the lurid courage to repudiate safety and the world’s wise barriers for herself, was her refusal to burden him with a defiant happiness.

She could not distinguish her weakness from her strength, nor know which had tempted and which saved her. She knew only her love for Geoffrey; a love that at the crucial moment seemed a long, strong stroke that sent her upward, up to the air again. It was a leaden waste of water she rose to; a sad, colourless sky above; but there was a radiance in its whiteness. Her soul was half fainting, but she knew that her lassitude was that of victory. And all the time the surface woman of custom and control kept her look of contemplative solemnity.

Such victory made all lesser struggle easy. She merely looked her incomprehension when she heard Geoffrey saying—

“And now I wonder if you will believe me when I say that I still want you to go back to Maurice.”

His voice told her that he, too, had been engulfed; that he, too, had struggled; that love of her had given him strength to win his victory, and then, in its light, to think; think clearly. But his thought made a fog about her. She could only gaze in wonder. “Nothing is really changed,” said Geoffrey, who, his hand still on the back of her empty chair, had curiously the expression of an orator determined to convince, hardly stooping to persuasion. “You and I are parted. He needs you as much as ever, and you, Felicia, need him more than ever, his claim on you, I mean, his dependence, the burden that it must take all your time and all your energy to carry. I must hurt you with the truth—only I believe you have seen it, as I have. It’s a choice between taking up your old life—and, I am sure of it, Felicia, making a tremendously good thing out of it—or living the new life I described to you—the life of the flower in the vase on the mantelpiece—a life of constant danger. For you—I know your strength; but could it keep me from you, year in and year out, do you suppose, if there were no barriers between us, no actual barriers of everyday life and everyday obligations? For myself—I would die for you, as you know; but to live without you—seeing you drifting—alone—in a sadness worse than any suffering—? I know that the time would come when I would ask you to chuck everything for my sake—for your own I’d put it, too:—Felicia—for my sake—if I asked you as I could—you would do it; and you know as well as I do that that sort of chucking means failure all round. You wouldn’t be the growing flower; you wouldn’t be the cut flower in the vase”—his face, white in its intentness, grew hard as his mind flashed to the similes that would strip all illusion from her; “you would be like those snowdrops that I carry here—on my heart;—on my heart for ever, but crushed, shrivelled, dead.” He had seen his weakness as she had not seen her own. She saw now, and as he had wished, without illusions.

“But go back to him!” she said, closing her eyes and shuddering from the cup he held out to her.

“He loves you. He needs you.”

“Go back from fear?—fear of you?—of myself?”

“Turn from that thought then. Don’t let it be a question of you or me. Go back from pity, and because you loved him; because you are his wife.”

“But after that letter!”

“Is a person’s moral deficiency to warrant the breaking of such a bond? If your mother had done something horrible would you be justified in disowning her?”

“Oh—a mother!” Felicia’s tears ran down.

“Remember, I wouldn’t urge—I wouldn’t ask you to fear me or pity him unless I knew he loved you. Unless he had that claim I would say that you were right, altogether right, in cutting him away from your life. Felicia, it’s his love, perhaps, his helpless, piteous love for you, that makes the barrier that holds me from you now—my memory of his face—his voice—when he said that you were his life—that he would die without you. He thanked me for his happiness—you and I had ‘made him.’ He said: ‘You shall never regret it—so help me, God.’ Felicia, you have given him his soul. You must not rob him of it.”

“Geoffrey! Geoffrey!” she said, pressing her hands against her eyes—for his words flooded her mind with memories that came with the intolerable pain of life, after long swooning, stealing into crushed arteries, wrenched and broken limbs—“I have given him no soul. He has found his soul through me, perhaps, but I can’t rob him of it.”

“You can stifle it, make it speechless, useless. Ah, Felicia, you do pity him. And you must—you must pity him—and forgive him.”

“How could we go on,” she whispered, “after my letter to him? after he knows?”

“He doesn’t return till to-morrow, you said? He has not read it yet. Besides, let him know the facts—but the facts from yourself. Tell him. Spare him the letter. It was a terrible letter, my dearest, dearest,” said Geoffrey, with the deep, quiet assurance of safety.

“After his to her!”

“You wanted to hurt. You meant to drive the dagger in up to the hilt. Cruel, dear, cruel. Save him before he gets it. Say it to him, if you will; let him have it straight; but don’t let him read it—alone. Poor old Maurice!” Geoffrey added.

The words, his comment on them, the “poor old Maurice!” that seemed a final summing, thrilled through her, and with the thrill flashed suddenly before her a vision of Maurice—a piteous Maurice. The hatred of her own written words smote upon her as she saw his face of terror reading them. He had betrayed her; he had lied and been a coward; but she knew, and she seemed to have forgotten it for so long, that his life was hers, that it was a new life, that he indeed loved her, and that bereft of her he could not recover. A distorting mist melted from her seeing of him, and as it melted she heard Geoffrey—so far away it seemed—saying, “Can you really bear to think of his reading that letter—alone?”

She went towards him—there was now no longer any fear in his nearness. He pushed the chair to the fire, and she sank into it sobbing.

Poor, poor Maurice. Yes, in that final, comprehending pity was the truth. Geoffrey was kneeling beside her. He put his arms around her and she leaned her head on his shoulder as she wept. How different this from the rapture of abandonment that had called to her—to him. What had he not conquered in himself—and her—to do this great thing for her?—to save not only her, but through her, Maurice?

But, though he had conquered, she felt broken.

“Life is so long, Geoffrey.”

He did not reply. She knew that he, too, was looking down that vista of long years where they must walk apart.

“And life—founded on pity——“

“More will come. Something like a mother’s love.”

She knew that he spoke the truth. That vision of Maurice’s terror-stricken face—reading her letter—had stabbed to more than pity. The protecting passion that had flung itself between him and the reading had in it a deeper quality. She could not analyze the fiercely defensive tenderness. Presently, when her tears were over, and his arms still around her, they were looking silently into the fire, she said, “I won’t disappoint you, Geoffrey.”

He hid his face against hers. She felt that his cheek was wet.

For a dizzy moment a greater pity, a fiercer tenderness, rose within her, a passion far other than the maternal passion that was to take her back to Maurice.

His cheek was wet; she clasped him in her arms.

And as they clung together, both felt the pendulum-swing of human emotion that from very excess of height plunges into abysses, the dark of unknown depths. They had not escaped the wrench with fundamental things, the swinging stupor of ecstasy and anguish. Tearless now, and in silence, they clung and kissed each other.

The pendulum swung in natures steadied by conflict; the plunging moment came, went, and, without any conscious volition, left them shuddering from the final and now inevitable victory, but looking again down the long vista. It was mechanically that Geoffrey unlocked his arms, rose, and moved away.

Her little travelling clock ticked, eagerly it seemed, on the mantelpiece.

“Just half-past three,” said Geoffrey.

Felicia went to the window.

“The rain has stopped,” she said. “We can walk to the station in less than an hour.”

Geoffrey, his hand on the mantelpiece, looked into the fire. “Don’t you want something to eat? Some tea?”

“No; do you?”

“No, thanks.”

“I will put on my hat and coat; I will be only a moment.” She went to the door while Geoffrey said—

“We can catch the fast afternoon train. We shall be in London by six.”

CHAPTER XIV

A COLD, evening sky was over London as Geoffrey and Felicia drove through wet squares and streets. Here, too, the storm had lifted, and between its darkness and the darkness of the coming night was the still moment of bleak and bitter twilight; strips of chill radiance behind the tattered trees; the pallid sky shining from the puddles of the roadway.

They had hardly spoken to each other during the walk; the wait at the desolate little station; the journey in the train. Geoffrey had merely expressed the hope that she was not cold; she had feared that he was hungry, had begged him to buy a sandwich. Once or twice from their corners of the railway carriage they had gravely smiled at each other. Now in the cab they neither spoke nor smiled.

Felicia’s mood was that of the bleak, still pause between the storm and the darkness. It had its peace, its colourless peace. She could not look back at the storm and the coming darkness seemed impenetrable, but already her thoughts stole towards it, seeing, as if in a dream, Maurice, comforted; feeling his hand in hers.

She had a dreaming, a sorrowing presage that he had already returned, already knew the truth, that she would find him waiting, hopeless, yet waiting hopelessly for help.

From her letter he would look up at her—returned to him. And, though the thought wept for his pain, in her weariness it had lost its fear. There was peace in its very sadness. For then there need be no horrid crash of revelation for her to face. In silence she would hold out her arms to him. And “poor, poor Maurice,” her heart whispered.

The river, when they reached the Embankment, had the sky’s cold stillness; a drowned face looking up at its ghost. Felicia, shivering a little, said that it was very chilly. A stir of fear came with the sudden hope that Maurice was not waiting for her. She would rather face crashes than have him waiting—alone—with her letter. Hope and its fear were like a rising of life, of eagerness in her. She leaned her head from the window of the rattling four-wheeler to direct the cabman; explaining: “They often take a longer way here.”

“I will see you up to the door of the flat,” said Geoffrey.

She nodded, then said, “But if he is there? If Maurice should come to the door?”

“But he doesn’t return till to-morrow.”

“He may be there—I think he is there.”

“Well—the maid would come to the door. Besides—if he did—what more simple than to shake his hand and say good-bye to you both?”

She said quietly, “We shall not see you again—for how long?”

“Oh, it will be quite natural that I should now go under for some years,” Geoffrey answered as quietly. “Some day, when you and Maurice feel like seeing me——“

“Yes; some day,” Felicia answered, with her head again out of the window.

His dull ache of misery had been so steady that he was surprised to find it capable of a deeper pang. He had almost the impulse to ask her if her quiet were wrung from such agony as his. The next moment he was hating himself for the whimpering selfishness that could not feel gladness for her fortitude. Yet the plaint was there, and it dimly guessed at a woman’s capacity, strange in its sanity, its acceptance of compromise, for two lives; her absorption in response to the claim that she may listen to. He himself had helped to lock her into that smaller room of her heart and now she must live in it, since the high and beautiful chambers were closed to her for ever. In the smaller room, too, was the love cruelly wounded, wounded by her hand. Her whole nature was now an eagerness to staunch, uplift, console.

The cab drew up before the block of flats, and while Geoffrey, saying that he would walk back to his rooms, paid the man, Felicia went inside and rang beside the lift for the porter. Geoffrey had joined her when the man appeared.

Yes, he said, Mr. Wynne had come back that afternoon. No, Mr. Wynne had not been out again, though he had sent the maid away soon after arriving. He knew that he had not gone out for he had been sitting in the hall all day.

There had evidently been talk, Geoffrey saw. Felicia saw nothing, thought of nothing but Maurice’s presence above; her heart seemed choked in its beating. She made no objection to Geoffrey following her into the lift.

They stepped out together and, before the foolishly decorative little door that Maurice had so often jested over they paused, the porter still lingering.

“You can go,” said Geoffrey cheerfully; “I prefer walking down.”

The man reluctantly descended and then Geoffrey rang.

Felicia leaned against the wall, seeing Maurice’s eyes as he had said good-bye to her, hearing his, “It seems to me an eternity before I shall see you again.” He had read her letter, alone. Remorse gave her the sense of swooning to all about her.

With almost a start she saw that Geoffrey still rang; and now he knocked as well.

“Maurice must be asleep,” she said.

Geoffrey, his finger pressed on the electric bell, nodded.

She had answered, “The eternity will pass.” It seemed an eternity. And it had passed. Yes, here she was again, before the familiar door, and in a moment he would see her.

“I should think that by now he would be awake. Don’t you think that he must be awake by now?” she repeated the question almost irritably as he did not answer her; adding, “Perhaps he guesses that it is we, and will not see us. Oh Geoffrey—Geoffrey. How could I have written such a letter!”

“It will be all right when you see each other. You must meet his despair, of course.” Geoffrey, his shoulder turned to her, continued to knock loudly. The draughty landing with its twilight square of window open to a damp brick wall, was vault-like in its cold; Felicia, clasping her arms, shivered.

Geoffrey presently said, “I shall have to break the glass and open the door.”

At this she started from her place, caught back his hand.

“No, no! He can’t have waked yet. He is worn out—tired—imagine how tired! Go on ringing. Knock again.”

Her face showed a horror that did not know itself.

“I think I had better break the door,” said Geoffrey, gently; putting her back.

She dropped to helpless submission.

The glass panel crashed in under the sharp blow and putting his hand through the aperture Geoffrey drew the bolt.

Inside was complete darkness. A touch at the electric button near the door and the little hall, its closed doors, its chairs, table, jar of laurel-leaves, flashed upon them.

Geoffrey still kept Felicia behind him.

“Let me go first,” he said.

“You! First! No, no, I must see him first.”

But firmly now he held her back.

“Felicia, you must wait here. Maurice may be ill.”

She had seized his arms to push by him and they stood clutching each other in the brilliant light.

“Ill!” she repeated. “And I am not to go to him! My husband!”

Something in her stricken face, her fixed eyes, made him yield.

“Come then, let us go together.”

“No.” Her thrust against him did not relax. “I must go alone; I must see him alone; I must speak to him alone.”

Geoffrey clasped his arm around her. “Felicia, understand me, you shall not go alone. We are too near to be separated—in this. We must go together.”

He saw that his words tore from her mind the veil that covered horror. She submitted, grasping, yet pushing from her, the arm that held her.

“To our room—first. The light is turned in the same place—near the door.”

Geoffrey flung open the door. It did not need the light to show them that the room was empty; the desolate evening sky again confronted them at the window. They drew back.

“The drawing-room—the studio—he could not easily hear in the studio.”

Geoffrey knew that her hope was desperate—almost mechanical. They looked into the drawing-room; went through the dining-room to the studio. All were empty. They retraced their steps. Her hand no longer grasped and repelled his arm. She leaned upon it.

“His dressing-room—across the passage,” she half whispered.

If only, Geoffrey thought, she would faint in his arms so that he might lay her down and go alone. But her swiftness equalled his. Neither could hesitate. He threw open the door of the little dressing-room.

Darkness again. The curtain drawn before the window with its courtyard aspect. Geoffrey’s hand felt for the electric button, trembled before it found it. Light came like a shock in the darkness. Maurice lay at their feet.

The pistol had not fallen from his hand, though the open fingers no longer held it. He had not shot himself through the head. Thank God for that, Geoffrey found himself trivially thinking; his head was unmarred and beautiful. One hardly noticed the breast’s tragic disarray.

As Felicia put away his arm and left him it was now Geoffrey who leaned, weak, nerveless against the wall.

He watched her kneel beside her husband, and, softly pushing the pistol from his hand, take the empty, open hand in hers.

With a look of tender wonder, like a mother with her sleeping child, she slightly touched his hair and brow. It was still with wonder that she looked up at Geoffrey.

“He is dead,” she said in a hushed and gentle voice, as the mother says: “He is sleeping.”

Geoffrey’s white, silent face, the tears so strangely running down it, over his cheeks, into the corners of his lips, gave her a shudder. Her eyes turned again to the serenity, the slumbering serenity, of the dead face.

For long moments she sat still, while Geoffrey stifled his sobs.

“Is my letter there?” she said at last. He saw the open letter on the dressing table; near it was a sealed envelope.

He forced himself to cross the room to them. The dressing table was behind her; he lifted the letters above her head; the envelope was addressed to Mrs. Wynne. Hesitating, he glanced down, and saw that she had raised her head, that her eyes were on him. She put up her hand.

“Wait—not now.”

“I want it now,” she commanded with her emotionless gentleness. Now—while I am still stupefied; he understood. He gave it to her and turned aside while she read, down there, at his feet, beside Maurice.

The letter was not long. He heard her hand fall softly with it. She sat, the vacant hand before her face, bowed over her husband.

Geoffrey could not speak to her and he could not leave her. He stood looking down at the dressing table—empty but for its little ivory tray, its pin-cushion. Maurice had not unpacked his dressing-case. A photograph of Felicia was stuck into the glass; not the framed one; that was packed too; he had taken it with him. This was a profile; not good; making her too sad, as Maurice had said.

He heard now that she wept.

He could not speak to her, he could not leave her, yet in his wretchedness he felt himself an alien, a merciless onlooker, till the tearing thought of Maurice, lying there, dead, seemed to justify his presence by his grief.

And presently he felt a touch on his hand. He looked down at her. Her face still hidden she held up the letter to him.

“I am to read it, Felicia? You wish me to read it?”

“He is ours. It is because of you—because of you that I——“ She could not finish, and again he understood that she would say that because of him she could look on her dead husband with a right to her despair. He had given him back to her and her to him.

“Dearest Felicia,” he read, “I was a coward. But I always loved you most—even when I lied to her. And now there is nothing in the world for me but you. And I am unworthy of you—and of my friend. All I can do for you is to set you free. Do you remember Maeterlinck’s poem, darling? I do smile; not only so that you shan’t cry, but for pure joy that at last I can really do something not ignoble in your eyes. Darling—darling—it is only horrible because I can’t see you again, and because you hate me and perhaps may still hate me and not believe me. Don’t, ah! don’t hate me. Love me again when I am no longer there to give you pain. Be happy, dearest one.—Maurice.”

A groan broke from Geoffrey’s lips. Had it been any other woman at his feet, however his understanding might have condoned her innocent guilt, he must at the moment have shrunk from her. As it was, his groan was half for her, for the hideous helplessness of her remorse. His love yearned over her, and longed, in speechlessness, to shield her from herself.

“Oh, Maurice—my Maurice, I have killed you,” Felicia said. “How can I live?”

He knelt beside her, his eyes on the piteous hand that blindly, patiently, wiped away the tears that fell and fell. He could not look at Maurice.

And with her sense of his nearness, his grief and his compassion, she shuddered with dreadful sobs.

“He went through that agony alone. He was so afraid of loneliness—so afraid of fear. He was like a little child. He came back to me—loving me—and he found that I had left him. He died thinking that I might always hate him. I can’t live. I can’t.”

Geoffrey could not think clearly. No phrases of consolation came to him to lift her from her despair. He was with her in it. He could not lift her yet.

And it was no selfish claim that rose to his lips; rather it was the succouring instinct of life that spoke through him to show her life’s supreme imperative as, putting his hand on hers and Maurice’s, he stammered, “You must, you must. For me.”

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Novels of my Nonage

The Irrational Knot (1880). Reprinted with a preface in 1905. 6/-

Cashel Byron’s Profession (1882), with the dramatic version in the Elizabethan style, entitled, “The Admirable Bashville or Constancy Unrewarded,” and a note on Modern Prize Fighting. 6/-

Essays in Philosophic Criticism

The Perfect Wagnerite (1898). Second Edition, 1903. Reprinted 1906. 3/6 net.

Dramatic Opinions and Essays. Originally contributed to The Saturday Review in 1895-98. Selected by James Huneker, with a Preface by him. 2 vols. 10/6 net.

Press Cuttings. Paper cover, 1/-net.

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CONSTABLE & COMPANY LTD.

Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:
The Confounding of Camilia=> The Confounding of Camelia {title page}
an idolent=> an indolent {pg 14}
You wont like Geoffrey=> You won’t like Geoffrey {pg 35}
milien=> milieu {pg 40}
tenacious worldiness=> tenacious worldliness {pg 48}
clearer vison=> clearer vision {pg 79}
he ammended=> he amended {pg 129}
unobstrusiveness=> unobtrusiveness {pg 176}
resistlessness=> restlessness {pg 303}
dependance=> dependence {pg 305}

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