Jane Holland and Tanqueray had left the others some considerable way behind. It was possible, they agreed, to have too much of Nicky, though he did adore them.

The wide high road stood up before them, climbing the ridge, to drop down into Wendover. A white road, between grass borders and hedgerows, their green powdered white with the dust of it. Over all, the pallor of the first white hour of twilight.

For a moment, a blessed pause in the traffic, they were alone; twilight and the road were theirs.

The two bore themselves with a certain physical audacity, a swinging challenge to fatigue. He, in his well-knit youth, walked with the step of some fine, untamed animal. She, at his side, kept the wild pace he set with a smooth motion of her own. She carried, high and processionally, her trophy, flowers from their host's garden, wild parsley of her own gathering, and green fans of beech and oak. As she went, the branches swayed with the swinging of her body. A light wind woke on the hill and played with her. Her long veil, grey-blue and transparent, falling from her head to her shoulders, flew and drifted about her, now clinging to her neck, her breasts, now fluttering itself free.

He looked at her, and thought that if Gisborne, R.A., hadn't been an idiot, he would have painted her, not sitting, but like that. Protected by the charm of Rose, there was no more terror for him in any charm of Jane's. He could afford to show his approval, to admit that, even as a woman, she had points. He could afford, being extremely happy himself, to make Jane happy too.

So sheltered, so protected was he that it did not strike him that Jane was utterly defenceless and exposed.

"Yes," he said, "it's been a day."

"Hasn't it?"

She saw him sustained by some inward ecstasy. The coming joy, the joy of his wedding-day, was upon him; the light of it was in his eyes as he looked at her, the tenderness of it in his voice as he spoke to her again.

"Have you liked it as much as you used to like our other days?"

"Oh more, far more." Then, remembering how those other days had been indeed theirs and nobody else's, she added, "In spite of poor Nicky."

It was at this moment that he realized that he would have to tell her about Rose; also that he would be hanged if he knew how to. She had been manifestly unhappy when he last saw her. Now he saw, not only that she was happy, but that he was responsible for her happiness. This was worse than anything he had yet imagined. It gave him his first definite feeling of treachery toward Jane.

Her reference to Nicky came like a reprieve. How was it, he said, that they were let in for him? Or rather, why had they ever let him in?

"It was you, Jane, who did it."

"No, George; it was you. You introduced him."

He owned it. "I did it because I hoped you'd fall in love with him."

She saw that there was a devil in him that still longed to torment her.

"That," said she, "would have been very bad for Nicky."

"Yes. But it would have been very good for you."

She had her moment of torment; then she recovered.

"I thought," said she, "that was the one thing I was not to do."

"You're not to do it seriously. But you couldn't fall in love with Nicky seriously. Could you? Could anybody?"

"Why are you so unkind to Nicky?"

"Because he's so ungovernably a man of letters."

"He isn't. He only thinks he is."

"He thinks he's Shelley, because his father's a squire."

"That saves him. No man of letters, if he tried all night, could think anything so deliciously absurd. Don't you wish you could feel like that!"

He rose to it, his very excitement kindling his intellectual flame.

"To feel myself an immortal, a blessed god!"

They played together, profanely, with the idea that Nicky was after all divine.

"Such a tragic little god," said Jane, with a pitiful mouth, "a little god without a single apostle or a prophet—nobody," she wailed, "to spread the knowledge of him."

"I say—we'll build an altar on Wendover, to Nicky as the Unknown God."

"He won't like that, our calling him unknown."

"Let's call him the Unapparent—the Undeveloped. He is the Undeveloped."

"In one aspect. In another he's a finished poem, an incarnate lyric——"

"An ode to immortality on legs——"

"Nicky hasn't any legs. He's a breath—a perpetual aspiration."

"Oh, at aspiring he beats Shelley into apoplexy."

"He stands for the imperishable illusion——"

"The stupendous hope——"

"And, after all, he adores you."

"And nobody else does," said Tanqueray.

"That's Nicky's achievement. He does see what you are. It's his little claim to immortality. Just think, George, when Nicky dies and goes to heaven he'll turn up at the gates of the poets' paradise, and they'll let him in on the strength of that. The angel of the singing stars will come up to him and say, 'Nicky, you sing abominably, but you can see. You saw George Tanqueray when nobody else could. Your sonnets and your ballads are forgiven you; and we've got a nice place for you, Nicky, near Keats and Shelley.' Because it wouldn't be heaven for Nicky if he wasn't near them."

"How about them, though?"

"Oh, up in heaven you won't see anything of Nicky except his heart."

"I suppose he'll be stuck somewhere near you, too. It won't be heaven for him if he isn't. The first thing he'll ask is, 'Where's Jane?'"

"And then they'll break it to him very gently—'Jane's in the other place, Nicky, where Mr. Tanqueray is. We had to send her down, because if she wasn't there it wouldn't be hell for Mr. Tanqueray.'"

"But why am I down there?"

"Because you didn't see what Nicky was."

"If you don't take care, Jinny, he'll 'have' you like the rest. You're laying up sorrow for yourself in the day when Nicky publishes his poems."

"It's you he'll turn to."

"No. I'm not celebrated," said he grimly. "There, do you see the full horror of it?"

"I do," she moaned.

Tanqueray's devil came back to him.

"Do you think he'll fall in love with Laura?"

"No, I don't." She said it coolly, though his gaze was upon her, and they were both of them aware of Nicky's high infatuation.

"Why not?" he said lightly.

"Because Nicky'll never be in love with any woman as she is; and nobody could be in love with Laura as she isn't."

She faced him in her courage. He might take it, if he liked, that she knew Nicky was in love with her as she was not; that she knew Tanqueray would never, like Nicky, see her as she was not, to be in love with that.

"Oh, you're too subtle," he said. But he understood her subtlety.

He must tell her about Rose. Before the others could come up with them he must tell her. And then he must tell Nicky.

"Jane," he said, "will you forgive me for never coming to see you? I simply couldn't come."

"I know, George, I know."

"You don't. You don't know what I felt like."

"Perhaps not. And yet, I think, you might——"

But what she thought he might have done she would not tell him.

"At any rate," said he, "you'll let me come and see you now? Often; I want to come often."

He meant to tell her that his marriage was to make no difference.

"Come as often as you want. Come as often as you used to."

"Was it so very often?"

"Not too often."

"I say, those were glorious times we had. We'll have them again, Jinny. There are things we've got to talk about. Things we've got to do. Why, we're hardly beginning."

"Do you remember saying, 'When you've made yourself an absolutely clear medium, then you can begin'?"

"I remember."

He was content now to join her in singing the duet of remembrance.

She dismissed herself. "What have you been doing?"

"Not much. It looks as if I couldn't do things without you."

A look of heavenly happiness came upon her face, and passed.

"That isn't so, George. There never was anybody less dependent on other people. That's why nothing has ever stopped you. Nothing ever will. Whereas—you're right about me. Anything might stop me."

"Could I stop you?"

Not for his life could he have told what made him ask her that question, whether an insane impulse, or a purely intellectual desire to complete his knowledge of her, to know how deep she had gone in and what his power was, whether he could, indeed, "stop" her.

"You?" she said, and her voice had a long, profound and passionate vibration. He had not dreamed that such a tone could have been wrung from Jane.

Her eyes met his. Steady they were and deep, under their level brows; but in them, too, was that sudden, unexpected quality. Something in her startled him with its intensity.

Her voice, her look, had made it impossible for him to tell her about Rose. It was not the moment.

"I didn't know she was like that," he thought.

No, he had never known until now what Jane was; never seen until now that the gods in giving her genius had given her one passion the more, to complicate her, to increase tenfold her interest and her charm.

And, with the charm of Rose upon him, he could not tell whether, if he had known, it would have made any difference. All he knew or cared to know was that he was going to marry Rose the day after to-morrow.

He would have to ask Nicky to let him go back with him and stay the night. Then he could tell him. And he could get out of telling Jane. He liked teasing and tormenting her, but he did not want to stab her. Still less did he want to stand by with the steel in his hand and see her bleed.

He must get away from Jane.

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