Letty was lying on a sofa in her bedroom. Her maid was to come to her shortly, and she was impatiently listening to every sound that approached or passed her door. The great clock in the distant hall struck seven, and it seemed to her intolerably long before she heard movements in the passage, and then Maxwell's voice outside.

"Here is your room, Sir George. I hope you don't mind a few ghosts! It is one of the oldest bits of the house."

Letty sprang up. She heard the shutting of the passage door, then immediately afterwards the door from the dressing-room opened, and George came through.

"Well!" she said, staring at him, her face flushing; "surely you are very late?"

He came up to her, and put his arms round her, while she stood passive.
"Not so very," he said, and she could hear that his voice was unsteady.
"How are you? Give me a kiss, little woman—be a little glad to see me!"

He looked down upon her wistfully. On the journey he had been conscious of great weariness of mind and body, a longing to escape from struggle, to give and receive the balm of kind looks and soft words. He had come back full of repentance towards her, if she had only known, full too of a natural young longing for peace and good times.

She let him kiss her, but as he stooped to her it suddenly struck her that she had never seen him look so white and worn. Still; after all this holiday-making! Why? For love of a woman who never gave him a thought, except of pity. Bitterness possessed her. She turned away indifferently.

"Well, you'll only just have time to dress. Is someone unpacking for you?"

He looked at her.

"Is that all you have to say?"

She threw back her head and was silent.

"I was very glad to come back to you," he said, with a sigh, "though I—I wish it were anywhere else than here. But, all things considered, I did not see how to refuse. And you have been here the whole fortnight?"

"Yes."

"Have you"—he hesitated—"have you seen a great deal of Lady Maxwell?"

"Well, I suppose I have—in her own house." Then she broke out, her heart leaping visibly under her light dressing-gown. "I don't blame her any more, if you want to know that; she doesn't think of anyone in the world but him."

The gesture of her hand seemed to pursue the voice that had been just speaking in the corridor.

He smiled.

"Well, at least I'm glad you've come to see that!" he said quietly. "And is that all?"

He had walked away from her, but at his renewed question he turned back quickly, his hands in his pockets. Something in the look of him gave her a moment of pleasure, a throb of possession. But she showed nothing of it.

"No, it's not all"—her pale blue eyes pierced him. "Why did you go and see her that morning, and why have you never told me since?"

He started, and shrugged his shoulders.

"If you have been seeing much of her," he replied, after a pause, "you probably know as much as I could tell you."

"No," she said steadily; "she has told me much about everything—but that."

He walked restlessly about for a few seconds, then returned, holding out his hands.

"Well, my dear, I said some mad and miserable things. They are as dead now as if they had never been spoken. And they were not love-making—they were crying for the moon. Take me, and forget them. I am an unsatisfactory sort of fellow, but I will do the best I can."

"Wait a bit," she said, retreating, and speaking with a hard incisiveness. "There are plenty of things you don't know. Perhaps you don't know, for instance, that I wrote to Lord Maxwell? I sat up writing it that night—he got it the same morning you saw her."

"You wrote to Maxwell!" he said in amazement—then, under his breath—"to complain of her. My God!"

He walked away again, trying to control himself.

"You didn't suppose," she said huskily, "I was going to sit down calmly under your neglect of me? I might have been silly in not—not seeing what kind of a woman she was; that's different—besides, of course, she ought to have thought more about me. But that's not all!"

Her hand shook as she stood leaning on the sofa. George turned, and looked at her attentively.

"The day you left I went to Hampton Court with the Lucys. Cathedine was there. Of course I flirted with him all the time, and as we were going through a wood near the river he said abominable things to me, and kissed me."

Her brows were drawn defiantly. Her eyes seemed to be riveted to his. He was silent a moment, the colour dyeing his pale face deep. Then she heard his long breath.

"Well, we seem to be about quits," he said, in a bitter voice. "Have you seen him since?"

"No. That's Grier knocking—you'd better go and dress."

He paused irresolutely. But Letty said, "Come in," and he retreated into his dressing-room.

Husband and wife hurried down together, without another word to each other. When George at last found himself at table between Lady Leven and Mr. Bayle's new and lively wife, he had never been so grateful before to the ease of women's tongues. In his mental and physical fatigue, he could scarcely bear even to let himself feel the strangeness of his presence in this room—at her table, in Maxwell's splendid house. Not to feel!—somehow to recover his old balance and coolness—that was the cry of the inner man.

But the situation conquered him. Why was he here? It was barely a month since in her London drawing-room he had found words for an emotion, a confession it now burnt him to remember. And here he was, breaking bread with her and Maxwell, a few weeks afterwards, as though nothing lay between them but a political incident. Oh! the smallness, the triviality of our modern life!

Was it only four weeks, or nearly? What he had suffered in that time! An instant's shudder ran through him, during an interval, while Betty's unwilling occupation with her left-hand neighbour left memory its chance. All the flitting scenes of the past month, Ancoats's half-vicious absurdities, the humours of the Trouville beach, the waves of its grey sea, his mother's whims and plaints, the crowd and heat of the little German watering-place where he had left her—was it he, George Tressady, that had been really wrestling with these things and persons, walking among them, or beside them? It seemed hardly credible. What was real, what remained, was merely the thought of some hours of solitude, beside the Norman sea, or among the great beech-woods that swept down the hills about Bad Wildheim. Those hours—they only—had stung, had penetrated, had found the shrinking core of the soul.

What in truth was it that had happened to him? After weeks of a growing madness he had finally lost his self-command, had spoken passionately, as only love speaks, to a married woman, who had no thought for any man in the world but her husband, a woman who had immediately—so he had always read the riddle of Maxwell's behaviour—reported every incident of his conversation with her to the husband, and had then tried her best, with an exquisite kindness and compunction, to undo the mischief her own charm had caused. For that effort, in the first instance, George, under the shock of his act and her pain, had been, at intervals, speechlessly grateful to her; all his energies had gone into pitiful, eager response. Now, her attempt, and Maxwell's share in it, seemed to have laid him under a weight he could no longer bear. His acceptance of Maxwell's invitation had finally exhausted his power of playing the superhuman part to which she had invited him. He wished with all his heart he had not accepted it! From the moment of her greeting—with its mixture of shrinking and sweetness—he had realised the folly, the humiliation even, of his presence in her house. He could not rise—it was monstrous, ludicrous almost, that she should wish it—to what she seemed to ask of him.

What had he been in love with? He looked at her once or twice in bewilderment. Had not she herself, her dazzling, unconscious purity, debarred him always from the ordinary hopes and desires of the sensual man? His very thought had moved in awe of her, had knelt before her. Throughout there had been this half-bitter glorying in the strangeness of his own case. The common judgment in its common vileness mattered nothing to him. He had been in love with love, with grace, with tenderness, with delight. He had seen, too late, a vision of the best; had realised what things of enchantment life contains for the few, for the chosen—what woman at her richest can be to man. And there had been a cry of personal longing—personal anguish.

Well!—it was all done with. As for friendship, it was impossible, grotesque. Let him go home, appease Letty, and mend his life. He constantly realised now, with the same surprise, as on the night before his confession, the emergence within himself, independent as it were of his ordinary will, and parallel with the voice of passion or grief, of some new moral imperative. Half scornfully he discerned in his own nature the sort of paste that a man inherits from generations of decent dull forefathers who have kept the law as they understood it. He was conscious of the same "ought" vibrating through the moral sense as had governed their narrower lives and minds. It is the presence or the absence indeed of this dumb compelling power that in moments of crisis differentiates one man from another. He felt it; wondered perhaps that he should feel it; but knew, nevertheless, that he should obey it. Yes, let him go home, make his wife forgive him, rear his children—he trusted to God there would be children!—and tame his soul. How strange to feel this tempest sweeping through him, this iron stiffening of the whole being, amid this scene, in this room, within a few feet of that magic, that voice—

* * * * *

"Thank goodness I have got rid of my man at last!" said Betty's laughing whisper in his ear. "Three successive packs of hounds have I followed from their cradles to their graves. Make it up to me, Sir George, at once! Tell me everything I want to know!"

George turned to her smiling.

"About Ancoats?"

"Of course. Now don't be discreet!—I know too much already. How did he receive you?"

George laughed—not noticing that instead of laughing with him, little
Betty was staring at him open-eyed over her fan.

"To begin with, he invited me to fight—coffee and pistols before eight, on the following morning, in the garden of his chalet, which would not have been at all a bad place, for he is magnificently installed. I came from his enemies, he said. They had prevented the woman he loved from joining him, and covered him with ridicule. As their representative I ought to be prepared to face the consequences like a man. All this time he was storming up and down, in a marvellous blue embroidered smoking suit—"

"Of course, to go with the hair," put in Betty.

"I said I thought he'd better give me some dinner before we talked it out. Then he looked embarrassed and said there were friends coming. I replied, 'Tant mieux.' He inquired fiercely whether it was the part of a gentleman to thrust himself where he wasn't wanted. I kept my temper, and said I was too famished to consider. Then he haughtily left the room, and presently a servant came and asked for my luggage, which I had left at the station, and showed me a bedroom. Ancoats, however, appeared again to invite me to withdraw, and to suggest the names of two seconds who would, he assured me, be delighted to act for me. I pointed out to him that I was unpacked, and that to turn me out dinnerless would be simply barbarous. Then, after fidgeting about a little, he burst out laughing in an odd way, and said, 'Very well—only, mind, I didn't ask you.' Sure enough, of course I found a party."

George paused.

"You needn't tell me much about the party," said Betty, nervously, "unless it's necessary."

"Well, it wasn't a very reputable affair, and two young women were present."

"No need to talk about the young women," said Betty, hastily.

George bowed submission.

"I only mentioned them because they are rather necessary to the story. Anyway, by the time the company was settled Ancoats suddenly threw off his embarrassment, and, with some defiant looks at me, behaved himself, I imagine, much as he would have done without me. When all the guests were gone, I asked him whether he was going to keep up the farce of a grande passion any more. He got in a rage and vowed that if 'she' had come, of course all those creatures, male and female, would be packed off. I didn't suppose that he would allow the woman he loved to come within a mile of them? I shrugged my shoulders and declined to suppose anything about his love affairs, which seemed to me too complicated. Then, of course, I had to come to plain speaking, and bring in his mother."

"That she should have produced such a being!" cried Betty; "that he should have any right in her at all!"

"That she should keep such a heart for him!" said George, raising his eyebrows. "He turned rather white, I was relieved to see, when I told him from her that she would leave his house if the London affair went on. Well, we walked up and down in his garden, smoking, the greater part of the night, till I could have dropped with fatigue. Every now and then Ancoats would make a dash for the brandy and soda on the verandah; and in between I had to listen to tirades against marriage, English prudery, and English women,—quotations from Gautier and Renan,—and Heaven knows what. At last, when we were both worn out, he suddenly stood still and delivered his ultimatum. 'Look here—if you think I've no grievances, you're much mistaken. Go back and tell my mother that if she'll marry Fontenoy straight away I'll give up Marguerite!' I said I would deliver no such impertinence. 'Very well,' he said; 'then I will. Tell her I shall be in Paris next week, and ask her to meet me there. When are you going?' 'Well,' I said, rather taken aback, 'there is such an institution as the post. Now I've come so far, suppose you show me Trouville for a few days?' He muttered something or other, and we went to bed. Afterwards, he behaved to me quite charmingly, would not let me go, and I ended by leaving him at the door of an hotel in Paris where he was to meet his mother. But on the subject of Fontenoy it is an idÉe fixe. He chafes under the whole position, and will yield nothing to a man who, as he conceives, has no locus standi. But if his pride were no longer annoyed by its being said that his mother had sacrificed her own happiness to him, and if the situation were defined, I think he might be more amenable. I think they might marry him."

"That's how the man puts it!" said Betty, tightening her lip. "Of course any marriage is desirable for any woman!"

"I was thinking of Mrs. Allison," said George, defensively. "One can't think of a Lady Ancoats till she exists."

"Merci! Never mind. Don't apologise for the masculine view. It has to be taken with the rest of you. Do you understand that matrimony is in the air here to-night? Have you been talking to Lady Madeleine?"

"No, not yet. But how handsome she's grown! I see Naseby's not far off."

George turned smiling to his companion. But, as he did so, again something cold and lifeless in his own face and in the expression underlying the smile pricked little Betty painfully. Marcella had made her no confidences, but there had been much gossip, and Letty Tressady's mere presence at the Court set the intimate friend guessing very near the truth.

She did her best to chatter on, so as to keep him at least superficially amused. But both became more and more conscious of two figures, and two figures only, at the crowded table—Letty Tressady, who was listening absently to Edward Watton with oppressed and indrawn eyes, and Lady Maxwell.

George, indeed, watched his wife constantly. He hungered to know more of that first scene between her and Lady Maxwell, or he thought with bitter repulsion of the letter she had confessed to him. Had he known of it,—in spite of that strange, that compelling letter of Maxwell's, so reticent, and yet in truth so plain,—he could hardly have come as a guest to Maxwell's house. As for her revelations about Cathedine, he felt little resentment or excitement. For the future a noxious brute had to be kept in order—that was all. It was his own fault, he supposed, much more than hers. The inward voice, as before, was clear enough. "I must just take her home and be good to her. She shirked nothing—now, no doubt, she expects me to do my part."

"Do you notice those jewels that Lady Maxwell is wearing to-night?" said
Betty at last, unable to keep away from the name.

"I imagine they are a famous set?"

"They belonged to Marie Antoinette. At last Maxwell has made her have them cleaned and reset. What a pity to have such desperate scruples as she has about all your pretty things!"

"Must diamonds and rubies, then, perish out of the world?" he asked her, absently, letting his eyes rest again upon the beautiful head and neck.

Betty made some flippant rejoinder, but as she watched him, she was not gay.

* * * * *

George had had but a few words with his hostess before dinner, and afterwards a short conversation was all that either claimed. She had hoped and planned so much! On the stage of imagination before he came—she had seen his coming so often. All was to be forgotten and forgiven, and this difficult visit was to lead naturally and without recall to another and happier relation. And now that he was here she felt herself tongue-tied, moving near him in a dumb distress. Both realised the pressure of the same necessities, the same ineluctable facts; and tacitly, they met and answered each other, in the common avoidance of a companionship which could after all avail nothing. Once or twice, as they stood together after dinner, he noticed amid her gracious kindness, her inquiries after Mrs. Allison or his mother, the search her eyes made for Letty, and presently she began to talk with nervous, almost appealing, emphasis—with a marked significance and intensity indeed—of Letty's fatigue after her nursing, and the need she had for complete change and rest. George found himself half resenting the implications of her manner, as the sentences flowed on. He felt her love of influence, and was not without a hidden sarcasm. In spite of his passionate gratitude to her, he must needs ask himself, did she suppose that a man or a marriage was to be remade in a month, even by her plastic fingers? Women envisaged these things so easily, so childishly, almost.

When he moved away, a number of men who had already been talking to him after dinner, and some of the most agreeable women of the party besides, closed about him, making him, as it were, the centre of a conversation which was concerned almost entirely with the personalities and chances of the political moment. He was scarcely less astonished than Letty had been by his own position amongst the guests gathered under Maxwell's roof. Never had he been treated with so much sympathy, so much deference even. Clearly, if he willed it so, what had seemed the dislocation might only be the better beginning of a career. Nonsense! He meant to throw it all up as soon as Parliament met again in February. The state of his money affairs alone determined that. The strike was going from bad to worse. He must go home and look after his own business. It was a folly ever to have attempted political life. Meanwhile he felt the stimulus of his reception in a company which included some of the keenest brains in England. It appealed to his intelligence and virility, and they responded. Letty once, glancing at him, saw that he was talking briskly, and said to herself, with contradictory bitterness, that he was looking as well as ever, and was going, she supposed, to behave as if nothing had happened.

"What is the matter with you to-night, my lady?" said Naseby, taking a seat beside his hostess. "May I be impertinent and guess?—you don't like your gems? Lady Leven has been telling me tales about them. They are the most magnificent things I ever saw. I condole with you."

She turned rather listlessly to meet his bantering look.

"'Come you in friendship, or come you in war?'" she said, pointing to a seat beside her. "I have no fight in me. But I have a great many things to say to you."

He reddened for an instant, then recovered himself.

"So have I to you," he said briskly. "In the first place, I have some fresh news from Mile End."

She half laughed, as who should say, "You put me off," then surrendered herself with eagerness to the pleasure of his report. At the moment of his approach, under pretence of talking to an elderly cousin of Maxwell's, she had been lost in such an abstraction of powerless pity for George Tressady—whose fair head, somehow, never escaped her, wherever it moved—that she had hardly been able to bear with her guests or the burden of the evening.

But Naseby roused her. And, indeed, his story so far was one to set the blood throbbing in the veins of a creature who, on one side pure woman, was on the other half poet, half reformer. Since the passage of the Maxwell Bill, indeed, Naseby and a few friends of his, some "gilded youths" like himself, together with some trade-union officials of a long experience, had done wonders. They had been planning out the industrial reorganisation of a whole district, through its two staple trades, with the enthusiastic co-operation of the workpeople themselves; and the result so far struck the imagination. Everywhere the old workshops were to be bought up, improved, or closed; everywhere factories in which life might be decent, and work more than tolerable, were to be set up; everywhere the prospective shortening of hours, and the doing away with the most melancholy of the home trades was working already like the incoming of a great slowly surging tide, raising a whole population on its breast to another level of well-being and of hope.

Most of what had been done or designed was of course already well known to Maxwell's wife; she had indeed given substantial help to Naseby throughout. But Naseby had some fresh advances to report since she was last in East London, and she drank them in with an eagerness, which somehow assuaged a hidden smart; while he wondered a little perhaps in his philosopher's soul at the woman of our English day, with her compunctions and altruisms, her entanglement with the old scheme of things, her pining for a new. It had often seemed to him that to be a Nihilist nurse among a Russian peasantry would be an infinitely easier task than to reconcile the social remorses and compassions that tore his companion's mind with the social pageant in which her life, do what she would, must needs be lived. He knew that, intellectually, she no more than Maxwell saw any way out of unequal place, unequal spending, unequal recompense, if civilisation were to be held together; but he perceived that morally she suffered. Why? Because she and not someone else had been chosen to rule the palace and wear the gems that yet must be? In the end, Naseby could but shrug his shoulders over it. Yet even his sceptical temper made no question of sincerity.

When all his budget was out, and her comments made, she leant back a little in her chair, studying him. A smile came to play about her lips.

"What do you want to say to me?" he asked her quickly.

She looked round her to see that they were not overheard.

"When did you see Madeleine last?"

"At her brother's house, a fortnight ago."

"Was she nice to you?"

He bit his lip, and drew his brows a little together, under her scrutiny.

"Do you imagine I am going to be cross-examined like this?"

"Yes—reply!"

"Well, I don't know what her conception of 'niceness' may be; it didn't fit mine. She had got it into her head that I 'pitied' her, which seemed to be a crime. I didn't see how to disprove it, so I came away."

He spoke with a dry lightness, but she perceived anxiety and unrest under his tone. She bent forward.

"Do you know where Madeleine is now?"

"Not in the least."

"In the Long Gallery. I sent her there."

"Upon my word!" he said, after a pause. "Do you want to rule us all?"
His cheek had flushed again; his look was half rebellious.

A flash of pain struck through her brightness.

"No, no!" she said, protesting. "But I know—you don't!"

He rose deliberately, and bowed with the air of obeying her commands.
Then suddenly he bent down to her.

"I knew perfectly well that she was in the Long Gallery! But I also knew that Mrs. Bayle had chosen to join her there. The coast, you may perceive, is now clear."

He walked away. Marcella looked round, and saw an elegant little bride, Mr. Bayle's new wife, rustling into the room again. She leant back in her chair, half laughing, yet her eyes were wet. The new joy brought a certain ease to old regrets. Only that word "rule" rankled a little.

Yet the old regrets were all sharp and active again. It seemed to be impossible now to talk with George Tressady, to make any real breach in the barrier between them; but how impossible also not to think of him!—of the young fellow, who had given Maxwell his reward, and said to herself such sad, such agitating things! She did think of him. Her heart ached to serve him. The situation made a new and a very troubling appeal to her womanhood.

* * * * *

The night was warm, and still, and the windows were open to it as they had been on that May night at Castle Luton. Maxwell came to look for Tressady, and took him out upon a flagged terrace that ran the length of the house.

They talked first of the Ancoats incident, George supplementing his letters by some little verbal pictures of Ancoats's life and surroundings that made Maxwell laugh grimly from time to time. As to Mrs. Allison, Maxwell reported that Ancoats seemed to have gained his point. There was talk of the marriage coming off some time in the winter.

"Well, Fontenoy has earned his prize," said George.

"There are more than twelve years between them. But she seems to be one of the women who don't age. I have seen her go through griefs that would kill most women; and it has been like the passage of a storm over a flower."

"Religion, I suppose, carried to that point, protects one a good deal," said George, not, in truth, feeling much interest in the matter or in Mrs. Allison now that his task was done.

"And especially religion of the type that allows you to give your soul into someone else's keeping. There is no such anodyne," said Maxwell, musing. "I have often noticed how Catholic women keep their youth and softness. But now, do allow me a few words about yourself. Is what I hear about your withdrawal from Parliament irrevocable?"

George's reply led to a discussion in which Maxwell, without any attempt at party proselytism, endeavoured to combat all that he could understand of the young man's twofold disgust, disgust with his own random convictions no less than with the working of the party machine.

"Where do I belong?" he said. "I don't know myself. I ought never to have gone in. Anyway, I had better stand aside for a time."

"But evidently the Malford people want to keep you."

"Well, and of course I shall consult their convenience as much as I can," said George, unwillingly, but would say no more.

Nothing, indeed, could be more flattering, more healing, than all that was implied in Maxwell's earnestness, in the peculiar sympathy and kindness with which the elder man strove to win the younger's confidence; but George could not respond. His whole inner being was too sore; and his mind ran incomparably more upon the damnable letter that must be lying somewhere in the archives of the memory of the man talking to him, than upon his own political prospects. The conversation ended for Maxwell in mere awkwardness and disappointment,—deep disappointment if the truth were known. Once roused his idealism was little less stubborn, less wilful than Marcella's.

When the ladies withdrew, a brilliant group of them stood for a moment on the first landing of the great oak staircase, lighting candles and chattering. Madeleine Penley took her candle absently from Marcella's hand, saying nothing. The girl's curious face under its crown of gold-red hair was transformed somehow to an extraordinary beauty. The frightened parting of the lips and lifting of the brows had become rather a look of exquisite surprise, as of one who knows at last "the very heart of love."

"I am coming to you, presently," murmured Marcella, laying her cheek against the girl's.

"Oh, do come!" said Madeleine, with a great breath, and she walked away, unsteadily, by herself, into the darkness of the tapestried passage, her white dress floating behind her.

Marcella looked after her, then turned with shining eyes to Letty
Tressady. Her expression changed.

"I am afraid your headache has been very bad all the evening," she said penitently. "Do let me come and look after you."

She went with Letty to her room, and put her into a chair beside the wood fire, that even on this warm night was not unwelcome in the huge place. Letty, indeed, shivered a little as she bent towards it.

"Must you go so early?" said Marcella, hanging over her. "I heard Sir
George speak of the ten o'clock train."

"Oh, yes," said Letty, "that will be best."

She stared into the fire without speaking. Marcella knelt down beside her.

"You won't hate me any more?" she said, in a low, pleading voice, taking two cold hands in her own.

Letty looked up.

"I should like," she said, speaking with difficulty, "if you cared—to see you sometimes."

"Only tell me when," said Marcella, laying her lips lightly on the hands, "and I will come." Then she hesitated. "Oh, do believe," she broke out at last, but still in the same low voice, "that all can be healed! Only show him love,—forget everything else,—and happiness must come. Marriage is so difficult—such an art—even for the happiest people, one has to learn it afresh day by day."

Letty's tired eyes wavered under the other's look.

"I can't understand it like that," she said. Then she moved restlessly in her chair. "Ferth is a terrible place! I wonder how I shall bear it!"

* * * * *

An hour later Marcella left Madeleine Penley and went back to her own room. The smile and flush with which she had received the girl's last happy kisses disappeared as she walked along the corridor. Her head drooped, her arms hung listlessly beside her.

Maxwell found her in her own little sitting-room almost in the dark. He sat down by her and took her hand.

"You couldn't make any impression on him as to Parliament?" she asked him, almost whispering.

"No. He persists that he must go. I think his private circumstances at
Ferth have a great deal to do with it."

She shook her head. She turned away from him, took up a paper-knife, and let it fall on the table beside her. He thought that she must have been in tears, before he found her, and he saw that she could find no words in which to express herself. Lifting her hand to his lips, he held it there, silently, with a touch all tenderness.

"Oh, why am I so happy!" she broke out at last, with a sob, almost drawing her hand away. "Such a life as mine seems to absorb and batten upon other people's dues—to grow rich by robbing their joy, joy that should feed hundreds and comes all to me! And that besides I should actually bruise and hurt—"

Her voice failed her.

"Fate has a way of being tolerably even, at last," said Maxwell, slowly, after a pause. "As to Tressady, no one can say what will come of it. He has strange stuff in him—fine stuff I think. He will pull himself together. And for the wife—probably, already he owes you much! I saw her look at you to-night—once as you touched her shoulder. Dear!—what spells have you been using?"

"Oh! I will do all I can—all I can!" Marcella repeated in a low, passionate voice, as one who makes a vow to her own heart.

"But after to-morrow he will not willingly come across us again," said
Maxwell, quietly. "That I saw."

She gave a sad and wordless assent.