THE house stood in the corner of a quiet square, a little south and west of the Green Park, and the room in which most of his evenings were spent was on the balcony floor. The balconies had blossomed. They burst in a wreath of color round the grim quadrangle in festal imitation of the spring, when the newer beauties and the May buds were coming out; but before Jim South’s windows were only a few green shrubs, which died hard through the summer. He always admired his neighbors’ decorations, without noticing the deficiencies of his own; yet that garland round the old dark fronts often seemed to him like roses on a faded face; there lurked a sort of shame behind the sweetness; it was almost a trifling with age.

The square was a kind of back eddy to the Palace Road, and held a strained hum from the traffic round it. The silence, which raised the rents, had attracted South; he used more of it, he said, than most of those who paid them, farming it himself.

He meant that he was less often an absentee than those about him, but his phrase suggested an alternative of occupation which did not exist; for never was a man with less of harness on his back. He lived solely for his own amusement; cropping life’s greenness in a slow, easy, ruminant fashion, and on a modest income. A cousin was his nearest relative.

He had a fire this evening, though half May was past, and his book had dropped from his hand, when the man who was owner, factotum and, with his wife, comptroller to that small household of bachelors, announced:

“Miss Rosamond Merlin!”

It was a girl who entered; a girl with a woman’s buoyant movement and pose; a woman with a girl’s footfall. She wore a cloak which was somewhat oppressively magnificent, and held out a hand to South, laughing, as he rose.

“Surprised?”

“Delighted!” he said.

She sighed as she dropped into his seat.

“I don’t suppose you are.”

He pushed a chair to the further side of the fireplace, and watched, while she drew off slowly her long gloves, with the flicker of curiosity which was always lambent on his face. It was like a color there.

The girl bent down, and spread out her arms to the glow. She let them fall on the front of her skirt, pressing it back from the little pink and gold slippers on the grate stone.

“What a man you are for fires!” she said.

“I like warmth.”

“In coals,” was her retort.

She looked up at him sideways, smiling.

“Why don’t you ask to see my frock?”

“Because I want to,” he said.

Her eyes brimmed with unbelief.

“You know you don’t care tuppence,” she said; but she threw the cloak at last from her shoulders, and leaned back in the chair, drooping an admiring eye. She was on her way to the great costume ball of the season, and forced from South a hazard at her masquerade.

“Apple blossom?” he ventured, and was complimented.

“Ah, you should see it standing up; but you’re not worth that. Look there!”

She spread out the phantom of a fan, shaped and painted as a tuft of its tinted bloom.

“Veynes gave it me,” she said.

“Oh, did he?”

“Ye-es, he did. Are you sorry for Veynes?”

“I!—why?”

“Oh, do be sensible!—you’re not that much of a fool;—because I’ve got him, or he’s got me, whichever you like. Don’t you think it’s bad for him?”

“It might be worse,” South said.

“Thank you. It might, you know; ’specially with Veynes. Oh, I say, do you mind my coming here?”

“I can mind nothing else for days,” he laughed. “Why?”

“I thought your man looked a sort of piled-up disapproval when he let me in.”

“For us all?”

“Yes; and for himself.”

“For himself! Why?”

“Oh, he’s probably seen my face too often in shop windows to care to see it here. You’re all deadly respectable, aren’t you?”

“The whole square is; we’ve taken life policies in propriety. Money, art and titles, and all of it married.”

She gave a little wince at that, but asked if he would offer her some coffee. South was famous in a small way for making it, and his friends, when out of humor with the world, would come and watch the brown liquid bubble through the valves of some strange machine of copper and nacreous glass he had picked up in the East, and regain their “values” over a cup.

He pushed a hanging kettle across the flame, and knelt down by his visitor to stir the fire.

“Turkish?” he inquired.

“That’s the gritty stuff, isn’t it? No, the other; and black. Why is your hair so long?”

“Is it? I’ve forgotten it. What is this on your shoe?”

“The gold?”

“Yes.”

“Letters.”

“What?”

“R. E. V.”

“A monogram?”

“Yes.”

“Whose?”

“Nobody’s.”

She swept her train across her little feet and laughed at him.

“Are you learning to be inquisitive?” she inquired.

South did not say. He lifted the kettle from its crutch, and set the cafetiÈre in action.

Rosamond screwed her chair round to the table, and spread her arms upon it, resting her cheek on one of them to watch his proceedings.

“Why do you want to know?” she asked, presently.

The bubbles in the dim glass tubes ran to and fro half a minute before he replied.

“To know what?”

“About my slippers.”

“Oh, curiosity,” he shrugged.

She tilted her face further over on her white forearm, and her eyes came round to his.

“I thought you hadn’t any?” she said.

His “Only about trifles” was meant unkindly; but she refused to take offense.

“I suppose that’s a compliment to my number threes,” she smiled; “so I’d explain the letters on them if I could; but they came from Veynes with the fan, so I can only guess—perhaps they stand for the motto of his house.”

“Probably,” he assented, grimly. “Regina ex vulgo, or something of the sort. Are you going to adopt it?”

“To adopt what?”

“The motto of his house.”

She rose without replying, and walked to an antique mirror which covered a corner of the room. She faced it with a sigh of satisfaction, and then turned slowly round upon her toes till her shoulders were reflected. Her head was flung back out of the lamp light which yellowed her breast, and the gold of her coiled hair floated over her in the darkness like a misty moon.

She stood, poised doubtfully for some time, pinching her little waist downward with both hands.

“Do you think it shows too much?” she inquired, presently, without moving.

South looked up from the table.

“For what?” he said.

“For what do you mean?”

“For my taste, or for yours, or for Veynes’, or for modesty—or what?”

“For yours, if you like.”

“For mine, yes! I don’t mean that I see too much of you, but it’s so tremendously announced; it’s squeezed into one’s eye.”

“And for modesty?”

“Oh, modesty doesn’t depend on clothes, any more than purity did on fig leaves. Eve only began to sew when she had lost hers. Come and drink your coffee.”

She came, after some further observation, and sipped in silence from the cup he handed her. He had a dozen questions on his tongue, but could not or would not put them; the girl seemed too independent. He mentioned finally the current report that they were to see her in the new piece at the Variety.

“Well, you’re not,” she said. “It’s a dancing part, and I’m going to act when I go back to the boards.”

“Why?”

“Because I can.”

“That would seem to be as good a reason the other way.”

“You know,” she scoffed.

“I do; I saw you three times.”

“Three!—some men saw me thirty.”

“I dare say. I couldn’t afford it.”

“The price of a seat?”

“No, the solace of one; the one you’re in; it’s almost a housewife in its economies.”

“Economies?”

“Yes, economies of content. It guarantees that while I stay in its arms. I think I buy it cheap.”

“Content! I wouldn’t take it as a gift; it’s a despair with a trousseau, a sort of bridal and sanctified kind of funk. Oh, content’s a miserable thing.”

South laughed.

“Well,” he said, “it’s not often offered with a ring. Will you take another cup?”

She pushed hers toward him and asked if he had any brandy in the house.

South nodded at a liquor stand, but suggested crÈme de menthe.

“It’s not for me,” she explained, “but for my driver—he’s got an awful cough; I’ve been listening to it up here all the time. Could you send him a glass?”

South laid his hand on the bell.

“What driver?” he said.

“The man on my hansom; he’s been waiting for me.”

“Why do you keep him?”

“I don’t. Veynes does.”

“Is Veynes in the cab?”

“No, no, silly!—it’s Veynes’ hansom; he sent it round for me. The driver of Veynes’ hansom has a cough, you have some brandy, and I want you to send it down by your man to the driver, that his cough may be stayed. Now do you understand?”

“No, I do not,” he said; but he did as she desired.

“I suppose that is a fresh indiscretion,” she remarked, as the man retired.

“I suppose it is,” he replied, “but the freshness need not count for much among so many. Is Veynes coming here for you?”

“Mercy, no!” she laughed. “He wouldn’t quite understand it; it doesn’t occur to him that a girl who kicks her skirts about at so much a week can ever want anything of a man but flattery and new frocks. A good deal of dullness goes with a title, you know.”

“If by dullness you mean bewilderment, I might be a duke. Will you explain?”

“Why I’m here?”

“Oh, no, I understand that; you’ve tried to make me envy Tantalus before; but why you’ve forgotten your prudence and your promises—I used to believe in both—and what has become of your chaperon; and how deep Lord Veynes is in it.”

She left all but the last question unanswered, and said, looking from him toward the fire:

“He wants me to marry him.”

She missed the quick spring of his eyes to her face, but she met them the next moment.

“Am I to congratulate you?” he inquired.

“You might have said him,” she remarked; “however, it’s good of you not to jump—but you always could sit still. I know you’re saying something nasty inside of you; mayn’t I hear it?”

“I don’t think I am,” he replied. “I was wondering precisely where I came in?”

“You come in here,” she laughed, with halting mirth; “you’re the oracle; you roll out the future in a hollow voice; you say what you think.”

He shook his head.

“No, I forgot,” she ran on, “you never do; you say what you think some one else will think of what you wouldn’t say if you thought it; isn’t that it? You explained it to me once, but it wasn’t clear. Well, say that! Say something! You’ve known Veynes longer than I have; say he’s not good enough for me!”

“Oh, that’s understood,” he murmured.

“By Veynes?”

“By Veynes just at present, probably. I meant by you and me.”

“Oh, you!” she flouted. “You mightn’t think yourself good enough.”

It was a curious challenge for a man’s matrimonial amen. The woman thirsting for love and eager to drink it; the man thirsty and afraid. She did not see the sudden change in his eyes, as though a flame went through them. She was looking the other way. But she heard the parry of his low “I should not” to her thrust. It pierced like the white pinch of frost, it ran cold even into her voice.

“Ah, you’re too modest,” she rallied, so briskly that he did not notice the shiver in her throat. “Besides, you’re rather cowed by my frock; but how about the family?”

“Veynes’?”

“Yes.”

“There’s only Lord Egham.”

“Only Lord Egham! No sisters, mothers, aunts—nothing? Oh, come, that’s better. And what is he like?”

“He’s a dear old gentleman who dotes on his son.”

“Then he’d take me badly?”

“I fancy so.”

“Why?”

“Ah, that’s a big question. Perhaps his education was defective.”

“I dare say. He’s an earl, isn’t he?”

“Yes, the Earl of Egham, sits as Viscount Alderly.”

“I see; and some day I might be a countess?”

“You might.”

“That’s a bribe; I like the word awfully; it sounds good; it’s like a stare to say it—the countess!—but I fancy it would be rather dreadful being one—that is, if you weren’t born to it—in the cast all along, don’t you know. Of course, then you could do what you liked; but if you’d only been made one, and made from a dancing girl, you’d have to be proper, just to show how easy it came! And I think it would be dull,” she drawled. “What do you say?”

“Nothing,” he affirmed.

“Not even to save poor Veynes from his fate? You could save him.”

He looked slowly across at her face, which lay back idly under the yellow light, and she held her eyes squarely to his, as a maid holds a mirror to her mistress. He might search them for reflections, but he would see nothing more. In point of fact, he looked for some time without troubling their surface.

“Marry him,” he said.

“And the earl?”

“Oh, you must treat him kindly, and show him what an excellent countess you can make.”

“Shall I?”

“I fancy not. You’re too human, you see; this warm, kind world is too near your heart. The great lady has nothing there but her corset; and the world—her little cold world—at her fingers’ ends, in a descending scale of chilliness. Besides, you’re too pretty.”

“To be a countess?”

“No, to be made one. You can’t melt beauty for new molds without breaking the old, you know; something goes.”

“And yet you say—marry him.”

“Well, I won’t say it,” he replied.

She had turned her head away, and was stretching over her shoulders for her wrap.

“I’m going,” she said.

He rose to put it round her, and caught the reflection in the glass of her averted eyes. They were shining with tears.

She held out her hand, shook his shortly, and went toward the door.

“You needn’t come down,” she said, as he followed her.

“No, but I will.”

“No, you won’t; I don’t want you.”

There was something more imperative in her decree than its tone—a sob; that stopped him at the open door.

The sound of her feet ceased from the stair, the front door slammed, and he walked across to the window, waiting there till the noisy motion of her hansom ebbed into the dull roar of the streets.

He stayed even longer, and the May sky had lost its last memory of the day ere he sat down again before his dying fire.

The girl’s gay audacity seemed to linger like an odor in the room; made pungent, as it were, by that sob. He had not noticed it before. Conscious audacity it was not; for she wore her beauty as a sort of decoration, the star of some regal order, which sanctioned the fine animal magnificence with which she had set the obligations of nobility behind those of good looks, and doubted if the charmed circle of coronets might not prove too dull for her endurance; putting, without a tinge of affectation, nature’s creations before those of dead kings.

But it was not of her vivid exuberance that South was thinking; he had inhaled that before, and the intoxication of it was dissolved. But those sly touches of humility, too faint to be felt through the written record of her words, dropped lids, and looks, and pauses, so unlike her, pressed still as a hand upon his lifted arm. Yet he told himself he had understood them, without the compulsion of her tears.

At least he understood this: that she had thrown the weight of her beauty without avail against the ease and freedom of his unwedded days. Yet it left him with a pricking sense—not of repentance—but that repentance might confront, might even confound, him.

II.

Some five months earlier in the year Lord Veynes had returned from a voyage round the world.

It was to have completed his education, which included, besides some Greek grammar, the use of a cue, a little Cavendish and the racing calendar. He was five-and-twenty, a gentleman; dressed well, looked well and lived well; on the whole, a nice fellow, deeply attached to his father and devotedly to himself.

The former was becoming an old man, having married late in life; was short, had a stoop, a halo of whitened hair, and a face that was a mask of merriment. His kindliness and humor were bywords, and his stories always made a widening silence in a room, to which fresh listeners drifted. He would laugh at them himself, yet his laughter seemed their best part, their sincerest compliment; it was like humor itself holding its sides.

He had filled every county dignity in turn, but they made no mark on him nor he on them; he bore them dutifully, but he was glad to be rid of them; they added something to his tales, to the fullness of his humor, to the softness of his heart; perhaps to public knowledge of his incompetence. Yet he was liked none the less for his failures; his blunt honesty thrust out of them obtrusively, as an elbow through a ragged sleeve.

Veynes was the one relic of his married life, having cost his mother her life; and he was adored as things may be that are made so ruinously unique. He was a good boy, and stood a great deal of spoiling; but he had argued, naturally, his own adorableness from so much adoration, and would have honored his father’s encomiums to any amount.

His home-coming had all the decoration of triumphal entries—flags, festival arches and singing children; afterward a tenant dinner, tenant humor and considerable drowsiness.

When it was all over, and the two men sat together by the log fire in the hall, which burned red splashes on the armored walls, the earl opened the subject nearest his heart—an heir.

“I want to see him here before I’m gone,” he concluded, with a kind of ruefulness which was a part of his pathos and of his humor; “and, by George, my boy, if you don’t marry soon, I will.”

“Oh, I’ll marry, I’ll marry,” laughed the other, “but you must find me the girl.”

Love, however, did that, though the earl was assiduous, surrounding the young man for the betterment of his choice with half the eligible petticoats in the county; a mistake, seeing that iteration and propinquity in affairs of the heart are of more assistance than variety.

Yet it was, in the end, variety which succeeded, in the person of Miss Rosamond Merlin.

She had come to lend terpsichorean relief to an amateur performance of burlesque in the neighborhood, and her appearance transformed Veynes, in a single night, from a conscientious brigand to a distracted and distracting piece of stage furniture; though it is but fair to add he was not the only one affected; for none of his brother bandits were, when slain—while Miss Rosamond was upon the stage—as stiff as their previous rigidity had led one to expect.

Miss Merlin attended but three rehearsals; yet ere the night of the performance, Veynes had decided, as he put it, that they were made for one another—a phrase which has not, in a man’s mouth, all the reciprocity that it conveys. He offered the idea to Miss Rosamond while applying some powder to her cheek.

She laughed, knocked the puff out of his hand, and ran on to the stage; but she found him awaiting her exit, deaf to cues and stage directions, in a kind of tragic calm.

“I mean it,” he protested.

She widened her eyes.

“Well, mean it a little later,” she said.

He took the hint and waited till, having found her some food, they were sitting in the deserted supper room, in an atmosphere of exhausted hilarity, among the ruins of the waiters.

“Have you thought it over?” he asked, impressively.

“I, no!—do I ever think anything over but a new step? Besides, such a simple little thing!”

“Simple!” he stammered.

“To say no to. Do you think I’d have the cheek to marry you?”

“Wouldn’t you?” dropped the young man, feebly.

He was innocent of having conceived, still less suggested, so tremendous a contingency; indeed, her contemplation of it, even in dismissal, appeared unseemly. For he had been strictly brought up, and had added, “Thou shalt not wed the name of Veynes in vain,” to a decalogue somewhat abridged, and, as his, father put it, “edited by Debrett.”

But neither his decalogue nor his delicacy prevented him from sketching airily the insignificance of wedding symbols in an aristocratic connection when the heart was involved.

“People talk such nonsense, you know,” he said.

She smiled with engaging innocence, and he edged a little nearer to his meaning, hoping she would meet him halfway.

It was like laying a wash of color beside another which might be wet; he was horribly afraid of a smear; he thought she might have assured him, figuratively, that she would not run. But she only helped herself to another meringue.

He made pauses and filled the silence with his eyes; but she met them with a pensive examination through the prongs of her fork; and the smiles he fancied ambiguous seemed, reflected on her mouth, to be merely inane; so he was driven back upon words and impersonal allusiveness. He groaned, in explanation, over the austerity which would tie all love knots to a wedding ring; suggesting that some people were able to conceive of them apart.

“Couldn’t you?” he inquired.

She gleamed with malicious coquetry.

“Couldn’t and wouldn’t,” she said, decisively. “Love and marry and trust to luck, that’s my sentiment; but don’t marry if you can’t love; and don’t love if you can’t marry; and don’t do either——”

“Well?”

“If you think you’re going to do both.”

“Poof!” he pouted.

“Oh, no, it’s not; it’s the very sober fact. Love’s a fever, you know, and no better than most of them—contagious and malagious and infectious and—and——”

“Go on!”

“But that’s the truth; it’s carried in frocks, pretty ones; and it’s caught by touching, and it’s regular poison to breathe! Then it must be in the air, because people take it in clumps, perfect epidemics; and the best way to catch it is to let yourself get low and dumpy. When you’ve got it, the only thing to cure you is marriage—and it does generally—a ring dissolved in syrup night and morning; kind of quinine, you know; takes away the shivering and gives you a headache.”

His face was whitening with disapproval, and she burst, as she caught a glimpse of it, into a gust of laughter.

“Shocking, isn’t it?”

“Well, it’s a matter of taste,” he remarked, with a further twist of his nose, to indicate that its flavor, at least in his mouth, was nasty. It is never the hangman can joke when he is hung.

She looked at him, with her head tilted over her plate, and a slow, broad smile.

“You’ll do!” she said. “But you know even your eight pearls won’t run to quite all that—every time.”

He moved impatiently on his chair as she raised her champagne glass and peered mockingly at him across its yellow brim.

She set it down with a laugh.

“My!” she exclaimed; “what a row they are making upstairs! Come along, I believe they are dancing.”

She went up three steps at a time, but Veynes followed more slowly. He feared he was sickening for the fever.

III.

The woman’s orbit—in a civil state—is, like that of other celestial bodies, either annular or elliptic.

Those of the circle are orderly satellites, turning an eternal sameness to the attraction they patrol, and as incapable of suiting themselves to a suitor, or of varying their reflection of his passion to a man’s requirements, as of coyness with its quoted sunlight is the cold face of the moon.

And the moons are many. They rise, wax, wane; are new, old and eclipsed; pass by progressive phases of the familiar to the lean crescent of contempt, with a constancy in decrepitude—speaking amorously—which cannot only be followed, but—foretold.

And those of the ellipse? They, too, revolve, but come, enkindled, from the unknown night, torn with fantastic splendors toward their sun—drawn into him, it may be, by his spell, or past him with unsolved desires, yet bent to him still—dying out, darkened, into the empty way, spent, speedless, splendorless; a danger to orderly patrollers of an orbit, and a possible acquisition for any new system of superior attractions; being, at their ebb, but weak and idle wanderers—inconstant, easily attached; though at other times superb, imperious; yet malign portents to the thatched propriety that lives in fear of sparks.

Such divide the sex, the passive and the passionate; the reflectors and the inflamed. Men love the second, but they wed the first—moon, not comet, and they do well. For men prefer comfort to coronation, and like the easy sense of lordship which a satellite confers; for there is something soothing to mortal vanity in centripetal rigors when oneself is the center sought; and, though men disparage the sameness which they wive, they would be but ill content with its reverse.

Veynes knew as much; or, rather, knew that as much was known. He had, morever, warning in the fate of a too recent ancestor, who, allying himself to one of the comet kind—the frame of her picture still hung empty, in evicted memorial, at the court—came to unrecounted grief. So, fearing his desires, and the failure of his desires, and the outcome of either, he told himself, shaking his head with that unvalorous and how-to-perform-I-wot-not wisdom of youth, that his refined perceptions had been estranged by Miss Rosamond’s too candid lack of quality. Which may have been; for our refined perceptions are so often only an injected opiate, in spite of which our heart still beats and sickens. Yet he shook his head sadly. He had his father to consider; he had the estate to consider; he had his name to consider; but, firstly and finally, he had himself. And, alas! it takes more than honor, piety and pride together to make a man forget that. And a young man in especial. For we are very practical when young, and only fight the good fight for a substantial share in the plunder; we ask what a man will get in exchange for his soul.

Veynes fought it, there is that to his credit; and it is pleasant to remember that, of all his obligations, duty to his father died the hardest; sheer tenderness for the old man’s hopes often wringing from him a resolve to conquer passion and wed a pedigree. But the resolutions of the young are, happily, impermanent; and this kind beyond the rest, being written in acid, eats its way out—through the stuff of our wills.

So it was that, in spite of this clamoring chorus of expediencies, the small voice which claims in every man the justice of joy made itself heeded, and Miss Merlin received an offer of marriage; which, stung by South’s indifference, she allowed herself to accept.

After that, of course, the deluge!—and, thinking to float it out the better on a certificate of marriage, Veynes took Miss Rosamond to the registrar.

Then, with Lady Veynes in her prettiest frock, they went down together to the court, and crossing, with a sense of diplomacy, from the station by a field path into the French garden, which lay behind the western wing of the house, Veynes left his wife and advanced alone.

He was some time gone, and the lady, tired at last of the flowers, the reflector, and the mossy sundial, and tempted by the cropped turf, turned to her ancient consolation for leisures that were too long; so that the first thing which met Veynes’ eye on his return was her lithe figure, in fawn and gold, doing a little melancholy dance between the scarlet flower beds.

The sight did not sweeten his temper; it emphasized too loudly reproaches which hummed still against his ears. Even those red blossoms, which had lived in their mute livery so many years about the court, might have been too surprised to recognize, by the swift, small feet that brushed their petals, a future mistress.

As Veynes drew near, the dance became a little more flamboyant, still further ruffling him; the spaces of dainty petticoat seemed to enlarge his grievance.

“Well?” she inquired, loftily, as he approached, dropping into an attitude.

“Well,” he echoed, gruffly, “you needn’t fool about for the benefit of the gardeners. He won’t see you.”

His tone sided with the rebuff, and brought a flush of color to her face. She had been his wife only a night and a day.

“All right,” she replied, simply. “I will see him; and meanwhile the gardeners are very welcome.”

He flung himself into a seat. “Just as you please,” he grunted; “only he doesn’t know you’re here.”

She took no heed to the hint, but walked in her deliberate fashion to the edge of the lawn; then she turned and came back more slowly.

“What did you tell him?” she asked her husband.

His arms were stretched along the top of the seat, and he was staring gloomily at the house. He did not look up.

“I told him I was married. He nearly bucked out of his chair, and looked as frightened as if he’d heard I was dead. So I said: ‘To an actress,’ and he put his face into his hands and cried.”

“What a soft!”

“Oh, anything you please! He said some other things that were a bit harder.”

“About me?”

“About the whole sickening concern. Said I might go to the deuce my own way, but it shouldn’t be through the Court; and that while he lived—which wouldn’t be for long—the old place should know only its own sort of people.”

“What sort is that?”

“People of birth and breeding, I suppose.”

“I see! Like Lord Egglesham, for instance, who shared the honeymoon with his fond parents; or Aubrey Beauthair, who gets fuzzy before ladies. Well, I’m going to show your father what a person is like who has been neither born nor bred; I dare say it will interest him. Shall I say that you’ll dine here?”

“Say what you like,” he growled.

She turned again toward the long west wing of the great house, which glowed above the box hedges, warm and red with sunlight above its clinging roses.

Her heart was not so brave as her words, but it carried her past the powdered footman with the air of a duchess, as she gave her name, though she read doubts in his curdling face as to her reception, and shared them herself. But therein she wronged a man too proud to let any woman suffer a slight in his own house; and in due time the heavily curtained library door was opened, and the earl entered and bowed.

“I am Lady Veynes,” said his visitor, quietly. She felt a sudden kindness and pity for the frail, bent old man, who was still as white as his son had reported.

He bowed again.

“I was waiting in the garden when my hus—your son was in here,” she went on, simply; “he came out and told me all about it. I’m very sorry. I mean I’m very sorry it is so bad for you. Your son said you’d wish him better dead. I hope you won’t. He’s an awfully good son; he thinks no end of you; and he’s outside now tremendously cut up.”

Lord Egham made no sign, but he was looking in the woman’s face.

“I’ve never thought about it,” she continued, naÏvely, “but I didn’t suppose there was such a difference between people as—as there seems to be. I thought if a man’s wife was pure and true to him, and loved him, he got all his change—I mean all he stood to; isn’t that it? You don’t think so, but I didn’t know that. I didn’t know anything about you, you see,” she explained, with warming sympathy; “you were only the Earl of Something, and it didn’t seem to matter much what an earl felt; he didn’t seem quite human; it really didn’t seem as if he could feel so very much. But you see you do.”

The earl bent his head gravely, but there was the ghost of a smile about his drawn lips.

“Sir,” she said, with a little gesture which opened her arms and seemed pathetically to expose herself, “I am sorry to be here to trouble you; I didn’t come for that. I suppose you think I was very glad to catch your son, and his title, and money, and things; but I wasn’t. I didn’t want them; I don’t know what you do with them; but I wanted to belong somewhere. I’m all by myself, you see,” with a little isolating wave of her hand, “and that’s dreary enough at times, especially for a woman.”

She waited a moment to allow the earl to fill the gap, but he did not. He was watching her intently.

“I came down here with my husband,” she continued at length, with an air of embroidering the interval; “he didn’t want me to come in to—to bother you, but I felt I must. I don’t want you to fall out with him; you haven’t had him back so long, I know; it seems pretty rough on you every way; but if you can’t take us both on, I’ll go. Of course I can’t go for good, but it’ll seem good enough, I dare say; I can keep out of the way, and you can have him to yourself; and you won’t have to apologize to all your friends for his making a fool of himself.”

There was some gentle irony in her voice, and it wavered as she concluded:

“I’ve been pretty lonely before, but it was never anything like this; and if I’d known how bad you’d take me I’d have stayed so.”

Her nervousness and her desire for simple expression soaked her speech in a kind of sweetened slanginess, from which, usually, she was able to wring out her thoughts into very clean English. Slang was, in fact, the charcoal outline of most of her talk, but it was generally concealed by the color. The latter she supplied on this occasion in person. She was a very pretty woman, and seemed able to look her prettiest at will; the need for beauty painting it freshly on her face. She had the dancer’s trick, too, of seeming to float above her anchored feet, like a butterfly with folded wings.

There were tears in her eyes, which aided the apparent sincerity in her tone, though, indeed, she was sufficiently sorry for the silent man before her to make it a very solid counterfeit of the fact; but the tears were come of disappointment and hurt pride.

However, to a man, the tear in a woman’s eye is always a tear, a salt tear; and in such eyes they looked well enough, and ill enough, to warm a colder heart than was in Lord Veynes’ father; for age is tenderer to beauty than youth, being a wayfarer among flowers which the other wears; besides, it sees at sundown, and lips seem redder and eyelids sadder when they face the sunset.

Lord Egham made a step forward, and offered her a seat. And Rosamond murmured to herself: “I’ve come to stay!”

IV.

But she had not; at least not so speedily as she supposed. She returned that evening to town with her husband, and crossed the Channel the following day for a honeymoon, which was rather endured than desired. But the earl proved, in the end, gentleman and philosopher enough—synonyms for gracious acceptance of the inevitable—to make his bow to necessity, and take fate and the prettiest lady in London on his arm.

South had heard from her twice, from Venice and Corfu; long, trivial, ill-spelt letters, lined with a secret wistfulness he had not perceived, under the brave talk of travel.

He received the second while away from town, and only learned, on his arrival in the end of October, that Lady Veynes and her husband had called some weeks earlier, and had inquired the date of his return.

He was puzzled by their presence at that time in London, and a telegram which came from the Court a few days later did not aid his enlightenment. It ran: “Please be at home this evening.—R.E.V.” He had indulged in the unusual extravagance of a box at the Variety for the amusement of some country friends who were doing London in the dull season, and was most anxious to entertain them; yet he provided a substitute and an excuse without a murmur, and dined early by himself. Then, the day having been close and warm, he pushed his chair beside the roasted greenness on the balcony and sat looking down idly, in the early evening, from behind the thick stone balusters upon the square.

The sky was clear above the mulled October mist, and a few pale stars had appeared already, weak and white as city children; there was a reek of heated brick, and an odor of brown leaves drifted from the park with the damp smell of its autumn water.

The roar of traffic had died down; it was always quieter there in the fall, and a piano-organ in the Palace Road seemed to play in an exhausted air. A clatter of wheels crushed through its tune as a hansom shot round the narrow entry and rattled across the quad.

The panels clanged, and South could hear the click of small-heeled shoes upon the pavement. The pause which might cover a payment, the long wheep of the whip, the sudden clash of hoofs, the thin clang of the bell below—all seemed borne up to him with abnormal clearness.

He sat where he was till the door opened and Lady Veynes was announced; then he rose, outlined in the open window against the sky, and called, as his landlord retired, for the lamps. Rosamond walked across to the balcony and stood beside him, gazing absently into the square; then she turned her head quickly and looked up into his eyes. There was an urgent smile in hers which was almost an appeal, but his in return seemed to satisfy it, for she stole out her hand and caught his arm lightly above the elbow.

“What does it mean?” he inquired.

She looked over his shoulder as the man entered and placed a lamp on the table; and when he had retired she stepped across the room and snapped it out.

“I don’t know why you called for it,” she said. “Was it to tint the proprieties?”

“I suppose so,” he replied, regarding her, “but I’m afraid it won’t.”

“No, it won’t. I’m going to sit in your seat here by the window; pull another beside it.”

He did as he was told, and she laid her arms limply along those of the chair, leaned back and sighed.

“Don’t you know why I’m here?” she asked.

“No,” he said.

“I’m going away.”

“From what?”

“From the Court, and my husband, and his excellent father, and everything! I’m sick of it all.”

“Why?”

“Can’t you guess? Because I’m not one of them. I’m a kind of curiosity in the house; people come to stare at me, they do, really; possibly they think I’ll kick their hats off at afternoon tea, or pass them the bread and butter on my toe; I don’t know. But I don’t mind that so much, it’s the feeling that I mustn’t do these things because I can. If I was a real lady I might do anything; but because I’m not I must do nothing. Smile, sigh and say good-by; and be a pretty piece of furniture to decorate the rooms and support my husband. But I won’t. I wasn’t made on castors.”

“Well?” he smiled.

“Well, I’m going to run—on wheels!”

“Are they unkind to you?”

“No, they’re not; they’re kind, rather too kind. I mean they make you feel it’s a moral obligation to treat such an outsider humanely. Of course they can’t help it, and it’s nasty of me to mention it, but I can’t help feeling it, either, and it makes me mad. Everything does down there, from morning prayers, with half a squadron of bluey-white servants on red chairs, to the candles at ten o’clock, and to bed with what appetite you mayn’t. And I’ve got to do it! If I suggest anything fresh and sensible they look at me as if I were a sort of missing link. So I shut up and scream inside me and wish for something to bite. Put your hand here.”

He smiled at the sudden change, but laid his hand on the arm of her seat, and she closed her gloved fingers over it.

“Do you want it to bite?” he asked.

“No. Jim!”

“Well?”

“Do you think me a fool?”

“No; I understand.”

There was a breadth in his tone which comforted her.

“You said: Marry him,” she pleaded.

“Yes, I did; perhaps I was the fool; but I didn’t say ‘for three months.’”

“Three? Six!”

“Never!”

“Five, then; I ought to know.”

A certain sharpness in her registry seemed to give it claims to be considered calendar. South looked up at her quickly, and she flushed scarlet.

“Well, five,” he said; “hardly time for a very exhaustive study of the married state.”

“Oh, it’s not the married state,” she explained, slowly, looking out over the square. “I shouldn’t mind being married—married to a man. I’m married to a house.”

“It’s a very good house.”

“I dare say it is; but I’m not a snail, and can’t stand having it on my back;’ I wasn’t born under family bricks.”

“And what are you going to do?”

“I’m going to leave them.”

“And why did you come here?”

She turned her head and flashed a shy glance across his eyes.

“I thought you might be leaving, too.”

She looked away as she said it, and he did not immediately reply. Presently she loosened her fingers from his, and laid her hand in her lap. She broke the silence sharply.

“I don’t understand you,” she said; “why do you suppose I’ve come here, ever? Do you fancy it’s for the pleasure of a little talk? Why, I’ve gone home sometimes clinching my hands to keep from crying, and hating you fit to kill you.”

South sighed.

“Have you?” he said.

“Yes, I have! It’s horrid of me, I know, because you’ve tried to be kind, mostly; but being kind is worse than anything, sometimes.”

She turned toward him, and through the shadow upon her face her eyes glowed molten, as lead grows red in the ladle.

“Well,” he said, “you may forgive me; I haven’t tried to be kind. I thought all the kindness on the other side. Your very coming was a concession.”

“To what?”

“To a man unknown and immaterial; to the genius of futility.”

“Genius of fiddlesticks! Why did you suppose I came?”

South swung his head in pendulous ignorance.

“Oh, you needn’t mind my blushes, it’s too dark to see them. And when I startled you with Veynes’ proposal, and bored you to admire my figure, and my frock, and everything he might be master of, was that a concession?”

“To my stupidity?” he parried.

“No; the genius for futility—a woman’s!” she said, with drawn bitterness. “All the same, if you guessed?”

“Oh, guessing!” he shrugged.

“No! You’re no such fool. Are you?”

She leaned somewhat away from him with a suggestion of disdain.

“No,” he replied, slowly, rising, “I did not guess; I knew.”

She heard him pacing in the dusky room behind her, and stop at last before the fireplace. He laid one hand over the other and pressed them with his forehead against the mantelpiece.

Cries, shrill and hoarse, drifted in with the darkness from the Palace Road; the evening’s pennyworth of print in shouted headlines, the details draining incoherently into the night.

“Won’t you say you’re sorry?” she inquired, presently.

“For you?”

“No, for yourself. Mightn’t we both have done better?”

“I’ve done nothing,” he murmured, between his arms.

“It’s not a fine confession,” she laughed, curtly; “but you chose.”

“Between what?”

“Between these arms and mine,” she said, slowly, tapping the chair; “between horsehair and flesh and blood. And you chose the horsehair.”

“It’s permanent,” he retorted, somewhat piqued, “and it hasn’t a pulse.”

“Oh, no,” she sighed, “it’s a ‘dead-sure thing’—dead and sure, they’re about the same; you can’t reckon up things that live; and, as for a pulse, it beats faster for other things than fever, you know, and it’s not only the doctor who feels it.”

“Feels it flag?” he queried.

“Oh, bother you!” she exclaimed. “If all men were such chickens, who’d ever marry?”

“The women,” he suggested.

“No, I think they’d be too wise,” she said.

He laughed, an echo of hers; there was not much mirth between them.

“That last day I came here,” she continued, presently, with a musing air, “you might have said more than you did.”

“More?”

“Yes, more for me; something to pretend you couldn’t see me; I felt stripped.”

He smiled at the fire-dogs, remembering her dress.

“I didn’t know it,” he said.

“No, a man never does. Some men, you know, lie to a woman to be rid of her, lie about their love and about their life; say it’s heartbreaking, but impossible; one forgives that—it’s craven but it’s kind; but one can’t forgive the men who lie by saying nothing, merely to be rid of her the sooner, when she might go comforted, and only a little slower, by just one whisper of the love they have.”

“You don’t understand,” he said.

“Oh, no,” she sighed, “we never do, we women. We pray not to sometimes; pray to be kept blind, dull, doting.” She laughed abruptly. “Well, I wish you’d said you loved me then, Jim; even though I might have hugged you. Couldn’t you say it now?”

“It’s not lawful.”

“Oh, no,” she sighed again, but reminiscently, “it’s not lawful; but it would be kinder and better than many things that are. Besides, you might rise in my esteem.”

“Thanks,” he said, smiling, pushing himself erect. “I think I’ll stay as I am. I’m high enough now to feel dizzy sometimes when you commend me. The question is, where are you going to stay?”

“To-night at the Grand; my things are there. To-morrow I shall be across the Channel.”

She swung her chair round toward the room.

“Am I going alone?”

“No,” he said, decidedly. “I want you to wait a day.”

“With you?”

“No, but for me. I’m going down to the Court.”

“To give me away?”

He had been staring at the dark mirror. He turned his face slowly toward her with a smile.

“I suppose I need not deny that,” he said. “I shall not give you away, even for your good; you know that.”

“Then for what are you going?”

“You’re making a mistake,” he said, ignoring her question. “If you must leave your husband, you should go by the front door; it’s a higher class of exit, pleasanter, more modern, and more effective; besides, it prevents the good man running after you with a posse of detectives.”

“Do you think he’ll do that?” she groaned.

“Doubtless; perhaps offer a reward. Now, to avoid that and live secure, you’ll grant me a day’s grace, won’t you—and wait?”

“I shall be trusting you,” she said.

“And now you’d better go. I have to catch the nine-fifteen, isn’t it? And I’m very certain you’ve had no dinner.”

“Besides, appearances!” she mocked.

“Yes; or non-appearances, as at present,” he replied, unruffled. “If you’ll wait I’ll call a hansom.”

But she said she would go down with him; and after a glance at her frock, a traveling one, before the mirror, opened the door as he relit the lamp. He followed her along the dusk of the passage to show her the way, but she stopped abruptly on the edge of the stairs, throwing back her head so that it nearly struck him.

“Kiss me,” she whispered.

“No,” he said, quietly; “you’re not mine to kiss.”

She bent her right arm back with a quick movement behind his head, and drew his lips down to her face.

“Ah! if it were only a question of possession,” she sighed, as she pressed them to her own.

She turned on the stairs and looked back at him.

“You don’t resent it?” she inquired.

“Why should I?”

“Oh, because you’re not mine to kiss, I suppose.”

“Ah! that’s your affair,” he smiled.

At the hall door she suggested that, being bound for Waterloo, he might accompany her.

“I’m afraid of you,” he said.

“You needn’t be,” she murmured. “I’m done.”

In the end she waited while he packed a bag, and they drove together under the withered planes through the park to her hotel. But she declined to alight.

“You promised to be good,” he reminded her.

“I’m good—good as gold—I wouldn’t touch you for the world, but I’m going to see you off. Jim, do let me! I’ll come straight back and eat no end of dinner; I will, really! But I must say good-by to you there!”

“Why?”

“Oh, you wouldn’t understand; it’s a presentiment.”

“Presentiments are all stuff.”

“Yes, I know; so are women; but one has them both in—hansoms. Jim!”

“All right; but only to the station, not inside!”

She assented, and they parted, finally, with a feminine complexity of farewell, under the glass-roofed entry; South arriving on the platform to discover that the nine-fifteen had been advanced ten minutes since the first of the month, and that, thanks to Rosamond’s presentiments, he had lost the last train to Veyne St. Mary’s by a few seconds.

V.

Vexed as he was with the woman who had barred the way, he was almost minded, driving back, to acquaint her with his failure.

The inclination was perverse and not in his sanest manner; but her presence had overpowered him that night as an inhaled narcotic; something diffusive in her strong, warm beauty, filling his room, had numbed him as he breathed it.

But his senses came again in the night air, and he kept on, after crossing the river, by the abbey, and his homeward way.

He had left his key behind him, and learned, on entering, that a gentleman awaited him above.

“Who?” he inquired, and was told Lord Veynes.

“Said as ’e couldn’t afford to miss you, sir; so ’e’d wait, and take ’is chance.”

South always faced trouble, but he went more slowly upstairs. The door of his room was ajar, the lamp had been relit upon the table, and soused in its shaded dome of light was the figure of a man, stretched along the big chair before the fire. Veynes did not respond to his host’s hail of welcome; his eyes were staring into the shadowy mirror; and his face reflected there was like a ghostlight on the glass.

Knowing something of his visitor’s moods, South took no notice of his silence, but, drawing a chair beside him, brought his hand down on the other’s fingers with an exclamation of abusive kindliness.

One speaks of words frozen on the lips, but those seemed frozen in the air, ringing with an awful icy vibration in the silent room, as South started back, dumb with horror, for the hand upon which his had fallen was damp with the grip of death.

Of the days which followed, South could never give a complete account. A stranger to sorrow, almost, indeed, to every ruinous emotion, the scenes he witnessed seemed to alter the spacing of the hours so that no two were of a length.

The noise and crush of daily life were suddenly muted, as though death had closed a door and shut them out; and within, behind the bolted silence of despair, were tears, sad talk, mourning darkness, and the melancholy business of the dead, haunted, as with pale marsh lights, by the pitiful inquisition in the dead eyes which he had closed.

His consolation, in that dreary time, was that he bore half the burden of its grief.

The earl knew nothing of his son’s death but what the doctors could tell him, for Lady Veynes, with a curious, but to her a natural, discretion had kept the motive of her movements a secret even from her maid.

So the two chief agents in the tragedy carried the weight of it between them, and alone heard the inquest verdict of “an overstrained heart,” with the desolate knowledge of all it meant—South with dry eyes, so dry that their color seemed faded, and hers so wet that they seemed mixed with their tears.

He had feared once, only once, that she would forget the righteous necessities of her secret, and admit another, with cruel penitence, to its miserable pale.

It was on her first entry to the room where the body was lying, the earl sitting by it, his face almost as gray and sharp as that of the dead. One of his hands was on his son’s, the other crept presently to Rosamond’s golden hair. She had dropped on her knees beside the bed, her eyes buried in the coverlet, her arms flung out across it, moaning an inarticulate torrent of useless tenderness, and penitence, and despair. Her head was shaken by its sorrow like a yellow leaf, but the old man’s grief ran silently, as a stream that dries upon its stones.

That was the one occasion when South had distrusted the charity and shrewdness of her discretion; after that his doubts were at rest. She was everything a woman could be who would not sink her duties in sorrow, and South often wondered what the earl would have done without her.

He had beside ample reason for surprise. Her delicate little performance as a woman of affairs for the benefit of the lawyers, her equally fine and far more difficult personation before the family as lady paramount, were revelations of an ability he had been indisposed to admit.

He called it mummery to himself, but there was a dreary earnestness and effort in it which gave his slight the lie. He would not see the whiteness of her face, or the sorrow in her clouded eyes; and for a curious reason, because her grief left him, and it seemed with deliberate intention, in the cold.

She bore it with a certain stiffness of control as a burden she was too proud to share, yet which bent her into measured steps.

But South, who felt himself almost an accessory to her fate, could better have endured complaint; he would sooner have been hated, so he told himself.

So, since that memorable morning when she had flung a crumb of toast across the table at the gravity on his face, gray as it was with its news, and, afterward, in anguish and self-contempt, laid her sobbing head among the breakfast things, South had doubted everything about her but her charm.

Yet her sorrow proved, as he was finally to discover, exceedingly sincere; it outlasted even his demands upon it; but it lived, as all her clouds, in a windy sky; and broke, and blew over.

Ere that, however, or the lightening of her widow’s crape, a fresh link was welded from her life, which gave the sad earl a joy in his old age, and a despot to Veynes Court.

South used to run down, sometimes, on the summer evenings, to watch Lady Veynes, the earl and his grandson playing like three children in the dappled sunlight on the lawn.

Or, at least, if there were other reasons for his appearance, he was not on thinking terms with them.

Lady Veynes was. She thought, moreover, that his visits were far too few.