BY the end of June, returning physical strength gave Hilda the wish to seek self-forgetful effort of some kind. She tried to busy herself with something—with anything—and experienced the odd sensation of a person upon whom duty has always pressed and crowded, in a futile search for duty. The stern, sweet helper eluded her, the unreality of manufactured, unnecessary activity appalled her. She regretted the strenuous days of labor that meant something. Taking herself to task for a weak submission to circumstance, she fitted up a large room at the top of the house with artistic apparatus; nice models were easily lured from the village; she told herself that art at least remained, and tried to absorb herself in her painting; but the savor of keen interest was gone; the pink cheeks and staring eyes of her village girl were annoying. Hilda felt more like crying than trying to select from and modify her buxom charms.

Mrs. Archinard had suddenly assumed an active rÔle in life most confusing to her daughter. Even mamma did not need her. Mrs. Archinard drove out in the pony-cart to see people; she held quite a little cÔterie of callers every afternoon. Mrs. Archinard’s little Causeries de Mardi, her society for little weekly dinners—only six chosen members—les Élites—stirred Allersley to the quick with Æsthetic thrills and heart-burnings. Mrs. Archinard laughed prettily and lightly at her own feats, but Allersley was awestricken, and got down its Sainte-Beuve trembling, resolved on firm foundations.

Hilda was not one of les Élites. “Just for us old people, trying to amuse ourselves,” Mrs. Archinard said, and at the Causeries Hilda was an anomalous and silent onlooker; indeed the Causeries were quite Sainte-Beuvian in their monologic form, Mrs. Archinard causant and Allersley attentive, but discreetly reticent, no one caring to risk a revelation of ignorance. The Captain carefully avoided both the Élites and the mardis, and devoted himself to more commonplace individualities whose dinners were good, and then one wasn’t required to strain one’s temper by listening to fine talk.

Mary Apswith spent a week at the Manor, and one fresh sunny morning she came to see Hilda. She found her in the garden standing between the rows of sweet-peas, and filling with their fragrant loveliness the basket on her arm. Mary’s mind had been given over to a commotion of conjecture since Peter’s flying visit to her in London. He had told her much and yet not enough; though what he had told insured sympathy for Hilda. Mary was generous, and the sight of Hilda’s white sunlit face completed Peter’s work. She found that she had kissed Hilda—she, so undemonstrative—and standing with her arms around the girl’s slight shoulders, she said, looking at her with a grave smile, in which the slight touch of playfulness reminded poor Hilda of Peter—

“You will see me, won’t you?”

Hilda still held in her hands the last long sprays she had cut—palest pink and palest purple, “on tiptoe for a flight.”

“How kind of you to come,” she said.

“Kind of you to say so, since I come from the enemy’s camp. That reckless brother of mine!”

“Did he send you?” Hilda asked, fright in her eyes.

“Send me? Oh no, he didn’t send me; but after what he has told me, I came naturally of my own free will.” Hilda smiled faintly in reply to Mary’s smile.

“What has he told you?”

“Why, simply that he had been in love with you almost from the day he proposed to Katherine; indeed he implied an even remoter origin. Really Peter ought to be whipped! He almost deserves the sacking you are giving him!”

Hilda winced at the humorous tone.

“That he had made love to you most cruelly; that Katherine had come in upon the love scene; that she, too, was cruel—natural, though, wasn’t it? Peter is rather hard on Katherine. And, to sum up, that you had been badly treated by the world in general, by himself in particular, and that he was very desperate and you painfully perfect, and—oh, a great many things.”

“Did he tell you that I loved him?” Hilda asked, looking down at her sweet-peas with, if that were possible, an added pallor. She wondered if it was demanded of her that she should humiliate herself before Peter’s sister—tell her that she had made love to him.

“My dear child,” Mary’s voice dropped to a graver key, “Peter trusts me, you know, and he ought to trust me. He told me that when he made love to you, you and he together found out that fact.”

Even Hilda’s morbid self-doubt could not deny the essential truth of this point of view.

“And now you won’t marry him,” Mary added, but in a matter-of-fact manner, and as if the subject were folded up and put away by that conclusive statement.

“Let us walk along the path, my dear Hilda. What a delightful garden this is. I must have a pansy border like that in mine. Tell me, Hilda, why have you always so persistently and doggedly effaced yourself? Why did you never let anybody know you, and subside passively into the background rÔle? I never knew you, I am sure, and if it hadn’t been for Peter I shouldn’t have known you now. He made me see things very clearly. The poor little caryatid cowering in a dark corner, and holding up a whole edifice on its shoulders.”

“How could he! Why will he always see things so? It makes me miserable.”

“Well, well; perhaps Peter’s point of view would seem to you exaggerated. But, as I say, why did you never let me get a glimpse of you?”

“I never tried to hide. Circumstances kept me apart. I loved my work.”

“Yes; it must have been charming work, in all its branches.” Mary gave her a gravely gay glance. “When you did emerge from your shadows, why did you never talk—make an effect, like Katherine?”

“Katherine makes effects without trying. She is effective, and people like her for herself. I was fitted for the dark corner. That is why I stayed there.”

“No, my dear, one can’t explain the injustices of fortune by that comfortably, or uncomfortably, fatalistic philosophy. Noble natures get oddly jumped on in this world,” Mary added reflectively. “The tragedy, of course, lies in being too noble for one’s milieu, for then, not only does one renounce, but one is expected to, as a matter of course. Forgive me, Hilda, if I am a little coarsely frank. I am speaking, for the moment, with gloves off; I know the truth, and you may as well face it. It’s a pity to be too noble; one should have just a spice of egotistic rebellion, else one is squashed flat to one’s corner.”

“Peter found me,” said Hilda, with a sad smile that evaded the “coarse” frankness.

They walked silently along the little path under the sunlit shade of the fruit-trees. Mary stopped at a turning.

“Yes; that is encouraging. Reminds one of Emerson and optimism. Peter did find you.” Her large clear eyes looked an exhortation into Hilda’s. “Peter found you, my dear child; let Peter keep you, then.”

“He always will keep—what he found,” said Hilda, trembling. “I love him. I shall always love him.”

“My dear Hilda!”

“But I cannot marry him. I cannot.”

“You are a foolish little Hilda.”

“We made Katherine miserable.”

“And therefore all three must be miserable. For Peter to have kept faith with Katherine—loving you—might have called down a far worse tragedy.”

Hilda gazed widely at her—

“Yes; I deserve that suspicion.”

“Oh, you foolish, foolish child!” cried Mary, laughing; and she kissed her. “Come, come; say that you will be good to my poor brother?”

“I love him, but I cannot ground my happiness on a wrong.”

“Your happiness would be grounded on a right; the wrong was a mere incidental. Peter must wait, I see. Perhaps you will own some day that that was ample expiation.”