Two years later, the musician and his wife went down to Relton for their Easter holiday. They stayed at the "Relton Arms," although they had a warm invitation to the Court instead; but Digby was unusually firm in his determination not to be the guest of Lady Joan, and Norah's objections that there was no nursery for the baby, and that people would "wonder," were for once overruled. She satisfied her sense of the fitness of things by telling Mrs. Reginald Routh and her set that there were early romantic associations in connection with the little old country inn which induced her and her husband to go there again; and to people who spent their lives in straining after unconventional effects with a conventional reason for them in the background in case it was wanted, the explanation was quite sufficient. But the fact remained that the "Relton Arms" offered insufficient accommodation for a baby and a growing boy and a nurse, and there were jars in that holiday in consequence.

"This is what I like," exclaimed the musician, enthusiastically, at breakfast, the morning after their arrival: "fresh eggs and milk straight from the cow—the—the animal I mean, none of your cooked-up stuff such as we've been eating in Victoria Street. I can't think why you don't have it straight up from here, Norah, instead of—"

"Because you said the eggs at the Stores were just as good, dear, and they are cheaper; don't you remember?" said his wife, gently. Digby wished, not for the first time, that her memory were less reliable.

"Well, at any rate, the milk is a different thing; just look at the cream on it. Baby ought to thrive on stuff like that, oughtn't she?"

"That is just what I am anxious about; It has only upset her so far. Hark! is that baby crying? Precious thing! Do you mind managing Sonny's egg and pouring out the coffee, Digby, while I run upstairs?"

"I am inclined to agree with Plato," began the musician, earnestly; but his wife was gone, and Sonny was clamoring for food. He took up an egg, and then almost dropped it again as the wooden door was pushed open from without, with the same creak as of yore.

"Auntie Joan, Auntie Joan," shrieked Sonny, tumbling off his high-chair with a clatter, and dragging the tablecloth with a medley of spoons and knives after him. The musician was thankful for the diversion at that moment, and forebore to swear as he set his son on his feet again, and held out his hand with a smile to Lady Joan. She was in her riding-habit, and he told himself that she looked like Diana, or any other goddess that represents the woman a man admires.

"Well?" she said, with her fresh, breezy laugh, "how soon will you be tired of picknicking and ready to come to terms? And where's Norah?"

"Upstairs. There's a draught under the bedroom door, and Mrs. Haxtell has quarrelled violently with nurse. Baby cries perpetually—teeth. And I can't get any breakfast. That's all so far, I think;" and he laughed as heartily as she, and they bumped their heads together under the table in picking up the fallen utensils, and came up again with red faces just as Norah returned with the baby in her arms.

"Oh, is it you, Joan? So glad to see you, dear; sit down and have some breakfast. Why haven't you poured out the coffee, Digby? How helpless men are! Take baby a minute, will you? There, you have set her off again, just when I had quieted her. She has taken cold in the night, that's what it is. Hush, hush! There then, it sha'n't, that it sha'n't!"

"After all," began the musician in a momentary lull, "I do think Plato—"

"Will you give Digby something to eat, Joan, dear?" interposed Norah gently; and peace presently pervaded the breakfast-table.

"The lambs is fat, isn't they, daddy?" asked Sonny, from the window-seat. "How does the lambs know, daddy, which sheep is their right mother?"

"Confound his precocity," grumbled the musician; "what is one to do with a son like that? Besides, I can't tell him myself; how do they know?"

"They don't," said Lady Joan, promptly; "it's a fact I used to dispute with my governess in my youth. It is only we who take it upon ourselves to say that they do; we have no means of proving it. The sheep takes them as they come, and looks equally bored with them all."

Digby laughed loudly, and Norah murmured something in a pained voice about maternal instinct.

"All nonsense, my dear," persisted Lady Joan, gayly; "no amount of maternal instinct could help a sheep to tell her own lamb from any other sheep's lamb. Besides, why should she want to? As it is, she can have a change without being called fickle. Happy sheep!"

Sonny was standing with his legs very wide apart and his blue eyes fixed on her face, as she said this.

"Auntie Joan's pertending," he said solemnly. The others laughed, which awoke the slumbering baby again; and Norah, after complaining between its wails that the draught under the bedroom door was answerable for everything, carried it upstairs again by way of curing it.

"Well, what is it?" said the musician, in the peace that ensued on his wife's departure; and he lighted his cigarette and looked across at Lady Joan.

"How did you know there was anything?" she asked.

"I always know," he said, in a superior tone; "we haven't been chums all these years for nothing. Tell me what's up, dear. Hasn't Jack been writing to you, the scamp?"

"Oh, yes. He always writes. He is quite good. I am the naughty one; I always have been, I think. I am not fit to be engaged; it is true what I told you—that day."

They were very fond of making allusions to that day; they told themselves it was one of the privileges of their friendship, now that she was safely engaged and he was securely married, to mention subjects which were not always even respectable; it did not occur to them that this constant renewal of back chapters in their lives had more to do with their egoism than their friendship.

"And what dreadful thing have you been doing now, please?" asked Digby.

She flung back her head and laughed mockingly, as she used to do.

"Do you remember telling me that marriage was the only way out of it? I am half inclined to agree with you now, though I wrote to Jack yesterday to break off our engagement. That is all."

Sonny hummed his baby ditty on the window-seat, without interruption, for a few seconds.

Then the musician laid down his cigarette.

"You—did—that?" he said, drawing a long breath; "what a wonderful creature you are, Joan!"

"Only wonderful?" she said lightly; "are you sure you don't mean heartless?"

"Why did you do it? Do stop laughing," he urged her. Her eyes flashed angrily.

"What do you mean?" she cried; "do you think I am heartless?"

"Surely not," said the musician, looking along his cigarette, and avoiding her direct glance across the breakfast-table.

"Then why do you say I am?"

"I—I didn't say so, if you remember, Joan. The word entirely originated with—"

"Oh, I know," she interrupted impatiently; "but why don't you think so? You ought to—everybody does—Norah would."

"Norah isn't—Norah can't understand—that is, Norah does not know you so well as I do, and she is a little prejudiced sometimes—" stumbled the musician.

"Just so, yes," said Lady Joan, gravely, and there was a pause.

"Then you agree with me that I have done the best thing under the circumstances, the miserable circumstances?" she began again in a few moments.

"I always agree with you," said the musician; "but you must own that—not knowing the circumstances which—which led to your course of action, it—it becomes difficult—"

He yielded to a nervous desire to laugh instead of finishing his sentence; and Lady Joan, after a desperate effort to lose her temper, weakly followed his example.

"Tell me why you did it," he said more naturally when they were grave again, and he walked round the table and leaned over the back of her chair. She fell into the rÔle of the penitent child.

"I couldn't help it, it came over me yesterday that I couldn't stand it any longer. I've always said perpetual engagements would not answer, because people could never stand the awful monotony of them. It is only the monotony of Jack's love for me that has exhausted my patience now. If he had really been at all wild after we were engaged, which every one was so fond of prophesying to me, I think I might have got to love him too much to give him up. But—oh! it is the badness in me I think, Digby. Why don't you scold me instead of looking at me like that?"

He stroked her hair idly without speaking, and she had to laugh again to hide the tremor in her lips.

"I always told you I wanted our engagement kept secret; it would have been much better. It was an experiment, rather a disastrous one for Jack—"

"And for you?"

"—and it should never have been made public. Engagements never ought to be made public, and if they were what they claim to be they never would be. It is because they are such miserable, heartless arrangements that we have to take refuge in the approbation of society to make them a success at all; if it were not for the connivance of their friends I don't believe people would ever get to the marriage service at all. No wonder men say such hard things about women; we simply destroy all the sentiment that is in them by our eagerness to cash it at once, and then we go in for a cheap cynicism and call them heartless brutes. If I were a man I would never ask a woman to be my wife, never, never, never! At least, not if I were in love with her."

She spoke rapidly and vehemently, and the musician framed her face in his hands and coughed a little to steady his voice.

"Poor Jack!" he said almost inaudibly.

"Why do you say that?" she asked, in the same tone.

"Because he might have married you, and he has just missed it," he breathed in reply; and their heads drew closer together and remained so for a few seconds. They had had enough in their two lives to make them either sure friends or enemies. And morality is mainly a question of circumstance, and largely dependent on the chances of detection.

"Why are you so good to me?" she asked.

"Am I?" he said with a smile, and he removed one of his hands to brush off the ash of his cigarette. "I am only what you make me. I have always been in your hands, you know."

"Rubbish!" she said, and laughed unnaturally, and freed herself from his touch and walked away to the window. Norah's voice came from the orchard, calling him, and he went out through the door. Lady Joan sat on the window ledge and thought over what he had been saying, and then about the words of her letter to Jack, and then that it was time to walk back to the Court and speak about the mending of a certain fence to the man. And finally she thought about nothing at all as she yielded to the drowsiness of the hot spring morning, and rested her cheek against a background of green creepers and became conscious of nothing but a confused medley of well-known sounds,—the loud ticking of the clock in the way trifles assert their importance after an event, the tuneless humming of the child on the floor, the warning bell of the postman's bicycle as he came round the corner of the street, and the splash of the ducks he frightened into the pond as he came. Then she raised her heavy eyelids, and saw the musician looking at her with a strange, frightened expression on his face.

"Yes?" she said quickly, with a tight feeling at her breast.

He had a telegram in his hand.

"Joan, dear, can you bear to hear something? I—I know I am a weak fool, but some one must tell you, and Norah won't, and I would sooner die than give you any pain, but—Joan—"

His agitation and her own anxiety almost made her hate him.

"Tell me what there is to tell," she cried fiercely, and snatched at the telegram, and then recoiled from it as it fluttered away on the floor.

"No, don't!" she said the instant after, "I think I know it. Jack—"

"Yes, dear. That is it. Jack will never—Jack will never have your letter," and the musician put out his hand to her. She did not take it, nor heed him.

"It was a railway accident—they have not cabled much," he faltered; but she did not help him by a word or a look, and they stood silent for an interminable minute.

Then she spoke through her dry lips with a little forced laugh.

"What a pity I did not wait for the next mail," she said; "what a character for constancy I might have had!"

He had just time to put out his arm to catch her as she fell suddenly forward.

"It is extraordinary how quietly Joan has taken it," Norah said on the evening of the same day. "I often wonder if she does feel things as we do, or whether Mrs. Reginald Routh is not right about her after all. You know, she always did say that Joan's hatred of music meant a lack of heart; of course, that is putting it rather strongly, and I shouldn't call her heartless myself—because nobody is quite that; but still, she has been strangely cool about poor Jack, and she has not even mentioned the mourning. I should not be surprised if she did not wear black at all, she is so inclined to be eccentric. I am glad I wrote to Peter Robinson's in time for the post; I shall get the patterns to-morrow. I don't know when I have felt so upset, though of course it does not do to talk about it. I wish there were a piano here; it would do us both so much good, wouldn't it, dear?"

Digby looked at his wife's gentle face as she bent it over her needlework, and he counted the regular folds of her soft gray gown and the coils of brown hair round her head, and he made a few mental reflections on the marvellous nature of woman.

"I cannot conceive what it must be to live without the love of music," she went on unconsciously in her low tuneful voice. "Music is like religion in that way, I think; we may try to do without it when we are happy, but we want it terribly when the trials come. Now, what has Joan to fall back upon to-night, do you suppose?"

"I don't know, but I will go and see," muttered the musician; he felt he had had as much as he could stand just then, and he took up his straw hat significantly. The old brown felt one had been gently but firmly suppressed soon after his marriage.

"What was that you said, Digby?"

"I will go and make her come down here to be cheered up. You are too tired to come, eh, childie?" said Digby; and he kissed her before he pushed open the creaking door and went out into the moonlight.

The butler said Lady Joan was busy in her boudoir and wished to be left undisturbed. But Digby managed to gain admittance a few minutes later, and he found occasion to add a few more reflections to his mental synopsis of woman.

"How nice of you to come, and what a cold creature you are! Come and sit near the fire; I waged a war with Mrs. Binks and had a wood fire lighted because I felt chilly, which shocked the conventional old thing very much indeed, because there never has been a fire lighted in here between spring-cleaning and Michaelmas, since the memory of man. But why should I listen to Mrs. Binks or any one else if I don't choose? At all events, it is nice and cosey, and I am going to tell you all my ideas. But tell me first why you came. What are you laughing at?"

She looked up at him sharply from the hearthrug where she had flung herself down to stir the fire, and he stroked his moustache hurriedly.

"I am not laughing, Joan. I came to take you back to Norah—to be cheered up."

"Oh. It was very kind of you—both. How is the baby?" said she, turning a log dexterously over on its side and making the sparks fly up the chimney and send a red glow over her face.

"The baby is—ah—quiescent. Mrs. Haxtell is not. I think on the whole you had better not go there for amusement. My family affairs are only funny from the outside just at present. I think you had better give me your new ideas instead. What have you been thinking about all day?"

"That is what I am going to tell you." She stood up and leaned against the mantelshelf, and looked over his head at the bookshelves on the wall. "First of all, I hated myself for a whole hour. I thought I had got outside myself and was looking at myself like—oh, like another woman would look at me, Norah for instance. And I didn't enjoy myself for that hour at all. I almost made up my mind to go abroad again; but it was lunchtime, and over the mayonnaise, which was particularly good to-day, I came to the conclusion that it was like running away, and everybody would say I had gone 'to get over it,' and I could not tolerate that for a moment, could I?"

"Of course not, no. I know I may smoke, mayn't I? And then?"

"Then—" she made an effort not to alter her voice, and exaggerated its pitch in the attempt, "oh, then it became very apparent from the attitude of all the servants that they had heard the news about—Jack. That is to say, Thomas spoke to me in a whisper at lunch, and never handed me anything twice, and the coachman never sent up for orders at all, and I only just stopped the maids in time from pulling down all the blinds, and Mrs. Binks has been drinking tea in the servants' hall in her black silk dress ever since three o'clock, and did not answer my bell until I rang the second time, and then she appeared with a clean handkerchief in her hand, and a face as long as a fiddle. Aren't servants fond of a tragedy? And am I very heartless to notice all these things, Digby?"

"Heartless? No," he said with emphasis, remembering what his wife had said in the inn; "and after lunch, please?"

"Oh, after lunch I went to sleep. And when I woke up I felt better. I was able to think without getting sentimental over it. Don't you see, it is like this. There isn't anybody."

"I don't understand," said the musician.

"I could hardly expect you to," she said dryly; "there is somebody for you. But for me there is nobody, and I am getting old, and I feel frightened sometimes. Remember, that is an admission. I don't know why I am telling you all this, because I want to get to the end. At all events, I had a sort of sensation that I had tried more than most women to gain something, and I had hopelessly missed it; so it was time to turn round and do something, as I should have to go on living all the same. Now, there were two courses open to me: one was to turn the literary cynic and write a novel in which I could vent my spite against my own particular Fate by personifying myself in an ill-used heroine, who talks epigrams from the moment she gets out of bed in the morning, and who loves to assure her men acquaintances that they may mention questionable topics before her if they like. And the other was to repent and do good works, and become the fashionable philanthropist, and tell the poor and fatherless that they have got to be improved in their condition whether they think they want improving or not. Guess which I chose! Oh, I do wonder if you will guess right;" and she dropped on her knees beside him and looked into his face.

"If you were any ordinary clever woman, I should guess the first; but—" he paused and looked at the eager, scornful face, and smiled to himself, "no, that wouldn't do for you, Joan. And yet, neither would the other. I can't imagine you walking through the village in awful, hideous garments, carrying a rice pudding and a Bible. Oh, Joan, surely you are not going in for that self-indulgent bosh known as charity?"

"That is where you are so like a man!" She flung herself away from him, and began walking about the room and talking quickly. "You are right about the novel, yes. You see, if I were to write a book it would be so frightfully personal that I should have to take a pseudonym to begin with. And where is the satisfaction of jeering at your friends when they don't know you are doing it? But I don't know why you should take up the old, played-out notion of charity as the only alternative. Who wants to go about with Bibles and rice puddings? Nous avons changÉ tout cela, mon ami! Why, there is no such thing as charity left now; haven't you learnt that from Sir Marcus? It is philanthropy nowadays, my good sir, equally self-indulgent, of course, but more modern and ten times more entertaining. The Bible never need come in at all, and no one sees the rice puddings, they're all managed by committees; all you have to do is to lend your name for the circulars of the league, and hold meetings over afternoon tea in your drawing-room, and talk. That is all. Now do you see what I mean?"

"I gather that you mean to take up philanthropy as a new form of diversion; but I am afraid I do not quite recognize the full advantages of the scheme. I don't see—"

"Of course you don't," cried Lady Joan, cheerfully, "you have no cause to see. I don't see the full advantages of married life, for instance. But I am really going to be serious now, so don't interrupt. In the first place, I am not going to be philanthropic in the country; that only means being hopelessly under the thumb of one's rector, or hopelessly at variance with him; besides, it is so mortally dull, and—I don't mean to be dull just now. So I am going up to Pont Street in October, and I shall organize a regular philanthropic campaign. Oh, I am going to have a fine time! I shall sing for concerts in the East End, I shall paint match-boxes and gridirons and send them to fancy fairs, I shall play with the children in the hospitals, and teach the children of Whitechapel—thank Heaven! no amount of philanthropy can ever spoil the children—I shall even give sumptuous receptions, at which we shall discuss the evils of the sweating-system and the possibility of distributing certain portions of bread and soup to the deserving poor during the cold weather. Who knows that I may not speak on a platform before long? There is always the bearing-rein to fall back upon, if all the others fail; or the prevention of cruelty to birds, now that wearing feathers is out of fashion; or compulsory vaccination, or hygiene and rational dress and other horrors which are so excellent for the poor. Think of my reputation, Digby! It will be so assured that even Mrs. Reginald Routh will not dare to cast a stone at me, and I shall be able to say just what I choose about anybody. Why, philanthropy, properly managed, is as telling as music! Won't it be glorious fun, Digby? Hey-day, what a noise I am making!"

He got up and stirred the logs in the low grate with his foot. She was lying on the sofa, looking at him.

"Well, have you nothing to say to my beautiful idea?" she asked presently.

The musician gulped at something in his throat.

"It is surprising," he began, with an attempt at his old impressive manner, "how difficult it is to make ourselves understood, especially in our most intimate relations."

"What are you talking about?" said Lady Joan.

"I mean," went on the musician, desperately, "that I don't know how to tell you all that is in my mind, dear. Perhaps it is best left unsaid. I don't know; but—when you ask me what I think of it, I can only feel that it is all sad, dreadfully sad. I'm afraid I have not made it very clear, have I?"

She moved her feet, and he came and sat down on the end of the sofa.

"Tell me what it is that is sad," she asked, shading her eyes with her hand.

"What you have been saying, that there isn't anybody," he said, and boldly moved the hand, and held it fast, and looked into her eyes.

"No more there is,—except you," she answered recklessly, and looked back at him for a moment.

Something surged up to his lips in the silence of the next few minutes, and he held his breath and tightened his grasp on the cold fingers before he said it. Then she pulled away her hand almost roughly, and spoke quickly.

"Do you know it is nearly eleven? Norah had a bad night with the baby last night, and you look awfully tired too. Hadn't you better be moving?"

So he did not say it after all.

"You have not told me what you think yet. I suppose you are only laughing at me," she said, when he bade her good-bye.

He found himself smiling in a conventional manner; he could not have said why.

"Oh, no, why should I? I think it is very wise of you," he said, opening the door to go out; "and when I tell Norah she will say 'Just like Joan!' Good-night."

And she answered down the stairs after him, "Good-night, and mind you tell Norah all about it!"

"I'll be hanged if I do," thought the musician, as he walked down the drive; and he congratulated himself all the way back on not having made a fool of himself.

"I'm sure I hope he won't," added Lady Joan to herself out loud, as the front-door banged. Then she walked unsteadily into her boudoir, and made up the fire, and sat down on the sofa, and looked dully into the flames. And presently she turned and hid her face in the cushions, and burst into tears.