BOOK_I

BOOK_II

BOOK_III

BOOK_IV

A Selection from the Catalogue of G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS

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GREAT POSSESSIONS

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eautiful, and I'll be hanged, too, if I'll talk to her any more."

But, alack for Molly, he did talk to her on almost every occasion on which they met. It was from no conscious lack of royalty to Rose; it was largely because he was so full of her and her affairs that he would in an assembly of indifferent people drift towards one who was in any way connected with those affairs. Then one word or two, the merest "how d'ye do?" seemed to develop instantly into talk, and shortly the talk turned to intimate things. And for him Molly was always at her best. Many people did not like her, yet admired her, and admitted her into their houses half unwillingly. Her speech was not often kindly, and there was an element of defiance even in her quietness, for her unmistakable social ease was distinctly negative. Molly was rich and dressed well, and Mrs. Delaport Green was a very clever woman, whose blunders were rare and whose pet vice was not unfashionable. There was nothing in this life to soften and ripen the best side of Molly. But Edmund drew out whatever she had in her that was gentle and kindly.

It does not need the experience of many London seasons in order to realise that it is a condition of things in which many of the faculties of our nature are suspended. It is not as a Puritan moralist might put it, that the atmosphere of a whirlpool of carnal vice chokes higher things, for the amusements may be perfectly innocent. Only for a time the people who are engaged in them don't happen to think, or to pity, or to pray, or to condemn, or often, I believe, to love, though it may seem absurd to say so. It may, therefore, be called a rest cure for aspirations and higher ambitions and anxieties and all the nobler discontents. To Molly it was youth and fun and brightness and forgetfulness. There was no leisure to be morbid, no occasion to be bitter or combative. The game of life was too bright and smooth, above all too incessant not to suffice.

Mrs. Delaport Green might be outside the circle in which Lady Groombridge disported herself with more dignity than gaiety, but she had the entrÉe to some houses almost as good, if not as exclusive, and she had also a large number of acquaintances who entertained systematically and extravagantly. That the Delaport Greens were very rich, or lived as if they were very rich, had from the first surprised the "paying guest." Lately it had become evident to her that if Adela had not been addicted to cards, Molly would never have been established in her house. She had found out by now that Mr. Delaport Green was a man of very good repute in the financial world as being distinctly successful on the Stock Exchange. He struck Molly as a sturdy type of Englishman, rather determined on complete independence, and liking to pay his way in a large free fashion. She rather wondered at his having consented to the plan of the "paying guest," but he seemed quite genial when he came across her and inquired with sympathy after her amusements, and evidently wished that she should enjoy herself.

Many girls whose position was undoubtedly secure, whom no one disliked and everybody was willing to amuse, had a much less amusing summer than Molly. And Edmund Grosse, most unconsciously to himself, was a leading figure in the warm dream of delight in which Molly lived from the middle of May till the end of June. They did not meet often at dances, but at stiffer functions, at the Opera, and also twice in the country—once on the river on a Sunday afternoon, and once for a whole week-end party, which last days deserve to be treated in more detail.

The group who met under the deep shade of some historic cedars, on a hot Saturday afternoon, to spend together a Saturday to Monday with a notably pleasant host and hostess, had carried with them the electric atmosphere of the season that so fascinated Molly's inexperience, to perfume it further with the June roses and light it with the romance of summer moonlight. Of the party were Molly and her chaperone and Sir Edmund Grosse.

By this time Mrs. Delaport Green had made up her mind that Molly had decidedly better become Lady Grosse, and she felt that it would be a pleasing and honourable conclusion to the season if the engagement were announced before she and Molly parted. She had fleeced Molly very considerably, but she wanted her to have her money's worth, and go away content.

It would take long to carry conviction as to the actual good and the possibility of further good there was in Mrs. Delaport Green. Out of reach of certain temptations she might have been quoted as a positive model of goodness and unselfish brightness. If her imitative gift had found only the highest models, she might have been a happy nun, or a quiet, stay-at-home wife and mother. But she was tossed into a social whirlpool where her instincts and her ambitions and her perceptions were all confused, and out of the depths of her little spoiled soul, had crawled a vice—probably hereditary—which might otherwise have slept. It was fast becoming known that Molly's chaperone was a thorough gambler.

Sir Edmund Grosse was not unwilling to dawdle under the shade of an old wall with Mrs. Delaport Green that Saturday evening in the country.

"I feel terribly responsible," she said, in her thin eager little voice; "I am sure that boy is going to propose to my protÉgÉ!"

"What boy?" asked Edmund, in a tone of indifference.

"Edgar Tonmore."

"Is Edgar here, then?"

"Oh, no; it won't be at once. He has gone to Scotland, but he will be back before we leave London."

"Really he is an excellent fellow. I don't see why you should be anxious."

"But Molly is an orphan," she said plaintively, eyeing him quickly as she spoke.

"Even so, orphans marry and live happily ever after."

"But I'm not sure she will live happily."

"Why not?"

"I don't think she cares for him."

"Then I suppose she will refuse."

"But people so often make mistakes. I don't think dear Molly knows her own mind, and it is so natural that she should not confide in me as I am in her mother's place."

"Leave things alone. Edgar will find out if she likes him or not."

"Will he? oh well, it's a comfort that you take that view." And she then changed the topic, being of opinion that nothing more could be done with it. But no doubt the effect produced in Edmund was an increase of interest in Molly's affairs. It would be exceedingly tiresome if she should marry this attractive but penniless boy, as he knew him to be, under the impression that she possessed enough money for them both.

Edmund had only that morning received certain intelligence of the whereabouts of young Akers, the son of the old stud-groom.

From Florence had come the information that Madame Danterre was supposed to be in failing health, and that she had been seldom seen to drive out of her secluded grounds this summer, whereas last year she used to go long distances in her old-fashioned English carriage in the evenings. Thus it became a matter of thrilling interest whether the great fortune would pass to Molly before any evidence could be produced of the existence of the last will in which he so firmly believed.

"I believe the old sinner knows all about it, even if she hasn't got it," Grosse murmured to himself.

Finally he concluded that it would be better if Molly married money and not poverty, and did not smile on the penniless Edgar Tonmore. Therefore, finding himself alone with her during church time next morning, he thought no harm of trying to put a little spoke in the wheel to prevent that affair going too easily. But first he asked her why she did not go to church.

"I might say, why don't you go yourself?" said Molly, "but I don't mind telling you that I hardly ever do go."

"Why not?"

"Why not?" Molly was leaning back in a low chair under the shadow of the cedars, as still as if she would never move again, as still as the greyhound that was lying by her. "I hate going to church. None of it seems beautiful to me as it does to Adela. My aunt used to say that we were not fortunate in our clergyman, but personally I don't like any clergymen. I am anti-clerical like a Frenchwoman."

"Have you any French blood?"

"Yes; my mother was French."

"But you do good works; I remember how you nursed the kitchenmaid at Groombridge."

"I like to stop pain, but not because it is a good work. I can't stand all the fuss about good works and committees, and nonsense about loving the poor. It's a way rich people have to make themselves feel comfortable. Don't you think so?"

"No, I don't. I know people who make themselves exceedingly uncomfortable because they give away half what they possess."

"Really," said Molly, a little contemptuously. She knew that he was thinking of Rose Bright. "My opinion is that doing good works means to bustle about trying to get as much of other people's money to give away as you can, without giving any yourself."

Edmund did not like to suggest that this opinion might be the result of special experiences gained while living in the house of Mrs. Delaport Green.

"If," Molly went on, evidently glad to relieve her mind on the subject, "you got the money to pay your unfortunate dressmaker, there would be some justice in that. But," she suddenly sat up and her eyes shot fire at Edmund, "to fuss at a bazaar to show your kindness of heart while you know you are not going to pay the woman who made the very gown you have on, is perfectly sickening."

"It is atrocious," said Grosse, who wanted to change the subject. But this was effected by the most unexpected apparition of Mr. Delaport Green, whom they had both supposed to be refreshing himself by the sea at Brighton.

Mr. Delaport Green was dressed in very light grey, with a white waistcoat. His figure was curious, as it extended in parts so far in front of the rest that it gave the impression that you must pass your eyes over a great deal of substance in the foreground before you could see the face. Then again, the nose was so predominant that it checked any attempt to realise the eyes and forehead, while the cheeks were baggy and the skin unwholesome.

Edmund Grosse had only seen him on two occasions when he dined at his house, and he had liked him at once. There was something markedly masculine about him; he knew life, and had made up his mind as to his own part in it without delusions and without whining. He would have preferred to have been slim and handsome, and to have known the ways of the social world from his youth, but there were plenty of other things to be interested in, and he was not averse to the power which follows on wealth. He was a self-made Englishman, with nothing of the Jew about him, either for good or evil. But no apparition could have been more surprising to the two as he came slowly over the grass to meet them. Molly saw at once that Adela's husband was exceedingly annoyed, probably exceedingly angry, and although she had always felt his capacity for being very angry, she had never seen him in that condition before.

"I came down in the motor to get a short talk on business with Miss Dexter," he explained, "but I am sorry to disturb a more amusing conversation."

Edmund, of course, after that left them alone, and walked off by himself.

Molly looked all her astonishment at Adela's "Tim."

"Miss Dexter," he said very slowly, "I was given to understand when you came to us in the winter that you were a young lady wanting a home and some amusement in London. I thought it kindly in my wife to wish to have you with her, and, as she is young and a good deal alone" (Molly looked the other way at this assertion), "I thought it would be for the advantage of both. But I had no notion that there was any question of payment in the case, and I must now ask you to tell me exactly what you have paid to Mrs. Delaport Green since first you made her acquaintance."

Molly was not entirely astonished at discovering that Adela's husband had known nothing whatever of Adela's financial arrangements with herself. But she was so angry at this proof of what she had up to now only faintly suspected, that it was not very difficult to make her tell all that she knew of her share in Adela's expenses, only that knowledge proved to be of a very vague kind. Molly had kept no accounts, and had the vaguest notion of what her bills included. One thing she intended to conceal (but Mr. Delaport Green managed to make her confide even that) was the fact that she had given £100 to his wife's dressmaker. He made no comment of any sort, only firmly and quietly insisted on Molly giving him all the items she could. Then he got up and said—

"Good-bye for the present; I want to get back in time for lunch."

And he walked away, making one or two notes in a little book he held in his hand as to the cheque that Molly should find waiting for her next day.

Molly, left alone on the bench, did not at the first moment dwell on the thought of how far this talk with her host would affect her own plans. She could only think of the man himself. She had been for many weeks in his house, and had never done more than "exchange the weather" with him, or occasionally suffer gladly the little jokes and puns to which he was addicted. She had written to Miss Carew that his attitude towards Adela and herself was that of a busy man towards his nursery. Since that how little she had thought about him! And now she felt the strength in him, not weakened, but lit up with a kind of pathos. He might have been a true friend to any man or woman. He was really fond of Adela Delaport Green, and that position in itself was tragic enough. It was plain to Molly, although nothing had been breathed on the subject that morning, that Tim would not find it hard to forgive his Adela. Adela would pass almost scot-free from well-merited punishment; and yet her husband was strong enough to have punished effectively where he deemed it necessary. Molly was puzzled because she was without a clue to the mystery. The fact was that Tim had no wish to punish effectively. As long as Adela passed untouched by one sin, as long as he felt sure of one great virtue in her life, all such details as much gambling, much selfishness, absurd extravagance, could be easily forgiven. Molly herself would be fairly dealt with and set aside; the "paying guest" was an indignity that he would soon forget. He would have been entirely indifferent to the impression of regretful interest that he had made upon her.

That night Edmund Grosse was Molly's confidant as to the second, and evidently final, rupture between herself and Mrs. Delaport Green that had taken place in the afternoon. He could not but be kind and sympathetic as to her difficulties. It was, no doubt, very blind of him not to see that she was too quickly convinced of the wisdom of his advice, far too anxious to act as seemed well in his opinion. It never dawned on his imagination for a moment that the most serious part of the loss of the end of the season to Molly was the loss of his society during that time.

They strolled in the moonlight between the cedars and under the great wall with its alternate "ebon and ivory" of darkest evergreen growths and masses of white climbing roses, Molly's white gown rustling a little in the stillness. And Molly discovered with joy that he was trying to set her mind against marriage with Edgar Tonmore. If he only knew how little danger there was of that! And under Edmund's influence she decided to offer herself for a visit of two or three weeks to Mrs. Carteret, in the old and much disliked home of her childhood. It would look right; it would give a certain dignity to her position after the breakdown of the Delaport Green alliance, and it was always a great mistake to break with natural connections. So far Edmund Grosse; and in Molly's mind it ran something like this: "He wants me to stand well with the world, and I will do this, intolerable as it is, to please him. He likes to think that I have some nice relations, and so I must try to be friendly with Aunt Anne Carteret, though that is the hardest part. And he wants me to get away from Edgar Tonmore, and I would go away from so many more people if he wished it."

The evening passed into night, and Edmund was walking alone under the wall, dreaming of Rose.

All this foolish gambling, quarrelsome, small world of men and women made such a foil to her image. Molly and her mother, the Delaport Greens, and many others were grouped in his mind as he purled the smoke disdainfully from his cigar. Something in Molly's walk by his side just now had made him see again the old woman with her quick, alert movements in the garden at Florence; after all they were cut from the same piece, the old wicked woman and the slight, dark girl with the curious eyes. Molly must not be trusted; she must be suspected all the more because of her attractions in the moments of dangerous gentleness. And with a certain simplicity Edmund looked again at the moon above him, all the more glorious because secret and dark things were moving stealthily under the trees in the lower world.

And Molly was kneeling on her low window-seat, looking out at the same moon in a mood of joy that was transmuted half consciously into prayer by the alchemy of pure love.

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CHAPTER XV

A POOR MAN'S DEATH

Early in October, Molly and Miss Carew took up their abode in a flat with quite large rooms and a pleasing view of Hyde Park.

August and September had been two of the healthiest and most normal months that Molly had ever spent or was likely ever to spend again. The weeks between the rupture with the Delaport Greens and the journey to Switzerland had been trying, although it was undoubtedly much pleasanter to be Mrs. Carteret's guest than it had ever been to be a permanent inmate of her house.

Molly—thought Mrs. Carteret—was restless, not inclined to morbid thoughts, and more gentle than of yore, but more nervous and fanciful.

It was not until after a fortnight abroad, after the revelation of mountains realised for the first time, that Molly had the courage to say to herself that she had been a fool during the visit to Aunt Anne. Was it in the least likely that a man of Edmund Grosse's kind would act romantically or hastily? Of course not. She had been as foolish as Mrs. Browning's little Effie in dreaming that a lover might come riding over the Malcot hills on a July evening.

The girls with whom Molly had travelled were of a healthy, intellectual type, and Molly, under their influence, had grown to feel the worth of the higher side of Nature's gifts. And so, vigorous in mind and body, she had come to London in October, so she said, to study music.

Miss Carew was a little disappointed when Molly expressed lofty indifference as to who had yet come to London. But that indifference did not last long when her friends of the season began to find her out. Then Miss Carew surprised Molly by her excessive nervousness and shyness of new acquaintances. "Carey" had always professed to love society, and had always been very carefully dressed in the fashion of the moment. But, as a civilian may idealise warfare and be well read in tactics, and yet be unequal to the emergency when war actually raises its grisly head, so it was with poor Miss Carew. She simply collapsed when Molly's worldly friends, as she called them with envious admiration, swept into the room, garnished with wonderful hats and fashionable furs. She had none of a Frenchwoman's gift for ignoring social differences, and she had the uneasy pride that is rare in a Celt, although she had all a Celt's taste for refinement and show and glitter. Miss Carew sat more and more stiffly at the tea-table, until she confided frankly to Molly—

"My dear, I am too old, and I am simply in the way. It is just too late in my life, you see, after all the years of governess work. Of course, if my beloved father had lived, I should never have been a governess. But as it is, I think I need not appear when you have visitors, except now and then."

Molly acquiesced after enough protest, chiefly because she had begun to wonder if it would be quite easy to have an occasional tÊte-À-tÊte with men friends without having to suggest to Miss Carew to retire gracefully. She had that morning heard that Sir Edmund Grosse was in London, but she had no reason, she told herself, to suppose that he knew where she was.

Meanwhile, she was exceedingly angry at finding that Adela Delaport Green was giving her version of her relations with Molly in the season to all her particular friends. Molly could not find out details, but she more than suspected that the fact of her being Madame Danterre's daughter made up part of Adela's story, although she could not imagine how she came to know who her mother was.

Molly would probably have brooded to a morbid degree over these angry suspicions, but that another side of life was soon pressed upon her, a new source of human interest, in the dying husband of a charwoman.

This woman, Mrs. Moloney, had cleaned out the flat before Molly and Miss Carew took possession.

High up in a small room in a block of workmen's buildings in West Kensington, Pat Moloney lay dying. He and his wife had been thriftless and uncertain, they drifted into marriage, drifted in and out of work, and, having watched their children grow up with some affection and a good deal of neglect, had now seen them drift away, some back to the old country, and some to the Colonies.

Mrs. Moloney counted on her fingers to remember their number and their ages, and spoke with almost more realisation of the personalities of three little beings that had died in infancy than of the living men and women and their children.

Moloney was far too ill by the time Molly Dexter came to see him to speak of anything distinctly. Three years ago he had fallen from a ladder and had refused to go into the hospital, in which decision he had been supported by his wife, who "didn't hold" with those institutions. A kindly, rough, clever young doctor had since treated him for growing pain and discomfort, and had prophesied evil from the first. Pat kept about and, when genuinely too ill for regular work, took odd jobs and drifted more and more into public houses. He had never been a thorough drunkard, and had been free from other vices, though lazy and self-indulgent. But pain and leisure led more and more to the stimulants that were poison in his condition. At last a chill mercifully hastened matters, and Pat, suffering less than he had for some months past, was nearing his end in semi-consciousness. Molly Dexter then descended on the Moloneys in one of her almost irresistible cravings to relieve suffering.

Ordinary human nature when not in pain was often too repugnant to Molly for her to be able to do good works in company with other people. She was, as she had told Edmund Grosse, a born anti-clerical, and she scorned philanthropists; so her best moods had to work themselves out alone and without direction. Nor was she likely to spoil the recipients of her attentions, partly from the strength of her character, partly because the poor know instinctively whether they are merely the objects on which to vent a restless longing to relieve pain, or whether they are loved for themselves.

Molly, in the village at home, had always made the expression of gratitude impossible, but she constantly added ingratitude as a large item in the account she kept running, in her darker hours, against the human race.

Late on a wet and windy October evening she went to undertake the nursing of Pat Moloney for the first part of the night. She had been visiting him constantly for several weeks, and actually nursing him for three days.

"Has the doctor been?"

"Yes, miss" (in a very loud whisper); "he says Pat is awful bad; he left a paper for you."

Molly Dexter walked across the small, bare room and took a paper of directions from the chimney-piece, and then stood looking at the old man's heavy figure on the bed. He was lying on his side, his face turned to the wall.

"You had better rest in the back room while I am here," she said.

"I couldn't, indeed I couldn't, miss, him being like that; you mustn't ask me to. Besides, I've been round and asked the priest to come, and so I couldn't take my things off. I'll just have some tea and a drop of whisky in it, and I can keep going all the night, it's more than likely he'll die at the dawn."

Molly eyed the woman with supreme contempt.

"It isn't at all certain that he's going to die, he'll make a good fight yet if you will give him a chance."

Mrs. Moloney looked deeply offended. It had been all very well to be guided by a lady at the beginning of the illness, but now it was very different. She felt half consciously that science had done its worst, and bigger questions than temperatures and drugs were at issue.

"A priest now," said Molly, in a whisper of intense scorn, "would kill him at once."

Mrs. Moloney did not condescend to reply. She had propped a poor little crucifix, a black cross, with a chipped white figure on it, against a jam pot on a shelf under the window, and she had borrowed two candlesticks with coloured candles from a labourer's wife on the floor beneath. The window had been shut, so that the wind should not blow down these objects.

Molly looked at the man on the bed and sniffed.

"He must have air—" the whisper was a snort.

At that moment there was a knock on the outer door. On the iron outer stairs was standing the priest.

"It's just the curate," said Mrs. Moloney, looking out of the window; and then she disappeared into the tiny passage.

Molly stood defiantly, her figure drawn to its full height. She felt that she knew exactly the kind of Irish curate who was coming in to disturb, and probably kill, the unhappy man on the bed. Well, she should make a fight for this poor, crushed life; she would stand between the horrible tyranny and superstition that lit those pink candles, and that would rouse a man to make his poor wretched conscience unhappy and frighten him to death. "If there is a hell," she muttered, "it must be ready to punish such brutality as that."

Mrs. Moloney opened the door as wide as possible, and the priest came in. Miss Dexter looked at him in amazement; how, and where had she seen him before?

He went straight to the bed and looked at the man in silence, while Molly looked at him. He was about middle height, with very dark hair and eyes, a small, well-formed head, and a very good forehead. It was not until he turned to Mrs. Moloney that Molly understood why she had fancied that she had seen him before. She was sure now that she had seen his photograph, but, although she was certain of having seen it, she could not remember when or where she had done so.

"Can't you open the window, Mrs. Moloney?"

"It's the only place to make into an altar, father?"

"Oh, never mind that yet; I will manage."

Molly stepped forward; whatever he was going to do, it should not be done without a protest.

"The doctor's orders are that he is not to be disturbed."

The priest did not seem aware of the exceedingly unpleasant expression on Molly's countenance.

"It would be a great mistake to wake him, of course," he said; and then, "Do you suppose he will sleep for long?"

"I haven't the faintest notion"; the uttermost degree of scorn was conveyed in those few words.

Mrs. Moloney suppressed a sob.

"He's not been to the Sacraments for three years," she murmured.

The priest leant over the bed and looked intently at the dying man.

Mrs. Moloney opened the window and put the crucifix and candlesticks in a corner on the dirty floor.

"It might kill him to wake him now," murmured Molly.

"Yes, that is just the difficulty." The young man was speaking more to himself than to her.

"Difficulty!" thought Molly with scorn. "Fiddlesticks!"

The silence was unbroken for some moments. The fresh autumn air blew into the room. A sandy coloured cat came from under the bed, looked at them, and then rubbed her arched back against the unsteady leg of the only table, which was laden with bottles and basins, finally retired into a further corner, and upset and broke one of the pink candles that belonged to the neighbour.

But Mrs. Moloney never took her eyes off the priest's pale face.

"I'll wait until he wakes," he said to her, "but is there anywhere else I could go? It's not good to crowd up this room."

"That's intended to remove me," thought Molly, "but it won't succeed."

Mrs. Moloney moved into the little back room, and pulled forward a chair. When the priest was seated she shut the door behind her and whispered to him—

"Father, you'll not let his soul slip through your fingers, will you, father dear? Just because of the poor lady who knows no better!"

"Who is she? She is not like the district visitors I've seen about in the parish."

"No, indeed; she is a lady, and I've done some work for her, and she would not be satisfied when she heard Moloney was ill but she must come herself, and yesterday, not to grudge her her due, father, the doctor said if he pulled through that I owed her his life. Well, that's proved a mistake, anyhow, but she's after spoiling his last chance, and he's not been the good man he was once, father."

"Yes, Mrs. Moloney, you must watch him carefully, and here I am if there is any change. I'm sure that lady is an excellent nurse, and we mustn't let any chance slip of keeping him alive, must we?"

She shook her head; this was only an English curate, still he must be obeyed.

Molly was profoundly irritated by Mrs. Moloney's proceeding to make a cup of tea for the priest, but he was grateful for it, as he had been out at tea-time, and had come to the Moloneys' instead of eating his dinner. He opened the window of the tiny room as far as it would go, and read his Office by the light of the tallow candle. That finished, he sat still and began to wonder about the lady with the olive complexion and the strange, grey eyes.

"I felt as if I should frizzle up in the fire of her wrath," he thought with a smile.

He took his rosary and was half through it when the door opened and Molly came in. She shut it noiselessly, and then spoke in her usual unmoved, impersonal voice.

"The new medicine is not having any effect; the temperature has gone up; the doctor said if it did so now it was a hopeless case. I must rouse him in an hour to give him another dose and take the temperature again. After that, if it is as high as I expect it to be, you can do anything you like to him."

As she said the last words, she went back into the other room.

The hour passed slowly, and she came again and let the priest know in almost the same words that he was free to act as he pleased. Then she added abruptly—

"Do you mind telling me your name?"

"My name? Molyneux."

"Then are you any relation of Lord Groombridge?"

"I am his cousin."

"I have been at Groombridge." But the priest felt that the tone was not in the least more friendly.

"Moloney won't suffer now," she went on, turning towards the door, "and I think he will be conscious for a time."

Molly was giving up her self-imposed charge; she wanted to be off. With the need for help no longer an attraction, Moloney had almost ceased to interest her; he would remain only as part of the darker background of her mind, as a dim figure among many in the dim coloured atmosphere of revolt and bitterness in which her thoughts on human life would move when she had no labour for her hands. He was another of those who suffered so uselessly, a mere half animal who had to do the rough work of the world, and then was dropped into the great charnel house of unmeaning death. As soon as the man began to show signs, faint signs of perception, she left the priest by his bedside and went back into the inner room to put on the cloak she had left there. And then she hesitated.

What would go on in the next room? She was anxious now to know more about it, because she had caught so strange a look on Father Molyneux's face. If he had only known this man before she could have understood it. But how could there be this passion of affection, this intensity of feeling, for a total stranger, a rough brutal-looking fellow who was no longer in pain, who would probably die easily enough, and probably be no great loss to those he left? She had seen a strange intensity of reverence in the way the young man had touched the wreck upon the bed. She had known thrills of curious joy herself when relieving physical agony; was it something like that which filled the whole personality and bearing of the priest?

She began to feel that she could not go away; she wanted to see this thing out. It was something entirely new to her.

Low voices murmured in the next room; she hesitated now to pass through, she might be intruding at too sacred a moment. She believed that the priest was hearing the dying man's confession. She had a half contemptuous dislike of this feeling of mystery and privacy. She felt she had been foolish not to go away at once. But she did not move for nearly half an hour, and then the door opened, and the man's wife came in and started back.

"I'm sure I thought you had gone, miss." Her manner was much more cordial than it had been before. She was tearful and excited. "I want to raise him a bit higher, and there's a cloak here. He is going off fast now, but he was quite himself when I left him with the father to make his confession; he looked his old self and the good man he was for many a year—and God Almighty knows he has suffered enough these last years to change him, poor soul."

Molly went back with her to the sick bed and helped her to raise the dying man. The dawn came in feebly now, and made the guttering candle dimmer. Death was all that was written on the grey face, and the body laboured for breath. The flicker of light in the mind, that had been roused, perhaps, by those rites which had passed in her absence, had faded; there was not the faintest sign of intelligence in the eyes now; the hands were cold and would never be warm again. The sandy cat had crept away into the other room; and outside the great town was alive again, the vast crowds were astir, each of whom was just one day nearer to death. There was nothing but horror, stale, common horror, in it all for Molly. But, kneeling as upright as a marble figure, and his whole face full of a joy that seemed quite human, quite natural, Father Molyneux was reading prayers, and there was a curious note of triumph in the clear tones. At first she did not heed the words; then they thrust themselves upon her, and her eyes fastened on the dying, meaningless face, the very prey of death, in a kind of stupefaction at the words spoken to him.

"I commend thee to Almighty God, dearest brother, and commend thee to Him whose creature thou art; that, when thou shalt have paid the debt of humanity by death, thou mayest return to the Maker, Who formed thee of the dust of the earth. As thy soul goeth forth from the body, may the bright company of angels meet thee; may the judicial senate of Apostles greet thee; may the triumphant army of white-robed Martyrs come out to welcome thee; may the band of glowing Confessors, crowned with lilies, encircle thee; may the choir of Virgins, singing jubilees, receive thee; and the embrace of a blessed repose fold thee in the bosom of the Patriarchs; mild and festive may the aspect of Jesus Christ appear to thee, and may He award thee a place among them that stand before Him for ever."

And so it went on; some of it appealing to her more, some less; some passages almost repulsive. But her imagination had caught on to the vast outlines of the prayer—the enormous nature of the claims made on behalf of the dying labourer.

Was it Pat Moloney who was to pass out of this darkness to "gaze with blessed eyes on the vision of Truth"? What a tremendous assertion made with such intensity of confidence! What a curious pageantry, too, so magnificent in its simplicity, was ordered, almost in tones of command, by the Church Militant for the reception of the charge she was giving up. The triumphant army of Martyrs was to come out to meet him; the Confessors were to "encircle him"; Michael was "to receive him as Prince of the armies of Heaven." Peter, Paul, John were to be in attendance. Nor in the rich strain was there any false ring of praise, or any attempt to veil the weakness of humanity. "Rejoice his soul, O Lord, with Thy Presence, and remember not the iniquities and excesses which, through the violence of anger or the heat of evil passion, he hath at any time committed. For, although he hath sinned, he hath not denied the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, but hath believed and hath had a zeal for God, and hath faithfully adored the Creator of all things."

Was it an immense, an appalling impertinence—this great drama? Was it a mere mockery of the impotence and darkness of man's life? Would the priest say all this at the death-bed of the drunken beggar, of the voluptuous tyrant, of the woman who had been too hard or too weak in the bonds of the flesh? Was it a last great delusion, a last panacea given by the Church to those who had consented to bandage their eyes and crook their knees in childish obedience? Vaguely in her mind there flitted half phrases of the humanitarian, the materialist, the agnostic. It seemed as if their views of the wreck on the bed pressed upon all her consciousness. But, just as they had never succeeded in silencing the voice of that great drama of faith and prayer through the ages, so she could not dull to her own consciousness the strange, spiritual vitality that poured out in this triumphant call to the powers on high to come forth in all their glory to receive the inestimable treasure of the redeemed soul of Pat Moloney.

---

CHAPTER XVI

MOLLY'S LETTER TO HER MOTHER

There followed after that night a quite new experience for Molly. It was the upheaval of an utterly uncultivated side of her nature. She was astonished to find that she had religious instincts, and that, instead of feeling that these instincts were foolish and irrational—a lower part of her nature,—they now seemed quite curiously rational and established in possession of her faculties. Her mind seemed more satisfied than it had ever been before. She did not know in what she believed, but she felt a different view of life in which men seemed less utterly mean, and women less of hypocrites. Externally it worked something in this way.

The day on which Pat Moloney died at dawn she could not rest so much as she intended, to make up for the short night. She wrote one or two brief notes begging to be let off engagements, and told the servants to say she was not at home. She could not keep quite still, and she did not want to go out. Gradually, as the day wore on, she worked herself into more and more excitement. Her imagination pictured what might be the outcome of such a view of life and death as seemed to have taken hold of her. In her usual moods she would have thought with sarcasm that such were the symptoms of "conversion" in a revivalist. But now there was no critical faculty awake for cynicism; the critical faculty was full of a solemn kind of joy. Next there came, after some hours of a sort of surprise at this sudden and vehement sense of uplifting, the wish for action and for sacrifice. Her mind returned to the concrete, and the circumstances of her life. And then there came a most unwelcome thought. If Molly wanted to sacrifice herself indeed, and wished to do some real good about which there could be no self-delusion, was there not one duty quite obviously in her path, her duty as a child? Had she ever made any attempt to help the forlorn woman in Florence? Perhaps Madame Danterre's assertion, when Molly came of age, that she did not want to see Molly, was only an attempt to find out whether Molly really wished to come to her mother. From the day on which her ideal of her mother had been completely shattered Molly had shrunk from even thinking of her. She now shivered with repugnance, but she was almost glad to feel how repugnant this duty might be, much as a medieval penitent might have rejoiced in his own repugnance to the leprous wounds he was resolved to dress as an expiation for sin. It did not strike her, as it never struck the noble penitents in the Middle Ages, that it might be very trying to the object of these expiatory actions. She felt at the moment that it must be a comfort to her mother to receive all the love and devotion that she would offer her. And there was real heroism in the letter that Molly proceeded to write to Madame Danterre. For she knew that if her offer were accepted she risked the loss of all that at present made life very dear, both in what she already enjoyed, and in the hope that was hidden in her heart.

Molly had pride enough to shrink utterly from the connection with her mother, and her girl's innocence shrank, too, with quick sensitiveness from what might be before her. How strange now appeared the dreams of her childhood, the idealisation of the young and beautiful mother!

The letter was short, but very earnest, and had all the ring of truth in it. She could not but think that any mother would respond to it, and, for herself, after sending it there could be no looking back. Once the letter was posted to the lawyer to be forwarded to Madame Danterre, a huge weight seemed to be lifted from Molly's mind. That night she met Edmund Grosse at dinner. He had never seen her so bright and good-looking, and he found he had many questions to ask as to the summer abroad.

For several weeks Molly received no answer from Florence, but during that time she did not repent her hasty action. And during those weeks her interest in religion grew stronger. Just as she had been unable to work with philanthropists, she was ready now to take her religion alone. She felt kinder to the world at large, but she did not at first feel any need of human help or human company. She went sometimes to a service at Westminster Abbey, sometimes to St. Paul's, sometimes to the Oratory, and two or three times to the church in West Kensington in which Father Molyneux was assistant parish priest. On the whole she liked this last much the best. Indeed, she was so much attracted by his sermons that she went to call upon him late one afternoon.

The visitor was shown into a rather bare parlour, and Father Molyneux soon came in. He was a good deal interested in seeing her there. He had never been more snubbed in his life than by this lady on their first meeting, and he had been much surprised at seeing her in the church soon afterwards. She was plainly dressed, though at an expense he would never have imagined to be possible, and she appeared a little softer than when he had seen her last. She looked at him rather hard, not with the look that puzzled Rose Bright; it was a look of sympathy and of inquiry.

"I have had curious experiences since we met," she said, "and I want to understand them better. Have you—has anybody been praying for me?"

"I have said Mass for you twice since poor Moloney died," he said.

"I thought there was some sort of influence," she murmured. "That night I was tired and excited and worried, and foolishly prejudiced. Somehow the prayers you read for Pat Moloney, the whole attitude of your Church in those prayers, caught my breath. I imagine it was something like the effect of a revivalist preacher on a Welsh miner." She paused. Father Molyneux was full of interest, and did not conceal it.

"I can't tell," he said. "Of course, it may have been——"

"Nerves," interrupted Molly so decidedly that he laughed; it was not in the least what he had meant to say.

"But," she went on, with an air of impartial diagnosis, "it has lasted. I have been very happy. I understand now what is meant by religion. I understand what you felt about that man's soul. I understand, when you are preaching, that intense sense of worth-whileness. I understand the religious sense, the religious attitude. It makes everything worth while because of love. It does not explain all the puzzles. It does not answer questions, it swallows them up alive. It makes everything so big, and at the same time so small, because there are infinite things too. Then it insists on reality; I see now it must insist on dogma for fear of unreality. Renan was quite wrong in that great sentence of his: 'Il ne faut rien dire de limitÉe en face de l'infini.' The infinite is a fog to us if there are no outlines in our conception of it. Don't you think so?"

There was a light in her face no one had ever seen there before.

"And the only outlines that can satisfy us are the outlines of a Personality. As a rule I have always disliked individuals. I know you are surprised. Of course, you are just the other way; you have a touch of genius, a gift for being conscious of personalities, of being attracted to them. Now I have never liked people; in fact, I've hated most of them. But since this religious experience I have known"—her voice dropped; it had been a little loud—"I have known that I want a friend, and can have one."

The priest was astonished by Molly. He had never met any one like her before. Her self-confidence was curious, and her eloquence was so sudden and abounding that his own words seemed to leave him. She was in a moment as silent as she had been talkative, her eyes cast down on the floor. Then she looked at him with an almost imperious questioning in her eyes.

"You have said so much that I expected to say myself," he said, with a faint sense of humour, "and you have not asked me a single question."

Molly laughed "Tell me," she said, "I am right; it is all true? I do understand religious experience, the religious sense at last, don't I?"

"Shall I tell you what I miss in it?" he said, suppressing any further comment on her amazing assertion. "I mean in all you have said. And, oddly enough, the Welsh miner would have had it. I mean that, seeing Our Lord as the One Friend of your life, you should also see that you have resisted and betrayed and offended Him during that life which He gave you."

"No: I have not thought much about that side of things" said Molly "I have been too happy."

"You would be far happier if you did."

"But what have I done?" said Molly, almost in a tone of injured respectability.

"Well, you have hated people—or, at least" (in a tone of apology), "you said so just now."

"Oh! yes; it's quite true. I am a great hater and an uncertain one. I never know who it is going to be, or when it will come."

"But you know you have been commanded to love them."

"Yes; but only as much as I love myself, and I quite particularly dislike myself."

"You've no right to—none whatever."

"And why not?"

"Because God made you in His own image and likeness. You can't get out of it. But, you know, I don't believe one word you say. I met you showing love to the poor."

"No, indeed," said Molly indignantly, "I did not love Pat Moloney. I wish you would believe what I say. I hate my mother; I hate the aunt who brought me up; I hate crowds of people. I don't hate one man because I want him to fall in love with me, but if he doesn't do that soon, I shall hate him too. I feel friendly towards you now, but I don't know how soon I may hate you. At least," she paused, and a gentle look came into her face, "I had all these hatreds up to a few weeks ago; now they are comparatively dormant."

Again the flood of her words seemed to check him, but he tried:

"I believe it then; I will take all you say as true. I think you are fairly convincing. Well, then, how do you suppose you can be united to Infinite Love, Infinite Mercy, Infinite Purity? God is not merely good, He is Goodness. Until you feel that His Presence would burn and destroy and annihilate your unworthiness, you have no sense of the joys of His Friendship. You stand now looking up to Him and choosing Him as your Friend, whereas you must lie prostrate in the dust and wait to be chosen. When you have done that He will raise you, and the Heavens will ring with the joy of the great spirits who never fell, and who are almost envious of the sinner doing Penance."

Molly bent her head low. "I see," she murmured, "mine have been merely the guesses of an amateur; it is useless—I don't understand."

"It isn't, indeed it isn't," he said quietly. "It is the introduction. The King is sending His heralds. Some are drawn to Him by the sense of their own sinfulness, others, as you are, by a glimpse of His beauty."

Molly was not angry, only disappointed. The very habit of a life of reserve must have brought some sense of disappointment in the result. She did not mind being told that she must lie in the dust; the abnegation was not abhorrent; she knew that love in itself sometimes demanded humiliation. But she felt sad and discouraged. She had seemed to have conquered a kingdom. Without exactly being proud of them, she had felt her religious experiences to be very remarkable, and now she saw that they only pointed to a very long road, hard to walk on. She got up quickly and was near the door before he was.

"Will you come and see me?" she said, and she gave him her card. "If you can, send me a postcard beforehand that I may not miss you. Good-bye."

He opened the front door for her and her carriage was waiting.

"The third time you have been late for dinner this week," observed the Father Rector. "Have some mutton?"

"Thanks," said the young man; "I wish I could learn the gentle art of sending people away without offending them."

"They didn't include that in the curriculum at Oxford?" The tone was not quite kind; neither was the snort with which the remark was concluded. It was no sauce to the lumpy, greasy mutton that Mark was struggling to eat. Suddenly he caught the eye of the second curate, Father Marny, who had conceived a great affection for him, and he smiled merrily with a school-boy's sense of mischief.

---

In a small room in a small house in a small street in Chelsea, Father Molyneux was sitting with a friend. There were a few beautiful things in the room, and a few well-bound books; but they had a dusty, uncared for look about them. It teased the young priest to see a medicine bottle and a half-washed medicine glass standing on a bracket with an exquisite statuette of the Madonna. The present occupier of these lodgings had had very true artistic perceptions before he had become blind.

Mark Molyneux had just been reading to him for an hour, and he now put down the book. The old man smacked his lips with enjoyment. The author was new to him, but he had won his admiration at the first reading.

"What people call his paradoxes," he said, "is his almost despairing attempt at making people pay attention; he has to shout to men who are too hurried to stop. The danger is that, as time goes on, he will only be able to think in contrasts and to pursue contradictions."

The speaker paused, and then, his white fingers groped a little as if he were feeling after something. His voice was rich and low. Then he kept still, and waited with a curious look of acquired patience. At last, the younger man began.

"I want to ask your advice, or rather, I want to tell you something I have decided on."

"And you only want me to agree," laughed Canon Nicholls, and the blind face seemed full of perception.

"Well, I think you will." The boyish voice was bright and keen. "I've come to tell you that I want to be a monk."

"Tut, tut," said Canon Nicholls, and then they both laughed together. "Since when?" he asked a moment later.

"It has been coming by degrees," said Mark, in a low voice. "I want to be altogether for God."

"And why can't you be that now?"

"It's too confusing," he said; "half the day I am amused or worried or tired. I've got next to no spiritual life."

Canon Nicholls did not help him to say more.

"I can't be regular in anything, and now there's the preaching."

"What's the matter with that?"

"Who was it who said that a popular preacher could not save his soul? Father Rector says that it's very bad for me that I crowd up the church. He is evidently anxious about me."

"How kind!"

"Then, since I've been preaching, such odd people come to see me."

"I know," said the Canon, "there's a fringe of the semi-insane round all churches; they used to lie in wait for me once."

"Then I simply love society. I've been to hear such interesting people talk at several houses lately. I go a good deal to Miss Dexter."

"Miss Molly Dexter."

"Yes."

"I wouldn't do that; she's a minx. She is the girl who stayed with that kind little woman, Mrs. Delaport Green, who sometimes comes to see me."

"You see," Mark went on eagerly, "I'm doing no good like this. So I have made up my mind to try and be a Carthusian."

His face lit up now with the same intense delight. "It's such a splendid life! Fancy! No more humbug, and flattery, and insincerity. 'Vous ne jouerez plus la comÉdie,' an old monk said to me. Wouldn't it be splendid? Think of the stillness, and then the singing of the Office while the world is asleep, like the little birds at dawn. It would be simply and entirely to live for God!"

"I do believe in a personal devil," muttered Canon Nicholls to himself, and Mark stared at him. "Now listen," he said. "There is a young man who has a vocation to the priesthood, and he comes under obedience to work in London. That is, to live in the thick of sin, of suffering, of folly and madness. If it were acknowledged that the place was full of cholera or smallpox it would be simple enough. But the place is thick with disguises. The worst cases don't seem in the least ill; the stench of the plague is a sweet smell, and the confusion is thicker because there are angels and demons in the same clothes, living in the same houses, doing the same actions, saying almost the same things. In every Babylon there have been these things, but this is about the biggest. And the most harmless of the sounds, the hum of daily work, is loud and continuous enough to dull and wear the senses. So confused and perplexed is the young man that he doesn't know when he has done good or done harm; being young, compliments appeal to him very seriously; being young, he takes too many people's opinions; and, being young, he generalises and if, for instance, I tell him not to go often to the house of a capricious woman of uncertain temper, he probably resolves at once never to lunch in an agreeable house again. Meanwhile, above this muddle, this tragicomedy, he sees the distant hills glowing with light; so, without waiting for orders, he leaves the people crying to him for help and turns tail and runs away! And what only the skill of a personal devil could achieve, he thinks in his heart that he is choosing a harder fight, a more self-denying life."

"But I could help those people more by my prayers."

"Granted, if it were God's will that you should lead the life of contemplation, but I don't believe it is. I don't see what right you've got to believe it is. As to not living altogether for God here, that's His affair. Mind you, I don't undervalue the difficulties, and it's uncommon hard to human nature. Don't think too much of other people's opinions; I know you feel a bit out of it with the priests about you. They are rough to young men like you—it's jealousy, if they only knew it. Jealousy is the fault of the best men, because they never suspect themselves of it. If they saw it, they would fight it. Face facts. You have some gifts; you will be much humbler if you thank God for them instead of trying to think you haven't got them. And be quite particularly nice to the growler sort of priest; he's had a hard time and, lived a hard life; much harder than the life of a monk. Mind you respect his scars."

He talked on, partly to give Mark time; he saw he had given him a shock.

"Mind," he said, "there is sometimes an acute personal temptation, but you've not got that now. You've got a sort of perception of what it might be. It won't be unbearable." He crossed his legs and put the long, white fingers into each other. "But I'm old now, and it's my experience that the mischief for all priests is to let society be their fun. It ought to be a duty, and a very tiresome duty too. Take your amusements in any other way, and go out to lunch in the same state of mind as you visit a hospital. Do you think the best women, whether Protestant or Catholic, think society their fun? They may like it or not, but it is a serious duty to them."

Mark sprang up suddenly. "I can't stand this!" he said. "You go on talking, and I want to be a Carthusian, and I will be one." He laughed; his voice was troubled and the clear joy of his face was clouded.

Canon Nicholls felt in his pocket for a snuff-box, and brought it out. "Go along, if you can't stand it. And don't come back till you've seen through the devil's trick. I don't mind what I bet that you won't run away."

Left alone, Canon Nicholls covered his blind eyes with his hands and heaved a deep sigh.

The man who had just left him was the object of his keenest affection, the apple of those blind eyes that craved to look upon his face. But his love was not blind, and he felt the danger there lay in the seeming perfectness of the young man. Mark's nature was gloriously sweet and abounding in the higher gifts; his love of God had the awe of a little child, and his love of men had the tenderness of a shepherd towards his lost sheep. Mark had loved life and learning, had revelled in Oxford, and would, in one sense, be an undergraduate all his days. He had known dreams of ambition, and visions of success in working for his country. Then gently—not with any shock—had come the vocation to the priesthood, and so tenderly had the tendrils that attached him to a man's life in the world been loosened, that the process hardly seemed to have hurt any of the sensitive sympathies and interests he had always enjoyed. Even in the matter of giving up great possessions, all had come so gradually as to seem most natural and least strained.

Long before the Groombridges could be brought to believe that the brilliant and favourite young cousin had rejected all that they could leave him, it had become a matter of course to the rest of the family and their friends that Mark Molyneux would be a priest, and give up the property to the younger brother.

When the outer world took up the matter, Father Molyneux always made people feel as if allusions to his renunciation of Groombridge were simply quite out of taste, and nothing out of taste seemed in keeping with anything connected with him. It was all so simple to Mark, and so perfect to Canon Nicholls, that the latter almost dreaded this very perfection as unlikely, and unbefitting the "second-rate" planet in which it was his lot to live. And to confirm this almost superstitious feeling of a man who had lived to know where the jolts and jars of life cause the acutest suffering to the idealist, had come this fresh aspiration of Mark's after a life more completely perfect in itself. Strong instincts were entirely in accord with the older man's sober judgment of the situation. And yet he wished it could be otherwise. He had no opinion of the world that Mark wanted to give up. He would most willingly have shut any cloister door between that world and his cherished son in the spirit. It was with no light heart that he wanted him to face all the roughness of human goodness, all the blinding confusion of its infirmities, all the cruelty of its vices. The old man's own service in his last years was but to stand and wait, but, even so, he was too often oppressed by the small things that fill up empty hours, small uncharitablenesses, small vanities, small irritations. Was it not a comfort at such moments to believe that in another world we should know human nature in others and in ourselves without any cause for repugnance and without any ground for fear?

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CHAPTER XVIII

MADAME DANTERRE'S ANSWER

At last there came a letter to Molly from her mother.

"Carissima,—

"I thank you for your most kind intentions. I too have at times thought of seeing you. But I am now far too ill, and I have no attention to spare from my unceasing efforts to keep well. I can assure you that two doctors and two nurses spend their time and skill on the struggle. I may, they tell me, live many years yet if I am not troubled and disturbed. I had, by nature, strong maternal instincts; it was your father's knowledge of that side of my character which made his conduct in taking you from me almost criminal in its cruelty. You must have had a most tiresome childhood with his sister, and probably you gave her a great deal of trouble. Your letter affected me with several moments of suffocation, and the doctors and nurses are of opinion that I must not risk any more maternal emotions. My poor wants are now very expensive. I am obliged to have everything that is out of season, and one chef for my vegetables alone. Have you ever turned your attention to vegetable diet? Doctor Larrone, whom I thoroughly confide in, sees no reason why life should not be indefinitely prolonged if the right—absolutely the right—food is always given. I am sending you a little brochure he has written on the subject.

"I hope that your allowance is sufficient for your comfort. I should like you to have asparagus at every meal, and I trust, my dear child, that you will never become a dÉvote. It is an extraordinary waste of the tissues.

"As we are not likely to correspond again, I should like you to know that I have made a will bequeathing to you the fortune which was left me, as an act of reparation, by Sir David Bright.

"I wonder why an Englishman, Sir Edmund Grosse, has made so many attempts at seeing me? Do you know anything of him? I risk much in the effort to write this letter to assure you of my love.

"Your Devoted Mother.

"P.S.—There is no need to answer the question as to Sir Edmund Grosse."

Molly was so intensely disgusted with the miserable old woman's letter that her first inclination was to burn it at once. She was kneeling before the fire with that intention when Sir Edmund Grosse was announced. She thrust the paper into her pocket, and realised in a flash how astonishing it was that Sir Edmund should have tried to see Madame Danterre. The only explanation that occurred to her at the moment was that he had tried to see her mother because of his interest in herself. She did not know that he had not been in Florence since he had known her. But what could have started him in the notion that Miss Dexter was Madame Danterre's child? And did he know it for certain now? That was what she would like to find out.

Molly had on a pale green tea-gown, which fell into a succession of almost classic folds with each rapid characteristic movement. The charm of her face was enormously increased by its greater softness of expression. Although she could not help wishing to please him, even in a moment full of other emotion, she did not know how much there was to make her successful to-day. She did not realise her own physical and moral development during the past months.

Edmund's manner was unconsciously caressing. He had come, he told himself—and it was the third time he had called at the flat,—simply because he wanted to keep in touch, to get any information he could. And he had heard rumours from Florence that Madame Danterre was becoming steadily weaker and more unable to make any effort.

"A man told me the other day that this was the best-furnished flat in London, and, by Jove! I rather think he was right."

"I never believe in the man who told you things, he is far too apposite; I think his name is Harris."

Edmund smiled at the fire.

"Who was the attractive little priest I met here the other day?" he asked.

"Little! He is as tall as you are."

"Still, one thinks of him as un bon petit prÊtre, doesn't one? But who is he?"

"Father Molyneux."

"Not Groombridge's cousin?"

"Yes, the same."

"I wonder if he repents of his folly now? I didn't think he looked particularly cheerful!"

"Didn't you?" said Molly. "Well, I think he is the happiest person I know! But we never do agree about people, do we?"

"About a few we do, but it's much more amusing to talk about ourselves, isn't it?"

"Much more. What do you want me to tell you about myself this time?"

Edmund looked at her with sleepy eyes and perceived that something had changed. "I should like to know what you think about me?" he said gently.

"No, you wouldn't," said Molly, and she gave a tiny sigh. "No, for some reason or other you want to know something which I have settled to tell you."

Her manner alarmed and excited him. As a matter of honourable dealing he felt that he ought to give her pause. "Are you sure you are wise?" he said.

"I'm not sure, but that's my own affair, and it will be a relief. I would rather you knew what you want to know, though why you want to know"—her eyes were searching him—"I can't tell."

Sir Edmund Grosse almost told her that he did not want to know.

"You want to know for certain that my mother is living in Florence under the name of Madame Danterre—the Madame Danterre you have tried to see there. And further, you want to know how much I have ever seen of her."

"Oh, please!" cried Edmund, "I don't indeed wish you to tell me all this."

"You do, and so I shall answer the questions. I have never seen her in my life. But these last few weeks I have thought I ought to try, so I wrote and offered to go to her, and I have this evening had the first letter she has ever written to me. In this letter"—she drew it half out of her pocket—"she declines to see me, and she exhorts me to a vegetable diet."

There was a moment in which her face looked the embodiment of sarcasm, then something gentler came athwart it. He had never come so near to liking her before. He could no longer think of her as all the more dangerous on account of her attractions; she was a suffering, cruelly-treated woman. It is dangerous to see too much of one's enemies: Edmund was growing much softer.

"But why," she went on with quiet dignity, "did you try so hard to break through her seclusion?"

It was a dreadful question—a question impossible to answer. He was silent; then he said—

"Dear lady, I told you I did not want you to satisfy what you supposed to be my wish for knowledge, and I am very sorry that now, at least, I cannot tell you why I wished to see Madame Danterre."

Naturally, it never struck him for a moment that Molly might think it was for her sake that he had tried to see her mother, as he had not known of her existence when he was in Florence. But his reticence made her incline much more to that idea. She almost blushed in the firelight. Edmund was feeling baffled and sorry. If there were another will—and he still maintained that there was another—certainly Miss Dexter knew nothing about it. He had wronged her; and after all what reasonable grounds had there been for his suspicions as to her guilt?

"I suppose," he thought, "Rose is right, and will-hunting is demoralising, or 'not healthy,' as she calls it."

But he had been too long silent.

"It is very hard on you to get such a letter," he said, with a ring of true sympathy in his voice and more expression than usual in his face. "I wish I had not come in and disturbed you; I wish you had a woman friend here instead."

"I don't," said Molly quickly. "Don't go yet. I can say as little as I like with you, and then I'm going to church to hear the bon petit prÊtre preach."

"He will lure you to Rome."

"Perhaps."

"Well, I think there's a good deal to be said for Rome."

"Don't you mind people joining it?" she asked, a little eagerly.

"No, I like it better than Ritualism."

"But Lady Rose is a Ritualist."

"I believe you will find angels few and far between in any religion."

"It must be nice to be an angel," mused Molly.

He had risen to go; he thought he might still find Rose at home and he wanted to speak to her, yet he was in no hurry to be gone.

"Don't give me an excuse for compliments; I warn you, you will repent it if you do," he said warmly; and then, after a little hesitation which might well have been mistaken for an effort at self-command in a moment of emotion, he added in a low voice—

"May I come and see you again very soon?"

As Molly gave him her hand he looked at her with wistful apology for having wronged her in his thoughts, for having intruded into her secrets. There was more pity in his eyes than he knew at the moment. He bent his head after that, and with the foreign fashion he sometimes fell into, and which Molly had known before, gently kissed her hand. The quick kindly action was the expression of his wish to make amends.

Molly stood quite still after he had gone away, as motionless as a living figure could stand, her grey eyes dilated and full of light. Would he could have seen her! But if he had, would he have understood what love meant in a heart that had never before been opened by any great human affection? No love of father, mother, sister, or brother had ever laid a claim on Molly. The whole kingdom of her affections had been standing empty and ready, and now the hour of fulfilment was near.

"He will come again very soon," she whispered to herself. And then she put her hand to her lips and kissed it where it had been kissed a moment before, but with a devotion and reverence and gentleness that made the last kiss a tragic contrast.

Presently, happier than she had ever been in her life before, Molly went out to hear Mark Molyneux preach on sanctifying our common actions.

"No position is so hard" he said in his peroration, "no circumstances are so difficult, no duties so conflicting, no temptations so mighty, as not to be the means to lead us to God if we seek to do His will."

But the words seemed in no way appropriate to Molly's mind, which was wholly occupied in a wordless song of thanksgiving.

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CHAPTER XIX

LADY ROSE'S SCRUPLE

As Edmund Grosse was shown up-stairs to Lady Rose Bright, he passed a young clergyman coming down. He found Rose standing with a worried look in the middle of the room.

"Edmund! how nice," she said gently.

"What has that fellow been worrying you about?"

"It isn't his fault, poor man," said Rose, "only it's so sad. He has had at last to close his little orphanage. You see, we used to give him £100 a year, and after David died I had to write and tell him that I couldn't go on, and it has been a hard struggle for him since that. I don't think he meant it, but when he came and saw this house"—she waved her hands round the very striking furniture of the room—"I think he wondered, or perhaps it was my fancy. You see, Edmund, I don't know how it is, but I've overdrawn again. What do you think it can be? The housekeeping comes to so little; I have only four servants, and——"

She paused, and there were tears in her eyes. She was wondering where the orphans would go to. It was not like Rose to give way like this and to have out her troubles at once. The fact was that she was finding how much harder it is to help in good works without money than with. If she had started without money it would have been different, but to try to work with people who used to find her large subscriptions a very great help and now had to do without them, was depressing. She had to make constant efforts to believe that they were all just the same to her as they had been in the past.

"How much did you give that youth instead of the £100?"

"Only ten, Edmund." There was a note of pleading in her voice.

"And you will have dinner up here on a tray as there is no fire in the dining-room?"

"Well, what does it matter?"

"And how much will there be to eat on the tray?"

"Oh! much more than I can possibly eat."

"Because it will be some nasty warmed-up stuff washed down by tea. It's of no use trying to deceive me: I've heard that the cook is seventeen, and an orphan herself."

"But what will those other orphans have for dinner?"

"Now, Rose, will you listen to common sense. How many orphans has that sandy-faced cleric on his hands?"

"There were only four left."

"Then I'll get those four disposed of somehow, if you will do something I want you to do."

"What is it? But, Edmund, you know you have done too much for my poor works already; I can't let you."

"Never mind, if you will do what I want."

"What is it?"

"Come right away in the yacht, you and your mother, and we'll go wherever you like."

Joy sprang into her face, but then he saw doubt, and he knew with a deep pang what the doubt meant. He wished to move, oh! so carefully now, or he would lose all the ground he had lately gained.

"What scruples have you now?" he asked laughing. "What a genius you have for them! Look here, Rose, it's common sense; you want a change, you can let the house up to Easter. Besides, you know what it would do for your mother; see what she thinks."

"It's all so quick," gasped Rose, laughing.

"Well, then, don't settle at once if you like; but not one penny for those poor dear little orphans if you don't come. And now, I want to say something else quick, because the tray with the chops and the cheese and the tea will all be getting greasy if I don't get out of the way. Do you know I think I was very hard on that Miss Dexter. I remember I solemnly warned you not to have to do with her. You were quite right: it is not healthy to think so much of that will; it poisons the mind. I am quite sure that poor thing is not to blame."

His tone was curiously eager, it seemed to Rose; and then he began discussing Miss Dexter, and said he thought that at moments she was beautiful. Presently he remembered the tray that was coming, and saw that the hour was half-past seven, and hurried away. She fancied that she missed in his "Good-night" the sort of gentle affectionateness he had shown her so freely of late.

She went up to her room to prepare for the meal he had disparaged so much, looking tired. She smiled rather sadly when she had to own to herself that the tray of supper was almost exactly what Edmund had foretold. She dismissed it as soon as she could, and then drew a chair up to the fire and took up a book. But it soon dropped on to her knee. She had been trying not to give way to depression all that day. But it was very difficult. There seemed to be so little object in life. She felt as if everything had got into a fog; there was no one at home to whom her going and coming mattered any more than the meals mattered. And, meanwhile, she was being sucked into a world of committees and sub-committees. She had thought that, as she could no longer give money, she would give her time and her work; so, when asked, she had joined many things just because she was asked, and she was a little hazy as to the objects of some of them. Having been afraid that she would not have enough to do, she found now that she had already more than she could manage. And everything seemed so difficult. During the past week she had twice taken the wrong bus, and come home very wet and tired. Another day she had taken the wrong train when coming back from South London, and had found herself at Baker Street instead of Sloane Square. These things tried her beyond reason with the sense of loneliness, of incapacity, of uncertainty. Then she had thought that, with very quiet black clothes, she could go anywhere, but her mother had discovered that she sometimes came back from the Girls' Club in Bermondsey as late as ten o'clock at night, and there had been a fuss. Rose had forgotten the fact that she was very fair and very good to look at; she found, half-consciously, that her beauty had its drawbacks. There did not seem to be any reason why she should spare her strength in any way. So, a little wan and tremulous, she appeared at the early morning service, and then, after walking back in any weather, there was a dull little breakfast, and soon after that she got to work. Every post brought begging letters in crowds, and these hurt her dreadfully. It was her wish to live for God and the poor, and every day she had to write: "Lady Rose Bright much regrets that she is quite unable," etc., etc. Then, after those, she would begin another trial—begging letters to her rich friends to help her poor ones, or letters trying to get interest and influence. The difficulties and the confusion of life in the modern Babylon weighed on Rose in something of the same way that they tried Mark Molyneux. It seemed to her that it must be safe and right to be doing so many disagreeable things and to be very tired, too tired to enjoy pleasures when they came her way. Constantly, one person was trying to throw pleasures in her way; one person reminded old friends that Rose was in town; one person suggested that Rose Bright, although she did not go to parties, might come in to hear some great musician at a friend's house; one person wanted to know her opinion on the last book; one person tried to find out when he could take her anywhere in his motor. And this very morning Rose had asked herself if this one friend ought to be allowed to do all these things? Was she sure that she was quite fair to Edmund Grosse?

It had been a day of fears and scruples. She had been unnerved when the clergyman had called just to let her realise that the withdrawal of her subscription had, in the end, meant the collapse of his little orphanage; and when she was breaking down under this, Edmund had come in, and how soothed and comforted she had felt by his presence! And then the joy of his proposal as to the yacht! Her pulses beat with delight; she felt a positive hunger for blue skies, blue water, blue shores; a longing to get away from cares and muddles and badly-done jobs and being misunderstood. Was it not horribly selfish, horribly cowardly? Was it not the longing to stifle the sounds of pain, to shut her eyes to the gloom of the misery about her, to shut her mind to the effort to understand what was of practical good, and what was merely quack in the remedies offered? Still, she realised to-night that she must get some sort of rest; that part of all this gloom was physical. She would understand and feel things more rightly if she went away for a bit.

But could she, ought she, to go away on Edmund's yacht?

Could Rose honestly feel quite sure that all his kindness meant nothing more? She had never since she was eighteen, and wearing her first long skirt, heard from him any word that need mean more than cousinly affection. He had contrived after that Easter visit to Groombridge to make her feel that she had been foolish and self-conscious in trying not to be alone with him. For many months now she had felt absolutely at her ease in his company. It seemed to be only to-day that this thought had come back to trouble her. She did not want to be disturbed with such notions; they would spoil their friendship. And he could not be feeling like that; he was always so cool, so untroubled. Why to-night, just as he was waiting to know if she would come on the yacht or not, he had talked much more warmly of Miss Dexter than seemed quite natural! Faintly she felt that it might be good for him if they went on the yacht, she and her mother. They would be better for Edmund than some of the people he might otherwise ask; he was not always wise as to his lady friends. And it would be so good for Lady Charlton, and so good, too, for those four orphans. And where should they go? It did not matter much where they went if they only gained light and colour and rest. The artist was strong in Rose at that moment. She looked at one or two old guide-books till it was bed-time. Then, the last thing at night, a strange gust of thought came upon her just after her prayers.

Could she, would she, ever marry again? She knelt on at the priedieu with her fair head bowed, and then there came over her a strong sense of the impossibility of it. The shock she had had was too great, too lasting in its effects. She did not know it was that, she did not tell herself that once humiliated, once misled, she could not trust again. She did not say that the past married life which she had made so full of duty, so full of reverence as almost to deceive herself while she lived it, had been desecrated, polluted and had made her shrink unutterably from another married life.

A young widow, sometimes, when drawing near to a second marriage, suddenly realises it to be impossible because the past asserts its tyrannous claim upon her heart. What had appeared to be a dead past is found to be both alive and powerful. But with Rose it was not simply her heart; it was her nature as a woman that refused. That nature had been hurt to the very quick, humbled and brought low once. Surely it was enough!

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CHAPTER XX

THE HEIRESS OF MADAME DANTERRE

For about a week after the evening on which she had received her mother's letter and Edmund Grosse had been to see her, Molly Dexter stayed at home from four o'clock till seven o'clock and wore beautiful tea-gowns. She had a very small list of people to whom she was always at home written on a slate, but one by one they had been reduced in number. Now there were five—Father Molyneux, who never came except by appointment; Sir Edmund Grosse; and three ladies who happened to be abroad for the winter.

The week was from a Friday to a Thursday, and on the Thursday several things happened to Molly. It was a brilliant day, and although those evenings from four till seven when nobody came were sorely trying, she was in very good spirits. A friend coming out of church the day before had told her that she had met Sir Edmund Grosse at a country house.

"He said such pretty things about you," purred the speaker, a nice newly "come out" girl who admired Molly very much.

But the main point to Molly had been the fact that Edmund had been away from London. Surely he would come directly now! She seemed to hear, constantly ringing in her ears, the voice in which he had asked if he might "come again very soon."

Thursday had been a good day altogether, for Molly had skated at Prince's and come home with a beautiful complexion to be "At Home" to the privileged from four till seven. She got out of her motor, and was walking to the lift when it came whizzing down from above, and the little friend who had said the nice things yesterday stepped out of it, looking very bright.

"Oh, Miss Dexter," she said, "may I come up again and tell you my good news?" Molly took her kindly by the arm and drew her into the lift again, and they went up. But she hoped the girl would not stay. She wanted to be quite alone, so that if anybody came who mattered very much they would not be disturbed.

"Well, what's the good news?"

Molly looked brilliant as she stood smiling in the middle of the room.

"Well, it isn't a bit settled yet, but I met Sir Edmund Grosse at luncheon, and he asked me if mother would let me go on his yacht to Cairo. Lady Rose Bright is going and Lady Charlton, and he said they all wanted something very young indeed to go with them, so they thought I'd better come, and his nephew Jimmy, too. Wasn't it awfully kind of him?"

Molly turned and poked the fire.

"When do they go?" she asked.

"Sir Edmund starts to-morrow, but Lady Rose and Lady Charlton will follow in about ten days. They will join the yacht at Marseilles, and I should go with them. Do you think mother will let me go, Miss Dexter?"

Miss Dexter looked down.

"Why should your mother object?" she said.

"But it's so sudden."

"Yes, it's very sudden," said Molly, in a low voice.

"I can hardly keep quiet; I don't know how to get through the time till six o'clock, and mother can't be at home till then."

Molly turned back into the room; her face was very white. There were white dents in her nostrils, and there was a bitter smile on her lips. Whatever she might have said was stopped in the utterance. The parlourmaid had come into the room, and now, coming up to Molly, said in a low voice:

"There is a gentleman asking if Miss Dexter will see him on important business; he says he is a doctor, and that he has come from Italy."

Molly frowned.

"What is his name?"

"It sounded like Laccaroni, ma'am."

"Show him up."

"Well, I'm off," said the young visitor, and, still entirely absorbed in her own affairs, she took Molly's limp hand and left the room.

A spare man with a pale face and rather good eyes was announced as "Dr. Laccaroni." "Larrone," he corrected gently. He carried a small old tin despatch box, and looked extremely dusty.

"I am the bearer of sad tidings," he said in English, with a fair accent, in a dry staccato voice. "It was better not to telegraph, as I was to come at once."

"You attended my mother?"

"Yes, until two nights ago. That was the end."

"Did she suffer?"

"For a few hours, yes; and there was also some brain excitement—delirium. In an interval that appeared to be lucid (but I was not quite sure) she told me to come to you, mademoiselle, quite as soon as she was dead, and she gave me money and this little box to bring to you. She said more than once, 'It shall be her own affair.' The key is in this sealed envelope. Afterwards twice she spoke to me: 'Don't forget,' and then the rest was raving. But the last two hours were peace."

"And where is my mother to be buried?"

"Madame will be cremated, and her ashes placed in an urn in the garden, mademoiselle, in a fine mausoleum, with just her name, 'Justine,' and the dates—no more. Madame told me that these were her wishes."

"Do you know what is in this box?"

"Not at all, and I incline to think there may be nothing: the mind was quite confused. And yet I could only calm her by promising to come at once, and so I came, and if mademoiselle will permit I should like to retire to my hotel."

"Can I be of any use to you?"

"Not at all: the money for the journey was more than enough."

Molly was left alone, and she gave orders that no one, without exception, was to be admitted. Then she walked up and down the room in a condition of semi-conscious pain.

At first it seemed as if Dr. Larrone's intelligence had not reached her brain at all. The only clear thing in her mind at that moment was the thought that Edmund was going away at once with Lady Rose Bright. The disappointment was in proportion to the wild hopes of the last week, only Molly had not quite owned to herself how intensely she had looked forward to his next coming. It was true he might still come and see her before he started, but if he came it could not be what she had meant it to be. If he had meant what Molly dreamed of, could he have gone off suddenly on this yachting expedition? She knew the yachting was not thought of when she had seen him, for he told her then that he meant to stay in London for some weeks. But as her thoughts grew clearer, what was most horrible to Molly was a gradual dawning of common daylight into the romance she had been living in for months. For, looking back now, she could not feel sure that any of her views of Edmund's feelings towards herself had been true. It was a tearing at her heart's most precious feelings to be forced to common sense, to see the past in the matter-of-fact way in which it might appear to other people. And yet, Adela Delaport Green had expected him to propose even in the season, but then, what might not the Adela Delaport Greens of life suspect and expect without the slightest foundation? Could Molly herself say firmly and without delusion that Edmund had treated her badly? How she wished she could! She would rather think that he had been charmed away by hostile influence, or even that he had deliberately played with her than feel it all to have been her own vain fancy! It was agony to her to feel that she had without any excuse, set up an idol in her sacred places, and woven about him all the dreams and loves of her youth. It must be remembered not only that it was the first time that Molly had loved in the ordinary sense of the word, but it was absolutely the first time that she had ever felt any deep affection for any human being whatever. And now a great sense of abandonment was on her; the old feeling of isolation, of being cast out, that she had had all her life, was frightfully strong. Edmund had left her; he had deceived her, played with her, she told herself, deluded her; and now her mother's death brought home all the horror, the disgrace, which that mother's life had been for Molly. An outcast whom no one cared for, no one loved, no one wanted. The new gentleness of the past weeks, the new softness, all the high and sacred thoughts that had seemed to have taken possession of her inner life, were gone at this moment. Her feeling now was that, if she were made to suffer, she could at least make others suffer too.

She had thrown off her furs in walking up and down, and they had fallen on to the box which Dr. Larrone had brought. Presently they slipped to the floor, and showed the small, black tin despatch box.

Molly broke the seal of the envelope, took out the key, and opened the box, half mechanically and half as seeking a distraction.

Inside she found two or three packets of old yellow letters, a few faded photographs, and a tiny gold watch and chain; and underneath these things a large registered envelope addressed to Madame Danterre.

Molly was not acutely excited about this box. She knew that her mother's will would be at the lawyer's. She had no anxiety on this point, but there is always a strange thrill in touching such things as the dead have kept secret. Even if they have bid us do it, it seems too bold.

Molly shrank from what that box might contain, what history of the past it might have to tell, but she did not think it would touch her own life. Therefore, thinking more of her own sorrow than anything else, Molly drew two papers out of the registered envelope, and then shrank back helplessly in her chair. She had just seen that the larger of the two enclosures was a long letter beginning: "Dearest Rose." She hesitated, but only for a moment, and then went on reading.

"I trust and hope that if I die in to-morrow's battle this will reach you safely. I have really no fear whatever of the battle, and after it is over I shall have a good opportunity of putting this paper into a lawyer's hands at Capetown."

Then she hastily dropped the letter and took up a small paper that had been in the same envelope. A glance at this showed that it was the "last will and testament of Sir David Bright."

It was evidently not drawn up by a lawyer, but it seemed complete and had the two signatures of witnesses; Lord Groombridge and Sir Edmund Grosse were named as executors. It was dated on board ship only a few weeks before Sir David Bright died.

At first Molly was simply bewildered. She read, as if stupefied, the perfectly simple language in which Sir David had bequeathed all and everything he possessed to his wife, Lady Rose Bright, subject to an annual allowance of £1000 to Madame Danterre during her life-time. It was so brief and simple that, if Molly had not known how simple a will could be, she might have half doubted its legality. As it was she was not aware of the special facilities in the matter of will-making that are allowed to soldiers and sailors when on active service. The absolutely amazing thing was that the paper should have been in Madame Danterre's possession.

Molly turned to the letter, and read it with absorbed attention.

The General wrote on the eve of the battle, without the least anxiety as to the next day. But he already surmised the vast proportions that the war might assume, and he intended to send the enclosed will with this letter to the care of a lawyer in Capetown for fear of eventualities. Then, next day, as Molly knew, he had been killed.

But Molly did not know that to the brother officer who had been with him in his last moments Sir David had confided two plain envelopes, and had told him to send the first—a blue one—to his wife, and the second—a white one—to Madame Danterre, faintly murmuring the names and addresses in his dying voice. The same officer was himself killed a week later. If he had lived and had learned the disposal of Sir David's fortune, it might possibly have occurred to him that he had put the addresses on the wrong letters. But he was sure at the time that Sir David's last words had been: "Remember, the white one for my wife." And perhaps he was right, for it is not uncommon for a man even in the full possession of all his faculties (which Sir David was not) to make a mistake just because of his intense anxiety to avoid making it. As it was, knowing nothing whatever of the circumstances, the will and the letter seemed to Molly to come out of a mysterious void.

To any one with an unbiassed mind who was able to study it as a human document, the letter would have been pathetic enough. It was the revelation, the outpouring of what a man had suffered in silence for many long years. It seemed at moments hardly rational. The sort of unreasonable nervous terror in it was extraordinary. Molly read most of the real story in the letter, but not quite all. There had been a terrible sense of a spoilt life and of a horrible weakness always coming between him and happiness. The shadow of Madame Danterre had darkened his youth; a time of folly—and so little pleasure in that folly, he moaned—had been succeeded by an actual tyranny. The claim that she was his wife had begun early after her divorce from Mr. Dexter, and it seemed extraordinary that he had not denied it at once. David Bright had been taken ill with acute fever in Mrs. Dexter's house almost immediately after that event. Mrs. Dexter declared that he had gone through the form of marriage with her before witnesses, and she declared also that she had in her possession the certificate of marriage. The date she gave for the marriage was during the days when he had been down with the fever, and he never could remember what had happened.

"God knows," he wrote, "how I searched my memory hour by hour, day by day, but the blank was absolute. I don't to this hour know what passed during those days."

While still feeble from illness he had given her all the money he could spare, and for years the blackmail had continued. Then, at last, after he had been a year in England, the worm had turned.

"I dared her to do her worst. I declared, what I am absolutely convinced to have been the case, that the marriage certificate she had shown me was a forgery, and I concluded that if she proved the marriage by forgery and perjury, I should institute proceedings for divorce on the grounds of her subsequent life. I got no answer, and for three years there was total silence. Then came a letter from a friend saying that Madame Danterre, who had taken her maiden name, was dying and wished me to know that she forgave me." With this note had been sent to him a diamond ring he had given her in the first days of her influence over him. He sent it back, but months later he got it again, returned by the Post Office authorities, as no one of the name he had written to could be found.

Then came a solemn declaration that he had never doubted of Madame Danterre's death.

"I thought that to have spoilt my youth was enough; but she was yet to destroy my best years. Ah! Rose," he wrote, "if I had loved you less it would have been more bearable. I met you; I worshipped you; won you. Then, after a brief dream of joy, the cloud came down, and my evil genius was upon me. I don't think you were in love with me, my beloved, but it would have come even after you had found out what a commonplace fellow it was whom you thought a hero; it would have come. You must have loved me out of the full flow of your own nature if I had not been driven to cowardice and deception."

Evidently Madame Danterre had had a kind of almost uncanny power of terrifying the soldier. He had been a good man when she first met him, and he had been a good man after that short time of mad infatuation. He was by nature and training almost passionately respectable; he was at length happily married; but this horror of an evil incident in the past had got such a hold on his nerves that when he met Madame Danterre (whom he had believed to be dead) coming out of a theatre in London, the hero of the Victoria Cross, of three other campaigns, perhaps the bravest man in England, fainted when he saw her. Without doubt it was the publication of Mr. John Steele's will leaving his enormous fortune to Sir David Bright that had resuscitated Madame Danterre.

From the moment of that shock David Bright had probably never been entirely sane on the subject. The resurrection of Madame Danterre had seemed to him preternatural and fateful. The woman had become to him something more or something less than human, something impervious to attack that could not be dealt with in any ordinary way.

From that time there had grown up an invisible barrier between him and his wife. He found himself making silly excuses for being out at quite natural times. He found himself getting afraid of her, and building up defences, growing reserved and absurdly dignified, trying to cling to the pedestal of the elderly soldier as he could not be a companion.

Madame Danterre had gone back to Florence, fat with blackmail, and then had begun a steady course of persecution.

Step by step he had sunk lower down, knowing that he was weakening his own case most miserably if it should ever become public. Nothing satisfied her, although she received two thousand a year regularly, until the will was drawn up, which left everything to her except an allowance of £800 a year to Rose.

Once a year for three years Madame Danterre had visited London, and had generally contrived that Sir David should be conscious of the look in her astonishing eyes, which Sir Edmund had likened to extinct volcanoes, at some theatre, or in the park, once at least every season. Evidently that look had never failed. It touched the exposed nerve in his mind—exposed ever since the time of illness and strain when he was young and helpless in India. It was evident that he had felt that any agony was bearable to shield Rose from the suffering of a public scandal. If he could only have brought himself to consult one of the Murrays something might have been done. As it was, he had recourse to subterfuge. He assured Madame Danterre annually, in answer to her insisting on the point, that no other will had ever been signed by him, but he always carried a will with him ready to be signed. There was much of self-pity perhaps in the letter, there was the plaint of a wrecked life, but there was still more of real delicate feeling for Rose, of intense anxiety to shield her, of poignant regret for "what might have been" in their home life. The man had been of a wholesome nature; his great physical courage was part of a good fellow's construction. But he had been taught to worship a good name, an unsullied reputation, and to love things of good repute too much, perhaps, for the sake of their repute, as he could not venture to risk the shadow for the reality. The effect of reading Sir David's last letter to Rose on an unbiassed reader of a humane turn of mind would have been an intensity of pity, and a sigh at the sadness of life on this planet.

Molly was passionately biassed, and as much of Sir David's story as reached her through the letter was to her simply a sickening revelation from a cowardly traitor of his own treason through life, and even up to the hour of death. Her mother had been basely deceived; for his sake she had been divorced, and he had denied the marriage that followed. Of course, it was a marriage, or he would never have been so frightened. Then her mother, thus deserted, young and weak, had gone astray, and he had defended himself by threatening divorce if she proclaimed herself his wife. Every word of the history was interpreted on the same lines. And then, last of all, this will was sent to her mother. Was it a tardy repentance? Had he, perhaps when too weak for more, asked some one to send it to Madame Danterre that she might destroy it? If so, why had she not destroyed it? Why, if it might honourably have been destroyed, send to Molly now a will that, if proved, would make her an absolute pauper? In plain figures Molly's fortune could not be less than £20,000 a year if that paper did not exist, and would be under £80 a year if it were valid.

Molly next seized on one of the old packets of letters in trembling hope of some further light being thrown on the situation, but in them was evidence impossible to deny that her mother had invented the whole story of the marriage. Why Madame Danterre had not destroyed these letters was a further mystery, except that, time after time, it has been proved that people have carefully preserved evidence of their own crimes. Fighting against it, almost crying out in agonised protest, Molly was forced to realise the slow persevering cunning and unflinching cruelty with which her mother had pursued her victim. It was an ugly story for any girl to read if the woman had had no connection with her. It seemed to cut away from Molly all shreds of self-respect as she read it. She felt that the daughter of such a woman must have a heritage of evil in her nature.

The packet of old letters finished, there was yet something more to find. Next came a packet of prescriptions and some receipts from shops. Under these were the faded photographs of several men and women of whom she knew nothing. Lastly, there was half a letter written to Molly dated in August and left unfinished and without a signature:

"Carissima:

"I am far from well, but I believe Dr. Larrone has found out the cause and will soon put things right again. If you ever hear anything about me from Dr. Larrone you can put entire confidence in him. I have found out now why Sir Edmund Grosse has tried to see me. He is possessed with the absurd idea that I have no right to Sir David Bright's fortune, although he does not venture to call in question the validity of the will which left that fortune to me. Dr. Larrone has certain proof that Grosse employs a detective here to watch this house. I have also heard that he is in love with poor David's widow, and hence I suppose this trop de zÈle on her behalf. As he cannot get at me he is likely to try to become intimate with you, so I warn you to avoid him now and in future."

That was all.

Molly sat staring vacantly in front of her, almost unconscious of her surroundings from the intensity of pain. Each item in the horror of the situation told on her separately, but in no sequence—with no coherence. Shame, "hopes early blighted, love scorned," kindness proved treason, the prospect of complete and dishonourable poverty, a poverty which would enrich her foes. And all this was mixed in her mind with the dreadful words from the old letters that seemed to be shouted at her.

Miss Carew, coming in at dinner-time, was horror-struck by what she saw. Molly was sitting on the floor surrounded by letters and papers, moaning and biting her hand. The gong sounded, the parlourmaid announced dinner, and Molly gathered up her papers, locked them in the box, fastened the key on to her chain—all in complete silence—and got up from the floor. She then walked straight into the dining-room in her large hat and outdoor clothes without speaking.

And without a word the terrified Miss Carew went with her, and tried to eat her dinner.

Molly ate a very little of each thing that was offered to her, taking a few mouthfuls voraciously, and then quite suddenly, as she was offered a dish of forced asparagus, she went into peal after peal of ringing, resounding laughter. "I should like you to have asparagus at every meal," she said, and then again came peal after peal—each a quite distinct sound. It was dreadful to hear, and Miss Carew and the servant were terrified. It was the laughter, not of a maniac, not of pure unreasoning hysteria, not quite of a lost soul. It suggested these elements, perhaps, but it was chiefly a nervous convulsion at an overpowering perception of the irony in the heart of things.

The hysterical fit lasted long enough for Miss Carew to insist on a doctor, and Molly did not resist. When he came she implored him to give her a strong sleeping-draught. She kept Miss Carew and the maid fussing about her, in a terror of being alone, until the draught was at last sent in by a dilatory chemist. She then hurried them away, drank the medicine, and set herself to go to sleep. The draught acted soon, as Miss Carew learnt by listening at the door and hearing the deep, regular breathing. But the effects passed off, and Molly sat up absolutely awake at one o'clock in the morning. She lay down again and tried to force herself to sleep by sheer will power, but she soon realised the awful impotence of desire in forcing sleep.

At last, horror of her own intensely alert faculties, blinded by darkness, made her turn up the light. Instantly the sight of the familiar room seemed unbearable, and she turned it down again. But again the darkness was quite intolerable, and seemed to have a hideous life of its own which held in it presences of evil. At one moment she breathed in the air of the winter's night, shivering with cold; at the next she was stifled for want of breath. So the light by the bed was turned on again, and to get a little further from it Molly got up and slowly and carefully put on her stockings and fur slippers, then opened a cupboard and took out a magnificent fur cloak and wrapped herself in it. Then suddenly one aspect of the position became concrete to her imagination. She knew that the cloak was bought with ill-gotten money. Her enormous allowance after she came of age, even the expenses of her education—Miss Carew's salary among other things—had been won by fraud. And now, oh! why, why had not her miserable mother spoken the truth when she got the will, or why had she not destroyed it? Why had she left it to Molly to put right all this long, long imposture, and to reveal to the world the story of her mother's crime? It seemed to Molly as if she were looking on at some other girl's life, and as if she were considering it from an external point of view. The sleeping-draught had, no doubt, excited still further the terrible agitation of her nerves, and ideas came to her as if they had no connection with her own personality.

Wicked old woman, dying in Florence! How cruel those words were: "Let it be her own affair"! Her last act to send those papers to the poor girl she had deserted as a baby, and refused even to see as a woman. "Let it be her own affair." Her own affair to choose actual poverty and a terrible publicity as to the past instead of a great fortune and silence as to her mother's guilt. "Let it be her own affair" to enrich her enemies, to give a fortune to the woman who would scorn her! Would the man who had pretended to be her friend, and who had been pursuing her mother with detectives all the time, would he some day talk pityingly of her with his wife, and say she "had really behaved very well, poor thing"?

Suddenly Molly stopped, full of horror at a new thought. Oh! she must make things safe and sure, or—good God!—what might not her mother's daughter be tempted to do? A deep blush spread over her face and neck. She moved hastily to the door, and in a moment she was in Miss Carew's room.

"I want to speak to you; I want to tell you something," said Molly, turning up the electric light as she spoke.

Miss Carew was startled out of a sweet sleep, and her first thought was the one which haunted her whenever she was awakened at an untimely hour. Her carefully-curled fringe was lying in the dressing-table drawer, and Molly had never seen her without it!

"Yes, yes; in one moment," she answered fussily. "I will come to your room in one minute."

Molly felt checked, and there had been something strange and unfamiliar in Miss Carew's face. Suddenly she felt what it would be to tell Miss Carew the truth—Miss Carew, who was now her dependent, receiving from her £100 a year, would be shocked and startled out of her senses, and might not take these horrible revelations at all kindly. It would, anyhow, be such a reversal of their mutual positions as Molly could not face. And by the time the chestnut hair tinged with grey had been pinned a little crooked on Miss Carew's head, and she had knocked timidly at Molly's door, she was startled and offended by the impatient, overbearing tone of the voice that asked her to "go back to bed and not to bother; it was nothing that mattered."

The night had got on further than Molly knew by that time, and she was relieved to hear it strike four o'clock. She was astonished at noticing that, while she had been walking up and down, up and down her room, she had never heard the clock strike two or three. The fact of having spoken to Miss Carew had brought her for the moment out of the inferno of the last few hours, and the time from four o'clock to six was less utterly miserable because worse had gone before it.

At six she called the housemaid, and kept her fussing about the room, lighting the fire, and getting tea, so as not to be alone again. At eight o'clock she sent for coffee and eggs, and the coffee had to be made twice before she was satisfied with it. Then she suddenly said she felt much better, and, having dressed much more quickly than usual, she went out.

Molly had determined to confide the position to Father Molyneux. When she got to the church in Kensington it was only to find that Father Molyneux had gone away for some days.

That evening the doctor was again summoned, and told Miss Carew that he had now no doubt that Miss Dexter was suffering from influenza, with acute cerebral excitement, and the case was decidedly anxious.

"He might have found out that it was influenza last night," said Miss Carew indignantly, "and I even told him the housemaid had just had influenza! Molly simply caught it from her, as I always thought she would."

---

rew back and pulled down the blinds.

It was not the first time she had put off her black, for, in the Paris heat, it had become intolerable, and she had certainly enjoyed her visit to an inexpensive but excellent dressmaker, who had produced this grey gown with all its determined simplicity.

Rose looked round at the drawing-room now. The furniture in holland covers was stacked in the middle of the room; the pictures were wrapped in brown paper with large and rather unnecessary white labels printed with "Glass" in red letters. The fire-irons were dressed in something that looked like Jaeger and the tassels of the blinds hung in yellow cambric bags. Rose smiled a little as she recalled how strange and strong an impression a room in such a state had made on her in her childhood. The drawing-room in her London home had seemed incomparably more attractive then than at any other time. Lady Charlton had once brought Rose up to see a dentist on a bright, autumn day. She had not been much hurt, but it was a great comfort when the visit was over. She and her mother had dinner on two large mutton chops, and some apricot tartlets from a pastry-cook, things ordered by Lady Charlton with a view to giving as little trouble as possible to two able-bodied women who were living on board wages, and both of whom were, in private life, excellent cooks. Lady Charlton was anxious, too, not to give trouble by sending messages, having quite forgotten that there was also a boy who lived in the house. So, after lunch, she had gone out to find a cab for herself, and had left Rose to rest with a book on the big morocco sofa in the dining-room.

Rose had found her way to the drawing-room, and she could see now the half-open shutter and the rich light of the autumn sun turning all the dust of the air to gold in one big shaft of light. The child had never seen the house when the family was away before, and with awestruck, mysterious joy, she had lifted corners of covers and peered under chairs and recognised legs of tables and footstools. Then she had stood up and taken a comprehensive view of the whole of this world of mountains and valleys, precipices and familiar little home corners, all covered in brown holland, like sand instead of grass, all golden lights and soft shadows.

What had there been so very exciting in it—an excitement she could still recall as keenly now? Was it the greatness of the revolution, or surprise at the new order of things? It was such a startling interruption of all the usual relations between the furniture of the house and its human beings. A great London house wrapped up in the old way spoke more of the old order its influence, its importance, than did the house when inhabited, and out of its curl papers. Nothing could speak more of law and order and care, and the "proper" condition of things, and the self-respect of housemaids, the passing effectiveness of sweeps, and the unobtrusive attentiveness of carpenters! But to the child there had been a glorious sense of loneliness and licence as she danced up and down the broad vacant spaces and jumped over the rolls of Turkey carpets.

Rose envied that child now, with an envy that she hoped was not bitter. It is not because we knew no sorrows in our childhood that we would fain recall it. It is because we now so seldom know one whole hour of its licensed freedom, its absolute liberty in spite of bonds.

A loud door-bell, as it seemed to Rose, sounded through the house as she closed the shutter she had opened when she came in. She knew whose ring it must be, and came quietly downstairs with a little frown.

Edmund Grosse had been shown into the library. The room looked east, and was now deliciously cool after the street. The dark blinds were half-way down, and a little pretence at a breeze was coming in over the burnt turf of the back garden.

Edmund's manner as he met her was as usual, but tinged perhaps with a little irony—very little, but just a flavour of it mingled with the immense friendliness and the wish to serve and help her.

Rose was, to his surprise, almost shy as she came into the room, but in another moment she was herself.

"Mamma has borne the journey splendidly. I've had an excellent account in a long telegram this morning."

But while she told him of their journey and of their life in Paris, a rather piteous look came into the blue eyes. Was she not to hear any of Edmund's own news? Was she not to be allowed to show any sympathy? She might not say how she had been thinking of him, dreaming of how nobly he had met his troubles, praying for him in Notre Dame des Victories. She saw at once that she must not; there was something changed. It was too odd, but she was afraid of him. She shook herself and determined not to be silly. She would venture to say what she wished.

"Are things——" she began, but her voice trembled a little as, raising her head, she saw that he was watching her. "Are things as bad as you feared?"

He at once looked out of the window.

"Quite as bad as possible. I am just holding out till I can get some work. Long ago, soon after I left the Foreign Office, I was asked to do some informal work in Egypt; they wanted a semi-official go-between for a time. I wish I had not refused then; I have been an ass throughout. If I had even done occasional jobs they would have had some excuses for putting me in somewhere now on the ground of my having had experience. I have just written two articles on an Indian question, for I know that part of the world as well as anybody over here, and they may lead to something. Meanwhile, I am very well, so don't waste sympathy on me, I am lodging with the Tarts, where everything is in apple-pie order."

"Oh, I am glad you are with those nice Tarts!" cried Rose, with genuine womanly relief, that in another class of life would have found form and expression in some such remark as that she knew Mary Tart would keep things clean and comfortable, and would do the airing thoroughly.

Edmund's voice alone had made sympathy impossible, but he was a little annoyed at the cheerful tone of Rose's words about the Tarts. It was unlikely that she could have satisfied him in any way by speech or by silence as to his own affairs. But why was she so very well dressed? He had got so accustomed to her in soft, shabby black that he was not sure if he liked this Paris frock; the simplicity of it was too clever.

There was silence, and Rose rearranged a bowl of roses her sister had sent her from the country. She chose out a copper-coloured bud and held it towards him, and a certain pleading would creep into her manner as she did so.

Edmund smiled. She was really always the same quite hopeless mixture of soft and hard elements.

"Have you seen Mr. Murray, Junior?" he asked.

"Yes; he came this morning, and I can't conceive what to do. At last I got so dazed with thinking that this afternoon I have tried to forget all about it."

"That will hardly get things settled," said Edmund, rather drily.

Tears came into her eyes, and were forced back by an effort of will. Then she told him quite quietly of Nurse Edith's evidence.

"You mean," he explained, "that there is a copy of the real will leaving everything to you. I can hardly believe it. In fact, I find it harder to believe than when I first guessed at the truth. I suppose it is an effect on the nerves, but now that we are actually proved right I am simply bewildered. It seems almost too good to be true."

Rose was also, it seemed, more dazed than triumphant. He felt it very strange that she had not told him the great news as soon as he came into the room.

"What made you say that you could not conceive what to do? There can be no doubt now." He spoke quickly and incisively.

"I cannot see," she said at last, "what is right. Mr. Murray is very positive, and absolutely insists that it is my duty to allow the thing to go on."

"Of course," Edmund interjected.

"But then, if he is mistaken! He really believes that Miss Dexter received the will from Dr. Larrone and has suppressed it."

Edmund got up suddenly, and looked down on her with what she felt to be a stern attention.

"And that," she concluded, looking bravely into the grave eyes bent on her, "I absolutely decline to believe!"

"Of course," said Grosse abruptly, "it's out of the question. It's just like a solicitor—fits his puzzle neatly together and is quite satisfied without seeing the gross absurdity of supposing that such a girl could carry on a huge fraud. A perfectly innocent, fresh, candid girl, brought up in a respectable English country house—the thing is ridiculous!"

He spoke with great feeling; he was more moved than she had seen him for a long time past, perhaps that was why she felt her own enthusiasm for Molly's innocence just a little damped. He sat down again as abruptly as he had risen.

"But it would be madness to drop the whole affair. This evidence of Nurse Edith's is really conclusive; and the only thing I can see to be said on the other side would be that David might have sent the will to Madame Danterre to give her the option of destroying it. But there is just another possibility, which Murray won't even consider, that Larrone destroyed the will on the journey."

"Do you know," said Rose, with a smile, "I believe it's conceivable that it is in the box, but that she has never opened the box at all! I believe a girl might shrink so much from reading that woman's papers that she might not even open the box."

"No one but a woman would have thought of such a possibility, but I daresay you are right."

He looked at her more gently, with more pleasure, and she instantly felt brighter.

"Then don't you think it would be possible to get at some plan, some arrangement with her? It seems to me," she went on earnestly, "that we ought to try to do it privately. Perhaps we might offer her the allowance that would have been made to her mother. If she could be convinced herself that the fortune is not really hers she might give it up without all the horrid shame and publicity of a trial."

"Yes, but the scandal was public, and you have to think of David's good name."

"Yes; but then you see, Edmund, the true will would be proved publicly, and the explanation of the delay would be that it had not been found before."

"She would have to expose her wretched mother."

"Not more than the trial would expose her; whether we won the case or lost it, Madame Danterre must be exposed. But if I am right how could it be done?"

"I think I had better do it myself," said Edmund. "I could see Miss Dexter. I really think I could do it, feeling my way, of course."

Rose did not answer. She locked her fingers tightly together as something inarticulate and shapeless struggled in her mind and in her heart. She had no right, no claim, she thought earnestly, trying to keep calm and at peace in her innermost soul. But she did not then or afterwards allow to herself what she meant by "right" or by "claim."

She looked up a moment later with a bright smile.

"Yes," she said, "you would be the best—far the best. Miss Dexter would feel more at her ease with you than with me or anyone I can think of."

"Of course, I must consult Murray first," said Edmund, absorbed in the thought of the proposed interview. "I ought to go now; I have an appointment at the Foreign Office—probably as futile as any of my efforts hitherto when looking for work."

He spoke the last words rather to himself than to his cousin, and then left her alone. He did not question as he walked through the streets across the park whether he had been as full of sympathy to Rose as he had ever been; he was far too much accustomed to his own constancy to question it now. But somehow his consciousness of Rose's presence had not been as apparent as usual. No half ironic, half tender comments on her attitude at this crisis had escaped him. He had been more business-like than usual, and, man-like, he did not know it.

---

CHAPTER XXXIV

THE WRATH OF A FRIEND

Canon Nicholls had had a hard fight with a naturally hot temper, and his servant would have given him a very fair character on that point if he had been applied to. But there came a stifling July morning when nothing could please him. He had been out to dinner the night before, and it was the man's opinion that he had "eaten something too good for him." He had been to church early, and had come back without the light in his face he usually brought with him, as if the radiance from the sanctuary lamp loved to linger on the blind face. He was difficult all the rest of the morning, and the kind, patient woman who read aloud to him and wrote his letters became nervous and diffident, thinking it was her own fault.

In the afternoon he usually took a stroll with his servant for guide, and then had a doze, after which he went to Benediction at a neighbouring convent. But to-day he settled into his arm-chair, and said he meant to stay there, and that he wanted nothing, and (with more emphasis) nobody.

He was, in truth, greatly disturbed in his mind. He had heard things he did not like to hear of Mark Molyneux. He had been quite prepared for some jealousy and some criticism of the young man he loved. Nobody charms everybody, and if anybody charms many bodies, then the rest of the bodies, who are not charmed, become surprised and critical, if not hostile. It is so among all sets of human beings: the Canon was no acrid critic of religious persons, only he had always found them to be quite human.

The immediate cause of the acute trouble the Canon was going through to-day had been a visit of the day before from Mrs. Delaport Green. Adela, who, as he had once told Mark, sometimes looked in for a few minutes, was under the impression that she very often called on the old blind priest, and often mentioned her little attempts to cheer him up with great complacence, especially to her Roman Catholic friends, as if she were a constant ray of light in his darkness. She had not seen him since her return from Cairo, but her first words were:

"I was so sorry not to be able to come last week," spoken with the air of a weekly visitor.

But the Canon thought it so kind of her to come at all that he was no critic of details in her regard.

She had cantered with a light hand over all sorts of subjects,—Westminster Cathedral, the reunion of Churches, her own Catholic tendencies, her charities, the newest play (which she described well), and her anxiety because her husband ate too much. Then, at last, she lighted on Mark's sermons.

Canon Nicholls spoke with reserve of Mark; he was shy of betraying his own affection for him.

"Yes; it is young eloquence, fresh and quite genuine," he said in response to Adela's enthusiasm.

"It sounds so very real," said Adela, with a sigh. "One couldn't imagine, you know, that he could have any doubts, or that he could be sorry, or disappointed, or anything of that sort—and yet——"

"And yet, what?" asked the Canon.

"And yet—well, I know I am foolish, and I do idealise people and make up heroes—I know I do! It is such a pleasure to admire people, isn't it? And after he gave up being heir to Groombridge Castle! I was staying there when poor, dear Lord Groombridge got the news of his ordination, and it was all so sad and so beautiful, and now I can't bear to think that Father Molyneux is sorry already that he gave it all up."

"Sorry that he gave it up—!"

Adela gave a little jump in her chair. It made her so nervous to see a blind man excited. But curiosity was strong within her.

"I am afraid it is quite true; a friend of mine who knows him quite well, told me."

"Told you what?"

"That he was unhappy, and has doubts or troubles of some kind. I didn't understand what exactly, but she knows that he will give it all up—the vows and all that, I mean—if——"

"If what?"

Adela was not really wanting in courage.

"If a certain very rich woman would marry him. It seems such a come-down, so very dull and dreadful, doesn't it?"

"You know all that's a lie!"

"Well, it was all told to me."

"But you knew there was not a word of truth in it, only you wanted to see how I would take it. And I thought you were a kind-hearted woman! How blind I am!"

Adela was galled to the quick. A quarrel, a scolding, would have been tolerable, and perhaps exciting, but this naÏve disappointment in herself, this judgment from the man to whom she had been so good, was too much!

"I thought it was much more kind to let you know what everybody is saying, that you might help him. I am very sorry I have made a mistake, and that I must be going now. It is much later than I thought."

"Must you?" There was the faintest sarcasm in the very polite tone of the Canon's voice.

Nor had this conversation been all; for out at dinner that night the Canon had been worried with much the same story from a totally different quarter. It was after the ladies had left the dining-room, and the gossip had been rougher.

He gave all his thoughts to brooding over the matter next day. Mark could not have managed well—must have done or said something stupid, and made enemies, he reflected gloomily.

Canon Nicholls had been young once, and almost as popular a preacher as Mark, and he did not underrate the difficulties. But it was his firm persuasion that, with tact and common-sense they were by no means insurmountable. What really distressed the old man was that perhaps Mark had been right in thinking that he personally could not surmount them. And it was Canon Nicholls's doing that he was not by this time a novice in a Carthusian Monastery! Therefore the Canon's soul was heavy with anxiety as to whether he had made a great mistake.

"He must be a fool, or else it's just possible that he has got an uncommonly clever enemy." The last thought revived the old man a little, and he received his tea without any of the demonstrations of disgust he had shown on drinking his coffee at breakfast.

Presently the subject of his thoughts came upon the scene, and the visitor saw at once that his old friend was unlike himself. The Canon was exceedingly alert from the moment Mark came into the room, trying to catch up the faintest indication, in his voice or movements, as to whether he were in good or low spirits; he almost thought he heard a quick sigh as Mark sat down. He could not see that Mark was undeniably thinner and paler than he had been only a few weeks ago, and that his eyes looked even more bright and keen in consequence.

"Take some tea," said the Canon; and then, when he had given him time to drink his tea, he turned on him abruptly.

"I've heard some lies about you, and I'm going to tell you what they are."

"Perhaps it's better to be ignorant."

"No, it's not, now why did you incite young men to Socialism in South London?"

"Good heavens!" said Mark. "Well, you shall catch it for that. I will read you every word of that paper; not a line of anything else shall you hear till you've been obliged to give your 'nihil obstat' to 'True and False Socialism,' by your humble servant."

"But that's not the worst that's said of you."

"Oh, no! I know that."

Perhaps if Canon Nicholls could have seen the strained look on the young face he could have understood. As it was, he believed him to be taking the matter too lightly.

"When I was young," he said, "I thought it my own fault if I made enemies, and you know where there is a great deal of smoke there has generally been some fire."

"Then you mean to say," answered Mark, in a voice that was hard from the effort at self-control, "that you think it is my fault that lies are told against me, although you do call them lies?"

"Frankly, I think you must have been careless," said the old man, leaning forward and grasping the arm of his chair. "I think you must have had too much disregard for appearances."

He paused, and there was a silence of several moments, while the ticking of the clock was quite loud in the little room.

"Unless this is the doing of an enemy," said Canon Nicholls.

"I do not know that it is an enemy," said Mark, "but I know there is some one who is excessively angry and excessively afraid because I know a secret of great importance."

"And that person is a woman, I suppose?"

"I cannot answer that," said Mark. He was standing now with one elbow on the end of the chimney-piece, and his head resting on his right hand, looking down at the worn rug at his feet.

"Will you tell me exactly what it is they do say?" said Mark, still speaking with an effort at cheerfulness that aggravated the nervous state of Canon Nicholls.

And there followed another silence, during which Father Molyneux realised to himself with fear and almost horror that he was nearly having a quarrel with the friend he loved so much, and on whose kindness he had always counted, and whose wisdom had so often been his guide. He was suffering already almost more than he owned to himself, and he had come into the room of the holy, blind old man as to a place of refuge. It gave him a sick feeling of misery and helplessness that there seemed in the midst of his other troubles the possibility of a quarrel with Canon Nicholls. This at least he must prevent; and so, leaning forward, he said very gently:

"Do tell me a little bit more of what you mean? I know you are speaking as my friend, and, believe me, I am not ungrateful. I am sure there is a definite story against me. I wish you would call a spade a spade quite openly."

"They have got hold of a story that you are tired of poverty and the priesthood, and so on, and that you will give it all up if you can persuade a certain very rich woman to marry you."

"That is definite enough." Mark was struggling to speak without bitterness. "And, for a moment, you thought——?" he could not finish the sentence.

"Good God! not for a fraction of a second. How can you?"

"Oh! forgive me, forgive me; I didn't mean it."

Mark knelt down by the chair, tears were flowing from the blind eyes. Canon Nicholls belonged to a generation whose emotions were kept under stern control; the tears would have come more naturally from Mark. There was a strange contrast between the academic figure of the old man in its reserved and negative bearing, seriously annoyed with himself for betraying the suffering he was enduring, and yet unable to check the flow of tears, and the eager, unreserved, sympathetic attitude of the younger man. After a few moments of silence Mark rose and began to speak in low, quick accents——

"It is a secret which is doing infinite harm to a soul made for good things, and yet it is a secret which I can tell no one, not even you—at least, so I am convinced. But it is a secret by which people are suffering. The result is that I cannot deal with this calumny as I should deal with it if I were free; and I believe that I have not got to the worst of it yet. I see what it must lead to."

He looked down wistfully for a moment, and then went on:

"Last year I had a dream that was full of joy and peace, and that seemed to me God's Will; but, through you, I came to see that I must give it up, and I threw myself into the life here with all my heart. And now, just when I had begun to feel that I was really doing a little good, now that I have got friends among the poor whom I love to see and help, I shall be sent away more or less under a cloud. I shall lose friends whom I love, and whom it had seemed to me that I was called to help even at the risk of my own soul. However, there it is. If I am not to be a Carthusian, if I am not to work for sinners in London, I suppose some other sphere of action will be found for me. I must leave it to Him Who knows best."

Canon Nicholls bent forward, and held out his long, white hands with an eager gesture, as though he were wrestling with his infirmity in his great longing to gain an outlook which would enable him to read a little further into the souls of men.

"I cannot explain more definitely. It is a case of fighting for a soul, or rather fighting with a soul against the devil in a terrible crisis. I don't know what to compare it to. Perhaps it is like performing a surgical operation while the patient is scratching your eyes out. If I can leave my own point of view out of sight for the present I can be of use, but I must let the scratching out of my eyes go on."

Mark went to the church early that evening, as it was his turn to be in the confessional. One or two people came to confession, and then the church seemed to be empty. He knelt down to his prayers and soon became absorbed. To-night he was oppressed in a new way by the sins, the temptations, and the unutterable weakness of man; his failures; his uselessness. Nothing else in Art had ever impressed him so much as the figure of Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. That beautiful figure, with all the freshness of its primal grace, stretching out its arms from a new-born world towards the infinite Creator, had expressed, with extraordinary pathos, the weakness, the failure, almost the non-existence of what is finite. "I Am Who Am" thundered Almighty Power, and how little, how helpless, was man!

And then, as Mark, weary with the misery of human life, almost repined at the littleness of it all, he felt rebuked. Could anything be little that was so loved of God? If the primal truth, if Purity Itself and Love Itself could make so amazing a courtship of the human soul, how dared anyone despise what was so honoured of the King? No, under all the self-seeking, the impure motives, the horrid cruelties of life, he must never lose sight of the delicate loveliness, the pathetic aspiration, the exquisite powers of love that are never completely extinguished. He must see with God's eyes, if he were to do God's work. And in the thought that it was, after all, God's work and not his own, Mark found comfort. He had come into the church feeling the burden on his shoulders very hard to bear, and now he made the discovery that it was not he who was carrying it at all; he only appeared to have it laid upon him while Another bore it for him.

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CHAPTER XXXV

THE CONDEMNATION OF MARK

Two excellent and cheerful old persons were engaged in conversation on the subject of Father Molyneux. The Vicar-General of the diocese, a Monsignor of the higher, or pontifical rank, had called to see the Rector of Mark's church, and had already rapidly discussed other matters of varying importance when he said, leaning back in an old and faded leather chair:

"What's all this about young Molyneux?"

Both men were fairly advanced in years and old for their age, for they had both worked hard and constantly for many years on the mission. They had to be up early and to bed late, with the short night frequently interrupted by sick calls, and on a Sunday morning they had always fasted till one o'clock, and usually preached two or even three times on the same day. They had never known for very many years what it was to be without serious anxiety on the matter of finance. Their lives had been models of amazing regularity and self-control. Their recreations consisted chiefly in dining with each other at mid-day on Mondays, and spending the afternoon with whist and music. Probably, too, they had dined with a leading parishioner once or twice in the week.

In politics they were mildly Liberal, more warmly Home Rulers, but they put above all the interests of the Church. They were, too, fierce partisans on the controversies about Church music, and had a zeal for the beauty and order of their respective churches that was admirable in its minuteness and its perseverance. They both had a large circle of friends with whom they rejoiced at annual festivities at their Colleges, and with whom they habitually and freely censured their immediate authorities. Those who were warmest in their devotion to the Vatican were often the most inclined to make a scapegoat of a mere bishop. But now one of these two old friends had been made Vicar-General of the diocese, and it was likely that the Rector would speak to him with less than his usual freedom. Lastly, both men had that air of complete knowledge of life which comes with the habits of a circle of people who know each other intimately. And neither of them realised in the least that the minds of the educated laity were a shut book to them.

"Well," said the Rector, and after puffing at his pipe he went on, "we can hardly get into the church for the crowd, and I am going to put up a notice to ask ladies to wear small hats—toques; isn't that what they call them?"

"I heard him once," said the Vicar-General, "and, to tell the truth, it didn't seem up to much."

"Words," said the Rector; "it's Oxford all over. There must be a new word for everything. Why, he preached on Our Lady the other day, and I declare I don't think there were three sentences I'd ever heard before! And on Our Lady, too! A man must be gone on novelty who wants to find anything new to say about Our Lady."

"It doesn't warm me up a bit, that sort of thing," said the Vicar-General. "I like to hear the things I've heard all my life."

"Of course," responded the other, "but you won't get that from our popular preachers, I can tell you," and he laughed with some sarcasm.

"Is he making converts?"

"Too many, far too many; that's just what I complain of. We shall have a nice name for relapses here if it goes on like this."

Both men paused.

"You've nothing more to complain of?" asked the Monsignor.

"No—no—" The second "no" was drawn out to its full length. "Of course, he's unpunctual, and he's often late for dinner. I don't know where he gets his dinner at all sometimes. And there are always ladies coming to see him. If there are two in the parlour and another in the dining-room, and a young man on the stairs, it's for ever Father Molyneux they are asking for. And, of course, he has too much money given him for the poor, and we have double the beggars we had last year."

"But," said the other, "you know there's more being said than all that. There's an unpleasant story, and it's about that I want to ask you. Well—the same sort of thing as poor Nobbs; you'll remember Nobbs?"

"Remember Nobbs! Why, I was curate with him when I first left the seminary. Now, there was a preacher, if you like! But it turned his head completely. Poor, wretched Nobbs! It's a dangerous thing to preach too well, I'm certain of that."

"Well, it's a danger you and I have been spared," said the Monsignor, and they both laughed heartily.

Then they got back to the point.

"Well," said the Rector, "there's a lady comes here sometimes who spoke to me about this the other day. It seems she went to see John Nicholls, and the poor old blind fellow bit her head off, but she thought she ought to tell somebody who might put a stop to the talk, and so she came to me. There's some woman, a very rich Protestant, who gives out openly that she is waiting till Molyneux announces that he doesn't believe in the Church, and then they will marry and go to America. Then, another day Jim Dixon came along, and a friend of his had heard the tale from some Army man at his Club. It's exactly the way things went on about Nobbs, you know, beginning with talk like that. Really, if it wasn't for having seen Nobbs go down hill I shouldn't think anything of it. Young Molyneux is all straight so far, but so was Nobbs straight at first."

"A priest shouldn't be talked about," said the Monsignor.

"Of course not," said the Rector.

"He has started too young," the Monsignor went on, not unkindly; "it's all come on in such a hurry; he ought to have had a country mission first. But my predecessor thought he'd be so safe with you."

"But how can I help it?" asked the other hotly; "I'm sure I've done my best! You can ask him if I haven't warned him from his very first sermon that he'd be a popular preacher. I've even tried to teach him to preach. I've lent him Challoner, and Hay, and Wiseman, and tried to get him out of his Oxford notions, but he's no sooner in the pulpit than he's off at a hard gallop—three hundred words to a minute, and such words!—'vitality,' 'personality,' 'development,' 'recrudescence,' 'mentality'—the Lord knows what! And there they sit and gaze at him with their mouths open drinking it in as if they'd been starved! No, no; it won't be my fault if he turns out another Nobbs—poor, miserable old Nobbs! Now his really were sermons!"

"Well," said the other, in a business-like tone, "I am inclined to think it would be best for him to take a country mission for a few years. I've no doubt he is on the square now, and that will give him time to quiet down a bit. He'll be an older and a wiser man after that, and he could do some sound, theological reading. Lord Lofton has been asking for a chaplain, and we must send him a gentleman. I could tell him that Molyneux had been a little overworked in London, and if he goes down to the Towers at the end of July, no one will suppose he is leaving for good, eh?"

"Very well," answered the Rector; "I don't want anything said against him, you know. I've had many a curate not half as ready to work as this man."

"No, no; I quite understand. Well, I'll write to him in the course of the week. And now about this point of plain chant?" And both men forgot the existence of Mark as they waxed hot on melodious questions.

I can't believe that Jonathan loved David more than the second curate had come to love Mark Molyneux in their work together. It is good to bear the yoke in youth, and it is very good to have a hero worship for your yoke fellow. Father Jack Marny was a young Kelt, blue-eyed, straight-limbed, fair-haired, and very fair of soul. He would have told any sympathetic listener that he owed everything to Mark—zeal for souls, habits of self-denial, a new view of life, even enjoyment of pictures and of Browning, as well as interest in social science. All this was gross exaggeration, but in him it was quite truthful, for he really thought so. He had the run of Mark's room, and they took turns to smoke in each other's bedrooms, so as to take turns in bearing the rector's observations on the smell of smoke on the upstairs landing. Father Marny had a subscription at Mudie's—his only extravagance—and he always ordered the books he thought Mark wished for, and Mark always ordered from the London library the books he thought would most interest Jack. Father Marny revelled in secret in the thought of all that might have belonged to Mark, and he possessed, of course most carefully concealed, a wonderful old print he had picked up on a counter, of Groombridge Castle, exalting the round towers to a preposterous height, while in the foreground strolled ladies in vast hoops, and some animals intended apparently for either cows or sheep according to the fancy of the purchaser.

But what each of the curates loved best was the goodness he discerned in the other, and the more intimate they became the more goodness they discerned. The very genuinely good see good, and provoke good by seeing it, and reflect it back again, as two looking-glasses opposite to each other repeat each other's light ad infinitum.

It was a Monday, and the rector had gone out to dinner, and the two young men were smoking in the general sitting-room. Father Marny was looking over the accounts of a boot club, and objurating the handwriting of the lady who kept them. Mark was in the absolutely passive state to which some hard-working people can reduce themselves; he had hardly the energy to smoke. A loud knock produced no effect upon him.

"Lazy brute!" murmured Father Marny, in his affectionate, clear voice, "can't even fetch the letters." And a moment later he went for them himself, and having flung a dozen letters over his companion's shoulder, went back to the accounts.

Ten minutes later he looked up, and gave a little start. He was quick to see any change in Mark, and he did not like his attitude. He did not know till that moment how anxious he had been as to the possibility of some change. He moved quickly forward and stood in front of the deep chair in which Mark was sitting, leaning forward with his eyes fixed on the carpet.

"Bad news?" he asked abruptly.

"Bad enough," said Mark, and, very slowly raising his head, he gave a smile that was the worst part of all the look on his face. Jack Marny put one hand on his shoulder, and a woman's touch could not have been lighter.

"It's not——?" he said, and then stopped.

"Yes, it is," Mark answered. "I am to be a domestic chaplain to that pious old ass, Lord Lofton. It seems I need quiet for study—quiet to rot in! My God! is that how I am to work for souls?"

It was, perhaps, better for Mark that Jack Marny broke down completely at the news, for, by the time he had been forced into telling his friend that it was preposterous to suppose that any man was necessary for God's work, and that if they had faith at all they must believe that God allowed this to happen, light began to dawn in his own mind. But he was almost frightened at the passionate resentment of the Kelt; he saw there was serious danger of some outbreak on his part against the authorities.

"They won't catch me staying here after you are gone!"

"Much good that would do me," said Mark. "I should get all the blame."

"They must learn that we are not slaves!" thundered the curate, his fair face absolutely black with wrath.

"We are God's slaves," said Mark, in a low voice, and then there was silence between them for the space of half an hour.

The door opened and a shrill voice cried out, "There's Tom Turner at the door asking for Father Mark," and the door was banged to again.

Tom Turner was the very flower of Mark's converts to a good life.

Father Marny groaned at the name.

"Let me see him," he said. "Go out and get a walk."

"I'd rather see him; I don't know how much oftener——"

The sentence was not finished. He had left the room in two strides.

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CHAPTER XXXVI

MENE THEKEL PHARES

The more Edmund reflected on the matter the more difficult he found it to decide what steps to take in order to approach Molly. In the first impulse he had thought only that here was the chance of serving her, of proving her friend in difficulty, which he had particularly wished for. It would make reparation for the past—a past he keenly defended in his own mind as he had defended it to Molly herself, but yet a past that he would wish to make fully satisfactory by reparation for what he would not confess to have been blameworthy. But when he tried to realise exactly what he should have to tell Molly it seemed impossible. For how could he meet her questions; her indignant protests? She would become more and more indignant at the plot that had been carried on against her, a plot which Edmund had started and had carried on until quite lately, and which had also until quite lately been entirely financed by him. Even if he baffled her questions, his consciousness of the facts would make it too desperately difficult a task for him to assume the rÔle of Molly's disinterested friend now, although in truth he felt as such, and would have done and suffered much to help her.

Edmund had by nature a considerable sympathy with success, with pluck, with men or women who did things well. There are so many bunglers in life, so few efficient characters, and he felt Molly to be entirely efficient. Even the over-emphasis of wealth in the setting of her life had been effective; it fitted too well into what the modern world wanted to be out of proportion. A thing that succeeded so very well could hardly be bad form. Hesitation, weakness, would have made it vulgar; hesitation and weakness in past days had often made vulgar emphasis on rank and power, but in the hands of the strong such emphasis had always been effective and fitting. There was a kind of artistic regret in Edmund's mind at the thought that this excellent comedy of life as played by Molly should be destroyed. And he had come to think it certainly would be destroyed.

One last piece of evidence had convinced him more than any other.

Nurse Edith had a taste for the dramatic, and enjoyed gradual developments. Therefore she had kept back as a bonne bouche, to be served up as an apparent after-thought, a certain half sheet of paper which she had preserved carefully in her pocket-book since the night on which she had made the copy of Sir David Bright's will. It was the actual postscript to Sir David's long letter to Rose; the long letter Nurse Edith had put back in the box and which had remained there untouched until Molly had taken it out. The postscript would not be missed, and might be useful. It was only a few lines to this effect:

"P.S.—I think it better that you should know that I am sending a few words to Madame Danterre to tell her briefly that justice must be done. Also, in case anyone, in spite of my precautions to conceal it, is aware that I possessed the very remarkable diamond ring I mention in this letter, and asks you about it, I wish you to know that I am sending it direct to Madam Danterre in my letter to her. May God forgive me, and, by His Grace, may you do likewise."

The sight of David's handwriting, the astonishing verification of his own first surmise, the vivid memory of Rose unwillingly showing him the letter and the ring and the photograph she supposed to have been intended for herself, had a very powerful effect on Edmund Grosse. The whole story was so clear, so well connected, it seemed impossible to doubt it. Yet he believed in Molly's innocence without an effort. What was there to prove that Madame Danterre had not destroyed the will after Nurse Edith copied it? She had the key and the box within reach, and the dying, again and again, have shown incalculable strength—far greater than was needed in order to get at the will and burn it while a nurse was absent or asleep.

Again, it was to Larrone's interest to destroy that will. They had only Pietrino's persuasion of Larrone's integrity to set against the possibility of his having opened the box on his long journey to England, against the possibility of his having read the will, and destroyed it, before he gave the box to Molly. He would have seen at once not only that his own legacy would be lost, but, what might have more influence with him, he must have seen what a doubtful position he must hold in public opinion if this came to light. He had been the chief friend and adviser of Madame Danterre, who had paid him lavishly for his medical services from her first coming to Florence, and who had made no secret of the legacy he was to receive at her death. He had been with her at the last, and was now actually carrying on her gigantic fraud by taking the box to her daughter. Would it not have been a great temptation to him to destroy the will while he had no fear of discovery rather than put the matter in Molly's hands? Lastly came Rose's subtle feminine suggestion that the will might be in the box but that Molly had never opened it. Some instinct, some secret fear of painful revelations, might easily have made her shrink from any disclosures as to her mother's past. Rose was so often right, and the obvious suggestion, that such a shrinking from knowledge would have been natural to Rose and unnatural to Molly, did not occur to the male mind, always inclined to think of women as mostly alike.

At the same time he was really unwilling to relinquish the rÔle of intermediary. His thoughts had hardly left the subject since the hour of his talk with Rose, and it was especially absorbing on the day on which Molly was to give a party, to which he was invited—and invited to meet royalty. He decided that he must that evening ask his hostess to give him an appointment for a private talk.

Edmund arrived late at Westmoreland House when the party was in full swing. He paused a moment on the wide marble steps of the well staircase as he saw a familiar face coming across the hall. It was the English Ambassador in Madrid, just arrived home on leave, as Edmund knew. He was a handsome grey-haired man of thin, nervous figure, and he sprang lightly to meet his old friend and put his hand on his arm.

"Grosse!" he cried, "well met." And then, in low, quick tones he added: "What am I going to see at the top of this ascent? This amazing young woman! What does it mean, eh? I knew the wicked old mother. Tell me, was she really married to David Bright all the time? Was it Enoch Arden the other way up? But we must go on," for other late arrivals were joining them. When they reached the landing the two men stood aside for a moment, for they saw that it was too late for them to be announced. Royalty was going in to supper.

A line of couples was crossing the nearest room, from one within. The great square drawing-room was lit entirely by candles in the sconces that were part of the permanent decoration. But the many lights hardly penetrated into the great depths of the pictures let into the walls. These big, dark canvases by some forgotten Italian of the school of Veronese, gave the room something of the rich gloom of a Venetian palace. Beyond a few stacks of lilies in the corners, Molly had done nothing to relieve its solemn dignity. As she came across it from the opposite corner, the depths of the old pictures were the background to her white figure.

She was bending her head towards the Prince who was taking her down—a tall, fair man with blue eyes and a heavy jaw. Then as she came near the doorway she raised her head and saw Edmund. There was a strange, soft light in her eyes as she looked at him. It was the touch of soul needed to give completeness to her magnificence as a human being. The white girlish figure in that room fitted the past as well as the present. The great women of the past had been splendidly young too, whereas we keep our girls as children, comparatively speaking.

Molly had that combination of youth and experience which gives a special character to beauty. There was no detailed love of fashion in her gorgeous simplicity of attire; there was rather something subtly in keeping with the house itself.

The Prince turned to speak to the Ambassador, and the little procession stopped.

Edmund was more artistic in taste than in temperament, and he was not imaginative. But he could not enjoy the full satisfaction of his fastidious tastes to-night, nor had he his usual facility for speech. He could not bring himself to utter one word to Molly. They stood for that moment close together, looking at each other in a silence that was electric. No wonder that Molly thought his incapacity to speak a wonderful thing; others, too, noticed it.

"What a bearing that girl has! What movement!" cried the Ambassador, as, after greeting the first few couples who passed him, he drew Grosse to a corner and looked at him curiously. But Edmund seemed moonstruck. Then, in a perfunctory voice, he said slowly.

"What is the writing in that picture?"

"Mene Thekel Phares," said his friend. "My dear Grosse! surely you know a picture of the 'Fall of Babylon' when you see it? Now let us go where we shall not be interrupted. Tell me all about this girl with the amazing bearing and big eyes, whom princes delight to honour, and Duchesses to dine with! How did she get dear Rose Bright's money?"

Edmund had never disliked a question more.

"I'll tell you all I know," he said unblushingly, "but not to-night, old fellow. It would take too long."

And to his joy a countess and a beauty seized upon the terribly curious diplomatist and made him take her down to supper. And they agreed while they supped exquisitely that the real job dear old Grosse ought to be given was that of husband to their hostess.

"But then there is poor Rose Bright."

"Lady Rose Bright would not have him when he was rich," he objected. "No; this will do very nicely. If I am not mistaken (and I'm pretty well read in human eyes), the lady is willing."

After supper there was dancing. Edmund did not dance. He stood in a corner, his tall form a little bent, merely watching, and presently he turned away. He had made up his mind. He would not try to speak to Molly to-night, and he would not ask her for a talk.

She was dancing as he left the room, and he turned half mechanically to watch her. It was always an exquisite pleasure to see her dance. He left her with a curious sense of farewell in his mind. Fate was coming fast, he knew; he could not doubt that for a moment. He was not the man to avert it. No one could avert it. It was part of the tragedy that, pity her as he might, he could not really wish to avert it. He would give no warning. Some other hand must write "Mene Thekel Phares" on the wall of her palace of pleasure and success.

Edmund Grosse declined the task.

Molly danced on in the long gallery between its walls of mirrors and their infinite repetitions of twinkling candles and dancing figures pleasantly confused to the eye by the delicate wreaths of gold foliage that divided their panes. In the immeasurable depths of those reflections the nearest objects melted by endless repetition into dim distances, and the present dancing figures might seem to melt into a far past where men and women were dancing also.

Gallery within gallery in that mirrored world, with very little effort of imagination, might become peopled by different generations. As the figures receded in space so they receded in time. Groups of human beings, with all the subtle ease of a decadent civilisation, ceded their place to groups of men and women who moved with more slowness and dignity in the middle distance of those endless reflections. And looking down those avenues of gilded foliage into that fancied past, the old cry might well rise to the lips: "What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue!"

But, whether in the foreground of to-day, or in the secrets that the mirrors held of a century before, or in the indistinguishable mist of their greatest depths, wherever the imagination roamed, it found in every group of human beings a woman who was young and beautiful, and yet it could come back to the dancing figure of Molly without any shock of disappointment or disdain.

"But it is daylight!" cried two young men who paused breathless with their partners by the high narrow windows, at the end of the gallery, and they threw back the shutters. The growing dawn mingled with the lights of the decreasing candles, with the infinite repetitions of the mirror, with the soft music of the last valse.

And Molly bore the light perfectly, as the chorus of praise and thanks and "good-nights" of the late stayers echoed round her.

"Not 'good-night' but 'good-bye,'" said a very young girl, looking up at Molly with facile tears rising in her blue eyes. "We go away to-morrow, and this perfect night is the last!"

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CHAPTER XXXVII

MARK ENTERS INTO TEMPTATION

The more he realised Molly's danger, the more he believed in her innocence—the more anxious Edmund became to find a suitable envoy to approach her from the enemy's side, and one who, if possible, would understand his position.

Like most men who have a repugnance to clerical influence he had a great idea of its power, and a perfect readiness to make use of it. He was delighted when he remembered having met Mark Molyneux at Molly's house. The meeting had not been quite a success, but this he did not remember. Edmund's half-sleepy easy manner had been more cordial, but not quite so good as usual. He was just too conscious of the strangeness of the fact that Edmund Grosse should be talking with a "bon petit curÉ." He knew Father Molyneux to be Groombridge's cousin, and to have been considered a man of unusual promise at Oxford, but, all the same, whatever he had been, he was a priest now, and Grosse had never quite made up his mind as to his own manner to a priest. He was so practised in dealing with other people, but not with ecclesiastics. He did not in the least realise that the slight condescension and uncertainty in his manner, with all his effort at cordiality, was the outcome of a rather deeply-seated antagonism to the claims he conceived all priests to make, in their hearts, on the souls of men. I have known a man, not altogether unlike Edmund Grosse, to cross the street in London rather than pass a priest on the same pavement. Grosse would not have been so foolish as that, but still, it was not surprising that the two men did not get on particularly well. All that Edmund now remembered of this chance meeting was Molly's evidently deep interest in the young priest, and he recalled her saying at the time when she had been much moved by her mother's cruel letter, that she was going to hear Father Molyneux preach that evening. From the avowedly anti-clerical Molly, that meant much.

Edmund knew nothing of the recent talk about Mark, although Mrs. Delaport Green had tried to sigh out some insinuations on the subject in talking to him. Perhaps he was a less receptive listener than of yore, when he had more empty spaces in his mind than he had this year. He received, indeed, a faint impression that Mrs. Delaport Green was sentimentalising over some disappointment she was suffering under acutely with regard to the popular preacher, and had felt her motive to be curiosity to gain information from himself on some point of which he knew nothing. But if he had been more attentive he might have gained enough information to make him hesitate to involve poor Mark in Molly's affairs.

Almost as soon as he had thought of consulting Mark, he proposed the notion to Rose, who was enthusiastic in its support.

It is not necessary to give his letter to Father Molyneux, which had to be long and careful, and was written after consultation with Mr. Murray.

Mr. Murray was quite in favour of an informal interview, and disposed to agree in the choice of Father Molyneux as ambassador. "I am not afraid of your letting Miss Dexter know the strength of our case," he said. "Father Molyneux must judge for himself how far it is wise to frighten Miss Dexter for her own sake. He is, as I understand, to try to persuade her to produce the will, and I suppose he will assume that she does not know of its existence among her mother's papers. This would save her pride, and you might come to terms if she would produce it. If you fail, the next course would be for me to insist on an interview, and to carry things with a high hand. I should say, in effect: 'We are aware that Sir David Bright made a will on his way to Africa, and we can prove that it was sent by mistake to your mother, because we have a witness who saw it in her box. It was in her box when it was handed to Dr. Larrone, and it has been traced, therefore, into your hands. We have a copy of it which we can produce if you have destroyed the original, and, if you have not done so, we can get an order of the court compelling you to produce it. You cannot deny the fact that the will was sent to Madame Danterre by mistake, for you have the letter which accompanied it, and we have the postscript to the letter taken from the box by a witness whom we are prepared to call. Will you produce the box in which, no doubt, the will has escaped your notice, or shall we get the order of the court? The will has, as I have said, been traced into your hands.' I doubt if any woman (at all events one such as you describe Miss Dexter) would resist, and no solicitor whom she consulted, and to whom she told the truth, would advise her to do so—no respectable solicitor, that is to say, and no prudent one."

When Edmund showed Rose his letter to Father Mark she had only one criticism to make. She felt that Edmund took too easily for granted that the priest would be ready to put his finger into so very hot a pie. Father Mark must be appealed to more earnestly to come to the rescue, and less as if it were quite obvious that he would be ready to do so as part of his natural business in life. Edmund agreed to add some sentences at her suggestion.

It is important to realise Mark's state of mind, at the time when this strong, additional trial was to come upon him.

With the full approval of his friend, Canon Nicholls, Mark decided not to take the decree of banishment from London without remonstrance. He was not astonished at the result of the talk against him. That his one great enemy should have poisoned the wells so easily was not very surprising. He could not help knowing that the very keenness and ardour of his friends had produced prejudice against him. There was, among the religious circles in London, a perhaps healthy suspicion of hero worship for popular preachers, and of any indiscreet zeal. The great Religious Orders knew how to deal with life, and it was safer to have an enthusiasm for an Order than for an individual. Seculars were the right people for daily routine and work among the poor, but for a young secular priest to become a bright, particular star was unusual and alarming.

Jealousy is the fault of the best men because it eludes their most vigilant examinations, and, while their energy is taken up with visible enemies, it dresses itself in a complete and dignified disguise and comes out either as discretion or zeal or a love of humility.

Mark saw all this less clearly than did the blind Canon, but he realised it enough not to be surprised at the quick growth of the seed Molly had sown in well-prepared ground.

But the blow he did not expect came from his own rector. He went to him, thinking he would back him up in his efforts to get an explanation of this sudden order, and he was told, between pinches of snuff, that he had much better do as he was bid without making a fuss, and that he was being sent to an excellent berth, which was exactly what he needed. The rector was sorry to lose him certainly, but he thought it was the best possible arrangement for himself. There was something of grunts and sniffs between the short phrases that did not soften them. Mark became speechless with hurt feeling.

It became clearly evident to Canon Nicholls that the rector and one or two of the older priests who had wind of the matter could not see why there should be any fuss about it. Young Molyneux was under no cloud; why should he behave as if it were a disgrace to be chaplain to poor old Lord Lofton? Was he crying out because London would be in such a bad way without him? What the Canon could not get them to see was the effect on public opinion. To send Mark away now was to advertise backbiting until it might become a real scandal. They could not see beyond their own immediate circle; if all the priests knew he was really a good fellow they thought that quite enough. They had a horror of a man making himself talked of outside, but they had no notion of giving him the chance to right himself with the outside world. It was much better that he should go away and be forgotten.

Canon Nicholls had always been of opinion that the secular clergy in England were more hardly treated than the regulars. They were expected to have the absolute detachment of monks, without the support that a Religious Order gives to its subjects. They were given the standards of the cloister in the seminary, and then tumbled out into life in the world. No one in authority seemed anxious not to discourage a young secular priest. To be regular and punctual, to avoid rows, and to keep out of debt were the virtues that naturally appealed to the approval of a harassed bishop. But a zeal that put a man forward and brought him into public notice was likely to be troublesome, and such men were seldom very good at accounts. The type of young man which Mark resembled, according to the priests who discussed the question, was not a popular one among them. As a type it had not been found to wash well.

Canon Nicholls was not popular among them for other reasons, but chiefly because of a biting tongue. He would let his talk flow without tact or diplomacy on these questions, and often did far more harm than good, in consequence. He fairly stormed to one or two of his visitors at the absurdity of hiding a man away because of unjust slander. It was the very moment in which he ought to be brought forward and supported in every way. The fact was that the man was to be sacrificed to the supposed good of the Church, only no one would say so candidly. Whereas, in reality, by justice to the man the Church would be saved from a scandal!

Mark was outwardly very calm, but he was changed. His friends said that his vitality and earnestness were bound to suffer in the struggle for self-repression. His sermons were becoming mechanical tasks and the confessional a weariness. He made his protest, as Canon Nicholls wished, but after the talk with his rector he knew it was useless. He wrapped himself in silence, even with Father Jack Marny. He began, half consciously, to be more self-indulgent in details and the only subject on which he ever showed animation was a projected holiday in Switzerland. He once alluded to the possibility of going to Groombridge for the shooting.

At first he had not allowed Father Marny to take any of his now painful work among the people he was so soon to leave, but, after a week or two, he acquiesced. What was the use when he was to leave them for good and all? It were better they should learn at once to get on without him. Father Marny, in passionate sympathy, was ready to work himself to death and acknowledge no fatigue. It was easy to conceal fatigue or anything else from Mark in his preoccupied state of mind. He showed no interest when Lord Lofton wrote him a most warmly and tactfully expressed letter of welcome, in which he told the coming chaplain that he must not suppose there was not work in plenty to be done for souls in the country.

"Humbugging old men and women who want pensions and soup and blankets!" Mark said with unusual irritation, as he flung the letter to his friend.

But to the curate Mark was as much above criticism as a martyr at the foot of the gallows.

Strangely enough, the first break into this moral fog that was settling down in his spiritual world was, of all unlikely things, the letter from Edmund Grosse.

When he got Edmund's letter Mark was sulking—there is no other word for it—over his answer to Lord Lofton, which ought to have gone several days ago. Of course he was bound by his mission oath to go where he was placed, but the authorities might at least have waited to hear from him before handing him over as if he were a parcel or a Jesuit. He read Edmund's cramped writing with a little difficulty, and then threw the three sheets it covered on to the table with a bang, and jumped up.

"Dash it!" he cried, "this is rather too much."

He did not stop to think that Edmund could not have been so idiotic as to write that letter if he had known of the state of the case between him and Miss Dexter. It only seemed at the moment that it was another instance of cruelty and utter unfairness, part of the same treatment he was receiving, which expected a man to be a plaster saint with no thought for himself, no natural feelings, no sense of his own reputation! First of all he was to be buried, torn from his friends, from his work for souls, from the joy of the Good Shepherd seeking the lost sheep. He was to lose all he loved and for which he had given up his life, his career, his position, and, for the first time, he enumerated among his sacrifices the possession of Groombridge. Then he blushed for shame—also for the first time. How little that had been, compared to what he had to do now! What had he to do now? And here the Little Master made his great mistake. He came out of the fog and shadow, he came into the light because he thought it was safe now.

What had Mark to do that was so much harder? To submit to authority and forgive its blunders. He hesitated for a moment; he almost thought it was that. Then came the light, and he saw the real crux. What he had to do was to forgive Molly Dexter. He was startled by the revelation, as men are startled who have been in love without knowing it. He had been nursing hatred and revenge without knowing it, for, until he had become bitter at the treatment of the authorities, he had felt no anger against Molly. She had simply been the patient who would scratch out the eyes of the surgeon. He was surprised into a quiet analysis of the discovery, and then his thoughts stood quite still. It was only necessary for a noble soul to see such a temptation for him to fight it. But he passed back from that to the whole of the wrath and hurt feeling that he recognised too. He was angry with those in authority who expected him to behave like a saint; he had been angry vaguely with Sir Edmund Grosse, but more with circumstances that also demanded of him that he should behave like a saint and do the very worst thing for himself and confirm the calumny against him by acting as Molly's confidential friend! But he could not be equally angry at the same time with Miss Dexter, with his own authorities, with Edmund Grosse, and with circumstances. One injury alone might have been different, but taken together they suggested a plot and intention. Whose plot? Whose intention?

And the answer was thundered and yet whispered through his consciousness. Is was God's plot, God's Will, God's demand, that he should do the impossible and behave like a saint!

Mark had said easily enough in the first noble instinct of bearing his blow well: "We are God's slaves." But that first light had gradually been obscured. He had not felt then that the impossible was demanded of him. He had come to feel it, and to feel it without remembering that man's helplessness was God's opportunity. Had he forgotten, erased from the tablets of his mind and heart, all he had loved and trusted most? Now all was terribly clear. Augustine, in a decadent, delicate age, had not minced matters, and had insisted that all hope must be placed in Him Who would not spare the scourge. "Oftentimes," he had cried, "does our Tamer bring forth His scourge too." Mark took down the old, worn book.

"In Him let us place our hope, and until we are tamed and tamed thoroughly—that is, are perfected—let us bear our Tamer.... Whereas, when thou art tamed, God reserveth for thee an inheritance which is God Himself.... For God will then be all in all; neither will there be any unhappiness to exercise us, but happiness alone to feed us.... What multiplicity of things soever thou seekest here, He alone will be Himself all these things to thee.

"Unto this hope is man tamed, and shall his Tamer then be deemed intolerable? Unto this hope is man tamed, and shall he murmur against his beneficient Tamer, if He chance to use the scourge?...

"Whether, therefore, Thou dealest softly with us that we be not wearied in the way, or chastisest us that we wander not from the way, Thou art become our refuge, O Lord."

As Mark read, the pain of too great light was softened to him. What had been hard, white light, glowed more rosy until it flushed his horizon with full glory.

It wanted a small space in time, but a mighty change in the spirit, before Mark read Edmund's letter with a keen wish to enter into its full meaning, and judge it wisely. Having come to himself, he was, as ever, ready to give that self away. He was full of a strange energy; he smiled to feel that the strokes of the lash were unfelt, while consciousness was lost in love. This was God's anÆsthetic. But it thrilled the soul with vitality, and in no sense but the absence of pain did it suspend the faculties. He had no doubt, no hesitation, as to what he must do. He would go to Molly, he must see her at once, but not a word should pass his lips of what Edmund wanted him to say. Not a moment must be lost. Who might not betray her danger and destroy her opportunity? Molly must be brought to do this thing of herself without any admixture of fear, without any aim or object but to sacrifice all for what was right. He yearned with utter simplicity that this might be her way out. Let her do it for herself. Let her do it of herself, thought Mark—not because she is afraid, not because her vast possessions appear the least insecure. And the action would be far more noble just because, at the moment of renunciation, the world would, for the first time, suspect her guilt. To Mark it seemed now the crowning touch of mercy that the criminal should be allowed to drink deep of the chalice. "Her own affair"—that was what the dying mother had said of the unfortunate child to whom she offered so gross a temptation.

And in the depths of his mind there was the conviction that it was a particular truth as to this individual soul, that not only would the heroic be the only antagonist to the base, but that some such moral revolution alone could be the beginning of cleansing of what had become foul, and the driving out of the noxious and the vile.

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CHAPTER XXXVIII

NO SHADOW OF A CLOUD

It was in the evening, and Edmund was waiting in Rose's drawing-room until she should come back from a meeting of one of her charitable committees.

He was walking up and down the room with a face at once very grave and very alert. Even his carriage during the last few weeks had seemed to Rose to have gained in firmness and dignity, and perhaps she was right. Nor had she failed to notice that one or two small, straight pieces of grey hair could now be seen near the temples. He looked a little older, a little more brisk, a little more firm, and distinctly more cheerful since his reverses. It is no paradox to speak of cheerfulness in sorrow, or to say that the whole nature may be happier in grief than in the days of apparent pleasure. It is not only in those who have acquired deep religious peace that this may be true, for even in gaining energy and a balance in natural action, there may be happiness amidst pain.

Rose came in without seeing that anyone was in the room, and gave a start when she saw the tall figure by the window. The evening light showed him a little grey, a little worn in appearance, a little more openly kindly in the dark eyes. Something that she had fancied dim and clouded lately—only once or twice, not always—now shone in his face with its full brightness.

"Has anything happened, Edmund? Have you come to tell me anything?"

He came across the room to her and took her hand in silence, and then said:

"You look tired. Have you had tea?"

"Oh, never mind tea," she answered. "Do tell me! Seriously, something has happened?"

"It is nothing of any consequence—nothing that need disturb you in the least. It is only about my own stupid affairs, and, on the whole, it is very good news. I have just come from the Foreign Office, and they have told me there that I am to have that job in India, and that the sooner I am ready to start the better."

As he spoke he turned from her with a sudden, quick hurt in his heart. It was, after all, only of great importance to himself. He knew she would be kindly glad that he had got the post he wanted. Had she not always urged him to some real work? Had she not pressed him again and again during the last four years, consciously and unconsciously, to bring out all his talents and to do a man's work in a man's way? So she would be simply glad, and she would wave him "God speed," and would, no doubt, pray for him at those innumerable services she attended, and write to him long, gentle, feminine letters full of details about all sorts of matters, good or indifferent, and she would ask about his health and press him to take care of himself and tell him of any word that was spoken kindly of him here in England. And she would somehow manage to know, or think she knew, that he was doing great things in the East. And so, no doubt, in the two years in which he was away there would be no apparent break in this very dear intimacy. But what, in reality, would he know of her inmost feelings, of her loneliness, of her sufferings, of any repentance that might come to her, any softening towards himself? He seemed to see all of the two years that were to come in a flash as he stood silent on one side of the neglected tea-table, and Rose stood silent, turning away from him on the other.

When he raised his eyes, he almost felt a surprise that the figure, a little turned away from him, was not dressed in a plain, white frock, and that the shadows and the flickering sunlight making its way through the mulberry leaves were not still upon her; for that was how, through life and in eternity, Rose would be present in the mind of her lover.

Time had gone; it seemed now as nothing. Whatever changes had come between, he felt as if he saw in the averted face that same expression of sorrowful denial and gentle resistance that had baffled him now for over twelve years. It was still that his soul asked something of this other purer, gentler, more unworldly, more loving soul, which she, with all her beneficence would not give him. He did no think of the impracticability of any question of marriage; he did not think in any definite sense of their relations as man and woman. At other times he had known so frequently just the overpowering wish for the possession of the woman he loved best, but now she stood to him as the history of his moral existence here below, and he felt as if, in missing her, he should miss the object and crown of his life.

At last silence became intolerable. He moved as though he wanted to speak and could not, and then he said huskily, almost gruffly:

"It is not 'good-bye' to-day, of course," and then he laughed at the feebleness of his own words.

Rose turned to him at that, and he was not really surprised to see that the tears were flowing rapidly over her cheeks—tears so large that they splashed like big raindrops on the white hands which were clasped as they hung before her. But that made it no easier. He thought very little of those tears; he felt even a little bitter at their apparent bitterness. He hardened at the sight of those tears; they made him feel that he could leave her with more dignity, more firmness in his own mind, than he had ever thought would be possible.

"Vous pleurez et vous Êtes roi?" He hardly knew that he had muttered the words as he so often muttered a quotation to himself. But Rose did not hear them. She was too preoccupied with her own thoughts and feelings to notice him closely. Ah! if she had but known before what it would be to lose him! She was horrified as she felt her self-control failing her, and an enormous agony entering into possession of all her faculties. She was so startled, so amazed at this revelation of herself. If she had felt less, she would have thought more for him. She did not think for a moment what that silent standing by her side meant for him. She knew at last the selfishness of passion. She wanted him as she had never wanted anyone or anything before. She could only think of the craving of her own heart, the extraordinary trouble that possessed it. Those who have had a passing acquaintance with love, those who have sown brief passages of love thoughts over their early youth, can form no notion of what that first surrender meant to Rose. "Too late!" cried the tyrant love, the only tyrant that can carry conviction by its mere fiat to the innermost recesses of a nature. "Too late!—it might have been, but not now; it is all your own doing; you made him suffer once; you are the only one to suffer now. You are crying now the easy tears of a child, but there are years and years before you when the tears will not come, call for them as you may; they cannot go on coming from a broken heart. They flow away out of the fissures, and then the dryness and barrenness of daily misery will not let them come again."

"He never cared as I do," thought Rose; "he does not know what it is!"

She called her persecutor "it"; she shrank from its name even now with an unutterable embarrassment. When she did turn to Edmund it was more as if to confide to him what she was suffering from someone else; it was so habitual to her to turn to him. What was the use? what was the use? How could she use him against himself? No, no; she must, she must control herself. She must not tell him; she must let him go quite quietly now; she must make no appeal to the past; he was too generous—she did not want his generosity. She put her hands to her forehead and pushed the hair backwards.

"I'm not well, I think," she said; "the room at the meeting was stuffy. I—I didn't quite understand what you said—I'm glad."

She sank on to a chair, and then got up again.

"I'm glad you've got what you wanted, but I'm startled—no, I mean I'm not quite well. I don't think I can talk to-day—I don't understand—I——"

She stood almost with her back to him then.

He was so amazed at her words that he could not speak at all. This was not sweetness, kindness, pity; this was something else, something different; it was almost a shock!

"I am so silly," she said, with a most absurd attempt at a natural voice, "I think I must——" Her figure swayed a little.

Edmund watched her with utter amazement. All his knowledge of women was at fault, and that child in the white frock—where was she? Where was that sense of his soul's history and its failure, its mystic tragedy, just now? Gone, quite gone, for he knew now that that long tragedy was ended. But Rose did not know it.

He moved, half consciously, a few feet towards the door.

"Rose," he said, in a very low voice, "if it has come at last, don't deny it! I have waited patiently, God knows! but I don't want it now unless it is true. For Heaven's sake do nothing in mere pity!"

"But it has come, Edmund; it has come!" she interrupted him, so quickly that he had barely time to reach her before she came to him.

And yet it had been many years in coming—so many years that he could hardly believe it now; could hardly believe that the white hands he had watched so often trembled with delight as they caressed him; could hardly believe that the fair face was radiant with joy when he, Edmund, ventured to kiss her; could hardly believe that it was of her own wish and will that she leant against him now!

"I ought not to have said it was the stuffy room, ought I?"

It was the sweetest, youngest laugh she had ever given. Then she looked up at the ceiling where the sun flickered a little.

"Edmund, it is better than if I had known under the mulberry tree. Tell me you forgive me all I have done wrong. I could not," she gasped a little, "have loved you then as I do now, because I had known no sorrow then."

And Edmund told her that she was forgiven. But one sin she confessed gave him, I fear, unmixed delight; she was so dreadfully afraid that she had lately been a little jealous!

Strange—very strange and unfathomable—is the heart of man. It did not even occur to him as the wildest scruple to be at all afraid that he had been lately a little, ever so little, less occupied with the thought of her. No shadow of a cloud rested on the great output of a strong man's deep affection.

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CHAPTER XXXIX

"WITHOUT CONDITION OR COMPROMISE"

It was on the same evening that Mark succeeded in seeing Molly. He had failed the day before, but at the second attempt he succeeded.

It was the first time he had entered Westmoreland House, and he had never, even in the autumn weeks when Miss Dexter had been most cordial to him, tried to see her except by her own invitation. Altogether the position now was as embarrassing as it is possible to conceive. He had been her confidant as to a crime for which the law sees no kind of palliative, no possible grounds for mercy. As he greeted her it wanted little imaginative power to feel the dramatic elements in the picture. Molly was standing in the middle of the great drawing-room dressed in something very white and very beautiful. At any other moment he must have been impressed by the subdued splendour of the room, and the grace and youth of the dominating figure in the midst. Mark was too absorbed to-day in the spiritual drama which he must now force to its conclusion to realise that he had also come to threaten the destruction of Molly's material world and all the glory thereof. He had, too, so far forgotten himself, that the mischief Molly had wrought against him had faded into the background of his consciousness. His absorbing anxiety lay in the extreme difficulty of his task. It would need an angel from Heaven, gifted too with great knowledge of human nature, to accomplish what he meant to attempt. First he would throw everything into the desperate endeavour to make her give up the will simply and entirely from the highest motives. But what possibility was there of success? Why should he hope that, just because he called and asked her for it, she would give up all that for which she had sold her soul? He could not feel that he was a prophet sent by God from whose lips would fall such inspired words that the iron frost would thaw and the great depths of her nature be broken up. In fact, he felt singularly uninspired, and very much embarrassed. And when he had tried the impossible (he said to himself), and had given her the last chance of going back on this ugly fraud from nobler motives than that of fear, and had failed—he must then enter on the next stage and must merge the priest's office in that of the ambassador. He must bring home to her that what she clung to was already lost, and that nothing but shame and disgrace lay before her. He had the case, as presented by Sir Edmund's letter in all its convicting simplicity, clearly in his mind—quite as clearly as the facts of Molly's own confession to himself. It would not be difficult to crush the criminal, to make her see the hopeless horror of the trial that must follow unless she consented to a compromise. But it was the completeness of her defeat that he dreaded the most; it was for that last stage of his plan that he was gathering unconsciously all his nerve-power together. He seemed to hear with ominous distinctness her words at their last meeting: "If I can't go through with it (which is quite possible) I shall throw up the sponge and get out of this world as soon as I can." That had been spoken without any sort of fear of detection, without the least suspicion that she would have no choice in the matter of giving up her ill-gotten wealth. What he dreaded unutterably was the despair that must overpower her as he developed the long chain of evidence against her. As he came into her presence, overwhelmed with these thoughts, he was also anxiously recalling two mental notes. He must make her clearly understand that he had not betrayed her by one word or hint to Sir Edmund Grosse or any living human being; and secondly, he thought it very important to impress upon her that Sir Edmund and Lady Rose were of opinion that Larrone had suppressed the will or that Molly had never opened the box which contained it—were, in fact, of any or every opinion except that Molly was guilty of crime. For the rest he could, at this eleventh hour, hardly see anything clearly, and as he shook hands with Miss Dexter an unutterable longing to escape came over him. Molly's greeting was haughty—almost rude—but that seemed to him natural and inevitable. He made some comment on a political event which she did not pretend to answer, and then as if speech were almost impossible, he actually murmured that the weather was very hot.

Then he became silent and remained so. For quite a minute neither spoke.

Molly was not naturally silent, naturally restrained. She moved uneasily about the room; she lit a cigarette, and threw it away again. At last she stood in front of him.

"What made you come to-day?" she asked.

Her large restless eyes looked full of anger as she spoke.

"I came to-day partly because I am going away very soon, so I thought that it might be——" He hesitated.

"But where are you going?" Molly asked abruptly.

"I am to take a chaplaincy at Lord Lofton's."

"And your preaching?" cried Molly in astonishment.

"Is not wanted," said Mark.

"And your poor?"

"Can get on without me."

"You are to be buried in the country?" she cried in indignation; "you are to leave all the people you are helping? But what a horrible shame! What,"—she suddenly turned away as a thought struck her—"what can be the reason?"

"It seems," he said very quietly, "that I have been foolish; people are talking, things are said against me, and things should not be said against a priest. But I did not come here to talk about myself. I came here——" He paused.

Molly sat down close to the empty fireplace, and was bending over it, her very thin figure curiously twisted, and one foot twitching nervously.

"You are going away," she said suddenly, "and it is my doing. I did not know I was doing that; it felt as if hitting at you were the only way to defend myself. Good God! I shall have a lot to answer for!"

She did not turn round; she crouched lower on the low chair and shuddered.

"And you," she went on in a low voice, "you want to save my soul! I have always been afraid you would get the best of it, and now I have destroyed your life's work. Did you know it was I who was talking against you?"

"I did."

"And that I have said everything I dared to say against you ever since I told you my secret?"

"Yes; more or less I knew."

"Why didn't you tell your authorities the truth long ago?"

"How could I?"

Molly made no answer. She got up in silence and took a key from her pocket and moved toward a small bureau between the windows. She unlocked the lower drawer and took out a packet of papers, and in the middle of this packet was an envelope in which lay the key of the room upstairs. Her movements were slow but unhesitating, and when she left the room Mark had not the slightest idea of what she would do. If he had seen her face as she slowly mounted the great well staircase he might have understood.

How simple it all was. She reached the top of the many steps with little loss of breath; she turned to the right into the dark passage that led to her own room, passed her own door, and put the key in the lock of the one next to it. She knew so exactly which box she sought, though she had never seen it since the day when Dr. Larrone brought it to her. Although she had actually come in the cab that brought the small boxes from the flat, she had succeeded in not recognising that one among the number heaped up together. She knew exactly where it stood now, and how many things had been piled above the boxes from the flat with seeming carelessness, but by her orders.

The shutters were closed, but she could have found that box in inky darkness, and now a ray from between the chinks fell upon it. She did not think now of how often she had told herself that she did not know what the box was like. Now it seemed to have been the only box she had ever known in her life. The cases on the top of it were heavy, and Molly had to strain herself to move them, but she was very strong, and every reserve of muscular power was called out unconsciously to meet her need. She did not know that her hands were covered with dust, and that blood was breaking through a scratch over the right thumb made by a jagged nail.

When she came back into the drawing-room, Father Molyneux was sitting with his back towards her, looking with unseeing eyes into the trees of the park. She moved towards him and held out a long envelope.

"Take it away," she said, "If I have ruined your life, you have ruined mine."

She moved with uncertain steps to the chimney-piece, leant upon it, and, turning round, looked wildly at the envelope in his hands.

"Why didn't you come for it before?" she asked him.

Mark could not answer. He was absolutely astonished at what had happened. He could hardly believe that he held in his hand a thing of such momentous importance. He had nerved himself for a great fight, but he had not known what he should say, how he should act, and then—amazing fact—a few minutes after he came into the room, and without his having even asked for it, the will was put into his hands! Nothing had been said of conditions or compromise; she only asked the amazing question why he had not come for it before!

"You were right," she mused, "right to leave me alone. I wonder, do you remember the words that have haunted me this summer?—Browning's words about the guilty man in the duel:

It has tried my nerves unbearably; I could not go on, I have not the strength. I might have had a glorious time if I had been a little stronger. As it is, it's not worth while."

It is impossible to convey the heavy dreariness of outlook conveyed by her voice and manner. There seemed no higher moral quality in it all.

"Half a dozen times I have nearly sent for you. But"—she did not shudder now, or make the restless movements he had noticed when he first came in: Molly had regained the stillness which follows after storms—"as soon as you are gone I shall be longing to have it back again. Men have done worse things than I have for thirty thousand a year! It won't be easy to be a pauper; I think it would be easier to kill myself."

She was silent again, and Mark could not find one word that he was not afraid to say—one word that might not quench the smoking flax.

"I had to give it to you without waiting to talk of the future, or I might not have given it at all. But I should be glad if the case could be so arranged that my mother's name and my own should not be dragged in the mud. It is only an appeal for mercy—nothing else." Her voice trembled almost into silence.

"I think that is all safe," said Mark. "I think if you will leave it all in my hands I can get better conditions for you than you suppose now. They will be only too glad."

"But I gave it to you without conditions." Her manner for the moment was that of a child seeking reassurance.

"Thank God! you did," he cried, with an irrepressible burst of sympathy.

"It's not much for a thief to have done, is it? But now I should like to do it all properly. Tell me; ought I to come away from here to-day, and give everything I have here to Lady Rose? If I ought, I will!"

"No, certainly not," said Mark. "I have been asked to offer you liberal conditions if you would agree to a compromise. I said they had come to quite the wrong person. No, no, don't think I told them. They have fresh evidence that there was a will, and they believe they know that important papers were brought to you by Dr. Larrone when your mother died."

"And you came to frighten me with this?" There was a touch of reproach in her tone.

"No, I came, hoping you would give me the paper, as you have done, without knowing this."

Evidently this news impressed Molly deeply, but she did not want to discuss it. Presently she said:

"I am glad you came in time before I was frightened. How you have wanted to make me save my soul! You have helped me very much, but I cannot save my soul."

"But God can," said Mark.

"You see," she went on, "I never know what I am going to do—going to be—next. Imagine my being a thief! It seems now almost incredible. And I don't know what may come next."

For a second she looked at him with wild terror in her eyes.

"Think how many years I have before me. How can I hope that I——?"

"You will do great, great good," said Mark, with emotion.

She shook her head.

"David committed a worse sin than yours."

Molly smiled, a little, incredulous, grey smile, for a moment.

"I may be good to-day. I may be full of peace and joy even to-night—but to-morrow? You told me once that I should only know true joy if I had been humbled in the dust. I am low enough now, but the comfort has not come yet, and, even if God comforts me, it won't last. I shall still be I, and life is so long."

"You must trust Him—you must indeed. He will find a solution. You are exhausted now with the victory you have gained. Rest now, and then do the good things you have done before. Trust in the higher side of your character; God gave it to you. Believe me, He has called you to great things."

As he spoke she covered her face with her hands, and a deep blush of shame rose from her neck to her forehead, visible through the thin, white fingers.

"I suppose He will find a way out. As I can't understand how you have cared so much to save my soul, I suppose I can understand His love still less. Must you go? You will pray for me, I know."

She held out her hand with a look of generous appeal to his forgiveness.

"God bless you!" he said, with complete sympathy, and then he went away to seek an interview with Sir Edmund Grosse.

Molly sank down on a low seat by the window. Then she went slowly upstairs, dragging her feet a little from fatigue, and took out of the tin box the packet of very old letters. She burned them one by one, with a match for each, kneeling in front of the empty fireplace in her bed-room. They told the story of her mother's attempt to persuade Sir David of their marriage during his illness in India. It was not a pretty story—one of deceit and intrigue. It should disappear now.

Then she sat down in a deep chair in the window. She stayed very still, curled up against the cushion behind her, her eyes fixed on the ground. She was hardly conscious of thought; she was trying to recall things Mark had said, murmuring them over to herself. She was trying not to sink into the depths of humiliation and despair. It was a blind clinging to a vague hope for better things, with a certain torpor of all her faculties.

Then gradually things in the vague gloom became definite to her. "No," she said to them with entreaty, "not to-night. My life is only just dead. I am tired by the shock—it was so sudden—only let me rest till morning, and in the morning I will try to face it."

She had, it seemed, quite settled this point; the present and the future were to be left; a pause was absolutely necessary. Then followed quickly the sharp pang of a fresh thought. It was not in her power to make things pause. She could not make a truce by calling it a truce. If she did not realise things now and act now herself, others would come upon the scene. Even to-night Sir Edmund Grosse might know. She shivered. Perhaps he was being told now. It would be insufferable to endure his kindness prompted by Rose's generous forgiveness. But ought she to find anything unbearable? Was she going to revolt at the very outset? She was not trained in spiritual matters, but it seemed to her that any revolt would betray a want of reality in her reparation, and in this great change of feeling she wanted above all things to be real. She tried to face what must come next. How could she hand over Westmoreland House? It could not be done as quietly as she had handed that letter to Father Mark. The house had been bought with the great lump sum Madame Danterre had accumulated in Florence—much of that money had been put in the bank before Sir David died. Perhaps if they were ready to come to terms, as Father Mark had said, an arrangement would be suggested in which Molly would not be expected to refund what she had spent, and would have the possession of Westmoreland House and its contents. The sale would realise enough to save her from actual want, and yet she would not be receiving a pension from Lady Rose. Her mind got out of gear and flashed through these thoughts until, unable to check it in any way, she burst into tears. She felt the self-deception of such plans with physical pain. What was that money in the bank at Florence but blackmail gathered in during Sir David's life? "Why cannot I be straight even now?" she whispered. She was still sitting on the couch with one leg drawn up under her, gazing intently at the ground. No, the only money she possessed was £2000 invested at 3½ per cent. "£70 a year—that is less than I have given Carey, or the cook, or the butler."

The fact was that while her heart and soul had gone forward in dumb pain in utter darkness with the single aim of undoing the sin done, the mind still lagged and reasoned. This is a peculiar agony, and Molly had to drink of that agony.

Gradually and mercilessly her reason told her that an arrangement with Lady Rose, the appearance of having the right of possession in Westmoreland House, the readiness of all concerned to bury the story, and the possession of a fair income, would make it possible to live in her own class quietly but, if tactfully, with a good repute. Then the thought of any kind of compromise became intolerable to her, and she realised that it was a fancy picture, not a real temptation.

To pretend that Westmoreland House was her own she could not do, but what was the alternative? Dragging poverty and shame, and with no opportunity for hiding what had passed, for living it down. Even if she did the impossible to her pride and consented to receive a good allowance from Lady Rose, it would not be at all the same in the world's view as the dignified income that could be raised from Westmoreland House, and from her mother's jewels and furniture. Her fingers unconsciously touched the pearls round her neck. Surely she need not speculate as to how her mother obtained the magnificent jewels which she had worn up to the end? Then more light came—hard and cold, but clear. If Molly had been innocent these things might have been so, but Molly had committed a fraud on a great scale. It would be by the mercy of the injured that she would be spared the rigours of the law. It was by the supreme mercy of God that she had had the chance of making the sacrifice before it was forced from her. And could she shrink from mere ordinary poverty, from a life such as the vast majority of men and women are living on this earth? She did not really shrink in her will. It was only a mechanical movement of thought from one point to another. Was it much punishment for what she had done to be very poor? Would it not be better to be unclassed—to live among people who help each other much because they have little to give? Would it not be the way to do what Father Mark had said she should try to do—those good things she had done before? She could nurse, she could watch, she was able to do with little sleep. She would be very humble with the sick and suffering now. And it would not surely be wrong to go and find such a life far away from where she had sinned? She began to wonder if she need stay and live through all the complications of the coming days. Must it be the right thing to stay because it was the most unbearable? She thought not. There are times when recklessness is the only safety. If she did not burn her ships now she could not tell what temptations might come. But she would not let it be among her motives that thus she would thereby escape unbearable pity from Lady Rose and the far sterner magnanimity of Edmund Grosse. She would act simply; she would ask Rose a favour; she would ask her to provide for Miss Carew.

Half consciously again her hands went to her throat. She unclasped the pearl necklace that Edmund had seen on Madame Danterre's withered neck in the garden at Florence. She slipped off four large rings, and then gathered up a few jewels that lay about. "One ought not to leave valuables about," she thought, and she did not know that she added "after a death."

If Miss Carew had been in the room she would probably not have understood that anything special was going on. Molly moved quietly about, collecting together on a little table by the cupboard, rings, brooches, buckles, watches—anything of much value. She sought and found the key of the little safe in the wardrobe and put away these objects with the large jewel cases already inside it. She also put with them her cheque book and her banker's book. A very small cheque book on a different bank where the interest of the £2000 had not been drawn on for six months, she put down on her writing table. Then she looked round the room. Was there nothing there really her own, and that she cared to keep either for its own sake or because it had belonged to someone she had loved? An awful sense of loneliness swept over her as she looked round and could think of nothing. Each beautiful thing on walls or tables that she looked at seemed repulsive in its turn, for it had either belonged to Madame Danterre or been bought with her money. There was not so much as a letter which she cared ever to see again. She had burnt Edmund's few notes when she first came to Westmoreland House.

She had once met a woman who had lost everything in a fire. "I have everything new," she wailed, "nothing that I ever had before—not a photograph, not a prayer-book, nor an old letter. I don't feel that I am the same person." The words came back now. "Not the same person," and suddenly a sense of relief began to dawn upon her.

Oh, the immensity of such a mercy! That hymn had made her shiver as a child; how different it seemed now! Molly knelt down by the couch, and her shoulders trembled as a tempest of feeling came over her. Criminals hardened by long lives of fraud have been known to be happier after being found out—simply because the strain was over. They had destroyed their moral sense. Molly's conscience was alive, though torn, bleeding, and debased. She could not be happy as they were, but yet there was the lifting of the weight as of a great mountain rolled away. She was afraid of the immense sense of relief that now seemed coming upon her. Could she really become free of the horrible Molly of the last months—this noxious, vile, lying, thieving woman? What an awful strain that woman had lived in! She had told Mark that what frightened her was the thought that she would still be herself. She longed now to cut away everything that had belonged to her. Might she not by God's grace, in poverty and hard work, with everything around her quite different from the past, might she not quite do to death the Molly who had lived in Westmoreland House? The cry was more passionate than spiritual perhaps, but the longing had its power to help. She rose and again moved quietly about the room of the dead, bad woman, which must be left in order for the new owners. She put some things together—what was necessary for a night or two—and felt almost glad that she had a comb and brush she had not yet used. There was a bag with cheap fittings Mrs. Carteret had given her as a girl, which would hold all she needed. And then she remembered that she had something she would like to take away; it was a nurse's apron, and in its pocket a nurse's case of small instruments. They were what she used when nursing with the district nurse in the village at home. Then she sat down and wrote a cheque and a note, and proceeded to take them downstairs. The cheque was for £30 out of the little Dexter cheque book, and the note was an abrupt little line to tell a friend that she could not dine out that night. She "did not feel up to it" was the only excuse given, and a furious hostess declared that Miss Dexter had become perfectly insufferable. She seemed to think that she could do exactly as she chose because she was absurdly rich.

The butler was able to give Molly £30 in notes and cash, and it was his opinion that she wanted the money for playing cards that night. Molly crept upstairs again with a foreign Bradshaw in her hand. She looked out the train for the night boat to Dieppe. It left Charing Cross at 9.45. She had chosen Dieppe for the first stage of her journey—of which she knew not the further direction—for two reasons. The first was because she knew that she ought to stay within reach if it were necessary for her to do business with her own or Lady Rose's solicitors. She was determined not to give any trouble she could avoid giving, in the business of handing over that which had never belonged to her. At this time of year the journey to Dieppe would be no difficulty, and she wanted to go there rather than to Boulogne or any other French port, because she had the address of a very cheap and clean pension in which Miss Carew had passed some weeks before coming to live with Molly in London. From that pension Molly could write the letters she felt physically incapable of writing to-night. The only note she determined to write at once was to Carey, asking her to remain at Westmoreland House and to tell the servants that Miss Dexter had gone abroad. She told her that she had gone to the pension at Dieppe, but earnestly insisted that she should not follow her. She begged her to do nothing before getting a letter that she would write to her at once on arriving at Dieppe. She also asked her to keep the key of the safe which she enclosed in her letter. Molly sealed the letter, and then felt some hesitation as to when and how to give it to Miss Carew. She finally decided to send it by a messenger boy from the station when it would be too late for Miss Carew to follow her, and when it would still be in time to prevent any astonishment at her not returning home that night.

Miss Carew, thinking that Molly had gone out to dinner, came into her bed-room to look for a book. The night was hot and oppressive, but no one had raised the blinds since the sun had set, and the room was so dark that she did not at once see Molly. She started nervously, half expecting one of Molly's impatient and rude exclamations on being disturbed, and, with an apology, was going away when Molly said gently:

"Stay a minute, Carey; I'm not going to dine out to-night."

"But there is no dinner ordered, and I have just had supper. I am going out this evening to see a friend."

"Never mind," Molly interrupted, "I can't eat anything. I am going out for a drive in a hansom in the cool. Would you mind saying that I shall not want the motor?"

"My dear! are you not well?"

"Not very." And suddenly Miss Carew began to read the great change in her face. "It has none of it been very good for me, Carey; you have been quite right. This house and all was a mistake. You have never said it, but I have seen it in your eyes. And it has not even been in quite good taste for me to make such a splash—you thought that too. I'm going to stop it all now, dear, and probably the house will be sold; it's been an unblest sort of thing."

Miss Carew stared. The tone was so different from any she had ever heard in Molly's voice; it was very gentle, but exhausted, as if she had been through an acute crisis in an illness.

"Carey dear, you have always been so kind to me, and I have been very unkind to you. You will have to know things that will make you hate and despise me to-morrow. But would you mind giving me one kiss to-night?"

Miss Carew was very nervous at this request, but happily all the best side of her was roused by something in Molly that, in spite of a vast difference, recalled the Molly of seven years ago when she had first seen her. It was a real kiss—a kind of pact between them.

"I wonder if she will ever wish to do the same again!" thought Molly.

Then Miss Carew left her and she called the maid, who brought at her bidding a long black cloak and a small black toque—insignificant compared to anything else of Molly's.

The mistress of Westmoreland House drove away in a hansom, with a bag in her hand, at twenty minutes past seven.

There is a small house with a little chapel attached to it in a road in Chelsea where some Frenchwomen, who were exiled from their own country, have come to dwell. It is built on Sir Thomas More's garden, and it possesses within its boundaries the mulberry tree under which the chancellor was sitting when they came to fetch him to the Tower. It is a poor little house with very poor inmates, and a poor little chapel. But in that chapel night and day, without a moment's break, are to be found two figures (when there are not more) dressed in plain brown habits and black veils. And on the altar there is always a crowd of lighted candles, in spite of the poverty of the chapel. It is a very small chapel and oddly shaped. The length of the little building is from north to south, and the altar is to the east. There are but few benches, but they run the full length of the building. Strange things are known by these women, who never go farther than the small garden at the back, of the life of the town about them. Some men and more women get accustomed to coming daily into the chapel with its unceasing exposition, and to love its silence and its atmosphere of rest and peace. Some never make themselves known; others sometimes ask to see a nun, and thus gradually these recluses come to know memorable secrets in human lives.

Molly had often been there in the weeks which she had afterwards called "my short fit of religious emotion." She chose to go there to-night, to spend there her last hour in London.

The little chapel was fairly cool, and through a door very near the altar, open to the garden, came the scent of mignonette on the air. Besides the motionless figures at the altar-rail there was no one else in the chapel.

At eight o'clock two small brown figures came in and knelt bowed down in the middle of the sanctuary. The two who had finished their watch rose and knelt by the side of those who relieved guard. Then the four rose together, and the two newcomers took up their station, and the others left them. And the incessant oblation of those lives went on. What a vast moral space lay between their lives and Molly's! What a contrast!

Molly had had no home, but they had given up their homes for this. Molly had pined in vain for human love; they had turned away from it. Molly had rebelled against all restraints; they had chosen these bonds. Molly had sinned, against even the world's code, for love of the world; and they had rejected even the best the world could give.

Was it unjust, unfair that the boon they asked for in return was given to them?

If, on the one hand, Molly had inherited evil tendencies and had fallen on evil circumstances, does it seem strange that she could share in good as well as in evil?

It is easy to take scandal at Molly's inherited legacy of evil tendencies. It is easy to take scandal at the facility of her forgiveness. The two stumbling-blocks are in reality the two aspects of one truth, that no human being stands alone and that each gains or suffers with or by his fellows.

The sinless women pleaded for sinners in a glorious human imitation of the Divine pleading. And the exuberant vitality poured by the Conqueror of death into the human race, flowing strongly through that tiny chapel, had carried the little, thin, stagnant stream of Molly's soul into the great flood of grace that purifies by sorrow and by love.

Molly knelt in one of the back benches with her eyes fixed on the monstrance, in a very agony of sorrow and self-abasement. I would not if I could analyse that penitence. Happily as life goes on we shrink more, not less, from raising even the most reverent gaze on the secret places of the soul. We do not know in what form, if in any form at all, and not rather, in a light without words, the Divine Peace reached her. Was it, "Go in peace, thy sins are forgiven thee?" Or was it perhaps, "This day shalt thou be with Me in Paradise?" We cannot tell. Only the lay-sister who saw Molly go out with the little black bag in her hand said afterwards that the lady had seemed happy.

THE END.

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