It was April in a week of warm weather, of blue sky, of white clouds, and a stormy south-west wind. Brodrick's garden was sweet with dense odours of earth and sunken rain, of young grass and wallflowers thick in the borders, and with the pure smells of virgin green, of buds and branches and of lime-leaves fallen open to the sun. Outside, among the birch-trees, there was a flashing of silver stems, a shaking of green veils, and a triumphing of bright grass over the blown dust of the suburb, as the spring gave back its wildness to the Heath.

Brodrick was coming back. He had been away a fortnight, on his holiday. He was to have taken Jane with him but at the last moment she had been kept at home by some ailment of the child's. They had been married more than three years now, and they had not been separated for as many nights and days. In all his letters Brodrick had stated that he was enjoying himself immensely and could do with three months of it; and at the end of a fortnight he had sent Jane a telegram to say that he was coming back.

She was waiting for him, walking in the garden, as she used to wait for him more than three years ago, in excitement and ecstasy. The spring made her wild with the wildness of her girlhood when the white April evenings met her on her Dorset moors.

She knew again the virgin desire of desire, the poignant, incommunicable passion, when the soul knows the body's mystery and the body half divines the secret of the soul. She felt again that keen stirring of the immortal spirit in mortal sense, her veins were light, they ran fire and air, and the fine nerves aspired and adored. At moments it was as if the veils of being shook, and in their commotion all her heights and depths were ringing, reverberant to the indivisible joy.

It was so until she heard Brodrick calling to her at the gate. And at his voice her wedded blood remembered, and she came to him with the swift feet, and the flushed face uplifted, and the eyes and mouth of a bride.

Up-stairs Gertrude Collett was dressing for dinner. She looked out at her window and saw them walking up and down the long alley of the kitchen garden, like children, hand in hand.

They were late for dinner, which was the reason, Brodrick thought, why the Angel of the Dinner (as Jane called her) looked annoyed.

They were very polite and kind to her, sustaining a conversation devised and elaborated for her diversion.

Gertrude was manifestly not diverted. She congratulated Brodrick on his brilliant appearance, and said in her soft voice that his holiday had evidently done him good, and that it was a pity he hadn't stayed away a little longer. Brodrick replied that he didn't want to stay away longer. He thought Gertrude looked fatigued, and suggested that a holiday would do her good. She had better take one.

"I wish you would," said Jane.

"We both," said Brodrick, "wish you would."

Gertrude said she never wanted to take holidays. She got on better without them. Jane looked at Brodrick.

"I might have gone with you," she said. "After all, Baby never did have convulsions."

"I knew he wouldn't," said Brodrick, and remembered that it was Gertrude who had said he would.

A pause in the dialogue robbed Gertrude's next remark of any relevance it might have had.

"We've seen," said she, "a good deal of Mr. Tanqueray." (Another pause.) "I wonder how Mrs. Tanqueray gets on."

"I imagine," said Brodrick, "that she never did get on with him."

"I meant—without him."

"Oh." He caused the conversation to flourish round another subject.

In the drawing-room, where Gertrude did not follow them all at once, Jane turned to him.

"Hugh," she said, "was I unkind to her?"

"Unkind?"

"Well, was I kind enough?"

"You are always kind," he said.

"Do you think so? Do you really think so?"

"Don't talk about her, Jinny, I've got other things to attend to."

"What things?"

He put his arm round her and drew her to their seat beside the hearth. So drawn, so held, she looked in his face and smiled that singular smile of hers that he found so adorable and incomprehensible.

"I'm tired of being made love to. I'm going," she said, "to fling off all maidenly reserve and make love to you."

She put away his arm from her and rose and seated herself with audacity on his knees.

"The devil gets into me when I have to talk to Gertrude."

She put her arm lightly and shyly about him.

"Do you mind?" she said.

"No, Jinny, I rather like it."

Her arms tightened ever so little.

"It gives you, doesn't it, an agreeable sense of impropriety at your own fireside?"

She did something to his hair which made him look unlike himself or any Brodrick.

"Supposing," she said, "you repulse me? Could you repulse me?"

"No, Jinny; I don't think I ever could."

"What, not this outrageous hussy, flinging herself at your head, and rumpling your nice collar?"

She let him go that she might look at him and see how he really took it. He drew her and held her close to him in arms that trembled violently, while her lips brushed his with skimming, fugitive kisses, and kisses that lingered a moment in their flight.

"Do you like the way I make love?" she said. "And do you like my gown and the way I do my hair?"

His voice shook. "Jinny, why aren't you always like this? Why aren't you always adorable?"

"I can't be anything—always. Don't you adore me in my other moods?"

"Can you," said he, "adore a little devil when it teases?"

"I never tease you when you're tired."

"No, but I'm sometimes tired when you tease me. You are, darling, just a little bit exhausting for one man."

"Yes," said Jinny complacently; "I can exhaust you. But you can never, never exhaust me. There's always more where I came from."

"The trouble is, Jinny, that I can't always make you out. I never know where I am with you."

"But, my dear, think of having to live with a woman whom you had made out. Think of knowing exactly what she's going to do before she does it, and anticipating all her conversation!"

"Think," said he, "of living with a woman and never knowing precisely whether she's your wife or not your wife."

"But it solves all the matrimonial problems—how to be the exemplary father of a family and yet to slip the noose and be a bachelor again—how to break the seventh commandment——"

"Jinny!"

"The seventh commandment and yet be faithful to your marriage vows—how to obtain all the excitement of polygamy, all the relief of the divorce court without the bother and the scandal and the expense. Why can't you look at it in that light?"

"Perhaps, Jinny, because I'm not polygamous."

"You never know what you are until you're tried. Supposing you'd married Gertrude—you'd have had Gertrude, all there is of Gertrude, always Gertrude, and nothing but Gertrude. Could you have stood it?"

"Probably."

"You couldn't. Before you'd been married to Gertrude six months you'd have gone, howling, to the devil. Whereas with me you've got your devil at home."

His smile admitted that there was truth in what she said. She had appealed to the adventurous and lawless spirit in him, the spirit that marked his difference from his family.

She went on with her air of reasonableness and wisdom. "I am really, though you mayn't know it, the thing you need."

He saw his advantage in her mood.

"And you, Jinny? Don't you know that you're happiest like this?"

"Yes. I know it."

"And that when you're working like ten horses you're in misery half the time?"

"In torture." She agreed.

"And don't you know that it makes little lines come, little lines of agony on your forehead, Jinny, and purple patches under your dear eyes; and your mouth hardens."

"I know," she moaned. "I know it does. And you don't love me when I look like that?"

"I love you whatever you look like, and you know it. I love you even when you wander."

"Even? Do you mind so very much—my wandering?"

"Sometimes, perhaps, a little."

"You didn't mind at all before you married me."

"I didn't realize it then."

"Didn't realize what?"

"Your genius, Jinny, and the things it does to you."

"But you did—you did—you knew all about it."

"I knew what it meant to me."

"What did it mean—to you?"

He appeared to plunge into deep memories before he answered her.

"To me it was simply the supreme intellectual interest. It was the strongest and the strangest intellectual influence I had ever felt. You'll never quite know what it meant to me."

"And it means nothing now—you don't like it—my poor genius? And they used to say you were in love with it."

"So I was, Jinny, before I saw you."

"You were in love enough to marry it."

"I didn't marry it. It wouldn't marry me."

"Is that why you hate it? Darling, you can't hate it as much as I do."

"I don't hate it. But you can't expect me to love it as I love my wife."

"But I'm not your wife. Your wife wouldn't behave like this. Would you like me better if I didn't?"

He held her arms in his arms, fiercely and tight, crushing her.

"If," she said, "I was a virtuous woman, the sort of woman who sits on her husband's head like an uncomfortable crown?"

"Jinny—if Gertrude were to hear you!"

She loosened his arms and sat up and listened.

"I hear Gertrude," she said. "Darling, your hair's all any way. Let me straighten it. It might be used in evidence against us."

Gertrude indeed wore as she entered the ominously distant air of one who suspects a vision of iniquity. She took her place on the other side of the hearth and bent her head over her sewing. A thin stream of conversation flowed from Brodrick and from Jane, and under it she divined, she felt the tide that drew them.

She herself sat silent and smooth and cool. She sat like one removed from mortality's commotion. But it was as if she were listening to the blood that beat in Brodrick's veins, and felt in herself the passion that ran there, in secret, exulting towards its end.

At ten o'clock Jane rose and held out her hand to Gertrude. She was saying good-night. Brodrick sat abstracted for a moment. Presently he rose also and followed her with shining eyes.

Gertrude's head bent lower and lower over her sewing.

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